Scruples (47 page)

“Are your purposes dishonorable?” she asked, giving him a sideways glance that betrayed very little.

“Christ, I hope so!” he groaned. For an enormously important lawyer to get himself unsprung from the legitimate crises and clutches of both Strassberger and Lipkin plus a wife and three children in order to run off to London in pursuit of a hauntingly perverse will-o’-the-wisp girl—“dishonorable” was hardly the right word, but it conveyed the message.

“In that case,” Valentine said, at her most haughty, “I shall first require a hot bath, cold vodka, soup, and, and—I must unpack.” Josh pressed three buttons arranged on a little metal rectangle on a side table. Within minutes three people stood in the doorway: a valet, a maid, and a waiter.

“Please run Madame’s bath and turn down the beds,” he told the maid; “I’d like a bottle of Polish vodka, two bottles of Evian, a bucket of ice, hot cream of watercress soup, and a tray of chicken sandwiches,” he instructed the waiter; and to the valet he said, “Madame’s luggage is in the bedroom. Would you please unpack it and take away the garments that need pressing. I’d like them back by tomorrow morning.” All three matter-of-factly disappeared about their tasks.

“It isn’t the most fashionable hotel anymore; they’re all in W.1,” Josh explained to a wide-eyed Valentine, “but you can’t beat it for service.” They were both thoughtfully silent until the maid and valet left.

“There is just one thing I should warn you about.”

“One thing?”

“Don’t, for heaven’s sake, drown in the bathtub. It’s very deep and about three feet longer than you are.”

“Perhaps I need a lifeguard.”

“Perhaps—but not for your first bath, darling—we’d both drown. And your hot soup is coming.”

“The waiter—he would be shocked?”

“A
Savoy
waiter, never!”

Valentine disappeared into the bathroom with a captivating backward look, an entirely imprudent spark in her green eyes, a half smile as provoking as an unopened present beautifully wrapped. It took Josh, who hadn’t been seduced in twenty years, a good four seconds before he started to struggle out of his jacket.

Neither the maid, the valet, nor the waiter, as they discussed it later, were at all surprised. In the Maria Callas suite—the Diva’s favorite when she had been in London—such behavior was the rule rather than the exception. “Perhaps it’s something in the air,” the valet suggested. “Wouldn’t be surprised,” sniffed the maid. The waiter, as always, had the last word. “I told my wife, it’s that Cleopatra’s Needle, I told her. A notorious woman she was, that one.”

They had five days, five days in which discretion was never calculated—five impervious, inviolate days in which the only things that existed were the excellent satisfactions of the flesh and the thrill of being marvelously unwise, even as they knew that the time for accounts would be in the future, but so far in the future that it didn’t matter, almost didn’t exist.

Valentine dispatched her business with Zandra Rhodes, Bill Gibb, Jean Muir, and Thea Porter with speed and certainty. Josh made a few phone calls and sent a number of Telex messages, but otherwise they were enclosed in the approving luxury of the Savoy, venturing out to explore London and dine at Tramp’s and Drone’s and Tiberio and the White Elephant Club and the dining room of the Connaught only for the pleasure it gave them to be in public and yet alone together.

There is a period, early in every romance, when lovers must show each other off, admiring each other and themselves reflected in the other. Even the noblest of back-grounds is merely a stage setting. Did doomed Lady Jane Grey really accept the crown of England more than four hundred years before in this long, dim, lavender-and-gold gallery of Syon House? How the other tourists must be admiring Valentine, Josh thought, as they wandered through, listening to the guide tell that melancholy tale.

It was too soon for them to question the texture of their love. Valentine was too enthralled with his adoration of her body, with her own physicality, truly alive for the first time. She had never been allowed an experience so purely animal as waking up in a bed that smelled of their earlier passion, to feel Josh quicken as he reached out for her again, the pungent odors of their bodies blending so that she didn’t know if she smelled of him or he smelled of her. She tried to fix in her memory the scent of Josh and the bed in the Savoy. She knew that the image of the man and the pink-and-cream bedroom, vaguely Art Deco, with a large, curving bay of windows over the Thames, would always be there, perhaps blurred or faulty, yet irradicable, but that exact smell—she inhaled, already nostalgic. It was the first time in Valentine’s life that she had been granted the luxuriant repletion of the senses, those long hours of twilight when merely being alive is entire unto itself, when there is enough—enough of everything, and the joy of the body makes the entire world seem good.

Josh was too filled with astonishing freedom, the bursting of the dam of duty and direction that had held him on one firm path from the day he learned to read, to ask himself where this was going, what future it could have. For the two of them, that certain moment, which in any potentially permanent love affair decides its outcome, was held in temporary suspension, intercepted by their tacit acceptance of the foolishness of trying to ponder the future.

“I don’t think I could stand making love with a man who didn’t have a hairy chest,” said Valentine, her nose pressed to his skin, sniffing like an ardent gourmet at the roots of the dark body hair, mixed with a few strands of gray, that covered his chest. “Could you?” And that, for five days, was perhaps the most serious question she asked.

Valentine boarded the polar flight one day ahead of Josh. His wife and, unfailingly, some of his children always met him at the airport after any business trip, a fact that caused Los Angeles to become a reality again. Even then, in the departure lounge, she did not speak of the next week or the next month. What, after all, was there for her to say? Only as the future unfolded itself would she see the shape of it. The Irish strain of fatalism that had always existed in her impetuous nature seemed to have taken her in hand. Nothing could have made Josh Hillman fall more deeply in love with her than this refusal to plan, to scheme, to make arrangements—this acquiescence to the evanescent. It drove him quite mad that she wasn’t trying to pin him down, to make sure of him, to demand something, anything. What was this? Two ships that pass in the night? Bullshit! He’d get this woman, no matter what. He saw her through the final gate, noted the loving farewell in her eyes as well as the nonchalance of her light, quick step, and almost ran to his waiting car. “The British Museum,” he told the driver. Only those monumental stone hallways, crammed with the heavy plunder of centuries, were suitably gloomy to witness the barbarian sense of abandonment he felt.

Billy Ikehorn
requests the honor of your company
at a Celebration
at Scruples on the first Saturday of November 1976
9:00
P.M
.
DANCING
BLACK TIE

Almost before the invitations went out,
Women’s Wear
predicted that it would be the most famous party since Truman Capote let people know who Kay Graham was. When Billy had wondered whom to invite, Spider had answered, “Everybody.”

“But I don’t know ‘everybody,’ Spider. What are you talking about?”

Spider had noticed, as they worked together bringing the new Scruples back to life, that Billy was curiously out of touch with the social scene in which he imagined she would have been involved. To him, her personal life, with its lack of family ties and intimate friends, seemed strangely empty and deprived. He had no way of knowing that she had been essentially alone for much of her life. The accidents of life had created an isolated woman. Her youth had stolen from her, perhaps forever, the ability to make friends easily. The years of being a freak had left her with scars that no amount of outward physical change could ever erase. She had left family behind when she quit Boston. When she left New York, after Ellis’s stroke, she hadn’t replaced her acquaintances there, who had never, in any event, except for Jessica, been true friends. In Los Angeles, where she might have made an entirely new start, her years of near-isolation—and preoccupation—in the citadel in Bel Air had kept her from forming close connections with other women.

Although millions of magazine and newspaper readers knew that “Billy” meant Billy Ikehorn, just as they knew the last names of “Liza” or “Jackie,” she, Billy, had never accepted the reality of her media celebrity status. She didn’t
feel
known. Ellis had taught her to distrust the pettiness of what is usually termed “Society” in New York, and she had been happy to stay just outside of it. When she moved to California she never made, in any substantial, meaningful way, the first move to swim freely in Los Angeles society. In addition, although Billy did not subscribe to the ultimate viewpoint of Boston society that no other “Society” exists worthy of the name, her Boston mannerisms and her residue of a Boston accent had never really disappeared, and they accentuated the impression she gave of being, in some final way, an outsider.

“Even if you don’t know everybody, they all know you,” Spider insisted.

“Well, what does that matter. I can’t invite perfect strangers—can I?”

“You damn well better,” Spider answered. “We’ve just spent about a million dollars, lady, and it would be a shame to let only the neighbors in on it.”

“Look, Spider, since you’re such an expert, you make out the list.” Billy fled, feeling for an embarrassing minute out of command. Spider tended recently to have that effect on her. He was such a wiseass, she reflected, annoyed at her own lack of social sophistication.

Spider had a field day. He started his list with the important local residents, then the barons and baronesses of the entire West Coast from the Mexican to the Canadian borders. Customers first, after all. Then he added selected notables from New York, Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, and Palm Beach. Hollywood—The New and The Old. The Fashion Establishment, of course. Washington? Why not the best? Well, maybe not President Carter, but certainly Vice-President Mondale, and it wouldn’t be a party without Tip O’Neill. Then he added what he could still only call the International Jet Set, but carefully culled, that fucked-up bunch. Was anybody left out? Jesus!
The press!
Spider hit himself on the forehead for his stupidity. That was what it was all about. He’d been jerking off over celebrities and politicians and overlooking their creators. So—the press; not just the fashion and society press but the right people from
People
and
New York Magazine
and
New West
and
Los Angeles
and the newsmagazines and Condé Nast and Hearst and network big shots.
Rolling Stone?
Maybe not. Would Walter Cronkite come? And Norman Mailer? How about Woodward and Bernstein? Hell, Scruples could easily hold six or seven hundred people when all the sliding walls were opened and all the display cases whisked away, just as Ken Adam had planned. That gave him room to invite at least four hundred couples since, Spider assured himself, many of the people he was inviting probably wouldn’t travel all the way from wherever they lived to attend a ball. He invited several dozens more, not forgetting his family or Josh Hillman and his wife. Maybe he was getting carried away, he reasoned, looking at the pages in front of him. He crossed out some names from Florida and Texas—how often did they get to California anyway? Then he went over all his lists, crossing off any names that were faintly dubious, either as potential customers or in their celebrity value. He ended up with three hundred and fifty couples and the party of the decade. Perhaps The Last Great Party. Certainly the most expensive party, the most photographed party, the most electric and talked-about party of the 1970s.

Without thinking it through, Billy had chosen well to give her ball on the first Saturday of November 1976, right after the presidential elections. Those whose candidate hadn’t won wanted to forget, while those who were glad about the outcome of the election wanted to celebrate. Above all, everyone wanted to think about something besides politics, the British pound, and pollution.

The last flower arrangers and lighting men left just as the caterers arrived to set up the bars and the buffets. On the first floor, which had been cleared for dancing, there were several large bars. Spider’s tour de force was putting a buffet, a bar, and a dozen chairs in each one of the twenty-four large fitting rooms. No one who came that night could miss a tour of the second floor of Scruples, which Billy Baldwin, working as fast as he had in his illustrious life, had transformed into a fascinatingly amusing and erotic pastiche of delectable rooms, each one of which provided his less inventive colleagues inspiration for years to come. Downstairs the dancing never stopped; Peter Duchin’s three best bands alternated so that there was never a moment without music. The Edwardian winter garden’s doors were thrown open so that people could stroll in the formal garden behind Scruples. There was even a full moon. Some magic lay over that warm night; women looked more beautiful in Ken Adam’s lighting than they had ever looked at any age in their lives; men felt more romantic and yet more powerful, perhaps just because they had been invited to the most glamorous and star-filled of all gala balls, perhaps because all of Scruples blended to touch somewhere, everyone’s most luxurious fantasy. Even the constant popping of flashbulbs added a note of delight. You have to be one of a half-dozen genuinely misanthropic celebrities to truly dislike having your picture taken.