Scruples Two (59 page)

“Then where’d you get that crazy idea?” Gigi demanded violently.

“Zach told me.”

“What!”
Gigi was stricken with utter confusion. “Why are you smiling like that!” she cried accusingly at Billy. “There’s nothing to smile about. Zach talked to you? I don’t believe this! But whatever he told you, it’s a lie!”

“Oh, Gigi, you and Zach are so pathetically screwed up. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be laughing,” Billy gasped, biting her lips.

“Billy, if you don’t stop turning this into a joke, I’ll … I’ll …”

“Now just shut up and listen to me. Zach came to see me a few days after the ski accident. He decided I was the closest thing you had to a mother, and he wanted to clear things up—”

“Oh, sure, make excuses,” Gigi shouted. “How dare that vile, promiscuous, sickeningly hypocritical sex fiend, that tin-pot dictator who doesn’t give a shit about anything but himself, have the
nerve
to try to lie to you!”

“Because he loves you.
He loves you
. Gigi! Don’t go off like a rocket again, Zach does love you, I’m convinced of it, and I know exactly what happened when you found him with that blonde. Will you shut up and listen to the whole story and just not interrupt until I’ve finished?”

“A pack of lies! Zach can talk anybody into anything, but I can’t believe you didn’t see through him!” Gigi was sputtering in her fury.

“Are you going to listen, or aren’t you?” There was something in the combination of Billy’s inescapably dancing eyes and obdurate, uncompromising attitude that made Gigi finally subside into grudging, unwilling silence.

“Okay,” she said unbendingly, and listen she did, as Billy told her everything that had been said from the moment Zach had introduced himself to her in the hotel lobby.

“Gigi, don’t you see that it wasn’t Zach’s fault?” Billy pleaded as she finished the story.

“I don’t
know
that it happened exactly like that … but, yes, I suppose it’s not impossible … I guess,” Gigi responded, as if she were talking to herself, thinking intently. “The one thing I’m sure of is that Pandora is quite capable of anything. That girl … I hate the idea, but I suppose that if he woke up … with her like that … he probably couldn’t have stopped. And up on the mountain—Zach did say he loved me and I believed him …” Gigi spoke reluctantly, but her face was opening like a flower in the sun after a shower of rain. “Why didn’t he tell me himself?”

“Would you have listened to him then?”

“I wouldn’t have let him in the door.”

“There hasn’t been a single opportunity to tell you sooner, or I’d have grabbed it,” Billy said. “It isn’t the kind of ‘oh, by the way’ sort of thing you drop into a conversation, and anyway I thought you’d forgotten him, consoled yourself with Spider.”

“I’ve never stopped brooding about Zach,
that poor dumb idiot.”
Gigi stopped for a fit of the giggles. “ ‘Intromission’? He actually said he was in a ‘posture in which intromission had already occurred’? Do you suppose he made up that word?”

“I checked the dictionary,” Billy said, “it’s in there all right, it means penetration.”

“I’d never have believed he knew such a.… dainty way to describe it.” Gigi doubled over in an unstoppable outburst of mirth. “Anyway,” she said when she’d recovered, mopping at her face with her napkin, “Spider’s too old for me, for heaven’s sake, he’s as old as …” she stopped in confusion.

“As I am,” Billy calmly completed the phrase.

“I don’t mean you’re old, you know that, but you’re almost exactly the same age as Spider, you’re the same age my mother was, even if you look twenty-seven, a too-thin, nervous twenty-seven, and Spider could have been my father, give or take a few months, if he’d started early … it’s not the same as Sasha and Josh at all. Josh could be her father theoretically, but she couldn’t possibly be his daughter, if you see what I mean.”

“You make your point perfectly.”

“Oh!” Gigi said. “Fathers. I almost forgot. I had dinner with mine the other night, and he asked me to ask you to put in a good word with Susan Arvey about
Fair Play
. He wanted you to tell her it was a movie that should be made, use your influence with her.”

“I simply do not believe the sheer callousness of that man,” Billy said flatly.

“I thought it was odd, his asking you for a favor, you’d be the last person—but apparently the Arveys really have him over a barrel. He’s never admitted that anything was going badly before, he even told me that they were only four million dollars apart on the deal, but it might as well be forty. That’s the first time he’s ever mentioned money to me, he likes to act as if it’s raining down from heaven. I’ve never seen him so deeply worried. I told him I’d pass on the request, but I couldn’t say that I thought you’d do it. Under the circumstances.”

“I’ll think about it,” Billy said briefly. “Now what are you going to do about Zach? Will you write or phone?”

“Oh no,” Gigi protested, shocked. “Not out of the blue. He’s coming out for the wedding next month. When I see him, I’ll know. What if he’s found somebody else?”

“Want to bet on it?” Billy offered. “I’ll give you interesting odds, if he’s found somebody else, you get a million. Cool cash. If he hasn’t, you owe me one dollar. You’ll never get a better bet than that.”

“It would be a nice consolation prize … but I only bet on cards, dice and horses. Men are too tricky.” Gigi looked at her watch. “My God, Billy, this has been the longest lunch in history. I promised Sasha she could bring her cat to spend a few days at my place. He’s developed a nervous condition, he’s losing his hair from severe jealousy of Josh—she wants me to see if I can live with Marcel. I don’t think it’s going to work, but I’ve got to get home because she’ll be coming by with him any minute. You don’t happen to want a cat, do you?”

“If I did, it wouldn’t be Marcel. Give me a kiss, you darling,” Billy said tenderly. “We must never, ever lose each other again, Gigi, not for a minute.”

After Gigi left, Billy went restlessly up to her room. It was rather late in the afternoon, but there was a sky punctuated by small, puffy pink clouds that reflected the setting sun. She couldn’t possibly stay indoors with so much on her mind, she realized, and she quickly made her way back outside, heading for her walled garden.

She strolled around it, searching for a dead leaf to pick off a geranium, or a drooping rose that needed to be pruned, finding nothing in all the swaying sheaves of bloom that needed any attention. “Too many gardeners,” she murmured to herself, taking a single fully open white rose and studying it absently as she thought over her complicated conversation with Gigi. The usual clarification of her thoughts that she hoped would come to her in the secret garden didn’t take place. She couldn’t see far enough in front of her, Billy decided, to know which way she was headed, but there was one definite thing she could do, only one, and she decided to get it over with immediately. With a look of resolution she made her way back to the house, a huntress pursuing her prey through the forest, repeating to herself that there was no time like the present, never any time quite like it. On the terrace she picked up a phone.

“Mr. Orsini, please,” she said to the operator at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

“Hello, Vito, it’s Billy,” she said rapidly. “Fine, thank you. Look, Gigi asked me to call Susan Arvey. I’m sorry, but I’d rather not. I can’t stand that woman, never could. There’s something about her that gives me the creeps. I don’t trust her. I know.… I know I used to see a lot of her, that doesn’t mean I liked her, and frankly I don’t think she ever liked me. She just liked knowing me, being my hostess, I can tell the difference. What’s the situation on the film? Come on, Vito, don’t waffle, just give me the bottom line, the whole story, as nasty as it comes. Never mind why I want to know, if you don’t want to talk about it I’ll hang up now. Right. Right … I see. How much is the grand total? Eleven? Is that final, or is that a budget you can live with? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. A definite twelve? You’re sure it won’t be thirteen? All right, I’ll finance the picture … yes, of course I mean the whole thing, you don’t think I want to be in business with Curt Arvey, do you? I’ll call Josh tomorrow and you can go see him in the afternoon, get a deal memo, so you can go ahead with preproduction. He’ll work out all the gruesome details, my profit percentage and all that, just don’t put my name on it. Oh, Vito, for Christ’s sake, don’t thank me, I’m not doing this for you. Of course I liked the book, that doesn’t have anything to do with it either. Why? Because I’ve always dreamed of being in show business, isn’t that enough for you? What? You ‘insist’ on knowing? I don’t fucking believe you! All right, I’m grateful to you. You don’t merit my gratitude, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel it. You have the great, good, totally undeserved luck to have Gigi for a daughter. No, I’m not doing it because she asked me, don’t you think I saw through that ploy? I know you, Vito, remember? I know exactly how your mind works. It’s because Gigi
is
, because I’ve had her in my life, because I’ll always have her, because I love her … and if you hadn’t been her father, she wouldn’t be here. Just accept it. No, you don’t owe me anything … you still don’t get it, do you, Vito? I
owe you
. Oh, Vito, just one thing, there’s a terrific New York theater director named Zach Nevsky—oh, you know about him already? I want him to direct the picture. Get him out here as soon as possible. Tomorrow if you can. Yes, Vito, that’s all the interference I’m planning on. But it’s a condition. A definite condition. I don’t care if he’s never used a camera before—get a smart cinematographer—you’ll be planning the shots yourself anyway. No, Vito, he’s not ‘uncredentialed’—
he knows me
. Fine, I’m glad we can agree. Good-bye, Vito, just don’t call to let me know how things are going.”

21

A
fashion show?” Billy asked coldly, repeating Spider’s words. She hadn’t seen him since her lunch with Gigi until this minute, when he burst into her office filled with his new idea. “I’ve never even considered that.”

“I hadn’t either, it came to me in the middle of the night,” Spider explained. “I’d been dreaming about the catalog, and when I woke up the whole thing was as clear as if it had already happened: we’d show only Prince’s clothes for the four capsule collections, each collection shown complete in itself, and then all the separate pieces reassembled and put back together in the endless different ways you’ve been working on, to demonstrate how versatile they are. We’d need at least eighteen runway models working at top speed, maybe more, considering Gigi’s accessory ideas.”

“It’s not impossible, every last one of the samples is finally here, but who would we be putting on the show for?”

“That’s the point,” Spider said, his enthusiasm flaring sharply. He’d slouched on the corner of Billy’s desk, lanky and graceful, but now he leaned forward eagerly. “The cream of the fashion press, the top editors of the big papers’ style sections, the wire service ladies, the fashion editors of every magazine women read, and TV of course, the fashion editors of the national daytime morning shows, the afternoon talk shows, and the people who book segments on the big local morning shows in the top markets—there are literally hundreds of people important enough to invite.”

“Invite?” Billy said, sounding almost quenched by the magnitude of his plans. “Invite where?”

“I thought we’d have a junket, a whole weekend, so we can fly them all here to Beverly Hills, plan some special events, and then show the Scruples Two Prince collections on Saturday night at a gala party, maybe on a studio soundstage—we’d get professional party planners to work that part out—but do you like the idea?”

“Give me a split second to think about it,” Billy said, leaning her elbows on her desk and supporting her head on her fingertips. It was well past seven o’clock on the Monday evening following her lunch with Gigi, and she’d been working without a break all day, munching a sandwich as she supervised the unpacking of the precious, finished “counter samples” that had arrived by courier after one of Prince’s chief assistants had spent months making sure that each sample was reproduced exactly to Prince’s specifications and to the quality of his original sample.

“Isn’t it too soon, Spider?” Billy asked, raising her head wearily. “We still have to manufacture our stock, produce the catalog, and get it in the mail—that’s months away. Why would we want the publicity now?”

“Buzz, Billy,
buzz
. We gotta arouse curiosity, get the customers’ juices flowing. Movie studios always start to show trailers of their big Christmas films in the middle of the summer to begin to build buzz. Scruples Two is so absolutely different from anything else in the catalog world that we need major PR far in advance of mailing. Hey, are you listening to me?”

“I was thinking of the Scruples ball … the first Saturday of November in 1976, remember? And now we’re talking about another party almost seven years later … such a different kind of party … it was sheer magic back then … the media was there too, but the guests were mostly stars, celebrities, society, the most beautiful women in their biggest ball gowns, the full moon, the dancing that never stopped … they called it the Last Great Party, but of course it wasn’t …”

“Billy, that’s over,” Spider said, almost harshly. “Stop hankering for something that can’t be reproduced. Get with it, kid. Scruples Two is appealing to a different kind of customer, and so we’re gonna give a different kind of party.”

“I thought you were asking my opinion,” Billy retorted caustically, rudely jolted out of her brief bout of nostalgia. “But I see you’ve made up your mind—asking me was just pro forma, wasn’t it, Spider? How far have your plans progressed? Have you already made a list of guests, hired a party planner, picked a date? No, wait! Let me guess, your first move was to hire the models, all eighteen of them. That would be true to form.”

“I just got the idea last night,” he said, astonished at the sudden venom of her tone. “You’re the first person I’ve mentioned it to—why do you have a bug up your ass?”

“Lovely! You express yourself with such elegance, Spider, such a rare and choice vocabulary—”

“Billy, cool it, sweetheart,” he said teasingly. “You’re not exactly one to talk.… there are career marines who’ve never used some of the words you throw around—did I say ‘used’? They may never even have
heard
of them.”

“Maybe not, Spider, maybe not, but then they don’t go around making moves on girls young enough to be their daughters either, do they?”

“Just what are you talking about?” Spider asked, straightening up abruptly.

“I think you know,” Billy said in a searing voice. “You’re awfully young to be a dirty old man, aren’t you? Getting in practice early, is that it? Or do you just have an uncontrollable itch to screw every single female in the world who happens to be momentarily available, emotionally vulnerable, lonely and helpless? How many hundreds of women had you nailed, Spider, before you decided to add Gigi to your long and squalid list?”

“Jesus! So that’s what this is all about. Come on, Billy, that was one isolated incident, months ago, and it never went further than a couple of kisses. And why the hell do I have to explain my private life to you?”

“It’s not your life,” Billy shouted. “I don’t give a flying fuck about your life, it’s
her
life, you confused her, you got her all upset, she’s been going through all sorts of traumas because you couldn’t keep your filthy paws to yourself!”

“You’ve gone batshit! Gigi and I are buddies. If she felt that way about me, I’d damn well know it. She’s too honest to hide anything, she’d have let me know.”

“Oh, of course you’d know, even if she didn’t say a word, everybody’s heard about you and your famous intuition, your legendary ability to understand women. What a sick joke! You can’t even tell if a woman is thinking about you when you kiss her, or about somebody else. Why do you think Gigi stopped you from taking advantage of her, from fucking her, to be precise? And you would have, Spider, don’t even try to deny it—she’s in love with somebody, you asshole, and you don’t have the sensitivity of an orangutan or you’d have known it.”

“Billy … look … I’m trying hard to understand this … you’re protecting your whelp, I see that, but this is ridiculous.… for the love of heaven, would you stop making me out to be worse than I am?”

“Are you trying to tell me that you weren’t going to fuck Gigi that night if she’d let you? With your reputation as an indiscriminate stud? You, Spider, the cheap male version of the good time that was had by all? Don’t make me puke. Of course that’s the way it would have ended!”

“You weren’t there,” Spider said, finally aroused to fury. “You weren’t standing around watching. You don’t know what I was thinking or what I would never have done. You’re sitting in judgment, in retrospect, on something that never even took place! But you’ve appointed yourself accuser, prosecutor, judge and jury, all in one—”

“Are you trying to deny it?” Billy’s rage, feeding on itself, opened up a vast gulf of unnavigable space between them.

“I do deny it!”

“Go ahead. Play the innocent. You’re nothing but a cock without a conscience.
I know what you wanted to do
.”

“I don’t give a tiny fart for what you think you know. You’re dead wrong. I’m outta here.”

Just to say that she was certifiable, Spider thought, as he padded ceaselessly around his big, sparsely furnished house in the darkness, was not enough. He’d dealt with a number of crazy women in his life, most of them only temporarily nuts, although Melanie Adams, one true loony, had slipped past him, to his everlasting regret, but Billy was beyond anything he’d ever experienced. She’d come at him out of nowhere, guns blazing, every word as wounding as she could make it, damn near accusing him of being a child molester and absolutely refusing to listen to him, after years and years of knowing what kind of person he was. Didn’t she have any reservoir of decent feelings toward him, after all they’d been through together?

The awfulness had hit him so quickly, he realized, that he was having a delayed reaction to it, like walking away from a serious car accident that should have killed him but hadn’t broken a single bone. He felt clammily cold and shaken and sick to his stomach. He’d never dreamed that Billy had the power to hurt him so much. He’d never seen her in such an unholy fury—and for what? For what, for Christ’s sake? For the straying emotion of a moment, a moment that had been over months ago, a mutual drawing together—at least he’d thought it was mutual—and a quick drawing away, the kind of thing that could happen to just about any two people on any given night, something that had left him and Gigi with a warm, appreciative feeling for each other, and a lovely but essentially unimportant memory. Or at least that’s what he’d thought.

Whatever he’d thought, it obviously wasn’t reliable anymore. Californians were used to anticipating an earthquake, he’d lived with that easily overlooked but omnipresent expectation in the back of his mind all his life, but Billy made him feel as if the foundations of his life had tumbled in on him in a few seconds, burying him alive. He’d actually thought she was joking at first, until she’d accused him of being a dirty old man. Jesus! Just remembering it was nauseating him.

The thing of it was, it just didn’t add up, didn’t make any sense. He knew, Spider told himself, he absolutely knew for dead certain that Gigi couldn’t have reported any traumas, serious or otherwise, to Billy. Even if Gigi had told her about that night at her apartment in every detail, nothing had happened to her that should make Billy freak out completely. As far as he knew, there hadn’t been any unfinished business to linger on in Gigi’s mind, and if she was in love with some unknown guy, whoever he was, well, then, didn’t that
prove
that there couldn’t have been any damage done?

Okay, okay, he shouldn’t have kissed her at all, he’d give Billy that much. He was sorry he’d done it. Sorry wasn’t the right word, but it would have to do. If he was going to go all the way back and pick the whole thing apart, it had been a very bad idea to start something with Gigi just because she looked so cute and interesting that night … because, oh fuck, because he’d been in the mood, and for no other good reason. He’d known Gigi since she was a kid—she was still a darling kid in some ways—and he should never have kissed a kid he’d known for years. For any reason. Or maybe he should have, if he’d been in love with her, but first, to be fair, he’d have had to tell her and find out how she felt about it—but he wasn’t in love with Gigi, never had been, never would be.

If that made him an utter and complete and irredeemable shit, so be it. There wasn’t anything he could think of to do or say that would change things with Billy. She had been so totally accusatory that it was hopeless. She didn’t just despise him, she must genuinely
hate
him. As that thought established itself in his mind, Spider discovered that it was possible to feel ten times worse than he had been feeling until now.

Would he have made love to Gigi if she hadn’t stopped him? Well, wouldn’t he?

“You miserable bastard,” Spider groaned out loud. Who was he kidding?

Billy hadn’t even been able to consider dinner, she couldn’t find a single place in the whole house where she could sit down for thirty seconds, she knew that even her hidden garden would hold no comfort for her tonight. Finally she’d come upstairs and huddled up on the window seat of the bay window of her dressing room, wrapped in the old afghan she’d had for more than twenty years. Her refuge of last resort, Billy thought. Did every woman have one private place to which she went when she faced the worst moments of her life, or were most women condemned to lock themselves in a bathroom with teenagers trying to get in? And why was she asking herself things she already knew? She was so deeply ashamed, so horrified at herself, that thinking about other people helped to take her mind off herself and her awfulness, that’s why.

Even when she’d been most bitter, most angry about Vito, she’d never allowed herself to carry on like that, in that indescribably odious, ghastly … she’d never even felt like it, come to think about it. She’d never wanted to utterly destroy Vito with words, she’d never wanted to cover him with slime, she’d tried her best to rise above their problems, not throw herself into the gutter and roll around in it like a demented … thing. A vile thing she didn’t recognize, with vile words, words she didn’t know she was going to say, spewing out of her mouth at Spider, who stood there looking so stunned, trying to treat it as if it were one of their typically good-natured, fake-aggressive, mock-hostile encounters, until he’d realized.… and even then he hadn’t gotten really angry until she’d goaded and goaded him until he had to protect himself.

Who did she think she was, the morals squad? The thought police? The Boston Watch and Ward Society? Gigi was more than mature enough to make her own decisions, she had been independent far beyond her age when she’d arrived in California long ago, and at this point in her life she’d been living on her own for years, in the biggest of big bad cities, with nothing more than a temporarily unconsummated romance with Zach Nevsky to make her miserable. Concern for Gigi was no excuse for becoming, without warning, a damned effective death ray of a woman.