“I’ve heard so much about the twins,” Victoria said glowingly. “When Gigi and I have our girl-talk lunches together, she often tells me what new stunts they’re up to, she even shows me photos, for all the world like a doting aunt. You must be so proud of them.”
“I’m totally gaga, but I understand that’s normal. What would you like to drink—coffee, tea, something cold?”
“Nothing, thanks. Mr. Elliott—”
“Spider, please. Nobody calls me anything else.”
“And I’m Victoria.”
Spider never looked at a woman without automatically redressing her. When he’d been running Scruples, even the most self-assured clients had rarely dared to decide on an important dress without his approval. Victoria Frost, he saw immediately, would never have needed to ask his advice. In her double-breasted coat-dress of crisp beige wool, she projected an ultimate combination of efficiency and authority. She could be nothing but an extremely successful businesswoman in that dress, yet it was so excessively chaste that paradoxically she created an impression of drama. Strange how Gigi hadn’t mentioned that she was a beauty, in the classically severe ballerina mode that other men so often found intriguing.
As Victoria received her first impressions of Spider, she couldn’t help regretting that this was one man with whom clearly she could never enjoy a secret afternoon. Every bit of knowledge she had about male manners, signals and codes computed into an instant understanding that Spider Elliott would never respond to her on a sexual basis. He was taken. As taken as a man could be.
“Spider, I’m here to talk about the Scruples Two advertising,” Victoria declared, with the kind of confidence that immediately puts another person into a receptive frame of mind, just as the first notes of a great musical performer reassure the audience and settle them down to listen. “I’ve been studying your campaign intensively for the last four months, and I’m convinced that Russo and Russo simply aren’t doing as good a job for you as we could, at Frost Rourke Bernheim.”
“Is that so?” She doesn’t waste time getting to the point, Spider thought.
“It is so. They’re not the most compatible mix for you. They fall short of being your ideal marketing partner. I’ll bet anything that the creative team is male.”
“You’re right about that, but bright, bright guys. They do great graphics. I like ’em.”
“With all due respect, bright isn’t enough. Advertising is a business in which it’s axiomatic that only the bright survive. And I don’t have to tell you that great graphics can only go so far. They have to be the right graphics or it doesn’t matter how good they are.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re selling a single product,” Victoria continued, feeling herself quickening the smooth rhythm of the pitch, “a catalog that only interests women. The one and only point of your advertising is to get more women to send away for the catalog. No man in the world would look through a Scruples Two catalog unless he were a drag queen, and yet you, a man, are using the creative ability of two fellows with male minds in male bodies. There’s too much testosterone floating around in that creative mix, Spider.”
“You really believe that men can’t write great ads for women? What about the reverse? Can women write ads for men?”
“Sometimes an extraordinary woman can. My mother, for instance. She had as many accounts that appealed to men as to women. But her heyday was decades ago, and women have changed. People don’t walk a mile for a Camel anymore—or at least they know they shouldn’t—and women today have changed, particularly the women who buy from your catalog, working women, young mothers with jobs, busy women executives who have no time to shop. They’re a whole new breed, Spider, and there’s a whole new set of needs and wants, a new set of priorities. Most important, there’s a new set of fantasies … women’s fantasies.”
She paused for a split second to make sure she had his full attention, before she went on.
“There isn’t a man alive who can really be aware of what’s going on in these women’s minds, and how they want to perceive themselves in terms of image.”
“We know all that, Victoria, or the catalog wouldn’t be so successful.”
“Oh, it’s dead right in the catalog, I agree, but you’re using copy based directly on what Gigi created. I have a complete set of Scruples Two catalogs, and the copy has barely changed since she left; you’ve just jiggled her words around and applied them to the new items.”
“That’s true enough.” Not just true, Spider thought, but too true. He’d been concerned about it for several months. He hated to rely on repetition, but nobody could write Scruples copy like Gigi.
“But the ads in the magazines have changed,” Victoria continued easily. “They just … miss, in my opinion. They’re as good as Russo and Russo can produce, but they’re not going to get better—they need a new direction. You also need serious new media planning. You’re not in many of the best hot magazines for your particular customer, you should be advertising on selected television shows, for your sales figures you’re not spending enough on advertising.”
“What is it that you’re proposing?”
“I’d like to make a pitch for your account.”
“I’m a little confused here. Would it be Gigi who’d be doing the creative work?”
“Of course, or I wouldn’t have dared to come here. Gigi’s quickly become our top creative on the copy side—aside from Archie Rourke, of course—Gigi’s a woman and she’s intimately familiar with the product. Obviously she’d be our first choice, although we have other female creatives with enormous talent. What we’d do is put all the creative resources of the agency to work before we made our pitch—we’d want to see ideas from everybody, male and female and every sex in between—it’s what’s charmingly called a ‘gang bang’—but I know that Gigi would come up with the best stuff.”
Spider got up from behind his desk and sat on it, his arms folded, looking down at Victoria.
“Does Gigi know about this?” he demanded sternly.
“No. She took the job with FRB on the condition that we not solicit you. But that was a long time ago. Now she’s more than proven herself; no one can doubt that she can stand on her own two feet without any help from anyone here. That’s why I took it upon myself to make this solicitation.”
“If we listen to the pitch and still decide to stick with Russo and Russo, will she be embarrassed?”
“Hah! Gigi? I have yet to see her embarrassed, Spider. She won’t take it personally. She’s become a different person since she used to work here. She’s highly professional.”
“You’re sure of that? The Gigi I know, as workmanlike as she was … could be emotional.”
“I’m sure she still is. But the agency business quickly teaches you to leave your emotions at home.”
“Well … look, you make a lot of sense, Victoria. I like the way you think. And most of all, I miss having Gigi’s brain to call on. But we need fresh catalog copy too, not just the ads or the media buys. Would we be able to ask her to spend time on that?”
“It goes with our becoming your marketing partner, Spider. Not at Russo and Russo, but at FRB.”
“Victoria, I’ll be frank. I’d do anything to get Gigi back working on Scruples Two. I haven’t been really happy with Russo and Russo. I don’t need a ‘gang bang’ or anybody else’s input, and I know your graphic guys are tremendous, especially Bernheim. Promise me a team of Gigi and Bernheim, and I’ll give you the account.”
“You make quick decisions,” Victoria said, smiling calmly, hiding her shock and triumph well.
“Only when the offer’s irresistible,” Spider said, and put out his hand to shake on it.
As Victoria Frost left the Scruples Two offices and stood in the elevator going down to the valet parking level, she felt her spirits rising higher with each descending floor. Gigi would spit blood when she found out … but there was nothing she could do about it … management was management, and th
e opportunity to capture a thirteen-million-dollar account—soon to be much bigger—on a cold pitch couldn’t be rejected for one individual’s personal reasons. God, but it made her feel at the top of her form to kill two birds with one stone! Gigi and Scruples Two. If only Spider Elliott weren’t so wedded to that wife of his, she could have killed three birds this morning, Victoria told herself in soaring good humor. But you can’t have everything.
She wished she had somebody to talk to, Billy thought, as she swam laps in her pool all alone except for any one of the six gardeners working on the eleven acres of gardens. She’d promised Spider not to swim by herself, but if she got a cramp, at least one of them would hear her call for help, she rationalized as she started her fourth set of fifty laps, feeling deeply sorry for herself.
Gigi was in New York; Sasha was off in Santa Barbara with Vito for a few days, although they couldn’t take a real honeymoon until Long Weekend had finished production; Dolly Moon, her best friend in Los Angeles, was on location in Maine, playing in a divorce comedy opposite Alan Alda, and Jessica Thorpe Strauss, her oldest friend of all, from the days before she’d even met Ellis Ikehorn, had taken off on a European vacation with her husband, now that their five kids were back in school. She simply was not in the mood to talk to any of Spider’s six sisters. Everyone she truly cared about had deserted her.
The twins were just beginning their long afternoon nap, and Spider was busy running Scruples Two. Talk about the dead center of the afternoon, Billy told herself as she churned up and down, this was unquestionably it. She hated swimming, but she had to exercise or she wouldn’t be able to fit into the giant roomful of clothes she owned, not that she had anywhere to wear them. The obscenely silly, petty, unimportant problems of a poor little rich girl …
Disgusted with her thoughts and herself, she climbed abruptly out of the pool, thirty defiant laps short of her goal, roughly toweled herself dry, wrapped herself in a terrycloth robe, put on sneakers, and set off rapidly for her walled garden, her private sanctuary at any time of the year. If she was going to be alone, she might just as well be alone in the place she had planned for solitude, Billy thought, looking apathetically at the glorious blooms of early fall that filled the garden Russell Page had designed for her in a palette of whites.
Fall was a rotten time of year, Billy decided, even here, where all was beauty and peace. Beauty and peace had their place, but not in the autumn, when her East Coast blood ran more quickly than ever in some sort of involuntarily programmed anticipation of the excitement of this season that always felt like the true beginning of the year. Autumn, when all the galleries had new shows; autumn, when the round of parties started; autumn, when people came back from vacation instead of going away; autumn, when the plays opened; autumn, when you bought a new wardrobe … to bloody hell with California, where autumn was the forest-fire season and where there was nothing new under the hot sun except more of the same beauty and peace.
She needed something to do with herself, Billy realized as she sat on the old bench beneath the arbor of wisteria, its leaves now turning yellow and its blooms long gone. She’d been totally plunged into motherhood for more than ten months. Hal and Max were the center of her life, after Spider. While she was pregnant she had decided not to try to choose among her options of full-time motherhood, part-time motherhood, and returning to work. She’d opted to give herself a chance to find out what she wanted, since she possessed, as so few women did, enough money to pick any path or combination of paths.
Now she knew that full-time motherhood wasn’t the answer. Not if she could judge by the vile and self-pitying mood she was in, the mood she’d been in for weeks longer than she’d admitted to anyone, including herself.
Even if she wanted to stay home and be with the twins, she’d be frustrated because they were so deeply involved with each other and their newfound world that consisted of searching out and destroying everything in their path, like miniature soldiers set forth to carry out a scorched-earth policy. They needed her far less than before, and gave her far less of their attention.
Without question, Billy assured herself, it was a sign of superior intelligence that they took everything apart to find out what it was—the toilet flush had been their latest project—but that didn’t make wreckage as fascinating to her as it was to them. Now that they had started to walk, becoming upright from one day to another, with a future in Olympic sprinting clearly evident from the beginning, even Nanny Elizabeth had demanded reinforcements, and a fast-moving assistant nanny had been added to the nursery.
She could, of course, return to Scruples Two and the job she had shared with Spider, Billy thought, except that Spider had, in the last year, expanded his activities to include hers. Face it, she told herself, he had taken over. Taken the fuck over. Completely. She didn’t blame him … not really … his abilities had always been greater than his responsibilities, but she couldn’t walk in and get her old job back, because her old job had been absorbed into his job and he didn’t even realize it. He’d be shocked if she told him how little time he spent now discussing the operations of the catalog with her, preferring to forget them when he wasn’t at the office, exactly like the typical businessman returning home to the little woman.
“And what kind of a day did you have, Spider, darling?”
“Oh, the usual, sweetheart, you know, details, details, tell me what the kids did today, tell me what’s new.” The only thing he didn’t ask was “What’s for dinner?” but that was probably only a question of time.
She had been naive not to have anticipated it, Billy realized. From the day she’d met Spider, from the very first day ten years ago when he’d toured Scruples with her and detailed every last thing she’d done wrong in running and decorating her cherished boutique, he’d been the man with the answers. He’d conned her into giving him and Valentine a free hand, and made it into a raving success that no other store had ever equaled.
When that era was over, Spider had come back from his sailing trip around the world and talked her into lending the name of Scruples to the catalog, although she’d been violently opposed to the idea when Gigi and Sasha thought of it. He’d been brilliantly right. Again. Had she ever done anything that Spider hadn’t forced her into, Billy wondered. Had she really let him dominate her to that extent for a decade? Yes, by God, she had, she realized as she leapt off the bench and paced back and forth in the walled garden. She’d been led around by the nose by this man, love him though she did, as if she were without a brain in her head, as though she were merely a rich woman, a woman he knew was going to listen to his advice, be convinced by his charm and his tra-la-la, and follow his lead. A rich doll. She, Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop Ikehorn Orsini Elliott, a rich, dumb, dependent dolly babe.
Well, fuck that! She had an idea, a good one too. Billy rushed out of the garden, not even bothering to lock the door behind her, and strode for hours through the woodland glades and gardens of her eleven acres, thinking as hard and fast as she’d ever thought in her life.
14
Are we going out tonight?” Spider stopped inside the door to their sitting room and looked at Billy in confusion.
“No, darling, why?” When he walked through the door, she had turned toward him with such an eager swirl of anticipation that his first thought was that he’d come home late on a night they were supposed to be meeting friends for an early dinner.
“You’re all dressed up and you look as if you can’t wait to get going somewhere.”
“Do I?” she asked. Billy knew exactly why he was so surprised. She had grown so excited in the course of developing her new idea while she was prowling around the gardens this afternoon that she’d worked herself into a state of flying exhilaration. She felt too jubilant to put on any of the casual comfortable clothes she’d grown used to wearing all day long, even right on through the pre-dinner hour when she and Spider played with the children while they had a drink. Usually she’d change into another pair of jeans and a fre
sh shirt only when Hal or Max had made her messy enough to go to the trouble.
Two hours before Spider came home tonight, Billy had stormed all four of the twenty-five-foot-long racks in her closet, a thirty-foot-square room carpeted in ivory, each rack-bearing wall padded in lavender silk, pushing aside one hanger after another in search of something to wear that went with her elated mood and yet wouldn’t require that she get into panty hose and real shoes, which would look ridiculous for an evening at home. It couldn’t be daytime, it couldn’t be fall or winter, not in this weather, it couldn’t be formal, and she was feeling too charged up to wear any of her long, elaborate, at-home robes. Was it possible, Billy asked herself, that a woman who had first appeared on the Best-Dressed List at the age of twenty-three should now find herself with nothing to wear for an evening at home with her husband? Was that what having kids did to you?
Finally she’d found the perfect ensemble tucked away in the rack where she kept her sportswear: slim pants and a long, flaring tunic with a deep oval neckline, made of a heavy oriental silk in an astonishing blaze of color that lay somewhere on the thin line dividing shocking pink and hot pink. It was almost a costume, especially with the matching velvet slippers she’d once had made to wear with it, back in the days when it had seemed important, even vital, to own a special pair of shoes for every separate piece of clothing she owned.
After she’d showered and brushed her blunt, heavy, wild curls back off her forehead, Billy realized that the color she was wearing demanded more eye liner, more blusher, and more lipstick than she normally used. Once she’d applied her makeup it was clearer than ever that something, some final note, was missing, and she’d gone to her vault to find a piece of jewelry to complete her outfit.
It had been so long since she’d worn anything that children couldn’t possibly pull off and put in their mouths that she’d almost forgotten the numbers of the two separate combinations of the vault’s intricate locks. The heavy door swung open and Billy looked in a state of semi-shock at the trays and trays of black velvet that were piled on the shelves in stately order. Well, yes, she realized that she had jewels, she’d had them since Ellis Ikehorn had started buying them for her as an emperor would bestow gifts on a newlywed empress, but there were so many … she had forgotten how much she owned.
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