Scruples Two (43 page)

She couldn’t judge yet, Gigi decided, but maybe a weekend in the snow would give her an idea. It was hard to really get to know Zach on his native turf because he was always in charge, always surrounded, the chief, the boss, the leader, always worked up in search of his vision—that vision thing of his that she understood so perfectly—but on skis he’d be different. Life-sized. Or almost. He didn’t know how to ski either, so they’d start even.

He’d missed a beat somewhere, Zach thought, trying not to listen to Pandora chat away, and that was something that should never happen to him. He’d intended to spend this trip sitting in the backseat with Gigi, watching the moon rise on the snow, while Nick and Pandora were growing increasingly absorbed in each other up front—at the very least, Gigi would let him hold her hand—but Pandora had somehow gotten his perfectly clear signals crossed and slid into the place he’d destined for Gigi. She was a grabby piece of work, that girl, and should go far. She basically belonged in Alfred Hitchcock’s Hollywood, but she was too bloody pretentious about the theater to admit it. Still, a highly useful actress who took direction perfectly.

Even with this glitch, his master plan was well under way, his plot to lure Gigi away from New York with him, away from his sister’s alarming influence, away to a place where the two of them would find themselves together and alone in the middle of nature. He had faith in nature, maybe because he was strictly a city boy, but he suspected that nature might make Gigi more generous to him than any amount of stagecraft. Of course, blizzard or not, Gigi wouldn’t have gone off for a weekend with him by himself, so he’d had to co-opt the others. As for the rest of the company of actors, he would have had to give them three days off, skiing or no, when they hit that wall that they’d been due to hit anyway. It never failed, even with fluff or farce, there was always one stagnant period when the most dedicated actors started going stale, and any smart director had to give them a time-out. But with the devastating richness of Shakespeare, the literally overwhelming language beating on and on in their heads night and day, there usually came more than one time when the circuits broke down and all they wanted to do was go home and watch daytime soaps and eat pizza and take naps.

It was easier for him, he was just a shoemaker cobbling a pair of shoes from scratch, dealing with so many elements besides the words, running a complicated human community, putting on a play, for Christ’s sake. A
play
. Directing was the only work in the world that was pure play, and he was the luckiest man in the world to be the playmaster, to have Shakespeare’s language in front of him, those most beautiful words in the public domain—although there were those who’d say the Bible—sitting there on the page waiting for him to turn them once again into a piece of reality, a celebration of life, a celebration of man, not an intelligence test or an entrance exam.

There were some directors who made themselves miserable from time to time, thinking that orchestra conductors had better jobs than they did, because the conductor was up on stage, a performer himself as well as the shaper of the composer’s vision. He’d had his own moments of frustration, sure, it had sometimes occurred to him that if he was in the business of interpreting the playwright’s vision using the creativity of the actors, then who exactly was he, Zach Nevsky? But then he’d realize that he’d a million times rather work with language than sounds, then he’d remember that he was tone deaf, then he’d ask himself if the only job he’d be ready to trade for was God’s. When that happened—and the answer to the question was yes, God, or, better still, Actor/Director—he knew he was the one who needed a pizza and a nap as a consolation for his lack of acting talent.

Okay, so you couldn’t have absolutely everything. He’d settle for exactly what he had, plus Gigi. If he weren’t so sure that Nick would never make a move on his girl, he’d be a little jealous of the way they were talking Hollywood trash together, ever so comfy. He tended to forget that Gigi had a movie-producer father because that incomprehensible bastard had no place in her life. Maybe Vito Orsini seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth, but guys like that never disappeared, they were harder to get rid of than Jimmy Hoffa. One thing he didn’t have to worry about was asking Vito for Gigi’s hand in marriage, that shit had forfeited all his rights to his daughter. He’d probably have to ask Sasha, if he had to ask anybody. Or maybe Gigi’s stepmother, Billy Ikehorn herself, far away in Paris. But first he had to get Gigi out alone in the sparkling snow, all by themselves in the pristine wilderness, with real blue sky and real pine trees and the kind of real air that never made it to Central Park, just the two of them. He’d always wanted to go skiing. It looked like a snap.

They arrived at Killington very late on Friday night and went to bed immediately, Gigi and Pandora sharing a room without discussion because they were so anxious to get to sleep, Zach and Nick in another, one door down the same corridor.

Early the next morning they all ate huge breakfasts of pancakes, bacon and porridge to give them strength, on the advice of Pandora, who had been put on skis before she was three, and Nick, who often skied in Vail and Sun Valley. Gigi and Zach went off together to rent skis and boots and join one of the classes at the ski school. Killington taught beginners on short, three-foot skis, without using poles, an amazingly rapid form of instruction that enabled the skier to experience the feeling of swooshing downhill almost immediately, since they didn’t have to cope with the awkwardness of long boards and flailing poles.

The beginners’ class was designed to be as easy as possible. The students took the low nursery gradient one swoop at a time, turning up into the hill to stop. There were fifteen of them, and eventually, urged on by their ski instructor, they made several turns in each swoop, checking their speed when they turned. Each move down the crowded hill, on which many other classes were busy, couldn’t take place until they each had had an individual turn and regrouped. Before lunchtime the beginners had all had the terrifying joy of standing at the top of a hill, looking way down to the bottom, knowing that they had done it once and could do it again.

Gigi and Zach stood at the bottom of the nursery slope, thrilled with themselves, and looked up to see Nick, a black bullet, and Pandora, a sleek silver arrow, coming straight at them from a great distance up the mountain, gathering speed as they skied dead straight down the hill, stopping just at their feet with a sharp turn uphill accompanied by a snappy flourish.

“Go ahead, show off,” Zach said. “We’ll learn to do that too.”

“It takes time, Zach, skiing the fall line.… and dumb guts,” Nick answered, releasing his skis.

“What’s the fall line, Nick?”

“The straightest way down the hill, without checking your speed. Until you ski the fall line you can’t get the full feel of it. You haven’t conquered the mountain and you haven’t conquered your basic, normal fear of falling. Nobody wants to risk a fall.”

“Come on, Nick, look at all those little kids coming straight down just like you and Pandora—half of them are two or three years old,” Zach protested.

“Sure, and they’ve been on skis since they could stand up. It’s not as easy as it looks.”

“Elitist pig,” Zach laughed. “Are you hungry or are you hungry?”

“I’m hungry,” said Gigi, as she watched Pandora hoist her long skis effortlessly to her shoulder, take both her poles in one hand, and stride off with a confident wiggle of her tightly encased silver ass. Zach looked after her with an appreciative gleam in his eye. Gigi was wearing baggy navy ski pants and a dark green jacket that looked dull with navy, borrowed from two different Strausses. She felt a sudden pang as she became conscious of how amateurish and clumsy she felt in comparison.

Their hearty lunch was served cafeteria-style, for the afternoon session of ski school started promptly at two. Nick and Pandora took the lift back up to the top of the mountain, waving good-bye to Zach and Gigi with what seemed to both of them to be looks of barely concealed pity.

“Gigi, do you really want to spend the whole afternoon doing the same thing we were doing this morning?” Zach asked her immediately.

“That’s the way the school’s set up,” Gigi answered firmly.

“Gigi, ski school’s a business, just like anything else. They hold you back so you’ll keep paying them, even when you could perfectly well do it by yourself. We spent most of our time waiting for the rest of the class—didn’t it make you feel frustrated?”

“Sure, but how else can I learn?”

“Listen, Gigi, we both know how to ski under control now, right? We’ve learned how to stop and how to turn, right? Why don’t we skip school, go up the mountain, and take the easiest beginner’s trail down slowly, doing
exactly
what we learned this morning? That way we’ll get ten times more skiing than if we stay in class.”

“That might make sense, Zach Nevsky, except I have the nasty suspicion that you lust in your heart to ski the fall line.”

“Gigi, I promise, I swear on every precious marigold hair of your precious little head, I will not try to ski the fall line this afternoon. I’m not a moron. I’ll do that mother before the weekend’s over—but today I just want to cram in as much practice as I can. It’s sunny, it’s cloudless, how can we waste it?”

She looked appraisingly at Zach. It seemed heartless to fetter such a natural athlete. He’d been far and away the best in the class, imitating the instructor much more exactly and effortlessly than any of the others, catching on naturally to the rhythm of the turns, leaning forward, bending his knees and swinging his arms from side to side with grace. An Orloff-Nevsky, after all, could always pick up a dance step faster than the rest of the chorus line, and Zach was no exception. And he looked so touchingly eager, his straight black hair, too straight and abundant to ever keep a part, falling over his forehead, his eyes squinched up in the yearning for adventure.

“Ah, Gigi, you must be itching to get away from these nursery slopes.… even the name’s demeaning, and they’re as crowded as the subway. In class we’re only getting to actually ski a few minutes at a time.” Zach spoke with all the intrepid persuasiveness that had led so many actors into taking chances with their talent, making leaps into new areas they hadn’t believed they were capable of conquering.

“I just don’t know.” Gigi hesitated, enormously tempted against her better judgment, but still unsure.

“The only way to feel truly
here
is to go up the mountain. You know I won’t let you get into any trouble … come on, Gigi, let’s go for it!”

“Oh, Zach …” Gigi looked down at her little red skis and her impressively high-tech plastic boots and something in his tone made her yearn to take a risk.

“I promise I’ll take care of you, please, Gigi! I won’t go if you don’t. It wouldn’t be fun by myself.”

“Oh … all right,” she agreed, as people eventually did when Zach Nevsky challenged them.

Zach had been right, Gigi decided. The beginners’ trail was hundreds of yards wide at the top of the mountain, a field of crisp, virgin powder snow. The mountain peak seemed a million miles removed from the trampled, crisscrossed, wet snow of the ski-school slopes, which now lay thousands of feet below, beyond their view. They were on top of the world, a hummingly quiet, strangely thrilling place from which they could see violet-white mountain peaks above them in every direction. Gigi felt as if the air she was breathing contained a rare essence distilled from sunlight and purity. Merely standing there gave her a completely new experience of peace and self that she could never have imagined if she had refused to follow Zach to the top of the mountain.

Gigi skied in Zach’s tracks, not at all anxious to make her own path. While dozens of other skiers sped past them he carefully went first, about twenty-five feet at a time, keeping half-horizontal to the pitch of the mountain, checking his speed several times before he stopped and waited for her to catch up with him. Gigi wobbled a bit, trying to coordinate the swing of her arms and knees. Soon, as they crisscrossed the mountain slowly, on the treeless snow field, she gained confidence and ability as she managed to arrest her downhill motion where Zach was waiting for her. He hadn’t told her, down at the bottom of the mountain, that he planned to reward her for each successful effort by kissing the top of her head, but there was no way she could evade him on skis, and the top of her head was not a recognized erogenous zone. At least it hadn’t been when he’d started, but now it was getting sensitized, or else she had sneaky, highly erotic nerve endings in her scalp she’d never known about.

“Listen, Zach, cut that out!”

“It’s like giving a dog a pat when he does a new trick. That’s all.” He grinned at her in admiration.

“Dogs don’t ski … and you’re patronizing me,” Gigi said, shaking her head at him in warning.

“So what parts of you can I kiss? I don’t want you to feel your courage and style are going unnoticed or unappreciated.”

“None of them, Zach. You know my rules,” she said severely.