Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  “When what?” Sasha asked, holding her breath.

  “When … two people meet and discover that they have an involuntary relationship,” he said, lifting his head and looking into her eyes, which were as dark as his own.

  “As opposed to … voluntary?”

  “As opposed to existing because of other relationships, meaningless relationships because they’re not chosen freely; as opposed to normal social life or any kind of responsibilities or civilized conventions. Involuntary because they are real and absolute and they exist in and of themselves and can’t be escaped. Because they are destined.”

  “Oh,” Sasha barely breathed, unable to sustain his gaze.

  “I wasn’t supposed to meet you … until today,” Vito said firmly. “You weren’t supposed to meet me … until today. And I do not believe in that sort of thing. I am not any kind of Buddhist or a follower of a Tibetan sage or a believer in reincarnation or any other sort of organized believer, come to that. But this is different. Isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Hold my hands.”

  Vito grasped both of her hands in his and they sat silently, trembling, alternately looking at each other and back to the tablecloth, until they felt resolute and steady enough to continue.

  “There’s something I have to tell you right now,” Sasha said, with an expression of painful determination, remembering her vow to herself.

  “You’re not, you can’t be, oh, even if you are, it won’t change the way I feel—”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” Sasha asked, astonished at the sudden look of dreadful anxiety on his face.

  “You’re sick, there’s something wrong—that’s what you have to tell me, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, Vito. I’ve never been better in my life!”

  “Thank God! Nothing else matters. Nothing!”

  “It matters to me. I have a past that involves lots of men.”

  “I once had a conversation with Billy,” Vito said, “before we got married, and I told her that I didn’t want to know a word about her past, because I could be a jealous man. I’ve gotten wiser since then, and a lot less jealous, but I continue to think that whatever you used to do is none of my business.”

  Sasha listened to him and paid no attention. “I had three lovers, never more, I gave them each a different night, twice a week, but never on Sunday,” she insisted stubbornly.

  “I hope they realized how lucky they were. The only thing I’d like to know is …”

  “I knew you’d have a question, I just knew it,” Sasha wailed.

  “Were any of them as old as I am? I’m forty-eight.”

  “Most of them were in their forties, a few in their thirties, late thirties. I’ve never been attracted to young men.”

  “Well, that takes care of that.” Vito sighed deeply in relief. “Do you want to know about my past?”

  “No. Not one word. It wouldn’t make any difference.”

  “Good.” He’d hate like hell to have to tell her about Susan Arvey and Maggie MacGregor, Vito thought, but he would, every word, if she asked. He would never devalue the truth with her. And all the others, even the ones whose names he couldn’t remember, way back to the very first girl when he was in high school. He’d have himself hypnotized if necessary, and regress.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said, remembering something important.

  “What?”

  “I’m a terrible father.”

  “But Gigi adores you,” Sasha protested.

  “That’s because she’s an angel. I neglected her disgracefully when she was a kid. Her mother and I were divorced when she was a baby, and I never even bothered to realize that she needed a father. I was too busy with my career to spend time with her, I thought if I paid child support I was doing my share, I was a shit and a half as her father and there’s no excuse for it, nothing you can invent or imagine, no matter how hard you try.”

  “But you’re sorry now?”

  “Of course I’m sorry! It’s the great regret of my life. Now I take her out to dinner when I’m in town and she has time for me, and we have long talks—grown-up stuff—but think how different it would have been if I’d been around when she was growing up. Think what she missed. Think what I missed.”

  “She’d have a father complex that would ruin her life.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’m positive. Ask her, if you don’t believe me.”

  “I believe you. I believe you about everything.” He truly did, Vito realized, mesmerized. He understood suddenly that he’d never really trusted a woman before.

  “Well, then …” she said lightly.

  Why did Sasha have that teasing fountain of dark enchantress light in her eyes, he asked himself frantically, that smile which curled her lips so provocatively? Didn’t she have any idea of the danger such a combination was to him?

  “You haven’t eaten lunch,” Vito said hastily, looking away.

  “Neither have you.”

  “Could you have dinner with me tonight?” Vito asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s too long to wait.”

  Vito thought intensely about what she’d said. She hadn’t eaten lunch, but it was too long to wait to eat dinner. It seemed, to his love-crazed mind, that there was only one meaning possible in her words, but he simply could not find it credible, in this world or in any alternative existence, that it was possible for him to meet Sasha Nevsky, the same Sasha who was Zach’s sister and his daughter’s best friend, this very morning, and then make love to her this very afternoon, with only one Cinzano to punctuate the occasion. It wasn’t a possibility. With some women, yes. With most. Back before he’d met her, back when he was another man, he would have seized the opportunity. But not with Sasha. She was too desperately important. However … there seemed to be no other next step for them to take, not reasonably. They’d settled all the other questions. Yet no man could ask her to do such a thing. No woman would consent. Could he? Would she?

  “Yes we can,” Sasha said. “Nobody can stop us. We’re going to make our own rules. Right now. That, if I’m not mistaken, is what these beach hotels are for.”

  “You … read my mind.”

  “It’s the first time that’s ever happened! In my whole life! I’m never psychic. Oh, Vito, you are in trouble.”

  “Do you think you’re not?”

  Sasha felt as if the universe had been reduced to one bed, as if the bed were a great white downy bird on whose safe and friendly back she and Vito were lying in a trance of love, swooping around to the music of a slow tango, watching the continents change color below them in the light of the setting sun. The setting sun …

  “Zach!” Shocked, Sasha sat up in bed suddenly. “We forgot him! It must be almost night—he said not to bother to come back. Did he really mean it?”

  “No,” Vito admitted indolently, drowning in memories of a palette of sensations which he’d never equaled. How could he have imagined that he was as much in love with her earlier as he was now? He roused himself with difficulty as Sasha shook him.

  “No conceivable way Zach wouldn’t expect me back to find out if he’d completed the day’s work, to ask how the crew was coming along, what kind of performances he was getting—you have the most adorable breasts in the galaxy.”

  “Fitters’ breasts,” Sasha said, distracted from her worry about Zach. “When I was a lingerie model, they always used to fit the new bra patterns on me because my breasts are … so they said … perfect.”

  “Fitters, swarming all over your breasts? They must have been men of iron will.”

  “Female fitters.”

  “It’s a good thing you were wearing baggy denim at lunch. I would have been too awestruck to tell you all the things I absolutely had to tell you.”

  “That means you fell in love with me for pure reasons.”

  “Reason had nothing to do with it, pure or impure. People don’t love because it’s rea
sonable, or the world would be a different place, more peaceful and a hell of a lot less interesting. Your breasts are a bonus, your bottom is beyond description, everything else is too perfect to talk about, but if you had an ordinary, average body, a totally indifferent body that nobody would look at twice, I’d love you just as much because I couldn’t love you more.”

  “But you’re going to love me more every day,” Sasha said with certainty.

  “Of course, I know that. I’m just talking about right now, this minute.”

  “Right now is what I’m worried about,” Sasha sighed, kissing him on his warm right shoulder. She felt as if it were the first man’s shoulder she had ever noticed, as if this particular transcendently powerful configuration of muscle and skin and sinew were being created by her lips. During the six months of waiting for her divorce following the miserable months after Josh had gone to New York, during which he hadn’t touched her, she’d been celibate. Now, after the thunderbolts and lightning of Vito, she knew she had never been made love to properly in her life. He was a Zeus indeed, she’d been right in her first impression. She felt like a newly devirginized virgin. She struggled to be practical.

  “Darling, what about Zach? And I have to call home to check on Nellie with the nanny, and that’s just the beginning … oh, the thought of it!”

  “The thought of what?”

  “All those people we know together. If only we were true strangers with no hellish mutual friends or family or connections. You have no idea how bizarre this is going to seem.”

  “I have a pretty clear idea,” Vito laughed tenderly. “Drama is my business, and ‘bizarre’ is an understatement. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll get married tonight, in Vegas, and then we’ll tell them. That’ll remove nine-tenths of the hassle, because it’ll be a fait accompli and they can’t try to reason with us or ask us if we know what the hell we’re doing or any of that ridiculous stuff people carry on about.”

  “Elope?”

  “Sure. Millions of people do it, and they couldn’t possibly need to more than we do.”

  “Not tell anybody! Oh, yes!”

  “Nobody but Zach.”

  “Oh, why do we have to tell him, of all people?”

  “It’s a question of honor. He’s your only male relative. I can’t carry you off without informing him.”

  “But he’s my big brother, I’m his baby sister, he’s the only one of the whole family who encouraged me, who always made me feel I wasn’t hopeless all the time I was growing up and nobody in our intolerably talented family thought I was anything but a pathetic little mouse—I worship him—he’ll kill me!”

  “Let’s find out.” Vito looked at his watch, reached for the phone by the bed, and called the number that had been set up in Malibu for the production. In a minute he had Zach on the line.

  “Hi, kid, it’s me. No, I don’t care if you wrapped or not. I don’t care if there was a tidal wave and all the houses we rented are gone. I don’t care if the script girl gave birth to triplets on the beach—Sasha and I are getting married tonight, I thought you should know. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So why didn’t you say something at the time? Anyway, we’re off to Vegas on the seven-o’clock flight and we want you to come with us and be our witness, make sure the rabbi is a real rabbi or whatever. Why a rabbi? Your mother, you idiot, she’ll feel better if it’s kosher. Great! See you at the plane. You’ll be back in plenty of time to start tomorrow at the usual time. Yeah, I’ll tell her. ’Bye.”

  “What didn’t he say ‘at the time’?” Sasha asked, gasping with curiosity and admiration at how Vito had disposed of Zach.

  “He said he knew we’d get married as soon as he introduced us, it was just a question of how soon. He said he’d been directing love stories most of his adult life, so it was impossible to hide anything from him. He mentioned Romeo and Juliet, among others. If you ask me, he’s giving himself a lot of credit, hindsight’s easy, but what the hell, that’s why Zach’s great. He never takes his eye off character, never overlooks the human condition. Oh, he said to tell you he loved you and you were doing the right thing. He said that if you look in Ecclesiastes you’ll see that there’s nothing new under the sun. And not to worry yourself sick about Ma. That I could have told you myself.”

  “Ma! Why did he have to remind me, I’d forgotten Ma.” Sasha shuddered. “I may have no sense of reality left, but if you think that Tatiana Orloff Nevsky, who runs my family with more power than any pope ever ran the Church, four feet ten inches of pure moral authority, the eldest of five younger sisters who are just as petrified of her as I am, if you think—”

  “Ma’s taken care of,” Vito grinned. “I’d heard so much about her reign of terror from Zach that I figured she could give me some production tips, and I went to visit her one day when I was in New York. We hit it off right from the beginning, she said if she weren’t too old she’d set her cap for me and I told her I was up for it, but she just laughed. Said she couldn’t be tempted, even by me, I should have come along a decade ago. But she let me pick her up—talk about tiny—and kiss her good-bye. Zach said that was like getting the Croix de Guerre.”

  Sasha’s mouth fell open in astonishment. “She let you pick her up? Nobody, but nobody, not even Zach, is allowed to pick her up. She’s very sensitive about being the smallest one in the family. In her head she thinks she’s taller than I am, so picking up is forbidden.”

  “Well, I wasn’t in the family then. And the next time I see her I’ll snatch her up right away and establish a new Orloff-Nevsky tradition. Tatiana and I will flirt heavily, unless you object. I’m her type.”

  “Better you than me,” Sasha said in surprise and joy. “Now I’ve got to call and check that Nellie’s fine and tell Nanny I won’t be back till tomorrow. What should I say if she asks questions?”

  “Tell her you met an old friend. Tell her it’s a surprise party. Then just hang up.” Vito lay back on the pillows and looked at Sasha, her long meshes of silky black hair falling over her white arms as she dialed the phone, and wondered what his past life had been about. All the chasing after scripts and book rights, all the casting sessions and fights with directors and the nagging, predictable war without a truce that every independent producer conducts with the studios, his Oscars and his Oscar nominations and all the money he’d made and lost, although, thank God, he’d had a few extraordinary years in a row and had saved damn near every posttax dime he’d made after the disaster of The WASP—Fair Play alone had made him rich for life—but what had it all been about, before Sasha? It had seemed important at the time, that’s all he was sure of. Now there were only two things on his mind. Getting something to eat and getting married. If necessary in reverse order.

  The next morning, Sasha phoned Gigi at the agency as soon as she and Vito were newly presentable.

  “Gigi, it’s Sasha. I’ve got to see you, it’s really important. Can we have dinner tonight?”

  “Oh, honey, I can’t possibly, not tonight. The Collins brothers are in town and they’re taking all of us to the Orangerie for a big celebration because of the success of their newest Abbondanza line.”

  “How about lunch? Gigi, it’s something that really can’t wait.”

  “Well, I was going to work through lunch, I have a ton of stuff to do, but okay, sure. What’d you do, get a bad haircut? Or, oh my God, don’t tell me Nanny quit?”

  “No, nothing like that, nothing to worry about. Just something we have to talk over.”

  “Why can’t we talk on the phone?”

  “Because we can’t! Meet me at the Dôme at one?”

  “Right. But it’ll have to be quick.”

  Sasha hung up the phone and turned to Vito. “Good news, she won’t have much time. She has to get right back to the agency after lunch.”

  “If you could see how frightened you look, darling baby, you’d laugh. Gigi won’t eat you alive. I’m the one who’s terrified.”

  “You don’t look it.” Vito had p
ut on his producer gear, one of his superbly made suits in a fabric so clearly expensive and tasteful that it made bankers and studio executives feel that they weren’t dealing with anyone too riskily creative. He was expert at dressing for the enemy, never so dapper or overly fastidious that he seemed to care excessively about his clothes; never falling into the trap of dandy-hood, so that in spite of the fact that his custom-made shirts were the finest that Charvet made, and his ties and shoes were minor works of art, they never ventured beyond well dressed into the dangerous area of eccentricity. No studio executive could accuse Vito of looking as if he worked at his clothes, although with his distinctively Italian features and a body on which everything hung with Italian style, he could easily have created that impression with one false note of flamboyance. He had settled for looking unplanned, as if the undeniable quality and fit of his clothes were an accident, something that had just happened, fallen onto him out of his closet while he was getting dressed.

  “Too bad Zach isn’t here to protect us, but he can’t leave the set,” Vito said, knotting a tie with purposeful nonchalance.

  “He wouldn’t come anyway,” Sasha said. “He hasn’t seen Gigi since she kicked him out.”

  “So my brother-in-law won’t be caught dead in the same room with my daughter?”

  “We have a major family feud and we haven’t been married twenty-four hours. Eloping doesn’t solve everything.” Sasha pulled down the corners of her beautiful mouth. “Not only that, I had to get all dressed up or Gigi would know that there’s something odd going on even before she sits down at the table.”

  “I don’t care if anybody in my family never talks to anybody in your family till the end of time, so long as they stay out of our hair.”

  “Who, exactly, is in your family?” Sasha asked, looking at her restored self in a full-length mirror. The sophisticated surfaces of her hair and her makeup glittered and flashed as they had never glittered before, she was wearing her most elegant fall suit, and she looked confidently ready to enter a ballroom full of inevitably lesser beauties.