Scruples Two (58 page)

He had not used his last card, Vito thought, he had not asked Susan to help him. They were locked in the grip of a passion so complicated, so grave, so far beyond anything that either of them had expected in the beginning, that it transcended Vito’s grasp. Susan and he were equally matched; every time they met she fought him to a draw and left him more in her thrall than ever. Yet she never refused any of his demands, never said
enough
. They wanted each other endlessly. The more they had each other, the more they craved. But their connection had turned into something that was no longer only sexual. It now involved Vito in his deepest sense of himself, in his very identity. He was sure of only one thing; if he asked Susan for help, whether she gave it to him or not, their merciless, miraculous, absolutely necessary adventure would end and he would forever think of himself as a defeated man. His back was to the wall, he was living on credit and a loan from Fifi Hill.

“Gigi,” he said, taking a difficult breath, “there’s something you could do for me … you asked me about
Fair Play
earlier. I haven’t wanted to tell you what the problem is, but in fact Curt Arvey is being completely unreasonable about the budget. We’re only four million dollars apart, but it might as well be forty. Susan Arvey owns stock in Arvey’s studio. That means that she’s more than just his wife, she has real power. As it happens, Billy is probably the only woman in this town who has influence with Susan. I know how close you and Billy are. If … if Billy could put in a good word with Susan, if she could say how much she thinks of the project, it might move things along.”

“I could certainly try,” Gigi said slowly. “The worst that could happen is that she’d say no.”

“I know I have no right to ask you …”

“Don’t say that,” Gigi protested. “It’s not a big deal. I’m glad you asked. I know Billy’s read the book and I know she loved it. I’m having lunch with her on Sunday, the day after tomorrow, and I’ll speak to her then. I just don’t know … well, I have no idea if … I mean, what Billy would be willing to do for you.”

“Thank you, Gigi,” Vito said, smiling. “I appreciate it.”

It’s not a question of what she’s willing to do for me, he thought, it’s what she’s willing to do for you.

“Do you remember the first time we ate here, four years ago?” Billy asked Gigi as they sat at the table on the terrace. “I’ll never forget how amazed you were that people lived like this.”

“I managed to get used to it,” Gigi said reflectively, vividly remembering her first impressions of that day, yet unable to fit herself into an ever dimmer, almost unrecognizable mental picture she had of the girl to whom it had all happened. “Still, every time I’m back, I’m stunned all over again. The gardens … they’re so wonderful with all the roses starting to bloom.”

“I know—it’s frustrating just seeing them in the morning as I go to the office. I’ve started to get up an hour earlier so I have time to wander around and notice what’s happening—by the time I get home it’s too dark. I’m missing this whole springtime, but it’s my own fault, I listened to Spider Elliott. I should know by now that he can talk me into anything.”

“Billy? You’re not sorry about doing the catalog? You’re not having second thoughts, are you?” Gigi asked. “We’re far past the point of no return now.”

“No, not second thoughts. I just didn’t realize how all-consuming it would be, how exciting, how … almost frightening. A store, even a number of stores, was bite-sized, essentially known territory, something I was sure I could handle, but this is different.” Billy shook her head ruefully. She looked too thin, Gigi thought, tense, even nervous, although Billy had made an effort to look relaxed, wearing white linen trousers and an oversized white turtleneck from which her dark, casually curly head rose on her long neck in the offhandedly queenly manner she always presented to the world.

“The catalog means going public such a different way than a store,” Billy continued. “It reflects its creators, puts their taste on the line. Last night I woke up at three. I’d had a nightmare that the whole thing flopped and I was a laughingstock.
Laughingstock
. I’ve been haunted all my life by that possibility. Naturally I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I read till morning.”

“I wake up in a cold sweat,” Gigi said, “wondering if anybody is going to buy antique lingerie from my copy and sketches—how do I even know if sketches will work when the rest of the catalog is photos?”

“Do you stay up all night the way I do?”

“I tell myself that if it doesn’t work, I can always go back to cooking,” Gigi admitted. “I try to remember very complicated French recipes, and by the time I get to the fifth or sixth ingredient, I’m dead to the world.”

“I wonder if Spider suffers from middle-of-the-night catalog anxiety attacks?” Billy asked.

“I don’t know, he’s never mentioned it.”

“Then I guess that means he doesn’t. That’s typical. ‘Who, me, worry?’ ” Billy said astringently.

“Maybe he’s just as worked up as we are, but won’t admit it. After all, I’m not the final authority on Spider.”

“As a matter of fact, Gigi, I rather think you are,” Billy said, her tone evenly pitched on the clear borderline between a joke and an unimportant speculation.

“What makes you say that?” Gigi asked, struck by Billy’s strange words. She suddenly shifted in her chair so that she faced Billy directly, her hair swinging away from her face with the abruptness of her motion, her pointed, startled eyebrows lifted so far that they were hidden in her bangs. Every feature in the perfect oval of her face, from her straight little nose to her full upper lip, seemed to echo the question in her green eyes.

“Oh, Gigi …” Billy shrugged her shoulders indifferently, carefully moving the saltcellar and pepper mill around on the yellow linen tablecloth, as if overcome with a search for perfect symmetry.

“ ‘Oh, Gigi,’
what?”
Gigi queried sharply, pursuing the remark. “Billy, what on earth makes you think I’m the final authority on Spider?”

“Well, you work so closely with him, copy and layout are totally tied together,” Billy said, backpedaling quickly. “If he were having doubts, he’d tell you about them.”

“Why me? You and he are the investors in Scruples Two, I’m just a hired hand, except for my royalties on the antique lingerie. I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. But you two have worked together for years, you’d certainly be the one he’d talk to.”

Billy hesitated, so slightly that it was barely visible. “Well, I see what you mean … but,” she insisted, “that’s not necessarily the case.”

“I don’t understand,” Gigi said bluntly, struck by Billy’s persistence.

“It’s not important.”

“It is to me,” Gigi insisted.

“Gigi … really, I’m sorry I said anything.”

“Well, you did. And I can’t let it lie there,” Gigi said defiantly.

“It’s nothing …” Billy said airily, speaking with a dismissive, smiling voice, but unable to further evade the subject that had haunted her for weeks, the subject she hadn’t been able to keep from mentioning. “Really nothing … I’ve simply noticed that you and Spider have a kind of … friendliness or understanding or relationship or whatever—that isn’t exactly … invisible. There’s some kind of intimacy, a bond between you and Spider.… something … new … and, well, who knows?… it could be something, oh, you know … something meaningful.” Billy stopped abruptly, aware that the forced lightness had been flattened out of her voice. She flashed a quick, unconvincing smile at the pepper mill, unable to look at Gigi’s face.

Gigi moved awkwardly in her chair and took an abrupt bite of a cookie. An uncomfortable silence grew between them, and yet neither of them moved to break it.

“I didn’t realize that it showed,” Gigi said finally. “There is something new, yes, but unless you call simple friendship meaningful, it’s not meaningful.”

“I do call simple friendship meaningful. There’s too little of it in the world not to be. But between a man and a woman—oh, forget a man and a woman, Gigi, between you and Spider, I don’t think for a second that friendship could possibly be ‘simple.’ ”

“Why not?” Gigi asked mildly, springing up from her chair and walking toward the stone balustrade that separated the terrace from a bed of yellow roses. She gazed out at the far acres of trees, without seeming to see them, waiting for Billy’s answer. When it didn’t come, she-walked back to the table as if she were returning from a far greater distance than a few feet. Hot red spots had ignited on each of her cheeks. Billy’s eyes were looking at her in an inexorable question that refused to accept her forced, uncharacteristic blandness.

“We had dinner one night, when you were in New York, right after I’d finished the introduction copy,” Gigi said rapidly, as she stood in front of Billy, trying to sound matter-of-fact. “Dinner to celebrate. Afterwards, we were talking and … then, Spider kissed me … for a few minutes, and then we stopped. That’s all that happened, a few kisses, but it dissolved some barrier between us—probably that of a giant generation gap—and we decided that we were going to be real friends from now on. Whatever you’ve noticed, simple friendship is what it boils down to.”

“Do you and Spider still have dinner together?” Billy asked, her face rigidly nonjudgmental. She was horrified as she heard how prying her words sounded, but Gigi answered easily.

“Sure, from time to time, when we work particularly late, usually with Tommy, but sometimes alone. He hasn’t tried to kiss me again and he never will.”

“How can you possibly sound so sure?
Never
is a big word. Never is a long time.”

“Because I told him it was completely wrong!”

“Well,” Billy said briskly, getting up from the table. “That’s that, then. Shall we take a stroll around the orchid house? My Jill St. Johns are just starting to bloom.”

“Billy, come back here and talk to me,” Gigi pleaded. “I want you to know why it was wrong.”

“It’s none of my business, Gigi, you don’t have to explain anything to me,” Billy said stiffly, with the nearest approach to coldness that Gigi had ever heard in her voice, but she turned toward Gigi and sank back into her chair. Gigi too sat down and took Billy’s hand, holding it tightly.

“Oh, Billy, I need someone to talk to so badly. I haven’t got a soul in the world anymore I can discuss things with but you, and I miss it! When I first came here, a little bedraggled mess, and you took me in and changed my life, there was nothing I couldn’t say to you, nothing I couldn’t bring to your doorstep, but after the fire at Scruples, when you went off to Europe—since then we just haven’t been together, just the two of us, in one place long enough to have any time alone. This is the first time in I don’t know how long—” Gigi bent her head to hide her emotion, the tears that were visibly rising in her eyes, and Billy found herself smoothing the bright strands of hair and making little comforting noises, as if Gigi were sixteen again, and wrapped in towels.

“You can talk to me about anything, darling, you know that,” Billy murmured. “I thought that Sasha had taken my place … it’s only normal, you’re the same generation.”

“No one could ever,
ever
take your place, Billy, don’t you understand that? And I couldn’t possibly tell Sasha about Spider. She’d think it was funny or she wouldn’t really hear me, she’s living in another dimension, Josh is the only thing that matters to her now.”

“I’m listening. You matter to me.”

“When Spider kissed me, after the first shock, because I didn’t know he was going to do it, he really took me by surprise, there was a moment when it seemed okay and then … Billy, the only way I can think of to describe it is that the room we were in was
full of people
. We weren’t alone. Spider wasn’t really all there, it wasn’t
me
he really wanted, I realized that almost immediately. I can’t guess what he was thinking, but I knew it was just a combination of circumstances that caused him to kiss me—a good dinner, wine, a fire, all the stuff that leads up to a kiss, but he hadn’t planned it. For example, if you’d been in L.A. instead of in New York, it would never have happened, it would have been the three of us having dinner … in fact, the first thing he thought of after I read him the copy was to call you so you could hear it, but it was too late in New York. I’m trying to say that there’s nothing
inevitable
between us, there never has been, and for me, kissing should be inevitable, not just because you’re at a certain place at a certain time and it seems like an amusing or interesting option.”

“How did you ever get so serious?” Billy said in wonder. “In this day and age, Gigi, a little kissing isn’t supposed to be something as momentous as ‘inevitable,’ for heaven’s sake.”

“A little kissing with Spider … it isn’t just like a little kissing,” Gigi muttered, “it’s like a lot of kissing.”

“I’ll bet it is,” Billy said dryly. “But you talked about a room full of people. I don’t understand that at all, unless you mean Valentine.”

“No … no,” Gigi said, considering deeply. “I didn’t think he could possibly get me mixed up with Valentine. I was so lonely that night, I was feeling so bummed out, I just needed some human contact, I guess. But in that roomful of people, Valentine wasn’t there at all. I think Spider’s mourned her, and he’ll always adore her memory, but he’s in another part of his life now. I guess what I meant was that.… the other people were mostly all the dozens of girls, the models he’d just been telling me about, the gorgeous girls he used to have flings with, before Valentine, and then, mainly … the most important thing for me was someone else … someone I met in New York. It didn’t work out, to put it mildly, but I can’t get over it. I know I have to, I tell myself it’s just a question of time, but while Spider was kissing me I couldn’t stop thinking of … this other person. That’s why I knew it was wrong.”

“Zach Nevsky,” Billy said with gentle authority.

Gigi gaped and turned red. “Sasha told you! Well, she doesn’t know fuck-all about it! Nobody does!”

“Sasha only told me that she was mystified by your relationship with Zach. Remember, Gigi, when we were looking at her catalogs before Christmas? That’s the only time she mentioned him, because she thought it was very strange that he hadn’t called all week to find out about your leg.”