Scruples Two (11 page)

Mrs. O. must have been having trouble sleeping, Josie thought, although she hadn’t mentioned it. Her own parents had never shared a room except on their brief honeymoon because her father snored so loudly. She understood that the Queen of England and Prince Philip’s bedrooms weren’t even on the same floor of Buckingham Palace. Even for royalty, that
was
just a bit odd, but separate bedrooms were a luxury she thoroughly understood and approved of, even for heavy sleepers. They kept the romance in the marriage as nothing else could except separate bathrooms, Josie concluded. If she’d ever been married, she would have insisted on the bathrooms even if she’d had to do without a closet.

When Vito had discovered that Billy had left for New York, he’d called Maggie for dinner. He had no intention of eating with Gigi and Josie and playing daddy, no inclination to eat out alone, no dinner meeting planned that night, and he could count on Maggie to sense his mood and not ask him questions he didn’t want to answer.

They’d gone to Dominick’s, the dark, smoky, cramped, uncomfortable, undistinguished grill without a sign over its door that was one of the best-kept secrets in Hollywood. Dom’s served only a short list of basic steaks and chops, although on rare days a favorite customer could get grilled chicken. Its limp tableclothes were authentically red and white checked, you had to pay cash or have a house account, they wouldn’t take a reservation unless you were a regular, you left there with your hair smelling of cooking, wondering why you’d gone, but every night a number of the power players in Hollywood congregated at Dom’s, where there were no civilians to be seen. Like the Polo Lounge, it was a place at which you were guaranteed to be noticed, and when Maggie and Vito had dinner there three days in a row, nobody, not even Dom, thought anything of it. You couldn’t carry on anything you shouldn’t at Dom’s because it was a part of the industry, and you couldn’t carry on with Maggie MacGregor for the same institutional reason.

Or so people reasoned, Vito thought. The first night he’d had dinner with Maggie, he’d gone back to her house for a drink, and there they had resumed the affair that had kept Maggie in Rome for two weeks in the fall of 1974, supposedly interviewing him for
Cosmo
. They had both known, all through dinner, that it was going to happen, and the clubby, nothing-to-hide atmosphere of Dom’s had only enhanced an anticipation that had needed no questions or answers to guarantee it.

Vito had never forgotten how lusciously erotic Maggie was, once she took off her clothes. In the four years since he’d last seen her naked, she had learned how to dress but she had lost nothing of her voluptuousness. There was not an inch missing of Maggie’s ripe, heavy breasts, and her plump, inviting bottom was as round and creamy as ever. She was wonderfully quick to attain her orgasm, coming almost as soon as he started to touch her clitoris, even before he entered her, and then insisting that he take her just as quickly and ruthlessly as he chose, urging him on without words, her movements unmistakable, her body juicy and open. Making love to Maggie was like fucking the best whore in the world, Vito thought, and he found himself capable of coming more often than he did with Billy because he could please Maggie so quickly and frequently, with so little preliminary attention. Between bouts of lovemaking they gossiped and laughed casually, in an offhand camaraderie he relished, without any of the sticky palaver of two people who are in love. And all along Vito was aware, with a lordly assurance, that if and when he chose to feel Maggie’s soft lips close around the tip of his cock, all he had to do was put his hand on the back of her neck and push it down between his legs. She liked it like that, she liked it any way he gave it to her, she wanted him hard and she wanted him soft, so that she could make him hard, and thinking about her readiness to please aroused him at odd times during the day in an urgent, inconvenient way that hadn’t happened to him since he was in high school. Fucking Maggie MacGregor involved no big fucking deal, Vito thought, and that was what made it so exquisitely addictive.

When Sandy informed him of Billy’s plan to return to California late that evening, Vito knew that he would be at Maggie’s house that night. Fed up with the limited cuisine at Dominick’s, they had decided to eat pizza at her place. He sat at the desk, wondering if he should leave Maggie sleeping, as he had been doing, to return very late to the guest room in the house on Charing Cross Road where he still slept, dressed and breakfasted, or whether or not he intended to be at home at a reasonable hour. A “reasonable” hour of return, for anyone out for dinner in Hollywood, would be eleven or eleven-thirty at the latest. People didn’t linger in restaurants here as they did in all civilized cities of the world. They ate no later than seven-thirty, and parties broke up soon after eleven; even successful parties held on weekends were over by midnight.

He couldn’t make up his mind what he was going to do, Vito realized at last. If he came home by eleven-thirty he would probably see Billy, and if he saw Billy they would have to talk and if they talked, he didn’t know what they’d end up saying. If he came home at three in the morning, there would be no explanation but the obvious one. Perhaps something would happen during the day to make him make up his mind one way or another, but right now it was in the laps of the gods, if there were any of them still hanging around, he thought, and picked up the phone on which Sandy had been buzzing him patiently.

It was nine o’clock by the time Billy reached her bedroom. There was no sign of Vito, and she had no inclination to look for him. The flight had been smooth, she’d done nothing but sit and read, yet she felt extraordinarily tired, too depleted to even tiptoe into Gigi’s room, where the light was out, and take the peek at her that she’d promised herself during the trip. She was simply too frazzled to do anything but strip off her clothes, put on a nightgown and crawl into the bed. It was midnight in New York, Billy realized, but it was some other, utterly drained hour in her body. Could a mere three-hour time difference produce jet lag, she wondered, as she drifted off to sleep.

Hours later, Billy woke in the dark, woke abruptly, as if from a bad dream, with her heart pounding, and the absolute conviction that something was wrong. She listened intently for a second, wondering if the house was on fire, until a fearsome cramping ache began to mount in her belly. She wrapped her arms around herself as tightly as she could, pressing into her stomach with all her power, and the ache, which felt like a very severe menstrual cramp, gradually receded. Now Billy knew what had awakened her, and a rush of fear enabled her to get out of bed and switch on the light. There was blood on the bottom sheet, and another cramp was beginning. Billy shut her eyes and bowed her head and waited, moaning, until it was over and she could move again. She had to get to the hospital, and quickly, was all she could think. Vito! No, she didn’t know where he was. She dialed Gigi on the intercom.

“Hello … hello, who is it?” Gigi’s voice said confusedly.

“Gigi, it’s Billy. I’m back, but I’m in trouble. Wake up whoever drives you to school on the intercom and tell him to have a car downstairs right away. I’m going to the UCLA hospital, got that, tell him UCLA, it’s the nearest.”

“Okay, hang on, I’ll be right in.”

“No, Gigi, no, I don’t want you to see this.”

“Billy, just put on your slippers and a warm robe,” Gigi said and hung up.

A minute later, as Billy was in the bathroom, stuffing Kleenex into a pair of panties she’d put on under her nightgown, she heard Gigi open the bedroom door.

“Do you need me in there?” Gigi called.

“No, I’ll be right out.” Billy emerged, ready to go, and saw Gigi standing watchfully by her bathroom door, clad in jeans and a sweater she’d pulled over her pajamas, slippers on her feet.

“Lean on me,” Gigi said. “Burgo’s waiting downstairs. I didn’t think you’d want him up here in your room.”

“Oh, Gigi, Gigi, I’m losing the baby.”

“It’s probably not certain, not yet. Come on, put your arm around my shoulders, we have to walk downstairs and get to a doctor.”

“Oh God, why did this happen?”

“Come on, Billy, just put one foot in front of the other, you can lean on me, I’m strong.”

“Wait … wait, I can’t move.… all right now, hurry, before I have another cramp.”

Together they quickly managed the stairs and walked through the house, stopping only once when another cramp hit Billy. Burgo took over as soon as they appeared at the front door, helping Billy into the car. Gigi slid in next to Billy, her arm around her protectively, as they sped the short distance to the emergency room of the hospital. But although they reached the UCLA emergency room in minutes and every measure was taken to save Billy from having a miscarriage, within an hour it was over. Dr. Wood, Billy’s own doctor, arrived too late to do anything but confirm the fact.

“But why, why?” Billy asked again and again.

“It’s not at all unusual, Mrs. Orsini. You were barely three months pregnant, perhaps a week more at the most. If a miscarriage is going to occur, it’s most likely to happen during these first three months. It doesn’t compromise your future capacity to have children. There was some good reason for this pregnancy not to continue. We doctors consider it nature’s way of correcting a mistake.”

“Oh God,” Billy said flatly. She would never ask again.

“If you feel strong enough, I’d advise you to go home in an ambulance. The hospital will only depress you. I’ll send you a private nurse to care for you there. A few days in bed and you’ll be as good as new.”

“Don’t bother about the ambulance. I have Gigi, and Burgo’s still waiting. They got me here, they can certainly take me back.”

The doctor looked at Gigi sharply. She was holding Billy’s hand, as she had been for the last hour. No one had been able to prevent her from staying by Billy’s side. “Fine, Mrs. Orsini, but stay here for another hour at least. I’ll wait outside and go home with you and settle you down. May I ask who this young lady is?”

“My daughter,” Billy said.

“At least you have one child, and you’ll certainly have another. You’re only thirty-five.”

“Yes,” Billy agreed, “this one … at least.”

4

A
fter her return home from the hospital, Billy stayed in bed, sleeping deeply, waking to a half-doze, and then sleeping again. Several times she rang for orange juice and toast with jam, occasionally she read for a half hour, but for two days and one night she managed to lull herself into forgetfulness, into a willed calm, a sheltered place where nothing was allowed to enter her consciousness but the smoothness of the sheets, a few pages of an unmemorable book, and the rapid recuperation of her body.

Long after midnight following the second day of rest, she opened her eyes, feeling strong and so wide awake that it was impossible to stay in bed for another minute. She looked out of the windows and saw that the moon was full and high in the sky, the night was unclouded, and the garden paths were softly illuminated by the concealed lights that went on automatically every night. Billy hastily pulled on a warm sweater, slacks, a trench coat and waterproof boots, picked up a key and went outside to prowl around and try to walk off her alertness so that she could go back to sleep again till morning.

She walked slowly but deliberately out onto the terrace, testing her body’s willingness, and found that the motion felt welcome, necessary. She began to stride briskly, enjoying the sound of her firm tread on the paths that lay bathed in the heavy dew that came in from the ocean every night. Taking the long gardeners’ walk that had been planned to circle the outer borders of the property, passing the cutting gardens, the vegetable gardens, the greenhouses, the tennis courts and the pool, occasionally exchanging a silent nod with one of her security men, she headed toward the hidden garden, to which only she and Gavin, the head gardener, had keys.

Within ten minutes, Billy unlocked the wooden door to the walled garden that lay concealed behind a screen of dark cypress. It was an all-white garden at every season of the year. Tonight the first roses of spring bloomed, flinging their new canes high over the twelve-foot-high stone walls, their sprays mixed with climbing trumpet vines and rampant jasmine that was in its full glory. The square garden had been Billy’s special request of Russell Page. She had first seen an all-white garden at Sissinghurst Castle, in Kent, on a day in earliest spring when she had visited there with Ellis Ikehorn. The only bloom at that time of the year in England had been a bed of enormous white pansies with violet centers. They had given her more of a shock of beauty than if the entire garden had been at its summertime peak.

Billy closed the gate behind her and walked forward, through the beds planted in drifts of white alyssum and primroses, narcissus, iris, tulips, lilies-of-the-Nile, cyclamen and ranunculus, all the flowers of spring dazzled by the moonlight that reached so softly into their hearts. She was a little tired now and she welcomed the old wooden bench that waited beneath an arbor of wisteria. The bench was her favorite place in the world, the place she came when she wanted to be alone, away from the house, from phones, from any hint of noise or hurry.

She hadn’t come here in weeks, she realized, more weeks than she could count. The roses hadn’t yet received their annual post-Christmas pruning the last time she remembered visiting the walled white garden, and now they were reaching the apex of their late April bloom, always their finest display of the year, after resting for three months during the short California winter.

The roses told Billy what she already knew. It was time to stop and think, one of her least natural occupations. It was time to take an inventory of her life instead of just rushing through it, time to leave the mental safe house of her restorative sleep.

Start at the beginning, she told herself, start at that dinner party at the Hôtel du Cap that Susan Arvey gave just a year ago; start with meeting Vito Orsini that night and falling in love with him; start with those short, urgent hours of courtship in which she had quickly declared her intention to marry him; start with the lunch at which her determination had carried the day and he had agreed to marry her; start with their flight back home, eleven uninterrupted hours, the longest stretch of time together they were to have until.… the longest stretch of time they were ever to have alone together, period, in bed or out.

Vito had plunged into casting
Mirrors
the day they’d returned from Cannes. After six wildly busy weeks, with a script almost finished, and casting completed, Vito had left her alone while he went location-hunting, and once the locations had been found in Northern California, she had joined him for the actual hurry-up-and-wait, frantically boring, slow-motion frenzy of film production, feeling so neglected by Vito, so overlooked, so barely tolerated as long as she didn’t make a nuisance of herself, that she had fled to Jessica in a fit of self-pity and rage, just as she had done only a few days ago.

And between trips to whine and complain and pour out her troubles to poor Jessica, Billy asked herself acidly, just what had she done with her life? She’d made friends with Dolly Moon, she’d watched from the sidelines as Spider and Valentine ran Scruples very competently without her, and she’d served as an emergency script girl while
Mirrors
was edited in her house. That script-girl stint, using her old secretarial skills, had been the only truly useful thing she’d done all year, besides demanding that Vito find a publicist for Dolly and thus, unknowingly, introducing Lester Weinstock into Dolly’s life. Other than those two good deeds, she had nothing to be proud of unless she counted rescuing Gigi when the reality was that Gigi had rescued her.

For months on end, she’d waited around endlessly, patiently, impatiently, but hanging around nevertheless for Vito to land somewhere for a few minutes so they could say hello, she’d been supportive and a good sport and a cheering section, a devoted, loving wife whose life was wrapped up in her husband’s success.… and an asshole. She was no more necessary to him than a third leg, a third arm or a third ball. Two of each made sense, three were unmanageable.

Vito wasn’t her husband, he was her lodger, Billy thought, someone who took up room in a highly superior boardinghouse and occasionally threw the landlady a quick, thorough and expert fuck. She had to grant him that. He made great love when he found a spare wedge of time, so long as the phone was disconnected. Why hadn’t she ever objected when he reconnected it immediately afterwards? She’d begged him to visit this garden with her, just once, but he’d never managed to free himself for the half hour it would have taken. Why hadn’t she tried harder to get him here?

Why—why bother to ask herself why, why bother to analyze what she’d done wrong and he’d done wrong? Why not just recognize that what she’d felt for Vito was infatuation, not love. She couldn’t be sitting here, reckoning up the past, her heart beating steadily and without anger, if she loved him now. She couldn’t think about him with the cold indifference, the vast contempt she felt, if she loved him still. The passing of infatuation left a barrenness of heart, a bruised soul. It was “an extravagantly foolish or unreasoning passion,” as Jessica, the dictionary freak, had once called it. Yes indeed, that just about summed it up, Billy thought, without a tremor. Everybody has to eat a peck of dirt in his life, or so she’d heard, and she supposed everybody had to go through an infatuation and out the other end. She just wished she’d gotten it over with earlier, at fourteen instead of thirty-five.

Except for Gigi. Billy felt a sudden surge of savage rage rise up and fill her with such heat that she couldn’t sit still any longer. She paced rapidly around the flower beds, tearing a rose apart with trembling fingers and flinging the petals into the small central pool. Gigi. The way Vito had behaved toward Gigi was unforgivable, permanently and forever unforgivable. Even now he ignored her except for one or two isolated, perfunctory phone calls. There were no possible
buts
, no extenuating circumstances, no defense. If Gigi hadn’t had a great mother, God only knows what would have happened to her. Yes, Vito was a busy man, Vito was preoccupied with his career, but none of that could explain how he had overlooked Gigi. The only explanation—not an excuse but an explanation—was that, in one very basic sense, he was a bad man. A bad man who made a bad father. Any good man, any decent man, might not necessarily have what it took to be a good father, but he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be a
bad
father.

Billy quickly closed the door to the walled garden behind her and locked it. She took the most direct path back to the house, not noticing the moonlight filtering down on her through the old trees, not paying any attention to the archways and glades and ponds and meadows, the hedges and vistas that stretched on all sides as she almost ran in the eagerness of having reached a decision. How early, she wondered, would it be all right to telephone Josh Hillman? It was almost four in the morning now, and her lawyer was an early riser. Still, she had to wait at least two hours until she could call and instruct him to put into motion the steps toward a divorce and, most particularly, the steps that would make her Gigi’s legal guardian. By California law the divorce would take just six months, by next October she’d be Billy Ikehorn again, thank God. Waiting till six to phone Josh would test her patience, but at least she was certain of the essential element of her plans. Vito wouldn’t put up the slightest opposition. He wouldn’t dare.

During the next year Billy was deeply immersed in the construction of the new Scruples in New York and Chicago. True to her vow, she had made Spider and Valentine partners in the new stores without any other investment than their talent. It was her way of showing them how much she valued them, of finally thanking them properly for their indispensable roles in the success of Scruples in Beverly Hills. It also served the purpose of making certain that she’d never lose them to her envious, always opportunistic competition. Josh Hillman maintained that there was no legal necessity for her to be so excessively generous, but she had insisted, and no one knew better than he when it was useless to argue with her.

Spider was now hard at work night and day, dealing with the architects and designers Billy had hired to create the new stores as quickly as possible. He used her executive jet to shuttle from New York to Chicago to make sure that the basic Scruples concept of a store as a shopper’s perfect playground, a great caravan of choice, a never-ending source of real and fantasy gratification, was maintained in every detail. Valentine hired a cadre of buyers to assist her in covering the European collections, although she still had to make the final decisions in Paris, Milan and London, a rigorous test of judgment she couldn’t leave to others, for Scruples’ customers were buying more foreign designers’ ready-to-wear than ever. Both she and Spider were often needed in the Beverly Hills store, she to design custom clothes and he to put his stamp of approval on the most important purchases of their biggest customers, to whom his unsparing advice had become indispensable.

Billy’s travels took her to Europe, Hawaii and Hong Kong, where she spent a vast amount of money buying superbly located sites on which future Scruples stores immediately went into the planning stage. She was so busy that when she came back to California she was eager to spend most of her evenings with Gigi, although she forced herself to accept an occasional invitation to a party. Her interest in meeting an attractive new man, should such a rare bird be flying free in Los Angeles, was nonexistent; emotionally, Billy felt as if she’d found a comfortably refrigerated room and shut the door behind her with relief. If a healing process was taking place, she was unaware of it; it seemed to Billy that her marriage to Vito had been essentially too shallow a union to require major repair. Its loss left her feeling empty rather than bitter. Vito’s open liaison with Maggie MacGregor was a matter of no interest to her, which surely proved that she was cured of him. The very fibers of her heart seemed to have dried out, she knew she had become more cynical about the possibilities of happiness, but reason told her that she was not wrong. Mentally she shrugged and turned to the constant interest and excitement of the expansion of her retailing empire.

Spider and Valentine didn’t have the time they needed to look for a proper house, so Spider had sold his small bachelor place and moved into Valentine’s West Hollywood penthouse. About once every two months, Valentine found a minute to fret that they weren’t living a proper bourgeois married life, that her spices were growing stale and she hadn’t made a decent
pot au feu
for him since leaving New York, but Spider was enthralled with the penthouse in which Valentine had magically reproduced the mood of the Manhattan apartment in which she had lived when they first met. There they had confided in each other the disappointments of their romantic problems during the years in which they had been loving friends, but never lovers.

That first tiny apartment, its furniture covered in faded pink and white toile de Jouy, lit by red-shaded lamps, in which the powerful nostalgia of Piaf’s singing was so often heard in the background, had never failed to remind him of Paris. Now he had a piece of Paris in Los Angeles, a make-believe Paris in which the single most authentic and unmistakably French element was Valentine herself, a sorceress whose green eyes were filled with whimsical, witty life, her ever-changing fund of expressions crossing her white face under her curly, unmanageable toss of hair that looked as if she’d dipped lace in paprika. He could live on take-out and restaurant food forever, he assured his wife, he hadn’t married her for her cooking—well, not entirely—and certainly he hadn’t married to live the bourgeois life. What was that all about anyway, he’d ask, since neither of them was what he thought of as bourgeois? Comfort, she’d answer, and regular habits and a sense of being really and truly settled down. Not this almost-bohemian existence, not all this travel, and certainly not,
no never ever
, take-out food.