“Just what the hell is going on here, anyway?” Billy asked, beginning to get over her shock, but still holding Gigi’s hand for moral support.
“We got married yesterday,” Valentine said.
“Oh, bullshit,” Billy said indignantly.
“I told you,” Valentine exclaimed, delighted. “I told you that’s what she’d say! You owe me twenty dollars, Spider.”
“Congratulations,” Gigi said, uncertain at these developments but automatically polite. “I’m sure you’ll be very happy.”
“You don’t even know these people!” Billy said to Gigi, even more indignantly. “Why did you say that?”
“They look married to me.”
“They do?”
“Definitely.”
“But they can’t just get married, not just like that, not without telling me, anyway they’ve known each other forever, they’re not in love with each other … they … they.… they got married.” Billy sat down weakly. Why was she talking to Gigi instead of to Spider and Valentine, she wondered, unable to grapple with more important questions.
“We went to Vegas, we eloped, we didn’t tell anybody. You’re the first to know,” Valentine said, jumping off Spider and coming to kiss Billy. “You and …?”
“Gigi Orsini, Vito’s daughter.”
“Sure, Billy,” Spider said indulgently.
“Graziella Giovanna Orsini, Vito’s daughter and my stepdaughter. Gigi’s come to stay.” Billy stated these simple words in a multileveled complexity of tone combined with a certain unmistakable look with which they were both deeply familiar. They were immediately informed that not only was this girl undoubtedly Vito’s daughter, although, incredibly, they’d never heard of her, but they had better not ask any questions or display the slightest surprise at her sudden appearance.
“I’m enchanted to meet you, Gigi,” Valentine said, shaking Gigi’s hand and, on second thought, kissing her on both cheeks. “Welcome to Scruples.”
Spider got up hastily and approached Gigi with the ease of a man who had rarely encountered a female mind he couldn’t see through. “Hi,” he said, looking down at her with unfeigned interest, taking both her small hands into his and holding them carefully as he inspected her with warm curiosity. “I’m happy you’re here. And I know we
“Come on.” Gigi smiled up at him. “It’s just that I’m from New York.”
“That would explain it.” Spider wondered what would account for the look in her eyes that contained an inexplicable sadness, the slight trembling he felt in her hands and the vulnerability she radiated? “Has Billy been showing you the town?”
“I have a haircut and a whole new wardrobe. If there’s more to this town, I’m not ready for it.”
“It takes a bit of getting used to. But since you’re going to live here, Gigi, you have all the time in the world. And one day you’ll wake up in the morning and wonder how you could ever have lived anywhere else and you’ll look at all the people coming out of the tourist buses and taking pictures of each other on Rodeo Drive and you won’t know why they’re doing it when it’s all so ordinary.”
“That sounds like being brainwashed,” Gigi said, laughing at his nonsense. How could such a spectacular-looking guy make her feel reassured, protected and appreciated, when, as a rule, exceptionally handsome men made her nervous, Gigi wondered, not knowing that hundreds of women had asked themselves exactly the same question. Maybe it was the laughing crinkles at the corners of his eyes, maybe the broken nose, maybe the chip missing on one of his front teeth, maybe just the genuinely involved tone of his voice, but magically he’d made her relax more than she had all day.
“It is being brainwashed, only we prefer to call it the California lifestyle. Gigi, you look hungry to me, and Billy, you too.”
“Oh, Spider,” Billy protested, “you always think women look hungry. Gigi, believe it or not, practically the first thing Spider made me put into Scruples was a complete kitchen so our customers never had to leave for lunch and break the rhythm of their shopping.”
“Didn’t it work?” Spider asked.
“It tripled our business and paid for itself in two months,” Billy admitted, “and I’m famished. Gigi and I had a pitiful lunch, and then we wore ourselves out shopping.”
“I’m feeling faint,” Gigi said hopefully.
Spider picked up the phone to the kitchen and ordered high tea, complete with cakes, scones and sandwiches for all of them.
“Spider, you forgot to ask for champagne,” Billy said. “I want to toast you and Valentine, even if I still can’t get straight how this happened or why I didn’t even have a clue, which is what really irritates me.”
“Oh, Billy, it’s such a long story and it was all my fault,” Valentine said joyfully. “I was so suspicious of him—he was too frivolous, this big, blond creature, this typical American beach bum with all his adoring girlfriends, too sure of himself—so I decided he could never be more than a friend.”
“No, it was my fault,” Spider objected, as a waiter appeared with a heavily laden tea cart and four bottles of champagne. “She frightened me off with her French superiority, so I got involved with the wrong people because I couldn’t get anywhere with her.”
“Oh, nonsense,” said Valentine, “practically the first thing you said to me was that I was a bad-tempered bitch who lacked gratitude. Does that sound like a frightened man?”
“No, you said I thought that’s what you were. Don’t put words in my mouth,” Spider corrected her.
“This sounds like the first draft of a script I’m going to be listening to for the next fifty years,” Billy observed dryly. “Or is it more like a Cosmo article come to life? ‘Men and Women, the Communication Gap’? Could we save the next installment of your mutual divine blindness until after the toast?”
Spider opened the champagne, offering a glass to Gigi with a question in his eyes. How old was she, he wondered. Fourteen, maybe?
“I started on brandy last night,” she assured him, “so I’m an old hand at this.”
“To Mr. and Mrs. Spider Elliott, together at last and not a minute too soon, it would seem. But let’s not bother with details, I love both of you and I always will. Long life and great happiness to you both.” Billy raised her glass and sipped deeply as the others raised theirs.
For a minute all four of them drank champagne peacefully, feeling a warmth envelop them that had nothing to do with the level of alcohol in the Dom Perignon. Spider poured more champagne, thinking that he’d never seen Billy look so glowingly beautiful. Perhaps it was Gigi, although the idea that Billy had been longing for a stepdaughter of her very own seemed farfetched, even considering that Billy had an immense capacity for hankering for things she didn’t yet have.
Billy waited until the others started to circle the tea cart before picking up a phone and calling her secretary at home. No, Josie told her, Mr. Orsini hadn’t called in. There were literally dozens of other messages for her, more flowers, more telegrams, but not a word from him.
“If he calls, I’m at the store,” Billy said abruptly, hanging up and drinking another glass of champagne to douse the flames of her renewed anger. Normally she and Vito checked in with each other by phone twice a day, no matter how busy he was. So he was going to go out in the garden and eat worms, was he? Well, that wasn’t going to stop her from enjoying herself, she vowed. Gigi was going to stay and be cherished by her, and cherish her; Spider and Val had found each other at what they insisted was long last, and what’s more, Lester Weinstock, her darling Dolly’s personal publicist, had just arrived in time to join the party, looking as happy as he deserved to be and carefully bearing a crumpled mound of sparkling fabric in his arms.
“Dolly sent me,” Lester said, his voice almost hesitant as he looked around at the festivities, but his smile as cheerful and reassuring as ever. “Here’s the dress Valentine made her for the Oscars. It finally dried out and she thought that maybe if it was sent to the cleaners …”
“Of course it can be rescued,” Valentine interrupted, “and there’s so much fabric in it that I promise when I’m finished with it she’ll have two dresses instead of one, a short and a long.” Billy, remembering the sight of Dolly leaving the Oscars after her water broke while the memorable wet patch of amniotic fluid on her miraculous dress was televised all over the world, drank another glass of champagne to Valentine’s talent.
“She made me promise to deliver it to you personally,” Lester added.
“Quite right, a dress like that must not be allowed to pass into any hands but those that understand it. But how is the baby, Lester, and how is Dolly?” Valentine vowed never to tell anyone that she and Spider hadn’t watched the Oscars.
“They’re both absolutely perfect. Incredibly perfect. I didn’t know anything could be so perfect.” Lester just stood there, never so much a tall, bespectacled, somewhat overstuffed rumpled teddy bear as at that minute. But, thought Billy, there was something very different about him from the young and unseasoned PR man she had made the studio attach to Dolly six weeks ago, after her Oscar nomination. What accounted for his new self-assurance, his visibly unbounded pleasure with all things in life, including himself?
“Lester, get yourself some champagne, sit down, say hello to Gigi Orsini, Vito’s daughter, and tell me how Dolly is besides perfect,” Billy ordered. “I couldn’t get through to her on the phone a little while ago, they wouldn’t let me. Was she sleeping, is she exhausted, will it be all right to visit her tonight?”
“She’s not a bit tired,” Lester said. “I had to cut off the phone. Hundreds, really hundreds of press people from all over the world want to interview her. There were a couple dozen photographers around the hospital, but they couldn’t get in. Normally there’s a lot of interest in the Oscar winners anyway, but with Dolly …”
“The circumstances were unusual,” Billy said, beginning to grin as she remembered the saga, known only to her and Dolly, of Sunshine, the rodeo rider, with whom Dolly had followed the circuit for a year before they broke up. Their reunion for a Fourth of July fling had resulted in Dolly’s baby.
“As her publicist, I think it’s a mistake for her to talk to anybody, anybody at all,” Lester declared. “It’s not as if she’s married.”
“You know you won’t be able to stop her,” Billy said. “Dolly’s such an innocent, short of sitting on her head.…”
“Yeah, and she’d probably tell them about Sunshine too,” Lester said firmly. “Except I’ve put the lid on that.”
“She told you about Sunshine?” Billy asked, stunned.
“We’ve told each other everything,” Lester answered, beaming with pride.
Billy looked closely through his heavy glasses into his nearsighted eyes. “Lester Weinstock, I think you are trying to tell me something, so will you stop beating around the bush and spit it out, we’re talking about my best friend here.”
“I love Dolly and she loves me and we’re going to get married as soon as possible,” he declared.
“Good God! Has everybody gone crazy? You’ve known her only six weeks, and she was pregnant the whole time. Lester, is this a rescue fantasy?”
“If it is, she’s the one doing the rescuing. Aren’t you happy for us?”
“I’m … overjoyed … I think it’s wonderful beyond words,” Billy said, feeling the tears begin to rise. What was wrong with her today? She, who almost never wept, was leaking tears all over the place.
“Dolly’s decided on the baby’s name,” Lester said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “Wendy Wilhelmina Weinstock. Wilhelmina for you because you’re the godmother and Wendy because it goes with Weinstock. Do you approve?”
“W. W. Weinstock,” Billy said slowly. “She sounds like a studio head. Very Hollywood, Lester, in the grand tradition. Of course I approve. You’re marrying the best girl in the world.”
Billy stood up and took the floor. “Order in this room, I demand order here! We will now drink a toast to the engagement of Lester Weinstock and Dolly Moon and their baby daughter, my goddaughter, Wendy Wilhelmina Weinstock.”
In the uproar that followed, Gigi tried to count all the things that made up the California lifestyle. A stepmother who had become a friend, a major haircut, a totally new wardrobe, a promise to move three thousand miles from New York and live in the most beautiful house in the world, an elopement, an engagement, a new baby, about four glasses of champagne—and that was only since breakfast. She adored it here, she thought giddily, as she toasted Lester and Dolly and the newborn baby with such an impressive name. These people were even crazier than gypsies.
Billy poured herself another glass of champagne. Dolly was a wonder, she mused, a miracle of nature. She and Lester were exactly right for each other. And now that the proof was before her eyes, Spider and Valentine were exactly right for each other too. Obviously she had no natural matchmaking instincts or she would have seen it all coming long ago. If it weren’t for Gigi she’d be feeling intolerably out of things, sitting here with her secret while the others drank to marriage, engagement and childbirth.
Imagine having a husband who passed out after you’d told him in plain English that you were pregnant! Vito hadn’t had the decency to phone all day. If there had been a mere message that he’d called, she’d have known that he wanted to make up their quarrel. One item of faith on which Billy would bet her last dollar was that if you truly want to make a phone call, no matter how busy you are, no matter how important you are, no matter how the weight of the world is resting on your shoulders, you can do so if there’s a phone available. Years ago Billy had stopped believing anybody who said, “I was going to call you, but I couldn’t get a minute.” But who was she to moralize, she asked herself, she who still hadn’t made her apology to Valentine, who had informed her that she was pregnant two days ago when her Oscar dress wouldn’t zip up. She drank more champagne, brooding, while Spider, Valentine and Lester excitedly discussed wedding and honeymoon plans, and Gigi tried to take it all in.
Gigi was used to the theatrical excess of dancers’ lives, but these people made dancers look drab and ordinary. Spider Elliott was like.… like … if her beloved James Dean had grown up into a man and become two feet taller and moved like Fred Astaire and been combined with the young Gary Cooper in one of the old movies she loved so much … yes … that might almost make a Spider Elliott, Gigi decided in a haze. He had the kind of splendor she associated only with Marlboro Country and Viking sea captains or college football stars, never with real people. And Valentine … she was the most French thing Gigi had ever imagined, her hair the most enviable firecracker red, her eyes the most brilliantly green, her face the most expressive.… everything about her was perfect down to the freckles on her nose, Gigi thought, carried away by a fever of hero and heroine worship.
As Gigi looked from Spider to Valentine and back again, Billy told herself that some things demanded to be made known. Some things were ripe for the telling and would only lose their flavor if they were kept back. Some secrets were made for sharing at certain moments when a crucial mass of energy developed, when you were in the right place at the right time with the right people, or at least all of them but one. Anyway, Gigi knew and Valentine had guessed, so it wasn’t really a secret anyway.
“I have another toast to propose,” she said, getting up rather unsteadily from her chair. “To Valentine O’Neill, who told me something I didn’t believe two days ago, Valentine, darling Valentine, as usual, you were right.”
“Billy! Oh, Billy, how wonderful!” Valentine ran and hugged her, leaving Spider and Lester mystified. “You silly men, she’s going to have a baby, at least give her a kiss!” Valentine laughed at their expressions as they began to comprehend what she had said.
Vito, frowning, appeared in the doorway a moment later as Billy was standing, bathed in glory, surrounded by a pandemonium of exclamations and congratulations. When he had arrived at the house and found it empty of everyone but the
staff, Josie had directed him to Scruples, where, as he had expected, he had walked in to find Billy the center of attention as usual.
A small, mysteriously familiar figure flung herself at him, crying, “Dad, I’m not going to be an only child forever, and I’m coming to live with you and Billy!”
“Vito, terrific news! Do you want a boy or a girl?” Lester demanded. “I hope it’s a boy, since you’ve already got Gigi.”
Spider clapped him on the back. “Well done, Vito! Gigi arriving for good and Billy having a baby all in one day—you’re a hell of a fast worker, fellow.”
“Vito, it’s thrilling! I’m so excited about your baby and Gigi is so delectable—you must be on top of the world! Did Billy tell you I was the first to guess?” Valentine asked.
“Vito, you’d better have a drink,” Billy drawled. “You’re pretty far behind the line of scrimmage.”
Automatically Vito accepted a glass of champagne, automatically he arranged his face in a smile and shook his head in a way that indicated that he couldn’t answer such a barrage of excitement, that he was speechless with delight. He sat down, with a look of a man in control of his life, and asked himself what kind of witch he had married, a woman who had metamorphosed herself into a prospective mother without the slightest communication with him, without a word of consultation or warning, without mutual agreement that they both were ready for a child or, at the very least, some private announcement. What kind of way was this to hear such news, having it babbled at him from everybody but Billy? And meanwhile, in a few hours, she had used her crafty wiles to put her unmistakable stamp on his daughter, at least he supposed it was still Gigi who called him “Dad,” to take it entirely upon herself to arrange Gigi’s life, and to announce her future to everybody.
“Cheers,” Billy said so quietly that the others couldn’t hear. She looked at him hard and raised her glass.
“Cheers?” Vito replied. “Cheers to the winner? I guess I’m the only one who didn’t realize that this was a contest.”
Scruples Two Page 6
