Scruples (73 page)

Although Josh said nothing more to her, as he had promised, Valentine finally told him that she couldn’t tell him if she was going to marry him until after the Academy Awards.

“What on earth does that have to do with us?” he had asked, baffled and disconcerted.

“I’m too busy to think about myself, Josh, and, anyway, until I know who wins, my mind is all wound up with Billy and Vito and hoping for them.” Behind the diversionary protection of her bangs and her eyelashes, Valentine wondered if that sounded as ridiculously lame—even false—to him as it did to her. In any case, it was the best answer she was prepared to give him and it would have to do. He knew better now than to push her. It was not, Valentine realized, that she was too busy to think about herself, but rather that she had no inclination to think about herself. Obviously her fatalistic Irish genes were dominating her French ones—so much the worse, or so much the better, as the case might be.

Valentine shrugged her unreconstructed Gallic shrug at her shamelessly ethnic excuse and waited, impatient now, for her next client, Dolly Moon. Billy had been so insistent this morning, so unusually nervous when she told Valentine to design for her friend the most marvelous dress she’d ever made.

Valentine had seen
Mirrors
twice, and she had a good idea of the problems involved in dressing Dolly, but she suspected that Miss Moon could wear almost anything and get away with it. She had the kind of personality that would inevitably triumph over whatever she put on. Billy had no need to worry. One did not look at her clothes, one looked at her funny-beautiful face, her wide, beguiling smile, her entire person, so adorably awkward and sexy.

Valentine stretched her arms to the ceiling, bent to the floor, and stretched up again. She felt tight from all the drawing she’d done. Time for Dolly Moon. Billy hadn’t made this much of a production about her own wedding dress.

A little more than an hour later, Billy had swept Dolly and Lester off to have dinner at home with her, as relieved as a mother who has watched her child perform in a school play for the first time.

“Well,” said Spider, handing a glass of Château Silverado to Valentine, “you can’t say that Billy has lost her capacity to astonish and confound us. How on earth are you ever going to upholster Miss Moon?”

“Oh, there is a way,” Valentine answered airily. “It’s merely a question of using one’s imagination. Obviously, it’s a little more difficult than the sort of thing you do all day, Elliott, but it can be done.” She put down her glass, took off her smock, and put on her coat, ready to leave.

“Wait a minute, Val. This dress for Dolly is something I could help you with, and, God knows, you’ve got enough on your plate already. Sit down for a few minutes and we can talk it over.”

“No thank you, Elliott. I can handle it and I’m late for a dinner engagement already. I can’t spend any more time here today.”

Spider stopped dead at her dismissive tone. “Can’t? My, my, this guy really makes you toe the line, it seems. Got you just right where he wants you, hasn’t he? Somehow, I never thought I’d live to see the day—Valentine tamed at last.” There was the slightest sneer in his tone, but Valentine picked it up instantly.

“What do you mean, Elliott? My private life is private. I thought we’d agreed about that weeks ago, but obviously you can’t leave well enough alone.”

“Oh, your little hole-in-the-corner arrangements don’t bother me, Valentine. I’m just rather amused by it all,” he said loftily.

Circles of. wrath appeared around Valentine’s eyes. “You are hardly one to speak of holes-in-the-corner—you spend your whole life in one, Elliott. I didn’t know, when I managed to get you this job, that I was providing Beverly Hills with its stud of the year. If I had, perhaps I might have persuaded Billy to give you a slightly higher salary.”

“Ah ha! I was waiting for that I knew the day would come when you’d take credit for keeping me off Welfare. Listen, my pet,” he snarled at her, “you would have been out of here on your ass in two weeks if I hadn’t come up with the ideas of how to change Scruples.”

“That was a year and a half ago. What have you done since then except act like some bloody floorwalker? A self-appointed arbiter of elegance. Ha! The thing that gives Scruples its cachet is my department; you’re just too mean-minded to admit it.” Her voice ripped the air.

“Your department! On the profits of your department we could barely pay the telephone bill.” He was caught in a rapture of rage. “You and that white smock, as if you were another Givenchy, giving yourself grand airs and graces because you’ve suckered a bunch of spoiled rich women into letting you design for them—it’s all supported by the rest of the store and I’m responsible for that—a store doesn’t run itself, or are you too much above it all in the fucking rarefied air you breathe to realize that?”

“You lousy, rotten—”

“Oh, ho, our Valentine’s about to embark on one of her famous temper fits; if she can’t get what she wants she gets all French and kicks her heels and foams at the mouth and frightens horses. Temper, temper.” He wagged a finger at her. He might just as well have shot an arrow into her face. Her hands and feet went numb with fury.

“You cheap prick. No wonder even Melanie Adams rejected you. And how typical of you, how typical of your standards, to have picked a hollow little creature like that to love, just another pretty face with nothing inside, all surface, no substance, a doll-child, as immature as you are—and
that
was the love of your life! I find that ‘amusing,’ Elliott. At least my lover is someone of substance—I wonder if you even understand what substance is?”

In a rusted, painful voice he said, “I hope he’s not another Alan Wilton, Valentine. I really couldn’t take it if I had to nurse you over a tragic love affair with a fag again.”

“WHAT!”

“You thought I wouldn’t hear about it? Half of Seventh Avenue knew—eventually the word got around to me.”

Valentine felt as if a weight like a great slab of stone had knocked her in the chest. She couldn’t speak. She crumpled in her chair, reaching blindly for her handbag. Suddenly Spider felt the greatest shame he’d ever known fall over him like a net. Never, never in his life had he been cruel to a woman. Good Christ, what had come over him? He couldn’t even remember how this had all started.

“Valentine—”

“I don’t want to talk to you again,” she interrupted, in a small, steady voice. “We can’t work together anymore.”

“Please, Val, I went crazy—I didn’t mean—it was a lie, nobody knew. Nobody. I met the guy once and figured it out for myself—Val, please—”

“One of us has to leave Scruples.” She said this in a way that allowed no room for apology or reason or discussion.

“That’s ridiculous. We can’t do that to Billy.”

“I’ll go.”

“No, you can’t. Nobody else can do your work. She can replace me.”

“Fine.” She was unmoved, frozen.

“I can’t tell her till after the Oscars. She’s got enough to worry about with Vito.”

“As you wish.” Valentine picked up her coat and left. Spider heard her taking the fire stairs, not waiting for the elevator. For an hour he sat there, rubbing his hands on the oxblood leather of the partner’s desk, as if the slight friction might make him warm again.

The documentary Maggie had done on Vito,
A Day in the Life of a Producer
, had never been shown on the network. Other, more controversial topics had superseded it for a few months and then it had languished in inventory waiting for an appropriate time slot. Maggie had almost forgotten it, particularly now, as she was bombarded by various studios competing for her attention as Academy Award time drew near.

A week after the nominations were announced, screenings of the five nominated pictures were begun in the Academy’s own marvelously comfortable Samuel Goldwyn Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard just east of Beverly Hills. With only three weeks left before the ballots were marked, Vito knew that whatever his last effort was, it had better be made soon. If Maggie’s show was ever to be helpful, it would be now. Vito telephoned her at her office.

“Maggie,” he asked, “who is your very favorite person in the whole world?”

“I am.”

“Who’s next?”

“Vito, have you no shame?”

“Certainly not,” he laughed.

“You want something,” she said suspiciously.

“Damn right, I do. I want you to schedule that piece you did on me before the voting for Best Picture takes place.”

“Jesus! Vito, do you realize how that would look? I mean, my God, that would be the most barefaced piece of propaganda—how could I do a thing like that even if I wanted to?”

“Which you do, don’t you, Maggie?” He was relentless.

“Well obviously, Vito, I mean I’d like to do whatever I could for you but—”

“Maggie, remember the night we all had dinner at the Boutique and you said you figured that you owed me?”

“Vaguely.”

“You’ve never been vague in your life. My Mexican dog made your career.”

“Yeah, but my quick thinking saved Ben Lowell’s ass.”

“So Ben Lowell owes you. Only you can never tell him. But now you have a chance to pay
me
back.”

“You’d really put the squeeze on me?” She could hardly believe this was Vito.

“Of course. What are friends for?”

There was a silence. Vito gave Maggie time to think, as he knew she would, that if she did this for a friend, she would have demonstrated her power so effectively that the demand for her friendship would be even greater, among the people who count in Hollywood, than it ever had been.

“Well,” she said finally, “I could talk to the vice-president in charge of Programming, I suppose, and maybe I might be able to con him into it, but I can’t promise anything.”

“It couldn’t be more topical,” said Vito helpfully.

“You Wop bastard! Topical! Political is what it is.”

“Oh, Maggie, just one of the things I love about you is that I don’t have to beat around the bush.”

“If this does get on, you’ll owe me. Win or lose,”

“Fair enough. You’ve got a deal. We’ll go through life doing each other favors and paying them back.”

“Yeah,” said Maggie, suddenly wistful. “Well, I’d better get started. It’s going to mean a lot of reshuffling if I can make it happen. Shit Listen, Vito, give my love to Billy, will you? Know something funny, I truly like her, and I never thought I would.”

“She’s not envious of you anymore, Maggie, maybe that’s why.”

“Was she? Was she honestly?” Maggie sounded like someone who had just opened a fabulous and unexpected present.

“Didn’t you know that? I thought you were my smart Maggie.”

“That smart, Vito, no one is.”

Lester Weinstock found himself in a state of considerable confusion. Was he, floundering, a victim of a cultural time lag, out of touch with the Now Generation, a regressed fuddy-duddy from the 1950s, when he had not yet been born, or was Dolly Moon out of sync with reality? Did having an illegitimate—no, wrong word—a one-parent baby only happen in the wilder reaches of Bohemia or was it being done every day all over the United States, with the same happy, wacky abandon Dolly displayed? He pondered these questions while finishing his second helping of Henny Youngman’s Sweet and Sour Ragout. No, he decided, wiping up the last of the prune-and-apricotladen gravy with a piece of Dolly’s homemade challeh, he still didn’t think it was fair to the baby, no matter how good a mother Dolly would be.

Lester had now been Dolly’s public-relations man for two weeks. He’d gained six pounds from her cooking and his first gray hair from worrying over her plight. The only fixed bright spot in his suddenly troubled world was the thought of Dolly’s dear old Jewish grandmother, the one who had taught her how to cook so miraculously.

“Lester, you’ve simply got to let me give you a haircut.”

“I’ll go to the barber tomorrow.”

“You’ve been saying that for ten days. You never have time, you’re so busy making up excuses about why I can’t meet the press and arranging those hilarious telephone interviews.”

“Dolly, you know what the studio thinks. If there is the slightest chance that you might win an Oscar, you’d blow it if people knew you were pregnant. And if you told them about Sunrise—the rodeo—and don’t think they wouldn’t get it out of you—forget it. There’s still a lot of ol’-time morality around, you know.”

“Maybe I’d get the sympathy vote,” Dolly dimpled. “Sit down and I’ll put a towel over you. Now—where did I put my cuticle scissors?”

As if in a dream, Lester let her lead him to a chair. There was something so, so—immediate—about Dolly’s face. She simply refused to inhabit the safe distance between people. It was disgraceful, really, the way she just dove into him, feet first He’d already told her about his boyhood bed-wetting problem; the catastrophe of his first love affair; the time he cheated on an algebra final at Beverly Hills High School and got caught; his innermost feelings about owing his good fortune to portable toilet trailers, a subject he had learned to joke about many years ago, but which he had never really felt was all that funny to live with; the catastrophe of his second love affair; the near-miss of his third love affair; the potential he felt he had to make wonderful movies someday. Christ, he’d just about told her his life story. About the only thing he’d left out were the circle jerks at summer camp. And only because he’d forgotten, not because she’d be shocked.