“You’re going too fast! Wait just one hell of a little minute here! You didn’t say anything about an advertising budget. No advertising, no Enchanted Attic.”
“What sort of budget did you have in mind?” If he hadn’t had a lifetime of practice in keeping a straight face, he’d have had to smile at her naiveté.
“Well. Hmmmm … we’re pitching a seven-million-dollar account just to try to sell one brand of swimsuits to one type of woman, not all of whom swim … and here we’re talking an explosion of kids … upper-income kids, right up to preteen, all of whom have birthdays and Christmas … let me think … to make a dent with a chain of a hundred and two stores … I’d imagine,” Gigi said, guessing wildly, “you’d need lots more than that for print advertising to establish the client’s identity. After all, Indigo Seas already has an identity, and The Enchanted Attic doesn’t. Oh, absolutely more. You’d want national print in the glossy magazines and local print in the city magazines and then you couldn’t possibly leave out the parents’ magazines or the women’s magazines … I’m not even thinking about TV … say twelve million the first year.” She held her breath.
“I’d say … eight. Until the metamorphosis is complete, the ads will be less than full-throttle.”
“But, Ben, it pays to advertise.”
“At the end of the year, I’ll reevaluate.”
“I don’t know,” said Gigi, and stopped.
“Go on, say what’s on your mind,” he urged, laughing. “It’s not as if you won’t eventually.”
“I don’t know, as the saying goes, whether to shit or go blind. YIPPEE!” She collapsed on the sofa, hugging herself in delight waving her boots in the air. “Wait a minute,” she said in the middle of her transports. “You won’t change your mind, will you? Is this a done deal or isn’t it? Shake hands on it,” she demanded.
“It’s a deal, here, let’s shake.” She might still ask for a percentage of the profit, since it was her idea, even after they shook on the deal, Ben Winthrop thought, or Billy or Spider might advise her to ask for it, and he’d be obligated to go along. But why worry now? After all, he could be wrong and The Enchanted Attic might not pan out. Worst case, he’d have a loss against his pre-tax profits.
“Let’s have a drink to celebrate,” he suggested.
“Oh. No, I really have to get home. I had no idea it was so late.”
“I’ll walk you to the valet parker.”
Ben’s suite was at a good distance from the entrance to the hotel, and they walked through dimly lit pathways bordered by the lavish displays of flowers for which the hotel was famous, which linked a series of mysterious dark courtyards in which fountains played. As they entered the last courtyard, both lost in thought, Ben stopped and drew Gigi close to him. She looked up in surprise and saw him smiling down at her.
“Sweet cousin-once-removed, you’re quite a revelation,” he said, and bent over and kissed her hand, his long mouth, even in that quick moment, quickly possessive, his lips pressing hers with an unmistakable potential for passion. Gigi’s entire body stiffened in instant resistance. He released her immediately so that she didn’t need to draw away. Mistake, he thought, furious at himself, big mistake. What had come over him to make such an obviously premature misjudgment? She had entranced him tonight, but that was no excuse for his stupidity. He never jumped the gun, damn it! It wouldn’t happen again, he promised himself in a cold rage of pride.
“I’d like to see the agency,” Ben said, in an impersonal tone, as if nothing had happened. “When’s a good time?”
“I’ll have to tell them first.” Gigi matched his cool. “I haven’t thought that far ahead.”
“Will you call tomorrow and let me know? I’ll be back here by six.”
“Absolutely,” she said, moving as quickly as she could toward the lobby lights, where the darkness of the pathways of the hotel disappeared.
As Gigi drove off, Ben walked slowly back to his suite, still thinking about Gigi’s reaction to his kiss. Yes, of course he had chosen an inappropriate moment, but her reaction seemed excessive. Was she gun-shy? Was she taken? One thing he was sure of, there was nothing specifically personal about it. He was sure she liked him, or he would never have touched her. She was a puzzle, Miss Gigi Orsini, and one day he would solve that puzzle, he promised himself. But he would do it with such patience, with such cunning, with such invisible planning, that she would come to him of her own accord. He owed himself that for her resistance, for her stiffening at the touch of his mouth. No woman had ever reacted in that way before.
One kiss, Gigi thought, as she drove home, just one perfectly natural kiss, from a man who knows nothing about Zach, and you act like a teenager. Why did she feel so … shaken … guilty … no, as if she’d just escaped … danger? Well, that was totally ridiculous. She wouldn’t allow herself to be irrational. As she ran up the stairs to her bedroom she decided on the perfect antidote to her lingering feeling of confusion. She’d phone Davy and tell him the incredible news. Even though it was late, even if he was asleep, he was her teammate and should be the first to know.
4
Oh, Gigi, sweetheart, this is no way to live.” Zach Nevsky’s voice contained the wholehearted power of persuasion that freed actors to attain heights they never imagined they could reach. His love for her added an irresistible weight to the deep emotion of his words, his voice roughened at the edges by insistence.
Gigi felt an unwelcome wariness spike suddenly into her mind as they lay entangled on their bed. She had been inhaling, her nose buried in his chest, whiffing up the complicated infusion, the utterly satisfactory soup of masculinity that was particular to Zach after they made love, so blissfully content that she felt as if she were floating weightlessly, expanding cell by cell into an aromatic heaven, until his words broke the spell.
She had heard similar words before, she had heard that tone of voice before, she had let Zach lure her up to the top of a high mountain when she barely knew how to ski, because of his ability to talk her into following him anywhere. She had been brought down from that mountain in tears and terror, lucky only to have broken a leg, and if anyone in the world was immune to the tenacious persistence, the dogged conviction, the great-hearted bossiness of Zach Nevsky, who believed so deeply that he knew better than you did what was right for you, she was.
“Zach, darling,” she answered, trying to summon her reason as well as she could while lying captured in his arms, relaxed, grateful, deliciously sore, possessed from head to toe. “I’ve barely started at FRB … it’s only been three days. How can I possibly take any time off? Unless … well, I suppose I could leave Friday after work and come back Sunday night—now that’s a possibility, if the flights are right.”
Zach had unexpectedly come back to Los Angeles in the late afternoon of the day following her dinner at Billy’s, and she’d found him arriving home just as she returned from the office. In this preproduction phase of his Kalispell epic, major budget problems had declared themselves and Zach had flown in with certain of his co-workers to confer with the studio chiefs before things got out of hand. Tomorrow, after a full day of meetings, he intended to fly back to Montana with the problems solved and saddlebags stuffed with an infusion of fresh money.
“I’m not talking about a weekend, Gigi—I can’t stand my life when we’re apart,” Zach told her. “When you walked in tonight and I saw your little face, I knew right down to the core that you had to quit this new job and marry me and be with me, the two of us together, with none of this ridiculous wait-and-see stuff. It’s a question of survival Gigi. We’re doing something criminally insane, darling, we’re wasting all the time we should be having together, we’re losing something irreplaceable.”
As she lay unmoving on the bed, he bent over her face intently, with all the massive maleness he commanded. Gigi looked up at him, at the dominating way in which his head sat on his strong neck, at the arrogance of his reckless, prominent nose with its broken ridge that was ma
tched by the determination of his demanding mouth, and she mentally dug in her heels.
“Zach, we’ve had this conversation before,” she said. “What’s changed in our circumstances?”
“Look, when I left for Montana I was so full of this new picture and its possibilities that I blanked on the amount of time I’d committed to, I put the fourteen-week shooting schedule out of my mind, I didn’t admit to myself that we’d be apart again for months and months—but now—hell, being away from you is taking half the fun out of making this picture.”
“You should have thought of that before you made your decision. The shooting schedule hasn’t changed, and God knows, we talked it over for hours.” Gigi tried not to let her irritation show in her voice as she moved away from him and drew the sheet over her legs.
“I know we did, darling, and it’s all my fault. Totally, absolutely my fault.” He was so utterly contrite that Gigi grew more annoyed. It wasn’t fair of him to insist on having his own way, no matter what mistakes he made and admitted to.
“Your last two pictures were made on location in New York and Texas,” she said evenly, “and I couldn’t go along. We met on weekends when it was possible, which was next to never, because you mostly had to work straight through. Next you had your choice of directing three films right here in Hollywood, but you were determined to do this one.”
“Why the hell didn’t you insist that I turn it down?”
“God damn you, Zach! Now you’re blaming me because you went ahead and did what you were dying to do!” Gigi disentangled herself completely and propped herself up on one elbow.
“You’re right to be mad at me. I’m mad at me! Mad as hell, darling. But we could have it all if you’d only marry me, don’t you see, isn’t it evident?”
“What I see is that you could have it all, Zach, and I’d turn into a kind of privileged camp-follower. Whenever your job left you time for me, I’d be there for you … if I hadn’t gone raving mad in the meanwhile.”
“Come on, angel, don’t talk dumb. There’s a whole life there for you—it’s the most beautiful country that ever was—you could be hanging out, making friends, the producer’s wife is a nice woman, she’ll be around, and you’d meet people in the town—you could come to dailies, in fact there just might be a chance I could wangle you a job in wardrobe, even though you’re not in the union—there must be ways to get around—”
“Shut the fuck up, Zach Nevsky!” She sat up so quickly that he jumped back to avoid her head striking his chin. “Those are insulting suggestions and you should know it! Hanging out, as if I were in high school. It’s amazing how you can overlook the fact that I have a job right here.”
“Oh, sure, advertising. Big deal!” Zach sat on the edge of the bed, speaking with a clear contempt he didn’t bother to hide. “Great line of work. You know as well as I do that advertising is a legalized form of fraud. My God, nobody needs most of the stuff that’s advertised, they could perfectly well keep their car five more years, drink the well scotch instead of Cutty Sark, use the supermarket brand of toilet paper, eat the cheaper brand of TV dinners—they all taste equally lousy—and give me a break, does one kind of battery really last longer than any other kind?”
“You sound like a bright twelve-year-old who’s just discovered Marxism,” Gigi said firmly. She didn’t want this fight, she hadn’t picked it, but she wouldn’t let him bulldoze her.
“Three days in advertising and by God you’re a convert, you’re actually defending it,” he said, grinning at the sight of her stubborn face. “This Archie character had the incredible chutzpah to tell you it was an art form, and you didn’t pack him off to a good movie?” Zach mocked her from Olympus, secure in his belief that film and theater were the only lasting art forms of the twentieth century. “You should have told him what George Orwell said—‘Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.’ ”
“Look, Zach, let’s not get into that art-form discussion right now,” Gigi said, sitting hard on her temper. She still hadn’t had a second to tell him about Indigo Seas or The Enchanted Attic, for they had fallen into bed with a monster hunger the moment they found themselves together. “Look at the time. Five people will be ringing our bell in a few minutes, and neither one of us can answer the door naked. Art is long and life is short, so get your pants on, darling.”
“Actually the words are ‘Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult, so get your pants on, darling.’ ” Zach grinned. “Bet you don’t know who said that.”
“You win,” Gigi responded, thinking that if you didn’t love Zach, it might be quite possible to learn to dislike him. A man with a phenomenal memory could always find a way to prove himself right.
“Hippocrates. From a Greek pageant I directed in high school.”
“ ‘Judgment difficult,’ huh? I’ll remember that. What should I wear? Where are we all eating?”
“Well … here, actually.”
“You didn’t,” she gasped, incredulous.
“Sweetheart … it’s only a couple of people and we need to talk privately … a restaurant isn’t a good idea … some simple pasta—you know it won’t take five minutes the way you work …”
“Zach, you walk in here unexpectedly, throw me in bed for an hour, make love to me two or three times, start a major discussion about our future, and now you want me to start cooking pasta for a crowd … Have I left out anything?”
“It was only twice, actually,” Zach said hastily, “but you’re right, we’ll go out. I’m sorry, sweetheart, it’s just that cooking’s so easy for you … and … never mind, where should we go?”
Gigi gazed at him, shaking her head. Zach truly looked crestfallen, his big, beautifully muscled, naked body slumped on the edge of the bed. Oh, what the hell, she thought, why not? A little pasta, a glass of wine … she adored feeding people and she hadn’t cooked for anyone but herself for much too long. Zach had to have a tight war plan for tomorrow. He’d assembled his team—his producer, his agent, his chief assistant on the picture, the script writer, and the film editor. Tonight was an emergency council before they went to fight with the studio, and unquestionably the troops had to be fed.
“I’ll make something;” she told him, “it’s okay, I don’t mind, in fact it’s fun.”
She had ten minutes to shower and jump into some pants and a T-shirt before the doorbell rang, Gigi figured. As she toweled herself dry, she excitedly planned a meal for seven people with the stores she kept in the house for herself, and by the time she put a bucket of ice cubes and an array of bottles and glasses on the coffee table in the living room, she had invented an angel-hair pasta served with a sauce derived from vitello tonnato, made of of puréed canned tuna fish, tiny defrosted green peas, capers, anchovies, olive oil, chicken stock, chopped parsley, and chives. There was always a hunk of aged Romano cheese in the house to grate over everything, there were loaves of Italian bread and containers of ice cream in the freezer, there were plenty of greens for a big salad. Probably not her finest hour, Gigi thought happily, as her experienced hands flew over the chopping board and deftly operated the can opener that defeated Zach’s always clumsy kitchen efforts, but it would fill seven stomachs.
“Toots, could you pass more pasta?”
“Sweetie, is there some more sauce down near you?”
“Hon, where’d the other loaf of bread go?”
“Darling, do you have a little garlic in the kitchen?”
“Kiddo, where’d you put the cheese?”
“I’m allergic to anchovies. Do you have a can of tomato sauce?”
“Kiddo, could you bring out another bottle of that red?”
“Anybody see any chocolate sauce?”
“Mind if I check out the fridge for strawberry ice cream?”
“Pasta, toots! We need more pasta down at this end!”
“Hon, is there more salad left anywhere?”
“I could use a clean
plate here, sweetie.”
“Anybody see any chocolate sauce?”
“Wasn’t there any strawberry ice cream?”
“Darling, would you get out the brandy? And some glasses?”
“Thank you, Gigi, it was a really lovely dinner, even if you forgot the garlic, even if there wasn’t any strawberry ice cream. It was lovely of you to fetch and carry and pour and serve while we talked our excited grownup talk that was too complicated for you to be expected to understand it. It was lovely of you not to mind being treated like an incompetent waitress and a thoughtless hostess. It was lovely of you not to notice that nobody was sure of your name, toots, hon, sweetie. It was lovely of you not to care that we were too busy with our important business to bother to say ‘please’ or ‘thank you,’ ” Gigi muttered to herself while she busily moved from the living room to the kitchen, beginning to restore order.
“You talking to me?” Zach asked, as he strode back and forth, wide awake and too charged up by the excitement of being on the eve of battle to stop moving.
“No, just keeping myself company.”
“God, what a great group of people! Didn’t you think they were great?” His expression was radiant with enthusiasm; his dark, excited eyes, his full mouth, and his taut, tanned skin all reflected his bursting energy.
“Great,” she assented.
“It won’t be like this all the time, darling, we won’t have to waste time worrying about money problems, although you can never ignore them, but that great mood everybody had, that essential spirit of a bunch of people all working together, all passionate about it, gaudy with passion, that’s what you’ll adore!”
Gigi stopped with a stack of dirty plates and turned to look at him.
“Where exactly am I going to adore it?”
“Come on, sweetheart,” Zach said impatiently, “in Montana. You know you’re coming back with me, why are you being so fucking pig-headed? You can be a little stupid sometimes for a smart chick, did you know that?”
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