Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  Vito stood next to her, tall, tough, yet every inch a grandee, seeming as sure of himself as any conductor of a great orchestra, possessed of the same magic authority that holds together every element in the performance of a symphony or the making of a film. They couldn’t stop looking at each other in bashful wonder at what a handsome pair they made.

  “You and Nellie and Gigi and Zach and your mother and all your relatives,” Vito said.

  “They’re my family too, so how can they never talk?”

  “I’ve just realized that you may have one fault.”

  “Already?” Sasha demanded, affronted.

  “You make sense.”

  Gigi raced into the Dôme ten minutes late, and was led, by one of the young women who worked at the headwaiter’s desk, through a long, mirrored corridor where tables lined both walls and every word that was said could be overheard. Beyond lay two smaller rooms, the last one for people who wanted ostentatious semiprivacy and the middle one for people who wanted to talk comfortably without being overheard, but still feel as if they were in a restaurant and not in a chic Siberia.

  Vito had chosen a table in the middle room so that Gigi’s reactions would be reduced by her high visibility and the fact that she’d be surrounded by four other tables of people.

  “Sasha, I’m sorry I’m late. Dad? How wonderful! You look fantastic. In fact you both do. But, Dad … what are you doing here?” She kissed both of them and sat down next to Sasha.

  “Did you tell him?” Gigi hissed at Sasha out of the side of her mouth.

  “Tell him what?” Sasha quavered.

  “That you have to talk to me, of course,” Gigi snapped. “Really, Sasha! Dad, listen, Sasha and I have something we have to talk about. I hate to ask you to join your own table, but I don’t have much time.”

  “Actually …” Sasha said. She stopped dead and looked at Vito in worshipful despair.

  “Gigi,” Vito said, “Sasha wanted to tell you something herself, but she’s been struck dumb, so I’ll tell you for her.”

  “Can I order first? Whatever it is, I have to get back to the office in three-quarters of an hour, and I don’t want another bagel lunch like yesterday.” Gigi studied the menu, one of the longest in town. “This is so complicated. What are you having, Sasha?”

  “We’re having the veal and chicken sausages with the warm potato salad,” Vito answered.

  “ ‘We’? Who invited you? Dad, you’re horning in on a girlfriend lunch, you’re not supposed to do that. Where are your manners?”

  “Actually …” Sasha said and stopped again.

  “Actually, I was invited,” Vito said.

  “Sasha, why did you invite him? You’re insanely polite. How can we talk while he’s listening? Sorry, Dad, but you’ll have to consider yourself uninvited. I love you, but go away, just for now. We’ll invite you another time, I promise.”

  “Gigi, Sasha and I got married yesterday.”

  “Very funny. What do you think about the Chinese chicken salad? Good choice?”

  “Gigi,” Sasha said, “we really did.”

  Gigi put down her menu and looked at both of them. She looked closely and then she leaned back and looked at them from as much of a distance as she could manage. She cocked her head and studied them as if they were a rare form of animal. She put her elbow on the table, rested her chin on it, and contemplated them slowly and at length.

  “Oh, wow,” she said quietly. “Oh, wow.”

  “I know it’ll take you a while to get used to the idea—” Vito jumped into her silence.

  “You and Sasha, you two don’t even know each other! I’ve never introduced you, you’ve never mentioned each other to me. Zach and I used to kid about it. Do you both realize what that means? I must have unconsciously known this would happen, I must have seen it coming a mile away! I mean—why did I never introduce you? There’s got to be a reason, doesn’t there? You’re perfect for each other! Just perfect. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to either of you—but why didn’t I just introduce you sooner, that’s what I can’t understand. God, I must have wanted to keep you all to myself, both of you, what an evil, jealous, withholding rat-fink I am! I hate and despise people like me. Oh!”

  Gigi started crying and kissing them simultaneously, all over their faces like an agitated puppy, so that their table was the focus of a dozen pairs of fascinated eyes and ears.

  When she could finally speak, she asked, still sobbing, “How long have you known each other? How’d you manage to keep it a secret from me? Not that I blame you, considering how I’d kept you apart. I guess it must have felt sort of … delicate, dating each other, especially waiting for Sasha’s divorce to become final.” She blew her nose and dried her eyes, her tears overcome by curiosity.

  “We met yesterday,” Vito said proudly.

  “Now you’re kidding me.”

  “On the beach, out at Malibu. Vito picked me up.”

  “I didn’t even know who she was,” Vito added.

  “Then how could you be married?”

  “We eloped to Vegas last night,” Sasha answered.

  “Oh, how sad! All alone, just the two of you. But how romantic! Just the two of you on the spur of the moment—crazy love …” She shook her head in a multitude of emotions.

  “Actually, we had somebody as a witness,” Vito said with a sinking feeling. She’d have to know eventually.

  “Who?”

  “My … brother,” Sasha said.

  “ZACH! You invited Zach to your elopement and you didn’t invite me! How could you do a thing like that?” Gigi shouted. “I was home all last night, all you had to do was call and I’d have been there like a shot—I’m so insulted—my feelings are so hurt—”

  “But Zach introduced us!” Sasha protested. “He literally chased us off the set—that’s where we picked each other up—and told us to get out of his hair and have lunch without him. If it hadn’t been for Zach, it wouldn’t have happened—not as quickly, that is. Zach was directly responsible for, well,—Gigi, you know what I mean, and then Vito got all heavy-duty Italian about things and decided he had to ask the permission of a man in my family, for my hand in marriage, and there was nobody to call but Zach, who promptly decided to get all Old Testament about it and barged in and simply insisted that he come with us to Vegas to make sure we got a rabbi and didn’t sneak off to some judge or Elvis impersonator. Really, Zach is just as unreasonable as you said, Gigi. Worse, if anything.”

  “Well … in that case … I suppose I understand, a little. I certainly wouldn’t have cared about a rabbi. But I get to give the reception, not Zach, is that understood?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Totally.”

  “I just realized,” Gigi said, turning pale with excitement, “I have two stepmothers now, you and Billy! You’ve got a tough act to live up to, Sasha, my girl. I expect some heavy-duty competition for my favors. And … my God … sweet little Nellie is my sister and Zach is my—oh, shit!—what is he? I don’t want him, whatever he is.”

  “Your father’s brother-in-law, or your stepmother’s brother, definitely not your uncle, if that’s what you’re worried about. At least I don’t think so.” Sasha thought of her mother and how she would know some absolutely specific Old Testament word for Gigi’s relationship to Zach now that Gigi, all unknowing innocence, had been irrevocably drawn into the Orloff-Nevsky circle.

  “Well, praise Yahweh. Say, are we going to eat, or are you both so much in love you live on air?”

  “We’ll order now,” Vito said. “And, Gigi, don’t tell a soul until we tell you it’s okay. You’re the only person who knows. I’m going to deal with Billy and Josh.”

  “You have many talents,” Vito said in admiration, after Gigi had rushed through her meal and left them alone with each other. “You certainly know how to handle Gigi. What a spin you put on the Zach story, it might have been fatal otherwise.”

  “That’s what best friends are for,�
�� Sasha said smugly. “I didn’t want her to feel bad.”

  “I thought I was your best friend,” Vito complained.

  “You’re my everything.”

  “So will I or won’t I get the spin?”

  “You’ll get the unvarnished truth, dearest love. You’re old enough to take it.”

  “I guess that’s the first installment.”

  “You wanted to see me, Vito?” Josh Hillman looked at Vito coldly. “If it’s a legal problem, there are firms that specialize in industry law, we handle very little of that.”

  “It has nothing to do with the film business, Josh,” Vito said, staring with much harder coldness at this man who had been, until a month ago, his wife’s legal husband, although, from what little Sasha had told him, he had never deserved to be married to her for a minute.

  “Then how can I help you?” Josh asked unwillingly. He had no reason to ask Vito to leave his office immediately except a powerful desire to do so, and that, for a man as formal and punctilious as he, wasn’t enough.

  “I came to tell you that Sasha and I were married yesterday.”

  Josh was struck by a feeling of blatant savagery such as he had never before felt in his well-ordered, conservative life. He jumped up and came around his desk at Vito, his fists clenched.

  “How dare you!”

  “We love each other. You have no further rights over what she chooses to do.”

  “You filthy son of a bitch! I know all about you, I know who you are and where you’ve been, you unsavory bastard, I know how you treated Billy and why she divorced you and how you forgot you had a daughter until Gigi was sixteen. I know how Billy financed Fair Play, I know how hard she worked on Mirrors and the way you rewarded her for your Oscar, I know why she had no problem in becoming Gigi’s legal guardian, I know you for the lowlife, bloodsucking, stinking piece of dirt you are—and you think for one minute that you can get away with marrying my wife?”

  “Sasha is not your wife. I understand your feelings, but she is no longer your wife. You caused her to divorce you.” Vito spoke evenly and took no step backward.

  “For fucking good reasons, Orsini, as you’ll find out.”

  “I know all about her love life in New York, it’s the first thing she told me, right off the bat, so there’d be no problems about it later. Look, Josh, Sasha and I are one of a kind about what we did before we met each other. We understand that jealousy is born when you love someone, that it’s natural, pardonable in its own way. But we’re different from you—for us, when an old love is dead, it causes no more jealousy. It’s over, finished, forgotten. It doesn’t live on as a cancer, eating us up day by day, and killing the new love. Sasha is mine now, and I don’t care how many other men she slept with before me. I’ll make her happy, I promise you.”

  “Do you think I give a fuck about your promises? Do you think you can patronize me with dusty philosophical observations? Do you think I don’t know that you must have been sneaking around behind my back with my wife long, long before I found out what kind of woman she really was? And do you think for one single second that I’m going to let my daughter be brought up with you around? I’ll sue for sole custody, and I’ll win. Sasha is an unfit mother, God knows you’ve proved yourself an unfit father—Nellie will be taken away—”

  “Josh, shut up. You’re screaming like a madman. Call your secretary, I have someone waiting in your anteroom you should talk to before you continue to embarrass yourself.”

  “The hell I will. You don’t give the orders around here.”

  Vito walked around Josh, reached over the desk to the intercom, buzzed and said, “Please send her in.”

  The door opened and Billy walked into Josh’s office.

  “You were right,” Vito said to Billy. “I do need you.”

  “Do you know what this prick has done to me?” Josh attacked Billy immediately, accepting her appearance without surprise, so lost was he in his frenzy of anger.

  “I’ve known for several hours,” Billy said, sitting down calmly. “And I think it’s perfectly splendid.”

  “Billy, you’re out of your mind,” Josh shouted. “You’ve been brainwashed. This is Vito, the man you told me to get out of your life at all costs.”

  “I remember who he is, I loved him enough to propose to him. And I remember you, Josh, and I know who you are. You’re a good and dear friend to me, someone whose counsel I value, someone I’d be lost without, but right now you’re not acting like the Josh Hillman I recognize.”

  “I won’t let him near my daughter!” Josh raved on as if she hadn’t spoken. “He’s stolen my wife and now he wants to steal my daughter! He has no idea of what I can do to him, I’ll bury him with legal bills, Nellie’ll be eighteen before I give up custody—”

  “Josh. Sit down and calm down.” It had been a long time since Billy Ikehorn had spoken to him in that tone of voice, and from years of dealing with her at her most dictatorial and impossible, from years of automatic obedience, Josh responded enough to sit on the chair behind his desk.

  “You and Sasha are divorced, Josh,” Billy said emphatically. “You know, as a lawyer, exactly what divorce means. If you call her your wife, it’s because you happen to be temporarily hysterical. You’re not thinking like the Josh Hillman I trust, the Josh Hillman who’s a pillar of the Los Angeles establishment, the Josh Hillman everyone comes to for help and wisdom.”

  “Billy, if you think I give a flying fuck for my image, you’re crazy! I want justice, I want to make them suffer for what they’ve done to me.”

  “My God, Josh, you are a pathetic case,” Billy said without changing her exacting tone of voice, more fit to lay down an injunction than for any other purpose. “You want justice? For what? What injustice have you suffered when a wife you wouldn’t forgive, wouldn’t touch, wouldn’t try to understand, finally left you, without you trying to stop her? What injustice have you suffered when she’s found someone who loves her unconditionally?”

  “You don’t understand!” Josh broke in passionately.

  “I’m afraid I do,” Billy answered. “It’s an old story. You still love Sasha, but you couldn’t manage to forgive her, no matter how you may have tried—if you tried. You don’t want her to be happy. Ever. You’re eaten up from head to toe with jealousy because she loves someone else. You want to ruin that happiness out of distorted, dark, venomous jealousy. You’d kill them both if you could.”

  “How can you, of all people, try to reduce this to mere jealousy? Don’t you remember what Vito was like after he won the Oscar?”

  “There is no such thing as ‘mere jealousy,’ Josh—I’ve been there and I know. I’ve also come to one single conclusion after half a lifetime in Hollywood: there should be a year’s period of grace for everyone who wins an Oscar, it’s a dangerous time for them. Vito didn’t handle it well, but not as badly as some others.”

  “But what about Gigi?” Josh raged on, his mania unabated. “You told me yourself what a rotten father he’d been. Why should I allow my daughter anywhere near him? You can’t expect me to forget that, that above all. No, Billy, I’m sorry, but no, never, he’ll never live in the same house with Nellie. Never! I’ll fight them to the end!”

  “Vito, would you leave me alone with Josh for a minute?” Billy asked.

  As soon as the door was closed behind Vito, Billy moved her chair closer to Josh’s and spoke in a low, intent tone.

  “You weren’t always such a perfectly upright innocent father yourself, were you, Josh? There was a time, my good old friend, not much more than seven years ago, when you divorced your wife of twenty years, breaking the heart of a wonderful woman who had done absolutely nothing to deserve it, and you gave her complete custody of your three teenaged children.”

  “What the hell has that got to do with it?” Josh was so astonished at this unexpected attack that his fury was checked in his surprise. “Joanne and I had reached a point of no return.”

  “As the French would say, Jos
h, permit me to laugh. You were a man of forty-two having a secret affair with a girl of twenty-six, you were willing to give up everything in life for her, including your three terrific children, you were madly, wildly in love, and you didn’t give a damn about all your responsibilities or duties, parental or otherwise. You were going to start fresh, leave your old life behind … all for the love of a charming redheaded girl …”

  “How? … You can’t prove any of this … you’re imagining …”

  “Didn’t you realize that Valentine and I were friends? Close, intimate friends? She told me, Josh, Valentine told me everything, including the fact that you fell in love with her the day you met her, doing business for me, if I’m not mistaken. Vito has only known Sasha since your divorce, I know that for a fact. I also know about that stolen week at the Savoy in London, Josh, that week you spent with Valentine, I know about Valentine’s apartment where you were with her during those many evenings Joanne was told that you had to work late, I know about the weekend when you, still very much married, took Valentine to New York and went to Lace’s party—even John Prince couldn’t resist telling me that little tidbit—don’t look at me as if I’m a ghost. Valentine told me because she needed to tell someone and she knew I’d never repeat a word. She told me because she loved you very much. I know that she’d have married you … if she hadn’t found out that she loved Spider more. Valentine and Spider. My Spider. I could indulge in a wallow of disgusting jealousy myself, if I’d let myself, but I won’t.”

  “Jesus, Billy—you knew, you knew so much and you never said a word …”

  Billy got up and stood behind Josh and put her arms around his shoulders. “You’ve been unlucky in love, my dear, but you’re still the most attractive bachelor in town … there’s hope for you yet. Third time lucky … I know you never loved Joanne, not like Valentine and Sasha, so we won’t count her.”

  “Billy … I don’t … I just don’t know what to do.”

  “Accept it, Josh. Vito knows what he should have been to Gigi, he knows it so deeply and so clearly that he’ll be the best stepfather Nellie could have. He’ll make up for everything Gigi missed, and more. And you’ll have joint custody, that’s always been in the agreement. Just accept it. Let it go. You’ve caused enough pain … you’ve had enough pain.”