Scruples (54 page)

Like most practiced hostesses, Susan Arvey liked her guests to feel honored by each other’s presence. This demanded that they be familiar with each other’s outstanding achievements. If one of her guests owned a giant savings and loan company and was as unknown to the general public as a shoe-repair man, Susan simply worked his savings and loan company into the introduction. She was so adept at this that hardly anyone was aware of what she was doing, but the subliminal impression was made. Not just a superior pimp but a great P.R. person existed in Susan Arvey. Many guests, of course, didn’t need explanation. They were the most satisfactory. She certainly didn’t have to tag a phrase of identification onto either Billy Ikehorn or Vito Orsini.

Tonight Susan had invited fourteen guests, all meeting first to have a drink in one of the Arvey’s suites before going on to the Pavilion. It was not at all one of her more illustrious gatherings, in fact, frankly, rather a mediocre crew, but at Festival time you took what was available. In other circumstances, Susan wouldn’t have invited Vito until he had a new hit picture, but she needed an extra man, and Curt had suggested him.

For the first half of the cocktail hour, Susan was so busy putting a little high gloss on everyone’s reputation that it was a while before she realized that Vito Orsini seemed determined to monopolize Billy Ikehorn. They weren’t circulating. It wouldn’t do, not at all. As she herded her guests down the walk from the hotel to the restaurant, Susan found time to whisper to Billy that it was too bad that Vito Orsini’s last three pictures hadn’t made money.

“So he told me,” said Billy. “Amazing, isn’t it? The taste level of the world is lower than low. I loved every one of them. I think he’s a genius—almost a Bergman. You have put me next to him at dinner, haven’t you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Please do, Susan dear.” There was an edge to Billy’s voice that only a very few people would have caught immediately: Valentine, Spider, Hank Sanders, Jake Cassidy, and Josh Hillman.

“Well, of course,” Susan agreed unwillingly. Perhaps Billy just felt like a little flutter of flirtation. Heavens, it must be years since—naturally, that explained it.

“You haven’t been into Cannes at all?” Vito asked with curiosity, as he and Billy ate dinner.

“Susan says it’s simply too grotesque. Tomorrow we’re going to the Maeght museum to see the Giacomettis and, if we have time, there is a wonderful old house in Grasse, restored in the period—sixteenth century, I think.”

“Tomorrow you are going to the Cannes Film Festival.”

“I am?”

“Of course you are. You’re dying to go. It’s not just grotesque, it’s Dante’s
Inferno
, painted by Bosch, with a touch of Dali, a little George Grosz, and if you look out at the sea, it’s pure Dufy. Susan amuses me. You come six thousand miles to the world’s most famous circus and she is too damn dainty to set foot inside the tent. But I don’t think you are.”

“ ‘Dainty’ is not a word anyone has ever used to describe me.”

“What words do they use?”

“You know, I haven’t any idea. I’m not being coy—I just don’t know.”

“Let’s use the process of elimination. Not dainty and not coy, to start with. Not ugly and not insignificant. Not stupid but not very self-aware. Not immature, yet not quite grown up. Not terribly happy but not melancholy. Perhaps—yes, I believe, a little shy.”

“Stop it!”

“You don’t like to talk about yourself?”

“It’s not that. You embarrass me.”

“Why?”

“All this instant character analysis. You just met me an hour ago.”

“But have I said anything you don’t agree with?”

“No—that’s what I don’t like. I had hoped to be a little more mysterious.” Now she did sound coy, she thought, annoyed at herself.

“But you’re very mysterious to me. I’m only talking about some of the obvious things I see—it’s in my profession to see these things, as if you were a character in a script. In the treatment for the script—the outline—we write something like ‘Billy Ikehorn is a beautiful, rich young widow who does not have a fixed center to her life, so she goes to the Cannes Film Festival with a friend, hoping for some distraction’ and then we have established the character and we can go on from there. But that doesn’t mean we know the really important things about her, the motivations, the nuances. Some will come out in the script and some in the actress we pick to play Billy Ikehorn—she must bring her own quality to the part. And the audience supplies the rest—each one of them brings something different to the idea of ‘rich young widow.’ So you remain mysterious still.”

“Just three lines in a treatment?”

“Something more. After all, you’re playing Billy Ikehorn.”

“I
am
Billy Ikehorn!”

“Perhaps it is the same thing.”

“Oh, that old bit about everybody playing a role,” she said scornfully.

“No.” He didn’t explain further but adroitly changed the subject. Nothing could have piqued Billy’s interest more, Vito was well aware. He was just letting his extrasensory perceptions take him where they willed. He didn’t have plans for Billy other than amusement. It gave him a mischievous pleasure to think of rescuing her from Susan Arvey’s overly rarefied atmosphere, if only for a day. The workingman in him was offended by the idea of someone who was too grand to dip at least a toe into the bazaar of the Festival. And she was so very beautiful.

Billy took refuge behind an expression of ancestral Winthrop hauteur, with her eyelids lowered so that Vito couldn’t penetrate her feelings about spending the next day with him. She had known, from the minute they met, that he was a virtuoso—would have known even if she had never seen one of his films. He had the unmistakable air of a man who has crossed a number of border lines, a man who didn’t waste time questioning the importance of what he was doing but just went ahead and did it—an impulsive, fearless man. At first she had thought that he looked classically Latin with his large, aquiline, aristocratic nose and his firm, full lips, his thickly planted hair as tightly curled as that on a Donatello statue. But he burned an energy that was purely twentieth century in its lack of formality, its direct, intent concentration on its object. Charm, she thought abruptly, is just one of the symptoms of energy.

Vito picked Billy up the next morning. She had been into Cannes before, of course, when she and Ellis owned a villa at Cap-Ferrat, the millionaires’ compound near Beau-lieu, but she had only dashed into town once or twice to pick up something in one of the branches of the great Paris shops or to buy some of the marrons glacé that Ellis had liked so much. They had used their villa for only a month or so in early spring and late fall, before and after the tourist season, and her strongest memory of Cannes was of a row of huge, rather empty hotels, bordering the wide Corniche, across from a stony beach.

Vito secured a tiny table on the terrace of the Carlton, by the arcane magic of having heavily overtipped the same headwaiter for fifteen years in a row, and let Billy look around. Within a space of a few hundred yards in each direction she saw thousands of people, swarming about in no perceptible pattern, yet each one looking purposeful and hurried. No one glanced at the sea beyond the beach, which was dipping and flirting with the sun. No one looked at the brave display of flags of all nations, which flapped on tall, white flagpoles all along the Croisette. Everywhere there were knots of men, jostled by the impatient crowd, who had stopped, sometimes in the middle of a driveway or on the steps leading to an outdoor terrace, to carry on what looked like deeply complicated conversations. The broad Corniche had become a seemingly permanent wall of unmoving cars, all honking furiously. There was something of the feeling of Grand Central Station at rush hour, something of the feeling of a stadium crowd looking for their seats for the big game of the season, something of the feeling of the floor of the Stock Exchange on a day of heavy trading. All under the bright, calm Mediterranean sky, ignored by the preoccupied throng.

“It’s exciting, isn’t it?” Vito finally asked.

“Terribly,” Billy smiled in agreement. “I had no idea. Tell me, who are all these people—do you know any of them?”

“Some. In fact, too many perhaps. That man over there with the hat on, he’s made fifty million dollars making dirty movies in Japan. He’s here to find some big-breasted Swedish girls who will agree to have their eyes made Japanese by plastic surgery. Then he will use body makeup and make even better dirty movies with them because he thinks that Japanese girls are too small breasted. The man with him has fifty Swedish girls to sell—they are dickering over the price. The tall, blond woman at that table over there is a man. He is waiting for his lover who is a woman casting director who only likes men in women’s clothing. She spends forty thousand dollars a year at Dior to keep him well dressed. The three Arabs behind us are from Kuwait. They have nine hundred million dollars and the dream of establishing a film industry in their country. But nobody wants to go and live there at any price. If they go home without a film industry, they may be killed, so they are getting nervous. They are seriously planning to kidnap Francis Ford Coppola and possibly Stanley Kubrick, but they’re not sure they can afford them. The Russians, who are waiting for a table, are trying to induce George Roy Hill to remake
War and Peace
so they can rent him their entire army as extras. But they want it to be set in the future so they can use their air force and their new nuclear subs—”

“Vito!”

“If I told you the truth it would be boring.”

“Tell me anyhow.” Billy’s dark eyes were as flirtatious as the sea.

“Percentages. Pieces of the gross. Pieces of the net. Pieces up front. Pieces deferred. Points and fractions of a point. Film rentals in Turin. Film rentals in Cairo. Film rentals in Detroit, in—”

“I liked it better the other way.”

“And yet you strike me as a woman to whom the truth is more seductive than the fake.”

“I like to be left with some illusions.”

“You’d be a failure in the movie business.”

She turned to him, suddenly serious. “Do you know that Susan thinks you’re on the verge of becoming a failure? It isn’t true, is it?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ve made twenty-three films and only six have been failures at the box office. Seven that made money weren’t critical successes. The other ten were successful both ways. It’s a very good record. Right now I owe three hundred thousand dollars and I’ve had three pictures, one after the other, that didn’t show a profit but didn’t actually lose money, so I think my luck is due to turn.”

“How can you be so cool about it?”

“You can be a silly girl, can’t you? If I were worried, I’d get out of this business. It’s simple. I’d rather make movies than do anything else in the world. I do it very well. I don’t always know what the public wants, so sometimes I lose money. But I can’t concern myself only with the public or I’d end up imitating others. For me, the thrill is in creating something that pleases me. That’s worth all the struggle. I believe in myself, in my ideas, in my way of working. That’s all there is to it.”

“Doesn’t it bother you to be up one day and down the next? Don’t you feel afraid that people might be laughing at you behind your back?”

He looked at her, astonished. “Where do you get these fears? Certainly no one likes to be laughed at, but I don’t worry about it. This is a fickle industry. If I weren’t willing to take a risk, I’d go back to my father’s business and manufacture silverware.”

The simplicity of Vito’s self-affirmation irritated Billy. She was envious of it.

“You’ve got a hell of a nerve for a man who’s in debt!”

“Said in the true Festival spirit,” he laughed. “You’re catching the mood. Come on, let’s take a walk. There is a prominent member of the New Hollywood waiting for our table so he can buy some cocaine.” She looked around, trying to spot another of his jokes.

“But, that’s—! Does he, really?”

“Yes. You’ll find out—I generally tell the truth.”

After lunch in a bistro on a side street, they spent the afternoon wandering around Cannes, poking through the antique shops and the old port, away from the Festival crowds. Later, after Vito had taken Billy back to the Hôtel du Cap to change into an evening gown, they went to the huge Salle des Spectacles to see an English film. The Cannes audience is the most purely vicious since Christians were thrown to the lions. The Leftist press whistles and screams insults. The Free World press screams insults and boos. The Third World press boos, whistles, and screams insults. Every year, by some strange combination of coincidence, a few films appear that do not offend the press of any country. However, they often offend members of the jury, a mini-U.N. with less in common than the real one. The choice of the winning film is rarely popular.

“Did you ever have a film in competition?” Billy asked Vito.

“Yes, in fact twice. Ten years ago I had
Street Lamps
. And three years ago,
Shadows.”

“Oh, I remember them both well, I loved them—
Street Lamps
the most.”

“I wish you’d been in that audience. I could hear the tumbrels coming for me.”