Scruples (12 page)

“No! Edouard, it is your duty, please do not play at the great seigneur with me any longer. I have had enough of your reproaches! You will tell her and you will tell her the truth or else she will think it is herself that you do not wish to marry, rather than the circumstances that make it impossible. Perhaps—perhaps she has lived in France long enough to understand.”

Years later, when Billy could think about Edouard with only disdain for him and a touch of pitying contempt for her young naïveté—or had it been stupidity?—she was grateful for his bluntness—at least it was based on brute necessity—and for her poverty. Had she possessed any respectable sum of money of her own she would have become another of the dozens of dull, young comtesses of the rigid Faubourg St.-Germain, bound for life by the kind of stuffy conformity that her husband would have demanded of her. A French version of Boston—only the food and the clothes were better. She had been too close then to the agony of her school years to have ever dared to rebel. Certainly she would have become a Catholic in order to please her in-laws, and by now she would be totally the captive of a bloodless tradition that would hold her with the inescapable and still strong fingers of a dying class that can survive only by clutching new flesh. She would have smothered before she had found her chance to live. From future lovers she would learn that Edouard was as unimaginative and pompous in bed as he was in life.

But all that knowledge, the perspective from which she could make these judgments, was still years away. She decided to leave Paris before her time was up and to come home on a boat, to give herself an empty space in which to cross from one world to another.

So there was to be no happily ever after, Billy thought, as she paced the decks at night. Somehow it didn’t surprise her. If she had been a typical young girl, accustomed all her life to being petted, admired, and loved, Edouard’s actions might have shattered her. But she had had so much confirmation about the possibility, indeed the probability, or rejection, that unknowingly she had become toughened to it. She was able, only days after it happened, to accept the experience as another example of what could happen to someone who didn’t have money, rather than seeing it as a totally personal affair. There was even something gratifying, no matter how painful, in finding out that she was right about life.

She was thin and she was beautiful, Billy told herself fiercely. Those were the important things. The necessary things. The rest she would have to get for herself. She had no intention of dying for love of a man, like one of the nineteenth-century women in the books she had read. She was no Emma Bovary, no Anna Karenina, no Camille—no spineless, adoring, passive creature who would let a man take away her reason for living by taking away his love.

The next time she loved, she promised herself, it would be on her terms.

T
he inspired heterosexual, the devout lover of women, the man whose life is a celebration of the fact that there are females in the world, arouses very little psychological interest. Volumes have been devoted to homosexuality and to the Don Juan complex, but the man who deeply, hungrily, passionately and persistently enjoys women in all their characteristics, not merely sexually, is as rare as he is little acknowledged.

A look at Spider Elliott’s life history might—or might not—give a psychologist some inkling of a working hypothesis.

Harry Elliott, Spider’s father, was a Regular Navy officer who spent twice as much time at sea as on land, by choice Spider always suspected, since he and his wife, Helen Helstrom Elliott, a nice Westridge graduate from Pasadena, fought with a military unruliness whenever he had shore duty. These battles had few satisfactory results except the peace treaties that produced Spider, the oldest child and only son, born in 1946, and three sets of twin daughters.

Holly and Heather, the oldest girls, were two years younger than Spider. The next pair, Pansy and Petunia, was born at another two-year interval. The last two, appearing punctually on a now familiar schedule, were called June and January. Spider barely winced, even as a teenager. He loved his mother too much to try and curb her raging whimsy, and in any case, it was all done before he was old enough to offer suggestions.

All six sisters in the Elliott household revolved around Spider like doting little sunflowers. From the days of their earliest memories there had always been a wonderful big boy who belonged to them, a strong, blond boy who taught them all kinds of magic things and had time to read Spider Man comics out loud to them before they were old enough to read themselves, and told them how beautiful they were, and was their prized and adored hero, to be freely shared by all, for he had plenty of love to go around.

As far as Helen Helstrom Elliott was concerned, her son, Peter, unfortunately called Spider by his sisters, was the light of her life. Peter could not put a foot wrong, in his mother’s eyes, although she sometimes found herself ridiculously irritated by his devotion to her daughters. Peter, she noted with satisfaction, had inherited his looks from her side of the family. Perhaps his height came from his father, but the bright blond hair and sailor-blue eyes were pure Swedish Viking. All of her family on both sides had been Scandinavian—blond until they were old enough to turn gray. The fact that there hadn’t been any real Vikings around since the tenth century—and never any in California—was a mere detail to this romantic woman.

Spider had that most unliterary of American experiences, a very happy childhood. Commander Elliott, a ruefully cheerful man, whose chief distinction was that he had graduated from the Naval Academy a year before Jimmy Carter, turned to Spider for masculine companionship when he had shore duty. He taught his son sailing and skiing, helped him with his homework, and from the time the boy was three, took him away for backpacking, trout fishing, tent pitching, heartily male weekends, as often as possible. He loved his wife well enough, but if they kept on fighting, he was afraid they might end up with yet another set of female twins.

The Elliotts lived in a comfortable house in Pasadena. Spider’s mother had family money in a genteel, just-enough-to-make-all-the-difference kind of way, and Spider’s school days were spent there, in that self-satisfied suburb of Los Angeles that looks like the best part of Westchester. He grew up in the 1950s, a comfortable conformist decade in which to be young and southern Californian, and he entered UCLA in 1964. For the next four years, while his peers were protesting and rioting at Berkeley and Columbia, an occasional pot party was an anti-establishment a gathering as he attended.

There were really only two things about Spider that made him distinctly and permanently different from that prince of the world, the healthy, upper-middle-class American male. First, he
adored
women. He had a passion for everything and anything that was part of the female element in the world. And second, he had great visual taste. His graphic sense was inborn and unself-conscious. It demonstrated itself, for the one or two people who noticed it, in the way he arranged the huge corkboard in his room, on which he pinned up a constantly changing gallery of photographs from newspapers and magazines, and in the way he used his bookshelves to display “found objects” long before the concept of found objects had been heard of: a row of empty Dundee Orange Marmalade jars, discarded street signs, and a pair of child’s ice skates, forming a group that pleased the eye in a way that could not be explained. He even wore his jeans and t-shirts with a subtle difference from the way every other boy wore identical jeans and t-shirts.

When he was thirteen his maternal grandparents gave him his first camera, a small Kodak. Although Commander Elliott had made sporadic attempts to photograph his family, he never had been able to get all the girls together in one picture without the use of threats, and invariably one of them made a face and spoiled the photo. What they wouldn’t do for their father, however, they clamored to do for Spider, vying with each other in this new game, dressing up in Mrs. Elliott’s old garden hats and high-heeled shoes, hanging from tree branches, posing in a ring around the statue of a Grecian nymph at the bottom of the spacious garden, a frieze of femininity in bud.

By the time Spider was sixteen he had bought a secondhand Leica in a pawnshop. It had a broken shutter, so he got it cheaply, and after he had it cleaned, polished, the lens replaced, and the shutter fixed, it was a fine camera. Spider paid for all this by working summers in a shop where he developed passport photos overnight. His camera was his hobby; his sisters were not so much his inspiration now as his work load, for, suddenly, they “needed” pictures of themselves with their best friends and, in the case of Holly and Heather, to give to boys. Spider turned his bathroom into a darkroom, buying a used enlarger and trays from his summer employer, and taught himself the finer points of developing and printing by trial and error. Often, inspired by photographs in
Life
, he would go out and take rolls of pictures of trees, mountains, and industrial buildings or drive into downtown Los Angeles to try to capture the feeling of the streets. But, invariably, he found himself happiest when working with his sisters, who were now growing more beautiful and more self-conscious in front of the camera. He learned how to make them relax and cooperate. For graduation from high school he received a new Nikon from the same proud grandparents who had given him his Kodak, and now, at UCLA, his opportunities for photographing women became unlimited.

Spider joined the Photography Club, but his real interest was in capturing images of California girls doing all the gorgeous things California girls are famous for doing so well. By the time Spider graduated with a major in political science, he knew that he had picked the wrong field of study. His hobby had gradually turned into something he intended to do professionally. He was determined to become a fashion photographer and for that he had to work in New York City, which is to fashion photography what Amsterdam is to diamond merchants.

This was a sensible aim for a man who loves women, a man with an exceedingly keen graphic sense and his own Nikon, but about as easy an ambition to fulfill for a boy just out of college as that of getting a job as a cub reporter in the city room of the
Washington Post
.

However, Spider Elliott arrived in New York in the fall of 1969, armed with the savings he had accumulated from twenty-three years of birthday checks, Christinas checks, and summer jobs, some two thousand seven hundred dollars in all, and immediately looked for a cheap place to live. He quickly found a loft in the grimy lower Thirties, near the wholesale fur district of Eighth Avenue. It was one enormous, long, skinny room, which seemed to sag in the middle, but it had a view of the Hudson River—and the ceiling was eighteen feet high and had seven skylights. It contained a miserable bath, which could also serve as a darkroom in a pinch, a kitchen table, and a sink. A previous tenant had installed an old stove and an older refrigerator. Spider bought a minimum of furniture, built a platform topped by foam rubber to sleep on, and invested in a few pillows, sheets, two pots, and a frying pan. Then he painted the old floors a golden sand color, the walls four slightly different shades of sky blue and the ceiling off-white. He installed three ten-foot-tall Kentia palms he got wholesale at Kind’s, lit them from underneath with uplighters, and soon, at night, lying on his raft of a mattress, looking up at the clouds of the city through the seven skylights, the shadows of the palm fronds making a tropical play on the walls, a little Nat King Cole or Ella Fitzgerald playing on his old turntable, he felt as loose and free and happy as a beach boy.

The building in which Spider’s loft was located was a musty, old business structure, not legally meant for people to live in. It had an ancient elevator with doors like folding iron gates, and the lower floors were occupied by a jumble of dusty mail-order firms, semibankrupt button manufacturers, seedy jobbers of yard goods, and two firms of accountants whose offices had attained positively Dickensian squalor. On the top floor, where Spider lived, there were several other tenants who kept mysteriously odd hours and seldom crossed his path in the hallway.

After two and a half months of unsuccessful job hunting, talent, persistence, patience, and luck eventually paid off, as they do with dependable infrequency, and Spider landed a job as darkroom assistant in Mel Sakowitz’s studio. Sakowitz, a third- or possibly a fourth-rate photographer, did a lot of hack catalog work and occasional shots for the “About Town” shopping pages of minor magazines.

One Saturday morning in the late autumn of 1972, Spider, like Robinson Crusoe finding a footprint in the sand, discovered his new top-floor neighbor in person. He was coming back from the Italian markets on Ninth Avenue with a bagful of groceries, taking the shallow old stairs at a deliberate run and wondering, as usual, if life without tennis was going to incapacitate him. As he reached the top of the third flight, sprinting at full speed, he rounded the corner of the landing and stopped with a skid. Only his excellent reflexes kept him from knocking down a woman who was struggling along and swearing angrily to herself in French, heavily burdened with a bundle of clean laundry, two full shopping bags, a bunch of yellow mums wrapped in newspaper, and two bottles of wine, one tucked tightly under each arm.

“Hey! I’m sorry! I didn’t think there’d be anyone on these stairs—here—let me help.” She was standing with her back to Spider, unable to turn around as the bottles slowly slipped out from under her arms.

“Idiot! Get the bottle! It’s going to fall.”