Lovers (10 page)

Although Ben Winthrop’s quick success in business might have indicated that he was an impatient man, such a judgment would have been wrong. He had an innate capacity to judge when patience, a keen and relentless patience, would repay the investment of his interest, and he was disciplined in the art of waiting and watching and coddling a project along until precisely the moment when it reached perfect ripeness. Then he would leap, quickly and thoroughly,
and take what he wanted and make it his own. Anything he possessed, he insisted on possessing in its entirety. The concept of sharing was foreign to him, and profoundly distasteful.

He treated women he coveted in the same way as he treated pieces of property, cultivating them with a deliberately lulling patience until exactly the propitious moment. He was more than enough of a self-observer to understand the advantage of his somewhat academic exterior that gave no clues to his inner and predatory self. He had graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, with a genuine interest in literature and history, and a genuine love of beauty in all its forms. His greatest pleasures were making money, loving women, and observing beautiful objects. When a woman or an object struck him as exceptionally worthy, he would stop at nothing to acquire her or it.

Ben Winthrop had no idea of the extent of his pride. He would have been astonished if anyone had called him immoral. He was amoral, he occasionally told himself with an inward smile, a man to whom petty moral judgments could not apply since he was outside the narrow world of morality, elevated by his own efforts to the rational sphere of nonmorality where the sensible and rich existed, envied by those who were unable to leap as high.

Ben Winthrop had always been keenly interested in the big clan’s other outstanding rebel, Billy Ikehorn, whose doings had gradually become the stuff of family legend. He had been a kid when she left Boston and just seventeen when, at twenty-one, she’d married Ikehorn, but he still remembered how the women of the family had discussed the subject of Josiah Winthrop’s daughter quietly among themselves at Sunday lunch, in tones that were the Boston equivalent of scandalized gossip. He’d read about her building of Scruples with the approval he reserved for absolutely anything that showed a spirit of enterprise, short of unsuccessful bank robbery.

As he let Burgo take his car, Ben Winthrop looked over
the vast house and its acres of surrounding gardens, softly illuminated by night, with quick appraisal. An expert on every kind of real estate, he still got a thrill out of recognizing the ultimate, no matter if you couldn’t build a mall on it. He was shown in by a maid, and advanced to meet Billy with his characteristic quick and long stride, that of a man who was always in a hurry.

“Welcome, Cousin Ben,” Billy said, scrutinizing his face. “I certainly can’t say that you look familiar.”

“That’s probably because we’ve never met. I was part of another wave of cousins. Your bunch never fraternized much with mine until we got older.”

“My bunch never fraternized with
me,”
she said in the matter-of-fact way people learn to deal with the deepest wounds of childhood.

Ben Winthrop was a man with presence, Billy decided as she introduced him to Spider. He had a lean, hard face, a lean, hard body, a lean, hard handshake and a slow, thoroughly convincing smile that had, even in the moment of greeting, something thoughtful about it, as if it weren’t prompted by an automatic response but by a genuine inner decision.

Nanny Elizabeth came downstairs and presented Max and Hal. Billy watched as her new cousin looked them over closely, knowing enough not to offer them a stranger’s finger, covered with a stranger’s germs, to touch and, God forbid, then put in their mouths. Instead he stroked the soles of their feet with more than the normal degree of appreciation she would have expected from a bachelor.

“I don’t have children, but that indescribably wonderful way they smell has a powerful impact on me,” he said as the nanny carried the sleepy pair away. “I get to inspect a lot of them, my friends are all reproducing like mad, but your two have more powerful stares than any I’ve encountered. I feel as if they’ve scanned my brain and judged it passable, just barely. Am I wrong, or are they particularly fine examples of their species?”

“Nah, they’re mutts,” Spider said.

“In that case, I stand corrected.”

He was a clever boy, Billy thought, this Ben Winthrop, or rather a clever man. She looked at him with renewed interest. He had a high and lightly furrowed forehead that gave him an almost intellectual air, lots of independent-minded brown hair that grew in several directions at once in spite of a good haircut, a biggish, long, bumpy, idiosyncratic nose, highly strokable like that of an intelligent dog, a firmly cut mouth, long and thin, and a good chin. His eyes were the indeterminate deep gray blue of a changeable winter sea, and the way they were set under his brows gave him a look of being trustworthy and open, although she doubted that a mall tycoon would possess those attributes. He must be at least three inches shorter than Spider, perhaps barely six feet tall, and he moved well, in possession of the space around him. There was something slightly professorial about him, Oxford donnish, Billy thought, which most probably was due to the lingering influence of growing up in Boston.

What would his cock look like when he was aroused, she wondered.
Good God!
How had that popped into her mind? She who was so totally ga-ga about Spider that other men didn’t exist. How on earth could she have had such an outrageously inappropriate thought?

Deeply shocked at herself, Billy quietly sipped a glass of champagne while Spider talked to Ben. Finally she decided that her question only proved that old habits died hard, sterling wife and noble mother though she was. Or did it mean that Ben Winthrop had the kind of sex appeal that made every woman he met entertain such speculations? She preferred the latter explanation, although the days when she’d had similar thoughts about every attractive man she saw lay not that far behind her.

“Anybody home?” Gigi’s lighthearted voice rang with the assurance of a certain welcome as she came into the brightness of the house, bringing with her that perceptible, all-but-visible suggestion of a creature who should, by all rights, be spending her life dancing the Charleston, a creature
whose personal attitude toward reality, a shimmying, swaying, tantalizing, ain’t-we-got-fun attitude, came out of a decade long past.

“Everybody, darling,” Billy called. “We’re in here.”

Gigi entered the room wearing slim brown velvet jeans tucked into her favorite pair of soft brown suede boots, which came up over her knees and ended in a wide cuff. Her pale green woven tunic was belted with thick gold cording, and there was a ruff of Irish lace at her neck. Gigi’s small breasts were visibly held up by nothing except youth and sheer Irish nerve. With her bangs and bell of orangy hair, she looked like a figure in a tapestry, a pageboy, a minstrel, a young prince, or a girl disguised as a boy for a masque.

After Gigi had kissed Billy and Spider, she turned to Ben Winthrop with her usual directness, offering her hand with open curiosity widening her eyes.

“Gigi, this is my cousin Ben Winthrop. Ben, this is Graziella Giovanna Orsini, my stepdaughter.”

“So formal? Is that because Ben is my stepcousin?” Gigi asked. “After all, Billy, you endured a year of my father, but you’ve kept me more than seven. You and I could even be considered married by common law, if one of us were a man, stepdaughter or not. So why shouldn’t your cousin be my cousin? I don’t have a single one of my own, and I’ve been deprived long enough. I
claim
this cousin.”

“There’s a certain rough justice to that,” Spider said, enjoying Billy’s perplexed look. “Ben’s my cousin by marriage, now that I think about it. Why don’t you just consider him a cousin-once-removed, Gigi, whatever that means?”

“Do I have a vote?” Ben Winthrop wondered, taking an involuntary step toward Gigi in a desire to see exactly what shade of green her eyes actually were, behind that bristling barrier of black lashes.

“This is not a democracy,” Gigi informed him, a smile deepening on her smile-shaped lips.

Oh, she’s up to no good tonight, Spider thought, surveying her. It’s either the new job or Zach being out of town too long, but she’s using that potent, private-blend heartbreaker stuff, and we all know that’s not playing fair, don’t we?

“What is it, then?” Ben asked. “A monarchy?”

“A benign dictatorship,” Gigi said. “Hal and Max make the rules, the rest of us live to understand and obey, right, Spider?”

“Too true, kiddo. How’s your new gig?”

“Fascinating, crazy, confusing, nerve-racking, intriguing, utterly manipulative, and at the same time curiously innocent. When a product is one of our accounts, it really, truly
is
the best. If it’s not, it’s beneath contempt—there’s no place for gray hats in advertising. I’m what’s called a ‘new hire,’ so everyone is suspicious of me, plus I’m a ‘creative,’ and creatives are notoriously flighty and childlike in their desire for approval, so for the moment I can do no wrong and no right. It’s entirely different from Scruples Two, where we functioned rationally. Advertising is like a lunatic asylum crossed with a kindergarten—I absolutely love it! It’s about ten thousand times harder than Scruples Two.”

Gigi looked excitingly reckless, Billy thought, like a combatant, a small, vital female fighting cock, living with a strutting glitter, ready to risk, to plunge, to take any chance. How could hawking bathing suits to overweight women cause this particular metamorphosis, or was it due to someone she’d met at work, or merely being out on her own? Gigi was deliciously, visibly full of herself in a complicated way; excited, almost overwhelmed, yet bursting with vitality.

“Who are you working for?” Ben asked.

“A new shop, a boutique called Frost Rourke Bernheim. They used to be with Caldwell in New York. You probably wouldn’t have heard of them.”

Gigi didn’t know much about the recent history of advertising Ben Winthrop thought in amusement. So she’d
joined the notorious account-nappers and found them curiously innocent. His new cousin-once-removed was clipper-ship-worthy for sure.

The evening ended early because Billy had to get up at dawn to give the twins their bottles. Gigi, her mood restless and much too keyed up to consider going home, accepted when Ben Winthrop asked if she’d like a nightcap.

“Where would you like to go?” he asked. “Silly that we have to take both cars. I feel ungallant.”

“This isn’t neighborhood-bar territory … no corner pub for miles. The nearest place is the Bel Air Hotel, but you’d never be able to find it by yourself,” she said, superior in her local expertise. “The few little signs to the hotel are easy to miss. Follow me.” Gigi lifted a grandiose arm, pointed forward, and hopped proudly into her VW.

Soon, after driving through the dark, winding roads of Bel Air, unlit, it seemed, deliberately, so that only residents could find their way about, they settled in a far corner of the little-used but spacious bar of that smallest and most elegant of Los Angeles hotels, a bar where a wood fire glowed under the mantelpiece even in the summer, a bar lined with dark wood paneling, where the banquettes were covered in tapestry and the green leather chairs studded with nailheads, a bar designed to look like a man’s retreat in a British castle.

“Where do you live?” Ben asked Gigi, who had curled up in the corner of the banquette, her boots tucked under her, elaborately tasseled pillows tucked behind her back, as if she were in her own living room.

“In the Hollywood Hills.”

“An apartment?”

“A tiny house,” she answered, purposefully brief. Gigi had no intention of broadcasting the exact circumstances of her private life to any man, particularly one she had just met. “Are you here to violate our lovely state? Pave it over with manicure salons and quick-copy stores and croissant bakeries, because if you are, it’s being done already.”

“I don’t do mini-malls,” he laughed. “I do the real thing, branches of department stores, multiplex movie houses, chain grocery stores, high-end speciality shops, restaurants—”

“Rape
and
pillage.”

“Exactly.”

“On the theory that if you don’t, someone else will.”

“Absolutely. Except I insist on getting there first.”

“It’s so refreshing to meet an honest man,” Gigi said in mock admiration.

“Honesty is my middle name, after Saltonstall. Don’t you want to know more about me?”

“Or, as David would say, ‘Let’s get the personal stuff over with.’ ”

“Who’s David?”

“An art director. We’re a creative team, the two of us. Can you imagine a business that puts two strangers into one room all day long and expects them to work up a winning ad campaign together in the week we have before the pitch?”

“And will you?”

“They’re betting on it. I have a feeling it could—might—maybe—just happen. Stranger things have come to pass in the ad business, or game … at least I think they used to call it a game.”

“It sounds a hell of a lot more fun than solving my latest problem.”

Ben Winthrop looked at Gigi closely. During dinner he had been too caught up in general conversation to pay close attention to her, but he had not, for a second, been unaware of her presence. He was a man who, rightly, considered women one of his areas of expertise. He had had many of the loveliest in the country for the period during which they interested him. Gigi did not fall, neatly or otherwise, into any category he recognized.

Women, in Ben Winthrop’s opinion, all played games, and she hadn’t revealed the nature of her game, although she must have one. He knew he was a cynic, but any man
who wasn’t a cynic about women was something worse, a fool. She wasn’t getting by on charm, although she easily could have; she wasn’t using her looks more than other women of equal visual delight; she didn’t seem to have an agenda in his regard. That, of course, could be an agenda in itself, but she was probably too young and inexperienced for such a subtle nuance.