“Elliott and I have been married for two years,” Valentine answered matter-of-factly.
“I used to know him … in fact, he took the first test shots of me when I started modeling. In a way, I guess you could say that he started me on my career.”
“You could say that,” Valentine agreed, “but any other photographer could have done the same—Elliott said it was impossible to get a bad shot of you. I remember when Harriet Toppingham first saw those test shots at Fashion and Interiors—Elliott said that she called you ‘killingly beautiful’—did you know that?”
“No,” Melanie laughed, delighted. “Harriet was always over the top, absolutely excessive—but a great editor. Goodness, you must have known Spider well for him to have told you that, such a silly detail, and it happened at least four years ago. I’m amazed that he still remembers.”
Valentine took out her tape measure. “Let me get some measurements before I forget,” she said. “Just stand still.” Deftly she began measuring the crucial distances from the nape to the top of the spinal column, from there to the precise end of the shoulder bone, from the shoulder bone to the point of the elbow, from the elbow to the wrist, from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger, measurements that were only the beginning of what she would need, yet measurements she trusted no assistant to take.
“It wasn’t that he remembered exactly,” Valentine said, continuing to speak as she plied her tape measure. “You see, we were neighbors in our little lofts, and at night Elliott told me everything that had happened to him during the day. I was weak-minded enough to cook dinner for him any evening that he wasn’t going out, but it was either that or let the poor foolish man starve to death. The day he met you, he told me that he’d blurted out that he was in love with you when he didn’t even know your name! He said he surprised you so much the only way he could get you to stay in the studio was to make you a great liverwurst and Swiss cheese sandwich on rye bread,” Valentine’s voice rang with humor. “I was frankly impressed that under such circumstances of high emotion he still had enough presence of mind to make a decent sandwich, when all he could ever think to make for me, when I came crawling to him for comfort at the end of one of my own tragic love affairs, was his eternal Campbell’s cream of tomato soup with Ritz crackers.”
“He told you about falling in love with me?”
“But of course,” Valentine said with a shrug. “We had no secrets from each other. I suppose that sounds strange, in fact I know it does, a woman and a man who tell each other everything, who continue to have no secrets from each other, but that’s what happens when you don’t start out with love, just with plain, ordinary friendship.”
“Ordinary friendship? It sounds like more than that to me.”
“Oh no, truly not. In fact, at first I didn’t even like Elliott … or rather I didn’t approve of his habit of falling passionately, head-over-heels in and out of love with half of the most beautiful models in New York. I’m sure you must have realized that was his pattern at the time you met him. How could I put my faith in a man with such a record of going from woman to woman, of loving wildly here and loving wildly there, almost indiscriminately, so long as the girl was beautiful? He had to go a long way to win my trust, fond as I became of him.”
“How … did he convince you … that you could trust him?” Melanie’s faltering question seemed to come from a distance, so thin was her voice.
“Ah, I must not tell you that,” Valentine said, smiling gently. “You would be too flattered, and if we are going to work together well, I can’t become yet another person who flatters you.”
“But it had something to do with me? Come on, Valentine, you have to tell! It’s not fair to hint at it like that, it’s really wrong of you. If you weren’t going to tell me, you shouldn’t have brought it up.”
Valentine laid down her tape measure. “You know, Melanie, you’re right. There are some things that Elliott told me that he should have kept to himself. I should have kept silent.”
“But I insist! I promise you I won’t be upset … since he told you everything, why should he have kept one thing back? What was it, Valentine?”
“Well … you’ll remember that after you’d finished your first picture, there was a long wait before Mr. Cope decided what your next career move should be?”
“How could I forget? I went crazy with the waiting, but what does that have to do with it, with your trusting Spider?”
“At that time, Elliott hadn’t seen you since you left for Hollywood, since you left him rather suddenly one afternoon in New York—ah, Melanie, I had to comfort him over that shock, let me assure you. Poor Elliott was quite broken up about it for a while—weeks and weeks, yes, as long as that before he found another love—but in the end it was good for his male ego to find that there was at least one girl who could say no … Where was I? Oh yes, quite a while after that time when you came to see him at home here in Los Angeles, and …” Valentine’s voice trailed off. She blushed and turned her eyes away from Melanie’s face.
“What about it?” Melanie demanded roughly.
“Melanie, of course it was natural, was it not, that you two made love? And that it was delicious for you? Both of you. I understood perfectly why you wanted to resume your old romance with Elliott, so many girls found him difficult, almost impossible to forget … but when he told me about it, and—how can I put it?—how he was forced to explain to you that his feelings for you were over for him, no matter how good the lovemaking was—well … I think the fact that he had been totally cured of you, which is something I imagine no other man who ever loved you could say—that it was then, at that time, that I began—slowly, I grant you—to trust him, to believe that perhaps he had grown up and had recovered from his addiction to loving every beauty who came his way. Does that answer your question?”
“Fully,” Melanie said, in a strained attempt at humor.
“And I have not flattered you too much?”
“I’m not sure, Valentine. I’ll have to think it over.”
“Bravo! So, let us begin. I’ve made some preliminary sketches, some rough ideas, that I had no intention of showing Mr. Cope until you gave me your own opinions. It is you, not he, who will wear the clothes, so it is you, not he, I design for. Come to my desk and I’ll show them to you.”
As Melanie turned the sheets of paper over, examining them closely, Valentine felt surprised at herself, with an inner merriment that she still had so much to learn about her own emotions and abilities. She left Melanie rapt over her designs while she treated herself to a rare cigarette. She always kept a pack of Gauloises Bleus in her office for times when she wanted to retreat into thought and now she felt a sudden need for one as she sorted out her emotions. First of all, she hadn’t dreamed that she could manage to so skillfully misrepresent her own Elliott as a man who had been in love with many women, not just two. And in the second place she had not known until today just how violently jealous she had been of Melanie Adams. Back when Elliott had been involved with Melanie, she, Valentine, had almost managed to convince herself that she thought of him only as a friend, although now she knew that she had loved him from the day she first saw him. And finally, in spite of all the confusion of these past emotions, she knew that she would make the once-hated Melanie truly magical clothes, that she would surpass herself.
Valentine resolved to create for Melanie clothes that would make the poor lovely creature less sad. She would never have believed, until today, that the strongest emotion she would feel for Melanie Adams was pity.
Susan Arvey left Mark Hampton’s office humming, her step as light as a debutante’s. As soon as the famous decorator could manage to take the time, he would be flying out to California to take a good long look at their house before he came back to New York and started to plan to redo it from stem to stern, from head to toe, from laundry room to drawing room. And what a nice man he was! His knowledge of the history of great interior design of the past was encyclopedic, yet
his relationship to the needs of today was so sensitive that for someone like her, who insisted on out-and-out grandeur, yet domesticated grandeur, so that comfort ruled all else, there could be no better choice. He understood to their depths the uses of extravagance and luxury. And she responded deeply to the last thing he had said to her during their consultation: “The only dogma worth observing is one that is self-imposed.” Actually, he’d said it about the way to decorate bedrooms, but she thought it was an observation that could be broadened and used for life itself.
Waiting in the early-evening rush for the light to change so that she could cross Fifth Avenue, she felt lightheaded and giddy as she always did when she abruptly found herself walking on a New York street after a trip from Los Angeles. She visited the city frequently, but she always forgot how many people there were in Manhattan, each one competing for his little bit of space, actually afraid that the light would change before he managed to get across in safety.
Thank God, Susan thought, as she always did on the first day in Manhattan, that she had been born on the Coast. In New York, even Joe Farber’s daughter and sole heiress would only be one of many hundreds of equally rich women with an always-to-be-reestablished claim on society’s attention. If she lived here she would be flung into a swarming pool of women like herself, competing, as anxiously as these people waiting for the light, for her place in the fashionable world. She would have to get in the ring, year after year, with women whose money came from ancient family fortunes, women with far more pride of birth than she, and with women with new fortunes made in banking, in industry, on Seventh Avenue, in publishing, in literally every single one of the great money-making businesses of America whose owners lived in New York.
In Hollywood, that single-industry town, where her father had been among the handful of financial giants and her husband was, in today’s terms, another, she could hardly have helped rising to the top. Her success had been assured unless she’d gone out of her way to avoid it. Susan knew that; any woman who calculated as clearly as she could not help but accept that particular fact. Nevertheless, she had dedicated her energies to making sure that she was always at the top of the top; she competed for ascendancy even when it wasn’t strictly necessary, aching daily for more power than male-dominated Hollywood would allow her.
Yet … yet … in New York a woman could sometimes seize her own power, not have it come to her as a reflection of the power of her father or her husband as it almost always must in Los Angeles. In New York a woman could run a magazine or an advertising agency or a fashion business, and owe nothing to a man.
But to do that would mean becoming a working woman, a career woman, a woman who had to risk failure, Susan Arvey realized, and such a life didn’t appeal to her at all. No, she didn’t mind getting up early for a tennis lesson, but to go to an office! As the British used to say, “It wouldn’t suit.”
When she reached the apartment at the Sherry Netherland that the Arveys had bought years ago, she phoned home. It was almost dinnertime in New York, afternoon in Los Angeles.
“Yes, Curt, I’m fine. I’ve just left him … he couldn’t be nicer. Yes, darling, we decided to do the whole house. Redecorating keeps you young, out of a rut. After all, you wouldn’t want me to get so restless that I’d sell the paintings and start a whole new collection of those modern artists, would you? Oh, it’ll be about three more days before I can leave … so much to do. How are you, sweetie? Feeling better? Good. You should try to forget about that film entirely. Everyone else has. Tonight? I’m doing the usual. Natalie’s discovered a play that’s so far Off Broadway I think it’s in Newark. Don’t worry, Curt, of course I’m arranging for a limo, you don’t think I’d get into a New York cab, do you? That’s like shutting yourself in a closet with a maniac. I’ll call tomorrow. Take care, try to get some sleep tonight. ’Bye, darling.”
Her wifely duties completed, Susan Arvey took off all her jewelry and put it in the safe she had had installed in her closet. She made another phone call, had a short conversation and fixed a time later in the evening.
As she took a long, self-indulgent bath, she thought fondly of Natalie Eustace, who had been her roommate during her freshman year at college, before she left to marry. Curt loathed Natalie’s artistic pretensions, her delight in plays that should never have been written, much less produced. He was always grateful when he didn’t have to spend an evening with her. In fact, he hadn’t seen Natalie in years, for Susan spared him, making dates with Natalie only when Curt wasn’t in New York with her. Curt realized that she needed to go to New York more than he did, considering her interest in art, given her great collection. There were so many exhibits to see, so many new galleries to check out, so many auctions that were promising, to say nothing of revisiting her favorite museums. He could live without all that perfectly well, thank you, Curt told her, but if she enjoyed it, why not?
Why not indeed? Susan Arvey echoed, inspecting herself carefully in the mirror on her dressing table. She had been just thirty-eight, an unusually pretty and young-looking thirty-eight, when she’d had her first facelift.
For years she’d been on the alert for the right moment, the absolutely first instant at which she would be able to notice the effects of gravity on her chin line. Every day she automatically pulled the skin of her jaw and cheeks back toward her ears and then let it relax into its normal configuration. The day on which it relaxed a certain amount too much, an amount that was far too little to be apparent to anyone but her, was the day on which Susan had made her appointment to have a consultation with the plastic surgeon in Palm Springs who was so much more discreet and so much more expensive than anyone in Beverly Hills.
The Good Doctor, as she thought of him, had told her that very few women were as smart as she was, clever enough to come to him as early as she had. Usually they waited until repair work was necessary to the naked eye. In the past, he said regretfully, even as little as ten years ago, doctors usually considered it wise to wait to do plastic surgery until they could make a difference in their patients’ looks. This meant that the work would be noticed, when the whole point was that it should never be noticed. Her facelift would be done at precisely the perfect amount of time before it was needed, he said, pleased at the prospect of perfect conditions. The Good Doctor assured her that he would do such a gentle, subtle job that not even the most sharp-eyed and suspicious of her friends would ever guess. In addition, the recuperation from the inevitable bruises and swelling would be exceptionally quick and easy. The Good Doctor had lived up to all his promises.
Susan Arvey told Curt that she was going to a health spa for a few weeks of diet and intensive exercise. When she returned from the desert, where she had stayed at the Doctor’s intensely private postoperative clinic, seeing no one but nurses and the Doctor himself, Curt observed that the spa had put the sparkle back in her eyes. Now, at forty-one, she looked exactly as she had at thirty-four. She assumed she always would, except for those inevitable, really rather attractive “character” lines that returned sooner or later as time passed and she used her facial muscles to smile or frown. The Good Doctor was only a few years older than she, and he had two brilliant young surgeons training under him, so if she kept up her tennis and her workouts and her massage, why should she ever look much older than thirty-four?
Susan Arvey inspected her naked body, as always with an unsparing, ferocious, suspicious eye for detail. She’d started out with a splendid, slender, full-breasted body, and thanks to her never-ending attention it remained as lithe, supple and well-toned as it had ever been. Thank God she’d never had children; that damage was irreparable. She never exposed her skin to the sun after her early tennis lesson, so the skin of her body was like a girl’s. She was a great deal stronger than she looked; for years her exercise had been directed at building her flexibility, and her flat abdominal muscles and long, shapely arm and leg muscles betrayed no bulk.
While she arranged her blond hair into its timeless chignon, as she ap
plied her simple makeup, Susan chuckled at the prospect of still looking thirty-four at fifty-four. Obviously, by that time people would realize that she must have had some “work” done, simply because they would have known her for so long, but they wouldn’t be able to gossip about specifics, and actually pinpoint the day and the doctor, the way they relished doing about every other woman in town who suddenly looked “rested.”
Susan went to the kitchen of the five-room apartment, took out the chicken salad that room service had left in the fridge for her, and ate it quickly, without interest. She dressed in the quietest and most conservative of her expensive dresses and left the hotel, greeting the friendly doorman as she always did. As soon as she was out of his sight she hailed a cab and gave an address on Second Avenue. The taxi drew up at an unimpressive modern building with no doorman and a self-service elevator. There she went to the eleventh floor and unlocked the door to a small apartment she had owned for years, an apartment she had had furnished by Bloomingdale’s design department. The apartment had been bought by her trustees at her direction, and furnished and maintained in the same way. Her trustees had as little curiosity about the apartment as her husband had access to her trustees.
It had a pleasant enough living room, she thought, as she always did, comfortable and in good taste, a living room that any well-paid, single working woman might be able to afford. She turned on all the air conditioners, for the air was stale, and went quickly into the bedroom of the apartment. There her heart started to beat even more heavily than it had been beating from the time she had left the Sherry Netherland.
The bedroom was not average, not ordinary, not easily affordable, and quite certainly not even in good taste. It was shut off from any connection to the outside world by lavish and thickly hung draperies that completely covered the walls and windows in feminine tones of light and dusky pinks, with an occasional touch of deep red. The room contained several cunningly placed screens and mirrors and a large bed with an elaborate wrought-iron headboard and footboard, piled high with pillows and made up with silk sheets, a bedroom that was entirely hedonistic and complicated, a bedroom that kept secrets.
Scruples Two Page 15
