Scruples (41 page)

He shook her gently and put his hand on her neck so that she had to look him in the eye. “My silly Valentine. You’ve got the three-in-the-morning blues. Didn’t anyone ever tell you never to think about anything serious at three in the morning?” Her eyes refused to be comforted by his words. He grew solemn. “Now look here, Valentine, if I didn’t think that together we have the taste and the imagination to make this thing work—so what if we never actually sold clothes? Fashion
is
our business, remember. You design clothes to make women look better than they really do; I take pictures to make them look beautiful. We’re both illusionists—the best! All we need is the time to get the lay of the land and we can turn Scruples around. I know it.”

“If it were only that simple.” She still looked bereft. “There are so many things I’m unfamiliar with here in this California. I’m out of my element—it’s frightening. And the way you talk to Mrs. Ikehorn, Elliott, it frightens me. Have you any idea how she is treated on Seventh Avenue—like a goddess—and not just there, everywhere. Today, yes, she took it from you, but tomorow she could turn on you. She can be ruthless. Don’t forget what happened to me when she wanted to see my dresses and I didn’t want to show them.”

“Did you ever hear that good old American expression ‘pussy whipped,’ Valentine?”

“Never, but it is self-explanatory, is it not?” Valentine smiled for the first time that day.

“Try to understand, Val darling. Some men are pussy whipped from the day they are born, some have it happen to them later in life, some never. I was born king of the castle; I never knew what it was like to have a woman try to pussy whip me until I met Harriet Toppingham. And when I didn’t let her have her fun, she ruined me.” He didn’t mention Melanie Adams, Valentine thought. “Billy Ikehorn has the qualities to become a topnotch pussy whipper, if she isn’t one already. I won’t and I can’t let her. It isn’t a question of just pride or saying ‘you can’t get away with this’—the whole thing goes so deep with me that it doesn’t stop. There’s no job, no contract, no success that would mean anything to me if it involved a pussy-whipping boss.”

“I understand you, Elliott. But does that mean that you will have to always be antagonists with her, always insulting what she’s done and getting her furious?”

“No. You’re right. I laid it on a bit strong for the first day.”

“Or even the second or third day? Elliott, she is so
rich!”

“If you start thinking about her money, baby, you’re lost. You’re not dealing with another human being then. You won’t be able to talk straight to her because you’re not dealing with reality. So she
is
very, very rich and she’s built herself a store that may never creep out of the red, no matter how hard we work, and she tells herself she’s creative and queens it queenily over Camelot like Marie Antoinette playing at milkmaid. But Golda Meir or Barbara Jordan or Queen Elizabeth or Madame Curie she ain’t If you start adding up her income your imagination will get paralyzed. It’s like trying to imagine how far it is to the nearest star or how small the planet Earth is in relation to the Milky Way. Billy Ikehorn is a
female person
. She shits, she fucks, she pees, she farts, she eats, she cries, she has emotions, she gets anxious, she worries about getting older, she’s a woman, Valentine, and if I ever forget that I won’t be able to deal with her. Nor will you.”

“Oh, Elliott, she isn’t Jeanne d’Arc either, and she isn’t Madame Chanel or Gerry Stutz; she isn’t even Sonia Rykiel and oh, I’m an idiot!” The waif Valentine had vanished. Her eyes had turned incandescent. She slipped out of her chair and had the door half open in one swift moment. “Thank you, Elliott, for keeping your head. Now we’d better get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a big day for fakers.”

“Not even a goodnight kiss, partner?” Valentine eyed him with an immediate return of the suspicion she had felt toward this disgustingly promiscuous friend. Since Melanie Adams, she knew he had not been with a woman. Graciously she extended her hand, at arm’s length, so that he could kiss it, then fled down the corridor, whispering, as French mothers do to their children as they put them to bed,
“Dors bien, et fais des bons rêves.”

Billy Ikehorn had gone to sleep relatively early, a mistake, she realized, when she found herself awake at five in the morning. She woke up with a start, filled by a nasty, heart-thumping feeling that something was very wrong, and as soon as she had a chance to snuggle into a more comfortable position in bed, she realized what it was, what it had been every day for almost a year. Scruples. If she could wish it away, vaporized in a cloud of dust, She would—in an instant.

Billy had been seized by the idea for Scruples during the almost endless last year of Ellis’s dying, some two years ago. By that time she had smoothly established her secret sex life in her studio. After the brief period of her interest in Ash had run its course, she had changed all three male nurses who attended Ellis, and as carefully as if she had been Catherine the Great choosing soldiers for her notorious personal guard, she had hired new nurses, feeling an almost incredulous elation at the knowledge that she was free to evaluate any number of men until she found the ones she wanted. Sometimes one of her choices failed to please her, sometimes the same young man would hold her sexually captive for months, but eventually she found that she grew weary of even the best of them. The remedy in either case was always the same—a day’s notice and a huge bonus. For a while the ritual of choice, the power of control, the consciousness of domination, were enough, but soon habit had bled out the illicit overtones, the forbidden coloration of her octagonal studio in which one canvas still stood in its place and the cases of art supplies remained unpacked. For a long while she had centered her thoughts, day as well as night, around the clandestine atmosphere of that locked room, but gradually it had become less and less compelling. Eventually it was only as necessary to her as a call girl is necessary to a man with no other sexual outlet The obsession that led her from one fresh, unknown male body to another, aggressively making them her possessions for as long as she wanted them, had burnt itself out in the last year of Ellis’s life. Whatever fulfillment she had sought in that studio, whatever answers to her lonely spirit she had once thought she might find there, she now knew did not exist.

Meanwhile, Ellis had almost entirely withdrawn from contact with her and from his nurses. He no longer seemed to really recognize her when she came to sit by him, or perhaps he did and didn’t care. When she held his hand and looked at his sunken face, the face of a man who had once commanded an empire, Billy’s heart hurt so terribly that sometimes she had to hurry away. Often, after one of these moments, she reflected that at least it proved she still had a heart.

She had enormous amounts of time on her hands during the day. Billy had never been the kind of woman who finds herself comfortable on charity committees. Perhaps it was a result of her virtually friendless childhood, but when she found herself surrounded by large numbers of women of her own age she retreated into a stiffness and shyness that was taken for haughtiness and snobbishness. She knew it and coukfart seem to help it. It was easier to let the Ikehorn Foundation give away her millions than to force herself to plan a fund-raising event.

Nor could she fill her time with tennis. She had an instinctive dislike of becoming one of the tennis-beset women she saw all around Beverly Hills. She went back to her regular exercise sessions at Ron Fletcher’s, where no one gave a damn who the sweating, swearing women in the leotards were: Billy Ikehorn, Ali MacGraw, Katherine Ross—it made no difference when it came to those great levelers like the saw stretch or the pendulum series, which reduced them all to mere muscle and willpower.

Billy telephoned her few casual women friends, many of whom she hadn’t spoken to in well over a year, and made lunch dates with them, explaining her virtual disappearance with a single reference to Ellis and the need to stay close to home. She realized that she had lost her fine edge of chic. Two years ago she had been dropped from the Best-Dressed List. She hadn’t bought anything new since her affair with Jake. Suddenly her passion for clothes revived. She had to have them now to provide some sort of emotional juice, to make her feel, outwardly at least, as desirable and romantic as she had been when Ellis was still himself and she was a queen of
Women’s Wear
. Nothing, absolutely nothing she owned looked right any more. They seemed to have been bought by a different person in a different life.

Billy embarked on a piratical raid of the Beverly Hills boutiques and department stores. Although her reasons for buying had changed, her critical eye and unconcealed distaste with anything less than the best had grown. Very little satisfied her, yet she was chained to California, unable to leave for a long shopping trip to New York or Paris.

One day, as she was walking on Rodeo and observing the amount of new building going on in that lovely, long avenue of luxury stores, each corner of which she knew by heart and no corner of which could seem to give her what she wanted, the idea of building Scruples seized her.

For two days she haunted that corner of Rodeo and Dayton, measuring the amount of footage she wanted, eyeing the Van Cleef & Arpels building and the building next to it, which housed Battaglia and Frances Klein’s, an antique jewelry store, with such scorn that it should have reduced them to rubble on the spot. She also needed to build over the parking lot next to Battaglia—all in all, 160 feet of Rodeo Drive, 145 feet deep. Her heart pounded with yearning, a craving she hadn’t known in years. Scruples would fill the empty spaces of her life. She
wanted
it. She would have it.

Josh Hillman’s objections and doubts were brushed away. At three million dollars, Billy insisted, that half block was a bargain. She paid for everything from the fortune Ellis had given her over the years. This wasn’t an Ikehorn Enterprises business; this was Billy Winthrop’s business. She would show Beverly Hills how a fine store should be run. Scruples would be the talk of the fashion world, an outpost of the elegance and grace and refinement that, until now, had existed only in Paris.

Throughout the year it took to build Scruples, she plunged wholeheartedly into her new obsession. She tried to hire I. M. Pei as her architect, but he was occupied with a seventy-million-dollar addition to the Rockefeller Foundation; she had to be satisfied with his most brilliant associate, who gave her a building that was destined to become a landmark. Billy haunted the site, harassed the workmen, maddened the contractor, and almost drove the architect into leaving the project. Her life was filled with expectations and impatience, but at least she knew that the fulfillment of her dreams was only a question of time.

When Ellis died, in the fall of 1975 just before Scruples opened, Billy realized that she had long ago finished mourning for him. The first two years of his illness had been one long, terrible work of true mourning. She would always love the Ellis Ikehorn she had married in 1963, but, she admitted to herself, the paralyzed, expressionless, old man who had died had not been Ellis, and there was no use being hypocritical about it. But still, she would call the store Scruples, a tribute, a salute to Aunt Cornelia, to all of proper Boston, to Katie Gibbs, to the pathetic Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop who had left for Paris and come back transfigured, to all the scruples she no longer felt. She knew that, in the whole world, only Jessica perhaps would see the joke, but it was enough. It was a gesture for herself, a counterbalance to the tower room in the Bel Air citadel. Something in Billy was deeply pleased with the name.

Lying there in bed she thought miserably of how well it had all started. It seemed, at first, as if every rich woman from San Diego to San Francisco wanted to see the new store. They came and bought and bought and for a few heady months Billy felt that Scruples was a success.
Women’s Wear Daily
kept a close watch on this new venture. Billy Ikehorn was one of their special people, and society women who went into commerce were always news. The newspaper devoted a double-spread to photographs of Billy in front of Scruples and a retrospective collection of pictures of her life with Ellis. Later, when then store opened, they gave it another double-spread for itself—twice as much space, gloated Billy, as they had allocated C. Z. Guest and her patented jumpsuit, her book on gardening, and her scented insect repellant. Such ladies were just piddling around, Billy thought smugly, compared to such a venture as Scruples. She was especially pleased with her inspired idea of making the interior of Scruples an exact duplicate of Dior.

How well she remembered the emotion she felt when she and the Comtesse had ventured through those famous doors on the Avenue Montaigne fifteen years ago, waiting in thrilled awe as seats were found for them in the main salon, sitting breathless with the beauty of it all, as the collection, otherworldly, the stuff of dreams, passed by. Afterward, she and Lilianne de Vertdulac had explored the boutique on the street floor with hopeless desire, each knowing, but not admitting, that she couldn’t afford even one of these ravishing follies and frills. Now she would have it all. A Dior in Beverly Hills.

Of course, Billy really didn’t expect Scruples to make a profit. She had been too thoroughly warned by Josh Hillman that the money she had poured out without stint on the land, the building, and the interior decoration was money gone forever. There was no possible way, he said, in which the profit on expensive clothes could recoup the original cost of Scruples, even though such clothes retail for 100 percent more to the customer than they cost the store to buy.