She poked her head out of the covers and considered the possibility of another Bloody Mary. No. Absolutely not. One was clearly medicinal but two? She would count her blessings instead as her mother had taught her to. First, as ever, health. The only blessing that really mattered. Hangovers didn’t count as being sick since they were temporary. Second, her sheets, the smoothest possible pure cotton, from Pratasi, the borders embroidered with tiny scallops, at six hundred dollars the pair. She had a closet full of them, they were her pride and joy—could you be addicted to sheets? Still it was a harmless pleasure surely since you couldn’t eat or drink them. Or were the sheets a case of transference?
During the last year she had worked herself out of her transference to her shrink, Doctor Florence Florsheim, psychoanalyst to the stars, and now she seemed to have transferred her affections to her linen closet. Could this be called progress? She’d have to check it out with Doctor Florsheim but she doubted it. What were her next blessings? Beautiful, rich, famous and talented. Even John Simon agreed about her talent, an opinion she allowed to convince her whenever she began to feel self-doubt. But she’d covered all that already and found them less than comforting. Still that made six blessings. Lovers? She didn’t have one currently and the last one she’d had was, without the slightest qualification, an error in taste on a scale so great that she blushed at the memory. The absence of lovers was perhaps a blessing in disguise. Count it as half a blessing, making a total of six and a half, not too bad for someone with a life-threatening hangover. Youth? She was only just twenty-seven. Yes, youth, if you didn’t remember that thirty was only three years away. Three years were ages and ages. More than a thousand days. A thousand days were nothing! She must not think about it. Christ, but it wasn’t easy to be the most beautiful movie actress in the world, it was stress on a major scale, even Doctor Florsheim had to admit that.
India thought of a remark made by Nijinsky when an admirer of the great dancer asked him if it wasn’t difficult to hang in the air as he literally seemed to do. He’d answered that it wasn’t difficult, “It’s just climbing up there and staying up for a little.” As good a description of a movie career as she’d heard, India reflected, and poor Nijinsky had died insane. Still, what else was she fit for? She’d wanted her career, worked hard for it, and now she just had to stay up there, defying gravity. Self-pity began to overwhelm India West once more. The phone rang just as she was about to get out of bed and comfort herself with pillowcases.
“Miss West. This is Jane Smith of ‘Sixty Minutes.’ We’ve decided to investigate the India West Syndrome and I’ll be out next week with a crew to follow you around for a month or so. My particular interest is in the problem of stardom, starting, of course, with the pimple on your ass …”
“MAXI! You angel, you blessing … how could you go away for so long … where are you calling from?… Are you really coming here? I’m all by myself and so very lonely.”
“No, I’m in New York and I’m not going anywhere, probably for the rest of my life. I have such a hangover that I don’t think I’ll live. I called you up to say goodbye forever.”
“You too? I’m curing mine with a Bloody Mary. Go make one—I’ll hold on.”
“What a sickening idea … I’d throw up.”
“Look, chemically tomato juice is half salt and half potassium. It replaces your electrolytes quicker than a transfusion and you can’t smell the vodka if you use enough Tabasco. The best internist in Beverly Hills told me to do it, honest.”
“All right … but don’t go away. I’ll hurry.”
As she waited by the phone India felt reborn. With Maxi back on the same continent, even a sinister Beverly Hills Sunday seemed filled with promise. Maxi couldn’t enter a room without creating a fiesta.
Over the clinking of ice cubes Maxi returned to the phone. “I know why I got drunk but why did you?”
“It was the party last night. I went by myself and there wasn’t anybody there I wanted to talk to. Then a definitely fascinating guy walked in and I perked up until he got close enough so that I could read his T-shirt.”
“India, I’ve warned you never to read T-shirts. They’re pure aggression. What did it say?” Maxi asked, breathless with curiosity.
“ ‘Life Is Shit and Then You Die.’ ”
“You’ve got to get out of that place! When T-shirts start to drive you to drink …”
“And eat,” India said on a dire note. “Everything in sight.”
“Think of it this way,” Maxi advised. “One night’s eating isn’t going to show on your thighs and if you don’t get compulsive and confess to Mike Abrums, he can’t read your mind and you can reveal all the awful things you did when you see Doctor Florsheim because she never makes judgments.”
“Oh, Maxi, you’re right! When you’re not here there’s nobody to put me in perspective except myself and I’m not good at it yet.”
“It takes two for perspective.”
“Maybe that could be the title for my novel,” India said excitedly.
“Are you writing a novel?”
“I’m going to start as soon as I get the right title. I have a feeling that it’s what I should be doing. I’ve always wanted to write and half the people in town are being published—so why not me?”
“Instead of being the most beautiful movie star in the world?”
“Exactly. What do you think of ‘If Hell Is Other People, Then Heaven Is Smoked Fish’?”
“India!” Maxi sputtered. “Not while I’m drinking.”
“Then you like it?”
“It’s divine, but a little too esoteric. Anything more mass market?”
“How about a science-fiction novel? I rather like ‘Chateau Margaux 2001.’ ”
“No, India, no.”
“Well then, ‘Married Men Don’t Have Wet Dreams.’ ”
“A hard case to prove.”
“How about ‘Hamlet Was An Only Child’?”
“What does it mean?”
“I think it speaks for itself,” India said with dignity.
“Look, India, I’m worried about you—seriously. Going to parties alone, getting drunk, thinking up novel titles, next thing you know you’ll be counting your sheets again. And you know what that means. It’s not healthy for you to be alone in that monster house. What ever happened to that heavenly housekeeper who used to do tarot cards with you?”
“Doctor Florsheim told me I had to stop relying on friendships I paid for, so that means no live-in help.”
“Are you sure you’re neurotic enough to suffer such deprivation?” Maxi asked anxiously.
“If I wasn’t when I started, I am now.”
“I think you should tell Doctor Florsheim that you need sick leave and come visit me. I need you desperately.”
“I would in a second but I’m in the middle of a picture.”
“I was afraid of that,” Maxi said in tones of utter despair.
“Is it a man?”
“Ten times worse than the worst man I ever met, or even married. Worse than Laddie Kirkgordon.”
“Nothing could be that bad … you’re not sick, are you?” India asked.
“No, not unless you count stupidity as a terminal disease. And arrogance and misjudgment, lack of information, acting like an idiot and jumping off the deep end into an empty pool.”
“But that sounds exactly like you when you fall in love. I knew it was a man,” India insisted, her hangover cured by the sound of Maxi’s voice, and the familiar delight of hearing about Maxi’s improbable problems.
“If you hold on while I make myself another Bloody Mary,” Maxi said in resignation, “I’ll tell you the whole hideous story.”
“Goody!” India cried and settled down for a lovely long listen.
10
Cutter Amberville’s return to San Francisco, after such a relatively short stay in New York, caused little surprise. His friends, all born-and-bred San Franciscans, felt gratified vindication of their own value
s. They had predicted, before he left, that nowhere in the East would he find the sweetness of life that they enjoyed, and his rejection of Manhattan proved how right they had been. Although some people persisted in calling San Francisco the Wall Street of the West, and others termed it the Paris of the United States, as far as they were concerned it was a city so unique that it need be compared to no other place on earth. Sheer civic pride alone would make San Francisco stand apart, for this quiet Spanish settlement had turned into an international boomtown when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848. From that time on successive waves of fortune had deposited millions, indeed billions, in the pockets of the lucky men who led the town, men whose freshly made money grew graciously mellow in less than a century.
None of Cutter’s friends—the Bohlings, the Chatfield-Taylors, the Thieriots, the de Guignés and the Blyths—ever knew that he had fled New York because of Lily. He was as welcome as a unicorn, that desirable legendary animal whose horn was reputed to possess magical properties—for was not an eligible yet unattached bachelor almost as rare as a unicorn?
His months in Manhattan had only made Cutter more compelling to look at; deepening the contrast between his blondness and his darkly proud, purposeful manner. He seemed older than twenty-four and more dangerous; a mysterious danger made more seductive by his perfect manners and the unexpectedly warm, rarely won smile that totally changed his expression, that humanized this aloof man. He was well born, he was beginning to be rather respected by the older men in the world of banking but, as the women of the Bay City told themselves, he was apparently not marriage-minded. Cutter Amberville remained resolutely, inexplicably hard to get, fascinatingly, infuriatingly, tantalizingly free of heart. None of the women who gossiped about him suspected that his reason for avoiding an involvement with one of the elegant, unmarried girls of San Francisco was a question of clear-eyed policy: what trouble might Lily cause if she heard about any new romance?
Cutter was absolutely armored against even the most delicious girl—if she represented a possible entanglement. But, in spite of a degree of emotional control that most men of any age could never achieve, he was utterly unable to dominate his avid, brutal need for sex. He had to have women and he had to have them often and now, after Lily, he had to have them in a condition of risk. Not for him the easy, relatively safe conquest of the women who worked at his office or women he could pick up in bars. Quite logically he recognized that there were women within Society, women who moved in his own world, who were just as restless as he was, who lived with unslaked desire to the same degree as he did, women he could possess at will. But to attract him they had to be women who had too much to lose to become a threat to his public life. He never pursued a woman who could make a claim on him, never stalked a woman who could injure him, and if he sensed in a woman any hint of that crazy, reckless, cap-over-the-windmill view of life that had been Lily’s, he never went after her.
But there were so many others! For a man with eyes to see, a man who was surrounded by married couples, there were possible conquests everywhere. Secret swift conquests, made without any ritual of courtship, conquests that were a kind of mutual recognition of an uncomplicated lust. Cutter was the cleverest of lovers. He knew how to make danger work for him, how to seize the most unexpected opportunities, how to sniff out the woman who was as wild and hot as he was under all the proper trappings of their world. With a glance he could tell a mere flirt from a woman in heat, and make his move in a way that drew no attention.
Cutter’s reputation as the most elusive single man in the city grew with every year that passed. He went out almost every night: at Ernie’s, the Gatti brothers both knew that he liked to begin dinner with the local Dungeness crab, served as simply as possible; at Kan’s, Johnny Kan himself came to the phone when Cutter called for a reservation; at Trader Vic’s his table was always in the Captain’s Cabin; but normally he was invited to private homes, not restaurants.
Cutter had realized that the quickest way to total social acceptance in San Francisco was through music. He never failed to attend some twenty of the twenty-six scheduled opera performances and he went to the symphony on both the “fashionable” nights and the “listening” nights. After a few years he was asked to join the Bohemian Club, an institution that was founded in 1872 to promote the arts. By the 1900s it had become a center of all-male power; a club to which the most important men in America were invited for the annual encampments on the Russian River.
Soon Cutter became known to banking leaders like Richard P. Cooley, president of the Wells Fargo Bank; George Christopher, chairman of the board of the Commonwealth National Bank, and Rudolph A. Peterson, president of the Bank of America. He was careful to maintain his New York banking contacts as well. His months in Manhattan had given him that sort of patina that is comparable to a year spent in the best finishing school in Switzerland for a debutante from a middle-sized American city. He hadn’t learned anything to which a specific dollar value could be attached, but he had been thoroughly dipped in the currents of the ocean of major American finance.
On his return Cutter had rejoined his old firm, Booker, Smity and Jameston, but soon moved on to another, larger one. By the time he was thirty, he was seasoned enough to become a junior partner in the firm of Standings and Alexander, one of the most influential in the city.
The head of Cutter’s new firm, James Standings III, was a fifth-generation San Franciscan. He had been born as royal as any citizen of a republic can be, and he thoroughly approved of Cutter. He invited him to play golf at the Hillsborough Country Club; he invited him to join the Woodside Hunt, to sail from Sausalito Harbor on his forty-eight-meter yacht, and he proposed him for membership in his town club, the Union League on Nob Hill, for James Standings, like Mr. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, was a man with daughters to marry. Not five, as he often thanked the Deity, only two, and although it pained him to admit it, Candice, his firstborn, was far from a beauty.
Along with its view of the bay, its charm, its culture and its restaurants, San Francisco takes justified pride in the beauty of its women. Such girls as Patsy McGinnis, Penny Bunn, Mielle Vietor, Frances Bowes, Mariana Keean and Patricia Walcott, lovely though each was, were not exceptions in the early 1960s, they were the rule. Compared to the average local belle, Candice Standings was, even in the eyes of her adoring father, just … average. Not desperately plain, mind you, but no, he had to admit, much as he loved her, she was not even pretty. No one had ever even dreamed of calling her Candy. He and his wife, Sally, also a fifth-generation San Franciscan, were just average too, but they both felt that their older child, a sixth-generation San Franciscan, should somehow have been born beautiful, defying all the laws of genetics. After all, their younger daughter, Nanette, showed definite signs of prettiness and she was only fourteen.
Candice had perfect teeth at last, after years of orthodontia, and glossy hair. She had well-developed arm and leg muscles from practicing all the right sports, but an unfortunately boyish body; she’d graduated from Miss Hamlin’s and Finch, her pearls were the best Gump’s could offer—but she lacked utterly that certain quality possessed even by girls from that lower-class place called Los Angeles, that unfortunately necessary dash of something sexual that appealed to men.
James Standings III was enormously rich and getting steadily richer. Even if Sally Standings didn’t send all her dry-cleaning to Paris by air as did Mrs. W. W. Crocker, or possess a Chinese cook of thirty-seven years standing, like Mrs. Cameron, they lived, when they weren’t traveling or vacationing, at the Ramble, a thirty-five-room mansion in patrician Hillsborough, eighteen miles south of the city. The Ramble, inherited from Sally Standings’s parents, had terraces and formal gardens that were almost as impressive as Mrs. Charles Blyth’s Strawberry Hill, but alas, alas, for Candice, Hillsborough was honeycombed with equally vast houses, populated by equally rich fathers of far too many other girls—less plain, so infinitely, incontestably much less plain than Candice, girl
s who all had to be married off in order to produce seventh-generation San Franciscans.
If James Standings III had ever recognized a buyer’s market, it was on those many many evenings when he and Sally dined with twenty-five-year-old Candice and waited, just as anxiously as she did, for the telephone to ring. When it did, as it was beginning to more and more frequently, it was always for Nanette.
Cutter was thirty-one. He had never again felt the emotions he had felt for Lily, and he looked back at that time in his life as a form of clear insanity. But he had made a promise to Lily. He had written her the only kind of letter that he felt sure would ensure her silence. Since that time he had written her other letters, carefully uncompromising, not so many that their arrival in New York would cause comment, far, far fewer letters than the ones she wrote him, but cunningly phrased to keep her from any rash action, for Lily was now more determined than ever that soon they must be together. They had waited seven years! Zachary had a mistress, she wrote—everyone knew about it, someone who worked on Style, a girl named Nina Stern—so there could be no possibility of his succeeding in keeping the children. Lily was wildly impatient. She hated Cutter’s ambiguous letters and thought he was being insanely cautious. Cutter could sense her gathering anger in each letter she sent him, asking what he was waiting for in order to claim her.
Cutter had absolutely no intention of marrying Lily and living with her and her children and making his way, step by step, like any ordinary man. He knew his full value and he planned to capitalize on it. He had decided to marry the girl who could do him the most good. He intended, most precisely, to marry Candice Standings, his boss’s daughter. He wanted the fat, easy commissions that would fall to him as her husband.
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