Scruples (43 page)

It was an authentic oddity, a restaurant constructed exactly like an old French farmhouse built of weathered bricks and crumbling plaster, which, one was asked to believe, had been commandeered by a British flying unit during World War I. It had hundreds of sandbags piled high around its ground floor, with early sten guns concealed behind them, a farm wagon full of hay by the front door, Muzak that played “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary” and “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag,” signs directing guests to the “Briefing Room,” and faded photographs of brave, dead pilots on the walls. An old biplane was parked between this apparition from another world and the real end of the parallel runways of the Van Nuys Airport, where some seventeen hundred private planes landed or took off every day of the year. Josh enjoyed the nostalgia and sweet melancholy of the place, which somehow managed not to feel fake no matter how much it had to be. But Joanne would have scorned it as a “theme” restaurant, and wondered why, if they were forced to eat in the Valley, they hadn’t gone to LaSerre.

Valentine was totally charmed by the Aero Squadron. It was so exactly what she had hoped to find in California, a glorious hoax. In fact, she found herself beginning to be charmed by Josh Hillman. Except for Spider, she had spent the last few years with men who weren’t men, or men who might be men but whose main interest in life was buying and selling women’s clothes. Enough! She was ready for a serious man, but not a solemn one, a man of substance, but not a stuffy man—in short, a real man! And Josh Hillman, having broken the habit of twenty years of dutiful marriage in inviting Valentine to dinner, felt a sense of freedom and unlimited choice in the air. Suddenly there were 360 degrees of space around him instead of a long, straight road. For a minute he remembered his grandfather’s favorite proverb: “If a good Jew finally decides to eat pork, then he should enjoy it so much that the fat runs down his chin.” Was Valentine O’Neill as tasty as a pork roast? Josh Hillman certainly intended to find out.

Their table was at the window, and as darkness fell and the fights of the descending planes floated past, the aircraft, behind soundproof glass, looked like wondrous fish with luminous eyes.

“Valentine—how did you get that name?” he asked. She was curious to note that he pronounced it in the French manner, Val-en-teen, strange for an American.

“My mother was a Chevalier fan—I was named after a song.”

“Ah,
that
Valentine.”

“You know her? It’s impossible!”

He hummed the first bars of the melody and, almost too shyly to be heard, said the lyrics: “
‘Elle avait de tout petits petons, Valentine, Valentine, Elle avait de tout petits tétons, Que je tâtais à tâtons, Ton ton tontaine!’ ”

“But
how
do you know?”

“My roommate at law school used to play the record endlessly.”

“Ah, but do you know what the words mean.”

“Something like—she had tiny little feet and tiny little breasts.”

“Not precisely—
tétons—
that’s slang; it means ‘tits.’ And the rest?”

“I’m not sure—”

“Tiny little tits, which I
tâtais,
felt—
à tâtons
—gropingly.”

“I can’t imagine Chevalier ever having to grope.”

“Nor can I. But do you know all the rest?”

“ ‘Elle avcàt un tout petit menton,’ ”
he answered, “a tiny little chin—and
‘elle était frisée comme un mouton!’
—she was curly like a lamb. like you.”

“Extraordinary—and the rest? No? Ah ha! You missed the best part—she did not have a good character! No indeed—and also she did not have a great intelligence and she was jealous and bossy—
autoritaire
. And then one day, you see, years later, Chevalier meets her on the street and she has big feet, a double chin, and a triple
poitrine!”

“Valentine! You’re breaking my heart. I was happier not knowing.”

They both rocked with laughter, the aphrodisiac laughter that comes when two people have decided to run away together from their real lives, even if only for an evening, that special, tingling laughter of complicity that is the first sign that they are finding each other altogether more entrancing than they had expected.

“So you, Joshua, are the hero of the Bible, who brought down the walls of Jericho, and I am merely Valentine, the first mistress of Chevalier, the eighteen-year-old girl he met in the Rue Justine. Not an even match.”

“No? Do you have a more impressive middle name?”

“But it is a dreadful secret.”

“Tell me.”

“Marie-Ange.” Wickedly, she tried to look humble. “Mary-Angel.”

“How modest, such an unpretentious little name. Your mother must have felt she shouldn’t take chances.”

“But you are right. We are prudent, we French.”

“And you are crazy, Miss O’Neill—you Irish.”

“And you Jews—you are not prudent? And you are not a little crazy?”

“Every last one. Haven’t you ever heard the theory that the Irish are really the lost tribe of Israel?”

“It would not surprise me. But I wouldn’t walk into an Irish bar on Third Avenue and give them the good news,” she responded, with a snap of mischief in her voice.

“You’re a real New Yorker, aren’t you?”

“Not a real anything, I fear. A woman without a country, not a real Parisian, not a real New Yorker, and now—California. How ludicrous. Does anyone ever become a real Californian?”

“You already are. Almost all real Californians are from somewhere else. There are a handful who came here, oh, possibly as long ago as two hundred years. Before that there were only Indians and Franciscan Fathers—so we are a state of immigrants in a country of immigrants.”

“But you feel at home here?”

“I’ll take you to Fairfax Avenue someday soon. You’ll see why.” Josh had a moment to feel astonishment at his invitation. He had never taken Joanne to Fairfax Avenue. They had driven past on the way to the Farmers Market, but they never stopped. She hated it. Why did he want to show Valentine, whose elegance seemed to float on the very air of Paris, the lively, noisy, crowded, and most unstylish ghetto of his childhood?

Spider and Billy ate lunch outside, under the spread of awnings of the Santa Barbara Biltmore, a glass screen framed by flowers and palm trees sheltering them from the brisk breeze that blew inland off the Parific. Billy waited calmly, knowing that Spider had to make the opening move. Meanwhile, she drank Dry Sack sherry on the rocks, ate a club sandwich with extra mayonnaise to make it a double sin (for which she would later penalize herself with abstinence), and felt deliriously in command of the situation.

Soon his experienced eye told Spider that this lady was as relaxed as she was ever going to get while she was upright. Carelessly he said, “Nice here, isn’t it?” She merely smiled agreement, guarding her words. “I’ve been on the East Coast-so long,” he continued, “that I didn’t really remember what California was like. And Beverly Hills! Christ, I fully expect it to vanish one night like Brigadoon and not be seen again for a hundred years, don’t you?”

“Probably,” Billy answered incautiously.

“I had a feeling you’d understand, Billy. When we hit town yesterday Val and I realized that we’d walked into a whole new ball game.” By now Billy was reassembling her forces, but Spider pressed on. “If you took Scruples and set it down in Paris or New York or Milan or Tokyo, you’d have the eighth wonder of the world—women would be lining up around the block to get in—it’s so perfect, what a class act! But Billy, Billy, in Beverly Hills! Home of the most casually dressed rich women in the universe! I’m so used to New York that I had to keep reminding myself yesterday that most of the women we saw on the street in pants and t-shirts could afford to buy anything they wanted, couldn’t they?” Since Billy had so often had the same thoughts herself, her eyes signaled faint agreement in spite of herself. Before she could interrupt him, Spider fixed her with his most persuasive gaze and continued. “I’m sure that if you give Val and me a week or two, at the most, to get acclimated, to wander around town and look at what women actually do buy when they’re shopping for expensive clothes, to see what they wear out at night, to case The Bistro and Perino’s and Chasen’s and all the new places—could you make a list of them, incidentally—it would help a lot—if we had the time to get a fresh feeling of the place, we can make Scruples the most successful store in town. It figures that no matter how those women look on the street, there wouldn’t be a Saks’ and a Bonwit’s and a Magnin’s and all those dozens of expensive boutiques squeezed together in one small place unless many women are spending huge amounts of money. There’s no reason on earth why Scruples shouldn’t be where they spend it, Billy, but you can see for yourself, we need a little time.”

“A little time?” Billy tried to make the words as sarcastic as possible, but simple logic told her that she couldn’t deny him a week or two without looking stupid, irrational, like a simpleminded, rich bitch who changed her mind from day to day—a dilettante.

“Exactly. As much time as you’d give a new hairdresser. The first time he works on you, you don’t really expect a good job, now do you? You’d let him do it again a week later, maybe even a third time. By then he’d know how your hair grows, how it takes a curl, where your cowlicks are, how much body your hair has, whether he has to tease it or whether he can blow dry it. Then if he did a poor job, you’d get another hairdresser.”

“I most certainly would,” Billy snapped.

“Of course you would.” Spider looked at her approvingly. His years of listening to garrulous models was paying off. “Val will be working on the stock side of things—I’ll be working on the concept.”

“ ‘Concept’? Wait a minute, Spider. On the phone Valentine told me that you were the best salesman in the world and that you could completely reorganize the store. What’s ‘concept’ got to do with it?”

“I
am
the best salesman in the world, but first I have to know something about who my customers are and how they live, exactly what the target area is, and what will make them want to buy at Scruples. The ‘concept’ is what will make them buy. Don’t you see, Billy,
buying clothes should be as satisfactory as a good fuck?
There are many kinds of good fucks—I just need to know which one will work best in Beverly Hills.”

Billy was shocked to realize that she was nodding her head in agreement. She’d never heard a statement that she could understand so viscerally. She had not forgotten the days when her sex life existed only in the moment of purchase.

“All right, Spider. You’ve made your point. Clearly. When can I expect your ‘concept’ to be unleashed on a waiting world?”

“In no longer than two weeks. Now, if you’ve finished your lunch, we’d better get started back or we’ll be caught in the rush-hour traffic. Ready, Billy?”

On the way back to Holmby Hills Billy found plenty of time to reflect that whatever Spider Elliott was or was not in reality, he certainly couldn’t be called a poor salesman. Still, all she had granted them was two weeks. If he didn’t come up with something solid, he and Val would be out, with no further dithering. It was a firm promise she made to herself.

After dinner Josh Hillman had a problem that he had never before faced in his life, an absurdly old-fashioned kind of problem but a real one. He and Valentine were two people who were intimate only by virtue of the restaurant roof over their heads. They didn’t know each other well enough to go to a private place without discussion. He needed a Lovers’ Lane, for God’s sake. In the old days, before he had married Joanne, he remembered that Mulholland Drive had had a reputation as the only place to park and neck, but now, as far as he could guess, dozens of new houses had been built on that tradition-hallowed land. But, damn it, if he didn’t get a chance to at least kiss Valentine O’Neill tonight—he was too square for this, he told himself, which reminded him of what his sons called him. Then inspiration finally came, the Pickwick Drive-in in Burbank, of course, one of the kids’ favorite haunts. Josh hadn’t been to a drive-in since high school.

“Valentine, since you really want to feel like a native, I’m going to show you one of our great California traditions,” he announced while he was paying the check.

“Could we go to a Hollywood movie premiere?” Her vixen face was filled with a question, a question that seemed to hang in the air, a question that had nothing to do with Hollywood premieres.

“Not tonight. Anyway, they’re really kind of old hat. They don’t really have them very often any more, not the way they used to. I was thinking of showing you a drive-in movie.”

“What’s playing?”

“That’s part of the point—it doesn’t matter. Come on!”

They drove to the drive-in in a fizzing silence. Once outside the restaurant they had both been filled with a sense of the immediate future that was too exciting to make other conversation possible, but in itself absolutely impossible to discuss. Josh bought the tickets as if he’d been going to drive-ins regularly, for years, and solemnly instructed Valentine in the functions of the speaker. She had just time to see four cars on the screen all meet in a head-on collision before he slid over from behind the driver’s seat and took her into his arms. For long, long stunned minutes that was all. As Josh wrapped Valentine tightly in his arms, she burrowed deep into them. They didn’t speak. They just held each other, listening to the soft sounds of breathing and heartbeats, made inexpressibly happy by the warmth, the closeness, the simple humanity of just holding fast to each other. The unquestioned silence of their embrace was more moving than hundreds of words. It was a moment in time that stood apart from thought or arrangements or declarations or anything artful or formal, the kind of rare moment that makes perfect sense without making any sense at all, the kind of moment that creates a knowledge of mutual need and surrender that is as frightening as it is necessary and right. But after a long while, each of them, as if moved by the same tide, searched for the other’s lips, saying only the other’s name, kissing. Kissing Valentine was like plunging his face in a bunch of fresh spring flowers after a long, parched winter. There were endless discoveries to be made from her lips, but first he licked the three freckles on her nose, something he had wanted to do all during dinner, and she nipped him back like a puppy. She gave him butterfly kisses on his cheeks with her spiky black eyelashes and he tasted her neck with his tongue.