Scruples Two (4 page)

Fired by the brandies she’d drunk, Billy knew that she had to confront Vito before another second passed. She was going to have this out with him if it took all night. If he didn’t want a child, their future was impossible. She couldn’t wait till morning. It would be as difficult to get him alone as it had been all of this endless, infuriating day. No, it would be worse, since he would want to avoid the issue. Vividly she imagined Vito sequestering himself in one meeting after another for the next week, the next month, the next six months, then in preproduction, then production, then postproduction, unable to give her his precious attention until after the wrap party for
The WASP
—and even that minute of concentration in the far future wasn’t guaranteed, she told herself, punching him viciously in the arm, prodding him on his shoulders, pulling his ears, pinching his nose, pounding on his chest in a rising tide of violence, not giving a damn if she hurt him, finally hoping to hurt him. Just as she was beginning to think he was completely insensible from the effects of the brandy, he opened one eye, lifted his head an inch from the pillow and squinted at her.

“Vito, we’re going to have a baby. I’m pregnant,” Billy shouted furiously.

Vito’s eye closed, his head fell back, and just before he passed out again, in a voice that she could barely hear he murmured, “Yeah, Lew … sure, Lew … seven-thirty …”

2

B
illy had acted as if he were a serial killer, a child molester, a man who put cherished pet poodles to death slowly and painfully, Vito thought with fury as he drove too quickly to his breakfast meeting, blinking impatiently at traffic lights through the thundering gray fog of the most intense hangover of his life. So what if he had forgotten to tell Billy about Gigi? There were thousands of things he’d never yet had time to tell her, never would tell her. Okay, it was thoughtless, careless, incredibly embarrassing, but it wasn’t malicious or deceptive, he hadn’t been trying to put anything over on anyone, he just had been too
busy
. Busy with a man’s work, busy with the most crucial thing in his world. Why couldn’t any fucking woman he’d ever met in his life understand
busy?

Trying and failing immediately to achieve a detached state of mind, Vito told himself that he was paying the too-high price, no less humiliating because it was inevitable, of marriage to a rich woman. When they’d met at the Cannes Film Festival last spring, when they’d fallen in love so immediately, when he’d let Billy talk him into marrying her in spite of all his convictions, he had been chasing his erection, nothing else. He had to look at the facts; his powers of reason and resistance had disappeared, vanquished by a hard-on. Vito remembered too well how he’d allowed Billy to convince him that if her money had been his, their marriage would be perfectly normal. Damn right it would have been normal. And it would have
remained
normal! But over the last ten months, from the day of their marriage, while almost all of their joint attention had been involved in the production of
Mirrors
, something powerful had solidified inside the internal, unseen structure of their marriage, something that he had ignored, willfully or not, until this morning when it became inescapable.

Only this morning, Vito thought, had he become keenly aware that he lived in a magnificent house he would never have been able to afford unless he’d been one of the old-time giants of his industry, a house that was maintained at an enormous weekly sum that had nothing to do with him, a sum at which he couldn’t even guess. His servants, including the second cook, whose only duty was to cook for the rest of the staff who lived in their own wing, were paid by Billy’s accountants, as were the restaurant bills, the flower bills, the entertainment bills, the travel bills, the insurance, even the dry cleaning. His car was always filled with gas by an unseen employee who kept it immaculate on a daily basis. When was the last time he’d so much as stopped at a drugstore and paid for a package of razor blades? He and Billy hadn’t been married long enough to file an income tax return, but since his income for this year had been next to nothing and hers had been in the tens of millions, the joint signing next month at her accountant’s office would be a farce, carried out because she
wanted
it that way. The vast, meticulous, luxury-freighted tempo at which their entire life was led existed because she
wanted
it that way, Vito said savagely to himself.
Want
, Billy’s middle name. The first time she’d asked him to marry her, he’d told her that it was impossible because it would mean living in her style, not his—when had he forgotten that? How long had it taken him to take his present life for granted, and when had he begun to accord Billy’s wants a never-mentioned power?

He’d felt the weight of that power this morning, felt it in the size and freedom of Billy’s anger, as if she were a queen who had been betrayed by a serf. Why couldn’t she understand that his long-ago first marriage to Mimi O’Brian, Gigi’s mother, carried no more real importance than a brief affair? Except for the child, of course, a child she’d insisted on having even though Vito had never wanted one. He’d told Mimi from the day she announced her pregnancy, a few months after he’d somehow entered into that impulsive, quickly regretted marriage, that he was moving too fast to have a child. He’d insisted that it was impossible, out of the question, a major mistake, but she’d been an Irish devil of stubbornness, she’d believed that a child would make their faltering marriage last, although he’d warned her that he wouldn’t be blackmailed. Her insistence on naming the kid after his grandmothers, Giovanna and Graziella, had been another form of blackmail, but Mimi had no living family to object, and she’d whisked Gigi off to be baptized before he’d even known about it. It had been a pathetic and meaningless gesture, since he’d never known either of the two old women.

But he’d done the right thing by Mimi after the divorce, more than the right thing, no matter what Billy thought. He’d waited to get the divorce until the baby was six weeks old and Mimi was back on her feet, he’d managed to keep up his child-support payments, and whenever he was in New York he tried to remember to drop in and see how they were doing, no matter how inconvenient it was, not that it was anything but inconvenient, to be honest. Half the time Mimi had been out of town with a show and Gigi had been living with one or another of a family of temporarily unemployed gypsies, all friends who took care of one another’s kids when it was necessary.… nothing wrong with that life at all, he’d decided. She was growing up in a dancers’ kibbutz, one big family in which all the kids got along just fine.

But, Jesus, when he struggled out of bed this morning, Billy had been already awake and in full fury. She must have been up all night planning how to accuse him of every crime any father had ever committed. Luckily he’d had to rush out of the house to make his early date with Lew Wasserman or he’d still be pinned down, listening to her enumerating a list of his faults. Right after the total joy of yesterday, she’d destroyed every particle of his well-deserved afterglow, Vito thought bitterly. He’d won the ultimate prize for which he’d worked all his life, he was about to put together a deal he’d yearned for, his whole career had been validated, he’d made the giant step and the future was his.

He had every right to be on top of the world, but Billy had spoiled everything with stinging recrimination for faults he wasn’t guilty of. She knew nothing about it, she hadn’t given him the benefit of any doubt. If she’d allowed him time to explain in any kind of detail—but no, she’d been transformed overnight into a hanging judge. He’d always known that Billy had the capacity to turn into a bitch. What woman didn’t? But he’d be damned if he’d stand for her announcing that someone had to start being responsible for Gigi even if he had never had the fundamental human decency to be a father, as she’d hissed at him while he tried to shave. Sure, Gigi was welcome to stick around for a little while, until she got over her mother’s death, but then she was going to be shipped right back to New York, where she’d live happily in one of the gypsy families and go back to her school and grow up the New York kid she was. His life wasn’t about
teenagers
, for Christ’s sake! Fatherhood had been forced on him, but that didn’t mean he had to like it, then or now. Did Billy think she could make pronouncements about his daughter? She had a lot to learn, Vito thought grimly as he turned his car over to the valet parker, and the first thing was the limitation of her power over him.

When Gigi woke up at ten, she found a sheet of paper on the carpet next to her bedroom slippers. “Gigi, I’m so glad you’re here! I’ll be home all day. Just dial 25 on the intercom on the phone next to your bed whenever you’re ready for breakfast or lunch or whatever and I’ll join you.” The communication was signed with a scrawled, “Love—Billy.”

Gigi sat up in bed and considered the note with amazement and respect. It was real, a perfectly real sheet of paper, the ink smudged when she wet it with her finger, so logically everything else in the room must be real. She’d seen rooms like this in old movies, but the person in the bed was dressed in a satin or chiffon negligee, an actress playing a grand lady, toying with a cup of tea and a triangle of toast from a tray that a butler had just placed reverently over her knees. If she didn’t have to pee so badly she’d just stay all day long, right here under the lace-bordered, monogrammed sheets in this sure-enough, honest-to-goodness, four-poster bed hung in acres of flowered cotton, a bed too thrilling for ordinary sleeping, a bed that deserved to be appreciated as a theatrical experience. She might even ring for that butler who was sure to be lurking around somewhere, Gigi thought, knowing she would never dare to do such a thing, but first things first. She scampered into the bathroom in the ripped T-shirt she wore to sleep in. She emerged in a few minutes, her face shining from the scrub she’d given it—she dimly remembered that she’d had a bath the night before, so there was no need to waste time on excessive cleanliness—and cautiously approached the intercom for the first time in her life. As she had anticipated, the phone was white. The only thing she wouldn’t do was swallow the contents of any bottle labeled “Drink Me,” Gigi vowed. This was Wonderland enough.

“Oh, Gigi, terrific, you’re up! Did you get a decent night’s sleep?” Billy asked.

“Marvelous, but I don’t remember anything. Did I drink brandy last night, or is that just my imagination?”

“It wasn’t a big drink … at least not very, purely medicinal,” Billy said guiltily.

“I guess I haven’t lost my memory entirely, but where am I? Where are you? What do I do now?”

“Just put on your bathrobe and I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Gigi looked at her ancient plaid robe, and hastily put on the jeans and sweater she’d arrived in. Clothes didn’t matter to her, but the robe looked kind of gummy. In fact it was filthy, now that she inspected it carefully. In New York it had seemed within the limits of acceptable, but the golden morning sunlight that streamed into the blue, white and yellow flowered bedroom showed stains and spots she’d never noticed before. In fact, everything in the sumptuously large bedroom existed in a different dimension of reality from anything she had ever known was possible, a dimension of never-imagined luxury that brought a shocking refreshment to her senses, as if she had wandered in the night through a black-and-white world and awakened to find herself in a Technicolor Oz. She was Alice in Oz, Gigi thought giddily, as a tap sounded on the door and Billy walked into the room, grabbing her in a firm hug.

“What do you want to eat more than anything in the world?” Billy asked.

“Oh, anything, I’m starving,” Gigi said, trying to throw the robe over the foot of the bed.

“No, really. We have everything.”

“Bagels, cream cheese and belly lox, please.”

“There speaks a true New Yorker. I guess we don’t have everything, after all. Try again.” Billy laughed. Ellis Ikehorn had always truculently maintained that belly lox was better than caviar.

“Corn flakes, fried eggs sunny side up, white toast? Orange juice?” It was the most normal breakfast Gigi could think of on a moment’s notice.

“Done.” Billy picked up the phone and relayed the order to Josie Speilberg, now recovered and back in her office. “Come on, Gigi, we’ll eat on the terrace.”

“Haven’t you had breakfast yet?”

“I’m going to watch you eat, and Josie is going to call Art’s Deli in the Valley and order the best belly lox west of Manhattan.”

“I don’t want you to go to a lot of trouble, honestly,” Gigi said in far less confusion than she would have believed possible. She had often imagined what her father’s new wife would look like, but nothing could have prepared her for the breathtaking reality of Billy’s height and beauty and powerful glamour, for her queenly assumptions and casual but absolute authority. Billy Ikehorn was totally outside of Gigi’s experience, yet somehow she had managed to make her feel uniquely wanted. The vast inequalities between them just didn’t seem to matter.

“It’s fun for me,” Billy said honestly. She yearned to fatten Gigi up. At sixteen she couldn’t possibly have stopped growing, but even at her present, decidedly modest height she looked too fragile.

During breakfast she questioned Gigi gently, and by the time the meal was over, Billy realized that there was no one in New York with a family claim on Vito’s neglected daughter. Gigi had never even known any members of her father’s family, and her mother hadn’t had any siblings or living parents. She was a sophomore in an average public high school, and although she knew a lot of boys, she hadn’t had a romance past or present. In fact she didn’t think she’d ever been in love except with James Dean in
East of Eden
, which she’d seen fifteen times. She liked all the three or four families she had stayed with when her mother was touring, but she hadn’t adopted any particular one as her favorite. Gigi had the subway map of New York City engraved on her heart, and she knew a surprising lot about cooking and shopping for food, tasks she’d taken over from her mother at least five years ago.

“Gypsies don’t eat right,” Gigi explained, warming to her subject under Billy’s interest. “They never have the time to buy fresh food and prepare a decent meal from scratch. Most of them live on Cokes and cigarettes, like ballet dancers. Mom used to worry that I wasn’t getting the proper nutrition for a growing girl, so I figured it was something I could help her with. Then I found out that I loved doing it and I’m good at it. I know a lot of the out-of-the-way markets in the city—I cook Italian, American and pretty fair Chinese—I learned from friends and cookbooks. I haven’t started French cooking yet, but I plan to. The thing is, even if you never make a career out of it, there’s always a job for a cook. And it’s a wonderful hobby.”