Scruples (14 page)

While they were growing up, almost any one of them would have given anything to be cuddly. Spider made them feel cuddly, kissable, cosseted, hugable, teasable, pinchable, altogether adorable. He liked them all—the lanky ones from Texas who still had retainers on their teeth, which they religiously whipped on between jobs; the tough ones who loved to talk dirty even though it shocked no one but themselves; the ones who constantly lost their contact lenses in thick carpets; the sad ones of twenty-four who looked upon their twenty-fifth birthday as the end of the world; the lonely ones who had been discovered in Europe long before they were really old enough to leave their homes; he even liked the ones who didn’t eat all day, mining their nerves, and then expected him to buy them the leanest steaks for dinner. Quality protein for starving women was Spider’s biggest expense.

The makeshift days of erotic confusion on the floor of Sakowitz’s darkroom were now forgotten as Spider discovered that what he really liked best was fucking in bed, in a girl’s bed, in a girl’s bedroom, smelling of girl smell. Although he was making good progress professionally, he still missed the atmosphere of a female’s dwelling, and the closest he could get was sniffing around a model’s apartment, picking up on all the evocative details. With bliss, he inhaled the smell of talcum and hair spray and Carmen Rollers getting hot. He particularly enjoyed messy girls who left things all over the place, underwear on the floor, wet towels slung over the tub, shoes forgotten where he’d fall over them, old favorite bathrobes, wastebaskets overflowing with Kleenex, sink tops littered with half-used lipsticks and eye-shadow brushes—all those girl-child artifacts gave Spider deep pleasure. His sisters, he thought longingly, were such a glorious bunch of little slobs. How he enjoyed their appetites, whether it was for each other’s newest clothes or three helpings of chocolate ice cream. To Spider, appetite was a sure sign of the female principle.

The only place Spider never considered using for sex was his own apartment He would have brought a girl there if he had been in love with one. But Spider knew he had never been in love. His bittersweet, sensitive heart was stubbornly his own. He had turned into an intelligent, feeling man and he understood perfectly that he loved women generically, as a group, a species. His very availability was a sign of some deep inaccessibility to a special one among them. Someday, he hoped, he would fall in love with one woman, but that day had not yet come.

Meanwhile he had his popsies and he had his friend, Valentine, whose cozy, crazy stage set of a Paris attic had become a special refuge for him, the place he wanted to be when he felt especially fine or, as occasionally happened, flat and grumpy. Valentine’s own blend of food, sympathy, and plain talk always set him right.

One evening, several months, many bottles of wine, many of Valentine’s savory stews, many long conversations, after they met, Spider burst into her room without knocking.

“Val, where the fuck are you?” he shouted and then stopped in confusion as he saw her almost hidden in one of her flounced armchairs. She was holding the burning end of a Gauloise Bleu cigarette a foot away from her nose, and with her eyes closed, she was sniffing the smoke with relish.

“So that’s what you do! I wondered why it always smelled of French cigarettes in here and yet you don’t smoke yourself—you burn it like incense. Aw, sweet baby.” He hugged her. She blinked at him, startled out of her dream and embarrassed at being caught in her sentimental secret.

“Oh, they don’t smell like Paris really, nothing does, but it is as close as I can get. And why, Elliott, don’t you knock before you come in?”

“Too excited. Listen, I’ve got something for you that tastes like Paris—
Bollinger Brut.”
He produced the bottle of champagne from behind his back.

“But that’s so very expensive—Elliott, has something good happened?”

“Bet your ass. Next week I start as chief assistant to Hank Levy. He’s light-years ahead of the guys I’ve been working for. Sakowitz, Miller, Browne—none of them have done as much high-fashion work as Levy. His studio is busy as hell—lots of commercial work. He’s not in demand as much as he used to be for editorial but still he’s in the big leagues—not the biggest league, he never—his assistant—was going back to Rome this morning from some gal and I went over to see Levy as soon as I could get out of the studio. Luckily it was a slow day—anyway, I start next week.” Elated, he dropped down on the rug at her feet.

“Oh, Elliott, I’m so happy! That’s the most marvelous, marvelous news. I have a good feeling about it and you know my feelings are never wrong.” Although she was an utterly practical woman in many things, Valentine had great faith in her occasional “feelings”—Spider teasingly said it was her wild Celtic blood trying to drown out the voices of French realism. Looking at Spider clutching his bottle of champagne, Valentine congratulated herself that he was not her type. He was a lecher and a womanizer and a heartbreaker, and any woman who felt sentimental about him was doomed to misery. She was happy to have him for her friend, but it would never go farther than that—she was basically much too sensible to think of such a promiscuous man as anything but her good neighbor. Thank God she was French and knew how to protect herself from this kind of man.

“You look hungry, Elliott. It so happens that I made a
blanquette de veau
, which is too much for one person. And it goes with champagne.”

Hank Levy was almost a nice guy, kind of. He had a lot of your basic Brooklyn charm—an aging Huck Finn, a tall, skinny version of Norman Mailer, with more freckles and fewer furrows, and a receding hairline instead of a noble brow. He dressed in standard Hollywood-director drag: French jeans, work shirts carefully unbuttoned almost to the waist, under which hung only one gold chain, but that was a very heavy one from Bulgari. His particular trademark was a Professor Henry Higgins cardigan made of four-ply cashmere, which cost him fifty-five English pounds at Harrods. He had a dozen of them in different colors and liked to tie them around his waist or throw them over his shoulders, sleeves dropping straight down à la Balanchine. If he had known when he hired Spider that in winter Spider wore irresistibly authentic, aphrodisiacally mangy sweat shirts and crew sweaters from his father’s Annapolis collection, he might not have wanted to have that kind of competition around the studio—too much the real thing for comfort.

The twin burdens of bisexuality and Jewish guilt weighed heavily on Hank. He considered that he’d been had. Shit, one day he was giving some pussy a try-on-for-size with a cute, little, blond fashion coordinator who was game for anything, and in what seemed to be only forty-eight hours later he found out that she was not only pregnant, indisputably by him, but also a Nice Jewish Girl who had several dozen relatives in Brooklyn, some of whom belonged to his mother’s branch of Hadassah.

So Hank ended up married and a father before he found out for certain if all-gay might have been more fun, not that he ever stopped trying to make sure.

However, it was far from a total loss. Chicky was a lot smarter than he was. She was also more aggressive and more ambitious. She wore sable hats before anyone had ever seen one except in the movie version of
Anna Karenina
. She wore the no-lipstick look before it was invented, or perhaps she invented it; she wore the first pants suit and the first miniskirt and the first midi and made
Women’s Wear Daily
at least five times a year. She shaped up Hank’s act, giving shrewd and cunning little dinner parties to which she managed to entice enough impossibly rude celebrities to make everyone else who was invited feel that they had had a brush with the glittering world of high fashion. Still, it kept the jobs rolling in to Levy’s huge studio, where the obligatory newest records played all day on the obligatory fabulous sound system, and the obligatory butcher-block table was always loaded with the obligatory feast of French cheeses, Italian and German sausages, dark, twisted breads from Bloomingdale’s gourmet department, and kosher dill pickles. All in all, a swell arrangement, and Spider learned a great deal during the year he was Levy’s assistant.

A photographer’s assistant spends nine tenths of his time handing his boss a camera that he has just loaded with fresh film, pulling down rolls of paper for backgrounds, checking the light meter, moving tripods from one place to another, fiddling with temperamental strobe lights, and shifting props. The other tenth of his time is devoted to changing the tapes on the sound system. However, Hank Levy was lazy and he was heavily involved in the social rumble, so he let Spider actually
take
a lot of pictures. Meaning that now Spider finally got to do all the things that had made him want to become a fashion photographer in the first place, like posing the models and deciding on angles and inventing his own lighting and focusing the camera and pushing the buttons and making the camera go click. It was even better than it looks in those movies about fashion photographers because Spider turned out to be a genius in talking to the models.

However, Hank Levy wasn’t so simpleminded or preoccupied that he ever let Spider take any of the pictures on magazine assignments. If anyone was going to go down to the Virgin Islands and shoot three models in next year’s monokinis, getting it off on the beach with a steel band, it was Hank. Not that he got a great many jobs like that. He had almost been a star photographer at one time in his career, but lately he was being asked to shoot Kimberly Knits on the Staten Island Ferry or White Stag separates at the West Side Tennis Club. Still, it was for
Vogue
and that was where you got your name underneath the photo. The money was lousy but the prestige was essential. Hank only let Spider loose on the small ads for watches and shoes and creams to bleach body hair, and not too many of those either—only when the smaller ad agencies were involved and he was sure that they didn’t plan to send their own art department people to observe the proceedings. Spider worked strictly on the low end of Hank’s business, the end that paid almost all of the rent.

The ad that launched Spider was for a new type of fingernail hardener, put out by a shoe-string company. The model, who was suppose to embody the essence of the romantic South, was young, inexperienced, and stiff in her hoopskirts and laced waist. Spider inspected the awkward-looking girl with frank appreciation.

“Perfect! Honey, you’re perfect! We finally booked someone who looks the part. I’m on to you, kid—you’re just that sort of proud little tease who used to drive the boys to drink in old Virginia. Too bad you weren’t born in time to play Scarlett O’Hara in the movie. My Lord, if this isn’t one irresistible girl—a little more to the right, sweet—I’ll bet there isn’t a man you meet who wouldn’t like to nibble his way up under that hoopskirt—now try to look remote, baby, remember you’re the plantation belle they went to war for. Great! It’s going great—bend a bit to the left, no that’s your right, lover—Christ, it’s fun to work with a fresh face. Oh, you are a clever little darling—this is better than a time machine—you can call me Ashley or Rhett, whichever you choose, because when a girl is as beautiful as you are, she always gets her pick. Come on, Scarlett honey bun, let’s try it sitting in that garden swing—lovely!”

And the now giggling girl, who had lived all her life in New Jersey, believed every word he said because she had only to notice the hard-on Spider got when he was shooting—and it was impossible to miss—to know that she really
was
divine. And that knowledge
made
her divine to the ninth power faster than Spider could say “Lick your lips, doll baby, and give me that smile again.”

The difference between the way a model looked when a fag photographer flung out a perfunctory “Fabulous, absolutely fabulous, darling!” and the way she looked when Spider was standing there clicking away with the bulk of his massive prick clearly outlined inside of his tight, white denims—and she felt her pussy begin to twitch, my God, actually get wet under that crazy hoop-skirt—was the difference between a good fashion shot and a great fashion shot.

Harriet Toppingham, the fashion editor who discovered Spider, was at the top of her field. However, all fashion editors, no matter how important, do not just breathe the electric, perfumed air of high fashion and gossip over expensive lunches. They work like dogs. One of her jobs was to scrutinize the ads in all magazines, not just purely fashion magazines, because ads are the life-blood of the magazine business. The cost of the paper and printing and distribution of each individual copy of a magazine is usually more than its newsstand or subscription price. Without advertising revenue there would be no magazine, no reason for a fashion editor’s job to exist.

There are only a handful of top magazine fashion editors in the United States. Each of the straight fashion magazines has an editor in chief, who is usually assisted by two or three subordinate fashion editors. There are always special editors for shoes, lingerie, accessories, and fabrics, each of whom has an assistant, since companies in these businesses advertise widely and have to be given particular attention and hand holding. On a general women’s magazine, like
Good Housekeeping
, the fashion department may have a staff of one fashion editor, her assistant, a shoe editor, and an accessory editor, but they fill only six editorial pages or less each month. At
Vogue
there are something like twenty-one editors of varying degrees of importance, including those stationed in Paris, Rome, and Madrid who are socialites first, editors second.