Scruples (29 page)

That night, as he and Valentine sat together, Spider said softly, “You have an appointment with John Prince tomorrow at three.”

“Oh, sure—” She wasn’t even curious. She had hardly listened.

“I called him up today and told him.”

“What are you talking about?” Prince, like Bill Blass or Halston, was one of those giant designers whose name is so valuable that they are able to license the use of it for everything from perfume to luggage, racking up, in certain cases, as much as one hundred million dollars annually in retail sales, not counting the money they make on their clothes.

“I called Prince and told him how much of the Wilton collection is yours, and he checked with Wilton, who confirmed it, and he wants to interview you for the job as his chief assistant at twenty thousand dollars a year, starting right away. He expects you in his office tomorrow.”

“Are you completely crazy!” It was the first time he had seen any animation on her face since he had found her.

“Wanna bet? I told him I was your agent—that means you owe me a commission, I’m not sure how much yet. But don’t think I won’t collect.”

Nothing rings as true as the truth. That Spider was not making this up was instantly plain to Valentine, even as she pretended not to believe it, reluctant to struggle out of her limbo of mourning and depression.

“But my hair!” she cried, abruptly snapped back to basics.

“You might consider washing it,” Spider said judiciously. “Maybe even use a little makeup. You could take off your bathrobe now. It’s not as if you didn’t have a thing or two to wear,”

“Oh, Elliot, why did you do this for me?” she asked, almost beginning to cry again.

“I got sick of making melted-cheese sandwiches,” he laughed. “And if I see one more tear out of you I’m never going to make you any more tomato soup again either.”

“Please God,” she breathed, “no more tomato soup, whatever you do,” and ran into the bathroom to start washing her hair.

T
he mansion in Bel Air that Lindy selected for the stricken Ellis Ikehorn had originally been built in the late 1920s for an oil baron who had fallen under the spell of the Alhambra in Granada. A Spanish-Moorish castle, as authentic as many millions could make it, it stood on a hilltop more than two thousand feet above the Los Angeles basin, surrounded by fifteen acres of formal gardens in which the play of multitudes of fountains was always the focal point. Thousands of cypresses and olive trees, planted in avenues, led from the mansion in every direction, always downward, since it stood on the highest point of the hilltop, glimpsed here and there from other points of the Bel Air peaks, never fully revealed, tantalizingly romantic in its foreignness, always admitted to be the most remote aerie of all in this remote enclave of millionaires’ estates. Only people who had a map ever found their way to the gatehouse through the bewildering maze of overgrown, twisting, dangerous roads that led there; even if a stray tourist was to attempt to get closer to the dwelling, he would see only the gatehouse and the massive double gates, the only break in the tall walls that surrounded the entire property. The oil baron must have had enemies, Billy reflected, when she realized how completely the house was cut off from intruders.

But in spite of the inconveniences imposed by its location, the mansion, which was often and justifiably called the citadel, the fortress, or the castle, had one overriding advantage: a climate of its own. It was spring there all year round except during the rare rainy days in winter. During most of the winter, however, the many balconies, terraces, and courtyards were so sheltered that Ellis could sit outside in the warmth of the sun a large part of the day. In the summer, when the hot Santa Ana winds blew, the cloistered interior patios, planted with hundreds of tree roses and pungent herbs, were cool and sheltered and filled with the sound of falling water. When there was smog, it could be seen only as a yellow-brown layer of air below them, and fogs from the Pacific never rose as high as their hilltop. And the gloomy month of June, when the sun seems to shine only an hour a day on the streets of Beverly Hills, was bright and filled with the smell of spring high on the hill.

Only after Billy realized how many people would have to be housed in the mansion did she fully appreciate how well Lindy had chosen. The entire staff had to live in, except for the five gardeners, and the servants’ wing contained more than enough room for them, fifteen in all—chef, butler, kitchen helpers, a hand laundress, maids, and a housekeeper, who had a suite of her own. There were five cars permanently at the disposal of the servants for use during their time off. No one who lived at the mansion could be without transportation, for it was a good four miles from the East and West gates of Bel Air on Sunset Boulevard and the nearest bus stop. The three male nurses lived in the guest wing. Each of them worked one eight-hour shift a day, so that Ellis was never unattended, and they too had to be provided with room and board so that their rotating schedules meshed perfectly. They also were provided with cars so that they would not become restless with their isolation from the attractions of Westwood and the Strip. Twenty people ate three meals a day at the lonely citadel on the hilltop.

Mrs. Post, the housekeeper, was busy almost all morning arranging for deliveries from Jurgensen’s, from Schwab’s, from the United Laundry, which handled all the towels, sheets, and nurses’ uniforms, from the dry cleaners, and from Pioneer Hardware, which held Beverly Hills in a tight monopolistic grip.

Lindy had accomplished miracles in preparing the huge mansion to receive them. A new kitchen had been installed; the old swimming pool, at the bottom of an avenue of tall, dark cypresses, had been fitted with a new filtering and heating system; and the pool house had been redecorated. Much of the vast house was closed off, but the main living quarters had been totally redone in a cheerful, luxurious way, so that a bright, Spanish quality now banished the musty, gloomy Moorish feeling it had had before. None of it was Billy’s own taste, but she didn’t have the heart to care. The gardens were halfway to restoration, and work was proceeding on the servant and guest wings. The old garages, fortunately, had room for a dozen cars.

When Lindy had made the house habitable, Billy and Ellis and Dan Dorman flew out in the company jet, which had been refitted to accommodate an invalid. The cabin was converted into two large rooms, one a pleasant bedroom containing a hospital bed for Ellis and a couch for Billy, the other a living room in which there was very little furniture besides easy chairs and side tables so that Ellis’s wheelchair could be easily moved around. The three nurses had their own lounge up front near the crew.

The problems involved in hiring the male nurses, converting the jet, giving her approval to Lindy’s choice for the new house, closing up the apartment in New York, and selling the houses in the south of France and in Barbados had all occupied Billy’s mind and given her a minimum of time to think about the new realities of her life. In the absolute shelter of Ellis’s love—Ellis, who had been lover, husband, brother, father, and grandfather to her, all the protective males she had lacked during her life—Billy had bloomed and yet not grown in any essential sense. She had glowed for seven years as the twenty-one-year-old girl-woman he had married, not becoming more mature, as she would certainly have had to do had she married a young husband. It was Ellis who had become younger during their marriage, Billy who remained the same.

Now, in her castle on the hill, three thousand miles away from her New York acquaintances, her New York activities, alone in a house filled with servants, nurses, and one paralyzed old man, she felt panic begin. Nothing had prepared her in any way for this responsibility. Everything frightened her, there was no comfort anywhere, no safe place, nothing to hang on to. Lost. Lost—and now, twenty miles away, even the sun was setting over the Pacific. “Stop it Billy!” she scolded herself in Aunt Cornelia’s abrupt manner. Aunt Cornelia, she decided, was to be the example she would follow until she could find her own way. Briskly she turned on all the lamps in her bedroom and sitting room and drew the curtains on the darkness. What did Aunt Cornelia do every day of her life? Billy sat down at her desk, took out a pad and pencil, and began to make a list. One, find a bookstore,
tomorrow
. Two, learn to drive. Three, arrange tennis lessons. Four—she couldn’t think of a four. It should be a list of people to call, but there was no one here she felt close enough to telephone. But she felt slightly less panic already. How Billy wished that Aunt Cornelia were still alive—she’d call Jessie in New York—maybe she could be persuaded to leave her five children and come out for a visit—

Within a month Billy had found a workable formula for her life. The first priority in each day was the time she spent with Ellis, four or five hours, either reading aloud or to herself, watching television, or just sitting quietly with him, holding his good hand, in one or another of their many gardens. She was with him for two hours every morning, from three to five in the afternoon, and an hour after dinner before he slept. She talked to him as much as she could, but he responded less and less. It had turned out to be easier for him to spell out words with little alphabet blocks fitted with tiny bits of magnet, which he arranged on a metal blackboard, than to learn to write with his left hand. Increasingly, even this cost him a great effort. Dan Dorman had explained to Billy, during one of his monthly visits, that a number of tiny strokes were bound to be taking place imperceptibly in Ellis’s brain as time passed, so that the brain damage was slowly increasing. The stricken man’s general health continued to be excellent, his body fairly strong. In the circumstances, Dorman thought to himself but did not tell Billy, Ellis might easily live another six or seven years, possibly more.

Billy had followed Dorman’s advice not to spend all her time with her husband. Every day she took a tennis lesson at the Los Angeles Country Club, and three times a week she exercised at Ron Fletcher’s studio in Beverly Hills. She made a number of casual women friends at both places, and she was careful to make several lunch dates each week with one or another of them. These lunches represented 99 percent of her social life.

Ellis refused to have her present while he was being fed and he slept a long time after lunch, so during those midday hours she felt free of the obligation to be at the mansion. Without the support system of a nearby family or a network of old friends, without the free time necessary to undertake a serious commitment to charity work or even some sort of part-time volunteer job, Billy realized that she had three chief resources in her life: books, exercise, and buying clothes.

There was something which almost relieved her constant tension in prowling daily through the boutiques and department stores of Beverly Hills, buying, always buying—what did it matter if she needed the clothes or not? She had hundreds of elegant robes to wear at dinner; dozens of pairs of beautifully tailored pants; forty tennis dresses; silk shirts by the hundreds; drawers and drawers full of handmade lingerie from Juel Park, where a pair of panties could cost two hundred dollars; closets full of two-thousand-dollar dresses from Miss Stella’s Custom Department at I. Magnin to wear to the few dinner parties to which she was invited; three dozen bathing suits, which she kept in the elaborate pool house where she changed for her daily swim. Three empty bedrooms in the mansion had been turned into closets for her new clothes.

Billy knew perfectly well, as she walked into the General Store or Dorso’s or Saks, that she was falling into the classic occupation of rich, idle women: buying supremely unnecessary clothes to feed, but never ill, the emptiness within. “It’s that or get fat again,” she told herself, as she walked up Rodeo or down Camden, feeling a sexual buzz as she searched the windows for new merchandise. The thrill was in the trying on, in the buying. The moment after she had acquired something new it became meaningless to her; therefore, each time she went out looking for something to purchase it was the same need that drove her. But she couldn’t buy just anything. It had to be worth buying. Billy’s Paris-born discrimination about quality and fit had become even more important to her as she noticed the casual way other women in Beverly Hills dressed. If she ever allowed herself to go around wearing jeans and t-shirts, what reason would she have to go shopping? Day by day she became an increasingly difficult and autocratic customer. A missing button or a badly finished seam became personal insults. The flesh around her full mouth would tighten in a fury when she found any defects.

Women’s Wear
occasionally did roundup features on how California women dressed, and Billy’s picture was always included as an outstanding example of West Coast chic. Keeping her body clothed to perfection, staying on the Best-Dressed List, the exercise classes, which kept her muscles firm, strong, and supple, the frequent visits to the hairdresser, the manicures, the pedicures—all these became obsessions that almost managed to cover over her desperate, growing craving for sex.

Until the day of his first stroke Ellis had been able to provide Billy with enough sexual pleasure to keep her satisfied if not satiated. Now, for well over a year, she had had no sex at all, except for occasional masturbation. And even that lesser relief was tainted by a feeling of deeply etched guilt left over from a childhood in which she had believed, as long as she could remember, that masturbation was a sin. A sin against what or whom had never been made clear, but Billy couldn’t get over feeling depressed and sad afterward whenever she now resorted to masturbation to try to lower the gnawing degree of sexual need with which she lived all of the time.