Scruples Two

by Judith Krantz

  Of course poor Billy was in no hurry to move into her fine house. She would never feel as at home there, no matter how cozy she mistakenly tried to make it, as she did in the rented rooms of a hotel, available to anyone who could pay their price. It was a great pity, Cora thought, smiling bitterly, her expression needlelike. She, Cora, could dwell in the Rue Vaneau in the way the house deserved, and if she’d had Billy’s money to spend during her marriage to Robert de Lioncourt, if she hadn’t had to manage so courageously to create an impression of ease, she would have made the grade. She was certain of it.

  “Never again! I promise you, Sam, darling, never again! I’m so sorry I’m late, you weren’t worried, were you?” Billy rushed into the studio well past seven o’clock, out of breath from racing up the stairs. “The traffic was worse today than it’s been all year. Christmas shopping’s started.”

  “I never gave it a second thought. I figured you were stuck on top of the Eiffel Tower for the night and that you’d be down by morning.” She couldn’t ignore the tightness of concern in his voice, even though his words were joking.

  “It almost came to that.” Billy kissed him hastily and sprawled exhausted in one of the rattan chairs that had come with the studio, giving it an incongruous patio touch. “Why is everyone I ever knew back home convinced that I have nothing better to do than spend their one day in Paris with them?”

  “I told you you didn’t have to say yes, sweetheart, you could have made some excuse,” Sam said evenly.

  “I’m sorry for them just passing through, but today was too much.”

  “Did your Cora appreciate her guided tour? Did she say thanks?”

  “Not so you’d notice.”

  “Come back here, sweetheart. You deserve major appreciation. You have that look on your face again, that I’m-too-busy-to-live look.”

  “Oh, Sam,” Billy wailed, and collapsed gratefully in his lap, her arms wound tightly around his neck, letting herself relax for the first time since she’d finally escaped from Cora and started on the zigzag trip home that had been prolonged by her stop at the Ritz to change clothes.

  “New shoes?” he asked.

  Billy looked down at the expensive Maud Frizon pumps that she’d forgotten to leave at the Ritz.

  “Oh. Yes, aren’t they nice? Cora couldn’t spend a day in Paris without doing some shopping, so I splurged too. I think it was the only time we sat down all day.”

  “Not even lunch?”

  “Lunch, of course. Believe it or not, Cora took me to lunch at the Ritz. But she’s always had a bit of money, so I didn’t feel guilty.”

  Billy had long ago realized that the more truth she used with Sam, the easier it was to lead her double life. She had also invented certain major lies that now were so firmly established that they seemed to have become the truth.

  Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, Sam believed that she left her daily work at the Bibliothèque Nationale and went straight to the home of a wealthy, house-bound Frenchwoman who lived in the heart of the faraway Sixteenth Arrondissement. There Billy gave her pupil English lessons and stayed on for a late dinner to engage her in English conversation. When Sam had asked her why she didn’t come back to his studio after the lessons, Billy had stubbornly asserted that she must sleep at least two nights in her own bed in her hotel on the Rue Monsieur le Prince to keep her independence.

  Her independence. That wretched, miserable, ragged, worn-out excuse for an excuse that had left her hating the mere idea of independence, Billy thought wearily. Her independence, the only subject about which she and Sam disagreed until, as now, they were sick and tired of it. Independence, of which every busy minute was spent working on the house with Jean-François, or catching up on her mail and messages at the Ritz, running a minimum of necessary errands and getting her hair washed. She couldn’t find time to shop, she was lucky if she could manage to schedule a pedicure. She rushed through her days and then hurriedly bathed and dressed to go out at night so that her presence in Paris continued to be established. She couldn’t risk having curious acquaintances begin to wonder out loud if she had totally disappeared, and if so, where had she gone?

  How could she have been so shortsighted, when she’d first met Sam, as to imagine that leading a double life would be a thrilling game? She’d made such clever plans, filled with self-congratulation as she faced down the staff of the Ritz without a blink on anyone’s part; she’d been so snappily efficient when she found a perfectly placed, modest hotel room near the Luxembourg Gardens to serve as her supposed home, one that Sam could visit at will. She’d established her system of getting around Paris anonymously; she’d managed to ride tight herd on Jean-François, constantly working to keep his more grandiose ideas in check. Somehow the details had meshed, no one had spotted her in the wrong place with the wrong person, yet every day her double life was becoming more and more distasteful to her. Billy felt fragmented, pulled to pieces, torn between being the animated, elegant, bejeweled woman who kept up her end of a cosmopolitan dinner table conversation, and the carefree schoolteacher from Seattle with a consuming interest in Voltaire and a passionate love for Sam Jamison.

  How she loathed having to lie to him! Only weeks after they first met, Sam had asked her to marry him. After their time in Paris was over, he told her, he would move to Seattle and work there if she couldn’t get a teaching job in Marin County. His West Coast dealer had sold two large pieces from his last show; he had hopes of receiving an Arts Council grant, and they wouldn’t have to live in a garret, he’d promised her. There was no reason for them to be apart ever again.

  If she’d been one person, the schoolteacher, Billy would have accepted him immediately, even if it was too soon, even if she barely knew him. But Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop Ikehorn Orsini, with all her history, had learned some hard lessons about men who had no money and women who had too much. She didn’t dare allow herself the bankrupting simplicity of yielding to impulse once again.

  She controlled one of the world’s great fortunes. She had once told Vito that she couldn’t get rid of it even if she wanted to, which she did not. It was as important to her as it had ever been. Billy understood herself clearly enough to know that the habit of being able to utilize great wealth with the same unthinking assurance with which she used her own two hands, had become woven into the very fiber of her identity. The kind of life she’d been leading with Sam was not a life she could endure for long. It was only bearable because it was a stopgap. In fact, to be resolutely honest, it was a form of slumming.

  No, it was slumming, plain and simple, Billy thought, holding Sam so tightly that she could feel his heart beating. She had to acknowledge, even as she rumpled the back of his hair with her loving touch, that she hated the five flights of steep stairs; she hated the coarse sheets that were washed weekly by a rough-and-ready local laundry; she hated getting out of a warm bed into a cold room and having to wait for the unreliable heat to warm the studio; she hated eating a cheap meal in a restaurant night after night, for there was only a hot plate in the studio; she hated the tiny tub in which she could only scrub herself section by section; she hated sharing a cramped bathroom and she hated not being able to buy armloads of blossoming plants and fresh flowers. She wanted to throw out every one of the inexpensive things she’d bought with such relish in that first raid she’d made on the Galeries Lafayette, looking for an appropriate costume for her new role as Honey Winthrop.

  Jessica would understand, Billy thought as she nipped Sam’s mouth with little kisses. Jessica would see immediately that Billy didn’t insist on an ostentatious life of gilded luxury, but that, on the other hand, living in an uncomfortable studio shouldn’t be the price of love.

  Billy yearned with all her heart to live with Sam in the spacious, soothing, deep comfort she and Jean-François had planned for the Rue Vaneau, yearned to turn the stables into a suitable studio for Sam. There they would inhabit that gracious old house humming with the quietude of centuries, and fill it w
ith their love. It wouldn’t be the brilliant public life she’d raved on to Jessie about, but a truly private life, warmly tuned to their deepest pleasures. They would see only people they both really liked; they could travel whenever they wanted to, they could buy a house on a Greek island or a farm in Tuscany. Or they could stay at home and dig in the garden—she didn’t care, so long as they were together. If it amused Sam, they could even lunch at the Ritz, where she knew the predictably pretentious menu by heart.

  She had not been ready to guess what their future held until she had enough confidence in him to believe that he could accept her riches and the immense freedom they allowed her—until she had reason to know that he would continue to love her in spite of them.

  During those weeks, last spring and summer while he had pressured her to marry him, Billy had retained just enough judgment to know that sex had left her judgment in ruins. She’d used her claim to a need for independence to put him off, bought priceless time with her lies about who she was, so that they had built a foundation together that went beyond the sexual need that continued to grow stronger the more they knew each other.

  They’d lived with each other’s moods and each other’s silences. She knew that Sam Jamison was a quietly obstinate man who had chosen to follow his talent in spite of the knowledge that making a living by sculpture was achieved by very few. She had found that he was a fair man who listened carefully to her reasons for retaining her independence, even though he continued to believe that she was wrong. She’d discovered that he was a profoundly proud man who hated it every time she insisted on paying her share of their bistro meals or the occasional movie they went to in the Latin Quarter. She had faith in him now, this proud man who was as straight as a die, this proud man who respected her as much as she respected him.

  Billy had watched Sam work for hours; she’d known him euphoric when his work went right and blackly depressed when it went wrong. They’d seen each other through food poisoning and head colds and allergy attacks. They’d survived a sweltering summer in Paris without air-conditioning; they’d rented a car and taken a week’s trip to the Loire, encountering flat tires, terrible hotels, bad meals, impossibly crowded châteaux, and days of downpour. He knew Honey Winthrop at her worst and Billy Ikehorn at her best, Billy thought with a rueful smile, but he still didn’t know the truth.

  She planned to tell him very soon. In two weeks Sam was having an exhibition at the Daniel Templon Gallery on the Rue Beaubourg, owned by an avant-garde dealer who showed works by Helmut Newton and other sculptors, like Sam, who made shapes Billy could understand only because they pleased her, because they gave her a visceral, nonjudgmental joy.

  If there were wise children in other galaxies, surely their toys would be wrought by Sam Jamison, she thought, looking over his shoulder at the series of large double and triple half-arcs, subtly entwined to make indefinable but unforgettable shapes. Each group of arcs rested in fragile yet perfectly balanced equipoise on a flat wooden base. Although she knew how firmly they were attached, Billy found herself keeping a sharp eye on the arcs, as if they had minds of their own and might decide to abandon their monumental equilibrium and start to roll wildly around the sides of the studio, in some sort of giant game played by unknown rules. At night she sometimes crept out of the bedroom to watch the arcs in the moonlight. Perhaps they waited until it was dark to do their thing, whatever it was. Finally she’d confided this concern to Sam. “That’s the way I wanted to make you feel,” he’d told her, clearly overjoyed.

  Sam’s brilliant young dealer, balding, bespectacled and charming, was sending for the contents of the studio next week. Once the opening of the show was over, after Sam had stopped worrying, as he now was doing about the reception of his work, Billy had decided that she would tell him everything.

  How? When? In what words? She didn’t know. The occasion would present itself as occasions always did once you’d finally made up your mind, once you had at last decided that it was safe to place your trust in another human being.

  Sam Jamison leaned against the far edge of the long bar in the refreshment foyer at the Paris Opéra, while Henri tried vainly to order drinks. Henri Legrand, his dealer’s eager young assistant and a fervent advocate of his work, had been given two tickets to tonight’s gala evening, and he’d invited Sam to come with him to celebrate the final installation of Sam’s show. From the vantage point of his height, Sam looked with fascination around the crowded room that contained everything he disliked most in architecture and interiors, yet managed to carry off its ultra-ornate Second Empire style by the power of sheer audacity. Never had there been so many varied marbles, such overblown chandeliers, or such an outlandish flood of gilt used before or since in France. The Opéra, Sam thought, made Versailles look like a chicken farm.

  The Opéra was a Paris of which he knew almost nothing. When he had first arrived almost a year ago, before he started to work seriously, Sam had given himself a month to explore the city as thoroughly as possible. From morning to night he’d wandered with the Michelin as his guide. He’d walked the length of every great Right Bank boulevard, seen every foot of the Seine from both banks, crossed every bridge to admire the view up and downriver. He’d sauntered along each small Left Bank street, sat in two dozen parks and explored two dozen churches; he’d claimed a hundred tables at sidewalk cafés on the city’s most populous corners and watched people for hours. He’d had a drink at the George Cinq and the Plaza Athenée and the Ritz, he’d looked into the windows of Dior and Nina Ricci and Hermès, he’d taken the Paris by Night tour, and seen the city from the top of the Arc de Triomphe. The greatest part of his time had been spent in museums.

  Once Sam had covered the main outposts of the tourist’s Paris, he had turned his back on it with little regret. It was time to get down to work. Life in the Marais continued to interest and satisfy him with its charming variety, its small, often humble, streets inhabited by artisans and small businesses, just around the corner from many of the noblest buildings of the seventeenth century. There in the air he could feel the ghosts of Madame de Sévigné, Richelieu, Victor Hugo, the ghosts of all the kings and courtesans and seigneurs and great ladies to whom the Marais had once been home. To truly know a city as vast and various as Paris was impossible, Sam had discovered in his month of exploration, but to experience Paris by living intimately the life of one of its neighborhoods was to possess Paris forever.

  He was glad that Henri had persuaded him to come to the Opéra gala tonight, the first day of December. It was certainly the only occasion he’d have for wearing the old dinner jacket he’d packed with the rest of his wardrobe, on the theory that if you own one you might as well have it with you. Sam felt invisible, dressed like every other man in the room, and invisible was exactly right for his mood. It made a needed change from the feeling of exposure to the public eye that had rocked him when he’d seen his work installed in the unfamiliar light of Templon’s gallery. Not one piece of these bones of his bone had seemed entirely at ease there, disturbed from the spatial relationships with each other that they’d gradually assumed in his studio, but Daniel had been vastly pleased by the look of the show. Sam hugged his long arms to his sides, making room for the crowd, as he visualized the night of the opening, the traditional vernissage, with its small drinks and large crowds of invited guests, jostling each other so closely that even if they wanted to see his arcs, they wouldn’t be able to do more than glimpse them or be goosed by them. But some of those people were critics and some would return to look at the work seriously and write about it. And collectors, one or two, or perhaps none, would buy. It was impossible to say what the future would hold for this particular show, but Sam was satisfied—almost satisfied—with his new work, and that was the only essential for him.

  Henri triumphantly handed him a drink and Sam toasted the gallery assistant, who spoke English well and was eager to improve his slang.

  “Thank you, old buddy, for distracting me tonight. If I weren’t her
e I’d be home hitting the bottle in an empty studio. Honey’s giving an English lesson tonight, and you’ve probably saved me from a nervous breakdown.”

  “You’ve never been to the Paris Opéra before?”

  “Never. And I’m enjoying the intermission better than the first act—more noise and prettier women.”

  “You realize, Sam, that this monument to bad taste was built to show off the Frenchwoman—the opera is only an excuse—the staircase of honor is the best parade ground for a grand toilette in all of Europe, but now, alas, unless it’s a gala like tonight, people come here in jeans and sweaters—but not those who sit in the best seats. Not yet, at least. Look at those people coming in right now. Admit it, old buddy, they decorate the room far better than it deserves.”

  Sam glanced across to a group of people who were being ushered to a reserved table in the center of the room, on which bottles of champagne stood waiting in their ice buckets. The men were in white tie, the women in lavish ball gowns, and everything about the way they moved toward their central position spoke of entitlement. They were so casually certain of special service in a roomful of people who were all trying to attract the overworked waiters, that they hadn’t hurried to secure a place, as the others had, but drifted in when they chose, with the languor and grace of peacocks on a lawn. They didn’t even glance around to see who else was there because they formed their own tight, superior cosmos in which exceptional territorial rights were taken for granted.

  People like that must know, Sam thought, that half of this huge room is staring at them, yet they received such attention by ignoring it, and ignoring it convincingly. You’d think they were having a picnic on a lonely beach from the way they concentrated on each other’s witticisms.