Scruples Two

by Judith Krantz

  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.”
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br />   “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.”

  Billy stood up, as tall as he was, and looked him in the eye without a hint of an expression on her face. “It seems to be starting out that way, doesn’t it?” she said calmly, and walked out of the room, shutting and locking the door to the bedroom firmly behind her.

  Billy sat in the window seat in her dressing room, to which she had retreated after Vito’s tirade, so dumbfounded that she didn’t move for an hour. Finally she picked up the phone and dialed Josie Speilberg at home.

  “Josie, I have to fly to New York unexpectedly tomorrow on Scruples business. Can you possibly do me a great favor and sleep in one of the guest rooms until I get back? Mr. Orsini’s schedule is irregular, and I don’t want to leave Gigi here alone with just the staff after you go home.”

  “Of course, Mrs. O. No problem. There’s no reason to worry about Gigi. She’s got Jean-Luc totally in her power. After school they’re working on the basic steps that go into making French sauces. She’s on the phone with her friends for hours every day. I don’t know when she finds time for her homework, but she does. I’ll keep Gigi company at dinner, and get her to bed on time.”

  “Could you call my pilot for me, please? Tell him I’ll want to take off by nine, and send a car and driver here at eight. I’ll be all packed and ready to go. And order another car in New York.”

  “Shall I make hotel reservations?”

  “Not unless I call you back. I’ll probably stay with Mrs. Strauss. You can reach me there.”

  “Certainly, Mrs. O. Have a good trip.”

  “Thank you, Josie. Good night.”

  Billy hung up and dialed Jessica Thorpe Strauss on Fifth Avenue.

  “Jessie, darling, I’m terribly sorry to call so late … Oh, good, I was afraid you might be asleep. Listen, I’ve got to see you. Can I come tomorrow and stay for a few days? Oh, wonderful! I’ll get there just before dinner. No, I can’t talk about it now. See you tomorrow.”

  Galvanized by having taken action, Billy started to put a few things into a suitcase. When she was packed she unlocked the bedroom door. There was no one in the sitting room. She got some tomato juice, fruit and crackers from the butler’s pantry, and returned to her room, not bothering to lock the door. Where Vito would sleep tonight was of no concern to her. After his charming little performance tonight she assumed it would not be in any house of hers.

  “I’d have bashed him with a bookend,” Jessica exclaimed, “and if I’d killed him by accident, no jury in the world would have convicted me. How could you have listened to all that load of vile crap and stayed so calm?”

  “I still can’t figure it out,” Billy answered, as unnaturally calm as she had been for the entire flight to New York. “The worse he got, the more I froze. Every word seemed to sever a nerve, a connection between us. I looked at him raving away, twisting everything that had happened, making up stuff that hadn’t happened, and there seemed to be an actual sheet of glass between us.… as if we were in different rooms.… as if he was on a stage and I was in the audience. It was Vito, but it wasn’t Vito. I couldn’t believe I was married to that man. And I still can’t. It’s so eerie. I don’t know how I should be feeling. We’ve never had a fight like that before. I still feel more numb than anything. All I could do was mock him, I couldn’t get up any fight. And now I can’t seem to feel as angry as I know I should be. Do you suppose it’s because of the baby? A protective cocoon or something?”

  Billy sipped on a cup of the mint tea Jessica had brewed in the lush little boudoir she called her “office.” It was the one room in her large apartment overlooking Central Park where no one was allowed to enter, a necessity considering the constant importuning of her five children and her husband, David, who was away at an important investment-banking function in Boston. Jessica trained her myopic eyes on her friend. Billy’s last bewildered words alarmed her more than any of the vile things Vito had said.

  “Do you remember,” Jessica said carefully, “when I came out to visit you last summer and you told me how desperately you hated having to be the producer’s perfect, invisible, useless wife while Vito was shooting Mirrors on location?”

  “I’m not likely to forget.”

  “And I asked you why you didn’t get a divorce and you said you were absolutely mad about him—in fact, your exact words were that you ‘couldn’t live without the fucker’?”

  “And then you told me it was just post-honeymoon depression and that in a few months I wouldn’t even remember it,” Billy said. “Maybe you’re not the person I should always flee to for advice.”

  “Possibly, but who else is there?”

  Billy smiled quizzically at her tiny friend. She’d been getting advice from Jessica Thorpe since 1962, Jessica Thorpe from the oldest of Rhode Island families; Jessica Thorpe of the Pre-Raphaelite hair, the lavender eyes, the summa cum laude, Vassar-trained brain and the irresistible droopiness of each of her delicate little features; Jessica Thorpe, who had turned into her best friend in the first five minutes of their meeting, who had educated her thoroughly about men and sex and seen her safely through all the affairs she’d had before she met Ellis Ikehorn.

  “Nobody. You’re stuck with me,” Jessica said briskly. “Tell me this, if you weren’t in a foaming rage, how come you jumped into your plane and came straight here? We could have talked about it on the phone.”

  “No, I had to see you. I had to have a reality check. Am I that person he said I am? You’re the only grown-up I trust to be honest with me except—well, maybe Spider Elliott, and I certainly couldn’t ask him. I know that my money keeps me from having to deal with the problems everyone else has, so.… well, could he be right? Am I that self-righteous and self-absorbed?”

  “Your money doesn’t stop you from being human, Billy. Don’t start thinking that way. Money can only prevent you from having to worry about the material things that everybody else worries about, money gives you more time to worry about the essentials.”

  “Ah, Jessie.…”

  “No, I’m not saying that just to make you feel better. I knew you when you didn’t have a bean, and you haven’t changed in the important elements of your character, except you’ve grown up a little. Sure, you have your own jet and a hundred and twenty-five gardeners and the biggest, best-stuffed closet and fanciest store in the world. You’re demanding and perfectionistic and obsessive, but you were that way when I met you, you just couldn’t afford to act on it. You’re still Billy Winthrop, you’re generous and loyal and your instincts are basically decent and you’ve never been self-righteous in your life. You were a wonderful wife to Ellis and you’ve tried like hell to be a wonderful wife to Vito. Of course you’re self-absorbed from time to time, but tell me who the devil isn’t the center of her own universe? I still am, and I’m proud of it. With five kids, my healthy self-interest is the only thing that keeps me sane. Do you think they are
n’t each the center of their own personal universes?” Jessica blew her permanently too-long bangs out of her eyes with an indignant puff.

  “When you get pregnant for the first time at thirty-five,” she continued, “it’s totally normal to be involved with how you feel. What’s not normal is Vito’s anger. That’s what bothers me the most. Everything he said came from anger, and I just don’t see what right he has to be angry at you. I wonder … is it possible that he’s afraid of something and is covering it up with anger?”

  “The only thing in his life now is WASP.… Why would he be afraid?”

  “He’s made nothing but low-budget pictures for eighteen years, right? When you met Vito he had some successes and some failures behind him, but basically he was hanging on by a thread. Remember how you told me that when he met you he cheerfully admitted that his last three pictures had lost money? Mirrors was a fluke, a lovely little picture, but a very long shot to win the Oscar. Suddenly, literally overnight, Vito’s a giant success. Could it be that? The change, the challenge?”

  “From being afraid to being angry to being mean … to me? Really rotten, shitty mean? Would success cause that? Is that a logical progression in any way?”

  “I just don’t know. I don’t know Vito at all, Billy. It certainly wouldn’t work that way for my David—I’m just asking questions, playing detective.”

  “No.” Billy shook her head decisively. “Vito’s always been so fearless, Jessie. That was the first quality I recognized in him, a fearlessness. He’s a man who never worried about ifs, he just forged on with it, making it happen. That’s been the way he’s been working on WASP, full speed ahead, no questions asked, a sense of his time having come at last. No, it isn’t fear, I wish it were that simple. Then I could begin to understand him.”