Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  “Of course not, she’s around here somewhere, probably doing their laundry.”

  “I don’t get it. I thought that with a great full-time, live-in nanny you wouldn’t have to do all the scut work, and just look at you … Why don’t you get another nanny if she can’t handle it?”

  “She can, Gigi, she can. Nanny Elizabeth’s the best in the West, and I’m afraid I may be driving her crazy because I won’t let her do everything. But if I don’t feed the boys, and burp them and change them and put them down and get them up, they’ll end up thinking she’s their mother, not me. This is the most important time of their lives, crucial time, Gigi, and if I miss it I can never get it back. Did you know that if people grew at the same rate as babies do in their first year, we’d all be about a hundred and eighty feet tall? So you see …” Billy’s voice trailed off at the thought of the immensity and importance of her task.

  “But, Billy, twins … Aren’t you supposed to have help with twins?”

  “In theory, of course, but the people who decided that never stopped to think that one twin could end up not getting as much maternal attention as the other. I can’t risk that. They’re four months old, a very impressionable age.”

  “Personally,” Gigi said, prudently suppressing a smile, “I don’t remember anything about being four months old.”

  “You think you don’t, but everything that happened made a difference. Everything, believe me.”

  “No doubt, but it’s too late now. Listen, Billy, there’s something I want to tell you …”

  “Gigi, it’s more important for you to listen to me now. There’s something you’ve really got to understand before you have children yourself.”

  “I’m not planning any, trust me.” Gigi allowed herself a giggle at Billy’s new piece of bizarre thinking, since it was directed at her.

  “You never know, and unless I make you realize the truth this minute, there’s a chance that I might not remember, because people forget the first months of their children’s lives the way they forget childbirth … having them is already a blur.” Billy spoke in a voice that a prophetess might envy. “Now listen carefully. Babies are a lot smarter than anybody realizes.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m sure they are, especially Hal and Max, but, Billy, I came to …”

  “Gigi, how do you think babies control you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Control. They can’t talk, they can’t walk, but they control you. I’ll bet you haven’t the slightest idea of how they do it.”

  “You can’t leave them alone and you won’t let the nanny do it, so you think they control you,” Gigi said, trying to restore reason.

  “Wrong!” Billy sat up. “That’s just what everyone says, because they know nothing, nothing!” Her voice lowered to an intensity that made Gigi lean forward in amazement. “They control you with their eyes, yes, just their eyes!”

  “Sure, Billy,” Gigi agreed quickly. Like purple aliens from another planet, spaceship residents visiting in the middle of the night, of course they did. Hal and Max controlled reckless, impulsive, billionairess Billy Ikehorn with their wondering baby eyes. Should she make an immediate excuse to leave the room and phone Spider, she asked herself. Did he not realize how totally obsessive Billy had become—just obsessive, or was it really crazy? Or did her weirdness seem natural to him, since the twins were his first children too?

  “I can tell that you don’t believe me,” Billy said, brushing her hair back in a gesture too tired to be impatient. “Just bring me that blue book over there on my desk, the one that’s open.”

  Gigi hastened to do as she was told.

  “Thanks,” Billy said, trying to find a particular page in the book, which was entitled The Interpersonal World of the Infant. “Now listen. This is about what happens during the first three-to-five month period in a baby’s life, and that’s exactly where the boys are. Are you paying attention to me?”

  “Yes, Billy.”

  Billy looked at her sharply to make sure. “Okay … here it is. ‘The infant takes control—over the initiations and terminations of direct visual engagement in social activities …’ What’d I tell you? There’s more, and I’m quoting here, ‘The visual-motor system, is … virtually mature …’ Did you hear that, Gigi, mature, and then he says that ‘when watching the mother and infant during this life period, one is watching two people’—people, Gigi—‘with almost equal facility and control over the same social behavior.’ So! What did I tell you? Equal facility! They’re four months old and I’m forty and we’re equal! And it gets worse,” Billy said dolefully, and read on. “ ‘They can avert their gaze, shut their eyes, stare past, become glassy-eyed. And through the decisive use of such gaze behaviors’—decisive, Gigi!—‘they can be seen to reject, distance themselves from, or defend themselves against mother.’ Isn’t that terrible! Oh, God help me,” Billy cried; sighing deeply, “they can reject me.” She took a deep breath and shook her weary head sadly.

  “But they don’t!” Gigi almost shouted.

  “Well, that’s up to them, Gigi. Listen,” Billy said, reading again. “ ‘They can also reinitiate engagement and contact when they desire, through gazing, smiling, and vocalizing.’ That’s the only thing that keeps me going, the reinitiation part.” Billy fell back on the pillows.

  “Who wrote this?” Gigi demanded suspiciously, picking up the book.

  “A famous infant psychiatrist. Daniel Stern. It’s my bible. I wish I could understand everything in it, but it gets very complicated. Still, you see I’m right. Hal and Max control me, I can’t help it.”

  Gigi bent over the page Billy had been reading from. “Wait a minute, Billy, he says that ‘the mothers give the infant control’—you left that out. You don’t have to give them control.”

  “Yes you do. You’ll see. Try to force a baby to look at you when he doesn’t want to. It absolutely, positively cannot be done. Or just try to make them look away when they’re giving you that teary, outraged, utterly pitiful glare because they’re unhappy. Oh, I adore them, Gigi, but they’re fiends, utter fiends …”

  Gigi got up, took the book away from Billy, and removed it to the desk. She spoke in the voice of a psychiatric nurse dealing with someone who was fractious and disoriented, but who needed encouragement rather than coddling. “Billy, I’m sure they’ll grow up and be perfectly nice kids. Not fiends. This, as they say, is but a phase. Meanwhile, on another front, I’m leaving Scruples Two to work in an advertising agency, writing copy. Tomorrow’s my last day.”

  “Say that again.” Billy raised herself on one elbow.

  “Come on. You heard.”

  “Oh, Gigi, I’m so delighted for you! That’s wonderful! Give me a kiss!”

  “You’re not … upset?”

  “Of course not! What kind of selfish person do you think I am? I’ve been wondering when you were going to spread your wings, get off this particular branch and fly away. Lord, Gigi, when I was your age I’d spent a year in Paris on my own and lived in New York and held down an exciting job, I’d had all sorts of lovers and then I’d married Ellis and I’d been to state dinners at the White House in my Dior ballgowns and he’d bought me Empress Josephine’s emeralds and the ranch in Brazil and the place in Barbados and I was on the Best Dressed List—heavens, what hadn’t I done, years before your age! You’ve always been a late bloomer, and Zach is your first real romance. He’s wonderful, of course, but you haven’t really … well, had a lot of experience, shall we say?”

  “Forget about my shortcomings, Billy,” Gigi pounced. “Let’s talk about your lovers—you’ve never mentioned that little item before. Could you be more precise? Some specific details?”

  “They’ve passed into history,” Billy laughed. “You heard it once, but from now on I’ll deny it,” she added with a renewal of her habitual energy. “I’ve been worried about you. Zach is away so much, and your job isn’t nearly enough for your scope, but you seemed so content to let things go on as they were …
I didn’t want to stir things up in your little love nest. This is great news, just stupendous! What kind of agency? Is it that new place that was trying to recruit you before the babies were born? Frost something?”

  “Right, same place. Archie Rourke, Byron Berenson Bernheim the Third, and Victoria Frost.”

  “Oh yes, I remember, Millicent Caldwell’s daughter,” Billy said in the voice she used unconsciously when she spoke of those few women she considered her peers. “What’s the daughter like?”

  “I haven’t met her yet. But the guys are wonderful.”

  “Married?” Billy asked sharply.

  “No they’re not. God, you’re conventional.”

  “You will be too, when you’ve been married three times. Just watch out for them. No office romances.”

  “But weren’t you Ellis’s secretary?”

  “That was the exception.” Billy shrugged and blushed faintly. “I still don’t recommend it. Does Spider know?”

  “Yes, I have his blessing. He understood perfectly, even why I have to leave so quickly.”

  “But, darling, we can’t let you go without a going-away party. Josie can arrange it in an hour.”

  Gigi growled and complained, but Billy, already at the phone, dialing Josie at the office, paid no attention. As she heard the familiar sound of Billy issuing a long list of detailed instructions, Gigi realized that this was an opportunity to get away before she had to hear anything more about the powers of the fearful, mind-bending twins. She kissed the top of Billy’s head, waved, and disappeared down the corridor, closing the door behind her. As she walked toward the staircase she crossed the path of the admirable nanny, carrying a basket of newly washed baby clothes.

  “Nanny Elizabeth, may I ask you something?” Gigi said, stopping her. “Is it my imagination, or is Mrs. Elliott overly … involved … in taking care of the boys?”

  “My first-time mothers are always over or under, Gigi. I’ve never had an even-keeled one yet, not in twenty years,” the sturdy Midwestern woman said, smiling and unsurprised. “Now, Mrs. Elliott’s definitely way over—I think it was that book that did it—but there’s nothing to worry about, she’s as strong as a horse, and I give it another month or two to taper off to normal. When they’re under-involved, I do get concerned. It’s not that I mind the extra work, but the mothers themselves miss so much.”

  “Do you believe that babies actually control adults with their eyes?”

  “Well, of course, everybody knows that, Gigi. And if it weren’t with their eyes, it would be with something else, count on it, the little devils.”

  After Gigi left, Billy noticed the box tied with blue satin ribbon. She opened it with immediate curiosity, realizing that Gigi had become too caught up in the discussion about the twins to give it to her. Under layers of tissue she found a peignoir made of gleaming satin in a particularly voluptuous shade of pink. It was elaborately decorated, with deep insets of Valencienne cream lace at the throat. Lace insets, four inches apart, ran vertically down the length of the garment all the way to the hem, where the lace foamed into a wide flounce that trailed on the floor. On the arms of the peignoir, more lace fell from mid-arm to the wrist.

  Entranced, Billy carried the peignoir into her bathroom and put it on in front of a full-length mirror, pulling it closely together so that her jeans and shirt were completely hidden. Another woman looked at her from her mirror, a woman with many a seductive secret, a woman she had forgotten she had ever been. She gazed at herself with astonishment and an immediate feeling that she was startled to identify as sexual arousal. Good grief, what was going on here, Billy asked herself, opening the card that Gigi had written to go with her gift.

  Gabrielle, yes, indeed, that Gabrielle, the divine one who invented “Le Coucher de Gabrielle,” always said that this peignoir was her lucky charm, for she wore it for her debut at the Folies-Bergere. Her debut took place on a night in the springtime, it took place, of course, in Paris, and it took place at a time when all women, no matter what their position in society, wore five layers of undergarments, fastened together by an infernal system of straps and hooks and buttons that had been invented so that it would take a very long time indeed for them to be removed. Women, especially our divine Gabrielle, did not wish to seem as if they could be easily conquered by any man. Every woman knew that men only wanted one thing of them, and this one thing they were determined not to surrender, for their Mamans had told them of the dangers of allowing men to have their way, and their Mamans were wise in the ways of the wicked world. Gabrielle, who lived on very few sous in a tiny attic with a view of the tops of the trees of the Parc Montsouris, was a dreamer by nature, and as she watched the buds on the trees swell in the purple twilight, she thought of all the unmarried men, all over Paris, who were, at this very minute, going home to their empty bachelor apartments. Oh, softhearted Gabrielle! These men, dangerous and wicked though they were, she told herself, must be lonely in their empty rooms. She felt pity for them, a pity that grew deeper as a new moon rose and the evening star spoke to her. Wasn’t there anything that a charitable girl could do to make them happier, she wondered, without, of course, surrendering that precious thing that was of great price? Night by night Gabrielle meditated until she arrived at an idea that no one in the history of civilization—or at least in France, which is the same thing—had ever had before. What if a woman, a woman as demure and chaste and lovely as Gabrielle herself, were to permit these poor bachelors to watch her undress for bed? What if she were to arrive on the stage of a theater, well-covered, it went without saying, in her pink satin and cream lace peignoir, for which she had saved all her extra sous for three years? What if she were to allow her peignoir to slip to the ground, while a pianist played light classical music to which she would listen, unaware of the eyes upon her? What if slowly, very slowly, in time to the music, she were to remove, with delicate manipulation of all the fastenings and buttons, the first of the five layers of dainty undergarments that every woman wore? And another and another? And yet another? Of course, she would never remove the last layer, the chemise and the knickers, for that would not only encourage men to have indecent thoughts, but it would bring the gendarmerie to close the theater. There should be a screen on the stage, Gabrielle realized, so that when she took off that last layer and put on her nightdress, a high-necked white nightdress made of heavy starched linen that no woman need fear being seen in, she could do it behind the screen. And there should be a bed on the stage as well, a simple white bed into which she would slip, taking only two quick steps from the screen to the bed. Perhaps an audience could be found for this decent representation of an event from everyday life, Gabrielle told herself as she made a rendezvous with the director of the Folies-Bergere.

  Ah, Gabrielle, the toast of Paris, Gabrielle who invented le strip-tease out of compassion for her fellow men, why did you never allow any of the men who wanted to marry you and share your little white bed to accompany you home? You could have married two kings, twenty-five noblemen, and two hundred stockbrokers, one more handsome than the other. Was it because each night, after you had given the performance of Le Coucher de Gabrielle, you changed into your dove-gray velvet coat and your hat with the gray ostrich feathers and told your coachman, who drove your four gray horses, to hurry to return to your big house that now looked out on the trees of the Parc Monceau? Was it because you were happily eager to go home without a king or even a stockbroker, and watch over the sleep of your little twin boys? Was it, oh, soft-hearted Gabrielle, because, you knew only too well what happened to women who listened to men, and surrendered that priceless possession they only possessed if no one else possessed it, for such is fate? To say nothing of biology?

  With love from Gigi.

  Billy read the card and laughed and cried a little and resolved to wear the peignoir tonight, for she too had listened to a man, and she, like Gabrielle, had no regrets.

  As soon as Gigi got back to Scruples Two, she made a lunch date with Sash
a, who was free that very day. Sasha Nevsky was the last important person to whom she had to tell her news, except for Zach, who wouldn’t care where she worked as long as she was happy.

  And her father, of course. Vito Orsini was in Europe for the moment, but as soon as he came home she’d have dinner with him and discuss the whole thing. Their relationship had grown close and warm in the past years, and often, when Gigi was alone, Vito would take her out, always to a different restaurant, and insist that she order the most expensive things on the menu, and talk over all sorts of things, with an intimacy she didn’t believe would be possible for a daughter who’d grown up normally in her father’s house.

  “You look awfully pleased with yourself—did someone just give you a lifetime supply of perfect panty hose?” Sasha asked her closest friend, with whom she’d shared apartments in New York and West Hollywood until, little over a year ago, she’d met Josh Hillman, Billy’s lawyer, and agreed to marry him on their first date.

  “I’m so excited and relieved I don’t know what to do,” Gigi admitted gaily. “I was dreading telling Spider and Billy that I’m leaving, but they both think it’s a great idea.”

  “Leaving? Leaving Los Angeles?” Sasha looked bewildered.

  “Of course not, leaving Scruples Two.”

  “What?” Sasha shouted. “You’re doing what?”

  “Stop making that awful noise, for heaven’s sake, it’s not going to bother you. I’ve got that job at the ad agency I told you about, isn’t that terrific?”

  “It’s the worst news I’ve ever heard! How can you do this to me, Gigi? Oh God, I don’t—I won’t—believe it, you’re just springing this on me, as if it doesn’t matter? What ever happened to you to make you so cruel?”