Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  It was one thing to be the fancy-free and eligible object of their admiration, but quite another to become ‘poor old Ben, isn’t it a shame that he never got married.’ He knew that they were all horribly envious of him in their heart of hearts—how could they escape envy when his personal wealth was proclaimed in Forbes’s unutterably vulgar list every year, when his eight hundred million dollars had grown by another hundred million dollars this year, and yet nothing about the way he behaved with them changed, when he remained the Ben Winthrop they thought they knew? They couldn’t even accuse him of having the poor taste to display any signs of the nouveau riche. That alone must make them as sick as did the fortune he’d made. Obviously his friends would jump on any excuse to imagine themselves happier than he was, because he’d lagged a bit too long in any stage of the footrace of life. He’d seen it happen many times, seen this sort of self-congratulatory emotional superiority spring up almost overnight, although a man could hold out for years and years, almost indefinitely, as long as he didn’t become a recluse, whereas a woman, no matter how rich, would be quickly pitied.

  He could never have married one of the Boston girls he grew up with; they were so familiar that they seemed like sisters—cheery, bookish, bossy, non-erotic. He didn’t care for any of the multitude of New York girls he’d met; they were, by and large, too formed, too sophisticated, often too neurotic. They had been spoiled by their parents and had acquired too hard a veneer too early in life.

  Gigi had been made for him.

  Her background was impossible, that went without saying. An Irish musical-comedy dancer for a mother, and a showbiz father of Italian heritage! Fortunately he had background enough for the two of them. His marriage would be one in the eye for ever-critical Boston, one in the eye for his father, who persisted in his disapproval of his way of life, one in the eye for all his smug Winthrop relatives, although the fact that Gigi could boast Billy Winthrop Elliott as her “stepmother,” or at least her former legal guardian, provided her with a certain stamp that would soften any edge of genuine disapproval they might feel. His taking of an unconventional bride would seal all his other triumphs as no additional financial success could.

  Gigi herself was so winsome, so original, and so charming that she would win them over. Everyone who had known him as a young man would be forced to acknowledge, once again, that, unlike them, he was no pale copy of his ancestors. Gigi was—and it was a large part of her charm that she didn’t know it—distinguished. The quality of her imagination, put to use in the world of philanthropy, would quickly bring her to the attention of the inner circle of older women who ran New York, and one day she would be an important figure in their ranks, a primary figure. Yes, Gigi was the perfect—not “compromise”—he would never compromise in marriage, but the perfect … well … for want of a better word … the perfect choice.

  And, of course, he was in love with her. “Madly” in love? No, he didn’t have the desire ever to lose himself in any essentially irrational emotion, he was thankful to say. But as much in love, far more in love, than he had ever believed he could be, now or ever again. Deeply in love. He could ask no more than that of life.

  No one had yet informed the Adriatic Sea or the lagoons and canals of Venice that the official tourist season was over. The water flickered, dappled and silver, under a celebratory sun in the city that even Dickens had said he was afraid to describe. No filigree of mist had yet flung itself over the dusky ochres of the smaller canals, the miraculous pinks of the Doge’s Palace, or the golden grays, beige grays, the plum grays, and mauve-burgundy grays of the marble palaces that lined the Grand Canal.

  In the blue air, all sounds seemed to hang suspended overhead except for the ringing of bells and the lapping of water. There was no longer any wisteria in blossom, trailing in loops from window to window; the occasional oleander trees hanging over tall walls, sending tantalizing messages from tiny hidden gardens, were denuded of their pink and white blooms; but that lack was more than made up for by the sense of freedom and space created by the departure of most of the five million tourists who came to Venice each year.

  Venice was ripe on the day of their arrival, an autumnal ripeness in a city of stones where there could be no harvest. Thoughts of the acque alte, or high tide of November, that often flooded the red and white marble of the Piazza San Marco, seemed impossible. Somehow the rocking, lounging water seemed to croon with a humming readiness, a welcome for the press who were due to deplane tomorrow from their staging point of departure in New York. There had been almost no refusals from the two hundred invited guests. Everyone of major importance who wrote about the booming businesses of commercial real estate and travel in the American media was expected tomorrow, along with groups of Canadian and British journalists. Ben’s researchers had discovered-that when the French took vacations, rich or poor, they preferred to stay in France, and that the Italians, when they took cruises, did so on Italian-owned ships.

  The travel agency with which Gigi had been working had made all the complicated arrangements to fly the press to Venice in first-class comfort. A fleet of four dozen motoscafi, with their sleek lines and shining decks, flying white and green flags, had been chartered for their entire visit. Their rooms would be waiting for them at the Gritti, the Danieli, and the Cipriani, filled with flowers, fruit, and buckets of iced champagne, mini-bars unlocked and fully stocked. A handsomely engraved and personalized letter of welcome from Ben Winthrop was placed on each night table, along with the schedule of events, guidebooks, and maps of Venice.

  During their first full day the press was free to use the speed-boats to visit Venice, Murano, the Lido, or Torcello, stopping whenever they felt hungry at elaborate buffets that would operate around the clock for the entire duration of the junket, in private dining rooms set up at all of their three hotels. On the second day of the junket, after lunch, they would be transported on specially decorated vaporetti from their hotels to the railroad station at the far end of the Grand Canal, where they would board buses for the trip across the bridge to the mainland, and from there to Porta Margera. Once inside the shipyard, more buses would take them to the three rows of bleachers set up along the drydock itself, where they would listen to a short speech that Ben would make, explaining the exchange of coins, and then they’d watch Gigi make the exchange itself, and see the plate rewelded into the hull of the Winthrop Emerald.

  On the trip home, the vaporetti, now illuminated with strings of lights, carrying musicians and waiters with trays of drinks, would return to the hotels in time for the journalists to dress for the ball and dinner at the specially decorated Municipal Casino, the Palazzo Grimini, where there would be dancing and gambling until the last member of the media felt like leaving. During the next two days the press would be at liberty to enjoy themselves, as they had been on the first day, with their return flights scheduled for the morning of the fifth day.

  “Three and three-quarter days of whatever pleases their fancy in Venice, the fastest and most expensive transportation, food, drink, and only one brief event plus a party to cover—if that doesn’t make them go home happy, what will?” Ben had asked when Gigi had shown him her plans.

  “They’re blasé about being well-treated,” Gigi worried. “I still think you should have fifty gondolas available twenty-four hours a day, flying a green and white flag, so they’d be able to tell which ones were yours.”

  Ben had given a negative shake of his head. “It’d mean negotiating for days with the gondoliers’ union—even getting a job as a gondolier means you have to be born to a gondolier in a direct line going back generations—they’re a hundred times worse than the Teamsters. If members of the press want to take a gondola, let them pay for it themselves, darling—after all, everything else is free.”

  “I know, but why stop at the gondolas? They represent Venice, they’re identified with it as nothing else is.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, they’re a rip-off, and I won’t do business with them
,” he’d said stubbornly.

  Gigi had sighed and dropped the matter. There was a blind side to Ben, a totally uncompromising attitude that allowed him to go light-years in any number of extravagant directions yet not bend the slightest in another. It was his way, as they said about Lee Iacocca—or was it Frank Sinatra?—or the highway.

  Gigi no longer thought this quality was an example of the oddball, often amusing frugality of the very rich. Billy would have seen at once that visiting Venice on the cuff without free gondolas just … missed. Not enough to spoil the junket in any important way, but still enough to shadow the experience with a tiny degree of incompleteness. The price demanded by the gondoliers’ union, no matter how unfair, wouldn’t even be noticed in the vast total that Winthrop Development was spending on the whole elaborate affair.

  Ben regulated his life by some system of his own that he lived by, with no exceptions, a system that continued to be an enigma to her. What, for instance, if she’d wanted to break his Rule of One on their first visit to Venice? What if she’d been in the mood to spend a whole afternoon looking at pictures—would he have dragged her bodily out of the Accademia while she begged piteously for just one more little Giorgione?

  After the fistfight with Zach at her party, she and Ben, with cautious tact, had managed to tuck the episode away. He’d teased her that she’d dressed like a temptress and behaved like a prude; she’d responded that he was an exhibitionist who’d gotten the black eye that he deserved, and she’d pretended to have forgotten it. But she knew she was right to dislike being groped in public, and she was privately as exultant that Zach had so excessively overreacted in defending her as she was irritated by Ben’s behavior.

  Her problems with Ben, Gigi frowned, aside from the gondolas, all seemed to be about something relatively minor: his fixation—that was the only word for it—on her ass; that embarrassing night in the Vineyard; his insistence on buying the earrings she hadn’t wanted; even their first kiss. He had a way of taking advantage of his position to assert himself, to take possession. Complete possession.

  It wasn’t selfishness in the ordinary sense of the word; it seemed to Gigi that nobody could be as generous, as wildly extravagant, as Ben was when he was in the mood. It was some other quality, some deep internal pattern, something she couldn’t manage to give a name to, try as she had since their love affair started.

  Granted, it had been wildly romantic, but would every woman have been thrilled to have been skyjacked to Venice, come to think of it? Probably. She was just being inordinately picky, Gigi reproached herself. A man’s and a woman’s ideas of romantic timing might easily not coincide. Most females would kill for someone who threw emeralds at them and swept them off to magic places and didn’t mind showing their loving possessiveness, no matter where or when or who was watching.

  The thing was that he didn’t possess her. Not yet, anyway.

  “I have this problem,” Archie said to Byron, as they sat in a bar at two in the afternoon. “I can’t decide if this is what it feels like to be drowned, to have slivers of bamboo stuck under my fingernails, or to be burned at the stake.”

  “Try to be betrayed, to be castrated, to be sodomized, and to be robbed at gunpoint of everything you own … yeah, I think it’s more like that,” Byron said, striving for conciseness.

  “Are we losing perspective? Are we overreacting, By? After all, we still have our health, we still have our hair, we have our suits and our talent. All we’ve lost is the fruit of the hardest-working years in our prime of life and our reputations in the business.”

  “We knew we were taking a risk, Arch.”

  “You mean we deserve this?”

  “No, just that it happens.”

  “Byron, if you get philosophical on me, if you say one mellow, shit-eating, rat-eyed word, I’m going to break every bone in your body with my own hands.” Archie croaked with the lack of menace of someone who knew he had only enough strength to lift a glass to his lips.

  “Gigi in Venice for God knows how long, Miss Vicky in Tokyo forever … how many accounts have we lost, Archie? I keep losing count.”

  “All three of our very own low-cal babies from Oak Hill Foods, Indigo Seas, Beach Casuals, and, now that we’ve heard from Spider Elliott in Paris, Scruples Two.”

  “You can’t count Indigo Seas,” Byron said fretfully. “We resigned them. And that’s where the trouble started.”

  “No, the trouble started when we left Caldwell and Caldwell with that double-dealing ice-queen bitch-goddess, Victoria Frost,” Archie pronounced his opinion in small, biting words.

  “Should we have foreseen that she’d dash home to mummy and daddy the instant they asked her nicely, without even giving us a word of warning? Was that our big mistake?” Byron wondered.

  “I don’t know, but she was uncomfortable enough with it to telex from Japan. She didn’t even have the guts to phone us before she left and talk to us, while we were trying to hunt up Gigi. At least Gigi had a reason—unprofessional as it was—for leaving, and she didn’t take any accounts with her. You can’t blame Elliott for pulling the plug when he’d been led to expect to get Gigi back … can’t even blame that foxy grandpa, Harris Reeves … is this what they call white-collar crime?”

  “I believe it’s known as ‘business as usual,’ ” Byron responded. “Also known as reality.”

  “In that case, I have an idea,” Archie said, running his hands through his black curls and sitting up straighter. “We still have a group of semi-respectable accounts, plus, for the moment at least, The Enchanted Attic and the Winthrop Line. Why don’t we go see the Russo boys and suggest a merger? Billy Elliott gave the Russos another chance at Scruples Two, and we’d bring new blood to the account—if we got together with them, we’d make a decent small agency. They’re good steady guys, just not as hot as we are—as we were—but then who is? Or should I say was?”

  “Hmmm. Russo, Russo, Rourke and Bernheim … no, I don’t like the sound of that,” Byron said peevishly.

  “If we could make it Russo, Rourke, Russo and Bernheim, would you like it better?”

  “I think I could begin to consider Russo, Bernheim, Russo and Rourke. I think I could swallow my pride to that point,” Byron answered. “At least we don’t have to work with Miss Vicky anymore.”

  “Toss you for who gets to make the phone call,” Archie said.

  “I’m only a great art director, Arch, you’re fair with words, or so they say. You make the call. And wake me when it’s settled,” Byron said, signaling the waiter. “Another bottle of Evian, please, we’re going to hell with ourselves.”

  The magnificent weather held as the press arrived and checked into their rooms. The next day they disappeared into Venice, drifting invariably into the Piazza San Marco before lunch, after lunch, and during the afternoon.

  Gigi had put together a group of the yellow wicker tables at Florian’s and surrounded them with chairs. While Ben worked all day with Renzo Montegardini, planning how to speed up the refitment of the Emerald, she sat at Florian’s, accompanied by the entire public-relations department of Winthrop Development. Sooner or later their journalist guests would come by to sit down, say hello, order tea, coffee, mineral water, and every kind of sweet cake, some of them perfectly content not to leave, until their informal party grew until it almost filled the ranks of the outdoor tables of the large café.

  One particular business reporter, a Boston Globe business writer on the verge of retirement, known as Branch T. Branch, took a particular liking to Gigi, whom he took to be a junior member of the PR department. Diminutive, almost fleshless, and deeply wrinkled, the reporter wore a thin wool shirt, a heavy sweater, and a battered tweed hat, even though the day was fairly hot and the sun was high.

  “You can’t be too careful here,” he told Gigi in his low, confidential rasp. “Know the place well, love it, but wouldn’t go out without a sweater for anything in the world. Caught a terrible cold here one beautiful July day, waiting for a va
poretto—a breeze off the water, another chill coming up from the canal, three minutes’ wait, that’s all it took, hung on for weeks. Miasma, my dear, miasma. Death in Venice, that’s no joke, happens all the time to tourists. These canals are full of things you don’t want to think about. At night, on a dark bridge, don’t look behind you, walk briskly, that’s my advice. Very little crime here, mostly pickpockets, but lots of ghosts, more than make up for criminals. The real Venetian—a dying breed, only eighty thousand of them left, you know—will tell you that if you’re not born here, it’s courting your death to stay longer than two weeks. And don’t ever get sick in Venice, that’s my advice. The doctors here come from the school of cupping and leeches. Got stung by a bee here once, had an allergic reaction, leg blew up three times its size, doctor told me it was impossible because Venice doesn’t have any gardens, so how could there be bees? Damn place has hundreds of little window gardens, and what about the flower market at the Rialto, eh?”

  “Where are you staying, Mr. Branch?”

  “Branchie, call me Branchie. I’m at the Gritti. Don’t think I’ll take that trip to see that keel ceremony, hate to miss young Winthrop’s speech, doing a book on the Winthrops, you know, but why risk coming back by night? Much too cold, much too long a trip for my taste, you should have held it in a more civilized location, that’s my advice. Mestre, of all places. Plague center, Mestre.”

  “But the ship can’t be moved out of drydock. Oh, dear, I don’t want you to miss it,” Gigi cried, feeling the Boston Globe coverage slipping away. “If I come to pick you up at the hotel, will you go out on the vaporetto with me? It’ll be perfectly warm at that time of day. Coming back, I’ll arrange a special motoscafo at the railroad station just for you. You can sit inside the cabin and close the doors. You’ll be perfectly snug, and you’ll get back long before the others.”