Scruples

by Judith Krantz

  “Neither one of us is a mind reader, Billy,” Valentine said calmly, her temper in control because of the very strangeness of the way Billy was talking. She had never seen her employer so senselessly outraged.

  “You don’t have to be a mind reader to know that I would need you this afternoon!”

  “I thought you’d be at home with Vito,” Spider said.

  “At home—” Billy was incredulous. “Anyone with half a head should have known I’d be here to order a dress for the Awards. By tomorrow everyone will be here—do you think I want to be bothered with that mob?”

  “But, Billy, until tomorrow—” Valentine began, her hair almost frothing as she shook her head in bewilderment.

  “Billy,” Spider said gently, “what’s the rush? You have at least a hundred evening dresses hanging in your closet. Until the nominations are announced you won’t know if—” He broke off as she took three quick menacing steps toward him.

  “Won’t know if what?”

  “Well, realistically—”

  “Realistically WHAT?”

  Now, angry himself, he answered bluntly. “If Mirrors will get a nomination. You certainly won’t need a new dress unless it does.” There was a long pause.

  Suddenly Billy laughed and shook her head at both of them, as if they were silly children, foolish but forgivable. “So that’s it, is it? It’s lucky you’re not in the movie business, Spider, you’d never make it. And you, Valentine. Just what the devil do you think Vito and I have been up to all year? Practicing to be gracious losers? Get off your asses, you two. Now what am I going to wear to the fucking Oscars?”

  Until Ellis Ikehorn died, at seventy-one, Billy Ikehorn had not realized the extraordinary difference between being the wife of an enormously rich man and being an enormously rich young woman without a husband. For the last five years of their twelve-year marriage Ellis had been in a wheelchair, partly paralyzed and unable to speak as the result of a stroke. Although, from the day Billy had married him, she had thrown in her lot with the rich and powerful of this world, she had never really established a position in that stronghold from which to organize her widowhood. During the years of her husband’s last illness, she had lived, in many ways, as a recluse in their Bel Air fortress, enduring, as far as her peers knew, the restricted life of the wife of a serious invalid.

  Now, suddenly, she was thirty-two, without responsibilities to a family, and the mistress of an income that was virtually unlimited. Billy realized with amazement that it scared the shit out of her, all this endless money. Yet was that not what she had craved during the long years of her childhood as a poor relation? But now her fortune was so great that it was deeply disquieting. The potentials of vast sums of money seemed to flatten out, to shadow, to turn into prospects and perspectives so blurred at the edges that they led nowhere.

  On that last morning when one of Ellis’s three male nurses had come to tell Billy that he had had a final stroke in his sleep, she felt relief mingled with sadness for that part of the past that had been so good. But she had grieved over the past for five years; she had had too long to prepare herself for his death to feel a fierce personal loss. Yet, even less than half alive, Ellis had protected her. During his lifetime she had never bothered to think about money. A corps of lawyers and accountants handled all that. Of course she was aware that after their marriage he had given her ten million dollars’ worth of tax-free municipal bonds, on which he had paid the gift tax, and that he had repeated the same practice on each of her seven birthdays until his first stroke in 1970. Even before she became his sole heir, inheriting all of his stock in Ikehorn Enterprises, her own fortune had swelled to eighty million dollars from which she derived an income of four million tax-free dollars a year. Now a platoon of IRS auditors spent weeks working on the Ikehorn-estate tax return, but do what they would, Billy was still left with roughly one hundred twenty million additional dollars. This new money confused and frightened her. In theory she understood that she could go anywhere, do anything. It was only by reflecting that she certainly could not pay for a moon shot that Billy was able to bring herself back to a sense of reality. Her magnifiying mirror reassured her as she looked into it to put on her mascara. All the familiar tasks remained. Bathing, brushing her teeth, weighing herself as she had done every morning and every evening since she was eighteen, dressing—it all restored the grain and texture of life. She would make one move at a time she told her image in the mirror, which showed none of the panic she felt. To a stranger who might have seen her for the first time at that moment, and assessed her height, her proud walk, her strong throat, her imperious head, she would have looked as autocratic and as strong as a young Amazon queen.

  The immediate need was to decide about the funeral. Billy almost welcomed it because it gave her such a precise and limited set of decisions to make.

  Ellis Ikehorn had never been a religious man, nor was he sentimental except on matters that touched on Billy. His will contained no instructions about a funeral, and he had certainly never expressed any preference about the matter of his burial. That form of anticipatory intimation of mortality held as little appeal to him as it did to most men, rich or poor.

  Cremation, obviously, thought Billy. Yes, cremation followed by a memorial service in the Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. Whatever his religion might have been, and he had always refused to discuss it, she had been brought up as a Boston Episcopalian and that would have to serve. Fortunately, there were enough local employees of his corporation and men he had done business with in the past to fill the church. If Billy had had to depend on her own personal friends to make up a respectable crowd, she could, she estimated, hold the service in the back room at La Scala’s and still have space left over for a large choir and a three-piece combo.

  She telephoned her lawyer, Josh Hillman, to ask him to make the necessary arrangements, and then directed her attention toward the next thing, a dress suitable for the funeral. Mourning. But she had lived in California too long, even for a woman who had spent years on the Best-Dressed List. There was nothing in her wardrobe, enormous as it was, that resembled a short, thin black dress appropriate for daytime wear in September 1975 with temperatures in the nineties accentuated by hot, dry Santa Ana winds. If only Scruples were finished she could go there, she thought longingly, but it was still under construction.

  As she picked out several black silk linens from Galanos at Amelia Gray’s, her gaze again went to the mirror. She was plagued by so much unused loveliness. Billy was not modest about her beauty. She had been desperately unattractive throughout her first eighteen years, and now that she was beautiful she gloried in it. She never wore a bra. Her breasts were high and almost lush. Any hint of support, which always provided uplift, would have made her too bosomy for chic. She thanked heaven that her ass was flat for a wide handspan below her waist, not becoming full until safely past the point where it would have destroyed the line of her clothes. Naked, she was unexpectedly rich in flesh. Flesh, Billy thought, with a dry, brittle heaviness of frustration, that had not felt the touch of a man’s hand in many, many months. Since Christmas, when Ellis’s decline had become more terrible day by day, she had, whether out of pity or a sense of taboo, deliberately deprived herself of the secret sexual life she had established almost four years before.

  As she put her own clothes back on and waited for the new dresses to be packed, she turned her thoughts away from herself and attacked the next problem: the question of the ashes. She knew only that she had to do something with them. Ellis, when she had first met him, would probably have wanted to be dusted lightly into the speaking end of as many telephones as possible, she thought with a small smile of memory. He had been not quite sixty then, a vigorous emperor in the world of international wealth, who had made his first million of what he called “keeping money” a good thirty years before. Perhaps he would have preferred to have his ashes rubbed, a pinch at a time, into the linings of the briefcases of his battalion of executives.
He had always enjoyed keeping them off-balance. The saleslady looked at her oddly, and Billy suddenly realized that she had made a small sound of mirth. She mustn’t start that. It would be all over town by lunchtime that Billy Ikehorn was laughing on the morning her husband died. But hadn’t there been something, besides their life together, that Ellis had been sentimental about before he got sick? He used to say that a glass of good wine and the new issues of Fortune and Forbes magazine was his favorite way to spend a quiet evening—of course—the vineyard, Silverado. Perhaps she was in more of a state than she realized, after all. Normally she would have thought of it immediately.

  They couldn’t use the Learjet, Hank Sanders, the head pilot, explained it to her. For the purpose she had described to him they needed a plane that could fly slowly, with a window open. The young pilot had been on the Ikehorn payroll for a little more than five years. It was he who had flown them all out from New York City to California after Ellis’s first stroke, he who had occupied the left-hand seat on the many trips the sick old man and his remote young wife had made to their vineyard in St. Helena or to Palm Springs or to San Diego. Occasionally Hank had left the controls to the copilot and walked back to the main cabin to report on weather conditions to Mr. Ikehorn, sitting by the window in his wheelchair; a formality, since he either paid no attention to them or seemed not to. But Mrs. Ikehorn had always thanked him gravely, pausing in whatever book or magazine she was reading to ask him a few questions about how he liked his new life in California, to tell him how many days they would be in the Napa Valley, even to suggest that he try a bottle from a particular vintage while he was there. He admired her dignity enormously and felt flattered when she looked him in the eye during their brief exchanges. He also thought she was a flaming, fabulous piece of ass, but he tried not to dwell on that.

  But now, with Mrs. Ikehorn sitting inches away from him in the rented Beechcraft Bonanza as they took off from Van Nuys Airport four days after the cremation, he sat rather nervously at the controls. His uneasiness did not stem from any unfamiliarity with a small plane. Actually, Hank Sanders owned a secondhand Beech Sierra for weekend trips to Tahoe and Reno. There was nothing, he had discovered, like flying a girl away for a weekend to insure as much pussy as you could eat. No, it was sitting next to Mrs. Ikehorn, so serious, so preoccupied, and so unreasonably sexy—too close for comfort considering the circumstances. He carefully avoided looking at her. If only she had some relatives there with her, sisters or something.

  He had filed a round-trip flight plan for St. Helena, some six hundred and fifty air miles in all, a trip that the Bonanza could make in no more than four and a half hours, maybe less, depending on the winds. As they approached Napa, Billy finally broke her silence.

  “Hank, we’re not going to land there on the strip. I want you to follow Route 29 straight up, losing altitude all the way until you get to St. Helena. Then bank to the right. Please enter slow flight by the time you’ve reached our boundaries at Silverado. Then level off as low as you possibly can—five hundred feet is legal, right?—and then circle the vineyards.”

  The Napa Valley is not wide, but it is exceedingly lovely, especially as the September sunlight showered down on the densely planted, miraculous acres of valley floor and the steep wooded hills that shelter it on all sides. The finest wines in the United States, considered by many experts to rival and often surpass the greatest wines of France, come from these mere twenty-three thousand acres, where wineries jostle each other almost as closely as they do on the hillsides of Bordeaux, although they are each many times as large as the French holdings.

  In 1945, Ellis Ikehorn, who detested the French on principle, which principles he did not choose to divulge, bought the old Hersent and de Moustiers property near St. Helena. That fine winery had fallen on ruinous days and had been badly neglected as Prohibition and the Depression and World War II dealt successive blows to American wine making. Its three thousand acres included a vast, elaborately shingled, twin-turreted, stone manor house, unmistakably Victorian in style, which Ikehorn restored to glory and renamed Château Silverado after the old road, once a coaching trail, which followed the length of the valley. From Germany he lured Hans Weber, the celebrated cellar master, and gave him free rein. The purchase of the winery and the interest Ellis Ikehorn took in consuming the great Pinot Chardonnay and the equally splendid Cabernet Sauvignon, which were eventually produced, some seven years and nine million dollars later, was the closest he ever came to having a hobby.

  As they circled the vineyards, speckled with workers in the last days before the harvest, Billy opened the window on her right. In her hand she held a massive Georgian presentation box of solid gold, about six inches square, bearing the London hallmark for 1816–1817 and the maker’s mark, that of the great craftsman Benjamin Smith. Inside the box were engraved these words:

  Presented to Arthur Wellesley,

  Duke of Wellington

  On the occasion of the first anniversary of

  The Battle of Waterloo

  By the Respectful Company of Merchants

  and Bankers

  Of the City of London

  “The Iron Duke will dwell eternally

  in our hearts.”

  Billy carefully put her right hand through the small window, tensing her wrist against the rush of air. As the Bonanza circled low over the Silverado vines at eighty-five miles an hour, Billy barely released the catch on the lid of the box and, little by little, allowed Ellis Ikehorn’s ashes to drift down on the rows of heavy bunches of grapes hidden beneath the deep green leaves. Her task completed, she returned the empty box to her handbag. “They say this will be a vintage year,” she murmured to the speechless pilot.

  During the flight back, Billy sat wrapped in a strange, quivering silence, which seemed in Hank Sander’s tense imaginings to expect something of him. However, they landed at Van Nuys uneventfully, and as he pushed the Bonanza back on its blocks on the tarmac and went inside the Beech Aero Club to return the keys to the plane, he felt that the strangeness of the episode must have been due solely to the reason for the trip. But when he came out to the parking lot, he found Billy waiting for him, sitting in the driver’s seat of the enormous, dark green Bentley Ellis had favored and which she had never sold.

  “I thought we’d take a little drive, Hank. It’s still early.” Her dark eyebrows were raised in amusement as she looked into his confused face. This was an invitation for which he was totally unprepared.

  “A drive! Why? I mean, yeah, sure, Mrs. Ikehorn, whatever you say,” he answered, struggling between politeness and embarrassment. Billy laughed at him gently, thinking how like a strong, young farm boy he looked with his fresh, blunt, freckled features, his straw-blond hair, and his absolute lack of interest, as far as she had been able to tell over the years, in anything besides airplanes.

  “Then get in. You don’t mind if I drive, do you? I’m the wizard of the right-hand drive. Isn’t it fun in this old thing? I feel as if we’re about ten feet off the road.” She was as natural and gay as someone going off to the beach.

  Billy drove expertly, seeming to know where she was going, gaily humming a bit to herself, while Hank Sanders tried to relax, as if going for an outing with Mrs. Ikehorn was something he did frequently. He was desperately uncomfortable, so preoccupied with the etiquette of the situation that he hardly noticed as Billy left the freeway, took Lankershim for a few miles, and then turned off the broad street into a narrow road. She made an abrupt right turn and pulled into the driveway of a small motel. She stopped the Bentley in one of the carports, which were built next to each room.

  “I’ll be right back, Hank—it’s time for a drink I think, so don’t go away.” She disappeared into the motel’s office for a minute and came back, casually flourishing a key and holding a plastic container full of ice cubes. Still humming, she handed him the ice, opened the trunk of the car, and took out a large leather case. She opened the door of the motel and laughingly waved him in.<
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  Hank Sanders looked around the room with apprehension mixed with wonder, while Billy busily opened the portable bar case, made to order in London ten years before for race meetings and country-house shooting parties, a relic of an era in her life that seemed as archaic as the silver-topped decanters she set in a row on the carpet for lack of a table. The floor of the air-conditioned room was covered from one wall to another in thick, soft raspberry carpet, which also covered three of its walls all the way up to the ceiling, which, like the fourth wall, was entirely mirrored. Hank nervously walked about, noting that there were no windows in the room, no chairs, nothing but a small chest in one corner. Light came from three poles, which reached from floor to ceiling, to which were attached small spotlights fitted with pink bulbs, which could be pointed in any direction. A large, low bed took up almost half the space. It was covered in rosy-pink satin sheets and piled with pillows. He was pointlessly investigating the spotless bathroom when Billy called to him.

  “Hank, what are you drinking?”

  He walked back into the bedroom. “Mrs. Ikehorn, are you all right?”

  “Perfectly. Please don’t worry. Now, what can I offer you?”

  “Scotch, please, on the rocks.”

  Billy was sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed. She handed him a glass as naturally as if they were at a cocktail party. He sat down on the carpet—it was either that or the bed he thought wildly—and took a long pull on his drink, which she had poured into a sterling-silver cup. In her white, handkerchief-linen blouse and her French-blue cotton wraparound skirt, with her long, brown legs sprawled on the carpet, she looked as if she were at a picnic. Billy drank too, playfully clinking her cup against his.