They had far more money than they needed anyway. Dolly couldn’t believe how much her agent had managed to get her—on her firm instructions—when she’d recently signed a three-picture contract with the Arvey Studio. It was ridiculous, all that money being paid to her, money that was, in her own unvoiced opinion, basically based on her giggle, no matter how the critics raved on about her acting, but there it was, and here she was, aching, quivering, intent, with the madness of an addict, on obtaining a quick fix of chopped chicken liver. On a Ritz cracker.
Incentive? If Billy were around she’d call her up and get a quick, good old-fashioned lecture on the exact number of very seriously bad calories in one ounce of chopped liver that would set her straight, but Billy hadn’t been back in the United States for close to a year. She wrote from time to time, and phoned on the odd occasion, but somehow she seemed to have … floated away … for the last six months or so. There had been a slackening off in their communication, nothing to get alarmed about, since Billy seemed to be so delighted with her Parisian life, in fact she seemed downright overjoyed every time she and Dolly talked. There must be something very wonderful about Paris, Dolly decided, for Billy had sounded quite unlike herself. She had sounded relaxed, and if there was one thing she knew about Billy Ikehorn, it was that she didn’t relax, not ever. She couldn’t, it was genetically impossible. Something to do with Boston, perhaps, or having been fat until she was twenty. Oh, Billy, where are you when I need you?
“Dolly, the twins are being dressed. Dolly, come upstairs and get made up and combed out. The photographer is ready, everything is ready, and from three to four Nanny says we can count on the twins to be angels. Dolly,” Janie Davis demanded, ready to call for help if necessary, “it’s two-fifteen now.”
“Hold my hand, Janie,” Dolly said, closing her eyes tightly on the door to the fridge, behind which stood the ultimate object of her amorous fantasies. “Hold my hand and lead me out of the kitchen. Pull as hard as you have to. I’ll be okay as soon as I get upstairs.”
Spider Elliott looked up from the letter he was having so much difficulty writing and ordered another bottle of SeyBrew, the local beer he’d discovered in a comfortable café in Victoria, on the island of Mahe, the crossroads of the Seychelles. The islands were scattered throughout an archipelago in the Indian Ocean some thousand nautical miles off the east coast of Africa, and the day before, Spider and his two-man crew had anchored off Victoria with the intention of spending a few nights ashore while they restocked the ship with the excellent local produce.
Although Victoria was a few degrees south of the equator, it was a good place from which to send mail with a certainty that it would be delivered, for the town was an international tourist destination. Mahe was as far away as you could travel, going around the globe from the United States, before you found yourself started on a return route, a dream of still-unspoiled beauty with famous bird sanctuaries and some of the best snorkeling and scuba diving in the world. English, French and other European languages were being spoken by the many visitors sitting at the tables around him.
When he’d dated his letter October 1981, Spider realized that he’d been gone almost a year and a half. He’d trained himself not to keep track of time, although days, weeks, even months had mercifully started to melt for him a long time ago. He had put so much space behind him that he had finally reached that place at which the past was indeed another country, the future was unimportant, only today existed, and even today merely unfolded, minute by minute.
He had still not communicated with anyone, this was the first letter he had written since he’d sailed from Los Angeles. Last night he’d ventured into the casino at the Beau Vallon Bay Hotel, inspired by a minor curiosity about how it would feel to find himself among a crowd again. He’d bought some rupees, played a little roulette, lost the rupees, and discovered that he felt irritated, jumpy and itchily uncomfortable amid so many people. He’d been about to leave when he’d come across a group of people off the cruise ship that was anchored in the harbor. A woman he vaguely remembered had come up to him, greeted him with amazement, and told him her name. Spider had realized that she was a minor Scruples customer, someone who shopped there for Christmas presents. It was from her that he’d first learned that every one of the Scruples, from Munich to Hong Kong, existed no longer.
Spider hadn’t been able to sleep that night as he pondered the meaning of this news. He’d finally decided that he wouldn’t try to find out any more about it, just let it be, when an idea came into his mind that wouldn’t leave, no matter how hard he tried to persuade himself that it wasn’t possible. Eventually he’d promised himself to write to Billy so that he could put the idea out of his mind and go on with his life, almost—but not yet entirely—peacefully drugged into painlessness by the sea, the sky and the sun.
Dear Billy,
I’m sending this letter to Josh Hillman since I have no idea where you are, but know he will have it delivered to you. You won’t have any idea where I am, although on a nautical map it’s all very precise, but I’m told that it’s as close to the classic idea of an island paradise as there is left, and so-called paradises are one thing I’ve become an expert on in the last year. Believe me, most of them are overrated.
In any case, yesterday I was on shore for the first time in many weeks and I bumped into someone who told me that every last one of the Scruples had been closed, not just those in New York and Chicago. It was the first time since I left that I’d met anyone from Beverly Hills … I’ve successfully stayed away from people. When I left I’d heard nothing about this, and naturally I’ve assumed that you were still busy opening one foreign store after another.
I spent hours trying to figure out why the hell you would have closed down all the stores, particularly when they were clearly going to do so well, and only one weird idea finally began to make any kind of sense to me. This is probably way off base, I’m probably imagining the whole thing, but just in case it isn’t, I felt I had to write and tell you that if you thought that you were in any way responsible for the fire at Scruples, you must not believe that for a minute.
We didn’t discuss how the fire happened, in fact we didn’t discuss anything at all, but I could have, and probably should have, told you that I believe now that Valentine must have caused it accidentally.
From the time I first met her in New York she had the habit of occasionally smoking French cigarettes when she had finished some hard work and was feeling a little tired or homesick.
Sometimes, when she had trouble sleeping, she used to go to her design studio and work, even when I was at home. It was a habit she’d picked up and I couldn’t get her to quit. She said that it was better than wandering around the apartment trying to get back to sleep. What I believe must have happened was that she went to Scruples to work that night, finished work, lit a cigarette, and fell asleep with it still burning. There’s just no other way to account for the fire.
The fact that she had an extra work load because of the costumes for Legend is not something you should think about. You ought to know that if there hadn’t been that job to do, she would have found something else, since there was always plenty of work waiting for her, and she enjoyed getting into it in the middle of the night when she wouldn’t be disturbed.
Billy, I know how much Scruples meant to you, maybe better than anybody in the world. I hope this letter is crazy and that the idea I had last night is equally crazy. I hope you just got tired of running so many stores and went on to something else … but somehow that doesn’t sound like you. Anyway, if I am crazy, just disregard this as the result of too much sun. If not, for the love of God, you must realize that nothing you did or didn’t do could have caused that fire.
I find it hard to believe that Beverly Hills exists. I’ve spent most of my time at sea and I’ve found out that no matter how big the ocean, you have to keep alert or it will get you. My crew and I are really in the survival business, and it keeps us hopping. Maybe I�
�ll weigh anchor somewhere or other and open a sort of Club Med for kids safely under the age of puberty.
Wherever this letter finds you, I hope you’re well and happy and thriving. I’m very well and as close to happy as I expect to get for a while … but at least I’m not the same guy who left L.A., and that’s a damn good thing. Give my love to Gigi and Dolly and my regards to Josh when you see them. I’ll be back someday but I just don’t know when. I’m sending a hug for you, Billy, wherever you are—it would have been great if it had been you I bumped into last night.
Spider
“Could you bring me another drink, please?” Spider asked the waiter as he put the letter in an envelope with a feeling of release. He looked at the envelope with disbelief that he’d been able to force himself to write it, to actually put on paper thoughts he had fled from in the course of sailing thousands of miles. “This time make it something stronger than beer.”
“If I ever get married,” Gigi said solemnly to Sasha, as she entered the apartment carrying an oblong cardboard box tied together with string, “I swear by everything that’s holy, I’ll elope! Nothing, nothing on earth could induce me to be the bride in a real wedding.”
“Now what?” Sasha asked mildly, putting another coat of polish on her toenails. It was their sacred never-on-Monday night, and she and Gigi, as usual, were going to be spending it at home together, peacefully organizing themselves for the arduous, man-filled week that lay ahead while Gigi gave Sasha a cooking lesson. It was an autumn evening in late October of 1981, and as Sasha had strolled homeward from the bus stop there was something in the very air that seemed changed since yesterday. Yesterday had still retained a memory of late Indian summer, today had the tempo and flavor of pre-Thanksgiving.
“Emily Gatherum and I had a first planning session this afternoon for a major wedding. I wish you’d been there. The mother of the bride was the kind of uptight perfectionist who has envisioned every splendid princessy detail of her daughter’s wedding from the time the poor kid was two. Add one tycoon father, a notorious control freak who doesn’t mind paying top dollar for a formal wedding for three hundred people as long as he’s sure that every penny of it is visible. Ma and Pa haven’t spoken since they got divorced three years ago.” Gigi peeled off the severely tailored jacket of one of the suits her boss, Emily Gatherum, had decreed that she always wear to work at Voyage to Bountiful, unzipped the straight skirt, unbuttoned her plain white silk blouse and kicked her plain black patent leather pumps toward the ceiling.
“If that wasn’t enough,” she continued, “immediately after the divorce, Pa married his young executive assistant. She was the only character in this drama who didn’t show up today, for obvious reasons. However, we did have the groom’s mother, a deeply suspicious, haughty grande dame from the last family in America in which there’s never, ever been a divorce, a woman who sat there with her nostrils quivering in well-bred distaste, letting everybody know she thinks her only son is far too good to marry this poor girl. Naturally the future bride was an emotional wreck. I felt so sorry for her, torn between her horrid parents and trying to placate her future mother-in-law at the same time. Imagine having to deal with all the tensions of those three natural enemies! The last item on the agenda today was the bride’s own ideas about what she wanted her wedding to be like, although they should have been the first consideration.”
“You worry too much,” Sasha said, unperturbed by Gigi’s familiar career anxieties. “When you started at Voyage to Bountiful, the only thing la Emily allowed you to do was answer the phone, extract the basic facts from new clients, and then pass on the call to her or one of her assistants—and I’ll never forget how you complained that you weren’t learning anything. Then, little by little—like in a week—Miz Gatherum realized what a perfect treasure you were, she taught you how the kitchen was run, you got cozy with all the sous-chefs, she trained you to write menus, you learned the details of contracts and commissions and how there’s a built-in profit the client doesn’t know about on every last sprig of parsley she buys, every tiny teaspoon she rents. Now you’ve been in charge of small parties from beginning to end, you’re sitting in on those all-important first planning sessions, but here you are, still grousing away. Why can’t you take a more positive view? I think that it’s just a matter of time before Emily Gatherum lets you run a planning session yourself.”
“God forbid,” Gigi said fervently. “It’s only the planning sessions that still get me nervous.… all that wishful, yearning, unspoken romance people bring to them … they have such lovely pictures in their minds and no idea of the logistics. They think that as soon as they’ve taken a deep breath and decided to hire Voyage to do the party, their troubles are all over because they’ve put themselves into experienced hands. They think we can take all the pain out of entertaining. And the fact is that they bring on all the complications themselves because they won’t—they can’t—just leave it to us. It’s unbearable, literally unbearable to them not to get involved in every last detail short of cooking the food and putting it on the plates.”
Gigi gathered up her clothes and took them into her bedroom. She emerged, brushed her hair vigorously, liberating her swaying cap of marigold hair from the neat bell she sprayed it into every morning. Her light green eyes flashed with light and humor under her long lashes on which even Emily Gatherum had never been able to make her stop using three coats of mascara. It had been more than a year during which Gigi had been rapidly learning the catering business, yet she seemed five years older than the girl who had arrived in New York to take possession of her new apartment and meet her new roommate.
She had made that inevitable leap into full adulthood, crossed that invisible and irreversible line that divides young women from real women. The impish quality that had made her seem almost childish well into her teens had disappeared, replaced by a piquant maturity, a lissome, nimble maturity that was illuminated by zest and a peppery sense that life was still a very good kind of game.
Gigi’s face had absorbed the individual details that had made her such a pert and impudent-looking girl. The almost-turned-up nose, the almost-pointed ears, the small mouth with the upper lip that promised merriment, the beautifully shaped eyelids under her pointed eyebrows, now belonged to a woman whom some would call beautiful and others would qualify as intensely pretty, but no one would ever again call elfin. Yet one thing had never changed; the 1920s Jazz Baby quality that Billy had first spotted. Something bred into her slim bones and her beautifully formed skull made Gigi, dedicated working girl though she was, seem like a reincarnation of an idealized flapper, a modern version of all the wild, glowing, flirtatious, restlessly naughty, breathlessly dancing, feverishly laughing, flushed young things who once broke hearts as carelessly as they breathed.
“You know the client of my dreams?” Gigi asked dreamily. “An executive, a busy single man. The first words out of his mouth would be the budget, then he’d provide all the vital details, allow us plenty of time to case his apartment so we’d know how to set up, approve one of the three choices of menu and never change his mind, not ask to see ten napkin colors or the size of the wineglasses or a sample flower arrangement, not become hysterical the day of the party …”
“And how many clients like that do you have?” Sasha asked interestedly. “Because if they’re hanging around, you could at least introduce me to a few.”
“Emily said she had one once. It was right after she started Voyage, but she still remembers him. Then he got married to a gourmet cook who did their parties herself with just someone in the kitchen to clean up.”
“Single men go to parties, they don’t give them, not catered parties anyway.”
“But Zach gives parties and he’s single.”
“Zach?”
“Your older brother, that Zach.”
“Gigi, you have to understand, Zach’s different,” Sasha explained kindly. “He’s in the theater, he’s a director, and on top of that he’s a Nevsky, s
on of an Orloff. To Zach, life is a party. For him, a few friends for drinks translates into vodka, wine and dinner for two dozen people and anyone they might bring with them. And they do the dishes.”
“I like … his attitude.”
“Get in line, little one, get in line,” Sasha said lazily, leaning back on a heap of pillows to let her toes dry. She was wearing a pair of heavy white satin man-tailored pajamas with a wide collar and deep cuffs made from softly fluted mousseline. On one pocket were embroidered the initials A.L. The pajamas, which had been made in 1925, had been Gigi’s birthday present to her ten months ago. Gigi had written a card to accompany the present:
Surely you don’t think anybody ever slept a wink in these pajamas? I happen to know that the lady—some say her name was Antoinette, yet others insist it was Lola—slipped into them only when slumber was the very last thing on her mind. Antoinette-Lola owned a large ebony chest that contained many great jewels, each one of them an emerald to match her eyes. Her yacht, although it had a crew of twenty, had only one master cabin. When she entered a ballroom, the entire orchestra stood up and played “Sweet and Low Down,” a song the Gershwin brothers had written just for her. Antoinette-Lola’s husband understood that he must never come home between five and seven, but nevertheless he was the happiest of men. What did Antoinette-Lola know? Nothing Sasha hasn’t learned. She would have wanted you to wear these pajamas and have only good times.
With all my love,
Gigi
Underneath the note Gigi had drawn a little sketch of Sasha at her most arrogant, wearing the pajamas, brandishing a long cigarette holder, her legs entwined with the leashes of three huge white Angora cats.
Scruples Two Page 29
