Billy closed the gate behind her and walked forward, through the beds planted in drifts of white alyssum and primroses, narcissus, iris, tulips, lilies-of-the-Nile, cyclamen and ranunculus, all the flowers of spring dazzled by the moonlight that reached so softly into their hearts. She was a little tired now and she welcomed the old wooden bench that waited beneath an arbor of wisteria. The bench was her favorite place in the world, the place she came when she wanted to be alone, away from the house, from phones, from any hint of noise or hurry.
She hadn’t come here in weeks, she realized, more weeks than she could count. The roses hadn’t yet received their annual post-Christmas pruning the last time she remembered visiting the walled white garden, and now they were reaching the apex of their late April bloom, always their finest display of the year, after resting for three months during the short California winter.
The roses told Billy what she already knew. It was time to stop and think, one of her least natural occupations. It was time to take an inventory of her life instead of just rushing through it, time to leave the mental safe house of her restorative sleep.
Start at the beginning, she told herself, start at that dinner party at the Hôtel du Cap that Susan Arvey gave just a year ago; start with meeting Vito Orsini that night and falling in love with him; start with those short, urgent hours of courtship in which she had quickly declared her intention to marry him; start with the lunch at which her determination had carried the day and he had agreed to marry her; start with their flight back home, eleven uninterrupted hours, the longest stretch of time together they were to have until.… the longest stretch of time they were ever to have alone together, period, in bed or out.
Vito had plunged into casting Mirrors the day they’d returned from Cannes. After six wildly busy weeks, with a script almost finished, and casting completed, Vito had left her alone while he went location-hunting, and once the locations had been found in Northern California, she had joined him for the actual hurry-up-and-wait, frantically boring, slow-motion frenzy of film production, feeling so neglected by Vito, so overlooked, so barely tolerated as long as she didn’t make a nuisance of herself, that she had fled to Jessica in a fit of self-pity and rage, just as she had done only a few days ago.
And between trips to whine and complain and pour out her troubles to poor Jessica, Billy asked herself acidly, just what had she done with her life? She’d made friends with Dolly Moon, she’d watched from the sidelines as Spider and Valentine ran Scruples very competently without her, and she’d served as an emergency script girl while Mirrors was edited in her house. That script-girl stint, using her old secretarial skills, had been the only truly useful thing she’d done all year, besides demanding that Vito find a publicist for Dolly and thus, unknowingly, introducing Lester Weinstock into Dolly’s life. Other than those two good deeds, she had nothing to be proud of unless she counted rescuing Gigi when the reality was that Gigi had rescued her.
For months on end, she’d waited around endlessly, patiently, impatiently, but hanging around nevertheless for Vito to land somewhere for a few minutes so they could say hello, she’d been supportive and a good sport and a cheering section, a devoted, loving wife whose life was wrapped up in her husband’s success.… and an asshole. She was no more necessary to him than a third leg, a third arm or a third ball. Two of each made sense, three were unmanageable.
Vito wasn’t her husband, he was her lodger, Billy thought, someone who took up room in a highly superior boardinghouse and occasionally threw the landlady a quick, thorough and expert fuck. She had to grant him that. He made great love when he found a spare wedge of time, so long as the phone was disconnected. Why hadn’t she ever objected when he reconnected it immediately afterwards? She’d begged him to visit this garden with her, just once, but he’d never managed to free himself for the half hour it would have taken. Why hadn’t she tried harder to get him here?
Why—why bother to ask herself why, why bother to analyze what she’d done wrong and he’d done wrong? Why not just recognize that what she’d felt for Vito was infatuation, not love. She couldn’t be sitting here, reckoning up the past, her heart beating steadily and without anger, if she loved him now. She couldn’t think about him with the cold indifference, the vast contempt she felt, if she loved him still. The passing of infatuation left a barrenness of heart, a bruised soul. It was “an extravagantly foolish or unreasoning passion,” as Jessica, the dictionary freak, had once called it. Yes indeed, that just about summed it up, Billy thought, without a tremor. Everybody has to eat a peck of dirt in his life, or so she’d heard, and she supposed everybody had to go through an infatuation and out the other end. She just wished she’d gotten it over with earlier, at fourteen instead of thirty-five.
Except for Gigi. Billy felt a sudden surge of savage rage rise up and fill her with such heat that she couldn’t sit still any longer. She paced rapidly around the flower beds, tearing a rose apart with trembling fingers and flinging the petals into the small central pool. Gigi. The way Vito had behaved toward Gigi was unforgivable, permanently and forever unforgivable. Even now he ignored her except for one or two isolated, perfunctory phone calls. There were no possible buts, no extenuating circumstances, no defense. If Gigi hadn’t had a great mother, God only knows what would have happened to her. Yes, Vito was a busy man, Vito was preoccupied with his career, but none of that could explain how he had overlooked Gigi. The only explanation—not an excuse but an explanation—was that, in one very basic sense, he was a bad man. A bad man who made a bad father. Any good man, any decent man, might not necessarily have what it took to be a good father, but he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be a bad father.
Billy quickly closed the door to the walled garden behind her and locked it. She took the most direct path back to the house, not noticing the moonlight filtering down on her through the old trees, not paying any attention to the archways and glades and ponds and meadows, the hedges and vistas that stretched on all sides as she almost ran in the eagerness of having reached a decision. How early, she wondered, would it be all right to telephone Josh Hillman? It was almost four in the morning now, and her lawyer was an early riser. Still, she had to wait at least two hours until she could call and instruct him to put into motion the steps toward a divorce and, most particularly, the steps that would make her Gigi’s legal guardian. By California law the divorce would take just six months, by next October she’d be Billy Ikehorn again, thank God. Waiting till six to phone Josh would test her patience, but at least she was certain of the essential element of her plans. Vito wouldn’t put up the slightest opposition. He wouldn’t dare.
During the next year Billy was deeply immersed in the construction of the new Scruples in New York and Chicago. True to her vow, she had made Spider and Valentine partners in the new stores without any other investment than their talent. It was her way of showing them how much she valued them, of finally thanking them properly for their indispensable roles in the success of Scruples in Beverly Hills. It also served the purpose of making certain that she’d never lose them to her envious, always opportunistic competition. Josh Hillman maintained that there was no legal necessity for her to be so excessively generous, but she had insisted, and no one knew better than he when it was useless to argue with her.
Spider was now hard at work night and day, dealing with the architects and designers Billy had hired to create the new stores as quickly as possible. He used her executive jet to shuttle from New York to Chicago to make sure that the basic Scruples concept of a store as a shopper’s perfect playground, a great caravan of choice, a never-ending source of real and fantasy gratification, was maintained in every detail. Valentine hired a cadre of buyers to assist her in covering the European collections, although she still had to make the final decisions in Paris, Milan and London, a rigorous test of judgment she couldn’t leave to others, for Scruples’ customers were buying more foreign designers’ ready-to-wear than ever. Both she and Spider were often needed in the Bever
ly Hills store, she to design custom clothes and he to put his stamp of approval on the most important purchases of their biggest customers, to whom his unsparing advice had become indispensable.
Billy’s travels took her to Europe, Hawaii and Hong Kong, where she spent a vast amount of money buying superbly located sites on which future Scruples stores immediately went into the planning stage. She was so busy that when she came back to California she was eager to spend most of her evenings with Gigi, although she forced herself to accept an occasional invitation to a party. Her interest in meeting an attractive new man, should such a rare bird be flying free in Los Angeles, was nonexistent; emotionally, Billy felt as if she’d found a comfortably refrigerated room and shut the door behind her with relief. If a healing process was taking place, she was unaware of it; it seemed to Billy that her marriage to Vito had been essentially too shallow a union to require major repair. Its loss left her feeling empty rather than bitter. Vito’s open liaison with Maggie MacGregor was a matter of no interest to her, which surely proved that she was cured of him. The very fibers of her heart seemed to have dried out, she knew she had become more cynical about the possibilities of happiness, but reason told her that she was not wrong. Mentally she shrugged and turned to the constant interest and excitement of the expansion of her retailing empire.
Spider and Valentine didn’t have the time they needed to look for a proper house, so Spider had sold his small bachelor place and moved into Valentine’s West Hollywood penthouse. About once every two months, Valentine found a minute to fret that they weren’t living a proper bourgeois married life, that her spices were growing stale and she hadn’t made a decent pot au feu for him since leaving New York, but Spider was enthralled with the penthouse in which Valentine had magically reproduced the mood of the Manhattan apartment in which she had lived when they first met. There they had confided in each other the disappointments of their romantic problems during the years in which they had been loving friends, but never lovers.
That first tiny apartment, its furniture covered in faded pink and white toile de Jouy, lit by red-shaded lamps, in which the powerful nostalgia of Piaf’s singing was so often heard in the background, had never failed to remind him of Paris. Now he had a piece of Paris in Los Angeles, a make-believe Paris in which the single most authentic and unmistakably French element was Valentine herself, a sorceress whose green eyes were filled with whimsical, witty life, her ever-changing fund of expressions crossing her white face under her curly, unmanageable toss of hair that looked as if she’d dipped lace in paprika. He could live on take-out and restaurant food forever, he assured his wife, he hadn’t married her for her cooking—well, not entirely—and certainly he hadn’t married to live the bourgeois life. What was that all about anyway, he’d ask, since neither of them was what he thought of as bourgeois? Comfort, she’d answer, and regular habits and a sense of being really and truly settled down. Not this almost-bohemian existence, not all this travel, and certainly not, no never ever, take-out food.
The first public screening of The WASP took place on a night in late April of 1979. Susan Arvey had made a print of the picture available for a gala preview for the Women’s Guild of St. John’s Hospital, at five hundred dollars a ticket. This annual fund-raising event traditionally consisted of a black-tie dinner followed by a preview of a yet-unreleased and unreviewed, but major picture. The dinner had been a quick sell-out since everyone who had read the book, which included everyone who still read current fiction, had been itching to see the movie, the filming of which had taken place with a tight lid on publicity that only made them more curious.
After the evening had ended, as Susan Arvey settled down to remove her makeup, she found that she was still humming the music from the picture. She unpinned her long, naturally blond hair, which had been arranged in the smooth, elegantly prim chignon that was her trademark in a town of full, tinted, teased, sprayed hair, and inspected herself carefully in the mirror, as meticulously as she did after she’d finished dressing, for she held herself to a standard that decreed that her makeup be as impeccable when she returned as when she left home. She was not disappointed, nor had she expected to be, although she would never fail to double-check her immaculate prettiness, a prettiness so complete that it made many genuine beauties seem unfinished and raw. Her features were small and dainty and perfectly sculptured, set in a delicately rounded baby face, a legacy from her mother, an actress from Minnesota whose Swedish ancestors had made her one of the few genuine blondes ever to reach Hollywood.
At forty, Susan Arvey looked like a woman whose thirty-fifth birthday lay somewhere in the future, but her mental processes and her thirst for power were inherited directly from her father, Joe Farber, once a redoubtable leader of the film industry. Susan was Joe Farber’s only child, born to his second wife when he was in his late fifties. Her parents had brought her up to the ermine and the purple, her father imparting lore of the golden days of Hollywood to her while she was still a small child, her mother, hastily retired from an undistinguished career, watching exactingly over her chick to ensure that she made full use of her advantages. Susan had been taught to run a house with the fastidiousness of the Duchess of Windsor, she had been groomed to marry well, marry young, and, above all, not to marry “a piece of talent.”
At nineteen she had accepted Curt Arvey, son of a studio owner and an established, rising executive of thirty-three in his father’s business. Joe Farber had approved. Now, twenty-one years later, Susan had long been in possession of all the necessary traits and equipment for dominance in Hollywood society. She was one of the industry’s most accomplished and feared social leaders. The coveted invitation to her black-tie dinner parties, at which she casually used her mother’s huge collection of priceless Chinese export porcelain, placed a couple within a circle that made up, in Hollywood, the equivalent of a regal court. Thereafter the favored couple lived on the point of a sword, for Susan was capable of making intimates of them and then, after years of friendship, dropping them without their ever knowing why. In point of fact, she didn’t need any good reason for her actions, except to prove once again that she could exercise an authority that she was prevented from using openly at her husband’s studio.
Did any of the women at tonight’s benefit realize that although she could produce a print of The WASP at will, her ability to influence her husband’s business decisions was severely limited? Susan wondered as she continued to check herself in the mirror. After Billy Ikehorn she was the best-dressed woman in Los Angeles; she possessed the most respected backhand on any tennis court in Bel Air, and she owned one of the finest collections of first-rate French Impressionists on either coast, yet she knew herself as an unfulfilled woman as she turned from side to side to study her delicate profile.
Her days were full. Every morning she had a seven o’clock tennis lesson. At eight-fifteen she took her shower, and by nine-thirty, after she’d skimmed the L.A. Times and the New York Times, she and her social secretary began two hours of phone work, steadily calling the women with whom she lunched, planned charity galas, and dined. Afternoons were devoted to shopping for new clothes for these lunches, balls and dinners, for fitting the clothes she’d already bought, and for a strenuous daily two-hour workout in her private gym, followed by a massage.
Yet in spite of this life in which not a minute was solitary or unemployed, Susan Arvey lived with constant frustration, for her birthright had been a giant appetite for business ascendancy that had been thwarted, not just by her gender but by her father. By the time she had reached the age of twenty-six, both Joe Farber and his wife were dead. She had inherited a vast fortune, but it had been left in a trust so constructed that it was unbreakable. Her trustees had invested a good portion of her inheritance in the studio her husband had now taken over from his father, and when Curt Arvey took his company public, Susan found herself her husband’s largest stockholder. However, all meaningful, heavy-duty muscle in the film business had been denied her because
her father hadn’t trusted her to manage her own money. Only through the unsatisfying proxy of marriage could she try to impose herself on the doings of the studio, an influence that at best could never give her a position of equality.
As Susan brushed her hair she couldn’t keep from brooding on this permanent grievance, the galling, infuriating, thwarting prohibition of a lifetime, an impotence for which there was no cure. As the mere wife of the boss, not the boss herself, she was forced to sugar-coat her demands, indeed to stifle all but the most important of them. If she hadn’t been married to Curt, her stock would have guaranteed her a recognized, major position in the studio’s policymaking. However, if she wished to stay successfully united to a man as stubborn and prickly as Curt, it was necessary to restrain herself, to stay within certain well-marked boundaries, for he could take umbrage even at her most tactful interventions. Yet divorce was not an option, even if she had wanted one, for a stable marriage is essential to a woman who intends to continue to rule within the film community.
Although Curt had now far surpassed her father’s financial success, Susan often reminded herself, with an inward sniff that it was only in today’s devalued dollars, her father’s money had been made when you could keep it. The Arveys’ twenty-one-year marriage existed in a state of turbulence. Curt Arvey couldn’t reject out of hand his wife’s deftly disguised reactions to his decisions. Yet, like two soldiers from opposing armies, cast up alone on a desert island, their sniping at each other made for a more distracting and interesting interchange than if they had been making a predictable common cause around a campfire.
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