Scruples

by Judith Krantz

  Steady. Here was one subject on which Billy felt superbly qualified to guide Dolly. She was awash with the desire to do something good for Dolly Moon, and she blessed the fate that had put her in a position to pass on some of the best advice she’d ever been given.

  “Oh, just listen, you just listen to me, Dolly Moon. When I was a few years younger than you, I went to live in New York City. I had a roommate—”

  Dolly listened in intent silence as Billy told her of the days with Jessica, the days at Katie Gibbs, the days of the glorious Jews. Billy hadn’t had a truly intimate, unguarded talk like this with any woman except Jessica since those long past days, but Dolly didn’t know that. She just thought her new friend was kind and smart and had sort of pretty clothes and was beautiful in all the ways Dolly admired. By the time they walked back to the roped-off part of the street, they had decided to meet for lunch every day.

  As they approached the makeup trailer, Dolly said reluctantly, “I have to check in here first, Billy. Say, what do you do, anyway, wardrobe, hair, script girl?”

  “They also serve who only sit and wait.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I sit around and wait for my husband, Vito Orsini.”

  “Oh my God! You’re The Producer’s Wife!”

  “Dolly, if you ever say that again, I won’t tell you one more word about how to find Jews. I’ll hide all the best ones from you and never even give them your phone number. I’m Billy and you’re Dolly and that’s that.”

  “But gee, aren’t you proud to be the—the you know what?”

  “I’m terrifically proud of him, but not of being the you know what. Nobody here knows why I’m hanging around, but we’ve only been married just over two months and—and—”

  Dolly put her arms around Billy comfortingly. “Listen. I followed a rodeo rider for a year and I’m petrified by horses, so I know exactly how you feel. At least I bet Mr. Orsini doesn’t reek of horseshit when he gets home at night. Listen, Mr. Hill told me he wants me to watch the dailies every night. Will you sit next to me and explain them? I never understand what the hell they’re all about, I’ve only made one other movie and I get kind of totally confused. Hey, what’s so funny about that? After all, you’re the produc—Billy, you’re getting hysterical—hey, come on! Oh, my goodness, where’s my Kleenex?”

  On a Wednesday, with everything in full swing, Maggie MacGregor and her camera crew arrived to spend five or six days gathering material for her television show on Vito, tentatively titled “A Day in the Life of a Producer.”

  Billy watched, her dark gray thoughts sunk down behind her eyes, as Maggie bustled merrily about, full of the justified conviction of television journalists that the business of the entire world is their personal playpen. Maggie herself was the first real star to appear as far as the crowds of Mendocino natives were concerned. By now they had become so accustomed to watching the progress of the Mirrors company that they treated it as casually as they might observe the antics of their own dogs and cats and babies. Although they had a friendly interest in all the Mirrors people, they didn’t recognize any of them except for Sandra Simon, and she was only familiar to those housewives who followed her particular soap opera. But Maggie MacGregor! Now there was a somebody. At least a third of the households in the town tuned in to her program every week. Isolated as they were, it gave them the feeling of knowing what was going on in the complicated cities they had fled in disgust.

  Maggie bounded around, skipping heedlessly over cables, intruding without a second thought into every group of workers, as if she owned the entire Mirrors company from Vito right down to the last stick of eye liner in the makeup trailer. She stood surefootedly at home in the center of that forbidden working territory, that world of film making, from which Billy was barred by invisible but absolute barriers. Her eyes like chips of granite, Billy thought bitterly that Maggie had all the goddamned CREDENTIALS. Christ, who the hell did she have to fuck to get off this picture?

  She decided to take a long ramble through some of the wild fields around Mendocino. She’d get away from the shoot, find a comfortable place in the grass and just stretch out and get herself in a better, more reasonable mood. Dolly, her friend Dolly, was on call, so she’d just wander off alone and come back refreshed, renewed, relaxed.

  Three hours later she returned, feeling like another woman. The sun and the wind and the breeze off the Pacific had all had their way with her. And so had the poison oak, which grew as freely as the field flowers and brambles but less conspicuously. A day later Billy was on her way back to Los Angeles and the test dermatologist on the West Coast. Trying not to scratch, she looked out of the plane window and wondered if it was worth getting poison oak to avoid enduring the rest of the time in Mendocino? It was hardly an ideal alternative, but Christ, anything had to be better.

  She soon changed her mind. Poison oak, Billy discovered, made poison ivy look like diaper rash. And there’s not much any doctor can do about it except relieve a small percentage of the itching and prescribe tranquilizers and sleeping pills. She spent the next five days in a wretched daze of unending discomfort, her misery lessened only slightly by the fact that it didn’t spread to her face. Vito telephoned every night, but their communication was inescapably unsatisfactory. Discussion and commiseration over an itch can last only so long as a subject of conversation, and while Vito tried to cheer her up over long distance, Billy could hear Sven’s or Fifi’s voice shouting in the background and imagine Vito’s mind concerned with them even as he spoke to her. She asked how the picture was coming along but didn’t really pay attention to Vito’s brief answers, and eventually the words “Everything’s going to be fine, darling, just fine” became the joint theme of their nightly, frustrating, half-lying phone calls.

  After the first ten days Billy felt that she’d turned a corner: The huge blisters on her hands, between her fingers, and all over her legs were slowly drying up, and she no longer woke up twenty times a night, horrified to find herself scratching in her sleep. She still looked like the dog’s dinner, she told herself, but suddenly she was desperate for company. Oh, how she missed Aunt Cornelia and her bracing frontal attack on life. Perhaps Lilianne would come to visit if she sent the plane for her? No, she remembered sadly, every summer the Comtesse visited Solange and Danielle who were both now married and living in England. There, she reveled in being called “Granny” by proper little English tots and in being asked to demonstrate the art of toasting a slice of bread in the fireplace. On impulse, Billy picked up the phone and dialed Jessica Thorpe Strauss in Easthampton.

  “Jessie? Thank God you’re home.”

  “Billy darling, where are you? In New York?”

  “Back home in California, recovering from poison oak and about to slit my wrists if I can find them.”

  “Good grief, and I’ve been thinking of your having such a glamorous honeymoon with a divine man.”

  “Not precisely. How are your five beautiful children and my sweet David?”

  “Dearie, just don’t ask.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The son of a bitch has them all out learning how to sail, all day, every day, and you know how I get seasick in a row-boat. All they want from me are endless supplies of dry tennis shoes—top winders or top spinners or whatever they’re called—I refuse to learn—and dozens of clean socks. What a dreary summer.”

  “Jessie, if I sent a plane for you, would you consider coming out for a few days to see me? We’d have to stay at the house because I can’t go out yet, but it would be such fun,” Billy pleaded.

  “How soon can that plane of yours be here?”

  “I’ll notify the pilot and call you right back. You’re sure that it isn’t too much trouble, leaving your family right in the middle of the summer like this? Seriously?”

  “Too much trouble? Ha! I won’t even leave a note. Serve the bastards right. Let them go crazy tying to figure out what happened to me, if they even notice. Remember that
old drinking song, Billy, about never trusting a sailor an inch above your knee? It’s the story of my life.”

  Jessica arrived the next day, still divinely droopy, although now, because of the fifteen pounds she’d put on her frail frame, her droop was temptingly voluptuous rather than poetically pathetic. She was close to thirty-eight, but men still sighed when she blinked her myopic lavender eyes at them through the careless tangles of her cloudy haze of bangs, which she absentmindedly trimmed herself with her cuticle scissors whenever they flopped too far into her vision. Jessica’s husband, David Strauss, was now one of the country’s most important investment bankers, and Billy had long envied her friend her happy, fruitful marriage and her wide circle of friends, her wonderfully organized and complete life, so unlike Billy’s own.

  The two women resumed their conversation right where they had left off on their last visit together some four years before. By the end of two days they had almost filled each other in on the major events of the intervening years, during which they had only talked by phone. Billy now felt well enough to sit outside by the pool in the shade of the lanai, while Jessica sat in the sun nearby and dabbled her toes in the water with delight.

  “Oh, the bliss,” she sighed, after a short silence, “the absolute undiluted bliss of having no children and no husband. You can’t imagine what heaven I’m in. Whatever nirvana is like, it can’t be half as good. Who would want pure nothingness when there’s California?”

  “But Jessie,” Billy said, suddenly vaguely alarmed, “you adore them all, don’t you? It’s not just show-and-tell, your wonderful life, is it?”

  “Oh, Lord no, dearie, I adore that scruffy rabble but sometimes—well—often—oh, I don’t know, perhaps half of the problem is just planning the menus.”

  “Jess, that’s ridiculous. You have the best cook on the East Coast.”

  “Had, dearie. Had the best cook. Mrs. Gibbons left three months ago. It all started about a year before when the girls became strict vegetarians. Well, who can argue with that? It’s so holy and pure and such a ghastly bore. Then the twins refused to eat anything but pizza for six months. Don’t ever have twins, lovey, their willpower is staggering. To keep them from malnutrition, we had to chop up vitamin capsules and sprinkle them artfully around the pepperoni. Mrs. Gibbons demanded a real pizza oven, so I got her one, but the thing that really prevented her from leaving was cooking for David. You know he won’t touch anything that isn’t fine French cuisine, so that kept her pride intact. No, the breaking point came when David Jr. had his religious experience.”

  “Religious what?”

  “He keeps kosher.” Billy stared at her blankly. “He decided he wanted to have a Bar Mitzvah. He started studying Hebrew and reading the Old Testament and the next thing I knew he demanded strictly kosher food. We turned one of the pantries into a little kitchen for him, and he cooks in there on his hot plate, eats off paper plates with plastic knives and forks. But it wasn’t so much that he wouldn’t eat her food—one day he told Mrs. Gibbons not to go near his kitchen because she was trayf. She started thinking about how she had made his baby food for him, never using the canned stuff, and her feelings were so hurt that she just packed up and left. I don’t really blame her, but since then I’ve had a dozen cooks. They all say they didn’t know they were supposed to run a restaurant and flee in the night.”

  “Oh, poor Jessie.” Billy rocked with laughter at her doleful friend. “Sorry, but it’s the idea of David Jr. brewing up his own chicken soup. Does he light the candles on Friday night too?”

  “Of course.”

  “Have you ever thought of getting in touch with your local branch of Jews for Jesus?” Billy choked.

  “Bite your tongue. It’s bad enough as it is, but at least I know what it’s about.”

  “So you did bring them up as Jews after all,” Billy said.

  “Oh, no, only the boys, dearie. The girls are Episcopalians, baptized in the church I was baptized in. It’s rather like the Rothschilds, you see—the boys have to carry on the tradition of the father’s family, but the girls can pretty much please themselves.” Jessie paused and looked at Billy sideways. Satisfied that what she had been observing in her friend’s face for the last few days was no illusion, she turned away from the pool and changed the subject. “When are you going to stop playing at good soldier and tell me about it?”

  “Tell you what? I’ve nothing to hide. I’ve been complaining about my poison oak since you first arrived and felt better with every little whine and whimper. Some good soldier.”

  “Come on.”

  “Whatever are you getting at, Jessie?”

  “Vito.”

  “Vito?”

  “Your husband.”

  “Ah.”

  “Indeed, the very one,” Jessie persisted, implacable. “Vito the bridegroom.”

  “He’s wonderful, Jessie. I never knew a man could be so incredibly dynamic, so creative, so energetic.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I never could fool you.”

  “Is he a ten?”

  “Oh that, definitely. Trust me on that.”

  “All right, then, what’s the horrible drawback, the intolerable dilemma, the unforeseen and absolutely permanent catch?”

  “Who said anything about a catch?”

  “Every wife I know, including myself, sometimes at night when I’m getting ready for bed and David is fast asleep. Every woman’s husband is hopelessly irredeemable in one way or another.”

  “Ellis wasn’t,” Billy said in a muffled voice.

  “Ah, Billy, that’s not fair. You were Ellis’s child bride for seven whole years. You never really became an ordinary wife because when he was well he simply did everything to please and protect you and make you happy. His own life’s work became second to you. And then, after all, once he was incapacitated, you could hardly be an ordinary wife either. I’m not criticizing you, love, but you never had to learn to play by the rules of the game.”

  “Game? Rules? You sound like one of those books about dressing up in black leather tights and waiting for your husband with six ounces of gin on the rocks in one hand and a humble request for a raise in your household allowance in the other. Not that from you, Jessie, I just don’t believe it.”

  Jessica shook her head at Billy in amusement mingled with pity. Why wouldn’t Billy deal in realities? Leather was beside the point, and, anyway, David was freaky about Fernando Sanchez’s satin teddies. “The game,” she said slowly, “is called being successfully married. The rules are all the compromises you need to make to get there.”

  “Compromises,” cried Billy, stung. “Compromises are all I’ve been doing since we got married. One fucking compromise after another. Little Billy, meek and mild. Believe me, you wouldn’t recognize your old friend if you’d seen me up in Mendocino being The Producer’s Perfect Wife.”

  “And hating every single second of it.”

  “Just about, all except the. times when we were alone together at night. The only time I think Vito knew I was really there was when we were making love. I wonder if he’d even recognize me if he couldn’t see my pussy—the rotten son of a bitch.”

  “Well then, get a divorce if it’s that bad.”

  “Are you out of your mind, Jessie? I’m absolutely mad about him. It was hard enough to get him—I’m not about to let him get away. I couldn’t live without that fucker.”

  “Then start compromising. Gracefully, willingly, graciously, and with a whole heart.”

  “Oh, God, that’s just asking too much! No, come off it, you sound like those neurotic put-upon Brontë sisters all rolled into one. Haven’t you heard of Women’s Lib? Why the hell shouldn’t he do some of the compromising?”

  “He already has. He married you against his better judgment and is willing to live your way knowing that ten tenths of all the people he meets probably think of him as some sort of kept man, and he hasn’t let that bother him or forced you to make changes in your life-sty
le.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “It’s a lot, Billy, especially for someone like Vito with all that Italian male pride you talk about so much.”

  “I suppose you’re right. All right, you are right. But still—” Even Jessica couldn’t really understand, Billy thought bitterly. What compromises was she really thinking about? The usual New York-Easthampton-Southampton banking crowd’s discreet infidelity, the times one or another had too much to drink at a party, the real but hardly earthshaking irritation over an annoying habit David didn’t even know he had? After all, for all her bitching, what was David doing now? Mucking about in boats, with his children as any normal man would do during a summer’s vacation instead of concentrating his whole mind, soul, and will on making a piece of film come out right. And anyway, what else could Jessie expect, since she got seasick?

  Jessica looked at Billy with an almost maternal glance, compounded with tenderness, foreknowledge, and a reluctance to hurt. Poor Billy, she thought, dissatisfied already, and yet how can anyone tell you the truth about what goes on in the heart of any marriage that endures? Who can teach you about the times when the well of love seems to run almost dry and you just have to keep going on faith, the moments when both of you wonder what wonderful other thing might have happened if you hadn’t met each other? Who can really explain about learning to communicate your true feelings to each other in spite of the traps of words and gestures—the days, even months, when communication somehow fails? And that wasn’t even taking into consideration the unescapable problems of a grande dame mother-in-law and the strange difference that becoming the father of five children makes in a man who was a passionate ten. No, she really couldn’t help Billy. Even the best of friends can’t help each other on the earthquake-quicksand landscape of marriage, except in superficial ways—by letting the other know she wasn’t alone.