Scruples

by Judith Krantz

  On the drive home, Billy asked carelessly, carefully, “Vito, you’ve known Maggie for ages, haven’t you?”

  “No, darling, only for a couple of years. She came to Rome to interview me once, you know, the picture with Belmondo and Moreau.”

  “Is that when you had an affair with her?” Brightly, still casually. Another man might have been fooled.

  “Now listen, Billy, we’re not children. We didn’t wait to meet each other before we lost our virginity; we agreed not to discuss the past before we got married. Don’t you remember the talk we had in the plane.” He shook his head gravely at her. “I don’t want to know, ever, not one word, about the men you have had in your life. I’m a terribly jealous man. I know that particular fact about myself and I wish it weren’t true. But I can refuse to think or hear about your past. And I expect the same consideration from you, about my life before I knew you.” He took one hand off the wheel and put it over hers. “Maggie was rubbing your nose in it tonight and I don’t blame you. Yes, we did have a little affair in Rome, not terribly important, but it left us good friends.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting Mexico?” Billy felt her mouth making an ugly grimace of distaste at herself as she spoke, but she couldn’t keep back the words.

  Vito roared with laughter. “Mexico! Silly, silly, darling idiot! That terrible motel was where—don’t you remember the Ben Lowell story, the stand-in he hit who died later? My God, where were you? The whole world was talking about it.”

  “I remember it vaguely. I was busy with Scruples. But did you—in Mexico—with Maggie?”

  “Look, love, you’re going too far. This is exactly the kind of sordid conversation we promised each other not to have. ‘Did you do this, did you do that, how many times, where, was it good, did you feel this or that?’ all those other ridiculous, hurtful questions. In Mexico, Maggie had the trots the first night, since you want the sexy details, and from then on, it was sheer nightmare, a dead man on our hands and hell breaking loose all over. Now, the subject is closed, permanently and forever. You have no reason to be jealous of any woman in the world and I’ll never give you reason. There is no one else I love. No one else compares to you. You are my wife.”

  Billy felt the nausea of jealousy grow less in her belly, but it was not banished by his words. She hadn’t been really jealous of Maggie, as another woman, but of Maggie as someone who had a part in Vito’s obsession with the world of films. A new place in her mind had opened up, a putrid place in which there was poison. So long as Vito loved his work as much as he did—as much as he loved her, Billy thought—that new place could only be scabbed over, never healed. It would be scraped raw again and again as long as he could forget she was by his side while he talked business. She felt tattered and diminished by her newly born understanding.

  As they walked upstairs together, arms around each other’s waist, on their way to their bedroom, Billy angrily reminded herself that the only kind of man she could respect was a dedicated man, a passionate man, a man who cared desperately about his work, who did it with total commitment. When Vito had told her, that first time she asked him to marry her, that he wasn’t the kind of man she could “acquire,” she had thought he meant that he couldn’t be bought. Now she realized that he meant he couldn’t be owned. She had rushed headfirst into the heart of the paradox; she who insisted on ownership had sought, as she had never sought anything else, a man she could never own. Using all her strengths and wiles, she had contrived to build her own prison.

  In early July, on the Monday following their dinner at the Boutique, Vito, accompanied by Fifi Hill and the art director of Mirrors, left for five days of preproduction hunting in Mendocino. When he left, loneliness fell over Billy like a dusty curtain. Billy had neglected Scruples since her marriage six weeks earlier. She fled to her own office, the only part of the store that had not been redecorated. She had loved the richly tranquil room, but now she found it curiously melancholy. The blue-gray velvet walls hung with a collection of watercolors by Cecil Beaton, the delicate, elaborately inlaid and gilded Louis XV furniture, the bureau à cylindre at which she worked, although it should have been in a museum, even the Fabergé document case, made for Czar Nicholas II, in which she kept her most important papers, all seemed as lifeless as if they were missing one crucial dimension. The room gave her no comfort. She left her office impatiently and made a tour of Scruples from top to bottom, finding nothing to criticize. The store had flourished indecently in her absence.

  After lunch she had an appointment with Valentine to talk over her fall wardrobe. It seemed to her, as they worked together, that Valentine had changed in subtle ways, which Billy found most intriguing. Somehow, in the past year, the girl had slowly acquired the delectable patina of the celebrated person. It was-as if she had been lightly, almost imperceptibly brushed with coat after coat of, not gloss, not sophistication, not fame—perhaps assurance. She had always been decisive, but there had been something just a little overly defiant in that spunky manner of hers, as if she’d go off like a firecracker at the least opposition. Now she had softened and matured into a calm certainty of touch. She no longer double-dared Billy to contradict her by her attitude; she had a quiet, seasoned conviction about her work, which made an amusing, yet oddly impressive contrast to her spirited girlish figure, which had now been photographed a number of times. Aside from the profits generated by her department, the magazine and newspaper publicity it attracted was priceless.

  All together, a most successful idea of hers, bringing Valentine to Scruples, Billy congratulated herself, but what did the girl do for fun? She wasn’t having a bit on the side with Spider Elliott, that was certain.

  No, it could hardly be Spider, unless he had a twin brother. From what Billy picked up here and there and all around, Spider was so involved with several women that she was amazed that he still had the strength to come to work. Yet he was the first person at Scruples in the morning and the last to leave at night. They walked through the entire store together, and Billy observed how he could change the mood of a room by entering it, banish tension, create excitement, and give tired saleswomen energy, charm dull women into feeling witty, let pretty women know they were intelligent, convince certain intelligent women, who, Billy thought, should have known better, that they were beautiful. He was a splendiferous one-man band, she decided, kind and funny and smart. He made every woman want to present him with her best qualities. Yet he, too, had changed. The pagan smile, so ready for joy, seemed to have dimmed. Now it was just a smile, not an expectation.

  Valentine O’Neill and Spider Elliott, both invaluable to the great caravan, the baroque bazaar, the fantasyland that was Scruples. Billy realized that although they were her partners, her employees, she didn’t know either of them very well. It never occurred to Billy that these thoughts would never have concerned her a few months ago. She might have been indignant, certainly puzzled, if someone had pointed out that her sensitivity to the changes in Spider and Valentine were signs of an even greater change in her.

  Mendocino, the seacoast town Vito had settled on for the setting of Mirrors, is California’s true Brigadoon. Some two hundred long, winding miles up the coast, north of San Francisco, it seems, to even the most unimaginative traveler, to have just risen out of the mists of a hundred years ago, intact and untouched by the twentieth century. It is set on a steep, rounded bluff jutting high out over the Pacific. The entire town is an official historic landmark, and once inside the village limits the traveler will look in vain for a McDonald’s or a Burger King or even any minor indication that modern day has arrived to lay a disfiguring hand on this enchanted settlement, an old mill town, which was first built in the early 1850s in a simple Victorian style known as Carpenter’s Gothic. Unlike anyone’s idea of California, the houses are all wooden, timbered and shingled, once painted pinks, yellows, and blues, now faded into weathered and romanic pastels, surrounded with vacant lots overrun with old rosebushes, briars, and wild flowers. Any new cons
truction in Mendocino—and almost none is allowed under any circumstances—must exactly duplicate this Cape Cod-style of architecture; even the signs for the one hotel, the bank, the general store, and the post office are of the period. On all three sides facing the Pacific, Mendocino is protected by wide stretches of fields, like Scottish moors in their windswept bareness, fields that are all state-park land and will remain forever in their natural condition.

  However, the population of Mendocino is far from frozen in the past. The town attracts many young artists and craftsmes, sturdy individualists who find a way to live there by selling their work to the annual invasions of tourists or by running shops and art galleries and little restaurants tucked away in the few rows of old houses in the center of town. In general, the people of Mendocino County are a proud, pugnacious breed, who have, in the last few years, officially “seceded” from the state of California several times.

  Vito had decided to shoot Mirrors in Mendocino for several reasons. Les Miroirs de Printemps, the French novel he had bought, had to be translated to an American setting. The original story took place in Honfleur, that much-painted Normandy fishing village that also is a haunt of artiste and tourists, and the weather in both places is similar, often chilly and foggy even in midsummer. Honfleur, a favorite target for invasion since long before Henry V, is less warlike in character than the northern California town but equally undisturbed by time.

  Before the shoot started the locations in Mendocino had all been chosen, the necessary rents agreed upon, the legal contracts signed, the licenses obtained, and a number of Mendocino residents, picturesque as a band of young gypsies, had been recruited as extras. Vito had rented a small house for himself and another for Fifi Hill, the director. The cinematographer, Svenberg, was staying in the Mendocino Hotel, along with the principal actors; other actors with smaller parts would arrive when they were needed by small plane from San Francisco, landing at the tiny Mendocino airport. The crew members were installed in motels in Fort Bragg, an exceedingly ordinary city a few miles up the coast.

  Billy had never been to Mendocino. Although it is only some hundred miles or so northwest from the inland Napa Valley, it is impossible to go from the valley to the coast except by two narrow little country roads with many hairpin turns. She had heard about the picturesque village for years, and she was in a state of high excitement as she prepared to spend the midsummer weeks there while the filming of Mirrors took place.

  Billy now assumed that she knew a fair amount about movie making, having spent almost all of the last two months listening to Vito’s end of the details of the preproduction activity, details she supposed were the necessarily dull and irritating prologue to the actual creative excitement that would take place once the cameras started rolling. She packed the simplest wardrobe possible. She didn’t want to look ostentatious, she thought, as she picked her plainest linen pants, her oldest silk and cotton shirts, her most classic sweaters. For evening, she assumed, she and Vito would dine together at any one of the several excellent restaurants in the country inns around Mendocino; she added a few long skirts and several understated, yet elegant tops, and a few heavy jackets against the cool evening temperatures. Shoes—God, how many shoes a woman needed! Billy’s passion for clothes had never overcome her annoyance at the necessity of having the right shoe for each outfit. Damnation, her largest shoe bag, which she had hoped not to have to take, was already full. She could manage with four handbags, she calculated, and only the simplest gold earrings and chains. Nothing really. She filled another bag with lingerie and dressing gowns. At least she’d be able to look glamorous when she and Vito were at home together. True, he’d warned her that their house, one of the few available at the height of the tourist season, was simple, on the verge of falling apart. But Billy was sure that it couldn’t be all that bad, and anyway, what did it matter? The important thing was that she and Vito would be together in this adventure—a summer on location in Mendocino—just those words themselves had a thrilling ring.

  Vito had been concerned that she might not find enough to do during the week. He’d even suggested that she fly up just for weekends, but Billy had been outraged by the idea. Did he think that she had so little interest in his work? Quite the contrary, she could barely wait to become a part of the film-making process.

  Mirrors had started shooting on Tuesday, the 5th of July. By lunchtime on Thursday they were still working on an outcropping meadow across a bridge from Mendocino from which they could view the entire town. The camera crew and lighting technicians were setting up on the edge of a perfectly round lily pond, surrounded by tall, wild grasses, which lay in the rough, scrubby field like a hidden miracle. If someone didn’t know exactly where it was, he could blunder right into it.

  Billy already had. Exploring the terrain on the first day of shooting, when the lily pond had not yet been used, she had slid down its steep, muddy sides and landed in mucky water up to her armpits. Her white linen slacks and her favorite Hermès bag, white canvas and leather, had been a total loss, but the major damage had been to her pride. She screamed and two grips had had to be sent to pull her out of the deceptively deep pool, and one of them had been detailed to drive her, dripping, in humiliation, like a miscast Ophelia, back to the rented house where she changed into dry clothes.

  And yet, looking back, that note of low burlesque had, at least momentarily, made her a member of the group. Her few minutes in the spotlight had been the first and last time that Billy had felt the cast and crew had been aware of her as more than an unnecessary bystander. Because that was exactly what she was, a useless onlooker. Everyone in Mendocino who was connected with the production of Mirrors had a job to do, except Billy. She was the most unproductive of all items, The Producer’s Wife. She had never felt so invisible and, paradoxically, so visible, in the wrong way. The tailored pants and plain shirts she had brought with her looked as out of place as an Edwardian Ascot dress. Billy couldn’t help the fact that her oldest sports clothes were no older than last year, fit perfectly, were made to order from the finest fabrics, in the most melting of summer colors. She couldn’t help the fact that she was incapable of wearing them without her stupendous built-in chic, which was only emphasized by their simplicity. She couldn’t help the fact that her personal style, her height, her very bone structure, all made it impossible for her to fade into the working group, dressed in the scruffy, well-seasoned, obviously right uniform of denim jackets and jeans, which were worn by everyone from Vito to the lowliest grip. She realized that she looked as eccentric as an Englishman having dinner in a black tie and a boiled shirt in the middle of Darkest Africa. But even that odd formality had been accepted years ago. Billy merely felt obsolete.

  However, she reflected, as she searched the shops of Mendocino and Frot Bragg, in vain, for jeans that would be long enough and slim enough to fit her, the problem was not really how she looked. That was minor compared to the old enemy she was battling, that betrayed misery of an outsider, the sunless climate of her youth, when whatever group she was in never included her in their busy activities and complicated arrangements. Even when surrounded by blood relatives she had felt as if she were staring while she pressed her nose against the restaurant window and watched the people inside happily and obliviously eating their dinners. Whoever the fuck it was who said “Time heals all wounds” didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, she thought savagely. Nothing heals old wounds. They were waiting there, inside, ready to incapacitate her, each and every time a situation came up that thrust her back into the emotional atmosphere of the past. Then everything—all the glamour, all the money, all the power—that had come after those first eighteen years suddenly seemed to be no more than window dressing. Was she stuck with her old wounds for life? Somehow she had to climb out of that dark corner, she decided, with an expression on her face so determined that she looked even taller and more self-confident than ever.

  On location, Billy put up a good front. Someone had found a spar
e folding canvas chair for her and put it next to Vito’s. In theory she had her appointed place to sit and be near him. In practice, Vito almost never used his chair except as a drop for his jacket, his sweater, and, as the day grew hotter, his shirt. As he came by to shed each garment, he ruffled her hair absently, asked if she was all right, if the book she was reading was good, and dashed off before she could answer any of his questions. She felt, flushed with fury, like a dog without an owner.

  During the shooting he was here, there, and everywhere, an Italian-American Scarlet Pimpernel, checking and double-checking to make sure that everyone was performing his job at 100 percent efficiency. While the cameras were rolling, he made notes so that Fifi could have the additional observations of a pair of fresh eyes.

  Once a picture is being shot, the set or location is under the director’s supervision, but if Fifi Hill had now become a general, Vito had been transformed into an entire army of top sergeants, as well as always remaining, in the final analysis, commander in chief. During the lunch break, Vito and Fifi were invariably huddled out of earshort, busily conferring, often sending for Svenberg or some other member of the production staff to discuss new ways of approaching the material.