During Christmas of 1980, Billy returned to New York to spend the holidays with Gigi. She’d been invited to the Nevskys’ for a fairly small family dinner of a mere two dozen people, and there she’d discovered how lucky she’d been in finding the demure, tongue-tied and unthreatening Sasha Nevsky as a roommate for Gigi. The girl could be an arresting beauty, Billy thought, but unfortunately she was unaware of her potential; she presented herself so mousily that you could easily miss her among the colorful cousins. Sasha held herself shyly apart, jumping and mumbling whenever Billy tried to draw her out in conversation, clinging to Gigi as her sponsor even within her own family, all of whom had embraced Gigi as an adopted Orloff-Nevsky. Better, far better a colorless and dependable roommate for Gigi than a hip New Yorker. As far as she was concerned, the later Gigi grew up, the better.
Billy had poked around Gigi’s apartment, asking indirect questions to find out just what their boyfriend situation was, but both girls seemed stuck, not at all unhappily, in that age of innocence which lasts from that final visit to the pediatrician to the first visit to the gynecologist to get a supply of the Pill. Since Marcel had given Billy an attack of hives, she couldn’t return for more in-depth investigation, but she was satisfied that Gigi was learning a great deal at Voyage to Bountiful, and Sasha’s job, which apparently was something to do with bookkeeping in a Seventh Avenue lingerie house, obviously kept her gainfully occupied. And the two girls kept the apartment immaculately; it almost looked as if it had never been slept in.
Early in 1981, soon after the New Year, Billy returned to Paris, where she occupied a vast four-room suite, as luxuriously spacious as a house, on the second floor of the Ritz, the suite in which the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had lived for long enough to give it their name. Billy sat curled up on one of the rose damask sofas in her favorite of the two sitting rooms, thinking that at last she was ready to start house-hunting. The briskly burning, well-tended fires of the Ritz fireplaces were, for all their warmth, hotel fires; the flowers everywhere had the rich but stiff impersonality of hotel flowers; the atmosphere of the rooms, as cozy and perfumed as the interior of a giant muff, was nevertheless a hotel atmosphere. She had managed to impose some of her personal presence on the rooms: the writing table was covered with her pads and pens and books of phone numbers; her favorite photographs of Gigi and Dolly and Jessica in their heavy silver frames stood on the mantel and on the end tables; books, magazines and newspapers were piled everywhere; the firelight was reflected from a dozen personal surfaces, from her highly buffed fingernails to the deep, almost greenish luster of the long string of black pearls she’d just taken off and was playing with idly—but she wasn’t truly at home here. Los Angeles was over, New York was over, Paris must provide her with a new home base.
Fortunately, Cora Middleton was in Paris too. She had arrived only yesterday, on some legal business connected with her husband’s estate, and when she’d telephoned, Billy had invited her to tea. Cora had offered to help Billy find a real-estate agent.
“There are so many of them,” Cora had said, “that it’s all but impossible to tell the good ones from the bad, but luckily I know someone I trust entirely. Her name is Denise Martin, and if you’d like I can manage to put you in touch with her. The best way to work with real-estate people, whether you’re buying or selling, is to use only one. If she knows you have three other competitors looking for places for you, she won’t break her back for you the way she will when you’re exclusive to her. Since you’re a serious buyer, one agent will show you absolutely everything on the market, even if she has to split the commission with another agent. As far as she’s concerned, fifty percent of a sure thing is better than working for a hundred percent of a commission that may not happen.”
As always, Cora’s advice had been excellent, Billy realized, in the weeks to come, as Denise Martin and she combed the Seventh Arrondissement together. This ancient, noble quarter of the Faubourg Saint-Germain on the Left Bank was the only part of Paris in which Billy would consider living. Like Madame de Staël, who once said that she would willingly give up her beautiful country house and view of the mountains in Switzerland for “the gutter of the Rue du Bac,” Billy felt that the Seventh offered the only chance to be a part of the secret, well-guarded charm of a Paris in which history was still alive. However, the rare private houses that became available there sold through personal relationships, almost never reaching the open market. People whose ancestors had lived in the Faubourg Saint-Germain long before the time of Louis XV had been known to languish for decades waiting for a small apartment in the Seventh.
Nevertheless, in less than two months Denise managed to hear a rumor that concerned an hôtel particulier whose owner had just died, a private house on the Rue Vaneau that none of the half dozen heirs could afford to buy from the others and keep up on their own. It was not palatial, a mere twenty rooms, but nevertheless the owners were asking the price of a palace: eight million dollars. Several days after she saw the house on the Rue Vaneau, Billy found herself in a musty office, surrounded by a pair of notaires, one acting for her and one for the owner, as well as a pair of real-estate agents who could only try, unsuccessfully, to conceal their eagerness.
The purchase of property was one of the areas in which Billy had, through the years, become a seasoned, tough businesswoman. Although she had never before consummated a deal without having the final legal papers vetted by Josh Hillman, she knew the steps of the process thoroughly and prided herself on always getting her money’s worth. As she sat at a large table, with everyone’s eyes on her, her pen in her hand, she hesitated.
She was about to sign the check for the promise de vente, a check for ten percent of the price of the house, a check for eight hundred thousand dollars, nonrefundable if she didn’t go through with the purchase for any reason whatsoever, including her death. Billy was keenly aware that no matter how desirable the house was, no one had ever dreamed that she would pay the asking price, as she was about to bind herself to do. The price, like all property prices, had been set unrealistically high to allow room for bargaining. In addition, it was customary, in fact essential, for a buyer to have an inspection made by a qualified expert to find out if the structure was sound, before signing anything. No Frenchwoman, not the richest and most capricious in the country, would dream of buying, at its inflated asking price, a house she’d seen only days before, no, never, it was unheard of under any circumstances. The notaires and real-estate agents would have every reason to consider her the biggest sucker they’d ever come across. She would be letting herself be nailed, pronged, hustled, rustled and whatever was the French equivalent of screwed, blued and tattooed.
“If you don’t sign today, someone else will certainly come along, and quickly too, on the Rue Vaneau,” Denise said to her in a low voice, as Billy sat without moving. “The heirs’ acceptance of the promise de vente means that they must, legally, sell to you, no matter what happens. And what if this afternoon someone else sees the house—there are so many rich people buying in Paris now, attempting to establish themselves—and offers them more than their asking price? Without the promise de vente, you could lose the house. It happens all the time when people hesitate.”
Utter rot, Billy thought. She had never quite trusted Denise’s judgment, and now she knew she’d been right. The trust Cora put in her was mistaken, that of a woman who was accustomed to buying small objects, not large properties. No hôtel particulier, even in the best of locations, would sell in an afternoon; the house would cost a fortune to maintain, it had been allowed to go to seed by its elderly owner, and there would be many months of hugely expensive renovation before she could start to decorate. She could safely negotiate for weeks.
Ah, but hundreds of years ago that particular house—not a mansion but a manor house—on the Rue Vaneau had been built for her, Billy thought. It had waited more than two centuries to capture her. A chord had been struck in her deepest fantasies from the minute someone had opened the
high grilled gates set into walls over which ivy clambered densely and showed its glossy tips on the street side. Billy stepped into a large courtyard irregularly set with cobblestones and looked at a supremely pleasant house that immediately invited her to enter. She walked forward toward the welcoming double doors set above four semicircular steps, barely glancing at the two flanking wings of the house, one of which, guarded by a statue of a prancing horse, was obviously the stable wing. Even in her eagerness she had time to note the distinctive, finely cut gray stones of the unimposing two-story house, the peeling gray-white shutters, the shell-headed carvings over the French windows, the air of rustic calm that had fallen over her as soon as the gate to the street had been closed. In a dream she walked into a circular entrance hall with inlaid, sagging parquet floors and ideally discreet measurements that spoke to the sense of proper human dimensions lodged somewhere in her brain. The noise of Paris disappeared entirely as she wandered through the shabby, interconnecting rooms that all possessed such a happy wastefulness of space, such a multitude of windows and fireplaces, that she knew that once the house had been surrounded by country gardens, once it had been a very fine house—though never a coldly grand house—in which generations had lived and died in grace and dignity.
Billy had stepped into a glorious past, where the patient passage of time was confirmed by every room: cobwebs glinted in the corners like mathematical drawings in spun silver; tall, dim mirrors set into paneling showed her dreamlike reflections splotched with gold; floors creaked with intrigue and intimate recognition of her step; every window seat, spilling stuffing, invited her to kneel and observe the fanciful play of creepers on the windowpanes. If she looked outside she felt she would see brave, arrogant horsemen with feathers in their velvet caps and beautiful women in powdered wigs, whose vast skirts concealed a happy amorality, whose titles illuminated the pages of old books. She didn’t care if every pipe in the house had to be replaced, if every piece of slate on the roof let in rain, if there were rats in the wine cellars and mice in the top floor and dry rot in the moldings.
She was in the mood to buy, and buy instantly, buy big and buy recklessly, a mood she’d believed she’d never feel again, with the listless, empty indifference of someone who has outgrown a vice. But now she felt herself being lured into the thrilling undertow of her old passion to own, to possess, to acquire; she was being filled by the old covetousness, the frenzied impatience to make something hers. Caution and common sense were equally absurd, for she was feeling desire again, desire, that life-giving force; desire, that need that can’t be called up by any force of will; desire, by whose rules she had lived for so long; desire, the pleasure that had given her up after her divorce.
Billy signed the check slowly, forming each letter of her name with mounting pleasure, utterly indifferent to the exorbitant fees of the notaires, the twelve different taxes she deliberately hadn’t asked about, the commissions on commissions that would curl Josh’s hair when he saw the documents.
Christ, it was bliss to spend too much money again.
From the street, Billy’s high gates presented an impenetrable façade that was as properly gray and austere as the other eighteenth-century houses in the neighborhood. Like the many old palaces in the neighborhood, the manor house on the Rue Vaneau was built entre cour et jardin, possessing the traditional cour d’honneur in front and a spacious garden at the back. Every one of its rear windows looked out on the parkland of the Hôtel Matignon, the official residence of the Prime Minister of France, which stood, guarded by police, several hundred feet away on the Rue de Varenne, at right angles to Billy’s house. The Matignon’s splendid park, for it was far too vast to be called a garden, stretched for many acres, and only a wall separated Billy’s garden from the great trees and wide lawns of the Prime Minister. In the Plan Turgot, drawn in 1738, Billy’s house didn’t exist, nor did the Rue Vaneau. The entire area had been covered with trees, lawns and flower gardens as far as the eye could see. Now the Matignon’s rural possessions had been reduced in size, and a number of the most desirable old houses in Paris lined the Rue Vaneau, an aristocratic street so quiet that the only transportation back and forth was by foot, bicycle or private car.
Once the renovation of the house was under way, but before she decided on a decorator, Billy had gone to Monsieur Moulie, the brilliant landscape designer who also owned Moulie-Savart, the most chic of Parisian flower shops in the Place du Palais Bourbon. She asked the droll, bouncy and agreeably flirtatious young Monsieur Moulie to redesign her conventional and overgrown garden into something rare and fine, knowing that full-grown trees would have to be carried straight through the house with their root balls intact, a project that had to be completed before the decoration was begun. Monsieur Moulie had given her a garden in which the trees and shrubs were chosen because they would stay green through the long, rarely freezing winters, until the vines and flowers he planted so cleverly began to bloom.
Billy continued to live at the Ritz, but she spent a large part of every weekday at the Rue Vaneau, supervising the work of renovation. She had learned that the progress of contractors the world over demands constant watchfulness to keep it on track. In the case of a French contractor, whose crews were allowed by their unions to work no more than thirty-nine hours a week, the work was further complicated by the early-Friday-afternoon disappearance of essential workmen, pleasure-bent, as well as the frequent long holiday weekends on which the entire construction crew expected, like the rest of France, to faire le pont, “make a bridge,” an arrangement that gave them off the day before the holiday and the day after.
The house on the Rue Vaneau totally consumed her. She had become willingly fixated on every detail of making the old house structurally sound again. With far less personal involvement and emotion than she now expended on one old manor house, she had been able to ride herd on the construction of half a dozen new stores in half a dozen countries.
Every night she returned to the Ritz, peeled off her clothes and plunged into a hot bath in the deep white tub. As she looked tiredly around at the white marble bathroom with its sink and tub faucets in the shape of golden swans, and piles of peach-colored Porthault towels, Billy admitted to herself that if she had done the sensible, normal thing and started to work with a great Parisian decorator, a Henri Samuel or a François Catroux or a Jacques Grange, as soon as she’d bought the house, it would now be as much her decorator’s concern as her own. He would have set someone in charge of all this basic construction, he would make weekly inspections, he would report to her only when it was necessary. She could be off skiing or lying on the beach of some private island or looking for a country place in England or buying racehorses or … but no, she might as well admit it, there was nothing else that she wanted to do except stay in Paris.
As Billy dressed for dinner she looked at herself in the mirror and laughed at her glowing face. She was as possessive as a doting mother of a new baby. She didn’t want any decorator near her house yet, she didn’t want to share it with a single soul, she didn’t want advice, no matter how good, she didn’t want help, no matter how necessary. It was her house, by God, and she’d spend her energy gladly to bring it back to life. Hanging about supervising the renovation of a neglected manor on the Left Bank was not why she’d told Jessica she had moved to Paris, not what she’d planned on before finding the house, but now she knew that even if she wanted to release her grip on the project, she wouldn’t be able to make herself do so. She was hooked.
10
Quickly a full life in Paris built itself around Billy, taking her out of the seductive cocoon of the Ritz, where every comfort could be attained by touching a button, and sending her off in many directions, accompanied by her driver, Robert, who expertly maneuvered the inconspicuous black Citroën that was appropriate to Paris, as if he had radar.
Invitations had started arriving almost before her suitcases had been unpacked. Her arrival had been unheralded by anything more than her reservation of
the Windsor Suite, yet somehow it was mentioned in Maggie Nolan’s well-read English-language society newsletter. Her purchase of one of the last of the beautiful houses of the Ancien Régime that had remained in private hands merited a small squib in the International Herald Tribune. Billy suspected that Denise Martin and probably someone at the reception desk at the Ritz were a key station on the underground circuit of Parisian gossip.
At first the bulk of her invitations came from the established business and social leaders of international society to whom Ellis had introduced her on former visits, and from the American Ambassador to Paris. Each party she went to brought more hospitable people into her life until the mantel of her fireplace was piled with “stiffies,” as Billy had once heard an Englishwoman call engraved invitations. She was frequently engaged for lunch, during which no work took place at the house in any case, for the workmen all consumed a serious picnic, complete with much red wine, at an improvised table in her future kitchen.
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