Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  When had she had time or occasion to wear all of these, she asked herself as she pulled out one tray after another, each tray bearing its load of treasure, the jewels all in their allotted places for quick inspection. Not plain gold, it looked awful on pink, and of course her diamonds were out of the question, Billy knew, putting back everything that was wrong. Not her emeralds, either, and somehow not her rubies, which she liked with pink or red, but not with this particularly powerful pink, which overwhelmed them. Her always-right pearls looked too conservative tonight, even the black ones, and her semiprecious collections, the turquoises and corals, the aquamarines, the amethysts and tourmalines, the citrines and the jade—none of them worked when she held them close to the silk and glanced at herself in the mirror. That left sapphires, the obvious choice, but hardly what one would call your obvious pink and blue combination, not when she’d put on the enormous sapphire earrings with a large baroque pearl hanging from each extraordinary gem, and the double ropes of sapphires and baroque pearls that fell so perfectly into the neckline of the tunic.

  Everyone knew that you had to wear your jewelry next to living skin or it lost its glow, Billy thought righteously, or was that story just about pearls? Weren’t you even supposed to swim in salt water with pearls at least twice a year? Never mind, at least she looked like herself again, didn’t she?

  She inspected herself from all angles in her three-way mirror. After she’d lost the lumbering weight of her early years, Billy had been able to wear and carry any clothes ever designed, thanks to her height and the slim, long lines of her limbs, but tonight, after so many months of dressing for staying at home and being with children, she caught her breath in delight at the sight of her reflected image. Oh, she looked—if she said so herself and there was no one else around to say it—she looked—and there was no other word to use, so she’d have to use it—magnificent. Magnificent in the way Lorenzo de’ Medici or Sultan Soliman had the word “magnificent” attached to their names, “magnificent” as in great and lofty and royally lavish, as in grand and splendid and sumptuous.

  There was nothing wrong with magnificent, Billy thought, as she waited for Spider. He hadn’t been treated to his wife in her magnificent manifestation in too long a time … this should be a lesson to her in not taking her husband for granted. He’d never known her in her consistently magnificent days, when she was Ellis’s wife and Ellis had wanted that for her, but he’d certainly seen her in many magnificent moments. He must have been wondering what had happened to her, perhaps even asking himself why childbirth had catapulted her into appearing as a perpetually practical housewife and mother instead of the woman he’d married.

  Billy was standing in front of a balcony door, looking out at the seemingly endless pathway bordered by noble sycamores that led the eye into the gardens below her, when she heard Spider’s step at the sitting room door. Deliberately, she didn’t turn until she felt him right behind her.

  “My God! I know what it must be,” Spider said, holding her at arm’s length as he inspected her. “There’s only one reason I can think of for you to look so beautiful and excited.”

  “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” Billy pushed forward against his strong arms, but he easily held her off.

  “And ruin your lipstick? Not until you tell me if I’m right—you’re pregnant again!”

  “Oh, come on, Spider! Is that the only reason you can think of for me to look beautiful?” she exclaimed, deeply disappointed.

  “It’s the best reason I can think of, but it’s not the only one,” he said, amused at her reaction.

  “What’s another?”

  “The twins did something new they’ve never done before, like discovering why people use napkins, or maybe you found a new hairdresser who’ll come to the house, or you just had a great massage, or, hell, I don’t know, maybe you’ve bought the kids that dog we’ve been talking about …”

  “Your imaginative powers astound me,” Billy said, hiding her exasperation. “Do you want a drink?”

  “Love one. Where are the kids?”

  “They’re playing in their playroom with their two nannies, and having a marvelous time prying up the floor tiles one by one. Actually I was hoping we might have a few relaxing minutes alone together when you got home, instead of the constant struggle to keep Max and Hal from drinking out of our glasses.”

  “Hell, darling, I don’t mind that. If the little buggers do manage to get a taste, it’ll probably put them off liquor for life. Aversion therapy. Why don’t you call Nanny Elizabeth on the house phone and ask her to bring them in? If I don’t see them now, they’ll be asleep by the time we finish dinner.”

  Pregnant again, Billy thought wrathfully as she used the house phone, pregnant again … as if the twins weren’t enough, as if the only reason a woman would make herself magnificent for her husband could possibly be to announce that her womb was still in working order. Was that what she was to Spider, a uterus on two feet, like some new kind of toaster oven that popped out warm infants? Or, even worse, someone who only looked her best when she had a piddling household accomplishment to bring to his attention? Or a new hairdresser? Apparently so, damn that condescending son of a bitch! He had no idea to what depths of taking-her-for-granted he’d slipped into.

  Still, she was as much to blame as he was, she had to be fair and admit it, Billy thought as she sipped her drink and the twins climbed over Spider as if he were a jungle gym, ignoring her familiar presence. She’d been blindly immersed in what some Victorian writers called “baby worship” for more than ten months, and heavily pregnant for months before giving birth, totally concentrated on her fascinating reproductive powers, so naturally he’d lost his sense of who she really was. So had she. She felt as if she had just awakened from a long coma.

  Still … wasn’t that forgetfulness convenient for him, this man with a firmly established history of telling her what she’d done wrong and then fixing it with his superior powers? Hadn’t he accepted her staying home with astonishing rapidity and not a single protest? Yet, in justice to Spider, wouldn’t any man behave in the same way? Wasn’t that the way the bastards were genetically constructed from the day they were born? From before they were born? Even Spider Elliott?

  Well, so be it. She didn’t intend to allow him to remain in his throwback-to-the-1950s mode for longer than it would take to explode that particularly odious little time capsule of typically male thinking. She’d have to keep her new idea to herself until after dinner—she was too enthralled with it to be able to eat and talk about it at the same time.

  Why was it, Billy wondered, as she and Spider went back upstairs to the sitting room after dinner, that no matter how many rooms a house had, no matter how many corners had been arranged just so that people could sit and talk, you always found yourself migrating to the same intimate quarters, which invariably turned out to be the smallest room in any house?

  She felt his arms close around her waist as soon as the sitting room door was shut behind them.

  “Okay, so you’re not pregnant,” Spider said. “But is there any reason why I shouldn’t get you pregnant tonight? Just think, we could have three kids under the age of two. Or even four, if you got lucky and had another set of twins.”

  “Now there’s a truly appealing idea,” Billy replied in what she assumed he’d understand was a resoundingly negative response, but as he pulled her back toward him, his busy, peremptory hands told her that he’d missed her irony. The trusty trouser snake, she realized, was deaf to nuance.

  “You’re resplendent,” he said, kissing the back of her neck.

  Resplendent, Billy thought, flinching, a word that had always brought to her mind the picture of a dowager wearing a diamond tiara, a word that had only two meanings for her: old and rich.

  She pulled away and stood looking down at the group of antique Japanese cachepots in which African daisies were massed, dozens and dozens of the multicolored Gerberas, tonight confined to a selection of brilliant
yellows that clashed gorgeously with the hot pink of her tunic. She selected one and played with its petals. Finally she spoke.

  “Spider, I have an idea and I’m dying to tell you about it.”

  “I have a better idea and I’m dying to demonstrate it to you,” he answered, taking the Gerbera out of her hands and kissing her purposefully on the lips.

  “Spider, I’m serious!”

  “So am I,” he pursued, ignoring her words and kicking his charm up a few notches. “Seriously horny.”

  Billy moved quickly and took refuge behind a heavy table. “Sit down and listen to me. You’re always horny.”

  “Only when I see you.”

  “Then it’ll keep, won’t it? Please, please pay attention.”

  “For how long?” he bargained.

  “Until I’ve finished, and I wish you’d really listen and not make me feel as if you’re just marking time until you can jump me.”

  Spider gave her that damned smile which always made her want to curl up in his lap.

  “I’m at your command, mentally alert, so long as you keep your distance. I’ll take a chair, you can have the sofa. You might consider putting a paper bag over your head … on second thought, don’t bother, I’ll just look at my knees. Now, what’s your idea?”

  “It hit me this afternoon. I was thinking that I had to find something to do with myself, that just staying home wasn’t the answer, and I found myself considering redecorating—”

  “Why not? A completely new look—it’d be fun for you.”

  “I started to consider redecorating,” Billy continued, shaking off his words, “and I realized that what I wanted was real work, not spending more time ditzing around on something that I’m perfectly happy with the way it is.”

  “If you want work, what’s wrong with your old job?”

  “My old job simply doesn’t exist anymore, Spider. I’ve been phased out. I can’t complain—after all, it’s been almost a year and a half since I was involved in Scruples Two full-time. How many people have you hired since then who do some of the things I was doing?”

  “Let’s see—we hired Dodie away from Bill Blass to work full-time with Prince, and we hired Fabienne and Serena and Tracy to do the accessory buying and keep finding new pieces to copy for Gigi’s antique lingerie; there’s Mary Anne in charge of maternity clothes, plus Sasha expanded her department, she has six assistants instead of four, and she’ll be back part-time by the beginning of next week—”

  “So there isn’t any place for me.”

  “Hell, darling, we own the business, we can create any kind of place you want—the only reason we took on so many new people is that the amount of business we’re doing is increasing almost faster than we can control it. Joe Jones walks around looking worried and saying ‘Inventory, inventory,’ out loud to himself all day long, as if he’d never had to deal with it when he was marketing chief at L.L. Bean—yet their inventory must have been more complicated than ours—”

  “Spider, Scruples Two is something I can look at now and say to myself, ‘We did it,’ ” Billy interrupted. “I can look at each new catalog with satisfaction and think, ‘Spider and I, working together, accomplished this.’ It’s a solid, ongoing achievement in which I invested a huge amount of myself, it exists in the form I helped shape, it’s mine and yours and Gigi’s and Sasha’s, a joint effort that will continue as it started, but that’s not enough.”

  “What would be enough?” Spider scrutinized her face with loving curiosity.

  “I want to do a new catalog. My own catalog, built from scratch, something that doesn’t exist … that’s never existed.”

  “What kind of catalog?”

  “A decorating catalog. I want to call it ‘The Scruples Home,’ and I want to commission a small group of the top furniture designers in the world to design compact, exclusive collections of furniture in the moderate but not cheap price range that Scruples Two sells clothes at, and I want—”

  “But where’s the market?” Spider broke in. “People don’t shop for furniture by catalog, not our kind of customers. They want to go and pick it out, sit on it—”

  “Have you ever actually been to the furniture department of a department store?” Billy demanded.

  “Actually … I don’t think so … in New York I just sort of accumulated some junk for my loft—a couple of palm trees and a mattress—in L.A. I took whatever furniture came with the two houses I rented, then I moved in here, furniture heaven … no, I haven’t.”

  “You’re lucky—even Bloomie’s in New York, with its model rooms, drives you wild with frustration. Trying to get a salesperson and make some sense out of the stuff you see is a lesson in total confusion. If you can stay the course, hours later you end up exhausted and depressed, convinced that you’ve made expensive mistakes. The Scruples Two customer doesn’t have time to waste in department stores, that’s why she’s buying from our catalog.”

  “Right. But what about using interior decorators?”

  “Spider, they’re not for the busy working mother, any more than she can afford to hire a personal shopper.”

  “If you say so, God knows, interior decorators are one of your areas of expertise.”

  He looked, Billy thought, as if he were repressing a desire to indulge his sense of the ludicrous at her expense. Didn’t he realize how earnestly she’d thought this through?

  “The whole point of buying from a catalog,” Billy said, watching Spider carefully, “is to get a rock-bottom price, because essentially a catalog is nothing more than a convenient and well-presented warehouse.”

  “I know all that, Billy, it’s my business,” Spider said impatiently. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “The Scruples Home would present the basics, the essentials for five different kinds of homes: urban traditional, classic modern, American country, French farmhouse, western ranch house. Five perfect sofas, five perfect armchairs, five dining tables for multiple uses, five loveseats, five coffee tables, five headboards, and so on—you get the picture—and they’d all be able to be used together or separately, our principle of mix-and-match that makes the Prince collection so successful.” Billy looked at Spider to see if she could get any feedback from him, but he looked as puzzled as before.

  “Spider! Pay attention! Our Scruples customer could decorate by herself, without leaving her home. She could finally find that French country headboard she’s always wanted but never could find, she could order the elegant loveseat from one of the collections and a modern expandable dining table from another, and get her place finished at last—we’re assuming that she isn’t living in crates—or if she’s just getting married or starting fresh with a one-room studio apartment, she could do all the indispensable basics from The Scruples Home, and when she has the time to spend, she can stamp it with her own individuality with things she picks up here and there at flea markets and junk shops. But she’d have her basics at wholesale.”

  “That loveseat,” Spider asked, “what would it be covered in?”

  “I figured plain muslin upholstery on everything upholstered, plus a choice of slipcovers.”

  “Slipcovers! Jesus, Billy, that’s asking for inventory disaster. How many different fabrics would you have to carry to give your customer enough of a choice?”

  “I think six would do it to start. Some sort of neutral, washable, textured fabric, like a duck or a seersucker, a black and white stripe in cotton, three basic mixable color choices in solid cotton, and one great floral. The customers could add sets of slipcovers as they went along. When needed, I’d keep adding new fabrics.” Billy spoke proudly. The slipcovers, she knew, were her most amusing and innovative part of the entire idea. They were dirt-cheap to manufacture, practical to use, and fun to switch around.

  “Look, let’s not talk about the slipcovers yet,” Spider said, trying to control his vision of Billy ending up with tens of thousands of yards of unwanted fabric. The next thing he knew, she’d be starti
ng a remnant store. “What sort of pricing are you talking about?”

  “Based on what I saw when I did this place with my decorator, the low-end wholesale on a decent three-pillow sofa would be about six hundred; a good, solid farmhouse table that would seat eight people would run about four-fifty—”

  “But didn’t you redecorate about three years ago?”

  “More or less.”

  “Oh, Billy, Billy—prices have zoomed since then, and you’re talking about major money here, even at what used to be the low end. Anyway, how did you happen to find out about low-end prices?”

  “I went everywhere with my decorator—I didn’t trust him to make a decision without me—and we were doing the staff rooms.”

  “Staff! Billy, aren’t you playing lady of the manor? You’re planning a furniture catalog for the Scruples Two customer, a tasteful woman with a healthy middle-class income. She’s not going to furnish in stuff intended for your live-in help.”

  “Damn it, Spider, do you think I bought anything that wasn’t really comfortable and good-looking for those rooms? Do you think I expected the people who work here to live in squalor? Is that what you think of me?”

  “Calm down, darling, of course I don’t. I just think you’re being impractical, basing this on your taste, not that of real people.”

  “You’re wrong,” Billy flashed. “I’m turning my back on what I buy for myself. I’m using my taste but not my extravagance. The chair you’re sitting on was five thousand dollars in plain muslin, before the fabric was ordered from France, which added another nine hundred dollars, plus labor costs for quilting and upholstery and shipping and sales tax. And that was minus the decorator’s one-third markup. Believe me, I okayed every single bill.”