“She’s honestly not my type, By, but I want to be treated as an equal, that’s the deal we signed on for.”
“You agreed to move the agency to L.A.,” Byron reminded him.
“That makes sense. You agreed to call it Frost Rourke Bernheim or FRB, depending on how fast you’re talking, does that make you a patsy?”
“Nah, it sounded better, came more trippingly off the tongue. Anyway, people’ll call it FRB, it’s still an unwieldy name. And L.A. makes sense to me too. There’s nothing here I need to hang around for, and my folks are in San Francisco … new start, new coast.”
Soon after the move to California, FRB picked up a number of smallish new accounts: an excellent vineyard in the Napa Valley, Bugattini Gourmet Pasta, the Association of California Artichoke Growers, a Bay Area herbal tea company, an importer of expensive balsamic vinegar and olive oil, and several others—all, frustratingly, in the food business. They had started as a packaged-goods agency, and they seemed destined to stay there unless they could manage to break out of that mold. Their new accounts, in total, billed ten million dollars, just enough to make them feel that they were making progress, but it was less than brilliant progress for people used to the excitement of a large agency and huge accounts.
FRB spent a few cramped months in sublet quarters. Soon, in determined anticipation of additional growth and to accommodate the new people they had hired, Victoria took a long-term lease on offices that were larger than they actually needed, and hired a decorator to renovate and redecorate on a scale that would impress future clients. Although she continued to function as account supervisor on the Oak Hill accounts, Victoria spent most of her time traveling, scouting accounts for the agency, the noncreative area of “new business coordinator” she had staked out firmly and entirely for herself, leaving Byron and Archie to concentrate on what they did best.
Even with all her travel, Victoria managed to see Angus far less than she had counted on. Millicent was making things difficult, he explained, more difficult than he had expected, and if he rushed her, she would dig in her heels and make things impossible for them. They had already accomplished so much that they only needed a little more patience, a little more time …
More time, Victoria thought grimly as she pushed aside the fruit salad Polly had put on her desk. More patience. As if she hadn’t given Angus more patience and yet more patience, until she thought she’d die from hemorrhaging patience. They hadn’t been able to manage a minute together on her trip to New York, not one single meeting. He’d been unable to see her, and her heart and body felt lacerated, flayed, raw with hatred of her mother and disgust with Angus for his inability to extricate himself from his endless obligations.
And when she’d returned, what had she found? Archie and Byron, the only people she could count on, the only two people who knew who she was, who knew her before her lonely California exile had started, were off to frolic and feast and waste time with Gigi Orsini, who was entirely too well dressed and obviously knew nothing, nothing at all, about the advertising business. A girl who, for some reason that she couldn’t identify, reminded her of her mother when she’d been young.
7
I met a man named Tom Unger while I was in New York,” Josh suddenly remarked to Sasha, shortly after a silent and tense dinner during which Sasha tried unsuccessfully to convince herself that he was merely preoccupied with a difficult case. He’d cut short their usual pilgrimage to watch Nellie sleep in her crib and had led her into the library.
“Well, thank the Lord!” Sasha exclaimed, in relief mixed with anger. “So that’s it! Don’t you ever do this to me again, Josh Hillman—I thought you’d discovered that you had some terminal disease and were trying to decide how to break the news. You have no idea what you’ve looked like since you came back from New York yesterday—doom piled on gloom. I’ve been frantic with worry … but I didn’t dare ask because I was too afraid of the answer.”
“Tom … used to be your lover.” Josh pronounced the words heavily, with a weighty sigh he couldn’t conceal.
“Well, of course he was,” she responded immediately, tossing her long black hair in annoyance. “Is that what you’re so upset about? The thing I find disgusting is that Tom actually told you about me when he knew we were married. What a lowlife he turned out to be! And you’ve put me through hell because of your silly retrospective jealousy. Men! You all make me sick!”
She got up from the chair in which she’d been sitting and flounced furiously around the room, scrutinizing Josh as if she’d never really seen him before. His clever mouth, his Slavic cheekbones, his distinguished skull covered with short gray hair, his height and the sardonic yet kindly lines of his face suddenly seemed unfamiliar to her, made strange by the tormented expression in his eyes.
“Do you mean to sit there and tell me that you expected me to be a virgin when we got married?” Sasha finally burst out, since he didn’t utter another word. “Did you think that a woman of almost twenty-four had spent her whole life locked in a chastity belt, waiting for you to come along?”
“No. I assumed you’d had romances just as I’d had romances … love affairs, relationships, whatever you want to call them. I assumed that, and then I put it out of my mind.”
“Then why bring up Tom Unger now? Am I supposed to apologize? And what the hell did you say to him when he dropped this charming little bit of ancient kiss-and-tell? Did you turn on your heel in dignity, or did you pop the guy?”
“He didn’t know we were married.”
“What? You mean Tom Unger is just going around gratuitously dropping my name as one of his ex-conquests? ‘Oh, by the way, I had an affair with Sasha Nevsky?’ I’m going to call him up, that filthy, slimy bastard, and give him such hell that he’ll forget his own name, much less that he ever knew mine. He’s as sick as he’s cheap! And to think I once really liked him.”
“That wasn’t the way it happened.”
“You’d better tell me the way it happened, Josh, and right now, every word. I won’t put up with this shit. I won’t let you sit there accusing me of God knows what with every pore in your body. Having a romance with Tom Unger isn’t a crime—even if he’s joined the criminal classes.”
Painstakingly, in deliberate detail, Josh told her everything that had happened during his downtown lunch in New York, not leaving out a single of the damning words he had been listening to in his mind since the minute he left the offices of Westcott, Rosenthal, Kelly and King.
When he had finished, Sasha sat looking at the carpet, rubbing the cord of her sash between her fingers, but otherwise motionless. The silence lengthened between them. Finally she raised her head and looked at him with compassion.
“I’m sorry, darling. Of course you’re upset. I can never tell you how sorry I am that I never told you myself. If I’d ever dreamed you’d hear it in such an awful public way … oh, I should have known, I should have told you—”
“You’re sorry because of how I learned that you used to have three lovers at one time? You think that the way I heard about that—the manner in which I was enlightened—is what’s important?”
“Isn’t it?” She rose to her feet, pacing the carpet, measuring him up and down with her eyes, as if he were a bedraggled stranger who had knocked on her door and asked to come in to use the phone. “Isn’t it?” she repeated with a sharp edge to her voice.
“No, by Christ, it’s not!”
“Then what is? Just what is more important, Josh?”
“You, for God’s sake, you! You did this … thing! You never even tried to hide it. Unger said each man knew about the others, you thought it was your right, you still do,” he cried in a passion of anguish.
“Oh no. I do not.” Sasha stopped and looked at him with deep seriousness. She brought her hands together, thumbs and fingertips touching and then opened them, like a blossoming flower, her noble wide brow clear and untroubled.
“I always knew,” she said quietly, “from the day I first
slept with a man, that when I got married that part of my life would be over. Absolutely over. I have a double standard for sex. Don’t you? Don’t other men? Don’t most people keep a double standard in their hearts about something important, if it isn’t sex? I believe that what is perfectly acceptable for an unmarried girl is never acceptable for a happily married woman. It can destroy a marriage.”
“Oh God, why can’t I make you understand? Three men—three lovers—three men having the right to … do … things to you—and you, like a juggler keeping three oranges in the air, no more meaningful than that? One on one day, another the next … oh, Christ …” He buried his head in his hands.
“That’s the way it was, Josh, I’ll never apologize for that. I had the right to dispose of myself as I wished. If you’re waiting for me to feel ashamed, you’ll have to wait forever.” Sasha was not defiant, simply conscious of the plain propriety of her actions as she saw them, of her fidelity to her own beliefs.
“You really don’t see,” he realized in utter despair. “You just don’t want to see.”
“I see that I was a Great Slut, as I used to call it, and what of it? I hurt no one. I’ll never regret using my freedom for as long as it belonged to me. I never slept with a man I didn’t genuinely like. I never slept with a man to get anything out of it but pleasure. I never deceived them. Exclusivity was exactly what I was avoiding. I’d still be doing it if I hadn’t met you and fallen in love.”
She paused, waiting for him to look at her, wanting to see his expression, but he sat hiding his face, rigid in his chair.
“Try to give me one good reason, Josh, why I shouldn’t have lived as I did?” Sasha persisted, determined to get through to him. “What has it taken away from you, what has it taken away from the way I love you? I’m the same person you fell in love with, the same human being you married. My days as a Great Slut are definitively over, never to be repeated, but otherwise I’m me, I’m Sasha. Tell me why you think you have a right to blame me now.”
“How … how many … were there?” He spoke as if the words had been dragged out of him with tongs thrust into his entrails.
“I don’t know.” Sasha’s voice rang out indignantly. “I didn’t count. Now you’re trying to degrade me, but you’re only degrading yourself. You should be disgusted to ask a question like that. It’s beneath you.”
“But it wasn’t beneath you to go from man to man to man?” he shouted.
“No, it was not. I was true to myself.”
Sasha’s simplicity took his breath away. Josh shook his head, hunching over even further, trying to clear his mind, attempting to see something—anything—from her perspective, but it was as if they lived on opposite sides of a wide chasm and were trying to scream delicate, nuanced subtleties across to each other in a high wind.
“Josh, for heaven’s sake, stop sitting there like Job. Get your head out of your hands! This has nothing to do with us in the present. It’s ridiculous.”
He lifted his head and she saw his contorted face, his eyes, which couldn’t bring themselves to meet hers. With a terrible lurch of her heart, Sasha saw how far it was from ridiculous. Into her heart flew the knowledge that no matter how strong an intimacy is, it can be overturned by facts that are meaningful to only one of the two people involved.
“Josh!” she cried. “Josh!” Her world could not be ruined, she promised herself as she flew to him and tried to cradle his head. All she needed was time. A just man must be able to understand, and Josh was just.
“Oh, Davy, we did it, we really did it!” Gigi exulted over and over in the living room of her house, where she had carried him off with the intention of having a drink to celebrate before going out to dinner. She was in a rapture of euphoria, flying higher and higher in the glory of having won, a clean win, a soaring win, a huge—no, a gigantic—win, a full-out Barnum-and-Bailey win that settled forever any unacknowledged doubts that she was meant for the advertising business.
After they’d left the pitch, she and David had decided that it would be unthinkably anticlimactic to return to the office, particularly since one of the senior partners would not be anxious to have them hanging around gloating.
“You did it,” he grinned, watching her tumbling around on the couch, unable to sit still in her excitement.
“We did it, and don’t start throwing me all the credit again or I’ll hit you, Davy Melville. Cheers!” She raised her glass to him. “Down with the ruling classes, knees up, Mother Brown, chin-chin, and anything else you want to toast to. Did you hear Victoria say, ‘We’ll all get to work on the details on Monday,’ did you think she was going to strangle on her words?”
“I thought she was going to faint, not strangle.”
David had trouble responding in kind to Gigi’s abandon. He was at least half as happy as she was about getting the account, but in advertising as in every other field, no triumph thrills as much as the first one. David still remembered when he’d made his first winning pitch, some five years before, for a half-million-dollar account. He hadn’t touched the ground again for three days and nights.
This winter afternoon his pleasure was considerably tempered. He knew it was essentially and fundamentally all Gigi’s achievement, but a team lost and won as a unit, so he had won too, and it couldn’t have been done with words alone; his inspired photos had been important. But David discovered that he was constricted in any free expression of joy by a stronger emotion, his realization that as Gigi kicked off her boots, threw off her vest, unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse, and snuggled, with an irrepressible series of bounces, into the pillows of her wide chintz couch, he was growing more and more alarmingly disturbed by her proximity.
This was the first time David had ever been really alone with Gigi. He had had no way to anticipate how different Gigi now seemed to him in her own place, how confiding, how casual, how heartlessly free and easy. If she had designed every move she made to force him to imagine her naked, she couldn’t have succeeded as well as her unself-conscious familiarity did. When she bent over to pour them drinks, he thought he saw her breasts fall forward under her blouse. When she brought him the drink, he could have sworn that he could hear her thighs brush together under her skirt. When she raised her glass with a flourish, he clearly envisioned her arms lifting to clasp him around the neck and draw his head down to her throat.
He was going fucking nuts.
“How come you’ve got such a big place?” David asked. Since Gigi had rushed in and taken only enough time to turn on the two lamps by the couch, the room seemed enormous as the winter twilight fell quickly.
“just luck. It’s a rental … one of those things. Oh, Davy, isn’t Signora Eleonora Colonna heaven?”
“Heaven. So you rattle around in here all alone?”
“It’s amazing how you can get used to more space than you need. Giorgio … Gianni … Enrico … I love them! Are they a world-class act of what?”
“Top-notch. Listen, Gigi, are you seeing anyone? I mean, is somebody going to walk in here and say, ‘Who’s this strange guy sitting on my couch and drinking with my lady?’ ”
“I’m not ‘seeing anyone,’ as you quaintly put it,” Gigi yawned, beginning to feel the fatigue of an adrenalin letdown. “I’m nobody’s ‘lady,’ thank you very much. My own woman, Davy my lad, and don’t call me a lady ever again. I hate that expression. Woman, female, girl, gal, even chick, but not lady.”
“I didn’t. I was imagining someone else saying it.”
“No one would dare,” she said, and with those words she realized that her liberty was real, as real as the empty house she inhabited, as real as the empty bed she slept in, as real as the solitary dinners she ate, as real as the lack of a man’s touch on her skin. Only the excitement and pace of preparing for the Indigo Seas pitch had enabled her to thrust aside thoughts of Zach, only brutally hard work had allowed the fact that she was no longer waiting for him to come back home to sink deeply and meaningfully into her mind.
Gigi stretched hugely, her arms high over her head, clasping her right wrist in her left hand and pulling as high as she could, then repeating the stretch with the other hand, trying to ease away some of the tension of the day. She groaned with the relief of it. What she really needed was to have her back rubbed, she thought lazily. “Davy,” she commanded, “come over here—you’re too far away. Now, take off your glasses.”
“If I take off my glasses, I won’t be able to see.”
“I don’t care, I want to look into your eyes,” Gigi insisted, determined to have her own way, for, as she quieted down and lost the energy that had been entirely concentrated in Indigo Seas, she found her attention eager to turn to David Melville, who had lived through every minute of the process with her. There was something mysteriously and pleasantly comfortable about sitting here with him. Cozy, chummy, warming.
But what was it about him exactly, she wondered with an unexpected rising of a tide of acute curiosity. Suddenly it seemed to her that although she thought she knew Davy, she didn’t know him, not really. And such ignorance, such almost-taking-for-granted, surely wasn’t proper between creative teammates, was it? Maybe, if she knew him better, she would ask him to rub her back, Gigi told herself.
It was getting so dark in the room that she had to lean forward to inspect him closely. “Hmmm—as I thought, the irises of your eyes are the most unusual kind of speckled brown, just like those brown eggs that are so hard to get, your hair is precisely the deep, dark brown of Godiva chocolates, there’s not a single light streak in it, and your skin could easily pass for heavy whipping cream. Why, Davy,” she said, her eyes wide and deliriously mocking as she stared intently at him, “I could make a chocolate soufflé out of you!”
“And I could make an entire meal out of you,” he answered, grabbing her with his long arms, goaded beyond endurance. “I am going to eat you up, Gigi Orsini, until there is nothing left but some bits of red hair and an empty tube of mascara!”
Lovers Page 17
