3
A week later, Maggie MacGregor and Vito sat having lunch in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Maggie had her customary command-center booth, placed to the left of the door, so that she could observe everyone who came and went. However, when she didn’t want to be interrupted by greetings she positioned herself with her back to the door, in a way that indicated to everyone in the industry that she was doing an interview and would welcome no intrusion. As she and Vito drank white wine and consumed their Cobb salads, a double operation was taking place in Maggie’s alarmingly alert mind. On the one hand she was listening intently, her round, Coca-Cola brown eyes focused and serious. In her capacity as a journalist she was the first, as was her right, to hear Vito’s earliest plans for the film production of The WASP, now that all the contracts to the rights to the book had been signed and Curt Arvey’s studio’s check for the down payment of half a million dollars had cleared the bank. On the other hand, in her capacity as a female, and one who had hankered after Vito for the four years after their affair ended, she was trying to figure out the exact nature of his mood. She was too tough an interviewer and too shrewd and intuitive a woman to be entirely convinced that Vito’s new project was the only thing on his mind.
There was some other quality, a kind of an edge or shadow, coupled with a forced over-intensity, an overinsistence in his apparent singlemindedness, that made every inquisitive hair on her head rise slightly off her scalp. The Vito Orsini she had first met in Rome four years ago, with his formidable aura of invincibility, was here in the flesh but not entirely in the spirit. Something was up with Vito, something not quite kosher, and she suspected that it didn’t have to do with movies or their production. Vito’s energy level, usually twice that of other men, lacked its full focus. His tone of voice sounded a shade less vibrant than usual, as if he’d forgotten to consume plutonium for breakfast. He still radiated the control of a maestro, a virtuoso, a man for whom the words “make haste slowly” would be utterly meaningless, but there was something.… something bitter?…. about him. Bitter or gloomy? Or possibly disappointed?
But how could he be any of these things, Maggie asked herself. He had received the ultimate accolade of the industry, and with his new picture still in the earliest, blue-sky phase of development nothing yet could have dimmed that glory. Hell, if a Best Picture Oscar didn’t give Vito total joy for at least a week, what would? And now he was about to make a film of the book for which the record-breaking price of a million and a half had been paid by Arvey’s studio. He should be flying. Well, she wasn’t the most powerful woman in television reporting because she hesitated to ask questions, Maggie reflected, and spoke with her usual tact.
“Vito, what the fuck’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing! You’re absurd, Maggie.”
“Have I ever been absurd since you’ve known me, pal?”
“A fool, yes. Infinitely foolish. But absurd … well, there’s always a first time.”
“Maybe so, but it hasn’t happened yet. What’s going on? And I’m not asking as a reporter, just as your friend.”
Vito drew a deep breath, put down his fork and allowed a silence to hang between them. Finally he spoke in an altered tone, acrid and touched with self-pity. “Maggie, could you just explain to me why it is that at the minute, at the absolute point in time that one thing finally goes right, something else goes wrong?”
“It’s the first rule of the universe. The double Big Bang theory. I think I was about ten when I figured that one out. Aren’t you a little old for such revelations?”
“Apparently not.”
“So it’s Billy.”
“I didn’t say that!”
“What else could it be? You only have time for one and a half things in your life at the same time, and since it isn’t the new picture it’s got to be your home life.”
“You want to know what her problem is?” Vito exploded. “She’s never found out that a man can’t possibly be successful and competitive in this business without being an egoist, without self-interest driving him every minute of every day, without a full measure of toughness and ruthlessness and utter determination to let nothing get in his way. Maggie, you know this town, you know that it takes balls like that, in fact that’s the minimum you have to have just to begin with. But Billy never had to fight hard for anything in her life. My God, Maggs, she’s one of the richest women who’s ever lived! Naturally she thinks that thoughtfulness and infinite consideration and floods of warm, emotional, tender puppyshit are standard equipment in a man, or if they’re not, they should be. I wonder how that first husband of hers ever managed to keep those illusions of hers intact, but of course he’d made his fortune by the time they met, the man was sixty and she was twenty-one, and he made a life out of spoiling her. Before me, Billy’s never known a self-made man who was in the middle of his career.”
“Is she giving you a hard time because you’re totally involved with the new picture? Come on, Vito, I know the amount of effort it took to make Mirrors a success, didn’t she learn anything then?”
“I guess so,” Vito said vaguely, shrugging.
“So it isn’t an attention problem,” Maggie said judiciously. “Sex? I never deal that out, although with you I’d really doubt it. Major, major doubts, Vito, all power to you. Money problems? Hardly. Hey, Vito, when you eliminate money and sex and attention, what’s left? Doesn’t she admire your character?” Maggie smiled wryly at her own last words. In her experience, producers’ wives learned early not to judge character too closely.
“She thinks I’m not a good father.”
“Oh, Vito, give me a break! I thought you were going to level with me.”
“It’s serious. I did a very stupid thing. I never told her that I had a kid by my first marriage—”
“You didn’t tell me, either,” Maggie interrupted in indignant astonishment. “Not the marriage and not the kid, but, after all, I’m not your wife. Billy must have been royally pissed.”
“Damn it, Maggs, it just didn’t come up, somehow. It has nothing to do with anything—the marriage was a mistake from the day it happened—the only problem was that it produced a child. She’s sixteen now, a good kid, but not anything I’d ever planned on, believe me. Gigi—that’s her name—showed up here unexpectedly the day after Billy found out that she was pregnant. The timing was as bad as it could have been.”
“You are not, definitely not, a good father, Vito.” Maggie shook her head so hard that every curly cowlick on her charming head bounced. “I have to agree with Billy.”
“But does that make me a total shit?”
“Not total. Not enough to seriously bother me. But Billy probably expected more of you.”
“She expects everything, Maggie, everything you can imagine, including the perfect papa, past, present and future. And for Billy, ‘expect’ is a verb that means ‘want.’ Her wants are her laws. I admit that I didn’t have an acceptable excuse, but I’m not a monster. So what happens? Right underneath the surface I feel this huge current of suspicion and doubt coming from her, Billy’s like a bird hatching an egg, ready to attack anyone who comes near. I wish I could just ignore it, it’s the last thing I need now, but it’s getting to me, even you noticed it.”
“Is Billy so perfect that she has a right to expect so much from you?” Maggie asked silkily.
“Now stop that! I know you don’t like her, Maggs, I shouldn’t be spilling all this stuff, not even to you, but there’s nobody else I trust. Obviously Billy’s not perfect, nobody is, God knows I’m not, but she’s my wife and she’s got to take me as I am.”
“ ‘Got’ or no ‘got,’ she obviously doesn’t.”
“Do you think that’s too much to ask?”
“How would I know, Vito? I’ve never been married.”
“Stay that way, there’s a lot to be said for it. Oh fuck, strike that, Maggie, I just don’t want to be made to feel that I’m in the wrong. Even when I am.”
�
��Oh, I do adore you. Vito! Not many men could say those words with such a sense of righteousness. You’re a rotten father, but at least you’re honest. When is Billy going to have this baby?”
“In six or seven months. As far as I understand it she’s barely pregnant, although with all the fuss you’d think the baby was going to be born today.”
“By the time that happens you’ll have turned into a decent enough father, believe me, I’ve seen the process time after time, even in this town.”
Maggie decided to digest Vito’s personal communications at her leisure. She’d never heard Vito talk at length about himself before. He’d never discussed his marriage except in the most casual and superficial way. Her new trove of information was too splendidly juicy even to think about now. And her interviewer’s timing told her it was time to change the subject.
“Tell me more about your conversations with John Huston,” she asked, shifting gears smoothly. “How come you haven’t signed Fifi Hill to direct the new picture? He did such a brilliant job on Mirrors. After all, he got an Oscar too.”
“Mirrors was a two-million-dollar picture, The WASP is going to come in at twenty, if I’m lucky. I need a major, major name director, somebody who’s made it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Fifi’s got a dozen good offers to pick from, so he can’t complain. But what a coup it would be if I can get Huston.”
“What a headache.”
“I can handle him.”
Not necessarily, thought Maggie with a swell of fizzing anticipation, violent curiosity and pleasurable wickedness rising in her belly, not if you can’t handle Billy Ikehorn, that spoiled, rich, ten-foot-tall twat you just had to go and marry when you could have had me.
“I’ve checked out the school situation, Mrs. O.,” Josie Speilberg told Billy when she came back from a solitary stroll under the path of sycamores that generally restored her soul to some semblance of tranquillity. “There are only two possibilities for Gigi. She can go to Westlake in Bel Air, or she can go to Uni, that’s University High, the nearest public school. I would certainly recommend Westlake.”
“Will they really take her in the middle of the second semester?”
“They’d be making a big exception for you, but yes, after they’d interviewed Gigi and given her their usual tests. You know, it’s considered the finest private school in Los Angeles and it’s all girls. Very suitable, I think.”
“What about Uni?”
“They have some three thousand students and a very high percentage of National Merit Scholarships. The children are mostly local, from Brentwood mainly, but there’s also a large and definite presence of inner city youngsters, most of them bused in. Of course it’s coed.” Josie sniffed meaningfully at the unsuitability of such raging democracy. Whatever Mrs. O. decided was law with her and had been ever since she first started working for her back in the days when Ellis Ikehorn had been slowly dying at the estate high in Bel Air, but she retained her right to indicate an opinion, if not to express it outright unless directly invited.
“Gigi would be better off at Uni,” Billy decided immediately. “She’d probably feel out of place at Westlake. It’s small, with a magnificent campus, but it’s filled with rich girls, the local elite. Didn’t Shirley Temple go there, and Candy Bergen?”
“Westlake also has its scholarship girls, like any other private school.”
“Uni, Josie, Uni. Where does the school bus stop?”
“There isn’t one, Mrs. O. When I called the L.A. School District, they hadn’t even heard of Holmby Hills. Nobody from around here goes to Uni, just absolutely nobody. They finally condescended to look us up on the map and said Gigi would have to take the city bus!” Josie bristled with outrage.
“She’ll have to be driven. Pick some reliable man on the staff and tell him to use one of the house cars,” Billy said, referring to the vans that shuttled back and forth, picking up various supplies for the kitchen and the garden. “As soon as Gigi learns to drive, she can take herself to school. I’m going to get her a little car, when she’s ready.”
“Of course, Mrs. O.” Josie wondered what vehicle her boss meant by “a little car.” An automobile, varying from a second-hand VW to a new BMW, was traditional for all the local boys over sixteen, but not necessarily the girls. Personally she thought it was silly to have such a big establishment without a chauffeur, but Los Angeles people rarely did. In Grosse Pointe, where Josie had started her work as a personal secretary, people kept their chauffeurs properly busy.
“Can Gigi start school on Monday?” Billy asked, as she left the room.
“Certainly. I’ll make all the arrangements.”
Who, Josie Speilberg wondered, should be tapped to drive Gigi to school? It wasn’t more than a ten-minute trip, but still somebody had to be responsible for getting her there on time and picking her up every afternoon. She took out the list of live-in household staff from her desk and pondered. She had hired them all herself, when Billy had moved into the house after Ellis Ikehorn’s death, and she ran a tight ship.
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 b
larney.”
“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.
Scruples Two Page 7
