Scruples Two (61 page)

“So I’ve heard,” Gigi managed to reply. “So I’ve been informed … reliably informed.”

He kissed her then, holding her delicate body close to his splendid bulk, kissed her until the lavender dress wilted and their entire beings were abandoned to each other, hearts and souls overcome, astonished by perfect wonder, yet somehow deeply unsurprised.

“You’ve never told me you love me,” Zach demanded at last, leaving her lips for an instant.

“I don’t think you ever asked,” Gigi answered. “Not exactly like that, not in so many words.”

“Do you love me?” he asked, his voice more humble than she’d ever heard it. Gigi hesitated for a moment, savoring what she knew was doomed to be only momentary uncertainty in Zach Nevsky.

“Yes,” she said finally, wholeheartedly giving up reluctance.

“That’s good enough for now.” He looked down at her and laughed his unguarded, triumphant laugh. “ ‘Yes’ … that’s all I wanted to hear.”

The front door opened in the hall and was closed with a loud slam as Marcel strolled pompously into the room, his tail in the air.

“That’s Sasha, trying to be discreet,” Zach said. “I made her go out to do some grocery shopping. She wanted to wait in the kitchen, but I wouldn’t allow it.”

“Is everything all right in there?” Sasha called, still not coming into the living room.

“Go away and shop some more,” Zach answered.

“I will not,” she said indignantly, as she entered the room. “You’ve had plenty of time. I just sat in the lobby, I never go grocery shopping, Zach, for your information. Gigi, are you okay?”

“I think so,” Gigi said shakily, peeping out from the massive barrier of Zach’s arms.

“Oh, my God, Gigi! You’ve wrinkled the dress! I knew I should never have left you two alone!”

Although John Prince had not accepted Billy’s invitation to spend the fashion show weekend as her houseguest, preferring the convenience of a hotel switchboard, she had sent her plane to bring him to Los Angeles, and her car and driver to transport him to the hotel, wait while he checked in, and bring him back to her house for a private dinner. They’d both be so busy over the weekend that Billy thought they might never see each other except in a crowd, and she wanted to discuss the introduction she was going to make before he began to narrate the show.

She waited for Prince in front of the fireplace in one of the twin living rooms. Although it was May, the nights were still cool enough to make a fire inviting. Billy heard Prince’s familiar rumble as he entered the house, and she walked quickly forward to greet him with the biggest smile she could muster and kisses on both cheeks. Just the sight of Prince in his tweedy glory made her feel a little less woebegone. He scrutinized her face as she led him toward the couch in front of the fireplace, and seemed reassured by what he saw.

“Well, ducky, I’m glad you’re ignoring this,” Prince said, tossing a copy of
Fashion and Interiors
on the coffee table. Billy looked at him in surprise. “Ducky” was ominous, that was his term of greatest affection, ten times more meaningful than “pet.” She eyed the glossy magazine with concern. Somehow they must have gotten wind of Scruples Two and broken the surprise in “P.D.Q.,” their notorious front-of-the-book column. “P.D.Q.,” anonymously written, and lavishly illustrated with deliberately embarrassing photographs, could be counted on to be an unapologetic fount of the latest and most malicious gossip of the worlds of society and fashion. It was as juicy and flavorsome as a perfectly ripe melon, and since its inception it had established itself as far and away the liveliest, nastiest and most titillating section of the influential magazine. “P.D.Q.” was the first thing every subscriber turned to when the magazine was delivered.

“My copy hasn’t arrived yet,” Billy said. “What am I ignoring?”

“I brought this from New York. It came late yesterday. Ducky, there’s an unfortunate ‘P.D.Q.’ story. I was hoping you’d seen it and managed to ignore it,” Prince said.

“Damn! After we’d managed to stay top-secret for months! I should have known. It couldn’t be worse timing, they’ve scooped everybody,” Billy wailed.

“No. It’s not about Scruples Two,” Prince said somberly.

Alarmed, Billy picked up the glossy magazine and scanned the cover. “P.D.Q.’s Special: Billy Ikehorn’s Romantic Caper.”

“What the devil …?”

“He’s the right one to ask.”

With suddenly trembling fingers Billy turned to the “P.D.Q.” pages and scanned the story while Prince poured himself a drink and stood with his back to her, studying the fire.

You’ve all heard the one about the pathetic Poor Little Rich Girl who didn’t know whether she was loved for her money or herself? “P.D.Q.” has discovered that Beverly Hills’s own Billy Ikehorn has been trying desperately to find out while leading a double life in Paris
.

Pay attention, MI-5! Would you believe that our fabulously well dressed Billy managed to pass herself off for almost a year as a simple schoolteacher from Seattle? (A French teacher, of course. What else?) Yes, one of the world’s richest women actually convinced the handsome San Francisco sculptor, Sam Jamison, that she was a poor but honest working girl during their long idyll in his Marais studio. Sorry, Sam, but did you ever get a wrong number!

Checking with the Paris Ritz, “P.D.Q.” learned that Billy officially occupied their Windsor Suite all of last year, but Henri Legrand, of the Galerie Templon, where the sculptor’s work made a sensation last fall, told “P.D.Q.” that he knew our Billy only as one “Honey Winthrop,” Jamison’s very much live-in inamorata of many months’ duration
.

Would this make it the first time that a blue-blooded Boston Winthrop (our Billy was born Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop, lest we forget) used the venerable family name to cover up a secret love affair?

Isn’t it passing curious that only by pretending to
be someone she is not, can Billy seem to find a man? Everyone remembers her short-lived second marriage to film producer, Vito
(The WASP)
Orsini, quickly interrupted by his big-time affair with Maggie MacGregor. Maggie dumped Vito when it was clear that
The WASP
was going to be the disaster of the decade, quickly replacing him with Fred Greenspan, her married boss, who soon decided that show-biz news queen MacGregor’s show was worthy of an additional half hour of the network’s time. Maggie, as everyone knows, got to the top professionally by knowing how to use the right men at the right time. Shouldn’t Billy beg smart Maggie for tips on picking men who can do a girl good? Since Billy lost Vito, there has been no one in her life except duped Sam Jamison. It would seem to “P.D.Q.” that no amount of money, (worse, not even the lack of it!) can buy our Billy lasting love
.

How did it end? Many eyewitnesses saw our intrepid heroine make the mistake of being caught with all her diamonds on one gala night at the Opera. (Well, not all of them, of course, but enough to blow that schoolteacher story.) Sam Jamison recognized his Cinderella-in-reverse and made a very public scene, followed the next day by his giving Billy the “cut direct” chez Lipp, where she had tracked him down
.

Our Billy decamped in a hurry, fleeing Paris for forgiving Beverly Hills, her old stomping ground, where she remains in mysterious, but understandable (n’est-ce pas?) seclusion. Tennis pro, anyone? “P.D.Q.” ’s advice for our unlucky-in-love, Poor Little Rich Girl: Next time; “Honey,” try to get a man with his own money. To Tell the Truth, will the real Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop Ikehorn Orsini please stand up? Or isn’t there one?

“Well, ducky, at least the photographs are good, particularly the one of you in that bikini,” Prince said, turning when he heard Billy throw the magazine down. “And they spelled your name right,” he added as he measured the raw bleakness of her face. “Billy, I know it’s bad, but it’s not life-threatening.”

“No.”

“What did you ever do to Harriet Toppingham to arouse such vileness? This is lower than they ever get.”

“I met her once … only once … at a party,” Billy answered with difficulty, through stiff lips. “Cora de Lioncourt did this, she’s the only one who could have put the pieces together.”

“Then what did you do to
her?”

“Nothing … nothing I know of,” Billy said in a voice as white and rigid as her face.

“Ducky, I know it’s a bromide, but when something like this happens, you just have to face it down, get right out there and pretend it never happened. It’s not as if you’ve done anything to be ashamed of.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I won’t kid you, Billy, of course people will enjoy this, they’ll dine out on it for a week or two, but they’ll forget it by the time the next issue comes around.”

“No, they won’t. People never forget stories as good as this. Never, not as long as I live.”

“Well … maybe,” he admitted, knowing she was right. “But realistically, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“No one,” Billy said slowly, “literally no one I’ve ever met or will ever meet won’t have heard about this and remember it when they see me … I’ll always know what they’re thinking. I’m a
laughingstock
, someone to be
pitied.”

“Oh, ducky, please try not to take it so hard. So they laugh, so what? They can’t take away all the things they envy about you. Just look in the mirror, just look around you. Billy, you have a triumphant life.”

He couldn’t understand, Billy realized numbly, he couldn’t possibly understand that throughout every day of every week of the formative years of her life she had suffered from being a laughingstock. No matter how high and mighty she seemed today, her deepest perceptions of herself had been formed by the neglect of her parents, by the endlessly cruel mockery of her schoolmates, by the pity of her aunts and the contemptuous rejection of her cousins. She tried to tell herself that it was a familiar story for a lot of people—maybe everyone’s self-esteem had been damaged in their youth—but this story in “P.D.Q.” was the pure, distilled, poisonous essence of the nightmares that woke her up in the middle of the night, worried about the reception of Scruples Two. Each sickeningly pointed word was burned into her mind. It was too accurate to deny. She felt as if she’d tumbled backwards for decades, she felt the way that fat freak, Honey Winthrop, had felt year after year after year.

“Prince, I can’t … I’m simply not capable of facing the media this weekend. Spider can introduce you. I’m staying right here. I won’t leave my house, I don’t care what anyone says … I just can’t do it.”

“Billy, that’s the wrong way to handle this,” Prince said sternly.

“There’s nothing else I can do. Prince, I’m sorry, but I have to be by myself.” Her austere conviction was unanswerable.

“Ducky!” Prince began to follow Billy upstairs, stopped, shrugged helplessly, and decided to leave. Even a room-service dinner alone at the hotel would be more cheerful than having to look at Billy’s tormented face any longer. He hated to admit that the whole thing sounded intriguingly spicy, although he certainly wished it had happened to somebody else. The hotel bar would be full of people he knew, every one of them dying to dish about Billy, incognito, fucking her brains out in Paris. Of course he wouldn’t linger too long talking in the bar. After all, he was genuinely fond of Billy.

22

D
o you know where I can find Billy?” Josh Hillman asked Spider very late on Thursday afternoon.

“Haven’t seen her,” Spider answered, quickly closing the copy of
Fashion and Interiors
in which he’d just finished reading the “P.D.Q.” article. “Why?”

“There’s something I want to give her, a good-luck souvenir, for tomorrow.” Josh placed the marble nameplate from Scruples that had been saved from the fire on Spider’s desk.

“Christ!” Spider recoiled. “You think she wants to see
that?
Jesus, Josh, where’d you get it?”

“The fire department gave it to me after Billy left. I’ve been hanging on to it for years, didn’t know what to do with it. But now, well, I was cleaning out my desk and I came across it and I thought maybe Billy should have it.”

“I can’t think of anything she’d rather
not
have. It’d just remind her of the fire.”

“I don’t agree at all, Spider. It will remind her of the success of Scruples. I know she’s worried about Scruples Two—I’ve noticed her looking very down lately. You’ve seen a million photos of people who lose their entire homes in fires going back to poke in the ashes. They’re trying to find something, absolutely anything, to keep as a remembrance of what they used to have. It always seems to comfort them, they’ll carry away the damnedest things, it gives them the courage to go on. It’s strange, but it happens all the time, I truly know it helps.”

“Yeah.” Spider looked at Josh in a rush of pity. The lawyer had no reason to suspect that his love for Valentine had not been a secret to Spider. While he’d been sailing from island to island, letting the sea and the sky and the wind slowly deal with his grief, Josh had been forced to stick to business as usual, unable to admit to anyone that he too had lost Valentine.

“Why don’t you give it to Billy yourself, Josh?”

“I have to meet Sasha in ten minutes, and I’m late already.”

“Okay, Josh, leave it with me and I’ll manage to get it to Billy somehow. One thing I’m sure of, she’s not in the office. Josie told me that a minute ago, and Josie would know.”

As Josh left, Spider realized why he had instinctively hid the “P.D.Q.” article, although Josh would unquestionably know all about it long before the day was over. He couldn’t endure watching anyone, anyone at all, read it, even someone as totally devoted to Billy as Josh Hillman. He touched the apricot marble with one tentative finger, and traced the beautifully swirling letters of the word
Scruples
that had been chiseled into the stone. Was it possible that this reminder of a past triumph would give Billy something to hang on to through the shipwreck of that unspeakably sickening article? The vomit that Harriet Toppingham had published? Unquestionably the nameplate had somehow helped Josh, that much was sure, or he would never have kept it all this time. Thank God the guy no longer needed it.

“Let me speak to Burgo O’Sullivan,” Spider said to the gateman who had refused him admittance to the Ikehorn house.

“Yes sir.” He handed Spider the phone.

“Burgo, it’s Spider Elliott. Yeah, I know she’s closed the house to visitors, the gateman told me. But, Burgo, you know as well as I do it’s not a good idea to be alone when you need a friend to talk to. I’ve tried to find Gigi—I called her apartment but no one answered. Look, Burgo, there really isn’t anyone else but me right now, is there? Someone has got to be better than no one. Sure. Will you tell him that? Thanks, Burgo.”

Spider handed the receiver to the gateman, who listened and promptly opened the electric gates for him. Spider pulled up in front of the house, where Burgo was waiting to greet him.

“Where is she?” Spider asked as he got out of his car, the piece of marble under his arm.

“After Mr. Prince left, she went upstairs for about an hour. Her maid said she was locked in her dressing room. Then she came down in her old cape and went out to walk around,” Burgo replied with a deeply worried look. “She hasn’t come in since. My hunch is that she’s in her private garden. I’ll show you where it is. If she’s not there, your guess is as good as mine. All the garden lights are on, you can look around as much as you like. I’ll let the guards know you’re here so they won’t bother you.”

Silently, without any small talk, Burgo led the way along the most direct path that cut through an olive grove and eventually came to a stop before the barrier of sentinel cypresses that concealed the stone walls of the garden. It was a chilly, windy night, the trees bending and rustling under the force of a dry Santa Ana wind that drove a full moon across the starry sky. Burgo parted the branches of two old cypress trees and revealed the door to the hidden garden. He gestured briefly and walked away before Spider could knock.

Faced with the uncompromisingly blank, well-made wooden door, Spider hesitated. He could leave Billy alone, in the privacy she had asked for and expected to be accorded her. He could stand here quietly, then wander around the grounds for a decent interval, and drive away, telling Burgo that he hadn’t been able to find her. He knew he must be absolutely the last person Billy would want to see, tonight or any other night; she hadn’t spoken a single word to him since their fight, she had even contrived never to be in the same room with him. In the course of the last month they had not laid eyes on each other once. But if there was any comfort on earth he could bring to Billy, if this fragment of marble had one-hundredth of the power Josh said it had, he had to give it to her. He knocked.

“What is it, Burgo?” Billy’s voice called.

“It’s me, Spider.”

A minute passed. Then another. “It’s not locked,” she said finally, in an absolutely neutral tone.

Spider pushed open the door and stood still, suddenly robbed of the power to move, bewildered by the magical whiteness of the enclosed garden, lit so softly that no source of light was visible. The passage through the somber screen of cypress into this square of concentrated enchantment made him feel as if he had stumbled into the heart of an awe-inspiring mystery. A living carpet of small white flowers eddied around his feet like surf foam, white tulips grew thickly around his knees, taller lilies tickled the backs of his hands, white roses climbed above his head and thrust their blooms so high that night was all but banished. The mingled sweetness of the climbing jasmine and roses startled him with its power; the moon’s reflection, a shivering shimmer, was the only adornment of the small center pool set so tightly into banks of fairy primroses that it seemed to have been dropped from the sky. He looked around for Billy, but he couldn’t find her.

“You’ve never been here,” she commented without any inflection, from her concealed seat across the garden under the arbor laden with twisted ropes of white wisteria.

At the sound of her voice, Spider located her barely visible form. “I never knew it existed,” he said, not daring to move.

“Since you’re here, come in.”

“Thank you.” He followed the curve of the path and stopped three feet away from the arbor seat, awkwardly putting the marble nameplate down behind him. Now that he was closer he could see that Billy was sitting far back, closely wrapped in some sort of dark, ample covering. Her head was shadowed by a hood, and he could barely make out the slight gleam of her dark eyes. He couldn’t give her the nameplate now, Spider thought, not here. He had expected to find Billy indoors, expected to repeat Josh’s words, deliver Josh’s gift and retreat, but in this sweet, blowing company of blazing, fragile whiteness, his solid hunk of marble seemed out of place.

Billy herself, in the shadows she had chosen, was suddenly inscrutable. He felt a great confusion fall over him. What did he truly know of the woman who sat here so quietly, whose retreat he had dared to invade? What could she have been thinking as she looked out at her garden, as if from a box at the theater, on a performance of private splendor? Suddenly he remembered Billy as she had sat with him at lunch one day in New York, in Le Train Bleu. She had worn high-spirited red, he thought, seeing her vividly, and she had been in total command of her electrifying self, her eyes carrying an empire within them, her strong throat a stalk more beautiful than anything in this garden. That day he had taken fresh measure of the depth of the intensely feminine tenderness that lived in her side by side with an autocratic impulsiveness. He understood her better now, after their intense partnership on Scruples Two, yet as well as he comprehended women, she still managed to elude him. More than in any woman he’d ever met, something about Billy remained fundamentally unknowable on the most basic level. He appreciated the depth of her shyness, yet she could be dauntless and daring far beyond other women. She’d managed to screw up her life, yet she’d maintained a powerful authority as she did so. She was sweet—oh, so sweet—but somehow unaware of the power of her own sweetness. He had come only to bring her comfort. He needed, more than anything, to heal her hurt somehow, to take away her pain, but he didn’t know how to begin, because of all the trouble between them.

“I came—” He faltered, and sought a new phrase.

“No, don’t,” Billy said, holding up a hand in prohibition. “I … I have to apologize to you. The things I said, they were totally unforgivable, I can’t explain them … I don’t expect you to forgive me, but—”

“No!” Spider was appalled at her words. “No! Don’t apologize! I was out of line, a hundred percent wrong, and you were right. But tell me you don’t think of me as a louse. I can’t endure your thinking I’m contemptible. Even if you do,
say you don’t!
Christ, Billy, I’ve missed you so! You’ll never have any idea how much I’ve missed you. We can never fight like that again, no matter what happens, it hurts too much. Jesus, I’ve cried myself to sleep, that’s how bad it’s been.” He stopped suddenly, amazed that he’d told her so much. He’d sworn to himself that no one would ever know how childish he’d been.

“But,” Billy said in a tiny voice, “but …”

“What does that mean?” Spider asked, confused.

“I … missed you too,” she answered, in an even smaller voice.

“You mean you don’t hate me?”

“Unfortunately … not. That would make it easy.” She shrank back farther into the protection of the folds of her old, sable-lined cape.

“I don’t get it—can’t we be friends again the way we used to be?” he asked, refusing to accept a note of unqualified farewell in her voice that terrified him. He moved toward her, bent down and took her cold hands in his, and tried to warm them.

“Friends? Oh no, Spider, not friends … not the way we used to be … I’m going away … back to Paris.… or maybe somewhere else … I’m not sure yet.”

“Billy, for God’s sake, you can’t leave! I won’t let you! It’s that lying garbage in the magazine, isn’t it?” he asked, trying to peer down at her face, almost hidden by the hood of the cape. Unable to see her and afraid to ask permission, he sat down gingerly on the edge of the narrow garden seat.

“No, not that,” Billy said. “It wasn’t a lie, you know. It happened, not exactly the way they said, but close enough. That’s why I didn’t tell you about Sam when you asked. I wasn’t proud of it, although, on balance, I believe I made an honest mistake. At first, after I read what they wrote, I was so assaulted by the tone of it—the
sneer
—that I felt like a poor, shriveled thing, someone without an identity except the one they pinned on me. And then, as I read it over and over, unable to leave it alone, it became thinner and thinner until the words became unreal. That thing wasn’t about me at all. I discovered that I don’t
perceive myself
as a pathetic person. Not anymore. Somewhere, somehow, I seem to have picked up some unmistakable self-esteem—high time, too, as my Aunt Cornelia would say, but never too late. I did have a bad time as a girl … growing up … but since then I’ve had a real life with real love and real friends and real achievements. Real ups, real downs, like everyone else.
There is a real me
—even if I don’t suit everyone’s taste. Don’t worry, Spider, I’ll survive that miserable magazine, I would never run away and give them the satisfaction of thinking they’d driven me out of town—”

“Then why are you even talking of leaving?” Spider interrupted fiercely. “How can you? It’s simply not possible, I won’t let you go.”

“It’s … it’s … because we can’t be friends again.”

“Why not?”
Spider demanded in anguish.

Billy was silent, struggling to gather together all her powers, willing herself to speak, to be honest at last, to say the inadmissible words, get them out and over with and put them behind her for once and for all, to give herself a chance to get on with her life. She couldn’t live like this, tasting her lonely love on her tongue, drawing it in on her breath, breathing it out in each sigh.

“Because … because you can’t keep a friend if you’re … jealous of him.”

“Jealous?” Spider asked blankly.

“Oh, my God, Spider, do I really have to spell it out for you? What do you think made me say those cruel things? Didn’t you even guess? I was jealous … yes, of Gigi … yes, of all the other.… women in your life. Of all the women.… you’ve.… loved.”