Scruples (42 page)

“Josh,” she had chided him, “I’m not doing this to make money. You know I can’t spend my income. Why even with everything I give to charity, even with those millions every year, it just keeps on increasing. I’m
indulging
myself and I won’t let anyone tell me I can’t afford to. Of course I can and you know it. This is between me and me!”

If only, Billy reflected bitterly, it had remained between her and her. If only
Women’s Wear
hadn’t kept such an interested eye on her, she wouldn’t be so frantic now. It was one thing to see the disappearance of money that she would never use if she lived to be ten thousand but quite another to have that fact published loud and clear in the one newspaper in the world whose opinion she cared deeply about. Lately there had been a few references to “Billy’s Folly,” signed by that pseudonymous “Louise J. Esterhazy,” undoubtedly the editorial voice of
WWD
, and she could feel the winds of the future. When the next set of half-yearly figures became known, she would be the laughing stock of the whole retail world. She had little hope that she could suppress the figures. Although only her own accountants would be aware of the losses, since Billy owned the store entirely, there were leaks and spies everywhere. And even if there were not, you only had to go into Scruples to see that there was very little selling being done. It was, Billy thought, like having the world’s most beautiful corpse lying on your doorstep with no way to remove it and knowing that soon the whole neighborhood would wake up and come to investigate that strange and horrible stink.

Why the fuck was she so impulsive? She could scream with rage, she could pinch herself black and blue, at the memory of that phone call with Valentine. She had wanted that girl so badly, she had been so convinced at the time that a talent like Valentine’s running a custom-order couture department was what Scruples needed that she had bribed her insanely to come to California. Of course, custom work couldn’t make the difference! Even St. Laurent and Dior and Givenchy, in fact every couture house in Paris, complained that they lost money on their couture business, but it kept their names alive and those names sold perfume and ready-to-wear all over the world. The French couture was dead, financially. It existed only to maintain the aura and ambience of Paris before World War II: to inspire department-store buyers and dress manufacturers from all over the world to trek to Paris twice a year; to allow the woman who bought an Yves St. Laurent ready-to-wear dress for three hundred dollars in one of his many boutiques to feel that some of that Paris magic was rubbing off on her. And Billy had known it all along. There was no one to blame but herself. And now she had hired two complete amateurs to do a job only professionals could successfully undertake.

And yet. And yet. Perhaps, Billy thought, perhaps being impulsive wasn’t always such a bad thing. Looking back, it was impulse that had led her to Paris in the first place, impulse that had told her to cross the corridor in Barbados and go into Ellis Ikehorn’s arms. Of course, it was impulse, too, that had let her imagine herself as a French countess merely because she had lost her virginity to a fortune-hunting count and impulse that had made her believe that one year of Katie Gibbs had given her the training to make a success in business. In the darkness of her bedroom, Billy shook her head ruefully as she realized how many times in her life she had expected miracles to happen because she
wanted
them to. Like Scruples. But, after all, she had come back from Paris thin and she had married Ellis and been happy for seven perfect years. Without her bad habit of impulse, what would she be now? A grotesquely fat Boston schoolteacher, no doubt, eating her way through a death in life, still the eternal outsider, the. freak, trapped within the closed circle of Boston aristocracy to which she, so inappropriately, “belonged.”

And with the help of impulse? She was divinely thin, fabulously rich, and enormously chic. The classic merry widow. If only she felt merry. It was all the fault of Scruples. It was a total disaster and the sooner she faced it the better. She had been impulsive once too often.

The next morning, as soon as she woke from the brief sleep that had come over her as dawn was breaking, Billy Ikehorn telephoned Josh Hillman at his home, a bad habit that she had caught from Ellis Ikehorn in the days of his glory and power.

“Josh, how committed am I to those two, Elliott and Valentine?”

“Well, they have contracts, of course, but they could always be bought out for less than it would take to pay them for the entire year, if that’s what you have in mind. It’s unlikely that they’d sue. They probably don’t have the resources to pay a top attorney and, to my mind, unlikely that a good man would take their case on a contingency basis. Why?” His question had an uncharacteristic note of uneasiness.

“I’m just considering my options.” Billy didn’t want to admit outright that she was planning on getting rid of Spider and Valentine. In the subtle seesaw of unexpressed second-guessing that takes place between lawyer and client she didn’t want to lose this round too ignominiously. When she had awakened actually flirting with the idea of selling Scruples, she had realized that she had been right about one thing, at least. The land was already worth more than she had paid for it, and perhaps a Neiman-Marcus or a Bendel might want to buy the building. Even if no one wanted it except as a great bargain, at least she would be free of the suffocating embarrassment of running a moribund store. Better for her to seem to have merely lost interest in Scruples than to cling to it while her peers laughed and sneered at her pretensions and secretly rejoiced to see her humbled. She felt depression creeping over her. She had put so much into her hopes for Scruples. It was still her baby. But she couldn’t take public humiliation. Of all the things that could happen to her, that was the one she was most afraid of. She had escaped the misery of her first eighteen years only physically. The scars they left would always remain. They had deformed her, and whatever else had happened to her later had not permitted her to forget the past.

A few hours later, while she was dressing, Spider telephoned.

“Billy, I’ve been up half the night thinking about how to turn Scruples around, make it a smash. Can we talk today?”

“I’m just not in the mood. Frankly, the subject is beginning to bore me. Yesterday you were tap-dancing all over the ceiling with a restaurant here and a massage parlor there. I’m just not up to any of your tricky schemes today, Spider.”

“I promise serious business only. Listen, I’ve latched on to a car. It’s a gorgeous day—let’s drive up to Santa Barbara and have lunch at the Biltmore. We could talk there. I haven’t been up the coast in ten years. Don’t you feel like getting away for a few hours?”

Oddly enough, she did. She felt as if she’d been trapped for an eternity between the city of Beverly Hills and the low Santa Monica Mountains, which rose behind West Los Angeles and separated it from the San Fernando Valley. It had been forever since she’d gone anywhere out of town for lunch except for predictable Sunday brunches at the Malibu Colony.

“Aw,
come on
, Billy! You’ll have fun, scout’s honor.”

“Oh—all right. Pick me up in one hour.”

Billy hung up reflectively. If it had been years since she had driven ninety miles for lunch, it had been much longer since anyone had asked her to go anywhere in quite that tone of voice, as if she were no more, no less than a slightly reluctant girl.

Billy remembered perfectly well how people talk to people who aren’t rich. For the past thirteen years, since she had married Ellis Ikehorn, people had talked differently to her, using that special intonation reserved for the very rich. She had often meditated on the great American game of trying to find out why,
exactly why
, the rich are different. Fitzgerald and O’Hara and dozens of lesser writers had been passionately absorbed by the rich, as if money were the most fascinating thing a person could possess—not beauty, not talent, not even power, but money. Billy thought privately that the rich are different only because people treat them as if they were. Sometimes she wondered why people bothered. It was not as if knowing someone rich rubbed off on them, put more money in their own bank accounts. Yet, there it was, that slight self-consciousness, the faint over-consideration, that eagerness to charm, the instinctive putting-the-best-foot-forward that she heard all day.

Perhaps she never would have realized that people don’t talk to the rich the way they talk to others if the change in her own fortunes hadn’t been so abrupt. If she had been born rich, she suspected, she wouldn’t have had enough experience to be impressed by Spider’s informal manner. Aside from certain, very few, women who had the power and position in Los Angeles to ignore her fortune, no one else spoke to her as Spider just had.

As only he could, Spider had promoted a classic Mercedes convertible, and an unspoken cease-fire seemed to have gone into effect between them from the minute Spider asked if she wanted the top up or down.

“Oh, down, please,” said Billy, thinking that, for all her thirty-three years, she’d never ridden in a convertible with the top down, something every American woman is supposed to have spent her youth doing. Or was that another, past generation? In any case, she’d missed it.

Once past Calabasas, the freeway was almost deserted and the valley stretched out around them in a series of brown, sun-dried, rolling hills dotted with live oaks, a landscape almost as simple as a child’s painting. And soon, past Oxnard, they could see the Pacific on their left with nothing between them and Japan except an occadonal oil rig. Spider drove like an angry flamenco dancer, cursing the speed limit as if somebody had taken away his high-heeled boots.

“Last time I was on this road you could go an easy hundred—we used to make Santa Barbara in less than an hour.”

“What was the rush?”

“Oh, just the fun of it. And sometimes, after a late party, I had to get a girl home before her parents sent out a statewide alarm.”

“A real California kid, weren’t you?”

“The genuine article—one step away from a surfer. If you’re going to have a misspent youth, have it right here.” He laughed his joyous, lazy laugh at a million memories.

Billy observed the perfect conversational opportunity to lead Spider into revealing what, just exactly, he had been doing since those days, but she felt too good to bother at the moment. The wind in her hair, the sun on her face, the open car—it was like being the girl in an old Coca-Cola ad; she could sense her clenched anxiety diminishing as every mile put her farther away from Rodeo Drive.

She had never been to Santa Barbara. When Ellis was alive, the only trips they took were by jet. Nor had she ever been tempted by the few invitations she had received to come to parties in Montecito, a community just outside Santa Barbara where the very rich live on a closely guarded few square miles famous not only for their natural beauty but also for their laws prohibiting the sale of liquor and their fabulous private wine cellars. Although the Biltmore hadn’t sounded too inviting, she was stunned as they drove around a curve and the grand, rambling old hotel was revealed on its high bluff overlooking the sea, romantic and beautifully maintained, a mirage out of a gracious, dignified past. Blue mountains stretched up the coast in the background, while nearby, surf pounded the cliffs.

“This is the way the French Riviera could have looked fifty years ago!” she exclaimed.

“I’ve never been there,” Spider said.

“My husband and I used to go. Oh, but this—it’s perfect. I didn’t know there were places like this so close to the city.”

“There aren’t. This is the first one. Then you keep going up the coast and it just gets better and better. Shall we eat outside or inside?” Spider was dazzling, Billy thought, as they stood in front of the entrance to the hotel—his smile, that seemed to expect, happily, only good things. A damn knockout if she’d ever seen one. Such an obvious combination: golden hair and blue, blue, blue eyes. Why did it always work?

“Outside, of course.” He wanted something, but she knew what it was, so she was prepared. He might be a knockout, but she was no pushover. And she still intended to cut her losses.

When Josh Hillman sent Valentine the basket of butterfly orchids, he committed, perhaps, the first absolutely unnecessary act of his life. When he called to ask her to dinner the next day he committed the second one.

He knew exactly where he wanted to take Valentine, to his special place, the 94th Aero Squadron out at Van Nuys Airport. He had never taken anyone there before. Five years earlier, Josh had taken up flying. He’d never been interested in sports, but he’d always yearned to fly. As soon as he felt he could reasonably spare one afternoon a week away from the office and one afternoon a weekend away from home, he started flying lessons, much to his wife’s disgust. Joanne flew only Pan Am, and then only after two Miltowns and three Martinis in the airport bar. As soon as he had earned his private pilot’s license, Josh bought a Beechcraft Sierra and began to steal more and more time on the weekends to indulge in the intoxication of flight. Joanne never cared; she always had a full schedule of tennis and backgammon tournaments. Nor did she mind the many nights he worked late at the office; she had literally hundreds of phone calls to make each week to keep track of the multitude of women she herded into working their asses off for culture and better hospitals. Often, after Josh landed, he went to the 94th Aero Squadron for a drink before driving home.