Scruples (44 page)

The titles of the second feature were flashing on the screen before they drew apart When two people are grown up, kissing cannot go on forever. When two people are as complex and self-defined as Valentine and Josh, kissing cannot lead to anything else without some words being spoken. But what words? They were suddenly as shy as schoolchildren, both of them overtaken by belated surprise. How had they arrived at this moment after only a few hours together? Self-consciousness came flooding back.

“What happens next?” Josh asked slowly. “Valentine darling, do you know?”

“No,” she answered, “I know as little—much less—than you.”

“Then we’ll both learn together,” he said, as cautiously as someone finding his way in the dark.

“Perhaps,” she answered, drawing back slightly.

“Perhaps! Why do you say that?”

“I am only being prudent—for me—for you.”

“To hell with prudence. We can both be prudent all the rest of our lives. But this time, Valentine, lovely, beautiful Valentine, oh, just once, let’s be crazy, just this once in our lives!”

He kissed her again and again, like a boy, planting impetuous, fervent, random kisses on her eyes, her ears, her chin, her hair. He felt all the starved spontaneity of his studious youth crying out to be expressed in romantic words, but all he could manage to say was, “Be crazy with me, Valentine.”

“Perhaps.” Something in Valentine, something very strong, would not allow her to be swept away. After giving in completely to the first, unimaginable, mindless comfort of feeling his arms around her, she had retreated, retrenched, gone back a step to her sturdy inner self. Her sense of reality had returned, and with it disquiet, disbelief that she was here, kissing this man, a man she had met only yesterday, a married man with children. Madame Hélène O’Neill’s clever, skeptical, logical daughter could not agree to be crazy. At least not yet, and most certainly not in a drive-in. One shall see, she said to herself, using a time-honored French formula for any sort of style of indecision, from downright refusal to near acceptance. Aloud, she said only, “Perhaps.”

With regrets, Spider returned the Mercedes to the dealer in used classic cars opposite the Beverly Wilshire Hotel—unfortunately it wasn’t exactly the car he was looking for, but he’d be back—and went to scare up Valentine to tell her the story of his day with Billy. When he couldn’t find her, he ordered dinner from room service and lay on his bed to think. His superbly sensitive antennae for the hidden thoughts of women had never told him anything as strongly as that the next two weeks were crucial. He suspected that he and Valentine might have been taking a plane back to New York tomorrow if he hadn’t sweet-talked Billy today. That lady was quirky, skittish, and just one baby step away from washing her hands of the whole venture. She was so used to having things go her own way that she’d almost lost all consideration for others, if she’d ever had it; she was spoiled rotten, trigger-happy, and yet there was something that was still vulnerable in her. Spider estimated that, all in all, he could manage her, given the right amount of inspiration. She was not another Harriet Toppingham, as he had wondered the night before; she did not want to see fear in a man; on the contrary, she wanted to see courage, she responded to boldness, she could be fair. She was fundamentally decent, he had to admit.

But first, Spider warned himself, before he went in for missionary work on Billy Ikehorn, he had to learn two things, and learn them within two weeks. He needed to absorb the climate of retailing as it currently existed in Beverly Hills in successful stores. Second, he had to find out about the way California women spent their money on clothes, the
how
of it. Obviously, they didn’t base their wardrobes on the sorts of things he was used to noticing in New York: wonderful urban coats, good-looking suits, polished street and office dressing. Spider almost fell asleep, thinking of how different the women looked on the corner of 57th Street and Fifth than they did on the corner of Wilshire and Rodeo, when two words sprang into his mind and shocked him awake, cursing himself for being so slow to remember and blessing himself for being lucky.
Native son
.

Jesus Christ Almighty, it was the fucking treasure of Sierra Madre! He’d been out of touch so long—three or four years since he’d been back for Christmas, and the last six months he had barely let his family know he was alive—but my God, how could a man, even bleeding from every pore because of Melanie Adams and punch-drunk from changing his life’s work in less than a week, to say nothing of the craziness of yesterday and the business of the contracts and today’s drive with Billy Ikehorn, lady razor blade—how could a man forget that he was
back home!

Pasadena, or rather San Marino, the quiet, wealthy part of Pasadena, had been his home until he was eighteen and UCLA in Westwood had been his Eden for the rest of his life in California, but even if Beverly Hills was relatively unexplored territory for Spider Elliott, it was still a part of the world where he had his roots, his friends, and hallelujah—his family.
Six sisters!

A man with six sisters, Spider realized with glee, was a rich man—unless he was Greek and had a duty to marry them off. He began to jot down notes on the pad on his bedside table. Five of the girls had married—three very well—he remembered, and unless the bottom had fallen out of oil and lumber and insurance, they must be socially secure young matrons by now. Holly and Heather were twenty-eight, and Holly had married an oil heir and lived in super-conservative, old-money Hancock Park. Pansy had married the only son of a man who owned half the redwood trees in northern California, but her husband owned and operated an insurance company from a home base in San Francisco. Even one of the kids, little June, had done awfully well for herself; only twenty-four, she was the richest of them all; her new husband’s fast-food franchises had given her a spread in Palm Springs, a beach house in La Jolla, and a vast house and stables in Palos Verdes. Not that the other girls had done badly—Heather and January were also married, not rich-rich, just nicely well-off; and Petunia, Spider guessed, liked screwing around too much to settle down. For his purposes, Spider needed to know about the social life of both the well-off and the rich-rich. Thoughts of the rich-rich reminded him of Herbie. He’d forgotten Herbie! His best friend at UCLA. Movie money, piles of it, and Herbie had gone into the family business.

Christ, Spider finally understood that while he was living in a loft in New York probably 90 percent of the golden lads and lasses he had known in his school days had become respectful and affluent citizens. He’d been tempted, for a moment, earlier that day, to ask Billy to give a party for him and Valentine so that they could see how women dressed out here at night, but on second thought he hadn’t wanted to ask her help; he’d wanted to do it on his own. Damn good thing he’d waited until his brains unscrambled. At the bottom of his list of names, Spider wrote in letters one inch high: EVERYBODY—WELCOME HOME PARTY NEEDED WITHIN LESS THAN TWO WEEKS—DRESSED UP! and with the other hand he dialed an old familiar number, the only one he’d ever bothered to memorize.

“MOM! Hi, Mom—I’m home!”

I
n the two weeks that followed his call home, Spider needed all his resilience, all his trained eye for detail, all his leaping sense of taste, all his imagination and sense of what works visually and what doesn’t quite make it. Fortunately, it was late August, the busy time, when Beverly Hills stores begin receiving their fall merchandise. Also it was still sale time for summer things all over town.

Separately, both he and Valentine worked the streets foot by foot. North of Wilshire, they covered Rodeo, Camden, and Bedford drives up and down both sides of the streets. Then they investigated every shop on Dayton Way and Brighton Way and on “little” Santa Monica, crisscrossing them from east to west. They left little but the pavement unturned on Wilshire Boulevard, from Robinson’s on the west boundary, delving through Saks, Magnin’s, Elizabeth Arden’s, Delman’s, and finally, on the east corner of the shopping part of the street, Bonwit Teller’s. It all formed a dense, vaguely triangular grid, which in New York City would have been stretched out into blocks and blocks of Fifth and Madison avenues but in Beverly Hills was so compressed that any boutique, any store, was easily reached by foot. An average, medium-sized boutique on Rodeo paid a yearly rent of ninety-six thousand dollars so that the unsuccessful quickly closed.

Sometimes Spider, who did everything but lick the paint off the walls in his efforts to fix the qualities of a store in his mind, would bump into Valentine, busily going through the sale racks to see what they hadn’t sold last season, driving salesgirls to murder in their hearts as she carefully inspected every piece of new merchandise, filing it away in the sketchbook of her mind but never being “carried away” enough to buy, as she apologetically explained. Spider, obviously a potential customer in his beautifully cut, new clothes, hastily bought before he left New York, often pretended to be buying a present for his mother or one of his sisters as he loitered and eavesdropped and fell into conversation with unsuspecting store owners and customers and sales personnel. Together and separately, they covered all the smaller boutiques and such major shops at Dorso’s, Giorgio’s, Amelia Gray’s, Jax, Matthews, the Right Bank Clothing Company, Kamali, Alan Austin, Dinallo, Ted Lapidus, Mr. Guy’s, Theodore’s, Courrèges, Polo, Charles Gallay, Gunn-Trigère, Hermès, Edwards-Lowell, and Gucci.

During those two weeks eight parties were given for Spider, hastily arranged but large and festive.

Although the Elliott girls as children had always felt that there was such an abundance of Spider’s love that they did not need to compete for it, now, as adults, they found themselves rivaling each other in entertaining the legendary brother their Mends had heard so much about but rarely seen. Since not one of them could bring herself to even begin to believe that Valentine was merely Spider’s business partner—who was he kidding, with that sexy French look, that sparkly way she had, and those eyes—they were all exceedingly, excessively polite to her. Valentine’s often reflected, when she had time to think at all, that while it had not been too difficult to be friendly with Elliott’s women, good God, the ladies of his family could think of only one thing. Nevertheless, it was well worth being treated with the utmost charm of course, as if she had come to steal away each sister’s particular treasure, since these parties, more than any other single element in the two exhausting weeks, gave Valentine a chance to see how affluent women dressed at night from San Francisco to San Diego. Josh telephoned her every day, but she had, truly, no time for him until this marathon was over. Valentine missed him, but she couldn’t afford to indulge in any emotional feelings at this crucial, crazy time.

During the two weeks she had allotted to Valentine and Spider, Billy made several infuriating visits to Scruples, where racks and racks of clothes were on sale, a sight that disgusted her to the marrow of her bones, much as she knew it was necessary. Only her need to keep up a good face kept her from hiding all the sale clothes and shipping them away to the Salvation Army, for she could imagine just how fast the story of such a caper would spread. She could scarcely contain her desire to have the final conference with those two imposters and get the whole abortion over with.

When the day came, Billy sat behind her desk as if it were a stone wall, eyeing Valentine and Spider with the air of an indifferent, paid executioner. By now she had almost convinced herself that everything that wasn’t working at Scruples was their fault.

Spider lounged against the wall, splendidly nonchalant in a lightweight Glen plaid, one of the several extremely good suits he had bought at Dunhill Tailors in New York. Billy was grimly pleased to see that, in spite of his casual pose, he looked serious and concerned. Valentine perched on a chair, obviously waiting for him to speak first. Billy thought that the girl looked exhausted, almost punch-drunk.

“Let’s have it, Spider,” Billy said, in a flat, bored voice. Everything about her breathed lack of interest, even her posture.

“I’ve got good news.”

“Surprise me.”

“You have only one rival to surpass to become the number-one store in Beverly Hills and you have only one way to do it.”

“That’s just insane. Try to make sense, Spider. I thought we’d agreed that fancy footwork was out.”

“Your rival is Scruples.” He held up a hand to forestall her interruption, locking eyes with her so that she subsided, only her dark eyebrows quirked in angry suspicion. “I could put it more plainly. Your rival is your
own dream
of Scruples, of the store you wanted it to be, the store you were convinced southern California was waiting for.
You were wrong, Billy
. By about six thousand miles. I understand your dream; it was the inevitable outcome of your personal taste, but it was as futile as expecting to build the Petit Trianon on the site of the Hollywood Wax Museum. Some things just don’t transplant. You can sell Coca-Cola in Africa and there may be as many Mercedes in downtown Abu Dhabi as there are in Beverly Hills, but there is only one possible Dior and it is located on the Avenue Montaigne and that is where it should stay.
Give up your fantasy of Dior, Billy, or buy a ticket to Paris
. The light is different there, the weather is different, the civilization is different, the customers and their needs are different, the entire approach to buying a dress is absolutely, completely different. You, of all people, know what a serious business it is there to choose a garment—it’s a monumental decision.”