And with the help of impulse? She was divinely thin, fabulously rich, and enormously chic. The classic merry widow. If only she felt merry. It was all the fault of Scruples. It was a total disaster and the sooner she faced it the better. She had been impulsive once too often.
The next morning, as soon as she woke from the brief sleep that had come over her as dawn was breaking, Billy Ikehorn telephoned Josh Hillman at his home, a bad habit that she had caught from Ellis Ikehorn in the days of his glory and power.
“Josh, how committed am I to those two, Elliott and Valentine?”
“Well, they have contracts, of course, but they could always be bought out for less than it would take to pay them for the entire year, if that’s what you have in mind. It’s unlikely that they’d sue. They probably don’t have the resources to pay a top attorney and, to my mind, unlikely that a good man would take their case on a contingency basis. Why?” His question had an uncharacteristic note of uneasiness.
“I’m just considering my options.” Billy didn’t want to admit outright that she was planning on getting rid of Spider and Valentine. In the subtle seesaw of unexpressed second-guessing that takes place between lawyer and client she didn’t want to lose this round too ignominiously. When she had awakened actually flirting with the idea of selling Scruples, she had realized that she had been right about one thing, at least. The land was already worth more than she had paid for it, and perhaps a Neiman-Marcus or a Bendel might want to buy the building. Even if no one wanted it except as a great bargain, at least she would be free of the suffocating embarrassment of running a moribund store. Better for her to seem to have merely lost interest in Scruples than to cling to it while her peers laughed and sneered at her pretensions and secretly rejoiced to see her humbled. She felt depression creeping over her. She had put so much into her hopes for Scruples. It was still her baby. But she couldn’t take public humiliation. Of all the things that could happen to her, that was the one she was most afraid of. She had escaped the misery of her first eighteen years only physically. The scars they left would always remain. They had deformed her, and whatever else had happened to her later had not permitted her to forget the past.
A few hours later, while she was dressing, Spider telephoned.
“Billy, I’ve been up half the night thinking about how to turn Scruples around, make it a smash. Can we talk today?”
“I’m just not in the mood. Frankly, the subject is beginning to bore me. Yesterday you were tap-dancing all over the ceiling with a restaurant here and a massage parlor there. I’m just not up to any of your tricky schemes today, Spider.”
“I promise serious business only. Listen, I’ve latched on to a car. It’s a gorgeous day—let’s drive up to Santa Barbara and have lunch at the Biltmore. We could talk there. I haven’t been up the coast in ten years. Don’t you feel like getting away for a few hours?”
Oddly enough, she did. She felt as if she’d been trapped for an eternity between the city of Beverly Hills and the low Santa Monica Mountains, which rose behind West Los Angeles and separated it from the San Fernando Valley. It had been forever since she’d gone anywhere out of town for lunch except for predictable Sunday brunches at the Malibu Colony.
“Aw, come on, Billy! You’ll have fun, scout’s honor.”
“Oh—all right. Pick me up in one hour.”
Billy hung up reflectively. If it had been years since she had driven ninety miles for lunch, it had been much longer since anyone had asked her to go anywhere in quite that tone of voice, as if she were no more, no less than a slightly reluctant girl.
Billy remembered perfectly well how people talk to people who aren’t rich. For the past thirteen years, since she had married Ellis Ikehorn, people had talked differently to her, using that special intonation reserved for the very rich. She had often meditated on the great American game of trying to find out why, exactly why, the rich are different. Fitzgerald and O’Hara and dozens of lesser writers had been passionately absorbed by the rich, as if money were the most fascinating thing a person could possess—not beauty, not talent, not even power, but money. Billy thought privately that the rich are different only because people treat them as if they were. Sometimes she wondered why people bothered. It was not as if knowing someone rich rubbed off on them, put more money in their own bank accounts. Yet, there it was, that slight self-consciousness, the faint over-consideration, that eagerness to charm, the instinctive putting-the-best-foot-forward that she heard all day.
Perhaps she never would have realized that people don’t talk to the rich the way they talk to others if the change in her own fortunes hadn’t been so abrupt. If she had been born rich, she suspected, she wouldn’t have had enough experience to be impressed by Spider’s informal manner. Aside from certain, very few, women who had the power and position in Los Angeles to ignore her fortune, no one else spoke to her as Spider just had.
As only he could, Spider had promoted a classic Mercedes convertible, and an unspoken cease-fire seemed to have gone into effect between them from the minute Spider asked if she wanted the top up or down.
“Oh, down, please,” said Billy, thinking that, for all her thirty-three years, she’d never ridden in a convertible with the top down, something every American woman is supposed to have spent her youth doing. Or was that another, past generation? In any case, she’d missed it.
Once past Calabasas, the freeway was almost deserted and the valley stretched out around them in a series of brown, sun-dried, rolling hills dotted with live oaks, a landscape almost as simple as a child’s painting. And soon, past Oxnard, they could see the Pacific on their left with nothing between them and Japan except an occadonal oil rig. Spider drove like an angry flamenco dancer, cursing the speed limit as if somebody had taken away his high-heeled boots.
“Last time I was on this road you could go an easy hundred—we used to make Santa Barbara in less than an hour.”
“What was the rush?”
“Oh, just the fun of it. And sometimes, after a late party, I had to get a girl home before her parents sent out a statewide alarm.”
“A real California kid, weren’t you?”
“The genuine article—one step away from a surfer. If you’re going to have a misspent youth, have it right here.” He laughed his joyous, lazy laugh at a million memories.
Billy observed the perfect conversational opportunity to lead Spider into revealing what, just exactly, he had been doing since those days, but she felt too good to bother at the moment. The wind in her hair, the sun on her face, the open car—it was like being the girl in an old Coca-Cola ad; she could sense her clenched anxiety diminishing as every mile put her farther away from Rodeo Drive.
She had never been to Santa Barbara. When Ellis was alive, the only trips they took were by jet. Nor had she ever been tempted by the few invitations she had received to come to parties in Montecito, a community just outside Santa Barbara where the very rich live on a closely guarded few square miles famous not only for their natural beauty but also for their laws prohibiting the sale of liquor and their fabulous private wine cellars. Although the Biltmore hadn’t sounded too inviting, she was stunned as they drove around a curve and the grand, rambling old hotel was revealed on its high bluff overlooking the sea, romantic and beautifully maintained, a mirage out of a gracious, dignified past. Blue mountains stretched up the coast in the background, while nearby, surf pounded the cliffs.
“This is the way the French Riviera could have looked fifty years ago!” she exclaimed.
“I’ve never been there,” Spider said.
“My husband and I used to go. Oh, but this—it’s perfect. I didn’t know there were places like this so close to the city.”
“There aren’t. This is the first one. Then you keep going up the coast and it just gets better and better. Shall we eat outside or inside?” Spider was dazzling, Billy thought, as they stood in front of the entrance to the hotel—his smile, that seemed to expect, happily, only good things.
A damn knockout if she’d ever seen one. Such an obvious combination: golden hair and blue, blue, blue eyes. Why did it always work?
“Outside, of course.” He wanted something, but she knew what it was, so she was prepared. He might be a knockout, but she was no pushover. And she still intended to cut her losses.
When Josh Hillman sent Valentine the basket of butterfly orchids, he committed, perhaps, the first absolutely unnecessary act of his life. When he called to ask her to dinner the next day he committed the second one.
He knew exactly where he wanted to take Valentine, to his special place, the 94th Aero Squadron out at Van Nuys Airport. He had never taken anyone there before. Five years earlier, Josh had taken up flying. He’d never been interested in sports, but he’d always yearned to fly. As soon as he felt he could reasonably spare one afternoon a week away from the office and one afternoon a weekend away from home, he started flying lessons, much to his wife’s disgust. Joanne flew only Pan Am, and then only after two Miltowns and three Martinis in the airport bar. As soon as he had earned his private pilot’s license, Josh bought a Beechcraft Sierra and began to steal more and more time on the weekends to indulge in the intoxication of flight. Joanne never cared; she always had a full schedule of tennis and backgammon tournaments. Nor did she mind the many nights he worked late at the office; she had literally hundreds of phone calls to make each week to keep track of the multitude of women she herded into working their asses off for culture and better hospitals. Often, after Josh landed, he went to the 94th Aero Squadron for a drink before driving home.
It was an authentic oddity, a restaurant constructed exactly like an old French farmhouse built of weathered bricks and crumbling plaster, which, one was asked to believe, had been commandeered by a British flying unit during World War I. It had hundreds of sandbags piled high around its ground floor, with early sten guns concealed behind them, a farm wagon full of hay by the front door, Muzak that played “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary” and “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag,” signs directing guests to the “Briefing Room,” and faded photographs of brave, dead pilots on the walls. An old biplane was parked between this apparition from another world and the real end of the parallel runways of the Van Nuys Airport, where some seventeen hundred private planes landed or took off every day of the year. Josh enjoyed the nostalgia and sweet melancholy of the place, which somehow managed not to feel fake no matter how much it had to be. But Joanne would have scorned it as a “theme” restaurant, and wondered why, if they were forced to eat in the Valley, they hadn’t gone to LaSerre.
Valentine was totally charmed by the Aero Squadron. It was so exactly what she had hoped to find in California, a glorious hoax. In fact, she found herself beginning to be charmed by Josh Hillman. Except for Spider, she had spent the last few years with men who weren’t men, or men who might be men but whose main interest in life was buying and selling women’s clothes. Enough! She was ready for a serious man, but not a solemn one, a man of substance, but not a stuffy man—in short, a real man! And Josh Hillman, having broken the habit of twenty years of dutiful marriage in inviting Valentine to dinner, felt a sense of freedom and unlimited choice in the air. Suddenly there were 360 degrees of space around him instead of a long, straight road. For a minute he remembered his grandfather’s favorite proverb: “If a good Jew finally decides to eat pork, then he should enjoy it so much that the fat runs down his chin.” Was Valentine O’Neill as tasty as a pork roast? Josh Hillman certainly intended to find out.
Their table was at the window, and as darkness fell and the fights of the descending planes floated past, the aircraft, behind soundproof glass, looked like wondrous fish with luminous eyes.
“Valentine—how did you get that name?” he asked. She was curious to note that he pronounced it in the French manner, Val-en-teen, strange for an American.
“My mother was a Chevalier fan—I was named after a song.”
“Ah, that Valentine.”
“You know her? It’s impossible!”
He hummed the first bars of the melody and, almost too shyly to be heard, said the lyrics: “ ‘Elle avait de tout petits petons, Valentine, Valentine, Elle avait de tout petits tétons, Que je tâtais à tâtons, Ton ton tontaine!’ ”
“But how do you know?”
“My roommate at law school used to play the record endlessly.”
“Ah, but do you know what the words mean.”
“Something like—she had tiny little feet and tiny little breasts.”
“Not precisely—tétons—that’s slang; it means ‘tits.’ And the rest?”
“I’m not sure—”
“Tiny little tits, which I tâtais, felt—à tâtons—gropingly.”
“I can’t imagine Chevalier ever having to grope.”
“Nor can I. But do you know all the rest?”
“ ‘Elle avcàt un tout petit menton,’ ” he answered, “a tiny little chin—and ‘elle était frisée comme un mouton!’—she was curly like a lamb. like you.”
“Extraordinary—and the rest? No? Ah ha! You missed the best part—she did not have a good character! No indeed—and also she did not have a great intelligence and she was jealous and bossy—autoritaire. And then one day, you see, years later, Chevalier meets her on the street and she has big feet, a double chin, and a triple poitrine!”
“Valentine! You’re breaking my heart. I was happier not knowing.”
They both rocked with laughter, the aphrodisiac laughter that comes when two people have decided to run away together from their real lives, even if only for an evening, that special, tingling laughter of complicity that is the first sign that they are finding each other altogether more entrancing than they had expected.
“So you, Joshua, are the hero of the Bible, who brought down the walls of Jericho, and I am merely Valentine, the first mistress of Chevalier, the eighteen-year-old girl he met in the Rue Justine. Not an even match.”
“No? Do you have a more impressive middle name?”
“But it is a dreadful secret.”
“Tell me.”
“Marie-Ange.” Wickedly, she tried to look humble. “Mary-Angel.”
“How modest, such an unpretentious little name. Your mother must have felt she shouldn’t take chances.”
“But you are right. We are prudent, we French.”
“And you are crazy, Miss O’Neill—you Irish.”
“And you Jews—you are not prudent? And you are not a little crazy?”
“Every last one. Haven’t you ever heard the theory that the Irish are really the lost tribe of Israel?”
“It would not surprise me. But I wouldn’t walk into an Irish bar on Third Avenue and give them the good news,” she responded, with a snap of mischief in her voice.
“You’re a real New Yorker, aren’t you?”
“Not a real anything, I fear. A woman without a country, not a real Parisian, not a real New Yorker, and now—California. How ludicrous. Does anyone ever become a real Californian?”
“You already are. Almost all real Californians are from somewhere else. There are a handful who came here, oh, possibly as long ago as two hundred years. Before that there were only Indians and Franciscan Fathers—so we are a state of immigrants in a country of immigrants.”
“But you feel at home here?”
“I’ll take you to Fairfax Avenue someday soon. You’ll see why.” Josh had a moment to feel astonishment at his invitation. He had never taken Joanne to Fairfax Avenue. They had driven past on the way to the Farmers Market, but they never stopped. She hated it. Why did he want to show Valentine, whose elegance seemed to float on the very air of Paris, the lively, noisy, crowded, and most unstylish ghetto of his childhood?
Spider and Billy ate lunch outside, under the spread of awnings of the Santa Barbara Biltmore, a glass screen framed by flowers and palm trees sheltering them from the brisk breeze that blew inland off the Parific. Billy waited calmly, knowing that Spider had to make the opening move
. Meanwhile, she drank Dry Sack sherry on the rocks, ate a club sandwich with extra mayonnaise to make it a double sin (for which she would later penalize herself with abstinence), and felt deliriously in command of the situation.
Soon his experienced eye told Spider that this lady was as relaxed as she was ever going to get while she was upright. Carelessly he said, “Nice here, isn’t it?” She merely smiled agreement, guarding her words. “I’ve been on the East Coast-so long,” he continued, “that I didn’t really remember what California was like. And Beverly Hills! Christ, I fully expect it to vanish one night like Brigadoon and not be seen again for a hundred years, don’t you?”
“Probably,” Billy answered incautiously.
“I had a feeling you’d understand, Billy. When we hit town yesterday Val and I realized that we’d walked into a whole new ball game.” By now Billy was reassembling her forces, but Spider pressed on. “If you took Scruples and set it down in Paris or New York or Milan or Tokyo, you’d have the eighth wonder of the world—women would be lining up around the block to get in—it’s so perfect, what a class act! But Billy, Billy, in Beverly Hills! Home of the most casually dressed rich women in the universe! I’m so used to New York that I had to keep reminding myself yesterday that most of the women we saw on the street in pants and t-shirts could afford to buy anything they wanted, couldn’t they?” Since Billy had so often had the same thoughts herself, her eyes signaled faint agreement in spite of herself. Before she could interrupt him, Spider fixed her with his most persuasive gaze and continued. “I’m sure that if you give Val and me a week or two, at the most, to get acclimated, to wander around town and look at what women actually do buy when they’re shopping for expensive clothes, to see what they wear out at night, to case The Bistro and Perino’s and Chasen’s and all the new places—could you make a list of them, incidentally—it would help a lot—if we had the time to get a fresh feeling of the place, we can make Scruples the most successful store in town. It figures that no matter how those women look on the street, there wouldn’t be a Saks’ and a Bonwit’s and a Magnin’s and all those dozens of expensive boutiques squeezed together in one small place unless many women are spending huge amounts of money. There’s no reason on earth why Scruples shouldn’t be where they spend it, Billy, but you can see for yourself, we need a little time.”
Scruples Page 32
