Scruples

by Judith Krantz

  Billy sat in her parlor-car seat, traveling from Back Bay Station to Grand Central Station, on a hot, sticky day during the first week of September 1962. Her stomach gave a sickening downward jerk every time she thought about the coming meeting with her future roommate, Jessica Thorpe. What a haughty name that seemed, so starchy, so dry and complete in itself. Even worse, she was twenty-three, a summa cum laude graduate of Vassar, and she had a job working for McCall’s in the editorial department. What a frightening paragon she must be, Billy thought. Even her background was impeccable. Her parents were both descended from the oldest families in Providence, Rhode Island. Not like being from Boston, Aunt Cornelia pointed out, but happily not as—ordinary—as being from New York. And her apartment was located on 82nd Street, between Park and Madison. These details alone convinced Billy that this inevitable, inescapable roommate was going to be sophisticated, full of herself, and a competent career girl in total charge of her life. Perhaps, oh horror, an intellectual.

  Meanwhile, Jessica Thorpe was having a most unpleasant morning. It had started when Natalie Jenkins, the articles editor, had ripped to shreds Jessica’s last rewrite of the Sinatra profile. The article, originally tossed off by a well-known raconteur, had been turned over to Jessica to be “cleaned up,” and she had worked on it for weeks, trying to give its confused anecdotes and scrambled syntax the smooth touch suitable for a women’s magazine. Mrs. Jenkins, famous as the first woman in publishing to survive a daily four-martini lunch, had hated her first attempt, disliked her second attempt, and this very day she had taken the third attempt and done the rewrite herself in three quarters of an hour, eviscerating the guts of the piece and demolishing all the parts that meant anything. Now it was just another bit of Pablum, old-fashioned sob-sister stuff, but Mrs. Jenkins, sitting in triumph at her typewriter, was finally satisfied. She had proven, once again, that no one could really do any job around the office without her help.

  And if this wasn’t dismal enough, the Girl From Boston was arriving today. Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop. The very thought made Jessica’s clouds of Pre-Raphaelite baby hair droop. Jessica was much given to drooping regardless of circumstances. Her skirts always drooped because her hips were too slender to hold them up properly, and it never occurred to her to have the hems altered. Her blouses drooped because she forgot to tuck them in. Her body drooped because she was only five feet two inches tall and she never remembered to stand up straight. But even when her spirits drooped, as well as everything else, she was irresistible. Men, seeing the drooping of Jessica, found the idea of an upright woman downright masculine. She had a tiny little nose and a tiny little chin and enormous, sad, lavender eyes and a lovely wide brow. When her adorable little mouth drooped, men were overwhelmed by an urge to kiss her. When it didn’t droop, they felt precisely the same way.

  Men were Jessica’s favorite thing. She thought that she had managed to hide this dangerous propensity from her mother, but obviously she hadn’t succeeded or otherwise her mother would not have forcibly insisted that she had to have a roommate or else move to the Barbizon Hotel for Women, that Devil’s Island of Chastity. Chastity was Jessica’s least favorite thing.

  The Girl From Boston was certainly her mother’s spy, Jessica reflected, as she drooped ravishingly homeward, ruining the evening of at least a dozen men on the Madison Avenue bus by not even looking at them. In normal spirits, Jessica looked directly at every man she saw for a fraction of a second, rating him on a scale of one to ten, the only criterion being “How good would he be in bed?” A man had to be actively unattractive to get less than a four because Jessica was very nearsighted and hated to wear her glasses in public. The number of sixes and sevens reached into the dozens in the course of Jessica’s average week. She could never be positive about them because her eyes were so poor, but she gave generous marks, to be fair.

  Billy had trouble getting a cab during the rush hour, and it was after six-thirty when she arrived, frozen with nerves, at Jessica’s apartment. The doorman rang up from the lobby to announce her just as Jessica had finished hiding five unmatched men’s sock’s, a Brooks Brothers belt, and, in a last-minute flurry, her douche bag. Would a girl use a douche bag if she was a virgin? Jessica was too terrified to think that one out. She stood at the open door of her apartment and watched a pile of impressively good luggage being wheeled toward her on a dolly. Behind the luggage was the second doorman and behind him strode, to Jessica’s nearsighted eyes, an Amazon. She exchanged flustered greetings with the tall blurred figure while the doorman disposed of the luggage, waiting unhappily for the moment when they would be alone together. The Amazon stood, silent and uncertain and voiceless, in the center of the living room. Although Billy had finally found herself relatively at ease, as long as she was speaking French, even when she was meeting strangers, the prospect of living in close association with a superior girl of her own background, a girl who was three years older than she was, brought back every one of the dozen of insecurities she had been tattooed with during her first eighteen years. And the sight of tiny Jessica, so slight, almost frail, had the strange effect of making Billy feel enormous again, just as if she were still fat.

  The doorman left and Jessica remembered her manners. “Ah—why don’t we just sit down?” she fluttered timidly. “You must be absolutely exhausted—it’s so hot out there.” She waved hesitantly toward a chair and the tall figure sat down with a gasp of relief and fatigue. Jessica groped for some common ground, something to make the stranger speak. “I know,” she ventured, “why don’t we have a drink—I’m so nervous—” At these kind words the Amazon burst into tears. So, companionably, did Jessica. Bursting into tears was another of her favorite things, really more useful, she found, for difficult moments than anything else.

  Within five minutes Jessica had put on her glasses and inspected Billy thoroughly. All her life she had wanted to look like Billy and she told her so. Billy answered that she had always dreamed of looking like Jessica. Both of them were telling the exact truth and they both realized it. Within two hours Billy had told her all about Edouard, and Jessica had told Billy all about the three number nines with whom she was currently having affairs. From there their friendship progressed in geometric proportions. Neither of them could imagine how there would ever be enough time to tell each other as much as they had to tell. Before they finally retired to their respective bedrooms—at 4:00 A.M.—after ceremoniously retrieving Jessica’s douche bag from its hiding place, they had, with great gravity, made a pact never to tell anyone in Providence or New York or Boston anything more about the other than her name, followed by the sacred formula “a very nice girl.” They kept that pact all their lives.

  As Billy stepped off the elevator into the entrance of the Katharine Gibbs School, the first thing that met her eyes was the gaze of the late Mrs. Gibbs, preserved with all its stern, implacable presence in the portrait that hung over the receptionist’s desk. She did not look mean, thought Billy, only as if she knew all about you and had not decided whether to actively disapprove—yet. Out of the corner of her eye she was aware that someone was stationed by the elevator door checking out each girl for gloves, hat, dress, and makeup, of which there must not be much. That, at least, was not a problem for a girl who remembered only too well the folkways of Boston.

  Gregg, on the other hand, was. Billy cursed Gregg and Pitman, whoever they were. Why had people been so cruel as to invent shorthand, she wondered, as the infernal, eternal hourly buzzers went off and she moved hurriedly, but with the required precision, from the steno room to the typing room and then back to the steno room again. Many of her classmates had some knowledge of typing before they entered Katie Gibbs, but even those who thought they had a leg up on the system were swiftly disillusioned about their skills. Being “Gibbs Material” meant that you were expected to reach certain degrees of proficiency that struck Billy as outrageous. Were they seriously expecting her to be able to take one hundred words a minute in shorthand and type fau
ltlessly at a minimum of sixty words a minute by the time she had completed her course? They were indeed.

  Within a week Billy decided it was a waste of time to revile Gregg and Pitman. Like the laws of gravity, they were not about to go away. It was the same as losing weight. She had suffered, almost more than she could remember, but it had been worth it in the end. Everyone at school had her own talisman story of a Gibbs graduate who had started as secretary to an important senator or well-known businessman and then gone on to more important jobs. Billy could feel her strong obsessive drives finally coming to her aid, helping her to bite into the work with the confidence that she would master it, make it her own.

  Jessica, on the other hand, was worried about Billy’s lack of what she euphemistically termed “beaus.”

  “But, Jessie, I don’t know a soul in New York and I came here to work. You know how I feel about becoming independent and making some money of my own.”

  “How many men did you look at today, Billy?” Jessica asked, brushing aside her friend’s ambitions.

  “How do I know? Maybe ten or fifteen—something like that.”

  “What numbers were they?”

  “Well really! I wasn’t playing the game; that’s your department.”

  “I thought so. If you don’t look and give them numbers how are you ever going to have any basis for knowing when you meet an eight or even a nine?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Billy, I’ve been thinking about you. You’re a cliche, like a rider who falls off a horse and doesn’t get right back on. You’re plain afraid of men because of what happened, aren’t you?” Jessica murmured all this in her tiny voice, but Billy knew her well enough to realize that under that adorable whimper there lurked a ferocious intelligence that it was useless to contradict. Jessica saw through walls and around corners.

  “You’re probably right,” she admitted wearily. “But even if I wanted to meet a man, look at the realities. I simply can’t pick up some number nine on the street, now can I? No, Jessie, don’t give me that eye—even you wouldn’t do that I think. Now, the alternative is to scribble a note to Aunt Cornelia and let her loose among her New York friends. She’d dig up some ‘nice boy’ here who is connected by a wire through his belly button to Boston. Whatever happened between us would be all over the Vincent dub in a week. You don’t know how they gossip! I simply will not let anyone there know what I’m doing with my life. I’m going to graduate from Gibbs, get a terrific job, and work my way up until I’m a big success, and I’m never going back to Boston again!”

  “Well, who ever said anything about getting involved with someone from your own circle, silly?” Jessica said with indignation. “I’d never, ever, do it myself. All my lovely nines haven’t the faintest idea who my family is. They don’t even care where I come from. I wouldn’t dream of having a thing with someone who might know the man I’ll eventually marry, whoever that lucky fool may be. The trick is to go outside.”

  “Outside?”

  “Dummy.” Jessica moaned, smiling at Billy’s skimpy grasp of life’s possibilities. “Outside of your own world. You have no idea of how limited that tiny little world is. Just because they all know one another, just because the people your aunts know in Boston, Providence, Baltimore, and Philadelphia are all connected to the people you might meet through them in New York, doesn’t mean that when you get just one step—one tiny step—away from the connections you can’t drop out of sight completely.”

  “I just don’t see how,” Billy complained. Jessica was maddeningly elliptical sometimes.

  “Jews.” Jessica gave Billy the smile of the smartest cat on the block, the cat who has just cornered the market on whipped cream and sardines. “Jews are perfect They don’t want to have things with nice Jewish girls either, because they’re all connected just the way we are, and they don’t want anything to get out about it any more than we do. So all my nines are Jewish.”

  “What if you met a Jewish ten?”

  “I’d run like a thief, I hope. But stop trying to change the subject. Now, how many Jewish men do you know?”

  Billy looked blank. “Well, you must know some,” said Jessica,

  “I don’t think so, except maybe that nice shoe salesman at Jordan Marsh.” Billy looked puzzled.

  “Hopeless. I thought so. And they’re the best too,” Jessica muttered to herself, her lavender eyes bemused, unfocused, her summa cum laude brain picking and choosing and sorting possibilities.

  “The best?” Billy asked. She had never heard that Jews were the best, except maybe for violin playing and chess and of course there was Albert Einstein and, well, you really couldn’t count Jesus. He had converted.

  “For fucking, of course,” Jessica answered absent-mindedly.

  Billy took to fucking Jews with an enthusiasm even Jessica couldn’t have matched. Jews were like Paris, she thought. A new world, a free world, a foreign world that was all the more exciting for being forbidden. In this unknown, secret world she had no secrets to keep. A Winthrop? From Boston? Perhaps historically interesting but essentially unimportant If they had gone to Harvard it would be highly unlikely that they would know any of Billy’s cousins because they would not have been asked to join any club more select than the Hasty Pudding. But just to be on the safe side, Billy never saw a Harvard graduate more than once and never let him kiss her. Even if he was a nine. There were so many nines it seemed. It was one big, wonderful world of Jewish nines if you knew where to look, and soon Billy became an expert NBC, CBS, ABC, Doyle-Dane-Bernbach, Grey Advertising, Newsweek, Viking Press, The New York Times, WNEW, Doubleday, the executive training programs at Saks and Macy’s—the list was rich, endless.

  Billy became clever at avoiding German Jews, particularly those whose families had been in the United States for many generations. They had a disconcerting way of producing mothers who had been born Episcopalians, from families who might well know the Winthrop clan. Billy warned Jessica to stick to Russian Jews, if possible second- or third-generation Americans only. Anyway, they were more fun.

  It was from Jews that Billy learned that she had never suspected the depths of her own sensuality. Gradually she learned to sink down into it and let herself go with the current. As she allowed herself to feed her appetites, her appetites grew. She became avid, avid for the feeling of absolute power she got when she felt the jutting stiffness of an engorged prick through an expensive pair of trousers, and she knew that in one swift movement she could uncover it, hold it, smooth and quivering and hot in her hand. She became avid for the electric moment when a man’s slowly exploring hand finally settled on her clitoris and found it already plump and wet, offering itself to his repeated, burning, stroking. She became avid for the rapturous time of expectation, which she drew out until it almost became pain, before a new lover parted the lips of her cunt with his cock and she finally knew what he felt like when he was all the way up inside her.

  She became so sexually charged that sometimes, between classes at Katie Gibbs, she had to duck into the ladies’ room, lock herself in a stall, thrust a finger up between her thighs, and, rubbing hastily, have a quick, silent, necessary orgasm. Her Gregg improved steadily.

  Billy had seven proposals of marriage from nines she didn’t love, and, reluctantly, she had to replace them. It would not have been playing the game fairly to keep them on the string after honorable intentions had been declared. Jessica had twelve proposals in the same period of time, but they decided that it amounted to an even number, because only men over six feet tall proposed to Billy, while tiny Jessica had a much wider field to appeal to.

  All in all, she and Jessica decided, as they reached the end of the spring and Billy approached her graduation from the one-year course at Katie Gibbs, it had been a very good year. A vintage year. It was the spring of 1963, Jack Kennedy was President of the United States, and Billy, about to go for job interviews, took herself to the custom-order millinery salon at Bergdorf Goodman’s, at Au
nt Cornelia’s behest, in order to have Halston, then Jackie Kennedy’s favorite hat designer, make her one perfect pillbox. “I want to look intelligent, efficient, capable, and chic—but not too chic,” she instructed him firmly.

  The year at Katie Gibbs, with its punishing discipline and high standards, combined with the revelation of the possibilities of her body and its infinite uses, had given a final polish to the transformation that had started in Paris. Although Billy was five months short of her twenty-first birthday, she looked and sounded a superbly balanced twenty-five. Perhaps it was her height; perhaps her way of standing, poised as a ballerina waiting for her cue in the wings; perhaps her unconsciously patrician Boston accent, smoothed down but not entirely hidden by a combination of Emery Academy, Paris, and New York; perhaps it was the way she wore her clothes, so that she stood out from any crowd as instantly as a flamingo would among a flock of New York pigeons. Altogether a formidable girl.

  “Linda Force? You mean you’re going to work for a woman?” Jessica cried incredulously. “After all I’ve told you about Natalie Jenkins, how could you?”

  “First of all, there’s the money. It’s top dollar. They’re offering one hundred fifty dollars a week, which is twenty-five more than anybody else. Secondly, it’s a giant corporation with lots of room to move around in—up, up, and away! And my boss is very close to the powers that be. She’s the executive assistant to the mysterious Ikehorn himself. Anyway, when she interviewed me, I liked her and she liked me. I could tell—sometimes you have to go on your instincts.”