As they waited for their appetizers, Josh and Sasha sipped their champagne thoughtfully, hunger a convenient explanation for the sudden silence that had fallen between them. Sasha was cursing herself for suggesting deli; even a hungry woman should remember that the harshest overhead light in the world is to be found in delicatessens. But he was so wonderful that she’d forgotten everything except the way his eyes slanted upward. To kiss him right there, on the outer corner of each eye, right on the laugh lines that appeared each time he smiled … oh, nothing like this had ever happened to her, and fluorescent lights or no, nothing like this would ever happen again. Her career was over, she thought in amazement, years of dedicated application to masculine torment brought to a dead stop by one grownup man for whom she felt ready, if need be, to stop a bullet.
Sasha brought an inner spotlight with her, Josh thought, trying not to stare. No matter how beautiful she’d been by firelight, she was more entrancing when he could see her clearly. When he’d been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of her this morning, taken off-guard and looking wild and wicked, he hadn’t dreamed that she was perfection itself. No wonder Billy had confided Gigi to her—she had such modesty, such dignity, and a beautifully serene reserve, a deeply mysterious quality that only a rare woman still preserved in this blaring day and age. He felt that he had already glimpsed her personal signature of flowering grace combined with a crisp, adult clarity, an intense, soothingly silent, precise listening quality. But, my God, that upper lip, that lush upper lip, that pouting, curling upper lip … a man could stand only so much.…
“Here you go,” the waitress said, putting down four generous plates of smoked fish, accompanied by a heap of sliced rye bread, a plate of sliced tomatoes, onions and lemons, and an oval dish of pickles.
“You start,” Josh said, giving Sasha a serving fork. She transferred a slice of smoked sturgeon to an empty plate, added a piece of the smoked salmon, a bit of whitefish and a piece of lemon. She nibbled on a crust of rye bread while he served himself. Sasha took a morsel of whitefish, chewed with determination, and washed it down with champagne. Josh speared a bit of smoked salmon and managed to swallow it by sheer willpower.
“It’s odd, when you get too hungry … sometimes you can’t eat right away,” she murmured.
“I know … I think I may have over-ordered.”
“It just looks like so much.… food.”
“They’re famous for their large portions …”
“It’s not that the whitefish isn’t delicious …”
“Try some salmon,” Josh suggested.
“Oh, I couldn’t—I’m saving myself for the sandwich.”
“Herring?”
“No, thank you,” she said piteously.
“Have you ever been married?” His voice was calm.
“No, thank you.”
“I asked if you’ve ever been married.”
“Oh. No.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve never met the right man. Only boys, immature boys. At least that was the way they seemed to me.”
“How could that be?”
“I haven’t any idea,” Sasha said in a bewildered voice, “I suppose they were all just too young for me. But you’ve been married. Why did you get divorced?”
“I wasn’t in love with my wife.”
“Was that enough reason?”
“I … fell in love with somebody else.”
“Who was she?” Sasha asked, feeling a sharply pointed shaft of pure jealousy slam into her stomach.
“Valentine, before she married Spider,” Josh said.
“I’m sorry,” Sasha said softly.
“It’s all right now. I’ve never told anyone but you.” His voice was blankly amazed as he heard his admission.
“Is there something wrong with the fish, Mr. Hillman?” the waitress asked in a worried tone.
“No, we’re just not as hungry as we thought.”
“What should I do about the sandwiches?”
“Oh, go ahead and bring them. Maybe they’ll inspire us.”
The waitress cleared the table and returned to the kitchen, stopping to have a word with Art as she went. She returned laden with a large tray from which she deposited the four plates of sandwiches and the platter of potato pancakes. Each sandwich was a tower of thinly sliced meat, at least five inches high, mounded on specially baked rye bread, garnished with more pickles and onion slices.
“Good Lord,” Sasha said, appalled, “I’ve never seen anything like this in New York.”
“I split them in half and eat them like open-faced sandwiches, otherwise you can’t get them into your mouth. Here, I’ll fix yours for you.”
“I … could I just start with the applesauce?”
“Without the pancakes?”
She nodded, rapt in contemplation of his hands as they moved amid the plates, lifted the saucer of applesauce and placed it in front of her. She took a spoon and dipped it in. Babies eat applesauce, she told herself, little tiny babies with their undeveloped digestive tracts can do away with a ton of the stuff. Why couldn’t she?
“Sasha, eat your applesauce,” Josh commanded, and she put the spoon in her mouth. It went down fairly easily, and with diligence and champagne, she made herself swallow four small spoonfuls.
“There’s a picture at the bottom of the plate,” Josh said coaxingly, watching her eat.
“You must have children.”
“Three. They’re good kids.”
Sasha was skewered anew by a flight of visceral arrows of jealousy. A man with children had to maintain a relationship with their mother. She wished she hadn’t asked, she thought, putting her spoon down with a definite gesture of rejection. She looked at his corned-beef sandwich and at the sight of it her heart lifted. It hadn’t been touched. Not so much as one bite.
“Josh, eat something.”
“I’m not hungry.… unless … you’re really not going to finish that applesauce …”
“It’s all yours.”
He took a few spoonfuls and put down his spoon. Skillfully avoiding the sandwiches, he took both of her hands in his.
“I can’t eat. It’s hopeless. I’m in love with you.”
“Me too,” Sasha said faintly.
“You can’t eat or you’re in love with me?”
“Both,” she whispered.
“Will you marry me?”
“Of course.”
“Look at me,” he demanded, but she couldn’t make herself meet his eyes.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Josh said, grabbing the passing waitress. “I can’t wait for the check.” He put five twenty-dollar bills down on the table. “I think that should be enough. Thank you for your service.”
“But your doggy bags!”
“Never mind.” He extracted Sasha gently from the booth and they walked, hand in hand, to the door.
“They didn’t eat, they didn’t even want doggy bags,” the waitress reported to Art.
“What’d I tell you, Irma? I spotted it right away. Love. It’s the only thing that doesn’t go with deli. But they’ll be back. Sooner or later they’re going to get hungry again.”
“Stop it,” Gigi muttered, “go away. I was in the middle of a wonderful dream.”
“Your alarm is about to go off anyway—I waited five whole minutes to wake you.”
“Sasha, you’re impossible,” Gigi said, opening her eyes. “First you throw me out of my own house and now you invade my bedroom at the crack of dawn to gloat over a new conquest—” She closed her eyes again.
“We’re going to get married.”
“Sure you are …”
“You heard me. Josh and I are going—”
“You can’t marry a man you met yesterday,” Gigi said, sleepily dismissing Sasha’s newest form of torture.
“Where is that written?”
Gigi opened her eyes wide, sat up and peered speechlessly at Sasha. She was still wearing the black dress, but her hair was dow
n around her shoulders and her makeup had all but disappeared, replaced by a look of such pure and utter happiness that it brought tears to Gigi’s eyes.
“Sasha!” She threw her arms around her and kissed her cheeks. “My God! It’s wonderful—wonderful beyond words—when?”
“Well, not right away. It takes time to organize a big wedding.”
“But … but …” Gigi stopped, too confused to know what to ask next.
“Someday you’ll meet a man too, Gigi, someone you can’t stand to see suffer,” Sasha said compassionately.
“Thank you, Sasha, I appreciate knowing that. Thanks for sharing. It gives me hope. This big wedding, does Josh want that?”
“He wants whatever I want,” Sasha said in blissful, justified confidence.
“And you’ll wear a long white dress?”
“With a long train and a long veil, and I know what you’re leading up to. Gigi. There’s a reason why the six Orloff sisters never disagree. They don’t dare. You see, there’s something called the Dreaded Orloff Curse, and if anyone ever puts the Orloff Curse on you, it’s good-bye, Charlie.”
“Isn’t it more like ‘good-bye, Great Slut’?”
“Gigi! I’m warning you—”
“You don’t scare me. My two Orsini grandmothers, Giovanna and Graziella, were both from Florence. This descendant of two very dominating old ladies, from a place where a lot of very bad things happened hundreds of years ago—ever heard of Savonarola?—can take on the six Orloff sisters anytime—so I’ll just forget the past. It’s a blank, for Josh’s sake—I’ve known him a bit longer than you have. Oh, Sasha, I’m so glad! You deserve him! Congratulations!”
“You don’t congratulate the bride, you congratulate the groom,” Sasha said, falling back on the bed in a heap of joy. “You tell the bride that you know she’ll be very happy.”
“I know you’ll be very happy, Sasha darling. Does he know how old you are?”
“We never actually got around to that. I don’t know how old he is, either. What does it matter?”
“Maybe after the wedding?” Gigi suggested.
“Good thinking. There’s hope for you yet.”
19
Now, darling,” Billy said with distilled sweetness to John Prince, the richest of the top American fashion designers, “don’t explode until I’ve had a chance to explain it to you, we’ve known each other too well and too long for that.”
“I don’t do cheap clothes, Billy. I never have and I never will. I’m stunned, actually stunned, that you would come to me, of all people, with this proposition. A catalog! Good grief!” Prince was genuinely offended. All the lines of his square, agreeably reassuring face were set in a disapproving frown, and even his carefully cultivated, English-country-squire manner had been dropped and replaced by his native Midwestern bluntness.
“Moderately priced, Prince, darling, never ‘cheap.’ ”
“I don’t care what adjectives you use,” Prince said, as he and Billy sat together in his New York office, on a bitterly cold day in early February. “You can call them whatever keeps you from blushing, but you’re talking about a skirt that would sell for fifty dollars.”
“Why not?”
“Just look at yourself in a mirror, for pity’s sake. That suit of mine cost two thousand two hundred dollars, look at the fabric, look at the workmanship, look at—”
“The markup,” Billy insisted in winsomely smiling disagreement. “Prince, I used to run a store, so I know what this suit really cost. Let’s see, if I remember correctly, and I do, your cost to produce it, including fabric, trim, labor and a percentage of what you pay to keep your business running, like rent, couldn’t have been more than four hundred fifty-five bucks. You sold it to Bergdorf’s for a thousand dollars, since that average markup is a little more than double your cost. Now, Bergdorf’s markup is also a little more than double, making their price tag two thousand two, plus, I might add, more for alterations. So here I stand, dressed in less than five hundred dollars’ worth of real value, having paid four times that at retail. I can afford it, but damn few people can. You probably didn’t sell more than a dozen of these suits in the whole country, if you sold that many.”
“Billy, what kind of point are you trying to make?” Prince asked heatedly. He dreaded the fortunately rare customers who knew the pricing structure of the garment business, something with which they had no business being acquainted, a secret that stripped away the glamour of beautiful clothes. How could you enjoy wearing an expensive suit if you knew what it was really worth, and why was Billy Ikehorn tormenting him? Why didn’t she go and inform the jewelers from whom she bought her diamonds that their markup was four hundred percent and leave him alone?
“I’m simply pointing out,” Billy said, resuming an air of appealing innocence, “that if you sold twenty of these suits, you made a profit of roughly ten thousand dollars. If you were designing moderate-priced clothes, you’d be taking orders in the hundreds or thousands of each item, making less per unit, but more, very much more, in the long run.”
“Do you think I don’t know that, Billy?” Prince responded in disdain. “The idea doesn’t tempt me for a second. My name stands for the very top of the market in ready-to-wear. I’ve made all the money anyone could need.… ‘thousands’ of anything is not what the John Prince label is about. People would be horrified if I started to design moderate-priced clothes. I’d lose my ladies, my lovely ladies.”
Billy repressed a sigh of exasperation. Prince’s cherished ladies, who vied for him as an indispensable extra man at every one of their parties, were nothing more than a small handful of women in Manhattan who depended on Prince as if he were a magic amulet against the powers of social oblivion. They, and their counterparts in perhaps fifteen other American cities, armed in their always becoming, always suitable, always stylish and self-evidently expensive Princes, could move confidently among their friends and enemies, secure in the knowledge that whatever else might be said about them, no one could accuse them of lack of taste or the inability to spend money freely.
Getting Prince to design for Scruples Two was worth any amount of persuasion, Billy thought, her resolve hardening. He had a particular talent she needed, even if he had never valued it, and, equally important, he had become, over the last twenty years, thoroughly famous throughout the entire country thanks to licensing his name. If Prince were instantly recognizable only to the three or four hundred thousand women who read Vogue, Fashion and Interiors and Harper’s Bazaar, it would mean little to the future customers of Scruples Two, but the words “By John Prince” could be found on top lines of bedsheets and bath towels, belts, shoes, costume jewelry, sunglasses, watches and handbags. His two perfumes were both wildly successful. His name had been so widely advertised, for so long, that he had become an institution, as well known in the United States as Dior or Saint Laurent in France. Getting John Prince to design the capsule collections for Scruples Two would be an instantaneous imprimatur of fashion authority to millions of women.
Billy knew perfectly well that in reality Prince created his expensive ready-to-wear, as well as his licensees’ designs, with the indispensable assistance of an entire troupe of unknown assistants, of whom Valentine had been the favorite for three years.
Billy and Prince were sitting, each with a cup of coffee, on the oversized tufted Chesterfield that was one of the Anglophile glories of Prince’s office. From Prince himself to the last rare, leather-bound volume on his polished mahogany bookshelves, nothing in the magnificent room betrayed that they were not in some privileged private house in the heart of the designer’s London fantasy land, a Henry Jamesian world he had created around him from the first days of his success. If she looked out his windows, Billy thought fleetingly, instead of crowded Seventh Avenue, she’d expect to see Hyde Park on a perfect June day a century ago, with perfectly turned-out riders on perfect thoroughbreds proceeding down the wide bridle path of the Row, some at a stately walk, some at a gallop, al
l pursuing a favorite pastime of a world in which splendid leisure was the norm.
She turned to look speculatively at Prince as he sat as interestingly clad as the Duke of Windsor had ever been. “Nobody puts his own clothes together better than you do, Prince,” Billy observed truthfully. “It’s such a miracle of systematic disagreement, each item so clearly independent and yet so right with the others, that I can only wonder how you manage to make the choices every morning. How do you decide to put together your own checks and plaids and polka dots and herringbones and flannels? They’re a symphony of the most sublime discords. Do you keep a chart on the wall of your closet?”
“I just throw everything together and it comes out like this,” Prince answered, “it’s a little knack. And you can’t butter me up, Billy, because everything I’m wearing was custom-tailored for me, to my choice of fabrics, and it all cost the earth.”
“I’m not buttering you up, darling. Sometimes I do, but not about business.” Billy moved closer to him on the couch. “Now take this red paisley tie,” she said as she admiringly flicked a finger at it, “just look at what it does for that brown and blue striped shirt you’re wearing. And the shirt is oddly perfect with your checked jacket, and the jacket’s the most exceptional partner to your taupe twill trousers. I saw your toggle-fastened pea coat when I came in—the ideal thing to wear over all this. That’s no ‘mere little knack,’ sweetheart, it’s a major talent for separates. You choose to use your knack in the way you dress yourself, but not your rich lady customers. That knack, Prince, is exactly the reason I want you to design my capsule collections.”
“Billy, will you never learn to take no for an answer?” Prince asked, his good nature restored. He and Billy went back a long way, after all, and during the time that Scruples had been in business, it had been one of his most profitable accounts.
“Never!” Her answer was launched with such profound conviction, such a martial spirit, that it took possession of the air and made him regard her with new interest. He remembered when she’d started Scruples—he hadn’t believed an amateur could make a success out of a boutique, but the fact that she’d proved him utterly wrong didn’t make her catalog notion any more appealing.
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