Scruples Two (5 page)

“Do you have any other hobbies?” Billy asked, impressed by Gigi’s enterprise.

“Not unless you count going to old movies and humming off-key. I was brought up on show tunes, original cast albums mostly, the real old stuff, Rodgers and Hart and Lerner and Loewe,
good
music. Art is my favorite class in school—I love to draw.”

“Have you ever thought about being in show business, Gigi?”

“No way. My mother.… died of being in show business and it certainly doesn’t leave Dad with much of a life. Look at the way he’s a victim of his work. It’s totally pathetic.”

“I guess you could put it that way,” Billy murmured. Vito, a victim! What a pack of lies that bastard had sold her.

“He’s such a great guy,” Gigi said with a small resigned sigh. “Of course I understood that he had to be out here where the business is, or away on location, and that there was never any reason for him to come to New York except to see me. He and Mom never got along, right from the beginning, I always knew that much. She explained to me, ever since I was old enough to understand, that Dad loved me a lot but his life was awfully difficult. Sometimes, when he was trying so hard to put together the financing for a picture, he was late with the child-support payments, but he always came through for me, no matter what. It’s so wonderful that it’s finally all happened for him at last,” Gigi concluded. “I guess this is the first real home he’s ever had.”

“I guess,” Billy said, realizing that Gigi’s mother had created a splendidly false picture of Vito so that his daughter would never suspect how little a part of his life she had been. Obviously she had been a woman who had put Gigi’s emotional welfare ahead of what must have been her own bitterness and disappointment. Billy shuddered at the thought of what Gigi’s mother’s life must have been—years of a far deeper anger than she had been living with ever since Vito rushed out of the house this morning. Only the need to distract Gigi had enabled her to put it at a moderate distance, where it lurked, unfinished business ready to pounce. Until she and Vito somehow resolved the miserable argument that his breakfast appointment had cut short this morning, there was no possible way to tell him about their baby.

“I didn’t know people really lived like this.” Gigi finished breakfast quickly, and as she looked around her, her voice was full of an innocent, gentle wonder, as lacking in envy as if she’d found herself sharing a cave with a hermit.

“Well … California … it’s sort of another world,” Billy said, suddenly seeing her familiar surroundings through Gigi’s eyes.

Gigi looked all around her, into a world of mythic freshness, and drew a breath of astonishment. The house was located at the highest point of the estate and so placed that from where they sat, no other houses were visible. All around them stretched romantic vistas that led the eye into tantalizing distances lit by the midmorning sun, a multitude of greens and a softness of many colors. There was a mellow European splendor to the scene, a European ripeness of bloom. After Billy had bought the charming, rambling old mansion, a well-ordered mass of white bricks, climbing vines, chimneys and the occasional, well-weathered half-timber, she had persuaded the greatest landscape designer of his age, Russell Page, an elusive legend, an English gentleman sometimes described as “taller than God and twice as frightening,” to redesign the entire eleven-acre property, creating gardens of lyric harmony. Dozens of tons of earth had been moved; thousands of full-grown trees had been brought in on huge cranes; magical woodlands, olive groves, and airy glades had appeared, watercourses and reflecting pools had been threaded through the gardens; richly planted flower borders illuminated the paradise of green, the triad of sky, trees and water.

“Those men over there,” Gigi said, pointing toward a group of gardeners who were visible at a distance, crossing midway down a long path created by two rows of majestic sycamores that divided a perfect sweep of lawn. “What
exactly
are they going to do, for instance?”

“Exactly?” Billy smiled at her innocent precision. “I suspect they’ll sweep up dead leaves, water, deadhead the flowerbeds, weed any weed that has had the nerve to spring up overnight, remove annuals that are past their bloom and plant new ones.”

“How do they know what to plant?” Gigi’s question was accompanied by a look of candid curiosity. Her knowledge of plantlife was limited to parks and sidewalk flower stands.

“There’s a head gardener who tells them what to do. Every week I get together with him and we walk around and plan things—we make lists. Something always needs work. Years ago this part of California was a desert, and without constant attention and water it could revert in no time.” Billy shuddered at the thought of nature.

“Do those men come every week?”

“Actually … every weekday.” And they were just the basic work crew, Billy thought. The head gardener, who had been trained by Russell Page himself, and his assistant lived at the house. In addition there were two men in charge of the orchid house and the greenhouses in which the blooming houseplants were boarded between seasons; another man did nothing but lawns; a part-time specialist kept a sharp eye on the temperamental rose gardens, and two women fed, watered and groomed the hundreds of houseplants three full days a week. Even a few days without intensive maintenance of her gardens was unthinkable.… but hard to explain, especially to Gigi.

“Wow. That’s neat. Never a dead leaf, is that the idea?” Gigi’s smile, now that she thought she understood how it all worked, was enchanted and amazed, like a child seeing its first huge, helium-filled Mickey Mouse balloon.

“Right, dig we must for a better Holmby Hills,” Billy answered, remembering that Josh Hillman, her lawyer, had standing orders with every major realtor in town to let him know before anyone else if one of the properties on the street came on the market. She intended to snap them up, one by one, bulldoze the houses, and lure Mr. Page back to extend her gardens. In addition to the unique pleasure of living with his work, these purchases would put even more distance between her place and Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, which was located down her street, Charing Cross Road. Billy couldn’t actually hear the inmates there doing whatever it was they did, but she didn’t like living on the same winding, narrow street as the Mansion without the widest
cordon sanitaire
money could buy.

As they talked, Billy observed Gigi as casually as possible. Her eyes, which had seemed a neutral gray last night, were discovered to be an unexpectedly fresh and hopeful pale green, as young as an opening bud on a New York tree in the early spring before a speck of soot has fallen, a green that lasts only a day in nature. Billy remembered that particular green from the days before her marriage, when she and Jessica and their boyfriends would come staggering home at daybreak and realize that spring had arrived overnight. But Gigi had pale eyelashes that didn’t call any attention to her eyes, and her incredibly uninteresting mess of dull, plain brown hair flopped over her eyes and hid them most of the time. First: Haircut, Billy thought, beginning a mental make-over. Next: Light brown mascara, I don’t care if she’s only sixteen, it’s criminal not to wear a touch of mascara. After that, clothes. Everything, from the sneakers up. It didn’t matter if Gigi chose to live full-time in jeans and ratty sweaters, but the girl needed new ones, or at least new ones that looked worn and tattered in the right way instead of the wrong way. Billy didn’t know how she was so sure that Gigi’s clothes were beat up in the wrong way, since teenagers were an enigma to her, but she was never mistaken about clothes. She was certain that she could walk through Peking and tell you which Chinese women had done a certain secret and invisible—and probably forbidden—little something to their identical jackets to give them an extra allure.

But it would all have to wait. She didn’t want to impose on Gigi, she didn’t want to make her feel that there was anything that should be improved about her. Billy tried to put herself in Gigi’s place. She was a girl who had just lost her mother and was trying valiantly not to impose her own deep pain on a stranger; a girl who found herself transported overnight into what must be an overpoweringly grand atmosphere; a girl whose father had left her alone for the day without saying good-bye; alone with an unknown older woman who Gigi had to have learned from the media was not just plain rich but famously,
abnormally
rich. Far more famous for being rich than for owning Scruples or being married to Vito Orsini.

And yet.… and yet. Suddenly Billy knew whom Gigi reminded her of. Spider Elliott, of all people. He had always treated her exactly like everybody else, as if she didn’t have a bean. He talked to her with the same openness as Gigi did. Her money had never impressed him worth a damn, and she felt that it didn’t impress Gigi either. She
knew
it didn’t impress Gigi. The house and the grounds interested her, she was curious about details and how things were done, but they didn’t awe her. She wasn’t mentally pinching herself, and at the same time trying to act as if her surroundings weren’t new to her. This was passing strange, to say the least.

“Gigi,” Billy heard herself saying with the same stealthy seductiveness as the snake in the Garden of Eden on the subject of apples, “have you always worn your hair long?”

Sara, currently the hottest hand with scissors at Vidal Sassoon’s Beverly Hills Salon, was delighted to give Mrs. Orsini an appointment in half an hour. For anyone else, as Billy well knew, the wait would be a week.

“Holy Father, what have we here?” Sara asked in her quick Cockney deadpan when Gigi sat down in her chair.

“A golden opportunity for you, kiddo,” Billy snapped. She wasn’t going to have any of the cheeky Brits Vidal brought over from London putting Gigi down as they managed to do with half the population of the city, male as well as female. “I want you to give my young friend here a look that will do her justice, not illustrate any of your pet theories, or Vidal’s either, for that matter. One trendy slash too much—just one—and we’re going to find ourselves with a serious problem.”

“I take your meaning, Mrs. Orsini,” Sara said, lifting up the weighty mass of Gigi’s totally unshaped head of hair in both hands so that she could see her hairline at the back. “Full, isn’t it? Nothing you can’t do when there’s plenty to play with.”

“You’re working today, kiddo, not playing,” Billy said severely, sitting down next to the hairdresser’s chair.

Sara looked at her sideways and ground her teeth. Billy’s grim policewoman’s expression reminded her of her own mum’s when she started to practice cutting on her younger sisters. The only thing worse was a mother with a handsome little boy. For the next half hour she put her scissors aside and combed and brushed Gigi’s hair into dozens of different styles. Gigi and Billy watched, mesmerized. Nothing worked.

“Mrs. Orsini, I’m going to have to cut quite a bit to get anywhere,” Sara said finally. “Cut and thin.”

“A half-inch at a time, Sara. Just don’t surprise me.”

“Rightio.” She set to work, as cautiously as a sculptor cutting directly into a precious piece of marble. Gradually Gigi’s neck was revealed, a very white neck that, for all its extreme delicacy of shape, was exactly as strong as it needed to be to form the perfect base for her head. More and more hair fell to the floor and was swept up by an assistant almost as soon as it fell. Repeatedly, Sara partially wet Gigi’s hair and blew it dry to estimate her progress. Basically it was ever-so-slightly wavy hair, she thought, and it wanted urgently to flip upward at the sides. She couldn’t think of anybody who had emerged from Sassoon’s with a flip since the day he went into business for himself and produced the straight, severe, geometric, face-hugging cuts that made his fortune. On the other hand, Vidal was six thousand miles away and horrible, scary Billy Orsini was almost sitting on top of her feet.

“Mrs. Orsini, the only way to keep this hair out of the young lady’s eyes is to give her bangs. There’s just too much of it to hold back off her face any other way. And it wants to turn up a bit at the sides and back.”

“That’s what I had in mind,” Billy said, smiling for the first time. “The flapper look. Louise Brooks with a flip.”

“Louise Brooks?”

“Before our time. An early movie star who disappeared after a few films. Her hairstyle was famous all over the world.”

“You don’t say,” Sara mumbled in relief, bending over Gigi now that she had Billy Orsini’s accord. Talk about your control freaks! Her rival, Dusty Fleming, was welcome to her.

Ten minutes later the haircut was finished. Gigi’s green eyes, under their pointed eyebrows, looked out at the world from a frame of wispy, multilayered bangs that revealed the shape of her oval forehead. When she moved her head quickly her hair moved too, with an enchanting, swaying freedom, and her pointed ears appeared and disappeared. When she held her head still, her hair still looked vitally alive down to the tips of each upward-flipping strand, each hair a tiny, independent arrow that seemed a lighter brown where it caught the light.

“Wow,”
said Gigi in awe. “I look … Wow! There’s no word for it, is there? But better … so much better that I can’t believe it. Oh, thank you, Sara!”

“It’s my personal best,” said Sara proudly. “Mind if I take a Polaroid? I want to send it to Vidal. Wish I’d thought to do a ‘before’ shot.”

“Of course not,” Billy said, giving her a fifty-dollar tip. Gigi looked perfect. Her elfin quality was clearly visible now. She wasn’t pretty in any usual, ordinary, average way, but she was deeply intriguing to look at. Or was she just deliciously impish? Elfin, impish? Impen? Elfish? In any case, she was astonishing and undeniably chic, which was something Billy simply hadn’t had the imagination to foresee. Chic at sixteen,
chic
, by God and by golly, the last thing Gigi had been at breakfast, chic, one of the great, good, miraculously permanent things you could never buy with any amount of money. That neck and head could go out to lunch in any great restaurant in the world for the next seventy years, if you wrapped the rest of Gigi in a cape down to the floor.
Lunch
.