Scruples Two (10 page)

Billy stood up, as tall as he was, and looked him in the eye without a hint of an expression on her face. “It seems to be starting out that way, doesn’t it?” she said calmly, and walked out of the room, shutting and locking the door to the bedroom firmly behind her.

Billy sat in the window seat in her dressing room, to which she had retreated after Vito’s tirade, so dumbfounded that she didn’t move for an hour. Finally she picked up the phone and dialed Josie Speilberg at home.

“Josie, I have to fly to New York unexpectedly tomorrow on Scruples business. Can you possibly do me a great favor and sleep in one of the guest rooms until I get back? Mr. Orsini’s schedule is irregular, and I don’t want to leave Gigi here alone with just the staff after you go home.”

“Of course, Mrs. O. No problem. There’s no reason to worry about Gigi. She’s got Jean-Luc totally in her power. After school they’re working on the basic steps that go into making French sauces. She’s on the phone with her friends for hours every day. I don’t know when she finds time for her homework, but she does. I’ll keep Gigi company at dinner, and get her to bed on time.”

“Could you call my pilot for me, please? Tell him I’ll want to take off by nine, and send a car and driver here at eight. I’ll be all packed and ready to go. And order another car in New York.”

“Shall I make hotel reservations?”

“Not unless I call you back. I’ll probably stay with Mrs. Strauss. You can reach me there.”

“Certainly, Mrs. O. Have a good trip.”

“Thank you, Josie. Good night.”

Billy hung up and dialed Jessica Thorpe Strauss on Fifth Avenue.

“Jessie, darling, I’m terribly sorry to call so late … Oh, good, I was afraid you might be asleep. Listen, I’ve got to see you. Can I come tomorrow and stay for a few days? Oh, wonderful! I’ll get there just before dinner. No, I can’t talk about it now. See you tomorrow.”

Galvanized by having taken action, Billy started to put a few things into a suitcase. When she was packed she unlocked the bedroom door. There was no one in the sitting room. She got some tomato juice, fruit and crackers from the butler’s pantry, and returned to her room, not bothering to lock the door. Where Vito would sleep tonight was of no concern to her. After his charming little performance tonight she assumed it would not be in any house of hers.

“I’d have bashed him with a bookend,” Jessica exclaimed, “and if I’d killed him by accident, no jury in the world would have convicted me. How
could
you have listened to all that load of vile crap and stayed so calm?”

“I still can’t figure it out,” Billy answered, as unnaturally calm as she had been for the entire flight to New York. “The worse he got, the more I froze. Every word seemed to sever a nerve, a connection between us. I looked at him raving away, twisting everything that had happened, making up stuff that hadn’t happened, and there seemed to be an actual sheet of glass between us.… as if we were in different rooms.… as if he was on a stage and I was in the audience. It was Vito, but it wasn’t Vito. I couldn’t believe I was married to that man. And I still can’t. It’s so eerie. I don’t know how I
should
be feeling. We’ve never had a fight like that before. I still feel more numb than anything. All I could do was mock him, I couldn’t get up any fight. And now I can’t seem to feel as angry as I know I should be. Do you suppose it’s because of the baby? A protective cocoon or something?”

Billy sipped on a cup of the mint tea Jessica had brewed in the lush little boudoir she called her “office.” It was the one room in her large apartment overlooking Central Park where no one was allowed to enter, a necessity considering the constant importuning of her five children and her husband, David, who was away at an important investment-banking function in Boston. Jessica trained her myopic eyes on her friend. Billy’s last bewildered words alarmed her more than any of the vile things Vito had said.

“Do you remember,” Jessica said carefully, “when I came out to visit you last summer and you told me how desperately you hated having to be the producer’s perfect, invisible, useless wife while Vito was shooting
Mirrors
on location?”

“I’m not likely to forget.”

“And I asked you why you didn’t get a divorce and you said you were absolutely mad about him—in fact, your exact words were that you ‘couldn’t live without the fucker’?”

“And then you told me it was just post-honeymoon depression and that in a few months I wouldn’t even remember it,” Billy said. “Maybe you’re
not
the person I should always flee to for advice.”

“Possibly, but who else is there?”

Billy smiled quizzically at her tiny friend. She’d been getting advice from Jessica Thorpe since 1962, Jessica Thorpe from the oldest of Rhode Island families; Jessica Thorpe of the Pre-Raphaelite hair, the lavender eyes, the summa cum laude, Vassar-trained brain and the irresistible droopiness of each of her delicate little features; Jessica Thorpe, who had turned into her best friend in the first five minutes of their meeting, who had educated her thoroughly about men and sex and seen her safely through all the affairs she’d had before she met Ellis Ikehorn.

“Nobody. You’re stuck with me,” Jessica said briskly. “Tell me this, if you weren’t in a foaming rage, how come you jumped into your plane and came straight here? We could have talked about it on the phone.”

“No, I had to see you. I had to have a reality check.
Am
I that person he said I am? You’re the only grown-up I trust to be honest with me except—well, maybe Spider Elliott, and I certainly couldn’t ask him. I know that my money keeps me from having to deal with the problems everyone else has, so.… well, could he be right? Am I that self-righteous and self-absorbed?”

“Your money doesn’t stop you from being human, Billy. Don’t start thinking that way. Money can only prevent you from having to worry about the material things that everybody else worries about, money gives you more time to worry about the essentials.”

“Ah, Jessie.…”

“No, I’m not saying that just to make you feel better. I knew you when you didn’t have a bean, and you haven’t changed in the important elements of your character, except you’ve grown up a little. Sure, you have your own jet and a hundred and twenty-five gardeners and the biggest, best-stuffed closet and fanciest store in the world. You’re demanding and perfectionistic and obsessive, but you were that way when I met you, you just couldn’t afford to act on it. You’re still Billy Winthrop, you’re generous and loyal and your instincts are basically decent and you’ve never been self-righteous in your life. You were a wonderful wife to Ellis and you’ve tried like hell to be a wonderful wife to Vito. Of course you’re self-absorbed from time to time, but tell me who the devil isn’t the center of her own universe? I still am, and I’m proud of it. With five kids, my healthy self-interest is the only thing that keeps me sane. Do you think they aren’t each the center of their own personal universes?” Jessica blew her permanently too-long bangs out of her eyes with an indignant puff.

“When you get pregnant for the first time at thirty-five,” she continued, “it’s totally normal to be involved with how you feel. What’s not normal is Vito’s
anger
. That’s what bothers me the most. Everything he said came from anger, and I just don’t see what right he has to be angry at you. I wonder … is it possible that he’s afraid of something and is covering it up with anger?”

“The only thing in his life now is
WASP.…
Why would he be afraid?”

“He’s made nothing but low-budget pictures for eighteen years, right? When you met Vito he had some successes and some failures behind him, but basically he was hanging on by a thread. Remember how you told me that when he met you he cheerfully admitted that his last three pictures had lost money?
Mirrors
was a fluke, a lovely little picture, but a very long shot to win the Oscar. Suddenly, literally overnight, Vito’s a giant success. Could it be that? The change, the challenge?”

“From being
afraid
to being
angry
to being
mean …
to me? Really rotten, shitty mean? Would success cause that? Is that a logical progression in any way?”

“I just don’t know. I don’t know Vito at all, Billy. It certainly wouldn’t work that way for my David—I’m just asking questions, playing detective.”

“No.” Billy shook her head decisively. “Vito’s always been so fearless, Jessie. That was the first quality I recognized in him, a fearlessness. He’s a man who never worried about
ifs
, he just forged on with it, making it happen. That’s been the way he’s been working on
WASP
, full speed ahead, no questions asked, a sense of his time having come at last. No, it isn’t fear, I wish it were that simple. Then I could begin to understand him.”

“We may never know what’s going on with him, since man is not an animal that chooses to communicate with its mate,” Jessica sidestepped, too angry with Vito to trust herself to speculate further on him without saying something Billy might never forgive her for. “Tell me more about Gigi.”

“I can see that she’s mourning her mother, even though she keeps so busy that someone else might not realize it,” Billy said slowly. “It’ll be a long time before she gets over that loss … maybe you never do. I never knew my mother, but I have such respect for the woman
Gigi’s
mother must have been … she brought her up to be so self-reliant, so straightforward, she’s interested in the whole world, at ease with all kinds of people. She fit into her new school right away. She’s wildly popular already, and thank God, she’s not interested in boys yet. That’s when I’ll have to start to worry.”

“Just don’t come to me for advice about adolescents,” Jessica said. “Each one of mine presents a revoltingly different set of problems. They ought to meet Gigi, it might shape them up.”

“Wait a minute, Jessie! Wouldn’t David junior be just about the right age for Gigi, not now, but when she gets interested in boys? They could get married, have lots of children and we’d be the joint grandmothers!”

“If she’d take David junior off my hands, consider it done.” Jessica laughed, delighted to have taken Billy’s mind off Vito for a minute. She went to make more tea, remembering how worried she had been when her friend had decided to marry someone she had known for only a week. Talk about asking for trouble!

Last summer, when Billy had been so unhappy, feeling like an outsider on the
Mirrors
location, she had spoken to her sagely of the necessity of making compromises in married life, even quoting Edmund Burke to her. But now, Jessica thought savagely, she’d be incapable of advising Billy to compromise with a man who had, by Gigi’s own account, spent almost no time at all with her during her entire childhood. If he hadn’t given a damn about his first child, why should he turn into a good father to Billy’s child? What a brutal bastard he was to abuse her verbally at this vulnerable time in her life. How could Billy not be as furious at him as she was herself? Or was Billy unconsciously preventing herself from getting as enraged as she damn well should be, because she was pregnant by the son of a bitch and didn’t dare admit to herself how bad the prospects looked?

If she really spoke her mind, Jessica thought, turning off the electric kettle as it boiled, she’d have to tell Billy that Vito had become a shit
because
of his success, not because he was afraid of it. She’d have to say that he’d behaved decently so long as he was in a down position, but now that he was top dog, he was able to express his resentment of Billy’s wealth. Few men, if any, wore well in marriage to women who were far richer than they, much less a woman as rich as Billy. But she wasn’t going to speak her mind, because maybe, just maybe, she was wrong and everything was going to work out. Maybe the Oscar wasn’t a curse.

“Mint or chamomile, Billy?”

“I’ll live dangerously. Make it instant espresso this time, dearie. Decaf, of course.”

Josie Speilberg’s relationship with Vito’s secretary, Sandy Stringfellow, was a cautious one. Sandy had worked for Vito for seven years, almost as many as Josie had worked for Billy, and they treated each other with all the punctilious protocol of ambassadors from neighboring countries that live in peace with each other yet remain on guard for any power play, any frontier invasion. They were too totally loyal to their respective bosses for them to regale each other with the inside gossip that made the mafia of Hollywood secretaries so strong, yet they kept each other informed of Billy’s and Vito’s whereabouts as a matter of course, without specific instructions to do so. Hollywood secretaries need to know, on a twenty-four-hour basis, where to reach people, and after hearing from Billy the morning after her arrival, Josie called Sandy to tell her that Billy would be in New York for a few more days.

“Shopping for maternity clothes?” Sandy asked.

“I imagine Mrs. O.’ll have them made at Scruples,” Josie answered.

“And why not?” Sandy was tart.

“That’s what I’d do, if I weren’t beyond my childbearing years.”

“I can’t wait to be safely postmenopausal like you, Josie. It’s such a bore to have to worry about getting pregnant, even with the Pill.”

“Cheer up, it won’t be long. A year or two, maybe three at the outside?”

“I’ll get you for that someday. ’Bye, Josie. Keep in touch.”

Three days later, Josie called Sandy again, to tell her that Billy was arriving home sometime that evening.

“Mrs. O.’s planning to leave New York after dinner, so even with the three-hour time change, she’ll be in late. She told me to go on home after dinner with Gigi. I guess she doesn’t want Mr. Orsini to wait up, she didn’t say one way or the other.”

“He’s out for dinner with Maggie MacGregor anyway.”

“Right. ’Bye, Sandy,” Josie said, thinking that it was interesting to know where Mr. Orsini was dining for a change. He’d been out for dinner every night since Mrs. O. had left, although without information to the contrary, Jean-Luc had prepared dinner as if he were going to be there. Each morning of Billy’s absence, by the time Josie Speilberg made her way downstairs for breakfast, Vito had left for his office. Although he’d called once to say hello to Gigi, she hadn’t seen him come in at night before she’d retired to watch television while Gigi finished her homework in her own room. The upstairs maid had reported to Josie that Mr. Orsini had moved from the master bedroom to one of the guest rooms, although the house had so many that Josie hadn’t laid eyes on him.