Scruples (62 page)

“When you’ve got your location picked,” Maggie continued, “just let me know and we’ll set things up. I’m so sick of doing pieces on actors I could spit. I want to do a show on producers, a day in the life of a producer, something about a mensch for once. Yeah, I like the idea more and more—a change of pace. And you’re the most menschish producer in the business.” She looked at Vito with an appreciative, nostalgic eye and then, remembering her manners rather late, turned to Billy. “Don’t you think it’s a good idea?” Before Billy could answer, Vito interrupted.

“We’re shooting in Mendocino, Maggie. Start date July 5th, all seven weeks up there.” Billy felt her charming waxwork smile being replaced by blank, outraged surprise. She’d known that Vito was considering various locations in the north of California, but this was the first time she had heard that it was all decided. She’d learned to listen to his side of phone conversations to pick up these details of what he was doing, which he didn’t remember to mention to her, but this was a major chunk of new information. “So,” Vito continued, “if you’re serious about coming, get the network to pull some strings and make your reservations now, because the tourists will be all over the place.”

“Anything would be better than that Mexican motel we were in the last time,” Maggie said, with a laugh that again excluded everyone but Vito.

As the four of them attacked their cannelloni and shrimps marinara, the conversation took an even more bewildering course. Vito launched on a discussion of something he called “creative accounting.” This was his hobbyhorse, the exposure of the ways in which the major studios of Hollywood have pioneered ingenious methods of reducing actual profits on their financial reports so that the people with participating shares in the profits of a picture, the producers, the directors, and often the actors, are left with a fraction of what they really deserve, if anything at all. Here and there Billy caught a phrase in the animated discussion, and then she was lost again as Vito, Maggie, and Herb Henry explored the devilishly complicated twists and turns invented by the business-affairs departments of the studios.

Billy felt utterly shut out. Incredibly, sitting there in the Boutique with the husband she loved, she was reminded of meals at boarding school, when she would find herself trapped at a table with some of the popular girls, forced to listen to them chatter on about mutual friends and parties to come, while she, invisible and negligible, was drowning in the thick soup of her own mortification, her own hatred of her own alienation.

Before that dinner came to an end, Billy had learned an emotion that she had been spared during her life: jealousy, the most filthy, the most thoroughly vile emotion of all.

All the forms of pain she had experienced while growing up had been forms of envy, feelings that others had something she wanted terribly to have but could not obtain. But there had never been a triangular relationship in her life in which someone threatened the love she wanted all for herself. The love she had known as a child, that of her father for what little it was worth, that of Hannah, the cook-housekeeper who took care of her, that of her Aunt Cornelia, all of those loves had been given with a steadiness. They had not been enough to make up for the disdain of her peers, but they had been hers alone. Then Ellis had loved her to the exclusion of the world. Never, in their life together, had she been less than everything to him. But here was Vito, her husband of little more than a month, totally caught up in a conversation with a woman who was part of his working world, with whom he obviously had secrets, forgetting that she, Billy, was there, enjoying himself with gusto, eating with relish, as if she didn’t exist for him. She felt her stomach turn bilious with jealousy, and her sense of self was equally sick with the understanding that she could feel this foul and demeaning emotion.

On the drive home, Billy asked carelessly, carefully, “Vito, you’ve known Maggie for ages, haven’t you?”

“No, darling, only for a couple of years. She came to Rome to interview me once, you know, the picture with Belmondo and Moreau.”

“Is that when you had an affair with her?” Brightly, still casually. Another man might have been fooled.

“Now listen, Billy, we’re not children. We didn’t wait to meet each other before we lost our virginity; we agreed not to discuss the past before we got married. Don’t you remember the talk we had in the plane.” He shook his head gravely at her. “I don’t want to know, ever,
not one word
, about the men you have had in your life. I’m a terribly jealous man. I know that particular fact about myself and I wish it weren’t true. But I can refuse to think or hear about your past. And I expect the same consideration from you, about my life before I knew you.” He took one hand off the wheel and put it over hers. “Maggie was rubbing your nose in it tonight and I don’t blame you. Yes, we did have a little affair in Rome, not terribly important, but it left us good friends.”

“Aren’t you forgetting Mexico?” Billy felt her mouth making an ugly grimace of distaste at herself as she spoke, but she couldn’t keep back the words.

Vito roared with laughter. “Mexico! Silly, silly, darling
idiot!
That terrible motel was where—don’t you remember the Ben Lowell story, the stand-in he hit who died later? My God, where were you? The whole world was talking about it.”

“I remember it vaguely. I was busy with Scruples. But did you—in Mexico—with Maggie?”

“Look, love, you’re going too far. This is exactly the kind of sordid conversation we promised each other not to have. ‘Did you do this, did you do that, how many times, where, was it good, did you feel this or that?’ all those other ridiculous, hurtful questions. In Mexico, Maggie had the trots the first night, since you want the sexy details, and from then on, it was sheer nightmare, a dead man on our hands and hell breaking loose all over. Now, the subject is closed, permanently and forever. You have no reason to be jealous of any woman in the world and I’ll never give you reason. There is no one else I love. No one else compares to you. You are my
wife.”

Billy felt the nausea of jealousy grow less in her belly, but it was not banished by his words. She hadn’t been really jealous of Maggie, as another woman, but of Maggie as someone who had a part in Vito’s obsession with the world of films. A new place in her mind had opened up, a putrid place in which there was poison. So long as Vito loved his work as much as he did—as much as he loved her, Billy thought—that new place could only be scabbed over, never healed. It would be scraped raw again and again as long as he could forget she was by his side while he talked business. She felt tattered and diminished by her newly born understanding.

As they walked upstairs together, arms around each other’s waist, on their way to their bedroom, Billy angrily reminded herself that the only kind of man she could respect was a dedicated man, a passionate man, a man who cared desperately about his work, who did it with total commitment. When Vito had told her, that first time she asked him to marry her, that he wasn’t the kind of man she could “acquire,” she had thought he meant that he couldn’t be bought. Now she realized that he meant he couldn’t be owned. She had rushed headfirst into the heart of the paradox; she who insisted on ownership had sought, as she had never sought anything else, a man she could never own. Using all her strengths and wiles, she had contrived to build her own prison.

I
n early July, on the Monday following their dinner at the Boutique, Vito, accompanied by Fifi Hill and the art director of
Mirrors
, left for five days of preproduction hunting in Mendocino. When he left, loneliness fell over Billy like a dusty curtain. Billy had neglected Scruples since her marriage six weeks earlier. She fled to her own office, the only part of the store that had not been redecorated. She had loved the richly tranquil room, but now she found it curiously melancholy. The blue-gray velvet walls hung with a collection of watercolors by Cecil Beaton, the delicate, elaborately inlaid and gilded Louis XV furniture, the
bureau à cylindre
at which she worked, although it should have been in a museum, even the Fabergé document case, made for Czar Nicholas II, in which she kept her most important papers, all seemed as lifeless as if they were missing one crucial dimension. The room gave her no comfort. She left her office impatiently and made a tour of Scruples from top to bottom, finding nothing to criticize. The store had flourished indecently in her absence.

After lunch she had an appointment with Valentine to talk over her fall wardrobe. It seemed to her, as they worked together, that Valentine had changed in subtle ways, which Billy found most intriguing. Somehow, in the past year, the girl had slowly acquired the delectable patina of the celebrated person. It was-as if she had been lightly, almost imperceptibly brushed with coat after coat of, not gloss, not sophistication, not fame—perhaps assurance. She had always been decisive, but there had been something just a little overly defiant in that spunky manner of hers, as if she’d go off like a firecracker at the least opposition. Now she had softened and matured into a calm certainty of touch. She no longer double-dared Billy to contradict her by her attitude; she had a quiet, seasoned conviction about her work, which made an amusing, yet oddly impressive contrast to her spirited girlish figure, which had now been photographed a number of times. Aside from the profits generated by her department, the magazine and newspaper publicity it attracted was priceless.

All together, a most successful idea of hers, bringing Valentine to Scruples, Billy congratulated herself, but what did the girl do for fun? She wasn’t having a bit on the side with Spider Elliott, that was certain.

No, it could hardly be Spider, unless he had a twin brother. From what Billy picked up here and there and all around, Spider was so involved with several women that she was amazed that he still had the strength to come to work. Yet he was the first person at Scruples in the morning and the last to leave at night. They walked through the entire store together, and Billy observed how he could change the mood of a room by entering it, banish tension, create excitement, and give tired saleswomen energy, charm dull women into feeling witty, let pretty women know they were intelligent, convince certain intelligent women, who, Billy thought, should have known better, that they were beautiful. He was a splendiferous one-man band, she decided, kind and funny and smart. He made every woman want to present him with her best qualities. Yet he, too, had changed. The pagan smile, so ready for joy, seemed to have dimmed. Now it was just a smile, not an expectation.

Valentine O’Neill and Spider Elliott, both invaluable to the great caravan, the baroque bazaar, the fantasyland that was Scruples. Billy realized that although they were her partners, her employees, she didn’t know either of them very well. It never occurred to Billy that these thoughts would never have concerned her a few months ago. She might have been indignant, certainly puzzled, if someone had pointed out that her sensitivity to the changes in Spider and Valentine were signs of an even greater change in her.

Mendocino, the seacoast town Vito had settled on for the setting of
Mirrors
, is California’s true Brigadoon. Some two hundred long, winding miles up the coast, north of San Francisco, it seems, to even the most unimaginative traveler, to have just risen out of the mists of a hundred years ago, intact and untouched by the twentieth century. It is set on a steep, rounded bluff jutting high out over the Pacific. The entire town is an official historic landmark, and once inside the village limits the traveler will look in vain for a McDonald’s or a Burger King or even any minor indication that modern day has arrived to lay a disfiguring hand on this enchanted settlement, an old mill town, which was first built in the early 1850s in a simple Victorian style known as Carpenter’s Gothic. Unlike anyone’s idea of California, the houses are all wooden, timbered and shingled, once painted pinks, yellows, and blues, now faded into weathered and romanic pastels, surrounded with vacant lots overrun with old rosebushes, briars, and wild flowers. Any new construction in Mendocino—and almost none is allowed under any circumstances—must exactly duplicate this Cape Cod-style of architecture; even the signs for the one hotel, the bank, the general store, and the post office are of the period. On all three sides facing the Pacific, Mendocino is protected by wide stretches of fields, like Scottish moors in their windswept bareness, fields that are all state-park land and will remain forever in their natural condition.

However, the population of Mendocino is far from frozen in the past. The town attracts many young artists and craftsmes, sturdy individualists who find a way to live there by selling their work to the annual invasions of tourists or by running shops and art galleries and little restaurants tucked away in the few rows of old houses in the center of town. In general, the people of Mendocino County are a proud, pugnacious breed, who have, in the last few years, officially “seceded” from the state of California several times.

Vito had decided to shoot
Mirrors
in Mendocino for several reasons.
Les Miroirs de Printemps
, the French novel he had bought, had to be translated to an American setting. The original story took place in Honfleur, that much-painted Normandy fishing village that also is a haunt of artiste and tourists, and the weather in both places is similar, often chilly and foggy even in midsummer. Honfleur, a favorite target for invasion since long before Henry V, is less warlike in character than the northern California town but equally undisturbed by time.