Scruples Two (47 page)

“But you finished it while you were awake? You knew perfectly well who Pandora was, you weren’t dreaming?”

“I knew and I was awake. I didn’t stop because I couldn’t. I know that’s not an excuse. But I didn’t want to fuck her—I mean I wanted to continue at that particular time, but I would never have sought an opportunity to do so.
She fucked me first
. Jesus, I sound like a little kid. ‘He hit me first, Ma, he started it,’ but it’s the truth.”

“Hmm.” Billy got up and walked to the window and looked out on Fifth Avenue far below. She didn’t want him to see her trying not to laugh. She tried hard to repress the giggles that bubbled up in her, biting her lips and trying to multiply nine by seven, which usually worked.

“But can you believe me?” Zach asked, unable to endure her silence.

“Oddly enough, I can.”

“You can!” Zach stood up, knocking over the chair. “Thank God! I was afraid I’d never find anyone who could understand.”

“Pandora reminds me of someone I knew once, long ago,” Billy said, remembering the pool house where she’d spent so many afternoons with a succession of men during the last years of Ellis Ikehorn’s long fight against death. The rapacious Pandora was chaste compared to the way she’d behaved back then.

“Is that the only reason you believe me?” Zach demanded.

“No, Zach, it isn’t. Perhaps I’m clairvoyant and I can read your thoughts, or perhaps it’s because you look and sound like a man who truly loves Gigi—I think people should be given the benefit of the doubt when they’ve hurt the person they love without meaning to, without intending to, without understanding exactly what they were doing. Your story isn’t as strange as … some I’ve heard recently.”

“Will you talk to Gigi for me?” he asked eagerly.

“I don’t think that would help, at least not right now. Gigi hasn’t the life experience I’ve had, she’s much too upset to listen to anything as improbable as your story, she could never believe it. What’s more, just the idea that we’ve discussed her together, behind her back, might be counterproductive. Give it a little time. At least you know I believe you, and I’ll tell
Gigi
I do when the right moment comes. Give her a little breathing space. It’s such a mixed-up mess right now, I don’t want to get into the middle of it.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive.”

Zach turned away, downcast. What good did it do for her to believe him and not tell
Gigi?
“Look, Mrs. Ikehorn,” he said, turning back to Billy, “I know Gigi so well, I refuse to believe that she wouldn’t at least attempt to be fair to me. Sure, I understand that you don’t want to get into it, at least right now, but you’d be doing such a great thing, such a good deed! She loves me, I know she does, and God knows I love her. Couldn’t you just take the risk? You can’t possibly know it’d be counterproductive if you don’t at least try, and what have you got to lose?”

“Zach, now I understand perfectly how you got Gigi to go up the mountain,” Billy said, shaking her head firmly. “But I’m a tougher nut to crack. If you’re so sure, then go talk to her yourself. She can’t get away from you with a cast on her leg.”

“I deserve that.”

“That’s why I said it. Good-bye, Zach. Till we meet again.”

Billy closed the door to the suite behind him. No touching, Sasha had said. No touching?
That man?
Should she have Gigi examined by a board of three shrinks before having her committed to an asylum, or should she just consider it a weird new fad, like swallowing goldfish? No, it couldn’t be a fad, swallowing goldfish was something she could almost imagine herself doing, on a dare, if she was totally drunk and carried away by peer pressure in a gang of happy goldfish swallowers … but not even
touching?

On impulse, Billy went to the phone and dialed Josh Hillman’s number. It was time to let him know she was back in the United States. After a full day’s diet of Gigi and Sasha and Zach, she felt the need to talk to someone settled and wise and safely on the other side of the confusions and misplaced enthusiasms and misunderstandings of the absurdly young. Maybe people like herself, grownups, should never try to make sense of children under thirty. Maybe there was something to the rhetoric of the sixties, after all. “Never trust anybody under thirty,” wasn’t that how it had gone?

The next afternoon, still surprised by her quick decision, Billy found herself getting off the first plane to leave New York in the morning and arrive in Los Angeles. She hadn’t told Josh she was coming, she hadn’t even called Josie to tell her to send a car and driver. After she and Josh had finished chatting last night, she’d been overcome by a feeling that she wanted to pop out to L.A. and just take a quick look around, just to get a feel of the place again. Unless you were actually in California you tended to forget it existed, especially when you were plunged into the morass of New York or trying to cope with Paris.

As the taxi drove out of the airport on its way to the Bel Air Hotel and she saw the first cornball, awkward palm trees standing by the side of the highway in the sunlight, Billy began to feel something in her heart open in pleasure. She really hated palm trees. It was so nice to see those goony-looking things, so nice to come to a place where there were so many trees that were green all year long that you could afford to disapprove entirely of some of them. She hadn’t seen anything green in winter, except the view from her garden on the Rue Vaneau, and the trees planted there so carefully didn’t have the same quality of genuine greenness as California trees. They were too dark, she thought, consideringly, far too dark, gloomy actually, and three-quarters of the time you were watching rain dripping off their grim branches. Why did no one ever admit that it almost always rained in Paris except for July and August when you died of the heat?

At the hotel, Billy changed into a winter-white wool suit, grabbed a scarlet cashmere muffler—the whole hotel was decorated for Christmas and she might as well get into the spirit—and arranged with the front desk for a car and driver.

“Where to, ma’am?” the driver asked as they drove along Stone Canyon Road.

“Drive around a bit, take a right here and just keep on going on up the hill, wherever it looks prettiest,” Billy said, knowing that you could stay lost in Bel Air for hours, even if you’d lived there for years.

“You new to the town, ma’am?”

“Yes, I’m sightseeing. But don’t explain anything to me, I want to see it as if I didn’t know anything.”

“Fresh eyes.”

“Exactly.”

After fifteen minutes of aimlessly looking out of the window and breathing the warm, perfumed midwinter air, Billy came to a decision. She took a slip of paper out of her wallet on which she’d jotted down some information Josh had given her. She consulted it, and gave it to him. “Driver, would you please take me to this number in Mandeville Canyon?”

“Certainly, ma’am.” The driver turned the car and headed downhill toward Sunset, where he left the confines of Bel Air and started out in the direction of the ocean.

The limo pulled up in front of a modern house set so high on the canyon rim that it had an unobstructed view of the Pacific Ocean in the distance. Billy walked up to the front door unhesitatingly and rang the bell. She heard a voice yell, “Coming,” and in a few seconds the door was pulled open.

“Hello, Spider,” she said.

17

P
eppone’s was the kind of authentically old-fashioned Italian restaurant that might be expected to exist almost anywhere except California, all well-worn leather and candlelight and dark wood, without a ray of sunlight piercing its intimate dimness, an oasis tucked into the corner of an old shopping street on Barrington Place, between Spider’s newly rented house and Bel Air. As Billy sipped her drink she remembered how Spider had opened his door, a few hours ago, and lifted her off the ground with a great shout of welcome and such a bone-crushing hug that she still seemed to feel it. He’d whirled her around and around and kissed both her cheeks before he’d finally put her down. In fact, she still felt dizzy.

“I feel deeply weird,” Billy observed as she watched the busy waiters discussing the specials of the day with the many customers. “It’s the oddest thing, Spider, I’m not quite here, but I’m not quite anywhere else … I’m all topsy-turvy.”

“By New York time,” Spider calculated, “it’s ten o’clock at night and in Paris it’s six hours later, which would make it four in the morning. You’ve only been back in the States for five days, so you’ve still got jet lag from Paris, aggravated by the trip here. You’re about to have dinner long before you used to wake up.”

“Spider, you do make sense. I never thought of jet lag.… that’s what comes of staying put for too long. This must be the way they feel in space. I think I’ve been spaced out since I arrived in L.A.—is spaced out the same as spacey?”

“I think you need that drink, Billy. Maybe it’ll ground you and alert your body to the idea that it’s almost dinnertime, and then we’ll think about looking at the menu, but not yet. I’m still trying to get over opening the door on you—I was expecting the dry cleaner and there you were, Billy, looking like the Spirit of Christmas Future. I called Josh the day I got back last week to find out where you were. Then when I called the Ritz they weren’t sure where you’d gone off to, so I figured you were away for Christmas. Somehow I pictured you lying under swaying palm trees in Marrakesh, with three Frenchmen at your feet.”

“Not even close.”

Billy looked at Spider briefly. Ever since they’d met again, she’d been snatching quick glances at his face, trying to decide why he seemed to have changed so much. Even in the dusk of Peppone’s, Spider looked like the Viking mariner of old. His hair, bleached by the sun, was blonder than ever, but there were many visible strands of silver in it now, particularly at his temples, and new lines on his deeply tanned face. He was leaner than she remembered his ever having been, not gaunt, but sinewy, as if he didn’t possess a pound to spare, yet he radiated health. He looked as if he would smell of the sea, of tar and rope and fog and a clean wind.

It wasn’t these visible and predictable changes that continued to occupy Billy’s attention, but something deeper, the disappearance of a quality Billy had always factored into her approach to Spider. Since she’d first known him, he had looked so much the part of the quintessential California Golden Boy that she’d never been able to take him entirely seriously. The combination of his hair and his blue eyes had always vaguely irritated her. It worked so dazzlingly well, in spite of being so obvious, that it deserved to be entirely discounted by any intelligent woman. Behind any thought she had of Spider lingered a subliminal vision of him dropping whatever he was doing and heading for the beach with a surfboard, absorbed in nothing more important than catching the perfect wave. This vivid mental picture had colored her entire perception of him, in spite of the fact that she’d never known Spider to go surfing.

The mind-set in which she’d imprisoned him for years had been suddenly erased and replaced by a strength and a seriousness in his character that was impossible to overlook. He’d always been tough, uncompromising and honest, but now those qualities, which she had taken for granted, had solidified into an emotional density that seemed new to her. He’d kept his irrepressibly pagan quality—Spider was still a free spirit who would never belong to the world of nine-to-five, never settle into a routine or any system of thinking but one of his own choice. He was a man who had, almost from childhood, escaped the bonds of the everyday, the mundane, a man who had always forged his own path without worrying about what people thought. He’d admitted happily to a misspent youth, and Billy had believed that he’d never truly left it.

Now Billy was aware, with her whole consciousness, that Spider was no longer the sensuous, almost happy-go-lucky, lazily good-natured seducer and charmer who had ruled over the hothouse world of Scruples—a dictatorial, loving Pygmalion to hundreds of women. For years Spider had taken all the good things of life as they came to him with a sort of innate innocence and intense pleasure. He had seemed to expect nothing but joy from the world, but now his smile was wise and tempered by experience. Not sad, Billy thought, not bitter, simply no longer
expectant
. Billy felt a prickle of tears at this realization, although the fact that Spider Elliott had finally become a full adult was surely no cause for sorrow.

“How were things at the house?” Spider asked. “Has it been kept up to your standards, or was there a weed in the cabbage patch?”

“My
house?
Do you believe it—it didn’t even occur to me to go there. Now I don’t have the time. I think I’ll go back to New York tomorrow.”

“Oh no, you won’t! I haven’t laid eyes on you in almost two years and you’re not going anywhere till I have a chance to find out what’s been happening to you. Corresponding with you is like putting letters in bottles, throwing them in the ocean and watching them float off into the horizon.”

“Two whole letters? Is that your idea of a correspondence?”

“For me it was. Heavy-duty correspondence—and they were long letters, too. Where have you been besides Paris?”

“Nowhere. I stayed there the whole time, except for Christmas of the first year, when I flew to New York to see Gigi.”

“So what kind of guy is the lucky son of a bitch?”

Billy blinked, turned slightly to pick up a bread stick, and took a bite to gain time. Shit! She’d been too busy puzzling out the changes in Spider to remind herself how dangerously sensitive he was to a woman’s whole being, how finely tuned he was to anyone female, that bloody mind reader. Too perceptive by half, certainly too much so for her comfort in this reunion.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Billy said calmly.

“The guy you’re involved with in Paris. Unhappily, I guess, or you wouldn’t have left him alone so soon before Christmas, unless he’s married of course, and having a family Noël.”

“Spider, you always jumped to conclusions,” Billy answered him smoothly, with a reproving nod of her head. “That’s one of your problems. Why does there have to be a guy? Isn’t Paris, the city, enough to keep a person fascinated for years? I’ve explained how involved I’ve been with renovating my house.”

“Sure, Billy, but there isn’t a house that could glue you in place that long, not even in
La Ville Lumière
. I know my Mrs. Ikehorn, remember? I find it outside of the realm of possibility—or any law of nature—to believe that you could stay unattached in Paris for two years, much less come home looking—hell, you were always one hell of a flagrantly beautiful broad and now you look more … alive?… more awakened?… whatever, there’s something so different about you, something less regal, less … formidable, more womanly, vulnerable, softer, even … yes, you can shoot me for it, but something
sweeter
, you’re less of a boss, more of a dame … a terrific dame. Oh, there’s
gotta be a guy
, I can see it in your eyes, but don’t tell me about it, tell Dolly or Jessie or Josie or Gigi or Sasha what’s-her-name—tell a woman, why confide in a man, even if he’s one of your best friends, he’s never going to understand, right?”

“Have it your own way.” Billy shrugged, still holding on to her calm and refusing to be drawn. “And why do you persist in calling me a ‘broad’ and a ‘dame,’ Spider? In your last letter you even called me a ‘frosty bitch’—is that the way you think of me?”

“It’s a habit, with you, and not necessarily a bad one, to help keep things in focus. When Valentine and I came out here to work for you, she was scared silly of you just because you were so rich. She was afraid of the power you had to take away that big chance you had given us. I remember one night, before we’d managed to make you see reason, I had to explain to her in graphic detail that no matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars you had, the only thing that mattered about you was that you were basically another female person, not all that different from every other woman in the world. You were demanding, sure, tough, sure, impossible, absolutely, but still ruled by the same needs and worries and anxieties and emotions as all other female persons. I finally managed to get Valentine to realize that simply having money hadn’t turned you into Marie Antoinette—of whom, as I recall, you were giving a damn good imitation—and she was never afraid of you again. That’s why you two got to be friends, real friends.”

“We were, weren’t we?” Billy was silent for a minute and so was Spider. Finally she spoke. “I still can’t understand why you think that being rich hasn’t made me … different. Don’t you respect power, Spider? I’m not talking about any personal power or abilities I may have, but at least the power of the money itself? The power of everything I can do with it?”

“Of course I respect power, who on this planet doesn’t? But when I think about you, it’s because of what you, Billy Ikehorn,
are
, not what you choose to do with something that you happened to inherit. Remember, you weren’t born rich, you didn’t grow up rich, it didn’t form your character from the very start—if it had, that’d be a different story. But if you gave all your dough away, you’d still be you, as far as I can see. So I keep the two things clearly and distinctly separate. You are Billy. Mrs. Ikehorn can do
x
or
y
because she can afford it, but that’s not what Billy’s
about
. Get it? It’s kinda like Dick and Jane, real simple. And it’s also healthier that way, believe me.”

“I do,” Billy said after a thoughtful pause. Dick and Jane? Why were other men unable to think of it so clearly and cleanly? Spider was anything but simple-minded. Perhaps he understood women because he’d grown up with so many sisters?

“Hungry enough to order yet?”

“Not until I have another drink.”

“Fine, if you promise not to leave tomorrow. You’ll just add on another three hours of jet lag in the other direction and really get screwed up.”

“You’ve talked me into it,” Billy laughed. “My ability to say no has been severely tried in the last few days. I haven’t got the strength to argue with one more person. I wish you could have heard Gigi and Sasha—you’ve got to meet the belle Sasha, Spider, to believe her—trying to persuade me to go into the catalog business with them. Those two wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“Why the catalog business?”

“Oh, it’s too complicated to talk about. And then there was Zach Nevsky … now there’s a discussion I definitely can’t go into …” Billy started to laugh again at the memory.

“All right, keep your secrets. I’ll find out everything sooner or later anyway. But why catalogs? Gigi is about as far as you can get from stupid, maybe she’s on to something.”

“A catalog called Scruples Two? I do
not
think so, thank you very much,” Billy said disdainfully, shaking her head in vigorous repudiation.

“Say again?”

“Her idea was to start a new, reasonably priced clothing catalog, and call it Scruples Two since that would give it an immediate name to attract people. And Sasha wanted to come out with it each season, not just at Christmas the way they do now. Of course I told them it was out of the question.”

“Of course. Just like of course Scruples, the original boutique, was all done up to the teeth in deadly Parisian gray silk and gilt and haughty salesladies so that it intimidated shoppers right out of the door.”

“Spider! You
can’t
possibly think it’s a good idea!”

“Why not, Billy?”

“But … listen, Spider, we were about the very best, we were the most exclusive … Valentine’s custom designs.… the elegance … Spider, a catalog is so … 
available
! Anybody, just absolutely anybody could order from it,” Billy sputtered, outraged at his lack of agreement.

“But Scruples doesn’t exist anymore, Billy, Scruples is over. Very much over,” Spider said patiently, with a touch of grimness. “You put Scruples out of business all by yourself. Now that was a perfect example of the power of money. You used that power and I, for one, was sorry, but it was clearly your prerogative to plow a thriving business underground, even if we ended up with a net profit. On the other hand, you wouldn’t be diluting Scruples’ name, because the name is only a memory.”

“But, Spider—”

“Hell, Billy, even if all the Scruples were still there, you could put out a catalog without going into competition with yourself. You’d be showing a less expensive version of the Scruples
attitude
toward clothes. Our customers never wore only our stuff, Billy, they wore all sorts of things at just about every price range. You were one of the few people who could afford to dress from head to toe at Scruples, and when you wanted anything in denim or jeans, even you had to go elsewhere. We showed the ultimate designers because we were carving out a position for the Scruples name, making it the top store for special occasions. But that was in real life, with money-making boutiques in the most affluent areas in the country. A catalog would have to be much less expensive and very different in its orientation … but since I live in the present tense, I see no reason not to think about it.”