Scruples (69 page)

“Show me an answer print,” said Vito, pointing with thanksgiving and weary glory to the six double reels of film that filled two metal carrying cases, “and I’ll show you a motion picture.”

Limply, Billy thought that, if nothing else, marriage had added to her vocabulary.

The two cases held the net results of months of virtually nonstop work, the cooperation of hundreds of people, the total commitment of one small group, the expenditure of more than two million dollars, and an incalculable number of small miracles. Bad weather, illness on the part of the actors, accidents in labs, or any one of the hundreds of other things that can go wrong during the shooting of a picture
hadn’t
happened. The inevitable series of minor and major crises had somehow been surmounted by Vito’s absolute determination to make this movie and make it fast. Luck and Billy had been on his side.

It was mid-November when Vito had his answer print at last. Curt Arvey was in New York. His difficulties with Vito were merely infuriating compared to the huge disaster the studio was facing with its major production, a star-studded musical based on Dickens’
Pickwick Papers
, a fifteen-million-dollar film, which the studio had been counting on for Christmas release and the family trade.
Pickwick!
, which should have been finished months ago, was still a month behind schedule and bogging down day by day. It was now almost three million dollars over budget and Arvey’s board of directors had summoned him to New York to explain.
Pickwick!
had been booked into two hundred and fifty carefully chosen, topnotch, first-run houses, and it was obvious that no combination of events would enable them to meet those dates.

Vito telephoned Oliver Sloan, the head of sales at Arvey Film Studio.

“You fellows can see the answer print of
Mirrors
now, Oliver,” he announced casually.

“Jeezus! That’s—” The head of sales checked his unseemly astonishment at the incredible speed with which the picture had come through postproduction. “I’ll have to call you back on that, Vito.”

“Anytime,” Vito responded, knowing that Sloan would have to report to Arvey before he said anything more.

With difficulty, Oliver Sloan reached his employer in his hotel suite in Manhattan. After a brief conversation he hung up and sighed to his assistant, “Arvey said to burn the fucking print when Orsini walks in the door and to throw his ass in jail.”

“What are you going to do?”

“We’ll see it first, I think, before we burn it. Mr. Arvey wasn’t in one of his better moods.” Sloan then called Vito and set up a screening for the next day with the gloom of a medical examiner about to perform his ten-thousandth autopsy.

The next afternoon at two the big screening room was half filled with the upper echelon of the studio’s Sales, Advertising, and Promotion departments, some sixteen men in all. Four of them brought their secretaries, who, by virtue of seniority and tradition, often deigned to come to screenings of new pictures. Since there were no big stars in
Mirrors
, they had scant interest in the film itself, but each of them wanted to be among the first in the studio secretary population to know what Billy Ikehorn’s husband had come up with.

The sixteen men, as was their wont, made no audible reactions to the picture except for a few coughs and the sound of cigarettes being lit. As the film ended, the four secretaries scrambled out a side door as inconspicuously as possible and the men sat a minute in the traditional noncommittal silence, but this time it was deeper and longer than usual. Everyone waited for the reaction of Oliver Sloan. Eventually he said, “Thanks, Vito. See you around,” and walked out. He was followed by the other men, discussing business matters in low tones, either ignoring Vito or else greeting him with tiny, meaningless nods. Vito waited until the last man had left and quickly slipped out of the screening room. He walked down the hall to the executive men’s room. There he slid quietly into a stall and waited. Oliver Sloan’s voice was the first he heard.

“Jeezus! This is the first time I’ve been able to go in four days. This job is getting more binding every year.”

“You should complain! I get the runs—had ’em a week.”

“Jeezus, Jim, Arvey’ll have a heart attack, but this picture is going to save his ass. We can use it to fill all those dates for
Pickwick!
Fucking Orsini—what a fantastic picture. Beautiful! Fucking beautiful!”

“Yeah, it’s gonna work, Oli, gonna make it. How many prints do we order?”

“Say two hundred seventy-five, be on the safe side. Fucking Orsini!”

“Why’d the girls leave like that? In such a hurry?”

“Embarrassed, I guess. They’d run out of Kleenexes. Dripping tears all over the place.”

“Secretaries—emotional types.”

“Yeah, Jeezus, a happy ending’ll do it every time. Females, they’ve got no emotional control. I thought Gracie was about to start sobbing right out loud—had to pinch her hard. Who knows from women? Gracie eats nails for lunch and then goes all sentimental.”

Vito had heard enough. Smiling like a conquering Caesar, he left the stall and stood at the door to the men’s room, addressing the four well-polished shoes planted on the floor under the stalls.

“I’m delighted that you like the picture, gentlemen. Enjoy a good crap. My treat.”

Valentine lay full length on her puffy couch, reveling in the luxury of putting up her feet after a mad day at Scruples. A November breeze blew through the open doors to her terrace, and if she waited there she knew that in a few hours she would see the moon rise. What a day it had been! Tonight was one time she wouldn’t give Josh anything more exotic to eat than a pizza, but she was too weary to even phone in an order. There had been the final fittings on the Portland, Oregon, wedding party; everyone from the bride and bridesmaids to the mothers of the bride and groom, plus the bride’s entire trousseau. Valentine wondered where the girl would wear those outfits in Portland. She had a vague idea that Portland was a strictly industrial city somewhere up north, but, on the other hand, a forty-thousand-dollar trousseau indicated some anticipation of galas.

She’d finally finished the sketches for Mrs. Byron’s winter cruise as well. If Mrs. Byron, at eighty-two, still saw herself as a shipboard femme fatale, Valentine had, at least, made sure that her wrinkled arms and shoulders would be appropriately covered. And, of course, all of her least favorite cilents had chosen today to come in to order their Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve dresses. Her favorite clients had ordered them last August, as any sensible woman would. Valentine twitched her ravishing nostrils at the idea of anyone who had so little knowledge of couture that she allowed only six weeks for a made-to-order dress, but she knew she’d manage to deliver them. She took enormous pride in the scope of her designing and the efficiency of her workrooms. She could switch in seconds, from concocting artfully, alluring black lace for a withered grande dame to creating a bridesmaid’s dress so pure of line that a girl could still proudly wear it five years frow now. She loved the many challenges of her job. Designing one ready-to-wear line had been so limited, compared to what she was now doing at Scruples. And, heaven knows, she had no one to tell her what to do or what not to do. Billy had totally vanished except for a phone call now and then, just to say hello. Valentine knew that something mysterious was going on at the Orsinis, since Josh had told her a little about it, but it was strange that Billy hadn’t ordered any new clothes in months, not since her wedding. Now that she thought about it, Billy had never planned her fall wardrobe, bought nothing except for those jeans. Jeans—Billy. They didn’t go together she thought as she slipped into a light doze.

The sound of the house telephone woke her an hour later. She had refused to arrange with the desk downstairs to let Josh up without being announced. The idea that he be allowed to come up without a warning call displeased her. He had his key to her apartment—that was enough. Josh had been irked, even hurt, but she was still her own mistress.

Tonight, she thought, still groggy, he looked a little different than he usually did. He seemed to be suppressing some excitement, some inner agitation. His hair was as perfectly groomed as ever, his conservative four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar suit hung precisely as it should on his well-designed body, but his eyes, those serious gray eyes were filled with some emotion she felt but couldn’t analyze. She inspected him more closely. Even his tie was perfectly knotted, yet he looked as if a hurricane had just blown him in the door.

“Josh, I’m too tired to phone. Will you call out for a pizza? Do you think the big one is enough or should we order one big and one small?”

He disregarded her words and came to kneel at the side of the couch where she still lay, stretching and yawning. A nap like that left her as vague as if she’d flown the Atlantic.

Josh kissed her round, white neck and the tender translucent insides of her elbows and her eyes and mouth until he was quite sure she was wide awake.

“No pizza tonight, my dearest. Put on your favorite pretty dress. We’re going out for dinner. I’ve reserved a table at The Bistro for nine o’clock.”

“Josh!” Of all places in Los Angeles, The Bistro was the most likely to be filled with friends of Josh and Joanne Hillman. They, along with many of their intimate group, had been among the people who had first financed the fashionable retaurant. To dine at The Bistro with anyone but his wife was possibly the most unwise thing a man could do.

“That’s my surprise,” Josh said, stumbling over his words. He held her head tightly between his two hands and looked intently into her eyes. “Oh, not The Bistro—I didn’t mean that—but from now on we can go anywhere we like in public. I’ve arranged my divorce.” His voice rang with youth and happiness and something like bravado.

“Divorce?”
Valentine sat up suddenly, almost knocking him down from his kneeling perch on the carpet by her couch.

“Yes—it won’t be final for six months, so we can’t get married till then, but all the legal business has been taken care of—” He had no intention of telling Valentine, but it had not been easy at all. However, he had prevailed, as he had known from the beginning, since there is no longer any way, at least in California, in which a woman can prevent a man from getting a divorce when he really wants one and is willing to pay the price, nor the other way around for that matter.

Valentine jumped up from the couch and hurled words in a tone he’d never known could come from her.

“You decided to do this without telling me?” she accused him, her pointed face white and distorted with fury.

“Oh, but darling, you
knew
. When we talked on the plane I told you what I wanted. Did you think I was just playing with words?”

“Did you think
I
was?”

“I don’t know what you mean—”

“I gave you a very precise answer, an
indefinite
maybe. You can’t have forgotten that! And with an indefinite maybe you went ahead and got a divorce?” She was sputtering with burning scorn, twisting her curls as if she’d like to pull them out.

“Sweetheart, when a woman gives a man that much of a go-ahead, he naturally knows she really means yes—I mean, it’s implicit, it’s understood, it’s just not spelled out.”

“Goddamn it, how
dare
you tell me what I meant? How dare you make me feel that because I didn’t say positively, absolutely NO, I said yes? What do you take me for? A coy flirt who hides behind ambiguous words? Who won’t commit herself but will smile like some little doll when a man presents her with a fait accompli? You live in another century, my friend.” She stood blazing at him, insulted to the core.

Josh was aghast. He was so used to having things his way that he underestimated Valentine. Christ, he’d started out underestimating her from the first day he met her. Abruptly, he turned away from the sight of her and stood blindly fingering the rim of a table lamp. Eventually, he spoke in a voice of such defeat and self-punishment that she listened in spite of herself.

“I can’t endure it when you get angry at me—I just don’t seem to have the understanding—the intuition—to make the right moves where you’re concerned. The only reason I didn’t tell you sooner was that I didn’t want you to feel responsible for my getting divorced. It was never, never for a minute because I took you for granted.” He turned back to her and she saw that his eyes were filled with tears.

“I love you so terribly much, Valentine. It makes me foolish. You love me, too—don’t you?”

With a heavy heart, Valentine nodded assent. She supposed she must love him or else why had they been together so long? And what was done was done. But if she had only said a plain no when he asked her to marry him, this wouldn’t have happened. It was partly her fault, letting herself be trapped by his clever persistence. She felt as guilty as a child who has accidentally set fire to a house while playing with matches—a house filled with people who couldn’t get out. She felt three emotions struggling with each other: love, guilt, and—a more significant emotion—the beginning of a deep, important anger.

“Go away, Josh. I have to think this over. And I wouldn’t dream of going to The Bistro with you—what a hideous notion—all those people there knowing that you are getting a divorce and then seeing you with me.”