Scruples Two (62 page)

Billy abruptly pulled her hands away from his and pushed her hood farther forward so that he couldn’t see her face at all, burrowing into her cape for protection.

“ ‘Jealous,’ ” Spider repeated slowly, in wonderment and the confused but unmistakable dawning of an impatient, rising hope that he knew far, far less about Billy than he had dreamed, unbelievably less, beautifully less. “Jealous. You wouldn’t be jealous if—”

“Don’t! Don’t say it! Have some decency, don’t rub it in. It’s bad enough as it is! I have to get over it and
I intend to,”
Billy said with pitiless determination.

“Oh no, you won’t!”
he cried, taking her in his arms and pulling back her hood so that he could see her desolate, pain-filled eyes and her trembling, determined, ardent mouth. He cradled her astonished face in his big hands, keeping himself from kissing her with a heroic effort. First he had to explain things so that she would understand. “If you make a move,” Spider told her solemnly, no hesitancy in his voice, “if you take one step, I’ll follow you, wherever you go, I’ll camp out on your doorstep, if you want privacy you can have it, but I’ll always be there for you, waiting patiently. You must never go away from me again, you can’t leave me, we’ve been apart for too long, we’ve wasted too much time. Now listen to me carefully, Billy, this is the important part. About a year and a half ago you rang my doorbell, and the second I opened my door and saw it was you, I fell in love. But the insane, awful thing is that I didn’t understand it until just now. Billy, I’ve been hopelessly in love with you right from that moment, but it never occurred to me that you could love me—you’d never seemed … well, to care about me that much, we’d never had a flicker of an underground romance, so I didn’t
allow
myself to know it, I never let myself even imagine … never started to even wonder.…
oh, but you do love me
, I know it—I can’t be that wrong now, can I?” he implored. “Not when I love you so much. Oh, say you’re not going anywhere without me, Billy, please say you’ll never desert me, say you couldn’t be that unkind.” Spider pleaded with her with all his heart, as a man might beg for his life, still not entirely sure he was right, for Billy’s few, almost enigmatic words had taken him utterly by surprise. “Say you’ll never be jealous again because there’ll never be a reason, say you know I’ll be true to you forever, because I will be—for God’s sake, Billy,
say something!”

“I don’t know where to start,” she whispered, her face awakening to the birth of a transforming happiness. “Ask me more questions.”

“Oh!”
He kissed her over and over in a fury of relief and sudden certitude and discovery. “I’ll ask you more questions, don’t you worry about that, we can go back and start this right, back to basics, like in the olden days, I’ll ask you out on a date and I’ll come by and pick you up and take you out for dinner and—and then I’ll bring you home and ask if I can see you again sometime, maybe next Saturday night, or even better, tomorrow, and then I’ll ask if I can kiss you good night, like this and like this and like—”

“Do we have to start so far back?” Billy managed to whisper between his needful, poignant kisses, kisses that had obsessed her for so long that she could scarcely comprehend their warmth, their breathtaking reality, their indisputable substance, scarcely believe that this was not just another daydream. “I’m much too … sophisticated.… to start dating again.”

“Anywhere you want … oh, darling, I’m so much in love with you I don’t know what to do. Can’t we get married? Come on, Billy,” Spider urged her, his voice becoming almost unrecognizable with impatience. “I can’t stand waiting around for all that in-between stuff when I’m absolutely sure what’s going to happen in the end—there’s no other possible way for us to exist except married to each other. Darling, what can I say to make you understand?”

“There’s always been this one particular thing about you, Spider,” Billy said, laughing in profligate bliss as she looked up into his eyes. She caressed his lips possessively, borne strongly aloft on a surge of happiness so pure that it was crystalline, so powerful that it felt like riding the swell of a mighty ocean, so indivisible that she trusted it fearlessly. “You have the most amazing ability to talk me into anything, anything at all. Are you going to miss it when you discover that everything you want, I want too? Because if you prefer, I can always put up a fight, but wouldn’t it be simpler if I said yes, in advance, to everything?”

“Sure,” said Spider, transcendently joyous but not blinded, “yeah, right, Billy, yes in advance to everything. Oh, my darling, that’ll be the day.”

Epilogue

One Year Later

T
here are many cunning ways in which to wake up a sleeping man without his ever knowing that he’s been deliberately aroused, Billy told herself, as she lay wide awake next to Spider in her big bed. You can move as vigorously as possible from side to side, until the mattress begins to feel like a rough sea; you can twitch the sheets and blankets up so far that they cover his mouth and nose and he has to wake up to get some air; you can tickle him sneakily in any number of tender places, until he’s irritated enough to open his eyes; you can even choose one hair on his head and pull it out so that his efforts to remain unconscious are doomed. Or you can shout “Boo!” into his ear and immediately lie back, feigning drowsy innocence, as he bolts upright in surprise
.

But was it fair to wake someone who was sleeping as profoundly as he was? Spider was probably enjoying REM sleep, the deepest stage, in which dreams come, that restorative phase of sleep, deprived of which for days at a time, people soon become disoriented and unhappy and start having delusions. But hadn’t he had more than enough sleep for
anybody’s needs, Billy asked herself fretfully, while she’d been up all night, trotting to her flower-filled bathroom every hour, walking miles around the enormous bedroom to stop her legs from cramping, getting carefully back into bed and composing herself once again for the rest that hadn’t come? Wide awake, she stared upward in the predawn dimness as she tried to decide whether Spider would be angry if she neglected to wake him up and share the saga of her disturbed night with him?

Yet there was an advantage to her being conscious while he slept. Even if she couldn’t look into the limitless blue of his eyes, even if she wasn’t listening to his voice or watching his pagan smile, in sleep he belonged entirely to her, and she could bask in uninterrupted contemplation of the heaven of sharing a bed with him. She could dote on him, that’s what she could do, dote as much as she liked, dote in an unashamed, unobserved orgy of being helplessly in love, a condition she’d learned was not for public display
.

As hard as she tried, she hadn’t mastered the art of entirely avoiding doting at the office. She’d noticed those amused little nudges people gave each other when Spider was running a meeting, and she’d become so mesmerized by him that she lost track of the subject under discussion and couldn’t produce a sensible opinion when it was asked of her. Heather, the most intellectual of Spider’s six sisters, had told her that the two of them were a model of uxoriousness. When she’d looked it up in the dictionary, pleased at the implied praise but not wanting to admit that she didn’t know what it meant, she’d found an illustrative quotation affixed to the word describing a woman who had “melted into absolute uxorial imbecility.” And another of a man who, according to Tennyson, was “a prince whose manhood was all gone, and molten down in mere uxoriousness.” Well! If that old prude Tennyson were around, she’d set him straight pretty damn quick on the manhood question, and as for Heather, she couldn’t have possibly meant it that way, she must have been trying to show off her vocabulary, missing by a mile
.

Marrying a man with six sisters was a continuing revelation, Billy mused. Ellis had had no family, and Vito, if he had one back East in Riverdale, had never bothered to introduce
her to them. But Spider’s parents lived nearby in Pasadena, four of his sisters were scattered around in Los Angeles, and the two others weren’t farther than an hour’s plane or car ride from their childhood home. Their reunions were frequent—how had she managed not to hear more about the Elliott family before she married Spider, Billy wondered—demonstrative, wildly good-natured, uninhibitedly verbal, and revolving around Spider in a way that stopped just short of going slightly overboard. The only son, the only brother … it was natural that they all adored him. They actually flirted with him, if she was any judge, and who better? Thank goodness she couldn’t be jealous of her husband’s very own sisters, or was there another horrid, little-known word, like uxorious, that she didn’t know about, Billy asked herself suspiciously—a word that might explain why, as much as she was charmed by the warm, happy feeling of becoming an instant member of a huge, loving family, a feeling she’d never known before and had always missed until her marriage, she was never too unhappy to see them all go home and leave her and Spider alone together?

It wasn’t as if her sisters-in-law didn’t treat her lovingly, Billy thought, smiling at the thought of them. They each had children of their own, more than a dozen altogether, but they hovered with anticipation and veneration over her belly as if, in six more weeks, she could be counted on to produce another Shakespeare and another Mozart, instead of merely twin boys who would be merely the only other male Elliotts in existence except for Spider and his father. Her mother-in-law had vainly produced three sets of female twins, trying to give birth to another Spider, but she had accomplished the trick first crack out of the barrel, so to speak, as easily as taking a stroll in the woods, a roll off a log, a shot in the dark—something about fecundity seemed to lead directly to clichés, heartburn, sciatica and insomnia
.

Spider moved slightly and she turned toward him hopefully, but he was as fast asleep as ever, his face hidden by one arm. Billy raised herself on her elbows, leaned closer to him and inhaled the smell of his hair. It was better than buttered popcorn, and ten times as tempting. Bravely she resisted the
urge to ruffle it, and lay back on her pillows, meditating on motherhood
.

Dolly had assured her that twins were no trouble at all, not really much more of a problem to raise than a single baby, but then, on the subject of her boys, Dolly lied like a bandit with the excuse that sticking to her diet took all the strength of mind she possessed. She was using hypnosis, acupuncture, crystals and channeling to bolster her resolve, as well as the thought of having to wear the Dolly Moons that sold in such huge numbers. Could it be Dolly’s own lack of willpower that caused her twins to be such free spirits, to put it kindly, Billy wondered. What would she do if her own babies turned out to be as stubborn as Dolly’s, Billy asked herself, as she patiently endured them duking it out in her womb. Didn’t they realize that there was room in there for both of them? Why did they have to try to trade places all night long? Or were they merely dancing a companionable tango? Perhaps she shouldn’t be so anxious for them to be born, perhaps she should be making the most of the last weeks of relative peace she’d have for a long while, but she felt as if she’d been put breathtakingly on hold with this enormous, mysterious, life-changing event looming in the near future
.

The only things she’d been able to concentrate on lately had been the designs for the new Scruples Two maternity collection and the line of baby clothes, none of which would exist as finished samples until July
.

How could they have imagined a catalog without those essential categories? Even without looking at statistics: she was pregnant; Sasha, with her customary efficiency, was two weeks more pregnant than she; two of Spider’s sisters, Petunia and January, were pregnant yet again; to say nothing of Dolly, who had just had to cancel a film in which she brought a lovelorn Arnold Schwarzenegger to his knees, because she too was going to have another baby in seven months. Four pregnant women besides herself in her immediate circle was enough to indicate a trend—or was it an epidemic?—and Scruples Two was nothing if not on top of trends, Billy thought with satisfaction. With hundreds of employees, most of them married women, they’d built model day care facilities
in Virginia and Los Angeles so that their carefully trained staff could opt for motherhood, keep their jobs and work out flexible schedules … nothing less made any sense
.

The entire catalog industry had been revolutionized by the stunning success of Scruples Two and its unprecedented swiftness of growth, right from the first mailing. They’d hit the market at exactly the right time with the right idea; millions of women with no time to go shopping needed well-priced, well-made, cleverly versatile clothes. The graphics Spider had worked out were so different from other catalogs that they’d grabbed an immediate audience, while Gigi’s copy had all but created a cult. Oh, they’d had their problems; one essential Prince scarf, intended to be worn with four different outfits, had been delivered in so jarring a combination of blues that not even Prince himself would have dared to wear them together; sixteen of their most carefully trained, friendly and helpful phone operators had quit in a single week to marry men they’d met via long distance when they’d called up to order antique lingerie as gifts; a wrong guess had left them short thirty-five thousand dark green velvet trousers; the single most popular Dolly Moon caused super-sensitive women to itch and had been returned by the tens of thousands—the list was longer, but through the quarterly sale catalogs they got rid of their mistakes and returns, and still made a healthy profit, with a customer base that was growing as quickly as their expertise and sense of the market
.

Joe Jones and his brother had both bought houses before their first year in California was over, and were busy putting in pools, buying boats and looking for weekend getaways in the nearby mountains of Idyllwild, as tangible a sign of total confidence as she could hope for. Josie Speilberg had resisted an alluring kidnap attempt from L.L. Bean when she’d received her VP in Charge of Sanity title; Prince was in a state of permanent slow burn because he hadn’t thought of doing moderate-priced clothes himself, instead of being bound to them by contract for five more years—in short, business as usual, Billy thought, stuffing another pillow in the aching small of her back. Business as usual, that is, except for Cora de Lioncourt. Strange, how violently upset Maggie MacGregor
had been at the swipe at her professionalism in that “P.D. Q.” article, revengeful enough to make it her business to find out who actually was responsible for the column. When she discovered through her network of informers that Cora had provided the information, although she hadn’t written the offending words, Maggie had exposed Cora’s secret traffic in kickbacks in a television half-hour devoted to the phenomenon that was just beginning to be known as Nouvelle Society. “The Ten Percent Empress of Social Climbers” she’d called the show, and it had ended Cora’s usefulness to anybody with a crash. Well, you couldn’t blame Maggie for being angry at being accused of sleeping her way to the top when her success had been based on hard work and talent, but that didn’t mean she liked Maggie any more than she ever had. Actually, come to think of it, if it hadn’t been for that horrid article, if it hadn’t been for Spider coming to find her that night to comfort her, it would have taken them longer to find out that they loved each other.… although nothing could have kept them apart.… sooner or later love, like a cough, makes itself known, Billy thought, happily philosophic, in spite of a discomfort that no well-placed pillow could cure
.

She would give just about anything to be able to lie flat on her stomach, Billy thought with longing. Facedown, cheek pressed to the bottom sheet, blankets pulled up over the back of her neck, utterly relaxed, drifting off to sleep … she could remember it dimly, no, she could imagine it; memory was too fleeting to capture that delicious state, but imagination was powerful enough to work
.

Imagination.… Zach Nevsky’s imagination had persuaded Vito to transpose an English comedy of manners to a San Francisco setting, thereby solving all the tricky nuances of the British class structure that had threatened to make
Fair Play
inaccessible to the mass audience. Nick De Salvo, playing the tough young owner of a restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf, had starred with Meryl Streep, cast as a discreet, very-much-married society woman from Nob Hill, the two of them generating enough forbidden heat to make
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
seem downright unisex. Even the teenagers were going to see it, the make-out movie of the year. Vito had his first giant success in a long time
.

The critics had singled Zach out for particular praise, forgetting the producer’s role, as usual, but the industry knew that even if Zachary Nevsky was on top of the most-wanted list of new directors in town, Vito Orsini was back in business in a big way. Curt Arvey was reported to be furious that he’d missed the chance to finance
Fair Play,
and was openly blaming Susan’s advice for his loss. Obviously she was busy trying to reel Vito back into the studio, even being spotted lunching here and there with him, although, Billy thought with a mental grimace, no amount of imagination could conjure up a situation in which Susan’s uptight, frigid, judgmental manner could influence Vito one way or another. Beginner’s luck, Billy told herself, she’d had beginner’s luck in her one fling in show business and she didn’t plan to risk it again. Impulsiveness had to stop somewhere
.