Scruples

by Judith Krantz

  “Suppose this customer had arrived at Scruples at eleven in the morning and suppose she had spent two hours looking and trying on things and hadn’t finished yet?”

  “Well?”

  “Would she be hungry? Would her feet hurt? Billy, I see you’ve taken off your shoes.”

  “What has that to do with retailing, Spider?” In one minute she’d tell him about her investigation of his nonexistent credentials.

  “Your shoes? Nothing. Your customer’s shoes? Everything. Your customer’s empty stomach? Even more. It is the key.”

  “You’ll have to be a little more explicit. We don’t sell shoes. We’re not running a restaurant—we’re running, or trying to run, a store.”

  “Not until you start running a restaurant.” Spider smiled at her benevolently. “What happens when your hungry customer’s feet begin to hurt? Her blood sugar goes down. If she continues to try on clothes she gets irritable and difficult, and she decides that nothing she sees suits her. If she stops to get dressed to go somewhere for lunch, the chances are that she’d have to be absolutely desperate to find a particular dress on that particular day in your particular store for her to come back to Scruples after lunch. If you lose her at lunchtime, she’ll try another store later. So, first we’re going to build a kitchen by shutting off part of the garage, which is much bigger than you need. Then we hire a couple of cooks, maybe only one at first, and some waiters and offer our customers lunch on the house. Nothing too fancy, Billy, just salads or open-faced sandwiches. I noticed that there’s a chaise longue in each fitting room. Our customers can sit there and eat while they get a foot massage. A good one can rejuvenate the whole body.” He quirked one eyebrow at Billy. “You probably know the best masseuses in town? I doubt you’ll need more than three of them in the beginning. Then, after lunch, well sell those ladies the whole fucking store.” He signaled the captain to bring the menus.

  For a minute Billy was mesmerized. She could see it, just as Spider described it. But then she returned to herself. “Excellent idea. It solves exactly one small and nonessential problem—how to keep your customers from leaving at lunchtime. But, at the moment, I haven’t got that many customers to leave. Business is getting slower day by day. I haven’t got the right stock to show them, and no obvious gimmick like a new kitchen is going to make a difference. Are you sure you were never in the catering business, Spider?”

  Spider turned to her with his most wicked grin, his cowboy-look, thought Valentine furiously, the one where she expected to see him kick a piece of shit and say, “Ah, shucks, Ma’am, it weren’t nothin’.”

  “That’s for openers, Billy. I haven’t even gotten down to the God-awful, tight-assed way the store is decorated yet—and that’s a good half of your problem.” Billy stared at him in utter shock, too disbelieving to be angry yet. Spider thought then that she was going to be a pushover. “But we’ll talk about that after we’ve signed the contracts. ‘No point in giving it away,’ a gal I once knew used to say. Come on, ladies, let’s eat.”

  The law firm of Strassberger, Lipkin, and Hillman took up two entire floors of one of the newly built towers of Century City, the twin glass monsters that make Beverly Hills residents shake their heads and think about earthquakes and doomsday whenever they drive past them on Santa Monica Boulevard. The firm, which enjoyed the quiet prestige of being one of the most powerful Jewish law firms in Los Angeles (where, as in many big cities, law firms like country clubs are either predominately Jewish or Gentile), had been decorated by someone who wanted, above all, to assure the firm’s clients that even if an earthquake should happen to hit while they were trapped high on the twentieth or twenty-first floor, they would perish in style, even splendor.

  Valentine and Spider stepped out of the elevator into a wilderness of walnut and rosewood, of thick new rugs and thin old ones, of fresh flowers, of genuine antiques and a genuine smile on the receptionist’s face. The possession of a truly welcoming and charming receptionist is an infallible mark of any topflight business in Los Angeles. They had an appointment to sign their contracts with Billy Ikehorn’s personal lawyer, Joshua Isaiah Hillman.

  Although the legal work of Ikehorn Enterprises was still carried on in New York, since Ellis’s death, Billy relied more heavily than before on her lawyer Josh Hillman. Much of his work now involved double-checking on the work done by the New York attorneys. Before Ellis died, she had just signed any necessary papers without worrying about them. In spite of the fact that Ellis could not advise her, she still felt as if she were under his protection. This essentially unreal state of affairs lasted until she became majority stockholder on inheriting Ellis’s shares in the business. Now Billy felt she should at least be thoroughly briefed before she signed her name to anything. Soon Josh Hillman found that more than half of his time was spent on Mrs. Ikehorn’s business; he employed several top attorneys within his firm just to oversee her affairs and report to him. Her legal fees became proportionately immense. No one suffered from this arrangement; even Billy’s New York lawyers approved, because Josh Hillman was an exceedingly brilliant lawyer. His advice was faultless. He protected Billy’s interests without trying to second-guess their own, far more informed, decisions.

  At almost forty-two, Josh Hillman was exactly where an ex-child prodigy should be: at the top of his profession and possessed of an unlimited future.

  He had grown up on Fairfax Avenue, the heart of the Jewish ghetto of Los Angeles, an only child, the son of the rabbi of a small, shabby synagogue. By the age of two-and-a-half, he could read; by fourteen-and-a-half he had been granted a full scholarship at Harvard; at eighteen-and-a-half he had been graduated summa cum laude, and at twenty-one-and-a-half he had been graduated from Harvard Law School as an editor of the Harvard Law Review, an editorship that is no more eagerly sought or won than that of The New York Times.

  At this point, tradition dictated that he should go to work as a clerk for a Justice of the United States Supreme Court and start dreaming about that day in the future when, after perhaps forty years of consistently more brilliant legal work, he would take his mentor’s place.

  But Josh Hillman didn’t like the odds: There was never more than one Jewish Justice on the Court at any one time and Supreme Court Justices seem to live forever, longer than anyone except the widows of rich men.

  He had more than a passing interest in making money, after living on scholarships for the last seven years. Only twice in that time had Josh Hillman been able to return home on holidays to see his parents, who still lived on Fairfax Avenue. He had earned enough money during the summers to clothe himself, get his hair cut, and buy those two round-trip plane tickets. He had missed most of the social life of a Harvard undergraduate because he couldn’t afford it, and if there was fun to be had during law school, he didn’t know about it. He joined Strassberger & Lipkin in 1957 and now, twenty years later, although he was the junior partner in terms of age, he was the senior partner in terms of real power.

  He was a serious man who thought romance was something invented in the Middle Ages to keep ladies at court occupied at home during the Crusades. He enjoyed sex, but he saw no reason to make a big deal out of it. He felt smugly superior to other men of his age who ran around getting divorced because their wives bored them in bed and then proceeded to make horses’ asses of themselves with young girls. The whole business was overrated. His wife bored him too, almost from the beginning, but was that a reason to play around? Not for a serious man it wasn’t.

  Josh Hillman had married seriously and intelligently. Joanne Wirthman was Hollywood royalty—the genuine article. Her grandfather had founded one of the great movie studios. Her father was one of the great movie producers. Behind her were two generations of private screening rooms. Not her mother, but her grandmother, had had the first all-Porthault bathroom in Bel Air.

  Joanne Wirthman had never even heard of belly lox until she met Josh Hillman, but she soon discovered that it was tastier than Scotch salmon, just as h
e was more impressive, more of a mertsch, than the rich boys she had grown up with. To their amazement, they discovered that both their grandfathers had been born in Vilna. Not that the genealogical fact—which, who knew, might make them distant cousins?—was necessary to quell any objections on the part of the Wirthman family to Joanne’s marrying a poor boy from Fairfax Avenue. They were only too happy to see their hefty, placid, well-organized daughter carrying off a Harvard Law Review editor who also happened to be tall and handsome, in a somewhat not-fully-finished-growing way; and with a shining future like his, he was obviously not interested in her money alone.

  Actually, it wasn’t just Joanne’s money he was interested in. To be fair, Josh told himself, he liked her well enough, and the year that he had allotted himself to marry and settle down was almost over. He was serious when it came to sticking to schedule. He was very serious about just about everything.

  Joanne proved to be disappointing in bed but great at pregnancy, producing two sons and a daughter. She was superb at winning women’s tennis tournaments at the Hill-crest Country Club and positively triumphant at raising money for the Music Center, the Childrens Hospital, Cedars-Sinai, the Arts Council, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. By thirty-five, she was a leader among that very tightly knit group of women in Los Angeles who are indispensable to both Jewish and Gentile charitable endeavors, thus socially bridging the gap between old California society and the wave of Jewish businessmen looking for sunshine, that the invention of the movie camera had brought to the land where money was supposed to come from land grants, lumber, railroads, and oil, not the sound stage.

  Over the years that separated him from the rather untidy, overgrown student he had been, Josh Hillman had grown into a lithe, trim man with the look of power about him. His dark gray eyes slanted slightly upward at their outer corners, giving him a permanently quizzical look, which did nothing to detract from his reputation for cleverness. His smile was rare but full of sardonic humor. He had high Slavic cheekbones and a straight, broad nose, about which both his grandmothers argued, each delightedly accusing the other’s mother of having been raped by Cossacks. Dozens of them. He wore his graying dark hair short and dressed in ultra-conservative custom-made suits with matching vests from Eric Ross and Carroll and Company, made from the finest British cloth in subdued colors and cut. He had his shirts made for him at Turnbull and Asser whenever he was in London. His ties were remarkable only for their price. None of this was vanity, merely a feeling of how it was necessary for a lawyer to look.

  Until he saw Valentine, Josh Hillman had considered himself satisfactorily married. His mother, a lady of the old school, had repeatedly and solemnly warned him that there is a yellow-haired, blue-eyed shiksa lying in wait for every good Jewish boy, and if he listens to her siren’s call, he will be lost and disgraced. However, Josh had never been attracted to the classic Anglo-Saxon type; he thought blandly beautiful girls were boringly alike; he considered Portnoy’s Complaint an example of sick, fetishistic thinking, attaching as it did sexual attraction to snub noses and blond hair. But, alas, his mother had been limited in her imaginative forebodings. She could not have conceived of the spark struck in her serious son by the lure of a flaming French-Irish damsel with pale green mermaid eyes and a witty, delicate look, which made Joshua, that least romantic man, leap instinctively to his feet as Valentine entered his office. Spider seemed only a tall blur behind her as she advanced toward him with her positive step. Josh Hillman felt something that he found impossible to name, except he knew that he’d never felt it before.

  Valentine noticed the tall lawyer’s slight confusion as they shook hands and attributed it to some change of heart on Billy’s part after Spider’s outrageous behavior of the morning. Instinctively she intensified her slight French accent, further nibbling away at Josh Hillman’s composure and making him endure impossibly distracting subliminal flashes of Paris in the spring.

  While the three of them waited for the secretary to bring in the contracts, Hillman’s mind raced.

  When Billy had first told him about the contracts she had agreed to with Valentine over the phone, he had been horrified. He had considered his client too sensible to give away a percentage of her profits in Scruples as well as these enormous salaries to some young designer she had only met a few times and to a man about whom she knew nothing. He had advised her to add a cancellation clause to the contracts, which would allow her to terminate their employment as well as their profit sharing within a period of three weeks’ notice. He patiently explained that it didn’t matter that Scruples was leaking money like a burst dam or that there were no profits to protect. It was the principle of the thing. She had to have control over these people. Billy had seen his point at once. Now he wished he hadn’t been quite so clever. The idea that Miss O’Neill might find herself fired at the whim of his most dominating, most spoiled, most demanding client was not a pleasant thing, but at this point it was too late to change.

  While Spider and Valentine read the contracts, Hillman studied her from behind a tent he made of his hands. By resting his thumbs on his cheeks and his index fingers just above his eyebrows, he was able to hide a large part of his face while maintaining a contemplative look, a trick he employed often. He watched the play of expression on Valentine’s small face with fascination, so bemused that he paid no attention when Spider stopped reading and said, “There’s something wrong here.”

  But when Valentine popped out of her chair with a loud cry of “Merde,” he came out of his dream with an undignified jolt.

  “What is this merde—this shit?” she demanded, smacking the contracts on the desk, gone so pale with rage that if it hadn’t been for her hair she would have looked like a photo in black and white. “This clause that we may be fired on three weeks’ notice! That was not in the conversation I had with Mrs. Ikehorn. How dare she? What kind of woman does a thing like that? It is dishonest, dishonorable, vile, disgusting! I did not expect it of her, but I should have known! We will never sign these contracts, Mr. Hillman. Call her up and tell her that immediately! And tell her what I think of her. Come on, Elliott—we’re leaving!”

  “It wasn’t her idea,” Josh Hillman said urgently. “I suggested it—just ordinary lawyers’ prudence. Don’t blame Mrs. Ikehorn. She had nothing to do with it.”

  “Ordinary lawyers’ prudence!” Valentine’s wrath was enough to make him blink in amazement. “I spit on lawyers’ prudence! Then it is you who should be ashamed of yourself. It was contemptible!”

  “I am,” he answered. “Please, believe me!” His chagrin and dismay were written large on his face. He hadn’t looked so helpless or so appalled since the day of his Bar Mitzvah speech, when all knowledge of Hebrew deserted him for one long unforgettable moment, a memory that still made him shudder. Valentine just glared at him balefully, all of her tempestuous nature seething in her eyes.

  “Val, baby, shut up a fucking minute, will you,” Spider ordered pleasantly. “Now, Mr. Hillman, if it was your prudent idea to put the clause in, is it now your prudent idea to take the clause out? Sir?”

  “I’ll have to talk to Mrs. Ikehorn,” the lawyer admitted reluctantly.

  “We’ll wait outside while you reach her,” Spider said, pointing at the telephone with a stern finger. “Maybe you could prevail on your secretary to bring us some coffee.” He took Valentine’s arm in a bruising grasp and led her, willy-nilly, to the door before she could turn the offer down again.

  Josh Hillman silently punished the leg of his desk with his shoe for a minute before he leafed through his private phone book, found a number, and made a call on his private line. He talked rapidly and intently for a short while and then buzzed his secretary to bring Valentine and Spider back in.

  “All settled,” he announced, with a relieved smile. “I’ll have those changes made in the contracts in five minutes. One year, guaranteed, no strings.”

  “Hah!” Valentine sounded scornful and suspicious. When the papers wer
e brought back she read every word with a look of historic French skepticism. Once Spider was satisfied that there were no more trick clauses, they finally signed.

  As soon as the two of them left, Josh Hillman told his secretary to hold all his calls. He would need at least a half hour, maybe more, judging from past experience, before he could track down Billy Ikehorn and inform her that in spite of everything he had tried to do or say, in spite of his best efforts, those two had not been willing to sign the contracts until he took out the offending clause. He estimated that it might take another ten minutes alone to persuade her that the cancellation clause actually had never been absolutely necessary, but he knew he could do it. He could persuade anyone to do just about anything. Or, so he had thought until this afternoon. “Merde,” he said to himself, smiling at the memory, as he told his secretary to start calling around and find Billy Ikehorn, on the double.

  When Valentine arrived back in her room early that evening, on the coffee table stood a low basket woven in Ireland. Seeming to grow from the green moss that filled the basket were seven tall stems of white butterfly orchids, some fully opened, some just in bud. They were all of springtime in one swoop of heartbreaking grace. On the card next to them was written, “With my most humble apologies for the contretemps of this afternoon. I hope I may be allowed to invite you for dinner after an appropriate period of penance. Josh Hillman.”

  Valentine forgave him immediately but would have forgiven him twice over if she had known the trouble he had had in spelling “contretemps” to the salesperson at David Jones, the best florist in Los Angeles. The order had been given over the phone earlier that day while she and Spider had been sipping coffee in his secretary’s outer office right after they had discovered the three weeks’ notice clause in the contracts.

  That same night, at three o’clock in the morning, Spider, still awake, heard a faint tap on his hotel door. He opened it to find a woebegone Valentine, huddled in her deep blue robe. He bundled her into the room, deposited her in a chair, anxious and surprised. “What’s wrong, Val—my God, don’t you feel well?” She looked like a terrified child; great green eyes, without their usual frame of heavy black mascara, swam in unshed tears, even her farouche curls seemed to have lost some of their fight.