Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  “Anybody home?” Gigi’s lighthearted voice rang with the assurance of a certain welcome as she came into the brightness of the house, bringing with her that perceptible, all-but-visible suggestion of a creature who should, by all rights, be spending her life dancing the Charleston, a creature whose personal attitude toward reality, a shimmying, swaying, tantalizing, ain’t-we-got-fun attitude, came out of a decade long past.

  “Everybody, darling,” Billy called. “We’re in here.”

  Gigi entered the room wearing slim brown velvet jeans tucked into her favorite pair of soft brown suede boots, which came up over her knees and ended in a wide cuff. Her pale green woven tunic was belted with thick gold cording, and there was a ruff of Irish lace at her neck. Gigi’s small breasts were visibly held up by nothing except youth and sheer Irish nerve. With her bangs and bell of orangy hair, she looked like a figure in a tapestry, a pageboy, a minstrel, a young prince, or a girl disguised as a boy for a masque.

  After Gigi had kissed Billy and Spider, she turned to Ben Winthrop with her usual directness, offering her hand with open curiosity widening her eyes.

  “Gigi, this is my cousin Ben Winthrop. Ben, this is Graziella Giovanna Orsini, my stepdaughter.”

  “So formal? Is that because Ben is my stepcousin?” Gigi asked. “After all, Billy, you endured a year of my father, but you’ve kept me more than seven. You and I could even be considered married by common law, if one of us were a man, stepdaughter or not. So why shouldn’t your cousin be my cousin? I don’t have a single one of my own, and I’ve been deprived long enough. I claim this cousin.”

  “There’s a certain rough justice to that,” Spider said, enjoying Billy’s perplexed look. “Ben’s my cousin by marriage, now that I think about it. Why don’t you just consider him a cousin-once-removed, Gigi, whatever that means?”

  “Do I have a vote?” Ben Winthrop wondered, taking an involuntary step toward Gigi in a desire to see exactly what shade of green her eyes actually were, behind that bristling barrier of black lashes.

  “This is not a democracy,” Gigi informed him, a smile deepening on her smile-shaped lips.

  Oh, she’s up to no good tonight, Spider thought, surveying her. It’s either the new job or Zach being out of town too long, but she’s using that potent, private-blend heartbreaker stuff, and we all know that’s not playing fair, don’t we?

  “What is it, then?” Ben asked. “A monarchy?”

  “A benign dictatorship,” Gigi said. “Hal and Max make the rules, the rest of us live to understand and obey, right, Spider?”

  “Too true, kiddo. How’s your new gig?”

  “Fascinating, crazy, confusing, nerve-racking, intriguing, utterly manipulative, and at the same time curiously innocent. When a product is one of our accounts, it really, truly is the best. If it’s not, it’s beneath contempt—there’s no place for gray hats in advertising. I’m what’s called a ‘new hire,’ so everyone is suspicious of me, plus I’m a ‘creative,’ and creatives are notoriously flighty and childlike in their desire for approval, so for the moment I can do no wrong and no right. It’s entirely different from Scruples Two, where we functioned rationally. Advertising is like a lunatic asylum crossed with a kindergarten—I absolutely love it! It’s about ten thousand times harder than Scruples Two.”

  Gigi looked excitingly reckless, Billy thought, like a combatant, a small, vital female fighting cock, living with a strutting glitter, ready to risk, to plunge, to take any chance. How could hawking bathing suits to overweight women cause this particular metamorphosis, or was it due to someone she’d met at work, or merely being out on her own? Gigi was deliciously, visibly full of herself in a complicated way; excited, almost overwhelmed, yet bursting with vitality.

  “Who are you working for?” Ben asked.

  “A new shop, a boutique called Frost Rourke Bernheim. They used to be with Caldwell in New York. You probably wouldn’t have heard of them.”

  Gigi didn’t know much about the recent history of advertising Ben Winthrop thought in amusement. So she’d joined the notorious account-nappers and found them curiously innocent. His new cousin-once-removed was clipper-ship-worthy for sure.

  The evening ended early because Billy had to get up at dawn to give the twins their bottles. Gigi, her mood restless and much too keyed up to consider going home, accepted when Ben Winthrop asked if she’d like a nightcap.

  “Where would you like to go?” he asked. “Silly that we have to take both cars. I feel ungallant.”

  “This isn’t neighborhood-bar territory … no corner pub for miles. The nearest place is the Bel Air Hotel, but you’d never be able to find it by yourself,” she said, superior in her local expertise. “The few little signs to the hotel are easy to miss. Follow me.” Gigi lifted a grandiose arm, pointed forward, and hopped proudly into her VW.

  Soon, after driving through the dark, winding roads of Bel Air, unlit, it seemed, deliberately, so that only residents could find their way about, they settled in a far corner of the little-used but spacious bar of that smallest and most elegant of Los Angeles hotels, a bar where a wood fire glowed under the mantelpiece even in the summer, a bar lined with dark wood paneling, where the banquettes were covered in tapestry and the green leather chairs studded with nailheads, a bar designed to look like a man’s retreat in a British castle.

  “Where do you live?” Ben asked Gigi, who had curled up in the corner of the banquette, her boots tucked under her, elaborately tasseled pillows tucked behind her back, as if she were in her own living room.

  “In the Hollywood Hills.”

  “An apartment?”

  “A tiny house,” she answered, purposefully brief. Gigi had no intention of broadcasting the exact circumstances of her private life to any man, particularly one she had just met. “Are you here to violate our lovely state? Pave it over with manicure salons and quick-copy stores and croissant bakeries, because if you are, it’s being done already.”

  “I don’t do mini-malls,” he laughed. “I do the real thing, branches of department stores, multiplex movie houses, chain grocery stores, high-end speciality shops, restaurants—”

  “Rape and pillage.”

  “Exactly.”

  “On the theory that if you don’t, someone else will.”

  “Absolutely. Except I insist on getting there first.”

  “It’s so refreshing to meet an honest man,” Gigi said in mock admiration.

  “Honesty is my middle name, after Saltonstall. Don’t you want to know more about me?”

  “Or, as David would say, ‘Let’s get the personal stuff over with.’ ”

  “Who’s David?”

  “An art director. We’re a creative team, the two of us. Can you imagine a business that puts two strangers into one room all day long and expects them to work up a winning ad campaign together in the week we have before the pitch?”

  “And will you?”

  “They’re betting on it. I have a feeling it could—might—maybe—just happen. Stranger things have come to pass in the ad business, or game … at least I think they used to call it a game.”

  “It sounds a hell of a lot more fun than solving my latest problem.”

  Ben Winthrop looked at Gigi closely. During dinner he had been too caught up in general conversation to pay close attention to her, but he had not, for a second, been unaware of her presence. He was a man who, rightly, considered women one of his areas of expertise. He had had many of the loveliest in the country for the period during which they interested him. Gigi did not fall, neatly or otherwise, into any category he recognized.

  Women, in Ben Winthrop’s opinion, all played games, and she hadn’t revealed the nature of her game, although she must have one. He knew he was a cynic, but any man who wasn’t a cynic about women was something worse, a fool. She wasn’t getting by on charm, although she easily could have; she wasn’t using her looks more than other women of equal visual delight; she didn’t seem to have an agenda in his regard. T
hat, of course, could be an agenda in itself, but she was probably too young and inexperienced for such a subtle nuance.

  “And what’s your latest problem?” Gigi asked.

  “I’m going to have to foreclose on my first tenants, the Muller family. My company is a landlord as well as a builder, and sometimes the landlord part gets painful. Kids’ Paradise is a chain of toy stores that is about to be put out of business by the spread of Toys “ ” Us—they can’t match Toys’ rock-bottom discount prices, and the merchandise is basically identical. I have a Kids’ Paradise in almost every one of my malls and I’m friends with their management, but they haven’t been able to pay the rent, not for months.”

  “How many Paradises does that make?”

  “A hundred and two. I own seventy-three malls, and they have stores that aren’t in malls as well.”

  “Seventy-three! The mall-master!”

  “I cover the country—and it’s a lot of country. I make it a point to build as close as I can to highly prosperous areas so that our tenants do upscale business and I get upscale rents.”

  “Where are you building in L.A.?” Gigi asked. Ben Winthrop’s eyes seemed frank and undefended. Nevertheless, they revealed nothing he didn’t intend them to show, she thought. He reminded her of basketball coaches in TV close-ups during the playoffs. When their “game faces” were firmly in place, the camera couldn’t get the slightest hint from the coaches of how upset or pleased they were with the performance of their teams, not even after the game was over. They had to make themselves into charlatans in order to remain authentic.

  “Right now we’re in construction in Santa Monica, Culver City, and Encino. Then I’ll spread up north and down south, on land I’ve already bought.”

  “It sounds like an invasion,” Gigi said with a low whistle. “Did you bring the pods with you? Are you friendly tous natives, or are we merely a species you plan on observing from afar, the playthings of the gods?”

  “It all depends on the status of your credit cards.”

  “You come from Planet Visa?”

  “Precisely.”

  “How crass!”

  “And I thought you were in advertising.”

  “Only for the last two days,” she protested. “I haven’t learned to be a hard-hearted businessman like you. Foreclosing on something called Kids’ Paradise, and you actually admit it!”

  “Told you I was honest. Business is business, eventually, no matter how you hate to do certain things. Look, you should see the renderings of the elevations of my mall in Santa Monica—it’s truly beautiful. The city gave me permission to buy the land and the permits to build because it’s architecturally outstanding. Let me show them to you, let me redeem my reputation.”

  “I couldn’t make time tomorrow to look at a long-lost folio of da Vinci drawings—it’s back to Indigo Seas and the abundant woman, all day, all night, if necessary.”

  “It’ll just take ten minutes, now, not tomorrow. I have them in my suite … here.”

  “Well, why the hell did you let me think you didn’t know how to get to the hotel?” Gigi asked indignantly. “You want to redeem your reputation, you claim to be an honest man, and you didn’t tell me you were staying here? Ha!”

  “You looked as if you were leading a cavalry charge into the wilderness—I simply enjoyed watching you, I like your style, I admire a spirited female, is that a crime?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she muttered, unimpressed.

  “Please?”

  “Oh, all right. But only because I claimed you as cousin-once-removed. I was overly impulsive, I see that clearly now, but I owe you the benefit of the doubt.”

  “I’m honestly impressed,” Gigi said, after she’d taken a long look at the architect’s drawings. “As malls go, this must be as good as it gets. But I guess there won’t be a toy store in it.”

  “It looks that way, unless Toys “ ” Us moves in, and with our high rents that’s not likely.”

  Gigi got up from her seat near the coffee table and began to pace slowly around the large sitting room of Ben’s suite, a room that breathed luxury in twenty-five shades of terra-cotta.

  “Did Kids’ Paradise ever advertise?” she asked.

  “Locally, but not much.”

  “Hmm. Listen, Ben, I had to go to five baby showers in the last six months—one of them for Billy, one for Sasha, three for Spider’s sisters. The guests were all women with money, from comfortable to rich, the kind who live near your malls. And I have never in my life seen such presents!”

  As she spoke, she walked faster and faster, shaking her head at the memory of the excessive baby showers.

  “I didn’t know such absolutely gorgeous baby clothes existed, and all the equally special outfits for when the baby stuff is outgrown—then there was a slew of really expensive toys and things that are more for the mother to enjoy than for kids to use or play with, like antique crib quilts, antique children’s chairs, music boxes, old doll’s tea sets.”

  Gigi stopped walking and turned to him.

  “Ben, listen, here’s my point. After the presents are opened, the guests invariably start comparing notes on how impossible it is to find something special for these showers, how much harder it is than finding things for a bridal shower. These occasions are more and more frequent with so many women having babies and lots of them having them later in life.”

  “Why do I have the feeling you’re leading me into a trap?”

  “Because I am. Just listen. Baby-shower guests are feeling the pressure to one-up each other with everyone watching as the guest of honor opens each gift. It’s obscene! Take me, for example. Once I spent hours looking for something really great to give Sasha. I was desperate. Finally I found a bookstore in the Valley that specializes in old children’s books.… I bought out their stock, every Oz book, every Beatrix Potter, every Hardy Boy, every Nancy Drew … I gave Sasha a first edition of Glinda the Good, and now I’m set for years of parties and I’m keeping my source a secret so that no one copies me.”

  “Gigi, your altruistic impulses are impressive. But could you get to the point here?”

  “Have I got your attention? Good. Okay, I realize I live in a community where everything is bigger than life, but doesn’t it make sense that this baby-present mania has spread to all the expensive suburbs, in a less dramatic way no doubt, but you know that trends start here first. Shaker Heights? Oak Forest? Brookline? La Jolla? The Main Line? You know. Doesn’t that mean that there’s a need for a store that sells nothing but upscale children’s things, especially to grandparents?” Gigi had stopped pacing and was standing in the middle of the room, her hands spread eloquently.

  “Grandparents?”

  “God, you’re such a dumb bachelor, Ben! Grandparents give the world’s most ridiculously expensive presents, because they had to hold back and try not to spoil their own kids, but now all bets are off. Plus one set of grandparents is always viciously competitive with the other set.”

  “I still don’t see it,” he said skeptically, drawing her out. Bachelor or not, Ben Winthrop spent many thousands of dollars every year on suitably impressive presents to the newborn babes his cousins were producing at a constant rate, as well as on presents to the many godchildren who had been foisted on him by his Harvard classmates. Birthdays seemed to come around on an almost weekly basis, and Christmas was a nightmare. One of his secretaries was permanently detailed to keep on top of the children’s gift situation and she complained about its difficulty.

  “I want to change Kids’ Paradise, make it into a Scruples for kids’ gifts. Call it, oh … oh … The Enchanted Attic, yeah, that’s it!—The Enchanted Attic—redecorate to fit the name, turn their entire merchandising policy upside down, bring in a line of fabulous gift wrappings—the right wrapping is essential, the box has to be a signature box—make it the place to find the best, most exciting, and original presents, the Tiffany of toy stores, plus kids’ antiques and clothing the department stores don’t have, and
a great line of specially designed smaller gifts, like Tiffany’s baby teething rings, for example, for people who want to spend less and still buy status and—”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ben said expressionlessly. He did know, he’d known from the minute she’d said “Scruples for kids” that this idea was a natural, a potential gold mine, his kind of investment, for his malls were located in precisely the communities where such shops would flourish.

  “Why the hell not?” Gigi put her hands on her hips and looked at him challengingly. “Give me one good reason. Aren’t you supposed to be a visionary?”

  “You talk fast, lady, but making it happen would take a major infusion of capital.”

  “I think capital is less of a problem than location. If you let the Kids’ Paradise people, the Mullers, stay put until they change over, they won’t go belly-up and—”

  “What’s in it for you?” he demanded.

  “But isn’t that obvious? They’d absolutely have to advertise. That would be an essential part of the deal. The Enchanted Attic would have to become a client of FRB and I’d bring in a piece of new business.”

  “That’s all you want? You’re sure?”

  “I never want to go back to retailing, thank you very much, but I just bet Billy—it’s right down her alley—might be—”

  Ben pounced before she could complete that thought. “Stop right there, Gigi, I never work with partners.”

  “Say that again.”

  “I never work with partners. I enjoy gambling now and then, so I’ll put up the capital myself, refrain from foreclosing, defer the rent for as long as necessary, and hire a retailing expert to work with the Kids’ Paradise people.”

  “Oh, oh, oh …!”

  “Why are you wailing like that?”