“Isn’t it too soon, Spider?” Billy asked, raising her head wearily. “We still have to manufacture our stock, produce the catalog, and get it in the mail—that’s months away. Why would we want the publicity now?”
“Buzz, Billy, buzz. We gotta arouse curiosity, get the customers’ juices flowing. Movie studios always start to show trailers of their big Christmas films in the middle of the summer to begin to build buzz. Scruples Two is so absolutely different from anything else in the catalog world that we need major PR far in advance of mailing. Hey, are you listening to me?”
“I was thinking of the Scruples ball … the first Saturday of November in 1976, remember? And now we’re talking about another party almost seven years later … such a different kind of party … it was sheer magic back then … the media was there too, but the guests were mostly stars, celebrities, society, the most beautiful women in their biggest ball gowns, the full moon, the dancing that never stopped … they called it the Last Great Party, but of course it wasn’t …”
“Billy, that’s over,” Spider said, almost harshly. “Stop hankering for something that can’t be reproduced. Get with it, kid. Scruples Two is appealing to a different kind of customer, and so we’re gonna give a different kind of party.”
“I thought you were asking my opinion,” Billy retorted caustically, rudely jolted out of her brief bout of nostalgia. “But I see you’ve made up your mind—asking me was just pro forma, wasn’t it, Spider? How far have your plans progressed? Have you already made a list of guests, hired a party planner, picked a date? No, wait! Let me guess, your first move was to hire the models, all eighteen of them. That would be true to form.”
“I just got the idea last night,” he said, astonished at the sudden venom of her tone. “You’re the first person I’ve mentioned it to—why do you have a bug up your ass?”
“Lovely! You express yourself with such elegance, Spider, such a rare and choice vocabulary—”
“Billy, cool it, sweetheart,” he said teasingly. “You’re not exactly one to talk.… there are career marines who’ve never used some of the words you throw around—did I say ‘used’? They may never even have heard of them.”
“Maybe not, Spider, maybe not, but then they don’t go around making moves on girls young enough to be their daughters either, do they?”
“Just what are you talking about?” Spider asked, straightening up abruptly.
“I think you know,” Billy said in a searing voice. “You’re awfully young to be a dirty old man, aren’t you? Getting in practice early, is that it? Or do you just have an uncontrollable itch to screw every single female in the world who happens to be momentarily available, emotionally vulnerable, lonely and helpless? How many hundreds of women had you nailed, Spider, before you decided to add Gigi to your long and squalid list?”
“Jesus! So that’s what this is all about. Come on, Billy, that was one isolated incident, months ago, and it never went further than a couple of kisses. And why the hell do I have to explain my private life to you?”
“It’s not your life,” Billy shouted. “I don’t give a flying fuck about your life, it’s her life, you confused her, you got her all upset, she’s been going through all sorts of traumas because you couldn’t keep your filthy paws to yourself!”
“You’ve gone batshit! Gigi and I are buddies. If she felt that way about me, I’d damn well know it. She’s too honest to hide anything, she’d have let me know.”
“Oh, of course you’d know, even if she didn’t say a word, everybody’s heard about you and your famous intuition, your legendary ability to understand women. What a sick joke! You can’t even tell if a woman is thinking about you when you kiss her, or about somebody else. Why do you think Gigi stopped you from taking advantage of her, from fucking her, to be precise? And you would have, Spider, don’t even try to deny it—she’s in love with somebody, you asshole, and you don’t have the sensitivity of an orangutan or you’d have known it.”
“Billy … look … I’m trying hard to understand this … you’re protecting your whelp, I see that, but this is ridiculous.… for the love of heaven, would you stop making me out to be worse than I am?”
“Are you trying to tell me that you weren’t going to fuck Gigi that night if she’d let you? With your reputation as an indiscriminate stud? You, Spider, the cheap male version of the good time that was had by all? Don’t make me puke. Of course that’s the way it would have ended!”
“You weren’t there,” Spider said, finally aroused to fury. “You weren’t standing around watching. You don’t know what I was thinking or what I would never have done. You’re sitting in judgment, in retrospect, on something that never even took place! But you’ve appointed yourself accuser, prosecutor, judge and jury, all in one—”
“Are you trying to deny it?” Billy’s rage, feeding on itself, opened up a vast gulf of unnavigable space between them.
“I do deny it!”
“Go ahead. Play the innocent. You’re nothing but a cock without a conscience. I know what you wanted to do.”
“I don’t give a tiny fart for what you think you know. You’re dead wrong. I’m outta here.”
Just to say that she was certifiable, Spider thought, as he padded ceaselessly around his big, sparsely furnished house in the darkness, was not enough. He’d dealt with a number of crazy women in his life, most of them only temporarily nuts, although Melanie Adams, one true loony, had slipped past him, to his everlasting regret, but Billy was beyond anything he’d ever experienced. She’d come at him out of nowhere, guns blazing, every word as wounding as she could make it, damn near accusing him of being a child molester and absolutely refusing to listen to him, after years and years of knowing what kind of person he was. Didn’t she have any reservoir of decent feelings toward him, after all they’d been through together?
The awfulness had hit him so quickly, he realized, that he was having a delayed reaction to it, like walking away from a serious car accident that should have killed him but hadn’t broken a single bone. He felt clammily cold and shaken and sick to his stomach. He’d never dreamed that Billy had the power to hurt him so much. He’d never seen her in such an unholy fury—and for what? For what, for Christ’s sake? For the straying emotion of a moment, a moment that had been over months ago, a mutual drawing together—at least he’d thought it was mutual—and a quick drawing away, the kind of thing that could happen to just about any two people on any given night, something that had left him and Gigi with a warm, appreciative feeling for each other, and a lovely but essentially unimportant memory. Or at least that’s what he’d thought.
Whatever he’d thought, it obviously wasn’t reliable anymore. Californians were used to anticipating an earthquake, he’d lived with that easily overlooked but omnipresent expectation in the back of his mind all his life, but Billy made him feel as if the foundations of his life had tumbled in on him in a few seconds, burying him alive. He’d actually thought she was joking at first, until she’d accused him of being a dirty old man. Jesus! Just remembering it was nauseating him.
The thing of it was, it just didn’t add up, didn’t make any sense. He knew, Spider told himself, he absolutely knew for dead certain that Gigi couldn’t have reported any traumas, serious or otherwise, to Billy. Even if Gigi had told her about that night at her apartment in every detail, nothing had happened to her that should make Billy freak out completely. As far as he knew, there hadn’t been any unfinished business to linger on in Gigi’s mind, and if she was in love with some unknown guy, whoever he was, well, then, didn’t that prove that there couldn’t have been any damage done?
Okay, okay, he shouldn’t have kissed her at all, he’d give Billy that much. He was sorry he’d done it. Sorry wasn’t the right word, but it would have to do. If he was going to go all the way back and pick the whole thing apart, it had been a very bad idea to start something with Gigi just because she looked so cute and interesting that night … because, oh fuck, because he’d b
een in the mood, and for no other good reason. He’d known Gigi since she was a kid—she was still a darling kid in some ways—and he should never have kissed a kid he’d known for years. For any reason. Or maybe he should have, if he’d been in love with her, but first, to be fair, he’d have had to tell her and find out how she felt about it—but he wasn’t in love with Gigi, never had been, never would be.
If that made him an utter and complete and irredeemable shit, so be it. There wasn’t anything he could think of to do or say that would change things with Billy. She had been so totally accusatory that it was hopeless. She didn’t just despise him, she must genuinely hate him. As that thought established itself in his mind, Spider discovered that it was possible to feel ten times worse than he had been feeling until now.
Would he have made love to Gigi if she hadn’t stopped him? Well, wouldn’t he?
“You miserable bastard,” Spider groaned out loud. Who was he kidding?
Billy hadn’t even been able to consider dinner, she couldn’t find a single place in the whole house where she could sit down for thirty seconds, she knew that even her hidden garden would hold no comfort for her tonight. Finally she’d come upstairs and huddled up on the window seat of the bay window of her dressing room, wrapped in the old afghan she’d had for more than twenty years. Her refuge of last resort, Billy thought. Did every woman have one private place to which she went when she faced the worst moments of her life, or were most women condemned to lock themselves in a bathroom with teenagers trying to get in? And why was she asking herself things she already knew? She was so deeply ashamed, so horrified at herself, that thinking about other people helped to take her mind off herself and her awfulness, that’s why.
Even when she’d been most bitter, most angry about Vito, she’d never allowed herself to carry on like that, in that indescribably odious, ghastly … she’d never even felt like it, come to think about it. She’d never wanted to utterly destroy Vito with words, she’d never wanted to cover him with slime, she’d tried her best to rise above their problems, not throw herself into the gutter and roll around in it like a demented … thing. A vile thing she didn’t recognize, with vile words, words she didn’t know she was going to say, spewing out of her mouth at Spider, who stood there looking so stunned, trying to treat it as if it were one of their typically good-natured, fake-aggressive, mock-hostile encounters, until he’d realized.… and even then he hadn’t gotten really angry until she’d goaded and goaded him until he had to protect himself.
Who did she think she was, the morals squad? The thought police? The Boston Watch and Ward Society? Gigi was more than mature enough to make her own decisions, she had been independent far beyond her age when she’d arrived in California long ago, and at this point in her life she’d been living on her own for years, in the biggest of big bad cities, with nothing more than a temporarily unconsummated romance with Zach Nevsky to make her miserable. Concern for Gigi was no excuse for becoming, without warning, a damned effective death ray of a woman.
A frosty bitch. That’s what Spider’s first impression of her had been. Mild, favorable, generous, compared to the reality.
Oh God, she must be still angry at Spider, Billy thought. She didn’t have a single good reason, but she felt, deep in her gut, that she wouldn’t be satisfied until she could hurt him and hurt him, until she’d reduced him to tears. Yes, to tears. Nothing less. He was so fucking invulnerable, so sure of himself, so at ease with life, so comfortable with people, so unshy, so.… everything she wasn’t. How could she be this kind of person, this loathsome dog in the manger, envying him his personality and lashing out at him so unforgivably because he was just being himself?
Couldn’t it be stress, she asked herself, deep in misery. Couldn’t stress, which was blamed for everything that went wrong from death to pimples, be the real reason she’d been so hideous to Spider? The stress of producing this wretched, bloody catalog? Yes, it was all the fault of the catalog, Billy told herself, as she had a piercing memory of the moment when she’d been swept up in Spider’s arms and greeted as joyously as if she were the one and only person in the world he’d really wanted to see. There had been no catalog then, no horde of employees, no business partnership … just a simple, happy relationship that she’d ruined for all time. Never. They could never go back after the words she’d said.
Billy pulled the old afghan up over her curls so that she was enfolded by it from head to toe, and gave herself up completely to a storm of hot, brokenhearted tears.
There should be an escalator, or even a fireman’s ladder, between the two floors occupied by Scruples Two, Josie Speilberg told herself as she stood waiting impatiently for the arrival of one of the four elevators that serviced the Century City office tower in which the company was located. How did they expect her to run this whole enterprise when she had to waste a good twenty-five minutes a day traveling from floor to floor?
The years during which she’d worked at Mrs. Ikehorn’s house were like a long, lazy luxury cruise on board an ocean liner compared to the white-water rapids, the electric, nonstop hurlyburly of the catalog. She’d always thought she wanted a more active job, she’d always felt that her talents were greater than she needed to run any house, no matter how big, but now, as office manager of Scruples Two, she was stretched in a dozen different directions. Of course the status and salary that went with it had changed her life, but still, had nobody any consideration for her? As if she hadn’t enough to do, acting as the essential liaison between merchandise and catalog production, she also had to keep track of marketing and operations and the rapid progress of the vast Virginia operation.
Everybody was a boss of something, all the departments had their own heads, but in effect, Josie estimated, she was the boss of the bosses, keeping them informed of what was going on from minute to minute. They’d all formed the habit of calling her on the office intercom to see where they could reach this one or that one—no question about it, she was paying the price of being the most efficient and organized person in the whole operation.
She was the only essential person at Scruples Two, Josie Speilberg decided as she stepped into the empty elevator, smiling prudently and contentedly to herself. Ultimately essential, and to think that she’d once believed no one was indispensable. Particularly now, with the fashion show weekend almost upon them and everybody plain silly with nerves. Who but she had hired the travel agents to arrange all the incredibly complicated plans that guaranteed that three hundred members of the national and local media would all arrive here tomorrow, early on Friday afternoon, and be transported back to their home bases by Monday evening? Who had located all the hotel rooms and arranged for all the limos and buses? Who had worked with the party planners and the PR people to coordinate every detail of the festivities, since Mrs. Ikehorn was too busy to give it a minute and Spider was out of the office on location photo shoots almost all the time? Who delivered the messages from one of them to the other? She would really like to know how they thought they could have communicated if she weren’t around. By satellite?
Surely her title should be changed. Office managers worried about stationery and telephones and payrolls and replacing carpets—she had two assistants to handle that. Vice-president in charge of—what? Sanity. Yes, it might be a new position in any company, but there must be a few other unsung women all over the world who deserved to wear that title, besides herself. She’d make corporate history, Josie resolved.
She’d speak to Mrs. Ikehorn about it as soon as the weekend was over. Now would not be a good time, in fact now would be a singularly stupid time, with Mrs. Ikehorn uncharacteristically down in the dumps, yet gritting her teeth and visibly gearing herself up to acting as hostess for the entire three days. Hating the limelight as she did, as fundamentally shy and antisocial as she was—did Mrs. Ikehorn think that she’d kept that particular little secret hidden from her? She had nevertheless recognized and bowed to the fact that it was her physical presence, her newsworthine
ss, that had made the across-the-board acceptance of her invitations so prompt. Her reclusiveness after the death of Ellis Ikehorn had only whetted the appetite of the press for new material about her. No one knew yet that Scruples Two was a catalog, not a new boutique. The secret had been amazingly well kept, there had been no leaks in the press.
Josie Speilberg, Vice-President in Charge of Sanity. Yes, it had a nice ring to it. And there would undoubtedly be members of the press who would want to interview her one day, not the same way they were clamoring for time with Mrs. Ikehorn, of course.… but nevertheless.
Nothing she had told Sasha about the sheer hell of weddings had penetrated, Gigi reflected. Not one word. There must be some sort of basic human instinct, as impervious to the thinking process as reproduction, that caused otherwise perfectly sensible people to feel that they wouldn’t be satisfactorily or even legally married unless they did it in the most public way possible.
The wedding itself was still six weeks away, but Sasha and her mother, the wee and terrorizing Tatiana Nevsky, had been on the phone with each other for hours every day. Apparently, chieftainess Tatiana was as pleased with this marriage as she would have been if Sasha had married Prince Andrew—never a real possibility, even with Charles taken—and Sasha was basking in the unusual glow of her mother’s approval. Josh, of course, like all grooms, was just along for the ride. Nobody cared that all he wanted was to get it over with.
The combination of the fashion show weekend and the looming wedding was enough to make anybody but a veteran of the catering wars lose her head, Gigi told herself with a measure of pride. There was nothing that wasn’t under control. Each model would go down the runway properly accessorized. They’d rehearsed and rehearsed; each pair of girls shared one professional dresser and each had an individual rack of accessories, all clearly marked, as well as a list of the dozen outfits each of them would wear. The assembly of all the different combinations simply wouldn’t have been possible if Prince hadn’t hand-tailored a flock of additional samples, but he had come through handsomely. In fact he was so tickled with himself over his enlightened, young, image-busting designs for Scruples Two that he was arriving tonight, Thursday, so that he could work the fashion press all weekend, in addition to narrating the actual show himself. It would all go smoothly, in spite of Billy’s apprehension, which must be the reason for the dismal depression she couldn’t seem to get over, Gigi assured herself in a flurry of worry, or her name wasn’t Graziella Giovanna Orsini. Oy!
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