Scruples Two

by Judith Krantz

  The French version of the ladies’ lunch serves the purpose of bringing eight or ten close friends together to engage in close inspection of all attractive newcomers. Keeping to her intention to go to all the right parties, Billy accepted invitations right and left, only stopping short at agreeing to spend weekends at various châteaux in the surrounding countryside. After a diet of two or three lunches and some four dinner parties or balls a week, Billy wanted her weekends to herself.

  She had made dozens of the right new acquaintances. The descendants of the noblest names in France, although some of them had always remained unbendingly aloof to Cora Middleton de Lioncourt, melted into wholehearted welcome at the arrival of Billy Ikehorn. Her celebrity piqued their interest; well-known foreigners, long before Benjamin Franklin, have always been a hot ticket in Paris; her money fascinated them, for aristocratic Parisians are as materialistic a group as has ever existed. With her beauty and her perfect command of French, Billy instantly became French society’s equivalent of the hottest new girl on the block.

  One or two of the clever, glossy women she had met might possibly become more than mere acquaintances, Billy judged, although her social life was growing almost too quickly for real friendship to develop. In addition she was too deeply involved in her right and necessary folly of a house to have the time to cultivate intimacy. Now, Billy realized, the only things missing, to make her life the triumph she had prescribed for herself to Jessica, were more time to shop and the right man to fuck. Sex and shopping … where had she heard that catchy, promising phrase before? In a song? In a book?

  Sex? Perhaps she had been too sanguine? The men she’d met in Paris were a disappointment. They were married and faithful, or married with a mistress, or married and casting about for a casual affair, or unmarried and looking for a fortune, or professional “extra” men. For a woman of thirty-seven the prospects of finding the right man were just as dim as they had been in Los Angeles and New York. Never mind, Billy thought, as she tore herself away, from time to time, from the tunnels of scaffolding and the forest of new pipes on the Rue Vaneau, to hurry to a fitting at Saint Laurent or Givenchy, never mind, there was always shopping floating in the air of Paris, and where there was shopping, sex would somehow follow.

  On those weekends she guarded for herself, Billy indulged a new addiction that was linked directly to the future she so clearly saw herself leading in her house. A Saturday or Sunday didn’t feel complete without a visit to the huge flea market, the Marché aux Puces at the Porte de Clignancourt, where she discovered the minor, personal, amusing things that no decorator could choose for her.

  With experience, Billy learned how to dress to shop effectively in the Marchés Biron, Vernaison or Serpette, the areas of the Puces where such small treasures could be discovered. Over the plaster-spattered jeans she wore at the construction site, she wore a heavy gray sweater she had bought for its evident cheapness, and wrapped a battered beige raincoat over the result. She used no makeup and tied a plain scarf in a nondescript shade of maroon under her chin. She laced up her oldest tennis shoes and carried plastic shopping bags from the Monoprix chain store in which to bring home her booty. She tucked a tube of lip gloss and a wad of cash in a deep inside pocket of her raincoat, but she left her handbag at the Ritz.

  She looked truly disgraceful, Billy thought, immoderately pleased with her all-but-unrecognizable reflection as she stalked through the Ritz lobby very early on weekend mornings. The three courtly concierges behind their desk, the gentle, hulking Yugoslavian guard who prevented the merely curious from wandering more than a few feet into the hotel, and the squad of doormen and package carriers who could always get a taxi when there were none to be had, were thoroughly accustomed to such garb when their more experienced clients headed to the Puces.

  Such a disguise was necessary in order to bargain with any chance of success. Billy, who had so often surrendered herself to spending with an abandon so total that it felt omnipotent, now found that living in France gave her a new attitude toward a different kind of spending. She was fascinated by the Puces because it provided the opportunity to spend money with miserly caution, with tightfisted reluctance, small sums paid in small bills with a fine and exhilaratingly guilty feeling of parting with real money, money she managed to believe, just before the moment she gave it up, that she really couldn’t afford—an authentic twinge of sweet sin that she hadn’t known since her youth. When she wrote a check on funds she knew to be bottomless, the money simply wasn’t real. The only way she could experience her money as actual and palpable was when she had to pay in cash, to peel off each bill and see it counted out after a long transaction that involved the game of bargaining.

  She was not fool enough to flatter herself that any Puces dealer would let her get away with a genuine bargain, but at least she looked so far from rich that she could haggle until she had reached somewhere near the lowest price the dealer would happily accept, coming away feeling that both of them were satisfied with the transaction and that the business had been concluded as properly as if she were a Frenchwoman.

  One clear, chilly April morning in 1981, Billy stumbled out of the long, shop-lined streets of the Marché Biron, worn down by many hours of all-but-fruitless search. The antiques dealers, heartened by the arrival of the first free-spending tourists of spring, had been unusually stubborn today, and she had reacted with the resistance of the native who feels she’s being treated as a sucker in her own country. She had bought only one tiny, mysterious ivory bottle, and as she sat in a crowded sidewalk café drinking coffee and hungrily eating a croissant, she unwrapped the bottle from its layers of protective newspaper and placed it carefully on the table to give herself something, no matter how small, to gloat over. She loosened her raincoat belt and slumped back in the wicker chair, with her tired feet sticking straight out in front of her, and carefully surveyed the two-inch-high bottle. She didn’t really crave it, Billy realized suddenly. The ivory was unquestionably old, but she had no idea what it was, nor did she care. But it would be a souvenir of the freedom she felt sitting here so anonymously, the freedom that came from being in a disguise that would attract no one’s attention, of being part of a crowd in which no one knew her, of being a stranger in a strange land, yet one in which she felt at home. She hadn’t felt so free in years, Billy mused, her eyes glazing over.… Feeling free was the same as feeling young.

  “That’s a damn good shape,” said a man’s voice from the table behind her.

  “Are you talking to me?” Billy asked wearily, over her shoulder.

  “Yeah, Would you mind if I took a better look at it?”

  “Sure,” she said. He was American, certainly a tourist. Billy turned, holding the bottle, and gave it to the tall man who was seated behind her, an empty coffee cup in front of him. He put on a pair of glasses and turned it over in his hands, running his fingers over and over its tapered cylindrical shape slowly and carefully. He twisted its tiny, rounded stopper experimentally, removed it and replaced it.

  “It’s a beaut. How did you find a Chinese apothecary bottle here? It must have held something fairly lethal, judging by the size of the stopper.”

  “Do you collect bottles?” Billy asked, thinking that since she’d spent over four hours at the greatest Parisian bazaar of antiques and managed to emerge with an ivory bottle that wasn’t even French, she must either know something arcane or be very stupid.

  “Collect?” His deep voice was humorous, speculative and leisurely. “Occasionally I accumulate junk, or rather it tends to accumulate around me, but that’s not collecting. I’m a sculptor—it was the shape of this bottle that attracted me.… it’s kind of wonderful.”

  “Please keep it,” Billy heard herself saying.

  “What!”

  “Really … I’d like you to have it. You appreciate it more than I do.”

  He thrust the bottle back at her, shaking his head. “Hey, thanks, babe, but no thanks, you’re a little nuts, did you know that? You
look as wiped out as if you’ve just fought your way through the trenches of no-man’s-land to find it, you can’t possibly give it away.” Now the humor in his voice turned to concern.

  “I’m probably hungry,” Billy said, suddenly self-conscious. She knew all too well what she must look like.

  “I’m getting you a ham sandwich on a baguette. Or cheese. That’s all they have here, babe, unless you want pastry.”

  “No thanks,” Billy refused automatically. Pastry!

  “Mind if I join you? At least let me buy you another coffee.” He stood up, without waiting for her assent, and sat down next to her. She’d eaten that croissant so quickly that she must be ravenous, he thought. She was ridiculously generous too, for she was obviously a tourist, a working girl who’d probably saved for a long time to come to Paris in April, and old ivory like that couldn’t have cost less than fifty bucks. Didn’t she know she’d be better off spending her money on a decent sweater than buying a useless bottle and offering it to a stranger? The sculptor in him cried out against seeing such authentic beauty muffled by such clothes.

  Billy drank the coffee he ordered, glancing at him sideways. She had never talked to a stranger in a café before, or allowed herself to be picked up, not even during the year she’d spent in Paris when she was twenty. She’d been too shy then, and later, when she’d visited Paris, she’d been with Ellis. Yet what were French cafés for?

  This sculptor person, who called her “babe” so casually, was noticeably lean and decidedly angular, and probably in his late thirties. He had exceptionally thick red-brown hair, cut very short, so that his handsomely shaped skull was clearly outlined. Under his cheekbones his cheeks went in instead of out, so that there was a patrician gauntness to the shape of his face. His long, battered nose gave him a tough, capable profile. He’d taken off the large horn-rimmed glasses he’d put on to examine the bottle, and she could see now that his thick eyebrows overhung deep-set gray eyes that looked at her as if she were funny. Comic, for Christ’s sake. His long mouth was quirky, with a good-natured twist, yet he looked like a man who could take care of himself in a fight. In fact he gave out so much physical strength just sitting there that he’d probably welcome a fight. On the other hand he had something of the unmistakably scholarly mien, the furrowed forehead of a professor crossing the Harvard Yard, she realized, remembering her Boston years, and the arrogant young section men who made a fetish out of sporting jackets in such bad shape they couldn’t be given to Goodwill. This man wore his beat-up tweed jacket, work shirt and jeans in a way that told her they were his daily garb, not put on for a visit to the Puces, but he wore them with brio. He was clearly something of a roughneck, and just as clearly Ivy League.

  “Sam Jamison,” he said, introducing himself, offering his hand.

  Billy murmured hello, shook his hand, and said, “Honey Winthrop.” She had decided, while taking her inventory of his face, that she couldn’t tell this man she was Billy Ikehorn. Any American would almost certainly recognize her name. She wouldn’t use the name Billy Orsini either, for she had been famous under that name too recently for comfort. Honey had been her despised nickname as a child, but she couldn’t think of anything else and she didn’t want him to know anything about her except what he saw. She was deeply curious to find out what it would be like to talk to a man who knew nothing about the endless baggage train of wealth that followed behind her, heaped with a load of invisible but acknowledged treasure, wherever she went in her nighttime Paris.

  “Where did you come from, generous Miss Winthrop?”

  “Seattle,” Billy said. “What about you?”

  “Marin County, outside of San Francisco. How long are you here for?”

  “Oh … quite a while … it’s my sabbatical year … I’m a teacher.” Good God, what had made her say that? She knew almost nothing about anything. Why hadn’t she said she was a sales clerk?

  “What do you teach?” he asked, his nearsighted eyes intent on her face.

  “French?”

  “Is that a question? Because if it is, I feel sorry for your pupils. Listen, you didn’t mind being called ‘babe,’ did you? When I get to know you better, I’ll call you Honey, but right now … it sounds weird, like an … endearment, as if we really know each other.”

  “No, I mean, that’s fine, babe’s fine. I definitely teach French. That’s why I took my sabbatical year here, obviously. But let’s not talk about it … it’s boring to everyone but me … studying the life and times of Voltaire at the Bibliothèque Nationale … you don’t want to know. Are you living in Paris or just visiting?”

  “I’m not sure, babe. I’ve always wanted to come here, and this year I finally did something about it, found a studio to sublet in the Marais, around the corner from the Place des Vosges, and came on over. I don’t ever want to go back. This place has gotten to me. I wish I knew more French, though. Living here must be easy for you. I can get around, but I don’t have any ease.”

  “It’s not hard to learn,” Billy assured him earnestly. She pulled her forgotten scarf off her head and was running her fingers artfully through her flattened curls. Christ, she thought, I’d promise to give this guy a crash course in French slang if he’d just shut the fuck up, drag me to his studio by my hair and throw me in his bed.

  “You don’t look like a teacher,” Sam Jamison said, and, to his horror, found that he was blushing to his forehead, the redhead’s curse that he’d thought he’d outgrown. “That’s a dumb thing to say, isn’t it?” he added hastily. “How should a teacher look, anyway? It’s typical of the kind of remark men make that women hate.” How could anyone so beautiful waste her life teaching kids a language they’d probably never use? Look at the way she wanted to give him her precious bottle, look at the hideous way she covered her body—why, she wasn’t even comfortable accepting a sandwich from a stranger or talking about her work. She needed to be taught to be self-assured and even selfish, to demand whatever she wanted which would be no less than she deserved. A girl like this must want to be fucked, or there was no justice, no mercy, no use in being in Paris in the spring.

  “Not necessarily,” Billy murmured.

  “What’s not necessarily?” What had he said, he wondered. He’d lost track. She’d done something to her hair with her fingers that had taken his mind off his words.

  “Women don’t necessarily hate being told that they don’t look like what they do. In my case, teach.” She’d never seen a man blush before. Or if she had, she hadn’t noticed. It would be heaven if she could get him to do it again. Absolute heaven. His skin was so creamy and fine-grained for such a tough-looking guy.

  “What do women like to be told?” Did she not own a lipstick, or did she go around that way to tempt every man who saw her with the natural pink of her mouth? Could he ask her without blushing again?

  “Ah, the old question. Even Freud didn’t know … especially Freud.” Why had she mentioned Freud? It sounded so academic, so musty, nobody even talked about Freud anymore. Jung maybe, but not that old creep Freud, who underestimated the clitoris just because he didn’t have one.

  “He said he didn’t know what women wanted, babe,” Sam corrected her.

  “A quibble. Wanting, telling, what’s the difference?”

  “You’ve got me. Anyway, how about lunch? The restaurants are just opening.”

  “Well … these sneakers …”

  “We could find a bistro. A very small bistro.” Or a small hotel, for the love of God, with a very small room and a very big bed. “Or are you expected somewhere for lunch? Husband? Boyfriend?”

  “Neither of the above. I’m happily divorced.”

  “Me too. Kids?”

  “A little stepdaughter, who lives in New York. What about you?”

  “Nobody … just me and my work and Paris and generous Miss Winthrop. Come on, have lunch with me,” he pleaded, putting on his glasses and looking into her eyes with the intense scrutiny he had given the ivory bottle.


  “I’m really not hungry right this minute, but I am curious about, well, actually.… as a matter of fact.… I’m curious.… about your work … I’d love to see it,” Billy said faintly, helplessly, her questing eyes downcast under the power of his gaze.

  “Oh. Sure. Absolutely. In fact. That’s a great idea. It’s in my studio … well.… obviously that’s where it’d be.” Shit! He could feel himself blushing again.

  “Is it far?”

  “No. Actually not … we can grab a cab …”

  They sat silently side by side in the cab, walked silently up the five flights of stairs to Sam’s studio, silently entered his large, light studio, silently ignored the large geometric shapes that stood everywhere, and silently walked straight into his small, darker bedroom, where they put their arms around each other and began to kiss, standing up, with a violence and a yearning and a need that surprised neither of them.

  They kissed for a long time, trembling violently, still without words, until finally Billy shrugged out of her raincoat and kicked off her sneakers and pulled out of his arms so that he could take off his jacket. Suddenly they had no more time for undressing as they were overcome with the mounting necessity of a desire so vast that it was appalling. They fell to the bed, Billy still wearing her sweater, ripping open her jeans and pulling them off, Sam managing to shuck his jeans and his shoes. He entered her without a word, without hesitation, severely, and she accepted him with a lack of control that met his inevitability, a wildly indecent openness that wanted him to fill her and take her without tenderness. He cared nothing for her satisfaction, she nothing for his, and together they met in a place of pure lust where they took what they needed, giving and taking part of one single act in which they lost themselves completely. When they both came at the same time, it was such a surprise that when it was over they lay laughing helplessly, for that wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen, not ever, not without at least a modicum of thoughtfulness, and then they managed to cast off the rest of their clothes and fell asleep in each other’s arms, still without a word.