Scruples (80 page)

“She has nothing to do with it, you know that. It’s just me—I could have refused any of the women who asked—don’t worry.” Valentine was aware that they were making conversation, like two semi-strangers. She sighed, waiting for the words that were sure to come.

“Darling, will you be too tired tonight to have dinner with me?” He was as casual as she had ever heard him, as if they had nothing in particular to talk about. Suddenly Valentine felt an overpowering desire to push away the moment of the final decision, for just one more day at least.

“Forgive me, Josh, but I’m practically falling down on my knees and it’s only early afternoon. I won’t get my last woman out of here for hours and by that time I simply won’t make sense. Not tonight, dear—tomorrow. I’ll sleep late tomorrow. Maybe I won’t even come in to work at all. You do understand?—Josh?”

“Of course.” He had the feeling that he was sitting at a table conducting a very delicate piece of negotiation, but one in which he was in perfect control. “I’ll let you go back to your work.” Christ, he thought, talk about the reluctant bridegroom. Valentine was a woman who had to be lured just to make a commitment to make a commitment to make a commitment. Still, wasn’t that very elusiveness a very large part of the delight he took in her? The phone still in his hand, Josh sat for longer than he was aware of, meditating on a future in which coming home to Valentine would be a daily affair, one which would eventually become routine, marvelous, of course, but still routine. He knew enough to anticipate that inevitability. Would he miss the thrill of leading a double life, the pleasures of a love affair kept successfully secret from all his businesslike working world? Would Joanne’s friends and the wives of his associates ever forgive Valentine or would he simply have to make an entirely new group of friends? And what would it be like to have a diaper can in the house again, after so many years? Funny how you could always smell them, no matter how big the house. But he had to face the possibility. He’d seen too many middle-aged men with second families to think he’d manage to avoid that. Still, they did have disposable diapers now, so perhaps diaper cans had gone the way of the spittoon. Well, in any case, after he and Valentine were married, he’d be settled down for the rest of his days; one division of community property in a lifetime was enough. Settled down. Strange how those words had a musty ring to them. At this point Josh took his hand abruptly off the phone, told himself not to be adolescent, and rang for his secretary. Second thoughts at the last minute were for other people. Josh Hillman was a serious man, and when he made a serious decision, he stuck to it seriously.

At the very end of the frantic afternoon, with all the ladies dressed and combed out and whisked away from Scruples by a fleet of hired limousines, Dolly pottered in, half dumpling, half moonbeam, with Lester’s shaggy, anxious bulk hovering never more than a few feet from her side.

“Valentine,” Dolly crowed, “I feel just like a girl again.”

“Indeed?” Valentine inspected Dolly’s childishly chaste face with a tired smile. “To what miracle do you attribute that?”

“The baby dropped! Oh, don’t you know? A couple of weeks before you give birth the baby drops down into position. It’s just a few inches, but gee, what a relief. I honestly feel as if I’ve got my waistline back.”

“I can honestly tell you that you have not. But Lester has. He’s lost ten pounds.”

“It’s prenatal tension,” moaned Lester. “She gave it to me. Also a hangover. Don’t ask.”

Valentine called down to the kitchen for an extra spicy Bloody Mary for Lester, to make his liver turn over and start ticking again, while she took Dolly away to dress her and let Helen Saginaw, that pro of pros, work on her hair and makeup. After forty minutes and two Bloody Marys for Lester, Dolly emerged, bringing Lester and Spider, who had joined him, to their feet in astonishment. Dolly’s little round head on its long neck was set like one bright star on top of a swirling, whirling cloud of a dress, misty gray-blue, in the twelve different sea shades of her eyes. Beginning safely above her bosom it was sprinkled with thousands of twinkling, hand-sewn brilliants. Her neck was long enough so that Valentine had been able to give her a ruff, a sparkling, pointed, stiff ruff, rather Elizabethan. Her hair was done up on top of her head and dusted with more brilliants and in her ears were Billy’s great diamonds. She seemed to be bathed in baby spotlights, although there was no special lighting in the room. Dolly looked like the sugarplum fairy nine months after a minor indiscretion. Only her giggle, that welcome assurance of the existence of an endless well of laughter, seemed familiar. Both men gaped in admiration and a kind of reverence. Valentine watched her with intense satisfaction. A designer who knew her business—and wasn’t afraid to borrow tricks hundreds of years old—could show even nature a thing or two. Lester, gulping, broke the spell of silence.

“We’re going to be late. Dolly, you haven’t got a minute. Hey, where’d you get those earrings?”

“Billy. She lent them to me for luck. Would you believe they’re nine karats each?”

“Lord have mercy on us poor sinners,” gloomed Lester. “I just hope they’re insured.”

“Gee, I never thought to ask—maybe I shouldn’t wear them if it’s important.” Dolly looked like an eleven-year-old offering to give up her favorite doll.

“Nonsense,” Valentine said briskly, herding them toward the door. “Billy’s feelings would be hurt. Go—your pumpkin is waiting.”

“Valentine,” whispered Dolly, turning back for a final kiss, “if you take the dress in a little, I could still wear it afterward, couldn’t I?”

“We’ll make at least two out of this one. I promise.”

Standing at separate windows in their office, Valentine and Spider watched Dolly and Lester drive off in the long black Cadillac the studio had rented for the occasion. Now, except for them, Scruples was empty, from basement to roof. They both waved even though they knew the couple at ground level couldn’t see them, and then turned to each other, their faces still lit with the almost parental frolic of being part of a Cinderella story. It was the first kind look they’d exchanged in many weeks.

“Dolly is going to win,” said Spider softly.

“How can you be sure?” Valentine was puzzled by the quiet conviction in his voice.

“Maggie told me, just before she left this afternoon. But nobody else, not even Dolly, knows yet. It’s a dead secret.”

“Oh, but that is glorious! What glorious news, Elliott!” Valentine hesitated a minute and then announced, not to be outdone, “As it happens, Vito’s going to win, too.”

“What! Who told you?”

“Billy. But it’s another dead secret. Maggie told them last night. I’m not supposed to tell anyone; Billy only let me know to apologize for something,” Valentine said vaguely.

“Maggie and her dead secrets,” Spider said in wonder. “Holy shit, Val, this is
marvelous
. I’m beginning to—Vito—Dolly,
Best Picture
—Valentine? Valentine? Valentine—what’s wrong? Why are you looking like that? Why the hell should you be crying?”

“I’m just so happy for them all,” she said in a disconsolate, tiny, devious voice.

“Those aren’t tears of joy,” said Spider in a peremptory tone. In her refusal to be honest with him, he felt something very bad hovering in the air, which surrounded his bubble. He saw her take a deep breath, like someone about to step off a high diving board, and then let it out in a shuddering sigh. She half turned to him and said something so softly that it seemed to him that he hadn’t quite heard it. Impatiently, instantly, irrationally terrified, he shook her shoulder.

“What did you say?”

“I said, I am going to marry Josh Hillman.”

“Oh no, you are fucking not,”
roared Spider without a millisecond of reflection. The bubble burst with an explosion only he heard, the rupture of an invisible membrane of depression he had constructed to shield himself from the blow he had been expecting for months. He fell with a crash into reality; in a blaze of belated insight, barriers crumbled, tumbled, crashed down in his mind, he saw the light flaming at the end of the tunnel. All his senses were as refreshed, as renewed as if he were awakening from an enchantment. He reeled at the joy of his captive heart. He had never seen Valentine so clearly, even in this half-light. He knew that she didn’t understand yet even before she spoke.

“Are you telling me again what I can do?”

“You’re not in love with him. You can’t possibly marry him,”

“You know nothing about it,” she said, sniffing delicate disdain.

Ah, but she was still as stupid as he had been. The thing he now knew in his blood and in his cells and in his marrow he would have to explain to her until even her sublime stubbornness was overcome. He mastered his impatience, his flame of anticipation, and dragged his eyes away from her mouth to her defensive, bewildered eyes.

“I know so much about you that I need only to look at you to see that you’re not in love with Josh. Jesus, have I ever been a total, incredible moron!”

“Perhaps you have been, Elliott, but what has it to do with me? Or Josh?”

“Right down to the wire, that’s my Valentine—struggling all the way home.” He put his hands over hers and held them firmly, speaking in the tone he might have used to tame a wild pony. “Now—come here, over here and sit down on the couch. Now, Valentine, you are going to listen to me and without interrupting because I have a story to tell you.” His look was so complex, so filled with an unflinching, golden blue tenderness, so limpid in its candor, so triumphant, so unpuzzled, that he swept all her objections out of her mind for once in her life. Silently, she allowed herself to be led across the room. They sat down, her hands still in his.

“It’s a story about two people, a young, smart-ass stud who thought all girls were interchangeable and a feisty little broad who thought that the guy was hopelessly frivolous. Five or six years ago they met and became friends, even though she disapproved of him. In fact they became best friends. They fell in and out of love—they thought—with some wrong people, but they stayed friends. They even saved each other’s lives from time to time.” He stopped and looked at her. Her eyes were downcast and she wouldn’t look up at him. But she wasn’t interrupting. She was so still that even Spider couldn’t tell that within Valentine there was a storm of wild speculation, a wonder booming in her blood. She concentrated on his hands. If she moved, she was afraid she would stagger.

“Valentine, these two people didn’t know the first thing about the long way around into the heart of love; they were impatient, they kept getting sidetracked, they missed obvious opportunities, they were so busy that they didn’t give each other a chance; when one zigged the other zagged, but all along, without knowing it, ridiculous timing and all, they were becoming completely necessary to each other, permanent, as permanent as—as the Louvre.”

“Permanent?” The word seemed to rouse her from the spell she was in. “Permanent? How can you talk of permanence with all of your girls, ever since I’ve known you?” She spoke shakily and there was a reservoir of suspicion in her eyes.

“First, it was because I was young and dumb. Then, later, there were so many because no one was the right one. No one was the one I really wanted—and, God knows, you never encouraged me—so I kept looking. Oh, you,
you
. Valentine, you are all I have ever wanted, all I ever will want. Christ, why didn’t I see it? I just don’t understand. Damn, I should have kissed you the first chance I had, back in New York, and saved us five years of walking around in circles. That fight we had—I was just jealous—pig jealous. Didn’t you guess?”

“Why did you never kiss me—back in New York?”

“I think I was a little scared of you. I thought it would frighten you off and I didn’t want that.”

“And are you still scared?” Her question was exquisitely mocking. Taken off guard by a forest fire of happiness, Valentine could still laugh at the man she had loved and refused to admit she loved, too proud and too stubborn to compete for him, from the first moment she saw him.

“Oh—you—” He enfolded her in his arms, clumsy, almost shy, until at last he kissed for the first time the tilted lips he knew so well. At last, he thought, the land of lost content.

After a minute she pulled slightly away. “You’re right, Elliott, it would most assuredly have been a shortcut.” Irresistibly, impetuously, she ran her hands over all the planes of his face, touching, touching, touching at last the flesh she had ached to touch for so long. She messed up his hair, scratched herself against the grain of his whiskers, kneading and pushing and smoothing his skin with the questing abandon of a passion too long held back. Her eyes were closed in joy as she possessed herself of his face, of his texture, of his smell. She buried her little nose in his neck, ferociously sniffing, biting, tasting, sucking, feeding like a fastidious French vampire off this masculine treat.

“Ah, you big dumb creature, waiting so long. I’d like to shake you until your teeth rattle, only you’re too big for me.”

“It’s not entirely my fault,” he protested. “You’ve been untouchable for months—I couldn’t have gotten to you even if I’d tried.”

“But we’ll never know that, for sure, will we? You could have tried to kiss me before, idiot. In any case, don’t bother to make out a case—I plan to hold it over you for a long, long time.” He had never heard words as triumphant as her threats.