Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  Two large tears plopped out of Sasha’s eyes and dribbled down her cheeks, merely enhancing her Edwardian beauty, that classic Gibson Girl profile, that lavish luster of black hair and black eyes and white skin that, in combination with her marvelous body and irresistible walk, had made her the best lingerie model on Seventh Avenue before she joined Gigi in Scruples Two.

  Gigi looked at her in astonishment. Sasha, the famously hard-hearted tormentor of the male sex; Sasha, who had brought Josh Hillman, the most eligible single man in Beverly Hills, to his knees in one evening; Sasha, the sweepingly tall, the domineering, the possessor of all the answers—weeping? She’d never seen a tear form in those eyes before.

  “But, Sasha,” Gigi protested, watching more huge tears appear, “it shouldn’t make any difference to you. It won’t change anything between us, you’re always out of the office with your assistants, why in God’s name are you crying? Stop it, or at least get out a Kleenex, this is getting embarrassing … people are looking at you.”

  “Let them look,” Sasha gulped as a narrow ribbon of tears dripped off her chin and hit the tablecloth. “I’m not ashamed of honest emotion.”

  “If you’d just explain … What emotion, exactly? It can’t be that you’re going to miss me at Scruples Two, because we hardly catch sight of each other at work anymore, it can’t be envy of my new job, because you have a fantastic job of your own … What’s this all about?” Gigi demanded sternly, handing Sasha a napkin. She hadn’t gone through a morning of confronting Spider and Billy to let Sasha, of all people, make her feel like a betrayer.

  “It … it just won’t be Scruples Two anymore if you go,” Sasha finally said, getting her voice under control, although the tears continued to come.

  “Be reasonable! It’s a huge business and getting bigger every day. I’m not irreplaceable.”

  “Sure, someone can copy your writing style, but you and me, oh, Gigi, we were Scruples Two before there really was one … it was just the two of us, me and my ratty old collection of Christmas catalogs and you and your idea of how to make a better one … If you leave, the spirit, the essence goes out of the whole thing.”

  “Sasha,” Gigi said gently, “that spirit was gone ages ago, as soon as Scruples Two became a definitive success and the marketing guys came in and started to make the big-money decisions. You’re remembering the start-up time, when Spider and Billy and the two of us were all creating something together and taking a gamble that we were right. It’s like people in the third year of a Broadway success wishing they were back rehearsing before the first-night curtain went up.”

  “Oh, Gigi, we had so much fun!” Sasha spoke in a voice of loss and sadness that Gigi thought was strangely unjustified, considering that her friend now had what any woman would consider a perfect life: a husband she adored, a heavenly baby girl, a job she did brilliantly, and all the money anyone could want.

  “But aren’t we still having fun?” Gigi asked, deeply puzzled.

  “No! We’re grown up now. Grownups don’t ever have fun the way we used to, and if you don’t know it now, Gigi, you will, just you wait.” Sasha seemed full of a strange, inappropriate grief.

  “Good Lord, you’re twenty-six, you’re married and a mother, if you weren’t at least a little bit grown-up now you’d be in trouble,” Gigi said, trying to ignore her friend’s unaccountable misery and bring matters back onto a plane of reality.

  “Do you think I don’t know all that?” Sasha flashed.

  “Well then?” Gigi challenged.

  “Oh, it’s all right for you,” Sasha said. “You’re playing house with my loopy genius of a brother—you can flit around and try this and sample that—you’re nothing close to a grownup yet and you don’t have to live up to … to … live up to things.”

  “Are we talking about my quitting or the married condition?” Gigi asked tartly.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Sasha said in confusion, “whatever you say. You tell me, Gigi,” she implored.

  “No, you tell me.”

  “Oh, Gigi,” Sasha burst out, “Josh is such a grownup. The real, solid, serious, unchangeable thing. The first few months it didn’t seem to matter that he’s fifty years old, but … well, I guess I didn’t expect that he’d be so deeply involved in things I don’t really care about … I thought we’d be like every other newly married couple, just starting out together, but now … oh, hell!”

  “Look, Sasha, be sensible,” Gigi said firmly. “Josh was the senior partner at one of the most important law firms in Los Angeles when you met him, he was a pillar of the community, you knew that going in, didn’t you? Did you expect to live in a small cottage by a waterfall as the wife of the most important lawyer at Strassberger, Lipkin and Hillman?”

  “How about finding yourself suddenly filling the shoes of the wife of one of the leading fundraisers for the Music Center, Cedars-Sinai Hospital, the County Museum of Art, and at least a half a dozen other worthy organizations? How about getting to know all the top good-works wives in town and having to keep on excellent, lunching terms with them when they have daughters my age and they all know his first wife and adore her? How about black-tie benefit dinners three nights a week, with endless speeches, and you can’t sneak out early because your table is too conspicuous or Josh is on the dais? How about he secretly thinks I should be home taking care of Nellie instead of going back to work, because that’s the way it is in his world, but he’s being understanding about it, very obviously understanding, because he knows that he has to compromise, considering all the things I’ve compromised about?”

  “It sounds worse than awful!”

  “Yeah,” Sasha sniffed in rebellious resignation.

  “Can’t Josh stop doing some of those things?”

  “He’s already disconnected himself from half of the stuff he used to do—I only mentioned the causes he’s so committed to that he won’t drop them. I can’t expect him to eliminate his social conscience … one of the things I love about him is that he’s such a good man, so genuinely good, so genuinely sweet … oh, shit! I wish he weren’t. Or rather, I wish he were the way he is, without being involved in doing all that stuff … does that make sense?”

  “Not a hell of a lot.”

  “Why should it be that the things men do best and that give them so much pleasure aren’t the things their wives wish they were doing?”

  “Ask your ‘loopy genius of a brother,’ ” Gigi said grimly.

  “Not you too?”

  “Me too.”

  “Well, at least I warned you, you can’t say I didn’t,” Sasha reminded Gigi virtuously. “I told you not to get involved with him.”

  “I remember distinctly. You admitted you were jealous. You said Zach was ‘yours.’ And you called me a slut.”

  “See? I told you we had fun!”

  3

  Now, only four days after her lunch with Sasha, Gigi found herself settling down in an office with David Melville, after as hasty a lunch as Le Dôme had ever served. Thanks to the old-fashioned scale of the building, their office was a real room rather than the usual creative team’s cubicle. Both of them had their feet up on their desks and their shoes off.

  “Let’s share your thoughts about swimwear,” David said invitingly.

  “The whole subject is sheer bloody hell for anyone over eleven,” she answered firmly. “What I want to know is more about Victoria Frost. Her name wasn’t even mentioned during lunch. You boys put on a terrific flimflam, lots of war stories about the accounts that got away, lots of good jokes you can tell a woman without being sexist, I almost got a contact testosterone high from the proceedings, but the ghost of the highly absent Miss Vicky seemed to be sitting right there at the table with us. Tell me all about her.”

  “I’ve only been here six months, and she never seems to be around for more than a week at a time,” David said lamely.

  “You’ve got to know something, Davy, my lad—come on, give!”

  “I don’t have any
information on her personal life. Honest. But professionally she’s tough and experienced and she’s totally about management. She’s our official rainmaker, she’s perpetually on the hunt for new accounts, and whenever we present our ideas to a prospective client, she’s always an essential part of the pitch team. Victoria relates exceptionally well to the client’s point of view—the client’s ‘culture,’ as we quaintly put it, as if they were a foreign country.”

  “What if the client’s culture rejects our ideas?”

  “Then we come home, to our own little culture, and bang our heads against the walls until we get new ideas or die, whichever comes first.”

  “She doesn’t try to persuade the client that our ideas are good?”

  “That’s the creatives’ job. She reminds us of what we have to do to keep the account. Compromise is what Victoria’s all about. Also sucking up to the client, otherwise known as building the kind of personal relationship that keeps them happy.”

  “So who really runs the agency?”

  “Huh?” He looked startled.

  “Victoria, or Archie and Byron?”

  “The three of them together. They’re the principals, they own the agency and split the profits, how I don’t know. Arch and By are co-creative directors; Victoria’s the executive director and chief account supervisor.”

  “What happens if they disagree? Do the creative directors prevail, or Miss Vicky?”

  “Now you’re into stuff I really don’t know about,” David protested. “I don’t go to those meetings.”

  “Do you have a theory about why she was so pissed off at me right from the start?”

  “She’s been generally tense lately, and when she gets back from New York she’s particularly unpredictable. But I think that it must have been that you don’t look like a new-hire creative, in that suit you come off looking like management, and that’s an area she’s violently territorial about. Management definitely belongs to Ms. Frost.”

  “But there must be other managers in the agency,” Gigi objected, “other account executives, just as there are three other creative teams, besides Archie and Byron.”

  “They’re all guys, and she’s their absolute capo. She hired every one of them. Advertising in general is a man’s business, and in FRB more than in most. Victoria is the only woman in the place with real clout, and definitely the only one who dresses like management. All the other female creatives wear really casual clothes, except for Ziggy and Joan, both art directors, who’re deeply into bizarre. Arch and By still sometimes dress New York, particularly when they pitch, like they’ve been pitching you. I dressed up today just because of lunch.”

  “Well, at least I know it wasn’t anything personal,” Gigi sniffed, unconvinced. No way would she believe that a dress-code infraction on the part of a new hire could provoke such a hostile reaction. “So back to you, Davy, my boy. Are you married, single, or divorced? We still have all that intimate stuff to tell.”

  “We don’t have time for that now,” he said, dismissing her friendly question. “Swimsuits are the business of the moment.”

  “In a perfect world, no woman should have to expose her flesh in a well-lit public place, with the exception of twenty-five females who were born, nay, genetically destined, to model swimsuits for a brief period in their lives,” Gigi said judiciously. “Perhaps between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, give or take a few years at the high end.”

  “Do you or do you not intend to help me sell swimsuits, or what my mother called bathing suits?” David asked, scowling at her. He couldn’t possibly be in love with Gigi, he promised himself. Please God, somebody tell him that it hadn’t happened as soon as he’d been able to get his first good look at her. He didn’t have time to be in love, advertising was a sixteen-hour-a-day calling, not a job, and he’d vowed to put his private life on hold for at least a decade.

  “Where’s that cappuccino you were so hot to make me this morning?” Gigi asked longingly, with a tiny wistful sigh that made the hair rise on his nape.

  “Swimwear’s a vast market, Gigi,” David insisted, feeling himself, to his horror, taking incredible secret pleasure in just saying her name. “Lots of magazine ads, lots of editorial support in the magazines, lots of in-store tie-ins. After all, women have to cover their bodies when they swim, and they can’t wear the same one suit forever.”

  “Would that they could. And would that I had the Fig Newtons I remember you pushing earlier. I’m still hungry.”

  “Research shows,” David went on firmly, ignoring his burning desire to bring her, on bended knee, every crumb of food in the office, “that the most common areas women complain about are heavy hips, expanding waists, pot bellies, jiggling bottoms, and other normal, post-puberty, gravity-induced changes. The master designers at Indigo Seas have devised many ways to minimize these problems. Have I lost you already, Gigi? Gigi! You may not know it, but two other creative teams, Kerry and Joan and John and Lew, have also been put on the Indigo Seas pitch. We’ve got heavy internal competition here. They’re sitting in their cubbyholes as we speak, trying to come up with something so good that they’re going to make us look sick. Will you, for Christ’s sake, pay attention?”

  “I’m sorry, Davy, I’m in another place,” Gigi said without any hint of repentance. “I was just trying to decide if I’m ready to reveal the details of how I lost my virginity, and I discover I am.”

  He ignored her, his heart pounding. Had he really been naive enough to hope she was still a virgin? “Indigo Seas specializes in suits that give the large woman a shot at looking okay. We’ve got a clearly defined target customer—the latest Lou Harris poll shows that fifty-eight percent of Americans are overweight—”

  “So they claim.” Gigi shrugged indifferently. “My sign is Aries, by the way.”

  “Why the hell did they hire you? That’s what I want to know.” David took off his glasses, slammed them on the desk, and glared at her. Aries, his fatal love sign. He’d been in love twice in his twenty-eight years, each time with an Aries. Even the cosmos was against him.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Do you hate me because I rejected your sinister organic apple?”

  “Don’t make everything so damn personal, for crying out loud! Victoria spent weeks just getting us invited to make this pitch, and so far you’ve been one hundred percent negative about the prospective client. But you were hired to manufacture yearning, Gigi, you have to make a woman yearn to buy an Indigo Seas suit.”

  “No woman in her right mind yearns to buy anybody’s swimsuit, not Cole, not Gottex, not Sandcastle, and a large woman yearns less than any other,” Gigi said stubbornly.

  She really wasn’t ready to get down to work yet, Gigi thought rebelliously. Archie and Byron still hadn’t found the time to introduce her around the office, there were no Indigo Seas suits around to give her an idea of what they looked like, and trying to think copy in a vacuum was something she wasn’t used to; she had always written from the inspiration of merchandise, or at least photographs.

  “We have to force them to yearn,” David insisted.

  “That’s not logical. You can’t force yearning, my boy. Yearning is involuntary, look it up in the dictionary.”

  “Not at FRB, Gigi. That’s the crucial difference between thinking catalog and thinking advertising. Here we invent yearning. Better get with the program, Gigi. Let’s see a little enthusiasm, damn it!”

  Irritated, Gigi stood up and threw him a snappy salute. “But I am enthusiastic, sir! Show me that target again, I’m ready to take off at dawn. Bombs away, sir!” He wanted enthusiasm, he’d get enthusiasm.

  “Stop kidding around.”

  “Yes, sir.” She saluted again.

  “I mean it. We have work to do.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “If you salute again, I’ll tear your arm off.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Sit the fuck down!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “If you ca
ll me ‘sir’ again, I’ll rip your head off.”

  “Whatever you say, Davy, my pretty one, my lovely lad,” Gigi said, sitting down and feeling more like herself. A touch of rebellion, even purely symbolic, refreshed her as it always did.

  “It’s such a kick having a teammate … I’ve never had one before … perhaps I’ve been carried away by your seniority.” Gigi flitted her eyelashes at him and, just for the hell of it, favored him with a shamelessly flirtatious smile, the one she secretly thought of as “old three eyes,” irretrievably, irrevocably inescapable. Was David aware that when he took his glasses off he had the most amazingly huge and interesting light brown speckled eyes? Like the girls in the old movies, nearsighted men always had an edge when they took their glasses off.

  “Why are you smiling at me like that?” David demanded, wondering how his private life could be put on hold for a decade when the only private life he’d ever want was sitting right there in the office with him.

  “Because I’m trying to drive you crazy—sir.”

  “You don’t really give a shit about swimsuits, do you?”

  “No team spirit, sir, that’s always been my problem.”

  “It’s a seven-million-dollar account, small for some people but major for a boutique like us. And Indigo Seas is a solid company with terrific growth potential.”

  “Oh, wow!”

  “You have the vocabulary of an eight-year-old.”

  “Seven million, hey, that’s almost enough to make a really cheap movie,” Gigi teased. The poor benighted guy was just too serious. She owed it to him to make him smile.

  “Gigi, we’re still wasting time.”

  “On the contrary, we’re getting to know each other, getting the personal stuff out of the way, as Archie suggested. Or was it Byron?”

  “I don’t want to hear how you lost your virginity, Gigi, I’ve changed my mind. I never want to know.”

  “Ah, gee, that hurts my feelings. If you won’t listen now, you’ll just have to go through it later. It’s not a subject we can skip, like third grade. But okay.” She grabbed a yellow pad and a pencil.