Scruples Two (9 page)

William, the butler, had to be available to serve breakfast and afternoon tea, so he was out. Jean-Luc, the chef, also had to be on call all morning and at teatime. Young Gavin, the head gardener, was up and out at dawn, carefully supervising the all-important watering crew before the sun had a chance to climb. She couldn’t ask him to leave his precious tasks, and his assistant, Diego, served as Gavin’s indispensable translator to all the Spanish-speaking workers. Except for Gavin and Diego, all the garden and greenhouse workers lived out, and she didn’t want to mess with their schedules. It was too hard to find careful, consistent people, and Mrs. O., otherwise far from godlike, would notice every wilted flower petal, if not every bird that sang. Any one of the three maids who lived in the house, or the second cook or the full-time laundress-cum-seamstress, both of whom lived out, could manage to add the chauffeuring to their duties, but Mrs. O. had specified a man, so a man it must be.

Which left Burgo, the full-time, live-in handyman. Burgo washed the cars, gassed them up and kept the garage spotless; Burgo touched up paint on almost a daily basis; Burgo knew, almost before something went wrong, how to fix the glitches in the plumbing or electricity, and when the problem was too deeply rooted for his talents he knew the professionals to call. He had a special ability to rustle up the overburdened phone repairman to service the antiquated system they had never had time to modernize since Mrs. O.’s marriage, he oiled squeaky doors and replaced light bulbs and oversaw the weekly window-washing crew. Burgo, in effect, was the husband—or perhaps the wife?—of the house, and how other people managed without a Burgo, bless his heart, was a question Josie never dared ask. However, ever since she had lured him away from the Playboy Mansion by a substantial increase in his wages, Burgo seemed perfectly happy with his room and his food and the company of his co-workers. Burgo O’Sullivan it was, then. After all, what was a handyman for?

“Oh rats, Burgo, is there anything worse than starting in a new school?” Gigi was plaintive and suddenly homesick for New York. Burgo, a cozy, cheerful, middle-aged man with faded red hair and a good smile, inspired her confidence, which was in short supply this morning.

“It’s a big place, and there’s safety in numbers,” he said.

“I used to go to a big school, and every new kid stood out as if she were standing in a spotlight, so don’t soft-soap me, Burgo.”

“You look just like the rest of them, and you’re probably just as far ahead in your classes as they are.”

“Great, that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“No, just not worse. I know it’s tough, but after today you won’t be new anymore, think of it that way. Make just one single friend and that’s all you need to start you out on the right road.”

“Ah, Burgo O’Sullivan, you’re an Irishman all right.”

“And what would you know about that, may I ask?”

“My mother was an O’Brian. She used to drag out the same kind of traditional blarney.”

“And wasn’t she right?”

“Most of the time. All right, Burgo, me boy, I feel better. Happy now? I can’t wait to be looked over by a whole class of new kids, all of them dying to be my first friend. If only I were about five inches taller, blond and a surfer.”

“Yeah, but the smaller girls catch more boys,” Burgo said thoughtfully. “Boys your age are mostly too short for the girls, but you can have your pick.”

“I don’t like boys,” Gigi said, annoyed. “They have zits, they smell and they don’t know how to have a conversation.”

“You will. In fact I’d lay odds. Here we are,” Burgo said, pulling up and stopping curbside near the driveway to the school. “That’s the faculty parking lot, over there. I’ll be back for you there at three-thirty on the dot.” He leaned out of the van and greeted a maintenance man who was standing nearby.

“Stan, I didn’t know you started work so early,” Burgo said. “This is Gigi Orsini, she’s starting school today.”

“ ’Morning, young lady. I didn’t know you’d become a driver, Burgo.”

“New assignment. I’m coming up in the world. You on for poker night, Stan?”

“When have I ever missed a game?”

“Never.”

“Poker!” exclaimed Gigi. “I
love
poker! And I’m good! Can I come?”

“Guys only, Gigi, and you’d have to be a little older.” Burgo chuckled at her eager expression. At least she looked in a better mood than she had when they’d started out. “Now out you go. Good luck!”

“Top of the mornin’ to you, Mr. O’Sullivan.” Gigi thumbed her nose at him, raising her eyebrows fiercely, and produced as false and toothy a grin as she could. She jumped out of the car, shrugged her shoulders, took a deep breath and sauntered away, in no visible rush to find her new homeroom.

A week later, in the early evening, Billy returned to the house after an appointment with her gynecologist, Dr. Aaron Wood. Her exhaustion was perfectly normal, he’d told her. The first trimester of pregnancy was often the most tiring, and she wasn’t into her fourth month yet, as far as he could determine. Her projected due date would vary by as much as several weeks, he warned her, since she couldn’t be certain when she’d become pregnant.

Billy sank down onto a chaise longue in the yellow and brown sitting room of the suite she and Vito snared. The smallish room, with its walls entirely hung with shirred paisley, was decked out today in a great abundance of flowering spring bulbs; baskets of jonquils, daffodils and fragrant yellow and white freesia stood on the tables, and potted white azalea trees in full bloom banked the sides of the fireplace in which a fire had been lit an hour before her return. She closed her eyes, let her shoes slide to the floor, and tried to relax in the warmth and perfumed air, but weary as she was, her body refused to unwind and her mind rejected the efforts she made to let it float. Instead she found herself yet again circling around the situation with Vito.

Since the morning after Gigi’s arrival, she’d been careful not to confront him with any additional reproaches about his past treatment of the girl. Gigi was too dear to her now for her to get into any fruitless discussion with Vito about what he could have done better in the past. Part of her silence was due to her reluctant realization that she’d been carried away that afternoon at Scruples. Even all the champagne she’d drunk, even the forty-eight hours of silent frustration while she’d guarded her secret, didn’t excuse the fact that she should have told Vito about the baby before anyone else. But what difference would it have made? she asked herself for the hundredth time. That night, after they’d come home, he’d said all the conventional things about being happy about her pregnancy, but to her ears his words had sounded like a formula. She didn’t know what she’d expected, Billy thought unhappily. Vito was such a volatile man that he might have danced for joy or burst into tears or … or … anything but the totally conventional response he’d made. And since then he’d been so busy that he hadn’t arrived home until right before dinner with her and Gigi. In fact he’d skipped dinner several times for meetings with various potential scriptwriters, agents and other such gentry. After dinner Vito went back to the phone in his office in the house, reaching the people he’d missed during the day. His working life, or what he referred to as “being in development,” seemed to have degenerated into one phone call after another, each blending into the next, interrupted only by meetings that gave birth to more phone calls to arrange more meetings. When was the last time they’d had a quiet hour alone together? Billy wondered, just as Vito walked into the room.

“I didn’t expect you before eight,” she said in surprise.

“Redford’s agent had to catch a plane,” Vito explained. “Drink?” he asked, heading toward the butler’s pantry.

“No, thanks. I can’t touch alcohol without a headache. Anyway, the doctor said not to. How’s the picture going?”

“So far, so good. It’s too soon to celebrate, but I’m almost certain I have a lock on Nicholson, and Redford’s just about in the bag. We’re down to negotiating the pieces of the profit, so it’s basically a question of money and I’m willing to give them what it takes, I just don’t want to make it too easy. Of course, what they both want to know is, who plays the girl?”

“Who plays the girl?” Billy inquired, wishing she gave a damn, wishing she weren’t mortally tired, wishing she didn’t feel slightly sick to her stomach all the time, not just in the mornings, wishing Vito would ask how she was, wishing she and Vito weren’t being so damned unnaturally polite to each other, wishing, in spite of her fatigue, that they had to dress and rush out to a party so they wouldn’t have to continue to be polite all through dinner alone together because Gigi had been invited to a sleep over by the girl she described as the neatest of her five—or was it fifteen?—new best friends.

“Dunaway or Fonda on the one hand,” Vito answered. “Streep on the other. I won’t even take a call from any of their agents until the actors’ contracts are signed, but I’m ready to bet that I can get whoever I want. The question is, which one is most obviously the right wife for Redford?”

“It’s a problem,” Billy agreed, thinking that none of them were obviously right for Redford, in fact they all seemed obviously wrong, but Vito was only interested in casting one of the top stars in the business. On the other hand, what did it matter? Streisand had been obviously the wrongest possible wife for Redford, but Billy had cried buckets at the end of
The Way We Were
.

“Maybe Streisand?” she suggested, trying to show an interest.

“Streisand!” Vito put his drink down with a bang. “For Christ’s sake, Billy, haven’t you
read
the goddamned book? Redford marries a girl from his own background, she’s a bigger WASP than he is, if such a thing is possible.
Streisand!”

“It was a joke, Vito.”

“The hell it was,” he said accusingly. “You weren’t even paying attention.”

“You’re right. I must have been thinking about something else,” she said coldly.

“And what’s that supposed to mean? As if I didn’t know.”

“As if you didn’t know what, Vito?”

“That you’re sitting there building up your grudge against me,” he said, suddenly ferocious. “Every single day since Gigi showed up, you’ve been working on that grudge, nursing it, building it up; Vito Orsini the terrible father, Vito the irresponsible, Vito the man without a heart, Vito from whom you rescued poor pitiful Gigi and turned her into a princess with a wave of your magic wand, Vito who isn’t so totally gaga, so worshipful, so thrilled out of his mind that he’s unable to think about anything else but you and your sacred, world-shaking pregnancy, Vito who will unquestionably turn out to be a dreadful father to this child, just as he was to Gigi …”

So this was what had been brewing, Billy thought. She should have known. He was full of guilt, and now he was turning it against her. Her exhaustion vanished as she pushed herself up from her reclining position.

“I get the picture,” Billy said in an infuriatingly temperate tone. “You really don’t have to keep on and on like that, Vito, working yourself up into a lather. You can’t imagine how utterly childish and ridiculous you sound.”

“You’re incapable of seeing yourself at all.” Vito’s voice got louder as he was stung by her words. “You think you can scream accusations at me at the crack of dawn one day and then give me the cool, calm, superior treatment for the next two weeks as if nothing had happened and that makes it all right, we can just go on from there. Well, I have news for you. I won’t stand for it! I won’t put up with it! I don’t intend to live this way!”

“Well, aren’t we having a nice little tantrum? Why don’t you just lie down on the carpet and kick your heels in the air?” Billy stood up, collected and icy. “I don’t intend to try to talk to you when you’re like this.”

“We’re going to talk about this now, so sit the fuck down, Billy,” Vito raged, putting both of his hands on her shoulders and forcing her back in the chaise. “Now you listen to me. I don’t
owe
you any excuses. I am exactly the man I was when you met me, nothing’s changed, and I refuse to apologize for anything in my past. There are explanations—not excuses but explanations—that I could have given you so maybe you’d understand why I was less than a good father to Gigi, but you never asked me about them, never gave me a chance. No, you jumped right away to the worst conclusions and you rushed like a fireman into a burning building to save her, make her over, fix her up, turn her into
your
child—”

“Forgive me for interrupting, but that simply isn’t—”

“Shut up, I haven’t finished. So now you’re pregnant. I wasn’t consulted, I wasn’t part of the decision, but fine, swell, when you wanted a baby it’s typical that you wouldn’t have bothered to find out how I felt about it. Whatever you want, you get, that’s your pattern. I’ll attempt to be a decent father, try to give me that much credit at least. I didn’t like hearing about it after everybody else in the world, but what the hell, what’s done is done. No, don’t interrupt! What I want you to understand, what I insist that you understand, is that the fact that you’re pregnant
does not
make everything else in
my
life unimportant—oh no, that’s where you’re dead wrong, Billy.”

“Vito, I don’t think—” Billy interrupted.

“Shut up, I’m not finished,” he shouted. “I’ve got a movie to make.
WASP
’s going to be a major movie, a big picture, the biggest one that’ll be made this year. It’s the chance I’ve been struggling for since the first day I’ve been in the business. I’m making this movie twenty-four hours a day, the way you’re making a baby, and I’m just as involved with
WASP
as you are in being pregnant. That’s the way it is—the way it would be with any man in my position—and you’ve got to accept it and stop acting like a fucking Sacred Vessel. Your money totally isolates you. You don’t live on the same planet as ordinary mortals, you can’t possibly realize or even care how vital this is to me. There’s no big stake in it for you—whatever happens, it won’t change your life one little bit, will it? Do you think producing pictures is just my
hobby
, for Christ’s sake? It’s been my life for eighteen years,
my life
, understand? You’d better get out of that ego-centered, self-absorbed, sable-lined, solid-gold space capsule of yours and start trying to turn into a real human being, because otherwise it’s going to be one hell of an impossible year.”