Scruples (35 page)

They fell apart, exhausted, as their orgasms subsided. After a minute Spider, still lying face down on the bed, felt her stir. “Don’t move—I’m just going to the bathroom.” She slipped away as he lay there, too happy and too drained to look after her. She’s finally made it, he thought, finally, finally. So that’s what she’d wanted all along. What a shy, repressed silly darling, afraid to do the thing that delighted her beyond all else—next time I’ll know what she really wants—and I’ll give it to her, and give it—His thoughts trailed off into a short sleep.

When he woke up she was gone.

“Val, darling Val, tell me the truth. Do you think I’m being paranoid?”

Valentine looked carefully at Spider. He was huddled, as if he were cold, in her biggest chair, yet his hair was streaked with nervous sweat, his skin gray and tight-looking around his mouth and eyes. Why, she wondered, did she feel as if her heart might crack for him? He was her best friend, nothing more. Of course, friendship was an important thing, more important really than love, for it lasted, while love—just look where love had brought him. She could have warned him about Melanie, but it had been none of her business.

“You are a bigger fool than I thought the first time I met you, Elliott,” she said softly.

“Huh?”

“Of course you’re not paranoid. One night you see Harriet Toppingham trying to make love to your little friend. Seven days later your little friend is in California and your new agent has called to tell you that all your bookings for this week have been canceled, not just for
Fashion
but for three different advertising agencies. And now he tells you that you have no bookings at all for next week and he can’t even get in anywhere to show your stuff. You’d have to be mad if you didn’t put two and two together.”

“But it’s so fucking unbelievable. Why would anyone do something like this? What did Harriet think I was going to do? Tell people—broadcast it maybe? Blackmail her or challenge her to a duel at dawn? She has no reason to destroy me!”

“Elliott, sometimes you are naive. You have told me a great deal about this Harriet Toppingham and her ways, and I can tell you, from being brought up in a world full of women most of my life, that she is evil. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you put yourself in her place and imagine how a woman like that must have felt about you when you didn’t bow down and kiss her ass like everyone else does?” Valentine’s bright, untidy head bobbed angrily to emphasize her words. “I have known many women who live for power and I know what wicked things they are capable of when they are threatened. You thought that because she was female she must have liked you? Elliott, I know you are considered delectable—but not to her.”

“Is that what you think it’s all about? Her being a dyke?”

“Not at all. It would have probably happened sooner or later even if there had been no Melanie. You didn’t give her what she wants from a man, every man she does business with.”

“I just don’t see what you mean, Val. I always respected her—everyone does—and I did my best for her and she knew it.”

“But did you fear her?”

“Of course not.”

“Alors
—” She said the one word with the dismissive, trailing-off sound the French make when they have scored an incontestable point, one that requires no further proof.

“There’s something else, something very odd about the way Melanie sounds on the phone,” he finally mumbled, breaking the silence that had fallen over them. He was ashamed and humbled in his pain. “She doesn’t really say how things are going, just that she’s working hard, but she sounds a lot farther away than three thousand miles. I wonder if that old bitch told her some filthy lies—” He stopped, arrested by a fleeting expression of pity and disbelief on Valentine’s stubbornly logical little face. “You don’t think that’s why, do you? You think it’s something different. What? Tell me what!” He could not forget that last evening with Melanie, when he was convinced that he had finally found the secret that would make her surrender wholly to him, yet, when he spoke to her on the phone, she had seemed as noncommittal, as distantly poised as ever.

“Elliott, it is none of my business, what goes on between you and Melanie. Perhaps she is being overwhelmed by it all. Why don’t we open some wine and I’ll heat up a little—”

“Jesus, Val! You remind me of the story about the mother whose son came crawling into the house bleeding from five gunshot wounds. ‘Eat first, talk later,’ she told him. Now stop trying to feed me and tell me exactly what you think about Melanie. I always know when you’re lying, so don’t pull anything cute. And it is your business. You’re my only friend.”

“And what are friends for?” Valentine said mockingly, stalling for time, trying to think of the right words to say.

“Tell me,” he pleaded. “What do you think is happening—just give me your best guess—I won’t hold it against you—but someone has to talk to me.”

“Elliott, I don’t think it has anything to do with you. I think that Melanie wants something you can’t give her. I thought so from the first day I met her. She’s not a happy girl—even you didn’t make her happy. No, don’t interrupt. You would have made her happy if anybody could have, but it’s not a man she wants. Not a woman either. Not another person—something else.”

“You just plain don’t like her very much,” said Spider, holding back a feeling of resentment.

“Perhaps it is merely as Colette says, ‘Extreme beauty arouses no sympathy.’ ”

“Colette!”

Valentine continued, ignoring him, “Maybe it’s as simple as your typical American fantasy—to be a movie star. Why did she leave so quickly? She had to cancel a week’s bookings? Why should you think that Melanie wouldn’t have exactly the same ambitions as ten million other American girls? She’s beautiful enough—”

“Enough!” he said savagely.

“More, far more than enough. It is strange, is it not, how an accident of a millimeter here, a millimeter there, makes one face so important. Think about it, Elliott. She has two eyes, a nose, a mouth, just like everyone else. It’s all in tiny degrees of placement, such a small area of magic to make such a big difference. For me, Elliott, I must tell you it is a hard thing to understand—why these things, these millimeters, are so crucial to you, you of all men. How sublime it must be for her not to need charm. Did she make you laugh? Did she love you as much as you loved her? Did she protect you and warm you and keep you from suffering?” Valentine turned her eyes away from him, unable to face the empty answer in his face but not wanting to stop saying what she had thought for so long. “I saw how fascinating her mystery was to you. For my part, I think that the mystery is always greatest where there is the most—emptiness. A person full of life is never mysterious, on the contrary. If Garbo had had something to say for herself, she’d just be another woman now.”

“Christ! The fucking, objective, know-it-all French. How can you dissect emotions like that? You’ve never been in love—that’s obvious!”

“Perhaps—perhaps not. I’m not at all sure. Now, damn it, we eat. You can starve for love’s sake if you like but I bloody well won’t.” Valentine poured them both some wine and watched him as sternly as a mother hawk as he drank it. In her heart grew the most profound wish, a prayer, very unselfish, for that spoiled little nothingness of a Melanie to become the world’s biggest movie star.

Melanie had been staying in Wells Cope’s guest house. For ten days she had worked all day long with David Walker, a great drama coach. Cope’s butler drove her to Walker’s house in the Hollywood Hills each morning and came back for her at four. It all felt, she thought, so right, so weirdly right. Perhaps she was crazy, but she had an idea that maybe she could act a little. David didn’t exactly overload her with encouragement, but, on the other hand, he hadn’t been as critical as she had expected. And the day before yesterday, before the test, he’d given her a fatherly kiss for luck—she didn’t think he did that for everyone.

At night she dined with Wells, always at his house—a dream of flowers, paintings, crystal, silver, music. She had never met a man like him. Witty, incurious, restrained, aloof, clever, wordlessly understanding, wanting nothing from her, yet taking enough obvious pleasure in her company so that she didn’t feel unappreciated. She wished in a way that he hadn’t seen the test today—that this could just go on forever, this protected, soothing world where nothing was asked of her except that she learn to pretend to be someone else—it felt so good. She floated in being someone else. She hadn’t felt the old need to
see
herself when she was acting a part.

In the distance she saw the gates open and Wells’s Mercedes being driven through. But he didn’t, as usual, go into the house. He crossed the garden, skirted the pool, walked over the lawn, and came to where she was sitting with a drink in her hand and a book in her lap. He took the book and the drink and put them on a table. Then he grasped both her hands and pulled her to her feet. She didn’t have to ask—the sight of his face was enough. But she did anyway, for sheer delight.

“I can act?”

“Of course.” He was triumphant, transfigured.

“What now?” An unexpected joy, awaited yet unpredictable, unfolded suddenly, as at the end of a long labor in childbirth.

“Now I shall
invent
you. Isn’t that what you’ve been waiting for?”

“All my life. All my life!”

That night Wells Cope took Melanie to Ma Maison for dinner and introduced her to everyone he knew. He gave no explanation of who she was, but Melanie was conscious that half the people in the restaurant were glancing at their table whenever they thought they wouldn’t be noticed. She could feel the heat of their greedy, questioning looks on her even when she couldn’t see their eyes. It felt terribly good.

After dinner Wells Cope made love to her for the first time. It was perfect, she thought later, like a slow waltz. He must have spent an hour just looking at her naked body, turning it this way and that, touching and exploring it all over with his undemanding fingers, like a blind man, lost in a dream that wanted no participation from her beyond her precious, empty self. Finally, when he possessed her, it was just an extension of the dream—deliberate, languid, and full of the grace of the flesh, with none of the sweaty, hot, urgent intensity that she feared. Best of all, he didn’t want to know if she had come. Why did men always ask that? It was no one’s damn business but her own. She had not, but she felt supremely good all over, like a cat whose fur has been smoothed in the right direction for hours. And when she finally got up, he seemed to know, without asking, that she never spent an entire night in bed with a man. He had let her go back to the guest house peacefully, with only a look from his visionary eyes, which made promises she was certain he would keep.

July 25, 1976

Spider
,

Please don’t telephone me again. I won’t answer the phone if you do. It just disturbs me and I don’t want to be disturbed. I don’t know why, but I’ve never been any good at saying things out loud and making people believe me, but maybe I can convince you in writing. I don’t love you and I will not marry you. I’m not coming back to New York—I’m staying here, and as soon as Wells finds the right property, I’ll be making a movie
.

Why can’t you understand when something is over? Couldn’t you guess from the way I sounded every time you called? I realize now that you’ve been trying to tie me up in ropes. You’ve wanted every bit and crumb and last drop of me, like a cannibal. I could hardly breathe when you were around the last few weeks—you stifled me. You might as well realize that you don’t have any choice in this. I’ve gone away from you for good. Can I be any more convincing than that?

I can act, Spider. This movie business isn’t a “crazy idea” as you said on the phone. I think I first knew I could act that last night at your house when you insisted on making love to me even though I didn’t want to. I convinced you that it was good for me that time, didn’t I? But I felt
nothing.
Nothing, I swear it
.

Melanie

John Prince, the designer for whom Valentine was working when Spider received his letter from Melanie, was one of the kings of Seventh Avenue. He liked to tell interviewers that the people who surrounded him in his various enterprises were special. “They are the Vivid People,” he said boastfully. “Every once in a great while,” he expounded, “you meet someone extraordinary and something immediately happens between the two of you—that’s how I know who My People are—it’s purely an instinctive thing.”

In point of fact, his troupe of assistants, like Valentine, was chosen entirely for their talent, hard work, and craftsmanship. Prince never merely licensed his name to a manufacturer and took the money. If a line of sheets and towels bore the legend “By John Prince” it meant that he had personally approved of the designs created in His image by one of His People. The same held true for His bathing suits, shoes, raincoats, costume jewelry, scarves, sunglasses, wigs, belts, furs, lounge wear, and perfume. Prince was far too protective of his reputation as a designer to choose anyone to work for him on mere instinct. However, in order to produce Vivid People he had often been known to take over a new employee and transform that person into someone exciting enough to be worthy of the Prince label.