“Whatever you like—just call me.”
“Oh, my darling—” They were profligate with kisses, no longer awkward, growing together like a strong tree. Finally Spider asked the question he knew had to be asked.
“What are you going to do about Hillman?”
“I shall just have to tell him tomorrow. He’ll know anyway, the minute he sees me. Poor Josh—but still, I never did give him more than an indefinite maybe—”
“But—the way you told me—I thought you’d made up your mind.”
“I hadn’t decided yet, not really—I couldn’t.”
“So you told me before you told him?”
“It does seem that way, doesn’t it?”
“I wonder why?”
“I don’t know.” She looked as innocent as a celestial puppy. Spider decided to keep his leaping intuitions to himself. Some questions are not meant to be asked as long as the answers are right.
“Just think,” he said, pulling back her curls so that he could see all of her small, splendid face, “how surprised everybody is going to be.”
“All but seven women,” said Valentine with pure mischief now spilling out of her great, green eyes.
“Hey, hold on!” said Spider, his suspicions newly aroused. “Who have you told?”
“How could I tell what I didn’t know? I’m talking about your mother and your six sisters—they knew—everything, I think, the day they met me.”
“Oh, lovely, silly Val, that’s pure imagination—they just think I’m irresistible to all women.”
“Ah, but you are, sailor, you are.”
Billy had stayed in her dressing room all afternoon, dreamily roaming around, while all sorts of ideas passed through her mind, restlessly inspecting various garments with an all-seeing but vague eye, even going through sixty empty handbags in her peregrinations and reaping a harvest of twenty-three dollars and twenty cents in change. She felt too tender all over, almost as if she had grown a new skin, to leave her retreat, but suddenly she realized with a start that Vito must already be home, dressing for the evening, while she was still incommunicado. She had long ago taken off the Mary McFadden so as not to wrinkle it, and she was wrapped in a favorite old at-home robe from the great days of Balenciaga, deep saffron silk velvet lined in shocking-pink taffeta with shocking-pink cuffs. Finally, as she realized the time, she unlocked the door and crossed her bathroom. It was like entering a spring garden, filled with the fresh perfumes and earth smells of the pots of daffodils, narcissus, hyacinths, and violets that banked both sides of her sunken tub and stood massed, in the large room, under the dozen rose trees that had been brought in from the greenhouses by the head gardener. They were covered with buds. In two weeks, she thought absently, they’ll be in full bloom. She rang for her maid and crossed the bedroom looking for signs of Vito. He wasn’t in his dressing room or in his huge, green-and-white marble bath or his sauna. She finally found him in the sitting room, which formed part of their suite, an intimate room hung entirely in shirred Paisley in rich browns and yellows, with glimmers of black and gold from an antique Korean screen and a group of seventeenth-century Japanese cachepots holding eight dozen half-opened tangerine tulips. He had been to the butler’s pantry off the sitting room to fetch a bottle of Château Silverado from the refrigerator there, which was used to hold white wine, champagne, caviar, and pâté de foie gras, and it looked as if he was about to drink a toast to himself. Billy took a second wineglass from the heavy silver tray on the lacquered black Portuguese table and held it out to him, her face serene, her eyes withholding some strong emotion.
“Oh, sweet, I’m so glad you’re home—I’m late but I’ll hurry. How was lunch with the chicken-shit pussy?” she asked.
“Gosh darn,” said Vito, “the language you rich girls use. You shouldn’t be so tough on that poor mound of buffalo droppings. My accountants just got the final figures on Mirrors and, it turns out, we were almost fifty thousand dollars over budget when he tried to take over. Would you believe?”
“I’d believe, and he’s still a chicken-shit pussy. Who paid for lunch?”
“He insisted. I had him by the balls, so his heart followed.” And, thought Vito, it only cost him a little over forty dollars plus one million five. Coming home, he had decided not to tell Billy about his bet with Arvey until tomorrow, until after the Oscars. She’d have enough of his success to swallow tonight without knowing that his next production was all set except for the screaming poor Arvey would do. And who knew, maybe Redford and Nicholson really would be interested—it was the book of the year, maybe of the decade.
“Well, that was the least he could do,” Billy said. Her mind was evidently on something Vito didn’t know about, but her spirits had never seemed so high.
“What, may I ask, lit you up like some fucking wonderful Christmas tree?” Vito inquired.
“My God, Vito, this is the big night. When am I supposed to get excited—Boxing Day, Bastille Day, Fidel Castro’s birthday, Amy Carter’s graduation from eighth grade?” She whirled around, her robe flying, drinking the wine, draining the priceless old crystal and throwing it at the fireplace where it shattered in a hundred pieces. “I must have had some Cossack blood,” she said, very pleased with herself.
“You’d better have some racehorse blood. You have exactly fifteen minutes to be dressed and in the car.” He gave her a smart smack on her bottom and watched, puzzled, as she blew him a kiss and strode away. There was something different about Billy tonight and it wasn’t just that she wasn’t wearing her earrings. Some—potency, some secret victory. She looked the way he felt.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had finally become aware that except for a few long-awaited minutes, the Award ceremonies could use a little jazzing up for the television audience. More than any pomp or lavish sets, those hundreds of millions of watchers really wanted to see famous faces in moments during which the average person could empathize with them, moments of tense waiting, of hope, of crisis, of concealed disappointment, of nerves and bluff and explosive joy.
The Academy officials had allowed Maggie’s crew, all properly dressed in dinner jackets, to take up positions right down on the floor of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with their hand mikes and their minicams. This way, instead of those brief flashes of the stars sitting somewhere in a row of people, sometimes accompanied by a zoom close-up of the blink of a celebrated eye, which more often than not vanished from the screen before the public managed to get a decent look, this year’s audience was treated to an orgy of lingering close-ups and was able to listen in on snatches of conversations in various moments during the presentations when the audience wasn’t silent in expectancy. Maggie’s men were so unobtrusive and blended so well into the audience that after a while they didn’t seem to be there at all and the nominees for the various Oscars, all seated in convenient locations near the stage, almost forgot they were on live television.
Billy and Vito didn’t reach their seats until long after Maggie had finished her interviews with the arriving stars, but they managed to slip in before the ceremonies began. By now Maggie was backstage. She had finished talking to the presenters in their dressing rooms, most of whom were a spate of words, and now she had retired to the control booth with her director to cover the Awards themselves. Maggie had worked out a game plan based on one simple directive, which she had issued to her troops.
“If Sly Stallone is scratching his ass while the gay who gets the Best Sound Effects Oscar is trudging up the aisle, STAY ON SLY until they actually hand the son of a bitch his statue and then, only then, cut to him.”
“What about his acceptance speech, Maggie?” an assistant director asked.
“He gets twenty-five seconds—no, make that twenty—and then cut back to the action on the floor.”
It made for an interesting show. Unfortunately, the Academy never granted this permission again.
The Oscar audience is truly captive. Not even heaven can help the person w
ho feels like going to the bathroom during the duration of the telecast There are no commercial breaks for them, no seventh-inning stretch. Billy found herself sinking into a reverie during the first, endless production number of one of the five nominees for Best Song.
Her brain, she realized, had never worked so logically as it was doing now. Something about figuring out and facing the facts of how she had managed to get herself pregnant had liberated powers of reasoning that she dimly sensed were beginning to vanquish her old habit of impulsiveness. There had always been a lot to say for making a list Even as she had taken up her pen, earlier in the day, she had heard Aunt Cornelia’s voice saying sternly but lovingly, “Wilhelmina Winthrop, pull up your socks.”
She knew now that she was about to arrive at the center of her life and she didn’t want to do it in a scramble of grabbing and clutching and flailing about, trying to keep her world tied down and under her control as if it were a runaway balloon. It was time to let the balloon loose and allow it to take her with it, soaring tranquilly over a new, broad, sunny landscape, with a light hand at the controls. Did a balloon have controls, a tiller, ropes, what? Never mind, she told herself, at least she wouldn’t be alone in the balloon. There would be the baby and, of course, another baby to follow. She had been an only child and she wouldn’t let that happen to her own child. Perhaps three children in all? There was time, if she hurried. No, she told herself, here’s exactly where you start grasping, snatching, and arranging it all just so, and get into trouble. First this baby and then she’d see. In fact, next time, she and Vito would see. What if she did, after all, spend some years in the role of La Mama Orsini? If she just let it happen, she might find out that she loved it, she reflected warily, feeling an unpremeditated and rambunctious quiver of anticipation.
There was applause for the song and two new presenters, one ravishing boy and one ravishing girl, gibbering with nerves, were trying to announce an award for, as far as Billy could tell, the Best Animated Film. As the titles of the films and the names of the animators, many of them Czech or Japanese rolled, with many mispronunciations, trembling off their lips—didn’t they rehearse?—Billy resumed her thoughts.
It would be easy, in fact inevitable, to slip, under the providential cover of fruitfulness, into the joys of motherhood, but she was beginning to know herself too well now—and not a minute too soon—to imagine that she would be satisfied with late-blooming maternity into the indefinite future. What if she tried to compensate for her inability to control Vito with an attempt to control her children—child—children? It would certainly present a temptation and she wasn’t awfully good at resisting temptation, but it must not be allowed to happen. Vito would always belong to himself and, therefore, it followed that her children would ultimately belong to themselves too. She didn’t have to like this piece of basic knowledge so recently arrived at, but she had to learn to live with it. Finally. No, the only person with whom she would always come first, who would always belong to her, was herself.
Finished, long, long ago, were the days when Ellis had put her first above everything. Finished not so long ago, the days when she could separate the life of her body from the rest of her life and decide how to lead it, as much in cold blood as a bitch in heat could be. All those cocks of all the various male nurses, Jake included, had been exactly what one of the words for them was: tools. Pieces of machinery. Vito’s penis was like those other words, the arm is a member of the body, just as a heart is an organ. When it was in her it was not an “it,” it was Vito, the love of her life, come what may.
Billy turned her attention back to the stage where four identically black-bearded gentlemen were all receiving Oscars. Animators? Raskolnikov, Rumpelstiltskin, Rashomon, and von Rundstedt? Surely not? Yet they were from Toronto, so they must be animators. All quite as usual.
The next nominees were for Best Costume Design. Billy watched, distracted from the flow of her thoughts, by the images flashed on the giant screen. As the winner was announced—would it be Edith Head again winning her ninth Oscar? No, not Edith this time but another designer. What misguided impulse had made her try to bring back sequin-paved body armour tonight of all nights?—Billy picked up her drifting interior monologue.
There was a major dilemma at the bull’s-eye center of her life. In fact she could put it into one sentence. If she wanted to stay married to Vito, and she did, without too much resentment, without too much jealousy and without more than the normal strain and pain of any marriage, she had to establish an abiding interest in life that did not depend on him in any way. Could this by any chance be the compromise Jessica had been so unenlightening about?
She didn’t need to make an Aunt Cornelia list to know where, amid all the interests the world offered, that choice lay. Everything pointed to Scruples. She had had the original idea. She had managed to see it through until it became workable. True, she had almost loused it up. When she made a mistake it was not just a beaut, it was a goddamned work of art, a bloody masterpiece. But she had known that it was wrong and she had picked Valentine to fix it. The fact that Valentine had turned up with Spider, who had had the imagination to turn Scruples around, would have meant nothing if she hadn’t cooperated fully as soon as he showed her the way. In other words, if she said so herself, she had what was usually called executive ability.
Billy interrupted her self-congratulations as the award for Best Achievement in Cinematography came up. Svenberg had been nominated and she found she was holding her breath. Damn. John Alonzo. Poor Per, but he was so happy with the ads for Mirrors, and he did have two Oscars already.
As another song was given a production worthy of Radio Qty Music Hall in the 1950s—where did they dig up these songs?—Billy’s head filled with ideas the way a Fourth of July sparkler gives off flashes of light There were still rich women in the world who lived much too far away from Scruples. She could open branches of Scruples in cities flung across continents. Rio was ripe for it—Zurich—Milan—Sao Paulo—Monte Carlo—all full of very rich, very bored, very elegant women. Munich—Chicago—either Dallas or Houston.
And New York. Ah, New York. Once, at lunch, about six years ago, Gerry Stutz had told her why she had never opened a branch of Bendel’s. She’d said that there weren’t enough women in any city in the United States except New York who could understand and support the Bendel approach to retailing. She’d enjoy giving Gerry a run for her money. The Scruples approach was not as confined to avant-garde chic as Bendel’s, It could be modified, tilted, angled to suit any metropolis so long as the country in which the city was located held a large leisure class.
Billy felt her fingertips tingling with the excitement of her visions. All those cities to visit, locations to scout, offers to be made on land, deals to be consummated, architects to be found and commissioned, interior decorators to hire, to consult with, the habits of the local wealthy community to explore. Each Scruples would be different from any other store in the world except for its basic kinship to the Scruples in Beverly Hills. There were salespeople to be trained, new buyers to be discovered, store managers to be hired, an infinitude of new refinements on the one basic theme of Scruples. Enough to last a lifetime. Billy shivered in delight. She felt, she realized, the way Vito must feel when a new picture went into pre-production. No less love for her, just more passion for something that had nothing to do with her, didn’t threaten her place in any way. Oh, lovely! But one thing at a time, or her balloon would grow too heavy and fall to earth.
Vito nudged her gently. She seemed lost in some sort of dream and the nominees for Best Director were about to be announced. Billy came alert immediately and was surprised by the surge of tension she felt. She did so love Fifi. The two presenters—Christ, who chose them?—seemed more engrossed in their jokes, bad jokes too and poorly memorized, than in getting down to the envelopes. It was sadistic. The reading of the five names seemed to take five minutes. The ritualistic fumbling with the envelope went on for an eon. How was it humanly possibl
e for two normal people to be unable to open one envelope? Fiorio Hill. Poor Fifi. Why was Vito jumping up and—it was Fifi. As she watched his familiar figure, clad almost unrecognizably in an elegant brown-velvet dinner jacket, run up to the stage, Billy wondered if she’d ever known Fifi’s whole name or was she just too full of her own ideas to make the connection?
Thank God, another song. Time-out. She wished she’d brought a pad and pencil. No, no, no. That was wrong. That was exactly what she must not do. She knew that if, in a mood of gut-thrilling covetousness, she so much as wrote down the names of the cities in which she was dreaming of establishing a branch of Scruples, she’d be on the phone within hours, avariciously and imperiously giving orders to real-estate brokers, pouncing on choice corners, ravening to get started, impatient to the point of frenzy to see her ideas come to life. She had changed enough, she told herself solemnly, to see the ease with which she’d make such a mistake. She had even changed enough to avoid it. Fleetingly, but implacably, Billy reminded herself of some of the things she had gobbled down in her life; once, long ago, it had been food; then, in New York, all those young men; then, after she met Ellis, the rich years of travel, too many houses, all the jewels, coming when she was so young that she was surfeited before the end of her twenties; then the clothes, the mountains of clothes, more than nine tenths unworn; and finally again, the men, Jake in the pool house, the others in her studio. She’d had too much, so very much too much, and so much of it unsavored, swallowed without chewing. Now she knew where she wanted to go. The days of unfulfilling cupidity were over, the days of a sensible, discriminating choice of priorities lay ahead. How very Bostonian of her. So she hadn’t left Boston totally behind after all.
Billy resolved not to make the mistake of trying to plan the future of Scruples alone, in secret, self-indulging acquisitiveness. She just wasn’t smart enough. It took executive ability to admit that. Valentine, and in particular, Spider, would be in on everything. They’d both be vice-presidents of the new branches, of the new company that would be formed, with more money and bigger profit shares for them both. Who knows—it might even cheer up Spider, cure whatever ailed him?
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