Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  Josh sighed deeply and put his head on his arms. Billy stroked his hair quietly, as if he were a child. Finally he looked up. “I guess you’re right. Hell, I know you are. But you tell him. I don’t want to see him again.”

  13

  Would she ever get used to flying commercial airlines again, Gigi wondered, as Ben’s Gulfstream III carried her to New York. It was mid-September, and during the past summer, when he wasn’t in Los Angeles, he’d frequently had her picked up and flown to meet him for the weekend wherever he happened to be. She felt as if she had slipped unnoticed into the back door of a doubt-free establishment, like that of the time of Queen Victoria, when all the rulers of Europe were related to each other and knew themselves to form a group that transcended nationality and made a class unto itself, with its own immutable laws and customs. What separated the rich at the piercing tip of the ultimate point of the needle of the pyramid of American money, from the rich seemingly just below them—yet in reality miles below—was the effortless ability to maintain a private aircraft with two pilots in a constant state of readiness, not merely a company plane.

  Winthrop Development, Ben’s company, had three executive jets of its own, so that the widespread web of malls could be visited by his employees at a moment’s notice, but the Gulfstream was Ben’s personal property, and he used it as casually as a kid jumped on a bike. She was getting used to being spoiled very quickly, Gigi reflected. She no longer felt the same quality of thrill when the limo drove up to the end of the landing strip at Burbank Airport and the chauffeur jumped out to carry her luggage into the waiting plane, where the steward stood at the top of the short flight of steps to welcome her aboard. A thrill, yes, decidedly she still felt a luxurious, cosseted thrill, but it diminished each time, and she suspected it could vanish slowly into an expected convenience, as it had for Billy twenty years ago.

  This present trip would keep her in New York for almost a week. There had been so much progress made on the planning of the Winthrop Emerald that Ben now wanted her to see what was going on in the big downtown warehouse he’d bought and converted into the center for all American operations on the cruise ship. He’d taken time, whenever he could get away from his malls, to make himself an expert on the business during the summer, but he’d been reluctant to share any of the details with her until he felt he had a total grasp of them himself. This visit was, Gigi realized, a sort of unveiling, a show-and-tell of what he had created. She had expected to be more involved, as she had been with The Enchanted Attic, but she’d been busy enough with her own work at the agency that she hadn’t bothered to pay much attention to the sort of quietly gleeful secrecy he’d thrown over the project.

  Actually, Ben’s attitude about the Winthrop Emerald paralleled in certain ways his attitude toward her, Gigi told herself as she pensively consumed the smoked Scottish salmon with thin slices of buttered brown bread that the steward had just offered her. There was a kind of possessiveness involved in both, a possessiveness that involved obtaining exclusive control. She didn’t mind that he kept the ship all to himself, like a child with a new toy, but every time they were together she had to be on the alert to keep him from maneuvering her into the position of his choice.

  When a man wanted to do everything for you, including marry you, but you weren’t sure you loved him, you had to keep a clearly marked distance between you, Gigi reflected. The pain of her experience with Zach—a pain she somehow couldn’t yet manage to put behind her, hard as she tried—had taught her that, if nothing else. Of course, the problem was that the more successfully she sustained this crucial distance, the more Ben wanted to break it down. If she’d been trying to snare Ben Winthrop, this catch of catches, she couldn’t have planned her moves more shrewdly, but she still was no more sure that she truly loved him than she’d been that night at dinner at the Cipriani. Whenever she thought about marriage to Ben, she found herself struck by a blankness of imagination as thick as a dense fog. Was this what men felt when they told women that they weren’t ready for commitment, or was it just her practical streak that had so often prevented her from building castles in the air?

  Or was it because Sasha had nicknamed Ben “Mr. Wonderful”? The expression annoyed Gigi, yet something in her was in sneaky agreement with Sasha’s worldly opinion—now illogically but definitively suspended in the single case of her father—that every man, no matter how good he seemed, was too good to be true.

  Damn it, Ben was wonderful! Intelligent, surprisingly thoughtful about pleasure and beauty, always so good to look at—he’d have been wonderful even if he’d been poor, except that Ben Winthrop was somehow impossible to imagine separated from the aura of his money. What the hell was wrong with her, feeling the need to defend him from an invisible Sasha, even taking a perverse pleasure in trying to find faults in him?

  She must be committable, but as the plane flew high above the Mississippi, Gigi thought about what had happened two weeks ago, over the Labor Day weekend, when she and Ben had joined a house party of his old Harvard friends and classmates on Martha’s Vineyard. There had been six couples in all, so close to Ben that he was godfather to each couple’s oldest child. There had been plenty of room for all of them, parents and children, in a huge, rambling, shabby clapboard cottage on a bluff above the sea. The time had been jammed with simple pleasures—sailing, walking, talking, and eating, pervaded by an atmosphere of camaraderie and shared experience, yet hadn’t she been aware at all times that Ben was the unacknowledged yet unquestioned top dog of the group, the first among equals? And hadn’t he not only reveled in it, but expected it as a tribute to his success?

  There hadn’t been any particular event she could actually point to, but as a stranger to the group, Gigi had noticed clearly how Ben’s opinion on any subject became the general opinion in spite of any amount of laughing disagreement; how all the very pretty, thirtyish women listened to his compliments with more enjoyment than they did to those of their husbands; how, when Ben tired of sailing, somehow they all agreed to head into shore; how, when Ben felt it was the moment for a drink, everyone discovered they were parched for their chosen brew, tall glasses of iced vodka and Doxee’s clam juice; how, when Ben had a notion, at the last minute, that it would be fun to abandon the dinner that had been cooked for that evening and go out for lobster, everyone concurred after a minimum of playful debate.

  Simply innate leadership? Or just a good sense of timing? Perhaps. Yet what about his habit of arranging—designing—moments for himself? It seemed to her that it had started that first time they’d made love, when he’d wanted to kiss her and look out at the Grand Canal at the same time. A perfectly harmless and poetic fancy, surely, much less planned than the Nardi earrings he’d “bought anyway” and produced from his pocket at the Cipriani. Obviously he had never accepted as serious her earlier refusal of the emeralds. If Ben Winthrop wanted to give someone earrings, by God, she’d get earrings, although Gigi had made him keep them in his possession ever since, consenting to wear them on only a few occasions.

  Was she … in any way … part of an … artistic arrangement … he’d made for himself, Gigi wondered. Someone he’d appropriated because she fit into a picture that he’d constructed? Or was she being absurdly unfair, mistaking his genuine manifestations of love for those of control? Maybe he simply didn’t know how to show love any other way. Damn Sasha, it was all her fault that she was even asking herself these questions! He was all she could ask for in a lover … and yet … and yet … didn’t he always choose the time and place?

  On the Vineyard, over that weekend in the big tumbledown family house, their hosts had considerately given them separate bedrooms, yet he had come to her that night, an hour after everyone else had gone to bed, come unexpectedly to her room right next to the master bedroom, awakened her, and fallen upon her with such a surging wave of passion that there was no possibility that the people on the other side of the thin wooden wall hadn’t heard his moans as he thrust, and the way he’d cried
out violently in his moment of orgasm. When he’d grown hard again, too quiveringly hard, too needful to resist, she’d made him swear to remain silent before she’d allowed him to take her once more, but in the oblivion of his powerful spasms he’d been unable to master himself, and he’d screamed again.

  Breakfast, with that group of near strangers, had been deeply embarrassing for her because of the impeccable behavior of everyone in the big kitchen, who all seemed to have heard nothing at all. Nudges and winks would have been easier to take than their pretense. One laugh, and she would have felt released from her constraint. She had been as angry as he was remorseful; she hadn’t let him near her the rest of the weekend, and he’d accepted her punishment without a word of objection. Still, she could imagine what they must have said among themselves, that band of close-knit, impenetrably silent, friendly young wives, when they got back to Boston.

  Ben, of course, never worried about what anyone said or thought. In his apologies he told her he’d never felt such physical passion for anyone, and that the worst the other women would think, if they thought about it at all, was envy because their own husbands hadn’t made love to them twice that night. If being in New England made her more Bostonian than the Bostonians, he would respect her feelings, he’d promised solemnly.

  Gigi got up to stretch her legs with five laps of a dogtrot around the cabin of the jet. She had to admit, she told herself as she stopped and leaned on the padding of an oval window and looked down at the clouds, those unforgettable sounds Ben made had, at least, drowned out her own gasps of delight, for he had learned her sexual secrets with astonishing quickness, and even while she was worrying about her hosts in the next room, she hadn’t been able to keep from making one hell of a lot of noise herself. She only hoped he’d suffered mightily from the punishment she’d imposed on him that weekend, because, damn him, it had been all but unendurable for her.

  The next afternoon, on the day Gigi was to visit the Winthrop Line headquarters, she dressed carefully in her most impressive big-city drag, since this would be her first official visit as the representative from Frost/Rourke/Bernheim. She’d bought a new suit from Karl Lagerfeld’s fall boutique collection for Chanel, the couture house he had recently joined with a free hand to revitalize the grand old business, which had become dowdy since the death of Mademoiselle Chanel herself. It was made of a cream tweed, with a wraparound skirt and a cardigan jacket, both pieces trimmed in cream and black plaid, worn with a black silk blouse with a giant floppy collar and a heavy gold chain belt low on her hips. As she checked herself in the mirror, Gigi felt that the jaunty, relaxed 1920s lines of the suit were exactly suited to her many-layered bangs, her chin-length bell of swingy hair, and her black lashes, almost thick and long enough to need untangling so they wouldn’t trap flies. Mademoiselle Chanel wouldn’t be ashamed of her, she decided as she set out, trying to remember to slouch in appropriate flapper fashion, although her quick, dancing walk didn’t accommodate itself to slouching.

  The first person to whom Ben introduced her in the converted warehouse in lower Manhattan was Erik Hansen, a man of sixty-three, the key man in the entire operation, head of the management team Ben had assembled.

  Hansen, who had been hired away from the Royal Viking Line, was one of the three top executives in the cruise world. He had accepted this new job only because he faced retirement and had far too much energy left to consider leaving the business in which he was a king. The Winthrop Line had given him lifetime financial security as well as a ten-year contract. He was a man of medium size, a walking furnace of brisk purpose. He had a wiry build, wiry white hair, and a wiry grip. It came as a surprise when he gave her a quick, warm smile, suddenly a wiry grandfather.

  “This is the man,” Ben told her, as they all had a cup of coffee in Hansen’s office, “who knew exactly which key men were worth stealing, and he’s already filled his wish list. When Hansen came calling, they listened.”

  “Is that the way it’s done?” Gigi asked curiously. “Theft?”

  “It’s the only way,” Hansen said. “Cruise ship owners, like Mr. Winthrop, raid the competition all the time when they build a new ship. There are just so many top men, and everyone wants them. Mr. Winthrop made it easier by giving me a free hand with salaries. We’re also planning the finest officer and crew accommodations and recreation space on any ship afloat, which will lure the best people from other lines, since their lives are spent on board.”

  “Each executive we’ve hired brings his own following with him,” Ben added, “so we’ve almost completed our top and middle echelons. They’re all in this building now. Our hotel manager, Eustace Jones, who comes from a famous British tea clipper family, is working upstairs, and so is Per Dahl, the Norwegian captain.”

  “But why do you need them now?” Gigi asked. “The maiden voyage of the Emerald isn’t scheduled for a year.”

  “They have to be consulted every step of the way,” Hansen answered. “The complications are endless. For example, the chief engineer, Arnsin Olsen, is all-important while the navigation, communications, electrical, and waste treatment systems are being designed. Since he reports to Captain Dahl, the captain is here too, to add his expertise. As we speak, André St. Hubert, the chef de cuisine, is breathing down the neck of the restaurant designer, Antonio Zamboni, to make sure that he doesn’t plan to install the dishwashers where the stoves should be. Although St. Hubert reports to Jones, the hotel manager, on the other hand, he must make his decisions with his chief chef, Paul Vuillard, and the head maitre d’hotel, Gianni Fendi, as well.”

  “Fendi? Vuillard, St. Hubert? No Americans?” Gigi asked.

  “Americans are singularly unsuited to an elegant restaurant atmosphere.” Hansen favored her with a wiry grin. “Cruise ships from all over the world go to Italy for their top service personnel—headwaiters, waiters, wine stewards, even busboys. They are simply the best. The Portuguese are good, the French are often too snobbish to do anything but cook, and the Spanish have no tradition. The stewards and chambermaids will be Scandinavian, the officers and captains Norwegian, Danish, or English, the hospital personnel Swiss. The casino is run, as everywhere afloat, by an Austrian company, just as the beauty salon is owned by an Englishman, who has concessions on all ships.”

  “But won’t the Emerald fly the American flag?”

  “The international flag,” Ben told her. “That gives us the right to hire who we please.”

  “Aren’t you going to hire any Americans?” she demanded.

  “Of course,” Ben answered, “for the orchestra, the entertainment staff, and the gym trainers. But I’m considering Greeks for the corps de gigolo. They have charm, enthusiasm, and endurance.” He winked at her look of outrage.

  Hansen coughed, ignoring the interruption, and continued his point about the kitchens. “You see, Miss Orsini, the chief engineer, Arnsin Olsen, must work closely with the chief chef. There are vital matters such as the sizes of the meat lockers, the tanks to hold fresh lobsters, the caviar storage compartments, even the space allotted to breakfast cereals—pampered travelers cling to their favorite cereal, and there’s no shopping center in the middle of the South Pacific. The use of every inch of the ship is a subject of intense discussion. Every one of these men is a specialist, each one demands more space for his own supplies than is possible, and they all have to work together because each detail ends up connected to every other—the size of the wineglasses, for example, must correspond exactly to the size of the racks in the dishwashers.”

  “Of course,” Gigi said, nodding as patiently as possible. Dishwashers? What was the ship going to look like, for heaven’s sake? A floating Kmart?

  “It sounds like the United Nations,” she said. “Who’s the boss?”

  “The owner, Mr. Winthrop, is the boss, and I report to him. He has to make all the final decisions, since he pays the bills. Naturally it would be easier if he could take a year off from his other activities and live in Venice, but since he can’t
, we’ve brought Porta Margera to him. Once all the plans are completed and we have everything we need, down to those wineglasses I mentioned, the ship will be fitted out in the drydock.”

  “I think Miss Orsini is going to faint unless she sees some designs,” Ben said, standing up. “I recognize a certain look in her eyes.”

  “Not faint, scream,” Gigi whispered to him, as he took her arm to lead her out of Hansen’s office. They bypassed the first floor, which was devoted to offices and accountants, taking a newly installed elevator up to the second floor, which was one vast space crowded by a hundred draftsmen working at computers.

  They walked up and down with Arnsin Olsen, who showed them the way in which the lower part of the 540-foot length of the freighter was being used: fuel tanks filling the bottom of the ship, separated by a double bottom from the tanks of drinking water, bath water, and cooking water that filled the next deck. There was a complicated desalination system for treatment of sea water used in the air-conditioning system and for scrubbing the decks and doing the laundry.

  Gigi looked at incomprehensible computer designs for the between-decks spaces that would contain all the pipes, electrical wiring, and telephone lines of the ship.

  “I didn’t realize it was going to be so complicated,” she said to Ben, while Olsen’s back was turned.

  “Neither did I,” he responded, “and we haven’t seen so much as a stewardess’s cabin yet. This stuff’s all below the waterline.”

  “Can’t we—?”

  “Not without being rude. Olsen is very proud of this,” Ben answered her unspoken question. “You started this, now be patient.” He put his arm casually around her waist, managing to give her a firm pinch on the ass in passing.