Scruples

by Judith Krantz

  He returned late in the afternoon. There, on his doorstep, was the paper bag of his own groceries, which he had completely forgotten about. Next to it sat a bottle of wine and a folded sheet of paper on which were scrawled the words “Have a drink on me.” Not even a name, he noted, amused. He walked down the hall, holding the bottle, and knocked on her door. When she opened it, he stood outside, making no move to enter.

  “My mother made me promise never to accept drinks from strangers,” he said solemnly.

  She gave him her hand to shake. “I forgot to present myself when we met before. I’m Valentine O’Neill. Please—come in and let me offer my excuses. I’m afraid that I was a bitch—was I not?”

  “I’d say that was a fair description—a little on the kind side maybe.”

  “A bad-tempered bitch who lacked gratitude?”

  “That about covers it.” Spider’s gaze wandered around her room, noting its half shadows lit by lamps with rosy shades. She had a fat, red-velvet sofa with old ball-fringe trimming, several armchairs in pink-and-white toile de Jouy with flounced skirts, a flowered carpet, and fringed red draperies, and in the background Spider could hear Piaf singing something familiar about the unfailingly poetic misery of love. Every little table in the room seemed to be covered: framed photographs, ferns, flowers, paper-covered books, records, and magazines. It was a small room with only two skylights, and something about it was powerfully evocative, familiar to Spider, although he knew he had never seen such an interior anywhere before.

  “I like your room,” he said.

  “It is only my old furniture,” she said, vanishing behind a screen also covered with the faded toile. “I’m afraid there is too much for this room, but I have to keep the other one free for my work.” She emerged, carrying a tray on which was an open bottle of chilled white wine, two glasses, a loaf of French bread, a crock of pâté, and half of a ripe Camembert on a pottery plate. She set the tray on the floor in front of the sofa. “Shall we drink to something? Or perhaps first you will tell me your name?”

  Spider sprang to his feet. “I’m sorry—I’m Spider Elliott.” Absurdly, they shook hands again. He took his second quick look at her. All he noticed in detail was that her hair, two crucial shades deeper than carrot, covered her head in a heap of bumptious, undisciplined curls that fell over a small, fine, white face. Everything fell into place—the room, the tray of food, her voice, the Piaf record.

  “Say, I just realized—you’re French—this room—it’s like being in Paris. I’ve never even been in Paris but I’m sure—”

  She interrupted. “I happen to be an American—born in New York at that.”

  “How can you look at me with that French face and that little touch of accent, plus the way you get your words just kind of wrong, and tell me you’re an American?”

  Valentine deliberately ignored his question. Aggressively she asked, “What kind of a crazy name is Spider?”

  “It’s my nickname, after Spider Man.” She looked unenlightened. “Now, just wait a minute, you don’t know—and you say you’re American! That’s a dead giveaway.”

  “I refuse to have a neighbor called Spider,” she said crossly. “I am allergic to them—I break out in spots just at the thought. Such a name. Truly it is too much! I shall call you ‘Elliott.’ ”

  “Swell. Whatever,” he grinned. What was with this cute nut? The most harmless question seemed to get her up in arms. No way was she American, and he didn’t believe she was allergic to spiders either.

  Responding to his easy acceptance, Valentine finally deigned to satisfy his curiosity. “I was born in New York, but when I was a child I went to live in Paris and until only last month I lived there. Now, shall we drink?”

  “What to?”

  “To my getting a job,” Valentine answered promptly. “I need one.”

  “To your getting a job and to my getting a better job.”

  As they touched glasses Valentine thought how American he looked, so undamaged, so careless, so—pleased to be alive. He was the first young American male she had ever spoken to socially in her life. She felt off-balance, almost like a teen-ager. He was excessively informal, disconcertingly open, so that she hardly knew how to talk to him except defensively. Valentine was not used to being flustered.

  “What do you do?” she asked, remembering from some article in Elle that all Americans ask each other this question immediately after they are introduced.

  “I’m a fashion photographer—at the moment only an assistant to a photographer. What about you?”

  “Come, I will show you.” She led him into the second room, smaller than the first. Next to the window stood a chair and a table with a sewing machine on it. Bolts of fabric were piled neatly on one long table. A dressmaker’s dummy draped in a fluid fall of material stood in the center of the room and a few sketches were pinned up on the wall. Otherwise it was bare.

  “You’re a dressmaker? I don’t believe it.”

  “I’m a designer. It doesn’t hurt to know how to sew—or did you not know that?”

  “I never thought about it,” Spider answered. “Did you design what you’re wearing?” She had on a Moused, open-necked, cozy slide of a long dress in a heavy, apricot wool, and although it wasn’t, in any particular detail, astonishing or striking, somehow Valentine projected an air of rare luxury, a note of casual yet quite specific originality that he wouldn’t have expected in a fellow attic mouse.

  “Designed and made, every stitch—but come on back to the other room. The cheese is just ripe enough. We must eat it before it runs right off the plate.”

  As she gave him a crust of bread spread with Camembert, Valentine also gave Spider the most appetizing but unprovocative smile Spider could remember receiving from a woman. He realized that she was not flirting with him, not even a little bit. How could she be half French? Or even half Irish? Or even female, for that matter?

  Spider Elliott had lost his virginity in his senior year in high school to a horny, big-breasted girl’s basketball coach who admired his dunk shots only less than the fit of his gym shorts, which one of his sisters had shrunk three sizes in a loving attempt to make them whiter than white. For the rest of his life Spider got a hard-on whenever he smelled a locker room, a condition that made it embarrassing for him to work out in a gym. He took up tennis and running.

  UCLA had been as ripe with nookie as with smoggy sunshine, but Spider soon discovered that fashion photographers’ studios are the heartland of verbal sex. Although a great many of the photographers are homosexual, to work effectively, they must create an aura of sensuality. A model is encouraged in her work by the lavish application of a stream of instruction, almost in the way a nervous small-plane pilot can be “talked down” to a landing by an air-traffic controller. The words of instruction, which are always flattering even when they are said through clenched teeth, are almost always hyped up by subliminally erotic music playing in the background. The field of sexual force built up in a fashion photographer’s studio is sometimes sincere, but far more often the fact creeps through that it is basically a synthetic, a fake, with a nervous, brittle undertone that carries a touch of the hidden hostility of the photographer for the model who falls short of perfection.

  When Spider was hired by Mel Sakowitz, he arrived on the fashion scene with something of the impact made on the decadent European courts hundreds of years ago when sea captains arrived to display their “noble savages.” Spider in his working clothes, old white denims and a UCLA t-shirt, was tangible evidence that men, real, pagan, lusty, loving men, existed, even inside the hothouse of fashion.

  In a matter of weeks, models who didn’t know Printol from bubble bath began to show an unusual interest in negatives and enlargers, making it necessary to visit Sakowitz’s darkroom and clutch Spider’s muscular California forearm. “From tennis? How freaky!” Soon Spider found that the smell of a darkroom was beginning to give him a hard-on too. However, he could and did do something about it. He even
smuggled in a bunch of pillows for his girls’ comfort, because he couldn’t stand the thought of their delicate little ass bones getting bruised on the floor. Most of Spider’s models insisted on cunnilingus because it didn’t mess their clothes or their hair. All they had to take off was their panty hose. They weren’t all that keen on fellatio because it always messed their makeup one way or another and they really had to watch out for their fingernails, but Spider was a strict tit-for-tat guy, as they soon learned. At any rate, there were no complaints, and the people at the model agencies found that it was easier and easier to get girls to accept jobs at Sakowitz’s, normally a booking of last resort.

  Spider warned each girl what to expect before he made a move.

  “I’m only promising a short story, babe. There’s a beginning and a middle with me, but absolutely no end. I’m not interested in commitment, enduring relationships, and unique interpersonal bullshit. And I don’t make promises, not even about tomorrow night.”

  “Spider, sweetheart, what if I told you that there’s got to be a first time for everything?”

  “You’d only be saying something I’ve heard many times before. The one thing I’ll never understand about women is why they refuse to believe you when you tell them honestly that there is absolutely no future in something. And yet, how can you possibly say anything more clearly than that?”

  “Hope springs eternal and all that jazz. Why don’t you just shut up, Spider, and fuck me—nice and slow. I’ll take my chances.”

  By the time he met Valentine, Spider had advanced from the darkroom through two increasingly good jobs as assistant to established photographers. He had become something of an institution in the fashion world in three years. The thing was that he dearly liked all his girls in his honest, sensual, big-hearted way, and they knew it. They had been fucked by too many men who talked about love and didn’t truly like women. When a girl made love with Spider it was as if she had been given a marvelous surprise birthday party—she felt so good about herself for a long time afterward. Just like a real girl.

  Spider had discovered, sometime during his first months in New York, that most models don’t think of themselves as “real girls.” Almost none of them had had a date for their high-school senior prom. Until the boys began to sprout in the late teens, the girls had always been the tallest, skinniest, most awkward people in their classes, the butt of a million jokes, their mothers’ disappointments, no matter how well hidden. By the time they learned what to do with their faces and discovered that their extra-long waists and lack of breasts and hips made them perfect living clothes hangers, their self-images were firmly established at close to zero. Of course, some of them had had the luck to be conventionally pretty enough throughout their early lives so that they were able to compete in things like the Miss Teen-age America Contest, but the top models, the most interesting-looking ones, still thought that a real girl was no more than five feet five, took a 36C-cup bra, knew how to talk to boys from the day she was born, and had never hit a ball with a bat.

  While they were growing up, almost any one of them would have given anything to be cuddly. Spider made them feel cuddly, kissable, cosseted, hugable, teasable, pinchable, altogether adorable. He liked them all—the lanky ones from Texas who still had retainers on their teeth, which they religiously whipped on between jobs; the tough ones who loved to talk dirty even though it shocked no one but themselves; the ones who constantly lost their contact lenses in thick carpets; the sad ones of twenty-four who looked upon their twenty-fifth birthday as the end of the world; the lonely ones who had been discovered in Europe long before they were really old enough to leave their homes; he even liked the ones who didn’t eat all day, mining their nerves, and then expected him to buy them the leanest steaks for dinner. Quality protein for starving women was Spider’s biggest expense.

  The makeshift days of erotic confusion on the floor of Sakowitz’s darkroom were now forgotten as Spider discovered that what he really liked best was fucking in bed, in a girl’s bed, in a girl’s bedroom, smelling of girl smell. Although he was making good progress professionally, he still missed the atmosphere of a female’s dwelling, and the closest he could get was sniffing around a model’s apartment, picking up on all the evocative details. With bliss, he inhaled the smell of talcum and hair spray and Carmen Rollers getting hot. He particularly enjoyed messy girls who left things all over the place, underwear on the floor, wet towels slung over the tub, shoes forgotten where he’d fall over them, old favorite bathrobes, wastebaskets overflowing with Kleenex, sink tops littered with half-used lipsticks and eye-shadow brushes—all those girl-child artifacts gave Spider deep pleasure. His sisters, he thought longingly, were such a glorious bunch of little slobs. How he enjoyed their appetites, whether it was for each other’s newest clothes or three helpings of chocolate ice cream. To Spider, appetite was a sure sign of the female principle.

  The only place Spider never considered using for sex was his own apartment He would have brought a girl there if he had been in love with one. But Spider knew he had never been in love. His bittersweet, sensitive heart was stubbornly his own. He had turned into an intelligent, feeling man and he understood perfectly that he loved women generically, as a group, a species. His very availability was a sign of some deep inaccessibility to a special one among them. Someday, he hoped, he would fall in love with one woman, but that day had not yet come.

  Meanwhile he had his popsies and he had his friend, Valentine, whose cozy, crazy stage set of a Paris attic had become a special refuge for him, the place he wanted to be when he felt especially fine or, as occasionally happened, flat and grumpy. Valentine’s own blend of food, sympathy, and plain talk always set him right.

  One evening, several months, many bottles of wine, many of Valentine’s savory stews, many long conversations, after they met, Spider burst into her room without knocking.

  “Val, where the fuck are you?” he shouted and then stopped in confusion as he saw her almost hidden in one of her flounced armchairs. She was holding the burning end of a Gauloise Bleu cigarette a foot away from her nose, and with her eyes closed, she was sniffing the smoke with relish.

  “So that’s what you do! I wondered why it always smelled of French cigarettes in here and yet you don’t smoke yourself—you burn it like incense. Aw, sweet baby.” He hugged her. She blinked at him, startled out of her dream and embarrassed at being caught in her sentimental secret.

  “Oh, they don’t smell like Paris really, nothing does, but it is as close as I can get. And why, Elliott, don’t you knock before you come in?”

  “Too excited. Listen, I’ve got something for you that tastes like Paris—Bollinger Brut.” He produced the bottle of champagne from behind his back.

  “But that’s so very expensive—Elliott, has something good happened?”

  “Bet your ass. Next week I start as chief assistant to Hank Levy. He’s light-years ahead of the guys I’ve been working for. Sakowitz, Miller, Browne—none of them have done as much high-fashion work as Levy. His studio is busy as hell—lots of commercial work. He’s not in demand as much as he used to be for editorial but still he’s in the big leagues—not the biggest league, he never—his assistant—was going back to Rome this morning from some gal and I went over to see Levy as soon as I could get out of the studio. Luckily it was a slow day—anyway, I start next week.” Elated, he dropped down on the rug at her feet.

  “Oh, Elliott, I’m so happy! That’s the most marvelous, marvelous news. I have a good feeling about it and you know my feelings are never wrong.” Although she was an utterly practical woman in many things, Valentine had great faith in her occasional “feelings”—Spider teasingly said it was her wild Celtic blood trying to drown out the voices of French realism. Looking at Spider clutching his bottle of champagne, Valentine congratulated herself that he was not her type. He was a lecher and a womanizer and a heartbreaker, and any woman who felt sentimental about him was doomed to misery. She was happy to have him for her
friend, but it would never go farther than that—she was basically much too sensible to think of such a promiscuous man as anything but her good neighbor. Thank God she was French and knew how to protect herself from this kind of man.

  “You look hungry, Elliott. It so happens that I made a blanquette de veau, which is too much for one person. And it goes with champagne.”

  Hank Levy was almost a nice guy, kind of. He had a lot of your basic Brooklyn charm—an aging Huck Finn, a tall, skinny version of Norman Mailer, with more freckles and fewer furrows, and a receding hairline instead of a noble brow. He dressed in standard Hollywood-director drag: French jeans, work shirts carefully unbuttoned almost to the waist, under which hung only one gold chain, but that was a very heavy one from Bulgari. His particular trademark was a Professor Henry Higgins cardigan made of four-ply cashmere, which cost him fifty-five English pounds at Harrods. He had a dozen of them in different colors and liked to tie them around his waist or throw them over his shoulders, sleeves dropping straight down à la Balanchine. If he had known when he hired Spider that in winter Spider wore irresistibly authentic, aphrodisiacally mangy sweat shirts and crew sweaters from his father’s Annapolis collection, he might not have wanted to have that kind of competition around the studio—too much the real thing for comfort.