Scruples (56 page)

Billy wandered around the park of the Hôtel du Cap, losing herself in the overgrown paths, avoiding the clearings where she might come upon another guest sunning himself on a bench, prowling through the kitchen garden where flowers for the hotel and vegetables for the restaurant grew in well-tended rows. Everyone was either sleeping late or having breakfast in their rooms. Except for a stray gardener, she had the acres of park to herself. Finally she sat under a tree in the sun-splotched, buzzing green shade, which smelled far different from any American earth, the smell of centuries of civilization she supposed, and tried to think.

She was acting like a love-sick child. Perhaps it was merely sexual. Vito had a knowledge of how to please a woman she had never known in another man. There was such a—she could only think of the word “generosity”—in his lovemaking. In recent years she had become a taker, a commander who told a man exactly what she wanted him to do to her, where and in precisely what manner she wanted him to stimulate her, and for how long, and if he wouldn’t or couldn’t, she left him flat and found another. She made her demands unconditionally and took her satisfaction as quickly as possible. That was what they were there for, those young male nurses who eventually went their way with such generous bonuses. Whatever happened to them afterward, whatever their private worlds were, Billy never knew or cared to know. To her, although she had never used the words, even to herself, they were male whores. She understood that now, and understood that she had had contempt for them. Did she have contempt for herself, with them? It was something she didn’t want to think about.

Oh, but with Vito she didn’t even remember her predatory, peremptory ways. She felt as if he were browsing in her, a man enjoying a long, lazy stroll over his beloved, property, treasuring everything about her as if the very happiness he gave her made her more precious than she had been before. When she came, he was like a man who had received a priceless gift, yet it was he who had given it. He was so perfectly unhurried. Lying with him, it was always as if they had all the time in the world, no urgency, no pressure, no goal except the moment. He had washed the cynicism out of her and the hardness and left her as soft and helpless and open as—as she had never been since Paris.

Billy stood up, left the shade of her tree, and walked back to the hotel, a golden-white château with tall shutters painted in the palest gray-blue. It wasn’t purely sexual and she knew it. Whatever happened, she felt in her bones that Vito was the love of her life. It terrified her.

The last few days of the Cannes Film Festival are like the last few days of college after exams. Everyone whose picture has already been seen leaves town as quickly as possible. Those who remain are aware of a change of mood. The carnival atmosphere melts away as if it had never existed; the press, nursing hangovers and bloat, drifts off; the facades of the hotels regain their dignity as the elaborate advertising signs are removed from them; it becomes possible to find a waiter from whom to order a drink; and the food improves.

Susan Arvey was in a snit. She and Billy should have already left for Paris as they had originally planned before coming to the Festival, but Billy seemed glued to Cap d’Antibes. It was all Vito Orsini’s fault. He was still milking his Mexican dog. In an excess of wild energy he had sold it to a dozen foreign countries. With the certainty of seeing his next movie through production, he seemed unable
not
to make a sale, even if he didn’t know where the country was located on the map. How he found time to do business while he saw so much of Billy, Susan couldn’t imagine, but she was a woman of little imagination to begin with. She did have enough, however, to stop herself from telling Curt what she thought of him for financing Vito’s next picture. Anyway, this delay could last only one more day, two at the most.

On the day before the end of the Festival, Vito invited Billy to have lunch with him at La Réserve, in Beaulieu. The restaurant of this small, gem of a hotel is a long, open, shaded marble gallery, decked in pink, facing the ocean, certainly the most elegant outdoor dining room in the world.

As Billy listened to Vito ordering lunch in his fluent Italian, a lunch she didn’t want to eat, she realized that, through the screen of her sunglasses, she was observing the scene as if to memorize it for the future. She was trying to photograph Vito, just as he was now, glowing bronze, as Mediterranean as the sea at his back, explaining to the headwaiter with words and gestures that the crayfish should be served with three different kinds of sauces. She was behaving as if the die had been cast and the game had been lost long ago, as if there was nothing for her to do but save her pride by treating the whole episode as just another impulse of a frivolous woman flirting wildly but not seriously, a sensation seeker, a maker of empty, affectionate phrases and promises. She was reducing her emotions to the size they had been stuck at for years, shrinking, diminishing with every minute that passed.

Slowly she took off her sunglasses and put them down on the pink linen tablecloth. She was not going to permit herself this failure of character. She had to risk another rejection, no matter what humiliations it would cost her in the middle of the night for as many years as it took for it to become a memory. She felt obstinate, urgent, awkward—even brutal—and she didn’t care.

“Vito.” There was a resonance in her voice that made him look up abruptly. “Vito, I don’t have the essential argument.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I wanted to captivate you with my flexibility, be whatever you wanted in a woman, convince you that you could never let me go, but I was wrong.”

“I don’t understand, Billy.”

“I was wrong, because my money will not go away—I couldn’t get rid of it if I wanted to, and I don’t.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“No, you can’t turn it into a joke with a twist of your voice. I’m rich and I’m going to always be rich. It is very important to me. But it’s not fair, is it? If I were a man and you were a woman, and I were rich and you were not, there wouldn’t be any problem, would there? We could try, couldn’t we, without anyone thinking anything except that it was natural—normal—to be expected?”

He looked at her brave, unbeaten, lyrical eyes and said nothing.

“Vito, I’m sure that there are other men in the world besides you who can’t be bought—but they’re not in love with me. You are. You’re throwing it away to prove how far you are above temptation. But the whole thing becomes an exercise in useless pride because you won’t stop loving me after you’ve made your gesture. So we’re both going to lose, aren’t we, for the rest of our lives?”

“Billy—”

“But I told you I didn’t have the essential argument, didn’t I? It’s just such a waste—I hate waste.”

“So do I.” It went beyond love, Vito thought. It simply
was
, like destiny, like nationality, like inevitability. He put his hands over hers. “I’ll give you the essential argument. You must promise never, under any circumstances, to buy me a Rolls-Royce.” Billy stood up abruptly. “And,” he added, “never to give me a surprise party.” Tiny crayfish and wineglasses crashed to the marble floor, skittering in every direction. His words hadn’t quite made sense to Billy yet, but her stomach or her heart or whichever part of her it was that knew things before her head was filled with an intimation of happiness. Everyone in the urbane restaurant looked at them, wondering what insult this man could have offered this woman to cause her to advance on him in such an uncivilized manner.

“If you’re teasing me,
I’ll kill you!”

“I never joke about family matters.” The diners turned back to their plates. Just another pair of lovers it seemed. Surrounded by waiters whisking away the debris, Billy sank back in her chair. She flamed with joy and felt as bashful as a child.

“Just don’t say, ‘I told you so.’ ” He traced the outline of her lips with his finger and caught a tear on her cheek before it had time to fall into the herb mayonnaise, the only dish left on the table.

The headwaiter, a hardy Communist from Milan, was thinking that the
poulet à l’estragon
and the lemon soufflé were going to be wasted on these two. On the other hand, he felt assured of a monstrous tip. If only all the lousy capitalists in the world were as much in love, it would be a better world for the working classes.

The cablegram was addressed to Valentine. She tore it open and, after one incredulous look, rushed into the office she shared with Spider and thrust the piece of paper at him. GETTING MARRIED IN A WEEK TO VITO ORSINI. HE’S THE MOST MARVELOUS MAN IN THE WORLD. PLEASE MAKE ME SOMETHING BRIDAL TO WEAR. I’M SO HAPPY I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. LOVE AND KISSES, BILLY.

“Holy shit! I can’t believe it either—this doesn’t sound like our employer—Valentine, why the hell are you crying?”

“Elliott, you don’t know a fucking thing about women!”

Maggie heard the news during a meeting with her head writer.

“Hey, how about that! Maggie, isn’t Orsini your buddy, for God’s sake. Don’t you think you could get an exclusive to cover the wedding? It’s the biggest thing of its kind since Cary Grant married Barbara Hutton.”

“Oh, shove it up your ass!”

T
he period of almost eight weeks between the final days of the Cannes Film Festival and the Fourth of July weekend of 1977 was one of settling accounts, in various and different ways, for both Spider and Valentine. For Vito it was a period of renewal, of calling in old markers, of revving up. For Billy it should have been a honeymoon, but, in retrospect, the only honeymoon she and Vito ever had took place during the eleven hours it took their plane to make the polar flight from Orly to Los Angeles International Airport, and at that point they still weren’t married.

Valentine had searched for a place to live as soon as she was assured of the future of Scruples. Her one absolute requirement was privacy. She couldn’t consider a small house where there might be observant neighbors or an ordinary apartment building where people could come and go at will. She needed a place in which she and Josh Hillman could meet and love in security. It had to be reasonably near Scruples, reasonably near his home, reasonably near his offices in Century City, since the time they spent together was carved out of his busy, public life. Finally, a few blocks east of the border of Beverly Hills, in West Hollywood, she found a penthouse in a splendid, new apartment building in Alta Lorna Road. It had the advantages she had been looking for. There was a guard at the desk in the lobby who questioned every visitor. No one could go up in the elevator without being first announced over the house phone, and permission given.

Of course, Valentine reflected, there were bound to be disadvantages. Inescapable walls of glass partly surrounded the living room and the bedroom. If she approached them without mental preparation, she found herself confronted with too vast, too wide, and too high a view of all of West Los Angeles, right out to the horizon of the Pacific Ocean. For a dedicated city rat like Valentine, so much air, so much light, so much space, made her feel like a visitor from another planet. But she was an illusionist, a conjurer of the first water, and when her furniture arrived from New York, the same furniture she had sent ahead of her from Paris more than five years before, Valentine devoted her wistful necromancy to re-creating another atmosphere, another time. This was particularly true at night when she closed her new white wooden shutters, drew her new rose-and-white curtains made from a romantic toile de Jouy, almost a duplicate of the old ones that were now too shabby, and lit her red-shaded lamps. She re-covered her old velvet sofa and deep armchairs in an old-fashioned Boussac print, sprigged in a rustic green-and-white print, which reminded her of Normandy, and covered the floor with her one great extravagance, a beautifully faded, very old, flowered needlepoint rug. The new kitchen was a great improvement on her improvised cooking arrangements in New York. She raided Williams Sonoma in Beverly Hills and made it perfectly French, filled with shining casseroles and earthenware crocks, wire whisks, copper-bottomed pans, and heavy, white pottery dishes banded in blue. Josh, who was frustrated by her independence, showered her with the only kinds of gifts she would accept, plants and lithographs, too many for her limited wall space, so that she had to hang them right up to the ceiling, even in the kitchen.

In spite of the abnormal expanses of glass Valentine was well content with her new home because it served its purpose, and she was certain that no one guessed why she lived where she did. Certainly Billy was too wrapped up in her new marriage to be curious about anyone else’s affairs. According to Josh, his wife saw nothing suspicious in the three nights a week he spent with Valentine; the habit of working late during a lifetime had paid off. And as for Elliott—well, that had been a close call, but he had been fooled. On the very night she finally moved in, while she and Josh were tumbled together in her new bed, Elliott had been announced by the man on duty in the lobby. In a panic, Valentine told the guard to say she was already in bed, exhausted, almost asleep, but the next day, at the office, Elliott had looked at her curiously.

“In bed, Valentine, at seven-thirty? And anyway, why couldn’t I come on up even if you were in bed? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“That’s precisely it.” Her eyes shot bits of green stone at him. “You treat me without respect. Good old Valentine, let’s go and see what she’s dishing up for dinner. I am not your seventh sister, Elliott!”