“Maybe I’ll get the anti-blockbuster vote,” Vito answered dreamily. “People in the industry know that every blockbuster that fails means six or eight or even ten other pictures that don’t get a chance to get made—thousands of jobs lost. Disappointing big pictures—and we’ve had more than our share this year—turn off the public—the industry knows that.”
“Dream on, Vito, dream on. Look, listen to the voice of experience. Have you any idea how long I’ve been head of the studio—since before you knew a lens from a view-finder. And I know all about how you got your nomination—those housewife matinees—did you think I wasn’t aware of the stunts you were pulling? But from a nomination to winning—it’s a whole other ball park, my boy.”
Vito addressed himself to his individual chocolate soufflé served with chilled whipped cream in a separate dish. He ate judiciously, Arvey studied him curiously.
“So you’re thinking of buying something?” he asked at last. The bastard wanted something from him. It would be a pleasure to turn him down.
“Uh huh. A book. The WASP. Heard of it?”
“What do you think I am, illiterate? My readers loved it. Susan loved it. I don’t have time to read, but I get outlines. Eleven months on the best-seller lists—if you can trust them, which I don’t. But one million five for the movie rights—they’re crazy. Nobody will pay that.”
“Billy’s wild about it—wants to buy it for me. If you don’t want your soufflé—?”
“Take it, I shouldn’t eat chocolate anyhow. So Billy wants to buy it, huh? I take it you have a birthday coming up? Nice, very nice.”
“It is nice, Curt, when your wife has faith in you. She’s got almost as good a nose as mine. You think Mirrors won’t win—my Italian nose says it will. Call it a hunch if you don’t want to be ethnic.”
“When you run a multimillion-dollar company you don’t play hunches as easily as when you have a rich wife—no offense, just the facts. Nicholson and Redford—do they really want to do it?”
“Yeah.”
“I just can’t believe that. And their salaries alone—Jesus—you’d be up to five, six million before you even bought the book. You’re talking a twenty-million-dollar budget. No, Vito, those deals are a little rich for your blood.”
“Tell you what, Curt, I’ll buy the book myself, or radier Billy will, and I’ll give you a free option of thirty days if you’re right about Mirrors not winning.”
“What’s the other half?”
“If I’m right, you buy the rights for me. Simple.”
“One million five?”
“The odds are against me and you don’t think I have a chance. But don’t sweat it. If you’re unwilling to risk your judgment, I’ll buy the book and find another studio. Shit, it’d take too long to order another soufflé, wouldn’t it? They’re so damn small.”
“You eat too much. Vito, I still think you’re a schmuck, but if you want to make this deal, OK. If you don’t mind, why don’t we make a memo of agreement while we’re here?” He signaled the waiter and asked for a menu.
“Curt, Curt—you can trust me,” Vito sounded hurt.
“After you stole my picture?” Arvey asked, busily writing.
“You got it back.”
“Nevertheless—I prefer something in writing.” Arvey and Vito both signed the memo and the waiter and Patrick Terail, the restaurant owner, witnessed it. Vito reached for the menu and started to fold it to put in his pocket when Arvey grabbed it from him.
“We’ll let Patrick hold it for us, eh Vito? Remember, this is the only copy. And I’ll pay for lunch. Otherwise it would cost you one million five, plus. I’m feeling generous today.”
Billy drove home from Scruples with all her senses focused on getting there safely. The short distance between Scruples and Sunset Boulevard is full of opportunities to hit jaywalkers and she knew she was so angry that she was afraid not to concentrate. Her self-control held as she ran through the enormous house, not speaking to any of the servants. She crossed her sitting room, her bedroom, and her bathroom, at last locking herself into her final refuge, her main dressing room. This room, thirty feet square, thickly carpeted in ivory, with pale lavender silk on the walls, held rack upon rack of clothes. In the center of the room a Lucite island was divided into hundreds of drawers, each one holding a different accessory. Beyond it, in another locked room, cooled to a permanent 45 degrees, hung Billy’s furs. Neither of the rooms was ever entered by anyone but Billy and her personal maid.
There was a deep bay window in the center of one of the walls, with a wide window seat covered in ivory velvet and piled high with silk cushions in the colors of anemones and Iceland poppies. She sank down, panting from her race through the house, and pulled up an old afghan she had never been parted from since Aunt Cornelia had knitted it for her. She tucked her cold feet under her thighs, wrapped one arm around the other, and made herself as small and as warm as possible. This hidden window seat was her ultimate private place where she came to think things out. It contained a phone, which only she ever used, and a buzzer to summon her maid. As long as she stayed in the bay window no member of her household dared to disturb her, and in her present mood Billy felt she might well spend the rest of her life there. The bastard had trapped her!
Oh how convenient, how very well timed, how marvelously well planned! Trapped, by Christ, in the oldest trap known to man. The minute Valentine had spoken, she’d felt the trap close. No doubt Vito expected to turn her into an old country Italian wife, contentedly producing bambino after bambino—perhaps learning to cook with lots of olive oil and garlic—certainly getting fat—while he gallivanted around the world making movie-producer magic, occasionally returning to his family just long enough to knock her up again. Oh, what a Machiavellian son of a bitch he had turned out to be! Mama Orsini—who would have thought that she, Billy Ikehorn, would turn into La Mama Orsini? How had he done it, the sneaky rat fink? How had he timed it for today, just when she had finally told him some of the things she had been so miserable about; how had he planned this to happen to her just at the right moment so that he would be able to pat her on the head and say that she had other things to do than worry about being lonely now? What an infernally clever manipulator he was!
Billy squinted her eyes as she calculated. She’d always had irregular periods, and while waiting for the nominations, she’d been under such tension that she hadn’t given her missing periods a second thought. When, exactly was the last time? She consulted the week-at-a-glance diary she kept on a table next to the window seat. Then she jumped up and unlocked the door to her bathroom and peeked out. No silent-footed upstairs maid was in there putting out fresh towels or watering any of the flowering plants. She tiptoed quickly over to her supply closet and found the pile of round, plastic, birth-control pill containers she kept there. She counted them twice and returned to her dressing room, locking the door. She rechecked her journal. She had seen her gynecologist the morning of her Christmas visit to Dolly, and she had just finished a period then. Her doctor had a roguish way of making sure that all his “girls” over thirty saw him twice a year by only prescribing pills every six months. Then why did she still have six full pill containers?
If she didn’t know that it was impossible, she’d have to say that she hadn’t taken a pill since Christmas. If she didn’t know it was impossible. If she didn’t know.
In the empty room Billy suddenly threw back her head and roared out loud with laughter. Oh, but she had screwed herself up good and proper this time. Really done a very thorough job—almost three months gone, my dear, how’s that for a slip?
Billy didn’t have to be psychoanalytically oriented to see and accept immediately that she’d done this on purpose. But then why, if she wanted to have a baby, had she been so angry at Vito just a few seconds ago, why had she been so absolutely hateful to poor Valentine?
Billy rocked back and forth, still snorting with laughter, her arms clasping her knees, while she pondered the wo
rkings of—was it her mind or her subconscious or her unconscious? She didn’t really know, didn’t have the vocabulary or the insights—it was the only resolutely unfashionable thing about her. She’d operated on impulse for so long, flinging herself into situations, floundering around in them, making them work out in one way or another, more or less successfully, but never with the benefit of foresight.
Foresight? In hindsight, she thought, there was something rather strikingly determined about a woman who forgets to take her birth-control pills for almost three months. Billy patted her flat stomach tentatively. This baby would be another product of her inveterate impulsiveness—like—like all the rest of her life. Her fingers wandered to her right breast, then to her left She weighed them experimentally in her hands. Bigger, and somehow warmer, than they had been since she was eighteen. How could any woman, especially one as conscious of her body as she was, overlook such elementary clues? What kind of woman carefully traps herself into having a baby but doesn’t want to face the fact that she is pregnant? And why?
Good question.
Billy pulled over a pad and pen from where they lay on the seat and started making notes, grinding her teeth in determination to get to the first layer of this. The bottom layer, she knew, was lost in murk.
First of all, she just didn’t feel ready to be a mother. Once she was a mother she would never again be a carefree woman without any absolutely irrevocable responsibility.
Second, she wanted to be Vito’s honeymoon bride for a long, lovely while. But, in that case, she’d lost the battle to Mirrors even before they had been married. A wife yes, she was that, but a bride?—hardly. They’d skipped that part.
Third, she wanted to make all the decisions in her life by herself, in her own good time, at her election or pleasure, with the authority she had enjoyed for so many years. None of this being crept up on and shaken by the scruff of the neck by nature. Billy did not accept being bossed around by life. But, in that case, why hadn’t she married one of the tame, decorative, amusing, caponish men available to women with money? It wasn’t by mistake that she had chosen Vito, would choose him again today, knowing everything she now knew, not only because he was the particular man she loved but also because he was the kind of man she loved. His authority, his ability to make decisions, his autonomy—all the things that would permit him to work apart from her much of the time—were the very things she admired most. She couldn’t cut off his air supply by suffocating him with her needs—for one thing, he wouldn’t let her. Life gets a little paradoxical, Billy told herself ruefully, when you start to grow up.
Fourth. She wanted to come first with Vito, before any other person, to be the be-all and the end-all in his life, never to have to share him. And that was the most absurd reason of all. She had shared him from the very beginning, from the first moment she saw him, shared him with his preoccupations, his scripts in development, his endless meetings, with the whole circus caravan that had to be pulled together to make any movie, with Fifi, with Svenberg, with the Moviola. Collaboration is the soul of movie making. But for emotion, for absolute trust, for simple human warmth, he would always come back to her. A baby wouldn’t be someone who took Vito away from her—on the contrary, a baby was someone she could share with Vito.
She looked at the three or four key words she had scratched on her note pad. The only one that still made some sense was that at thirty-four she still didn’t feel ready to become a mother. Thirty-four? She chortled out loud at her own absurdity, for she’d also managed to forget her thirty-fifth birthday in November when they were in the full spate of editing. She had certainly been up to some monumental forgetfulness lately. Did she plan to wait till she was sixty?
And yet, and yet—how difficult, how really wrenching it felt to relinquish freedom. Obviously, her subconscious, or was it unconscious, mind had made that decision for her. The un or sub probably knew best, worked on a lunar clock or some such thing. Billy contemplated her list with gloom. No question that she was a slippery bitch indeed. In fact, a damn silly cunt. She wanted it all, the possible and the self-evidently impossible, and she gave up only with reluctance, dragging her feet and screaming foul play until the last possible moment. A fine example to set for a poor innocent baby. She looked at the piece of paper with the few words she had written on it. Slowly, carefully, and decisively she crossed them all out. Then with strong strokes of her pen she wrote: CORNELIA ORSINI? WINTHROP ORSINI?—and studied the two names with a mixture of acquiescence, slow, tender captivation, and the fast-fading remnants of sheer surprise. It was a half hour later before she came out of her reverie to realize that she still hadn’t decided what to wear tonight.
She put out the piece of paper carefully on the table, slithered out of her clothes, and went directly to the section of her dressing room in which her evening gowns were hung. She flipped through dozens of garments, each encased in its own plastic covering, and quickly found the white silk Mary McFadden two-piece dress she’d bought a month ago. Over her head she flung the fragile pleated tunic, painted in a multicolored abstract shell design, quite beautiful enough in itself to frame and hang on a wall. Then she stepped carefully into the long skirt, finding that it still closed at the waist, just barely. She hesitated between seven pairs of silver slippers, chose a pair, and put them on. As Billy walked toward the triple mirror with the special lighting that reproduced evening illumination, she tightened the corded belt of the tunic.
Not bad. In fact, good, really very good. Billy inspected herself in each of the three panels of the mirror; front, both sides, and finally a full back view. Not as smashing as Valentine’s red number but quite acceptable. She wandered over to her daybed and picked up a small silk pillow; then she loosened and lowered the corded belt and stuffed the pillow under the tunic. She sauntered back to the mirror, approaching it sideways, as if to take her reflection by surprise. Hmmmmmm. Not without a certain style—rather Botticelli, all those soft billows. What if she added just one more little pillow? No. Not really. The tunic wasn’t that ample. But what if she substituted a long, loose Geoffrey Beene top woven of gold and silver thread? Surely there was enough room in it for three babies. She tied the Mary McFadden belt over the Beene top at crotch level and added a third pillow. A strange effect indeed. Something like a Memling Madonna—but it missed. Still, it did have a look, though not one either Beene or McFadden would acknowledge.
Now Valentine could design maternity clothes to her heart’s content Oh God! Valentine. How could she possibly apologize? The truth was entirely too complicated. She was only beginning to understand it herself. Never mind—she’d figure out something, she thought, and picked up the phone.
Maggie had arrived at Scruples shortly after a lunch date with an actor whom she had gently persuaded not to sign for his next picture until after the Awards, no matter how much pressure his nervous agent was putting on him. She earned that actor’s lifelong gratitude when, Oscar in hand, he was able to get an additional three quarters of a million dollars for the part he had almost accepted twenty-four hours earlier. It had been that kind of morning. For every award there were five potential winners. Some of Maggie’s dozens of phone calls conveyed the unmistakable message, “Take the money and run.” Others counseled, “Wait and see.” Not everyone Maggie talked to took her advice, but they all remembered it later. Her legend grew, during that one morning’s work, from mythical to almost mystical proportions. Maggie MacGregor knew how the movie business worked all right, which made her one of the very few—perhaps the only one in the world—who did.
Valentine had Maggie’s dress ready to be taken to the dressing room Maggie would be using at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion where the Awards would take place. They had had a final fitting on it several days ago, but Maggie insisted on trying it on for Spider.
“Let him see it on television, that’s what I designed it for,” objected Valentine.
“I want to see the look on his face when he sees what you’ve done,” Maggie ins
isted, with a swagger, her round, brown eyes screwed up with her sense of fun and clever power. “He’ll freak.”
But Spider, when he had been found and summoned to Valentine’s studio, looked at Maggie through his bubble, reverently and absentmindedly brushing his fingers across the top of each superb breast. He nodded approval as if he were feeling the cool smoothness of a statue.
“Ravishing.” He gave her an approximation of his old smile. Looking at Maggie and touching her, the bubble thinned out until he almost didn’t feel it. His smile deepened. “I can only allow this once a year, Mags. Otherwise your public will stop taking you seriously and just spend their time waiting for one—or the other—to fall out entirely. Good luck tonight—and don’t bend down.” He kissed her automatically and left the room, weariness apparent in his graceful lope.
“He must be coming down with something,” Maggie said anxiously.
“Probably the clap,” Valentine snapped. “Listen, gorgeous, Colette here will help you out of that invitation to riot and put it back on the hanger. Remember, no jewelry. Ill be watching, so don’t try to cheat. I must go now and return a phone call before this place turns into bedlam. You’ll be the best-looking one on that screen tonight. Bonne chance!”
Valentine retreated into the little room where she did her sketching and reached for the phone. She simply had to call Josh. He had phoned her twice yesterday and she’d been too busy to talk to him. Last night she’d been so tired that she had shut off her phone and let the switchboard downstairs take her messages. He’d called her once and been told that she wasn’t accepting calls, and today he’d already phoned again while she was busy with Maggie. Slowly she dialed the number of his office, hoping that he’d still be out to lunch. His secretary put her through immediately.
“Valentine! Are you all right? You must be exhausted, poor sweet.” His voice was deep with concern.
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