Scruples (81 page)

“As long as we both shall live?”

“At least that long.”

It was growing darker outside and only one lamp was lit on their partners’ desk. Spider started to unbutton her white smock, his usually nimble fingers fumbling with the big buttons until she came to his aid. For all their experience, both of them were curiously clumsy, as if each separate movement was happening for the first time. And yet each gesture, as they undressed each other, felt as if there was no possible way to do otherwise. When they were naked at last, lying on the wide suede couch, Spider thought that he had never seen such wholeness, such perfect unity. Her small, up-pointed breasts were as delicately alive, as impertinently arrogant as her expression. Her tousle of pubic hair curled more tightly than the hair on her head, but it was the same spicy red. He felt, even as he touched it gently for the first time, that he knew its springiness, its soft tangle, from many dreams. Valentine, who had been so voracious when she bit his neck, now lay motionless as he looked at her naked body, offering herself proudly to his gaze, like a hostage princess, the prize of a great victory.

She was so luminously white, next to the tan of his chest, that Spider thought she would be fragile, but, as he began to stroke her breasts, she grasped him in her fine, young arms and pulled him close, flinging one smooth thigh over his hip so that he was trapped. “Stay, just stay like this for a while—I want to feel the whole length of you next to me—to learn your skin,” she whispered, and he stayed still, a fiercely tender prey. They lay on their sides, pressed together, breathing together, pulses touching, listening with their bodies as their passion gathered like warm mist on a lake and covered them in a swirling cocoon. Soon they were both panting, still motionless but ravenous with curiosity and need. When he knew that she wanted that simple, irrevocable act, more than anything in the world, he entered her, directly, simply. She was small. She gasped, once, in pleasure, and then she was small no longer. He was clasped, utterly clasped, and he felt no overpowering desire to thrust, so hot, so tight was the dream. But Valentine rocked her pelvis languidly until she pushed them over the edge into urgency, wild, flash-flood urgency, as much an urgency of the soul as of the body, to finally know each other, be joined, made one. They invented lovemaking for each other as that March twilight faded into night, and afterward, they were as humble as nonbelievers who have suddenly become pilgrims, so great was their astonishment at their ability to create together a new thing neither had ever known before.

Valentine slept for a long while, enclosed in Spider’s arms like an exotic bouquet of pink and red and white blossoms, damp and aromatic and tumbled every which way, abandoned to him in sleep as trustingly as she was now pledged to him awake. Spider could have slept too, but he wanted to watch over her, astonished and at the same time absolutely sure. She was Valentine, yet not Valentine. For all that he had thought he knew about her, he had never suspected the existence of a Valentine who concealed such a treasure of deep, pure sweetness under her fiery surface. The whole world was full of splendid surprise. Their office was transformed into a bridal chamber. Could he ever sit across from her at the desk and talk business without remembering the room as it was now? Could he ever see her in her white smock without wanting to take it off? If not, Spider smiled to himself, they’d probably have to redecorate and she’d have to find something else to wear when she worked.

Waking in Spider’s arms, Valentine knew quite simply that this was the happiest minute of her life. Nothing would ever be the same again. The past was another planet. The search for a native place was over—she and Elliott were their own principality.

“Have I been asleep long?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what time is it?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“But—the television—the Awards—we’ve probably missed them.”

“Probably. Does it matter?”

“Of course not, my Elliott. Between us, we only had about two hundred customers in the audience or on the stage—we shall just tell each one she looked sensational.”

“Are you going to call me Elliott for the rest of my life?”

Valentine considered the matter. “You don’t insist on Spider, do you? Why not Peter? It is your name, after all.”

“No. God, no.”

“I could call you darling or I could call you sailor—I rather like that—sailor. What do you think?”

“Whatever you like—just call me.”

“Oh, my darling—” They were profligate with kisses, no longer awkward, growing together like a strong tree. Finally Spider asked the question he knew had to be asked.

“What are you going to do about Hillman?”

“I shall just have to tell him tomorrow. He’ll know anyway, the minute he sees me. Poor Josh—but still, I never did give him more than an indefinite maybe—”

“But—the way you told me—I thought you’d made up your mind.”

“I hadn’t decided yet, not really—I couldn’t.”

“So you told me before you told him?”

“It does seem that way, doesn’t it?”

“I wonder why?”

“I
don’t know.” She looked as innocent as a celestial puppy. Spider decided to keep his leaping intuitions to himself. Some questions are not meant to be asked as long as the answers are right.

“Just think,” he said, pulling back her curls so that he could see all of her small, splendid face, “how surprised everybody is going to be.”

“All but seven women,” said Valentine with pure mischief now spilling out of her great, green eyes.

“Hey, hold on!” said Spider, his suspicions newly aroused. “Who have you told?”

“How could I tell what I didn’t know? I’m talking about your mother and your six sisters—they knew—everything, I think, the day they met me.”

“Oh, lovely, silly Val, that’s pure imagination—they just think I’m irresistible to all women.”

“Ah, but you are, sailor, you are.”

Billy had stayed in her dressing room all afternoon, dreamily roaming around, while all sorts of ideas passed through her mind, restlessly inspecting various garments with an all-seeing but vague eye, even going through sixty empty handbags in her peregrinations and reaping a harvest of twenty-three dollars and twenty cents in change. She felt too tender all over, almost as if she had grown a new skin, to leave her retreat, but suddenly she realized with a start that Vito must already be home, dressing for the evening, while she was still incommunicado. She had long ago taken off the Mary McFadden so as not to wrinkle it, and she was wrapped in a favorite old at-home robe from the great days of Balenciaga, deep saffron silk velvet lined in shocking-pink taffeta with shocking-pink cuffs. Finally, as she realized the time, she unlocked the door and crossed her bathroom. It was like entering a spring garden, filled with the fresh perfumes and earth smells of the pots of daffodils, narcissus, hyacinths, and violets that banked both sides of her sunken tub and stood massed, in the large room, under the dozen rose trees that had been brought in from the greenhouses by the head gardener. They were covered with buds. In two weeks, she thought absently, they’ll be in full bloom. She rang for her maid and crossed the bedroom looking for signs of Vito. He wasn’t in his dressing room or in his huge, green-and-white marble bath or his sauna. She finally found him in the sitting room, which formed part of their suite, an intimate room hung entirely in shirred Paisley in rich browns and yellows, with glimmers of black and gold from an antique Korean screen and a group of seventeenth-century Japanese cachepots holding eight dozen half-opened tangerine tulips. He had been to the butler’s pantry off the sitting room to fetch a bottle of Château Silverado from the refrigerator there, which was used to hold white wine, champagne, caviar, and pâté de foie gras, and it looked as if he was about to drink a toast to himself. Billy took a second wineglass from the heavy silver tray on the lacquered black Portuguese table and held it out to him, her face serene, her eyes withholding some strong emotion.

“Oh, sweet, I’m so glad you’re home—I’m late but I’ll hurry. How was lunch with the chicken-shit pussy?” she asked.

“Gosh darn,” said Vito, “the language you rich girls use. You shouldn’t be so tough on that poor mound of buffalo droppings. My accountants just got the final figures on
Mirrors
and, it turns out, we were almost fifty thousand dollars over budget when he tried to take over. Would you believe?”

“I’d believe, and he’s still a chicken-shit pussy. Who paid for lunch?”

“He insisted. I had him by the balls, so his heart followed.” And, thought Vito, it only cost him a little over forty dollars plus one million five. Coming home, he had decided not to tell Billy about his bet with Arvey until tomorrow, until after the Oscars. She’d have enough of his success to swallow tonight without knowing that his next production was all set except for the screaming poor Arvey would do. And who knew, maybe Redford and Nicholson really would be interested—it was the book of the year, maybe of the decade.

“Well, that was the least he could do,” Billy said. Her mind was evidently on something Vito didn’t know about, but her spirits had never seemed so high.

“What, may I ask, lit you up like some fucking wonderful Christmas tree?” Vito inquired.

“My God, Vito, this is the big night. When am I supposed to get excited—Boxing Day, Bastille Day, Fidel Castro’s birthday, Amy Carter’s graduation from eighth grade?” She whirled around, her robe flying, drinking the wine, draining the priceless old crystal and throwing it at the fireplace where it shattered in a hundred pieces. “I must have had some Cossack blood,” she said, very pleased with herself.

“You’d better have some racehorse blood. You have exactly fifteen minutes to be dressed and in the car.” He gave her a smart smack on her bottom and watched, puzzled, as she blew him a kiss and strode away. There was something different about Billy tonight and it wasn’t just that she wasn’t wearing her earrings. Some—potency, some secret victory. She looked the way he felt.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had finally become aware that except for a few long-awaited minutes, the Award ceremonies could use a little jazzing up for the television audience. More than any pomp or lavish sets, those hundreds of millions of watchers really wanted to see famous faces in moments during which the average person could empathize with them, moments of tense waiting, of hope, of crisis, of concealed disappointment, of nerves and bluff and explosive joy.

The Academy officials had allowed Maggie’s crew, all properly dressed in dinner jackets, to take up positions right down on the floor of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with their hand mikes and their minicams. This way, instead of those brief flashes of the stars sitting somewhere in a row of people, sometimes accompanied by a zoom close-up of the blink of a celebrated eye, which more often than not vanished from the screen before the public managed to get a decent look, this year’s audience was treated to an orgy of lingering close-ups and was able to listen in on snatches of conversations in various moments during the presentations when the audience wasn’t silent in expectancy. Maggie’s men were so unobtrusive and blended so well into the audience that after a while they didn’t seem to be there at all and the nominees for the various Oscars, all seated in convenient locations near the stage, almost forgot they were on live television.

Billy and Vito didn’t reach their seats until long after Maggie had finished her interviews with the arriving stars, but they managed to slip in before the ceremonies began. By now Maggie was backstage. She had finished talking to the presenters in their dressing rooms, most of whom were a spate of words, and now she had retired to the control booth with her director to cover the Awards themselves. Maggie had worked out a game plan based on one simple directive, which she had issued to her troops.

“If
Sly
Stallone is scratching his ass while the gay who gets the Best Sound Effects Oscar is trudging up the aisle,
STAY ON SLY
until they actually hand the son of a bitch his statue and then, only then, cut to him.”

“What about his acceptance speech, Maggie?” an assistant director asked.

“He gets twenty-five seconds—no, make that twenty—and then cut back to the action on the floor.”

It made for an interesting show. Unfortunately, the Academy never granted this permission again.

The Oscar audience is truly captive. Not even heaven can help the person who feels like going to the bathroom during the duration of the telecast There are no commercial breaks for them, no seventh-inning stretch. Billy found herself sinking into a reverie during the first, endless production number of one of the five nominees for Best Song.

Her brain, she realized, had never worked so logically as it was doing now. Something about figuring out and facing the facts of how she had managed to get herself pregnant had liberated powers of reasoning that she dimly sensed were beginning to vanquish her old habit of impulsiveness. There had always been a lot to say for making a list Even as she had taken up her pen, earlier in the day, she had heard Aunt Cornelia’s voice saying sternly but lovingly, “Wilhelmina Winthrop, pull up your socks.”

She knew now that she was about to arrive at the center of her life and she didn’t want to do it in a scramble of grabbing and clutching and flailing about, trying to keep her world tied down and under her control as if it were a runaway balloon. It was time to let the balloon loose and allow it to take her with it, soaring tranquilly over a new, broad, sunny landscape, with a light hand at the controls. Did a balloon have controls, a tiller, ropes, what? Never mind, she told herself, at least she wouldn’t be alone in the balloon. There would be the baby and, of course, another baby to follow. She had been an only child and she wouldn’t let that happen to her own child. Perhaps three children in all? There was time, if she hurried. No, she told herself, here’s exactly where you start grasping, snatching, and arranging it all just so, and get into trouble. First this baby and then she’d see. In fact, next time, she and Vito would see. What if she did, after all, spend some years in the role of La Mama Orsini? If she just let it happen, she might find out that she loved it, she reflected warily, feeling an unpremeditated and rambunctious quiver of anticipation.