“Wait! Hold it right there! Gigi’s been having affairs with one guy after another, which isn’t her style, and Zach’s not fucking around, which isn’t his style either, so—”
“How come when it’s your daughter she’s having affairs, when it’s my brother, he’s fucking around—”
“Have a little respect, Sasha, darling, and don’t miss the point. Are you listening?”
“Breathlessly.”
“Gigi and Zach are still in love.”
After a silence, Sasha nodded her dark head up and down in respect and admiration.
“I’ll never forgive myself for not putting my finger on it before you. And you’ll always remind me, won’t you, Vito? For the rest of our lives you’ll hold this over me as proof of your superiority.”
“Only when I have to,” Vito said. “What are we going to do?”
“Fix it, obviously,” Sasha said with her usual proud confidence in her powers.
“But how? This has been going on for almost a year.”
“So much the better. If they haven’t gotten over each other in that long, it’s serious.” Sasha closed her eyes and concentrated. “Let’s not monkey around, we’ll fix it the usual way.”
“We abandon them on a desert island for a week?”
“Oh, darling, that’s such a typical boy solution. We don’t do anything. You hint to Zach that Gigi’s still in love with him and I hint to Gigi that Zach’s still in love with her. But be subtle! Remember, they’re almost as smart as we are.”
“The Much Ado ploy? I didn’t realize that was still in use.”
“It was working tens of thousands of years before Shakespeare, and it’ll be working when they colonize Mars.”
“But what if it doesn’t work with Gigi and Zach?”
“We’ll worry about that if it happens. Or I’ll have to call Ma and let her fix it.”
17
For two days following his fight with Billy, Spider Elliott lived in a monotonous, repetitious trance of self-justification, repeating her final words to himself over and over while his mouth seemed to shrink as it grew tightly bitter at the edges. His eyes were narrowed and their Viking blue was darkened in a frown of defiance; his normally open features were shadowed by the unmistakable hardness of someone nursing a killing rage and resolved not to show it. No one now, watching him bent ferociously over the work on his desk, would have imagined him as the prototype of the carefree California surfer he once had been. He was so elaborately polite to his assistant, Tommy Tether, that the self-assured fellow decided that Spider must be getting ready to fire him; on three occasions he inquired solicitously of Josie Speilberg about how her adored nephews were getting along in school, the first time he’d shown more than a passing interest in them, and he braked for traffic lights that had suddenly turned yellow a mere twenty feet away.
He spent every waking minute reviewing each terrible thing Billy had done since he’d known her, from calling him “a cock without a conscience” when she’d accused him of making a play for Gigi on the basis of a few innocent kisses, to trying to add a three-week cancellation clause to his employment contract when he’d first come to California in 1977 to work for her at Scruples. Oh, yes, even way back then, at first sight he’d been aware of Billy’s potential as a pussy-whipper, way back then he’d told Valentine that there was no success he would accept if it meant working for a pussy-whipping woman, and by Christ, nothing had changed, not in Billy and certainly not in him. How could he have been fool enough to marry her, knowing what he knew?
In the middle of the third night, after forty-eight hours of self-perpetuating fury, Spider woke up from a dream about sailing that left him with a vivid sense memory of the feeling of the tiller in his hand and the sight of an endless expanse of ocean. As he lay in bed, trying to recapture the dream in all its details, memories of his days at sea flooded over him.
After Valentine’s death in 1980, Spider had bought a small sailing boat and disappeared, with his two-man crew, sailing ever westward, dropping anchor at countless islands in the many bodies of water that lay between Los Angeles and Greece, fleeing introspection and blunting his pain by plunging himself into a daily contest with the power of nature.
During that almost two-year voyage of mourning and recovery, he had written only two letters, and they had both been to Billy. He had sent his mother postcards from various ports, but Billy had been the only person he’d felt the need to communicate with, the only person he’d continued to feel close to during that necessary trip into an oblivion of sky, sea, and sun, through which he had succeeded in accepting his loss and envisioning a future.
Now, wide awake, with his anger burned out, he realized in shock and terror that he felt a monstrously urgent need to talk to Billy, to put things right between them. There was no one in the world he could go to for comfort from the things Billy had said to him—and the things he’d said to her—but Billy herself.
In the last letter he’d sent to her during his voyage, Spider remembered, he’d written that when he returned there’d be no point in going back into business because he’d never find another partner like her, never find anyone who’d be as much fun to fight with as she was. Granted, he’d written from a remote Greek island in the Aegean Sea, Spider reflected with despairing anguish, but his brain cells must have been reduced to ashes for him to have written that.
Nothing had ever been more exactly, precisely, specifically not “fun” in his entire life than his fight with Billy. Whatever the dictionary opposite of fun was, that fight had been it.
As he paced the floor, he told himself that he would give anything to find himself back inside the thick bubble of thorough-going depression he’d felt when he and Valentine had fought, long before their marriage, over her mysterious lover. That had been fun, compared to the way he felt now. That had been merely a muting of all his senses, a free-floating grayness cast over all the good things in life, a self-pitying sense that he might as well be dead for all the reason there was to go on living.
That fight with Valentine, Spider suddenly remembered, was the first time in his life that he’d been deliberately cruel to a woman. And the last, until he’d been cruel to Billy.
Well, he’d more than broken his brief record now, hadn’t he? He’d really gone for broke, he had about as much reason to be proud of it as the hunter who’d bagged the last lion on earth, or shot the last nightingale and cooked it for dinner. And sucked on its bones when he was finished.
Where the fuck was she? It was still too early to call her at Jessica’s in New York, or in Maine where she might be with Dolly, Spider thought, getting dressed because there was no way he could possibly go back to sleep. People as conspicuous as Billy don’t just disappear, he told himself as he made scrambled eggs for breakfast and discovered that he couldn’t touch them. He swallowed cup after cup of instant coffee and watched the clock until 5:00 A.M., when he started phoning. Jessica, he soon found out from her housekeeper, was in Florence, and Dolly, in Maine, hadn’t heard a word from Billy in a week. By nine-thirty Spider was in the office, waiting to grill Josie Speilberg as soon as she arrived for work. There was no point in standing on his pride and pretending to her that he’d somehow mislaid his wife, and was trying to find her out of idle curiosity.
“Spider, if I knew anything, I swear I’d tell you. I haven’t talked to her in five, maybe six days.”
“Could you try to track down Jessica Strauss in Florence for me, Josie? And anyone else you can think of?”
By the end of the day they had exhausted everyone who might know Billy’s whereabouts, from John Prince in New York to the concierge at the Ritz and his fellows at every other major hotel in Paris, London, and New York. Billy, it was clear, had taken a limo to LAX and vanished.
“She’ll be back Spider, remember the twins are here,” Josie said comfortingly.
“Don’t think I haven’t been saying that to myself all day long.”
“Nanny Elizabeth! I’ll bet she knows somet
hing!” Josie said, and Spider went racing home.
“Mr. Elliott, you know I’d tell you if I could,” Nanny Elizabeth assured him, “but there hasn’t been a single sign from her. I’m beginning to worry myself. But in my experience, these … misunderstandings … they don’t last long when there are little ones in the house. She probably had to take a few days away from everybody in the world—it’s been almost a year since their birth, and that’s a long haul for any woman, no matter how many people she has helping her.”
“We should have taken a vacation,” Spider said. “Damn, why didn’t I think of that?”
“Mrs. Elliott wouldn’t have left,” Nanny Elizabeth replied flatly. “There was no chance you could have made her take a vacation unless you’d taken the twins with you. I’ve rarely seen a mother so … well, devoted to her children.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Spider asked.
“Too much of anything isn’t good. I always tell my parents to get away together, even if it’s just a weekend now and then. The children won’t know the difference so long as I’m here, and the parents need time alone. I said as much to Mrs. Elliott, several times, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”
“She has a mind of her own.”
“Ah, yes, indeed, and a will of her own. She’s an unusually stubborn woman, that’s for sure, but I love her dearly.”
“So do I,” Spider said. “Oh, God, so do I.”
By the end of a week, Spider was so frantic that he was beginning to consider bringing in the police, although Josh Hillman’s advice was to sit it out.
“What could the L.A. police tell you? We know she’s not here. On the possibility that she might have doubled back from wherever she went, we’ve searched the records of every possible hotel and apartment hotel in the city.”
“Maybe … if I went to the media?”
“Spider, for heaven’s sake, you don’t want to broadcast your private disagreements to the world! Don’t go near the media. Billy would hate that more than anything.”
“You’re right, Josh, but I keep imagining …”
“You’re being unnecessarily morbid. Billy is not the kind of woman who’s self-destructive, I promise you. She’s tough, Spider. Go home, play with the kids, and remember that in a few days this will all be a bad dream.”
“Do you bill for that stupid advice, Josh? Shit, I’m sorry, I know you’re doing your best. And I am going home—Nanny Elizabeth will just have to take care of me too.”
Spider sat in the twins’ nursery like a large, loving toy as they climbed over him, feeling that he wasn’t going to move from the floor until they were taken away to be fed. No, he’d feed them himself, both of them, and bathe them too. Contact with their flesh gave him the only comfort he had, and he even got a glow from the feeling of their food in his hair.
“Bow-gow!” Max said to him with a look of heartrending appeal. “Bow-gow!”
“Boo-goo!” Hal cried hopefully. “Boo-goo!”
“You guys want a dog?” Spider asked. “A bow-wow?”
They stood, each holding onto one of his knees, their lower lips thrust forward in their determination to make themselves understood.
“Boo-goo!”
“Bow-gow!”
“Nanny Elizabeth, listen to this! They want a dog! They just said their first word! Bow-wow! Come on, kids, we’ll go out and buy a dog. A bow-wow. Its amazing, yesterday all they could do was wave bye-bye and say ‘mama’ and ‘dada,’ and today they want a dog! Isn’t that exceptionally intelligent of them, learning to express an abstract desire overnight?”
“Not considering the amount of time Burgo O’Sullivan has been spending with them recently, getting under my feet. I hate to have to admit this, Mr. Elliott, but their first word is an attempt to say ‘Burgo.’ He taught it to them just at the very instant they were primed and ready to learn how to speak. Boys are so late in their verbal skills. Very naughty of Burgo indeed, and I told him so, but the damage was done.” Nanny Elizabeth sniffed in disapproval.
“Burgo? That sonofabitch, I’ll fucking kill him when I find him!”
Spider sprinted off in search of Burgo, leaving Nanny Elizabeth thinking that poor Mrs. Elliott certainly had good reason to stay out of the way of a man capable of such jealousy. It was only another name, after all.
“Burgo! You come out of your room, you maggot, you coward, or I’ll kick the door in!”
“There’s no need to shout like that,” Burgo said, emerging from his quarters with the calm confidence of an indispensable man.
“Where’s my wife, you lousy bastard? Don’t tell me you don’t know, the kids blew your cover, you miserable turd! You’ve been hanging around them—since when are you so interested in children, you deceptive, malice-ridden—”
“I don’t know where she is,” Burgo said with dignity. “There’s no need to insult me.”
“Yes, you do!” Spider screamed, and seized him around his neck.
“She phones me, I don’t phone her,” Burgo sputtered. “Let go!”
“Why didn’t you tell me? You know damn well I’ve been going crazy!”
“I probably would have been forced to in a day or so, considering my sympathy for any fellow man, no matter who he is or how he behaves, but my first loyalty always has been to Mrs. Elliott, and she made me promise on my mother’s grave,” Burgo said with dignity. “Fortunately, my mother is alive and well.”
“What the hell did she say, Burgo? What, for God’s sake?”
“Mrs. Elliott asks about the children, each time, and I report in detail, I ask how she is, and she answers that she’s fine—she sounds perfectly all right—and then she hangs up.”
“Thank God!” Spider sagged in relief. “Well, now that I know she’s okay, I guess I’ll have to wait it out until she comes home. She could be absolutely anywhere.”
“One day,” Burgo offered, “I did happen to hear her say something to a person she called ‘Marry John’ or some such foreign name.”
“Marry John? How do you know it was foreign?”
“Mrs. Elliott didn’t pronounce it like an American name. It was slurred, faster than she usually speaks.”
Spider was on the phone to Josh Hillman before he’d finished his sentence.
“Josh, does the name ‘Marry John’ mean anything to you? The wife of who? Marie-Jeanne? Billy’s been paying their salary for years? And you didn’t think of them? Jesus, Josh, so what if the house is empty and uninhabitable? Since when would that stop Billy? Oh, you’re sorry, are you—big fucking deal. Now give me that address, you absolute moronic asshole!”
“Lawyers!” Spider muttered to Burgo, planted a kiss on his forehead, and raced upstairs to tell Nanny Elizabeth the news and grab his passport.
Billy walked along the Rue de Barbet de Jouy, swinging an empty shopping basket. She’d gone to the best local wine merchant to replace the wine that Marie-Jeanne had lent her, and discovered what a rare vintage the 1971 was. He’d promised to find a case for her somewhere or, failing that, to order a wine equally as good.
“Do you have suitable storage space, Madame?” he’d asked. “If so, I can try to find you several cases.”
“I have excellent cellars, Monsieur, but I. must wait to decide about an order.”
“At your service, Madame.”
Should she, Billy asked herself, perhaps buy wine? Cases and cases of wine? The best vintages, the most rare, the great treasures? In Paris, even in an empty house, it didn’t feel comfortable not to have wine right on hand in case anyone dropped by. There were always several bottles of champagne on ice in any proper French fridge; no one thought twice about asking for a little “coup” of champagne when they were offered a drink by a friend, because they knew that a bottle would be finished too quickly to go flat. She sighed, disappointed by the lightness of her empty basket.
Today felt like the first real day of fall, Billy thought as she turned the corner to cover the short section of the Rue de Varenne that led back
to the Rue Vaneau. She’d put on a heavy crimson turtleneck and a pair of black trousers this morning, and the tails of a long crimson and black striped wool scarf bounced behind her. She wasn’t in the mood for the Luxembourg Gardens, Billy realized, as if awakening from a fit of indolence that had held her captive.
She was in the mood to swoop down on the Rue Cambon and buy every single new suit in the Chanel collection. Every single coat, every last dress, every chain belt, shoes, oh, yes, dozens and dozens and dozens of shoes! … Uh-oh, she was in trouble! She couldn’t show her nose in the Rue Cambon, right at the back entrance to the Ritz. At Chanel she’d run into at least five women she knew, especially now, in the middle of the afternoon, when everyone had fittings.
But what if she ordered her car and driver? There’d be only a quick step from the curb through the gray glass doors of the shop; she’d keep her sunglasses on, and wear a big silk square well forward to shade her face. She could phone the manager in advance and arrange to be led straight to a private dressing room … could she risk it? She felt as strong a desire to buy something—anything—as she’d felt when she’d bought her house, and she knew that such a mood was a certain sign of dangerous restlessness, of a feverish need to make things happen. She had cabin fever, she was like someone who’d lived through a dark Arctic winter or a long convalescence during which she’d been forced to stay in bed and do nothing but rest her eyes.
If only Sam hadn’t sent that enormous bouquet of fall flowers. And a card on which he’d written, “If you ever change your mind, if the timing is right someday, here’s my new phone number. I’ll always be here for you, my love. Sam.”
He shouldn’t have done that, Billy thought. It wasn’t cricket. She’d made up her mind and it was staying made up, but it didn’t help to have those flowers, arranged in a vase by Marie-Jeanne, standing on the floor of the sun room in a blaze of russet and gold, reminding her of Sam’s hair each time she looked at them. She’d throw them out, along with the card, the minute she got home she resolved, turning the corner of the Rue Vaneau.
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