Lovers (55 page)

Gigi, pad and pen in hand, sat in the jet bringing her back to California, writing a card to go with her gift for Eleonora Colonna, who was going to be sixty-five next week. In the course of the last year, Gigi had made many trips to San Francisco to work with the Indigo Seas designers, and to keep their ad campaign fresh and on course. Her friendship with the matriarch of the family had deepened steadily. Eleonora Colonna’s guest room was where Gigi stayed now, whenever she visited San Francisco, and she knew the large, close-knit family intimately, from all three Collins brothers and their wives, down to the last grandchild.

During her five days in New York she’d had time to visit some of her favorite hunting grounds for antique lingerie, searching for the romantic, richly decorated, hand-sewn garments created in days when women knew the erotic provocation of suggestion and understood well that a minimum of titillating revelation created a maximum of desire. In a box at her feet lay a true find, a complete bathing costume dating from 1894, a hundred-year-old creation an emancipated woman wore into the water only after a bell had chased all the men from the beach.

It consisted of four pieces, the first a very wide floor-length cloak made of heavy white linen, deeply flounced and bowed at the hem, and tied at the neck under a double ruffled collar. This enveloping garment totally covered the bathing costume itself as its owner proceeded across the sand. Underneath the cloak, the brave bather wore a knee-length, full-skirted, tightly sashed dress made of thin linen, worn over separate drawers of even thinner linen, gathered below the knees, and falling almost to midcalf. Both dress and drawers were navy and white, with much contrasting embroidery in nautical stripes. The last piece of the ensemble was a striped navy and white band, with a bow on each side, that was intended to sit on top of the head.

At the bottom of the card, Gigi had carefully done one of her expressive, humorous little sketches of Eleonora at that brief, tantalizing moment for which the gentlemen with field glasses waited for so eagerly, when she was
forced to emerge from the gentle sea at Deauville after her swim and rush toward the attendants holding out the billowing cloak in which they would rapidly envelop her.

Satisfied, Gigi tucked the card into the box and tied a bow around it. She rang for the steward to tell him that she was ready for lunch. She still had hours left to write cards to go with the amazing five-piece white lace. Victorian “marriage set” she had found for Sasha and the velvet-collared Edwardian dandy’s smoking jacket made by Charvet and obviously never worn, which she’d discovered for Vito. He’d have to grow a mustache to do it justice.

Gigi arrived at the agency so early on Monday morning that she expected to be among the first hungry souls at Bagel Central. She’d spent the kind of thrillingly sleepless night that comes from overexcitement, obsessed by the plans for the
Winthrop Emerald
. She’d realized that she was in overdrive at three-thirty in the middle of the night, when she found herself still planning how to con Renzo into making room for a regulation-sized Ping-Pong table on the part of the deck reserved for deck chairs. Ping-Pong was the only sport at which Gigi herself excelled, the only sport at which she believed everyone, no matter how un-athletic, had a fighting chance. After another hour of feverish concentration on a cruise-long Ping-Pong tournament with fabulous prizes, it occurred to her that a Ping-Pong table could be put up and taken down in a few minutes, that it didn’t need a space all of its own, and she finally calmed down enough to plunge into an hour of deep sleep, only to wake up at six as if a fire alarm had gone off next to her pillow.

“Hi there, Polly,” Gigi said languidly to the receptionist, as she took a plate, hoping that bagels were complex carbohydrates, a question she’d never dared to ask because she feared the answer.

“Hi, stranger. How was New York?”

“Fantastic. How’s life at FRB?”

“Wild. Listen, Victoria wants to see you pronto, the minute you get in.”

“She’s
in already?”

“Everybody’s in early today,” Polly said with the air of someone who knows something she can’t tell.

“Which explains why there aren’t any bagels left,” Gigi said with disappointment, putting two sticky cinnamon rolls on a plate and getting hot tea out of a spigot. She carried her breakfast to her office, empty for the moment of Lisa Levy, the talented art director who worked as her creative partner, and decided that nothing Victoria had to say to her was more important than nourishment. She hadn’t made breakfast at home, and she felt light-headed. Her mouth was full when her phone rang.

“It’s Polly, Victoria wants to know if you’re on your way to her office.”

Gigi chewed as quickly as she could and swallowed hastily. “How fast can I eat, for Pete’s sake? I could choke to death here.”

“Bring it with you, she’s in a chop-chop mood.”

“Screw that. Tell Miss Vicky I’ll be in as soon as I’ve done my Transcendental Meditation and read ‘Dear Abby.’ Without my morning rituals, my day gets off on the wrong foot.”

“Gigi, please, please, do it for me,” Polly said.

“Oh, okay.” If Victoria Frost thought she could spoil her morning, she was wrong, Gigi thought, as she walked down the corridor and into the big office in which Victoria reigned.

“Well?” Gigi said, stopping inside the door. Archie and Byron were standing around looking excited while Victoria tested a fresh pepper grinder that stood next to a large platter of bagels, cream cheese, and smoked salmon.

“Is this my birthday?” Gigi asked delightedly as Arch and By both moved forward to kiss her hello.

“It’s a little welcome-home party,” Archie explained. “We missed your cheery face, believe it or not, so we laid on your favorite feast to express our affection.”

“Now I see what that rush was about,” Gigi said to Victoria, feeling only slightly ashamed of her uncharitable thoughts. “Let me at it!”

“It was my idea,” Byron said proudly. “Archie wanted to get a cake, but I knew what you liked best.”

“You were right on the money, Byron the Third,” Gigi said, helping herself lavishly. “Did you have a vote, Victoria?” she asked curiously.

“I was in favor of a kilo of Beluga caviar and lots of Dom Perignon,” Victoria said, “but I was outvoted. I’ve never really understood bagels. Gigi, fresh pepper for that salmon?”

“Just a little,” Gigi replied. When Victoria Frost thought of mounds of caviar, champagne, and Gigi Orsini in the same context, something wasn’t kosher.

“Tell us about your week, Gigi,” Archie said when they’d finished eating.

“Archie, why don’t you tell Gigi about our week?” Victoria broke in smoothly. Wasn’t it enough that she’d finally agreed to this absurd breakfast without anyone expecting her to listen to any of Gigi’s effusions on cruise-ship data and decor? She’d been waiting for this moment since last Tuesday, six impatient days of imagining how Gigi was going to look when the realization finally came home to her that in her absence the agency had expanded by over a hundred million in billings, had changed from a newly created shop in which she had been indulged and petted and treated like a prodigy, to an agency in which she would merely be another employee, albeit a busy one.

Byron and Archie had made a case for the welcome-home celebration. In spite of her reassurances to the contrary, they’d felt some minor residual concern about taking the Scruples Two account while she was away. Archie had even suggested giving Gigi the title of “assistant to the creative directors,” but Victoria had vetoed it.

“The time to give Gigi some sort of a title is when she comes up for her yearly compensation review,” she’d insisted, and she’d made her judgment stick. How like the
boys it was to want to rush the rewards to which Gigi would feel entitled. They’d already given her too much more money. A title was all they had left, but Arch and By had no talent for management, they had never understood the discipline of delayed gratification and the necessity of maintaining order among the creatives.

Little Miss Orsini would have to be rewarded, no doubt about that, but there was no point in overdoing it. Her head, had been enormous even before her first day on the job; she’d waltzed in here full of attitude, but during those delicate days in which they were struggling to get over the hump of being a new boutique agency, there had been no way for business reality to be applied to Gigi—she’d turned into a one-man band. But now, with the gigantic acquisition of Beach Casuals, the picture had changed totally and Gigi was back in perspective. No more girl wonder, no longer the pint-sized procurer of medium-sized accounts courtesy of the easy generosity of Ben Winthrop, who undoubtedly congratulated himself every time he fucked Gigi that the IRS was paying for it, since advertising was a deductible business expense. Had Gigi ever realized she was the sexual equivalent of a business lunch?

“Why don’t you tell her, Victoria?” Archie countered. “It’s your baby, not mine.”

“I don’t care who tells me what,” Gigi said, “if you’d manage to get to the point. I have so much to tell you about the
Emerald.”

“Gigi, it’s almost a year that you’ve been here,” Victoria said, launching, as she had planned to all along, into the role of leader that belonged to her by right.

“You must know that you’ve proven yourself as a copywriter with the ability to get new business as well,” she went on. “We all realized that you were afraid of the smell of nepotism and favoritism when you insisted that we stay away from the Scruples Two account when you came to work here. However—”

“ ‘However’?” Gigi broke in. “I don’t like the sound of
that word.” Now she knew the reason for the caviar and champagne.

“However,” Victoria continued with a small smile, as if she and Gigi had a secret between them, “you’ve undoubtedly realized that you’ve had more than enough success on your own to render that particular scruple, for want of a better word, utterly unprofessional and deeply unfair to us, as your employers.”

“Are you telling me I’m unprofessional, Victoria?”

“Just the reverse. When you were new and green, Gigi, indeed you were, but certainly not any longer. We all agree that you’ve become a true advertising pro.” Victoria’s smile deepened, as if the understanding between them were stronger than anyone realized. “Before you came here, before you understood the nature of the business, Archie and Byron made a hasty mistake. They allowed you to clip our wings and prevent us from going after an account we’re uniquely qualified to service. Last week I went to see Spider Elliott—he’s been unhappy with Russo and Russo for a long time—and he positively jumped at the chance to have us handle the Scruples Two account … he didn’t even want any other agencies to pitch it.”