Scruples (74 page)

“I think you’re getting it too short,” he complained.

“Not for all the world. It’s just taking me longer because it’s kind of hard to get close enough to you. There, it’s finished.” She sat down heavily on the chair. “Go look at yourself in the mirror and then tell me that’s not an improvement.”

Obediently, he took a nearsighted look and liked what he saw. Turning to compliment her, he caught sight of an unexpected expression of pain on her face.

“Hey, something wrong?”

“Just my back. You know, people shouldn’t have to be pregnant standing up; it puts too much strain on the back muscles. All pregnant women should go around on their hands and knees. Maybe someday they will.”

“Is there something I could do?”

“Well—”

“Really. In return for the haircut.”

“It’s kind of a drag, but I’ve run out of oil—for rubbing my stretch marks—oh, Lester, don’t you even know about stretch marks?”

“I’m an obstetrical innocent,” he said humbly.

“Could you go down to the all-night market and get some oil for me? That would really be a blessing.”

Ten minutes later Lester was back with a bottle of imported Italian olive oil, a bottle of domestic olive oil, a bottle of safflower oil, a bottle of peanut oil, and a bottle of Johnson & Johnson’s baby oil. A clinking Santa Claus, he deposited his brown paper bag on the table. Dolly had vanished.

“Where are you?”

“In the bedroom. Bring it on in.” Dolly, pink and burnished from her quick shower, was lying on her bed in a pair of lace and satin pajamas, one of Billy’s Chirstmas presents. Shyly, Lester emptied the heavy bag on her night table.

“I wasn’t sure which kind—”

Dolly contemplated the oils, biting her lip to keep from bursting into laughter. Gravely, her eyes brimming with tears of merriment, she pointed to the baby oil. He handed it to her. She opened it, poured some into his still outstretched hand and raised the top of her pajamas and lowered the bottoms. Her belly, magnificent, monumental, and velvety white, seemed to Lester to be the most extraordinary sight he’d ever seen. He averted his eyes, shocked and fascinated. Unable to resist, he looked at it again. Had there ever been so wondrous a work of nature? An alp dwindled by comparison. Art was a pastime for the dilettante. My goodness!

“Kind of a knockout, isn’t it?” Dolly asked, patting it lovingly.

“Splendid,” he choked.

“Don’t just stand there, Lester, the oil will drip. Sit down and rub.”

“Rub?”

“Lester, Don’t you know
where
stretch marks are?”

“I haven’t made a study of it, no.”

She took his hand and guided it to her side and slowly nudged it over the mound of her abdomen. “All around here, from one side to another. Oh, my, that feels so good. Just keep rubbing, Lester—and I’ll dribble the oil. You can use both hands if you like.” She sighed voluptuously. “It feels so much better when you do it for me. This is what I call luxury—sheer luxury. Take off your jacket, Lester, you look awfully hot. Mmmmmm. There—that’s better, isn’t it?”

Three hours later Lester woke up. Someone was pushing him slowly but relentlessly, like a large, soft, fist in the stomach. Who was in his bed, pushing him, he wondered in sleepy alarm. He groped around with his hand and encountered Dolly’s belly, or rather Dolly’s baby, turning a lazy somersault inside of Dolly. Then he realized that Dolly’s hair was tickling his nose, Dolly’s head was on his chest, and Dolly’s feet were mixed up with his legs. Pinned down, immobile and incredulous, he opened his eyes in the dim light of the bedroom. Without his glasses, everything was a blur, but his mind was clear. He, Lester Weinstock, had made love to a woman who was eight months’ pregnant! Furthermore, he, Lester Weinstock, had never
ever
had such a sublimely erotic, altogether delectable experience in his entire life, and he, Lester Weinstock, would like to repeat it immediately. He was a monster of depravity, no doubt about that, but he felt like a member of the Now Generation at last Why had he been so nervous about everything, he wondered? Dolly stirred in her sleep. He jiggled her a little. He supposed he really shouldn’t wake her up, but he wasn’t so far gone that he would make love to a
sleeping
pregnant woman! He jiggled her some more and played with her bountiful breasts with his free hand. Talk about good!

After the fight with Valentine, Spider Elliott started counting the days until the Oscars. They couldn’t pass fast enough to suit him. Since he was going to leave Scruples, he wanted to get it over with, but until Billy knew, he couldn’t start looking for another job. He had no doubt that he could almost write his own ticket in any number of large stores: His success with Scruples had been widely noted throughout retailing. Or, if he didn’t want to stay on in retailing, he could go back to photography, perhaps here on the West Coast. Or maybe the Harriet Toppingham vendetta was forgotten and he could go back to New York. In any case, he had saved his money. Why not go around the world on a slow boat? To China? And stay there? Oh, he had a number of options.

As far as Valentine was concerned, he had put the matter behind him. She was totally unreachable. He had tried to apologize half a dozen times and each time she’d left the room without even looking at him or letting him speak his piece. He was willing to take all the blame, in spite of her cheap shots, but she didn’t want to know about it. Whoever said that a man and a woman could never be real friends was right. It was a chapter in his life and it was over, finished, forgotten. On to something else. Naturally he felt bad about it, but that was a temporary state of affairs.

The weeks passed and still Spider couldn’t shake off the grayness of his inner landscape. This was nothing like the state of rage, grief, and loss that he had felt in New York when Melanie left him to come to Hollywood and Harriet Toppingham bitched up his career. Those emotions had had clear outlines; he had known why he felt the way he felt But lately he had taken to waking in the middle of the night and lying sleepless for hours, thinking thoughts that made no sense at all the following day, thoughts in a key Spider had never known before, thoughts that he judged as self-pitying even as he had them, absurd thoughts about who really cared about him, who gave a damn, why was he doing what he was doing, what difference did it make, what was there to look forward to, why, in short, was he alive?

In all his healthy, carefree, rambunctious, self-confident thirty-two years, Spider had never for one minute indulged in wondering about the meaning of life. As he saw it, he had had the great good fortune to have been the product of one lucky ripe egg and one aggressive sperm that met on just the right night at just the right time of the month in just the right woman. Chance, pure chance, dumb luck it could be called, had caused him to be born instead of that other child his mother and father would have had if they had not made love on that auspicious night. Having had the good fortune to be born, he took the world as he found it, riding it like a splendid horse. The meaning of life? To
live it!

But now, in early March of 1978, he woke up every morning feeling bad after a lifetime of waking up feeling good. Taking a shower, getting dressed, making breakfast, and driving to Scruples became the most stable part of his day, as hasty routine tasks absorbed his attention. Once at work, he found that the well of energy on which he had always drawn unthinkingly seemed to have a bottom.

At least that was the cause he gave to what he called the “bubble,” a feeling that he was not connected, in the way he used to be, to the outside world. The bubble became in his mind an actual physical sphere, like those transparent balloons that have grains of something inside of them that bob around at random. It made voices seem muted, food taste bland, physical contacts less real, less actual. It took the edge off everything. Spider was able to get through his day at Scruples by consciously forcing himself to behave as he had behaved naturally in the past, but his heart wasn’t in it; so that although the customers didn’t see any difference in him, the fun was gone. Passing a mirror once he noted without surprise that his eyes were about as lively as the Dead Sea.

Rosel Korman, the first saleswoman to be hired at Scruples, was one of the few people who noticed the change in Spider. She thought—to herself since she was infinitely discreet—that where once he had looked like Butch Cassidy
and
the Sundance Kid put together, he now looked like a pallid remake of the same movie.

Billy, one of the other people who was aware of Spider’s sudden lack of zest, thought it must be the need for a vacation. Since he had come to California in July of 1976, he hadn’t been away for more than a long weekend. There was fresh powder in Aspen that March and the ladies would just have to do without him for a while, she informed him.

“You know, you’re a pushy dame,” he observed. “How do you even know I can ski?”

“People who look like you always can. Now get out of here and don’t let me see that face for three weeks.”

From a skier’s point of view, Aspen was a success. But the bubble was waiting for him when he arrived. One day he found himself alone on a mountainside and he came to a stop, leaning thoughtfully on his poles. He checked out the pure air and the undiluted sunlight and the crisp, creamy quiet; it was all there and accounted for. No one could possibly ask for more. On other days of skiing, before he had gone to New York, a moment to himself such as this would have been an affirmation of the goodness of life, a time to gather in the realizations of his luck. He had always looked for those rare opportunities to ski alone so that no other human being came between him and the full joy of being part of the mountain. Why now did he feel so
abandoned?
He dug his poles into the snow and pushed off, recklessly skiing the fall line as if he were running for his life.

Back in Beverly Hills, he decided that he probably needed a change in his love life. He eased himself out of his current involvements, which he had never allowed to become so serious that they couldn’t be untangled without any loss of pride or self-esteem on the part of the women in question. They would miss Spider, but they would never doubt that he had deeply liked and enjoyed them—because he had. Spider had perfected a way of dropping a woman so that she felt more cherished than if he had continued the relationship.

Within a week, he found a new girl; soon yet a different one. No question, thought Spider in despair, he was fucking more and enjoying it less. Suddenly it seemed so automated, so predestined, so ultimately unimportant. He could go through the motions, exactly the same motions that had given him such gorgeously simple pleasure in the past, and afterward—finally he knew what the fellow was talking about who had sagely said that after coitus all men felt sad. He didn’t know who the philosopher was, but all his life Spider had thought the guy must have been screwing the wrong girls. He had more respect for him now.

Maybe it was his age. He had never paid attention to birthdays, but, after all, he was over thirty and it could be some physical thing. Spider had a complete checkup with Billy’s doctor, who told him to come back in twenty years and stop wasting his time.

There was something else too, but he didn’t see what he could do about it. He was getting sentimental, or at least that was what he called it. If he picked up a newspaper or a magazine and read about some couple celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary, surrounded by their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, he felt tears come into his eyes. He felt the same way for the guys who won the Super Bowl, television beauty-contest winners, teen-age kids who saved small children from burning houses, blind people who managed to graduate from college with honors, and people who sailed around the world by themselves in small boats. News of death, disaster, and other routine horrors affected him not at all, but good news turned him to mush.

He was too young for male menopause, Spider thought, in deepening worry, and too old for adolescence, so what the fuck was this all about? He dragged himself into the kitchen of his wonderful bachelor house and opened a can of Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soup. If that didn’t help, nothing would.

It didn’t.

A
s Dolly entered her last weeks of pregnancy, she found herself less enthusiastic than she had been about trying out new dishes from the
Celebrity Kosher Cookbook
or the precious, tattered copy of the
Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook
she had found in a secondhand bookstore. It wasn’t that she had lost her appetite, she told Mrs. Higgens, her loving landlady, the fire chiefs wife, but that it was kind of hard to get near enough to the stove. And she couldn’t go out to eat because the case of measles that Lester had fabricated for her to keep the press at bay had been followed by an announcement of a case of mumps, which wouldn’t be cured until tomorrow, the night of the Awards. Not that hordes of people were calling for interviews anyway, but three weeks ago Lester had decided that the duties of a public-relations man included moving into her apartment in case she needed him for anything in the middle of the night, like driving her to the hospital or something.

“Lester Weinstock, that baby isn’t going to be born until a week after the Awards, and that’s eight whole days away. You’re just taking advantage of a poor knocked-up female who hasn’t the heart to say no.”