Scruples Two

by Judith Krantz

  He had every right to be on top of the world, but Billy had spoiled everything with stinging recrimination for faults he wasn’t guilty of. She knew nothing about it, she hadn’t given him the benefit of any doubt. If she’d allowed him time to explain in any kind of detail—but no, she’d been transformed overnight into a hanging judge. He’d always known that Billy had the capacity to turn into a bitch. What woman didn’t? But he’d be damned if he’d stand for her announcing that someone had to start being responsible for Gigi even if he had never had the fundamental human decency to be a father, as she’d hissed at him while he tried to shave. Sure, Gigi was welcome to stick around for a little while, until she got over her mother’s death, but then she was going to be shipped right back to New York, where she’d live happily in one of the gypsy families and go back to her school and grow up the New York kid she was. His life wasn’t about teenagers, for Christ’s sake! Fatherhood had been forced on him, but that didn’t mean he had to like it, then or now. Did Billy think she could make pronouncements about his daughter? She had a lot to learn, Vito thought grimly as he turned his car over to the valet parker, and the first thing was the limitation of her power over him.

  When Gigi woke up at ten, she found a sheet of paper on the carpet next to her bedroom slippers. “Gigi, I’m so glad you’re here! I’ll be home all day. Just dial 25 on the intercom on the phone next to your bed whenever you’re ready for breakfast or lunch or whatever and I’ll join you.” The communication was signed with a scrawled, “Love—Billy.”

  Gigi sat up in bed and considered the note with amazement and respect. It was real, a perfectly real sheet of paper, the ink smudged when she wet it with her finger, so logically everything else in the room must be real. She’d seen rooms like this in old movies, but the person in the bed was dressed in a satin or chiffon negligee, an actress playing a grand lady, toying with a cup of tea and a triangle of toast from a tray that a butler had just placed reverently over her knees. If she didn’t have to pee so badly she’d just stay all day long, right here under the lace-bordered, monogrammed sheets in this sure-enough, honest-to-goodness, four-poster bed hung in acres of flowered cotton, a bed too thrilling for ordinary sleeping, a bed that deserved to be appreciated as a theatrical experience. She might even ring for that butler who was sure to be lurking around somewhere, Gigi thought, knowing she would never dare to do such a thing, but first things first. She scampered into the bathroom in the ripped T-shirt she wore to sleep in. She emerged in a few minutes, her face shining from the scrub she’d given it—she dimly remembered that she’d had a bath the night before, so there was no need to waste time on excessive cleanliness—and cautiously approached the intercom for the first time in her life. As she had anticipated, the phone was white. The only thing she wouldn’t do was swallow the contents of any bottle labeled “Drink Me,” Gigi vowed. This was Wonderland enough.

  “Oh, Gigi, terrific, you’re up! Did you get a decent night’s sleep?” Billy asked.

  “Marvelous, but I don’t remember anything. Did I drink brandy last night, or is that just my imagination?”

  “It wasn’t a big drink … at least not very, purely medicinal,” Billy said guiltily.

  “I guess I haven’t lost my memory entirely, but where am I? Where are you? What do I do now?”

  “Just put on your bathrobe and I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Gigi looked at her ancient plaid robe, and hastily put on the jeans and sweater she’d arrived in. Clothes didn’t matter to her, but the robe looked kind of gummy. In fact it was filthy, now that she inspected it carefully. In New York it had seemed within the limits of acceptable, but the golden morning sunlight that streamed into the blue, white and yellow flowered bedroom showed stains and spots she’d never noticed before. In fact, everything in the sumptuously large bedroom existed in a different dimension of reality from anything she had ever known was possible, a dimension of never-imagined luxury that brought a shocking refreshment to her senses, as if she had wandered in the night through a black-and-white world and awakened to find herself in a Technicolor Oz. She was Alice in Oz, Gigi thought giddily, as a tap sounded on the door and Billy walked into the room, grabbing her in a firm hug.

  “What do you want to eat more than anything in the world?” Billy asked.

  “Oh, anything, I’m starving,” Gigi said, trying to throw the robe over the foot of the bed.

  “No, really. We have everything.”

  “Bagels, cream cheese and belly lox, please.”

  “There speaks a true New Yorker. I guess we don’t have everything, after all. Try again.” Billy laughed. Ellis Ikehorn had always truculently maintained that belly lox was better than caviar.

  “Corn flakes, fried eggs sunny side up, white toast? Orange juice?” It was the most normal breakfast Gigi could think of on a moment’s notice.

  “Done.” Billy picked up the phone and relayed the order to Josie Speilberg, now recovered and back in her office. “Come on, Gigi, we’ll eat on the terrace.”

  “Haven’t you had breakfast yet?”

  “I’m going to watch you eat, and Josie is going to call Art’s Deli in the Valley and order the best belly lox west of Manhattan.”

  “I don’t want you to go to a lot of trouble, honestly,” Gigi said in far less confusion than she would have believed possible. She had often imagined what her father’s new wife would look like, but nothing could have prepared her for the breathtaking reality of Billy’s height and beauty and powerful glamour, for her queenly assumptions and casual but absolute authority. Billy Ikehorn was totally outside of Gigi’s experience, yet somehow she had managed to make her feel uniquely wanted. The vast inequalities between them just didn’t seem to matter.

  “It’s fun for me,” Billy said honestly. She yearned to fatten Gigi up. At sixteen she couldn’t possibly have stopped growing, but even at her present, decidedly modest height she looked too fragile.

  During breakfast she questioned Gigi gently, and by the time the meal was over, Billy realized that there was no one in New York with a family claim on Vito’s neglected daughter. Gigi had never even known any members of her father’s family, and her mother hadn’t had any siblings or living parents. She was a sophomore in an average public high school, and although she knew a lot of boys, she hadn’t had a romance past or present. In fact she didn’t think she’d ever been in love except with James Dean in East of Eden, which she’d seen fifteen times. She liked all the three or four families she had stayed with when her mother was touring, but she hadn’t adopted any particular one as her favorite. Gigi had the subway map of New York City engraved on her heart, and she knew a surprising lot about cooking and shopping for food, tasks she’d taken over from her mother at least five years ago.

  “Gypsies don’t eat right,” Gigi explained, warming to her subject under Billy’s interest. “They never have the time to buy fresh food and prepare a decent meal from scratch. Most of them live on Cokes and cigarettes, like ballet dancers. Mom used to worry that I wasn’t getting the proper nutrition for a growing girl, so I figured it was something I could help her with. Then I found out that I loved doing it and I’m good at it. I know a lot of the out-of-the-way markets in the city—I cook Italian, American and pretty fair Chinese—I learned from friends and cookbooks. I haven’t started French cooking yet, but I plan to. The thing is, even if you never make a career out of it, there’s always a job for a cook. And it’s a wonderful hobby.”

  “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. Loo
k 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.”