Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  “I used to be a chef,” Gigi explained. “I adore thinking about food.”

  “A charming talent,” he said, regret mounting each minute. Without appetite, what was beauty?

  “Renzo, here,” Gigi said, pointing, “these two huge, empty spaces at the stern of the Zodiac Deck, are they the bases of the funnels?”

  “Indeed, yes. They serve no other function but that of style. And the open space behind them, totally at the stern, is another sun deck.”

  “What if the ship carried two large helicopters? Could you use the funnel bases as hangers? Could the helicopters land on that sun deck?”

  “Certainly, but we have no plans for two helicopters. Why?”

  “I’ve been thinking … let’s say you’re docked for the day in London—if a group of women wanted to visit a couture collection in Paris, rather than sightseeing in London, they could do so easily by helicopter and get back to the ship by dinner, couldn’t they? Or if you were docked at Piraeus, instead of fighting the smog at the Acropolis, they could take a day trip to a Greek island or two—there would be a hundred ways to use them.”

  “Have you discussed helicopters with Ben?”

  “No, but I will, now that you’ve told me you can accommodate them.”

  I could find space for even four helicopters if you could accommodate me, Montegardini thought, accommodate me with your green eyes open and imperious, accommodate me mockingly and flauntingly, with all your melting, absorbing, exasperating charms laid bare until I was as exhausted as the victor on a battlefield. He bit the inside of his lip and thought of Ben Winthrop again. A possessive man, utterly possessive.

  “Renzo? Renzo! Don’t you think you could carve out some space from the ballroom—it’s really huge—and make a costume storage and fitting room?”

  “For what purpose, my dear naval architect in training?”

  “For masked balls. I think that there should be a masked ball on each voyage, a ball with a surprise theme, with different costumes each time. They’d have to be bought in advance, stored on hangers, and fitted to the passengers by clever alteration people. I don’t see another inch of space available.”

  “And where would these alteration people sleep?”

  “Perhaps … with the officers?” Gigi suggested in a purring, beseeching tone of voice that made him desperately try to think of his wife’s cats.

  “I will try, Graziella Giovanna, at this stage nothing is impossible.”

  “Oh, Renzo, you’re an angel! If nothing is impossible, wouldn’t you say that you could make the main dining room just a tiny little bit smaller, and add a private party room where people could plan special dinners, one night Chinese, one night Italian, one night—deli? They could reserve it before the cruise and hold birthday and anniversary parties there—wouldn’t it be a good idea?”

  “I’ll see, most cara Gigietta, I’ll try to see if it can be done,” he sighed.

  And you, my enchantingly nerve-racking girl, are a supple, artless devil, an instinctive passionate animal wielding your warm weapons without even realizing it … and I must absolutely throw you out of my office until I regain my senses.

  Gigi found the study of the blueprints so fascinating that by the end of the week she had them all reduced in size and put into a portfolio with the Sizione Maestra, the painting of the Winthrop Emerald, and a set of interior photographs of the suites. This package, with Ben’s enthusiastic approval, was planned to be used as a special advertising supplement, bound separately and inserted into Town and Country, Architectural Digest, and Vogue. Through the use of selected Zip Codes it was possible to mail it to the areas where most of the future American passengers of the Emerald lived. The last page of this section bore only one line of type, an announcement that the maiden voyage of the Winthrop Emerald was sold out.

  “You do not hesitate to count your chickens so soon in advance, piccolla Graziella Giovanna?” Renzo had asked, his eyebrows raised.

  “The maiden voyage will be by invitation only,” Gigi assured him, “direct from Venice to New York. Is that an offer you would refuse?”

  “From you, dear and valued colleague, no offer would ever be refused.”

  Gigi, pad and pen in hand, sat in the jet bringing her back to California, writing a card to go with her gift for Eleonora Colonna, who was going to be sixty-five next week. In the course of the last year, Gigi had made many trips to San Francisco to work with the Indigo Seas designers, and to keep their ad campaign fresh and on course. Her friendship with the matriarch of the family had deepened steadily. Eleonora Colonna’s guest room was where Gigi stayed now, whenever she visited San Francisco, and she knew the large, close-knit family intimately, from all three Collins brothers and their wives, down to the last grandchild.

  During her five days in New York she’d had time to visit some of her favorite hunting grounds for antique lingerie, searching for the romantic, richly decorated, hand-sewn garments created in days when women knew the erotic provocation of suggestion and understood well that a minimum of titillating revelation created a maximum of desire. In a box at her feet lay a true find, a complete bathing costume dating from 1894, a hundred-year-old creation an emancipated woman wore into the water only after a bell had chased all the men from the beach.

  It consisted of four pieces, the first a very wide floor-length cloak made of heavy white linen, deeply flounced and bowed at the hem, and tied at the neck under a double ruffled collar. This enveloping garment totally covered the bathing costume itself as its owner proceeded across the sand. Underneath the cloak, the brave bather wore a knee-length, full-skirted, tightly sashed dress made of thin linen, worn over separate drawers of even thinner linen, gathered below the knees, and falling almost to midcalf. Both dress and drawers were navy and white, with much contrasting embroidery in nautical stripes. The last piece of the ensemble was a striped navy and white band, with a bow on each side, that was intended to sit on top of the head.

  It took Deauville twenty-five years to recover from the sensation caused by that mysterious Italian girl who appeared on the sands one morning and captivated the gentlemen of the town so instantly that within days there wasn’t a pair of field glasses left to be bought in all of Normandy. No one knew her name, although that night everyone at the casino was buzzing about her, even the blasé croupiers. Soon a rumor started that she was named Eleonora. But was she a dancer or was she a duke’s daughter? Was she a blue-blooded lady of virtue or was she an actress? All that could be discovered, by bribing the female attendants who rubbed her dry after her daring immersion in the sea, was that she had the body of a great courtesan, the skin of a young child, the face of an angel, and the modesty of a nun. Also, she was merely fifteen years of age. Crazed by desire, two young princes sent her presents by means of the bathing attendants. One sent her a diamond the size of a chestnut that had recently been the property of a baccarat-mad maharaja; the other sent her a diamond tiara that had been in his family for five hundred years. All they asked for was a rendezvous with Eleonora as she walked back to the closed carriage that waited for her at the edge of the sands. But she returned the presents without an answer. The two princes observed her through their glasses every day, their hearts so utterly captured that they thought of nothing else. One day, for a sum that would have bribed the President of France twice over, they managed to replace the bathing attendants, wearing their dresses and bonnets. Eleonora, who was not a chatterbox, noticed nothing strange until she returned from her dip in the ocean and went to the changing cabin to have her bathing costume removed. “Why am I waiting here soaking wet?” she exclaimed in astonishment. “Can’t you see that this accursed dress is clinging to me? I shall catch la grippe if you do not make haste. ” But her attendants were so frozen with lust by the sight of the wet cloth outlining her gloriously voluptuous body that they were rendered incapable of movement. “Oh, well, then, I shall have to undress myself,” she announced with an intoxicating shiver, and unbuttoned her bathing costu
me all by herself, for she was a clever and handy girl. At that moment both of the princes flung themselves on their knees in shame at what they had done, for they realized that Eleonora was the one woman each of them would die to marry—their mamas had feared that no such woman existed. Covering their eyes in remorse, they revealed their identities to Eleonora, who replied calmly, “In that case perhaps one of you would have the kindness to give me a towel.” That night, at the casino of Deauville, Eleonora appeared with a prince on each arm. Even the sound of the roulette wheels stopped as she made a regal tour of the private rooms, clad only in her flowing white linen cloak with her long dark hair hanging loosely over her shoulders. Her ornaments were orange blossoms in her hair, for she was far far too young to wear diamonds. The next day Eleonora had disappeared from the beach, and so had the handsomest of the two princes, the one who had been the first to give her a towel. It is said, on reliable information, that they lived blissfully ever after, immigrating to the coast of California, where Eleonora became a princess long before she and her prince renounced their titles to become citizens of the United States. Eleonora’s youngest daughter became the mother of Eleonora Colonna, another great beauty who understands the power of a wet bathing costume.

  With all my love,

  Gigi

  At the bottom of the card, Gigi had carefully done one of her expressive, humorous little sketches of Eleonora at that brief, tantalizing moment for which the gentlemen with field glasses waited for so eagerly, when she was forced to emerge from the gentle sea at Deauville after her swim and rush toward the attendants holding out the billowing cloak in which they would rapidly envelop her.

  Satisfied, Gigi tucked the card into the box and tied a bow around it. She rang for the steward to tell him that she was ready for lunch. She still had hours left to write cards to go with the amazing five-piece white lace. Victorian “marriage set” she had found for Sasha and the velvet-collared Edwardian dandy’s smoking jacket made by Charvet and obviously never worn, which she’d discovered for Vito. He’d have to grow a mustache to do it justice.

  Gigi arrived at the agency so early on Monday morning that she expected to be among the first hungry souls at Bagel Central. She’d spent the kind of thrillingly sleepless night that comes from overexcitement, obsessed by the plans for the Winthrop Emerald. She’d realized that she was in overdrive at three-thirty in the middle of the night, when she found herself still planning how to con Renzo into making room for a regulation-sized Ping-Pong table on the part of the deck reserved for deck chairs. Ping-Pong was the only sport at which Gigi herself excelled, the only sport at which she believed everyone, no matter how un-athletic, had a fighting chance. After another hour of feverish concentration on a cruise-long Ping-Pong tournament with fabulous prizes, it occurred to her that a Ping-Pong table could be put up and taken down in a few minutes, that it didn’t need a space all of its own, and she finally calmed down enough to plunge into an hour of deep sleep, only to wake up at six as if a fire alarm had gone off next to her pillow.

  “Hi there, Polly,” Gigi said languidly to the receptionist, as she took a plate, hoping that bagels were complex carbohydrates, a question she’d never dared to ask because she feared the answer.

  “Hi, stranger. How was New York?”

  “Fantastic. How’s life at FRB?”

  “Wild. Listen, Victoria wants to see you pronto, the minute you get in.”

  “She’s in already?”

  “Everybody’s in early today,” Polly said with the air of someone who knows something she can’t tell.

  “Which explains why there aren’t any bagels left,” Gigi said with disappointment, putting two sticky cinnamon rolls on a plate and getting hot tea out of a spigot. She carried her breakfast to her office, empty for the moment of Lisa Levy, the talented art director who worked as her creative partner, and decided that nothing Victoria had to say to her was more important than nourishment. She hadn’t made breakfast at home, and she felt light-headed. Her mouth was full when her phone rang.

  “It’s Polly, Victoria wants to know if you’re on your way to her office.”

  Gigi chewed as quickly as she could and swallowed hastily. “How fast can I eat, for Pete’s sake? I could choke to death here.”

  “Bring it with you, she’s in a chop-chop mood.”

  “Screw that. Tell Miss Vicky I’ll be in as soon as I’ve done my Transcendental Meditation and read ‘Dear Abby.’ Without my morning rituals, my day gets off on the wrong foot.”

  “Gigi, please, please, do it for me,” Polly said.

  “Oh, okay.” If Victoria Frost thought she could spoil her morning, she was wrong, Gigi thought, as she walked down the corridor and into the big office in which Victoria reigned.

  “Well?” Gigi said, stopping inside the door. Archie and Byron were standing around looking excited while Victoria tested a fresh pepper grinder that stood next to a large platter of bagels, cream cheese, and smoked salmon.

  “Is this my birthday?” Gigi asked delightedly as Arch and By both moved forward to kiss her hello.

  “It’s a little welcome-home party,” Archie explained. “We missed your cheery face, believe it or not, so we laid on your favorite feast to express our affection.”

  “Now I see what that rush was about,” Gigi said to Victoria, feeling only slightly ashamed of her uncharitable thoughts. “Let me at it!”

  “It was my idea,” Byron said proudly. “Archie wanted to get a cake, but I knew what you liked best.”

  “You were right on the money, Byron the Third,” Gigi said, helping herself lavishly. “Did you have a vote, Victoria?” she asked curiously.

  “I was in favor of a kilo of Beluga caviar and lots of Dom Perignon,” Victoria said, “but I was outvoted. I’ve never really understood bagels. Gigi, fresh pepper for that salmon?”

  “Just a little,” Gigi replied. When Victoria Frost thought of mounds of caviar, champagne, and Gigi Orsini in the same context, something wasn’t kosher.

  “Tell us about your week, Gigi,” Archie said when they’d finished eating.

  “Archie, why don’t you tell Gigi about our week?” Victoria broke in smoothly. Wasn’t it enough that she’d finally agreed to this absurd breakfast without anyone expecting her to listen to any of Gigi’s effusions on cruise-ship data and decor? She’d been waiting for this moment since last Tuesday, six impatient days of imagining how Gigi was going to look when the realization finally came home to her that in her absence the agency had expanded by over a hundred million in billings, had changed from a newly created shop in which she had been indulged and petted and treated like a prodigy, to an agency in which she would merely be another employee, albeit a busy one.

  Byron and Archie had made a case for the welcome-home celebration. In spite of her reassurances to the contrary, they’d felt some minor residual concern about taking the Scruples Two account while she was away. Archie had even suggested giving Gigi the title of “assistant to the creative directors,” but Victoria had vetoed it.

  “The time to give Gigi some sort of a title is when she comes up for her yearly compensation review,” she’d insisted, and she’d made her judgment stick. How like the boys it was to want to rush the rewards to which Gigi would feel entitled. They’d already given her too much more money. A title was all they had left, but Arch and By had no talent for management, they had never understood the discipline of delayed gratification and the necessity of maintaining order among the creatives.

  Little Miss Orsini would have to be rewarded, no doubt about that, but there was no point in overdoing it. Her head, had been enormous even before her first day on the job; she’d waltzed in here full of attitude, but during those delicate days in which they were struggling to get over the hump of being a new boutique agency, there had been no way for business reality to be applied to Gigi—she’d turned into a one-man band. But now, with the gigantic acquisition of Beach Casuals, the picture had changed totally and Gigi was back in perspective.
No more girl wonder, no longer the pint-sized procurer of medium-sized accounts courtesy of the easy generosity of Ben Winthrop, who undoubtedly congratulated himself every time he fucked Gigi that the IRS was paying for it, since advertising was a deductible business expense. Had Gigi ever realized she was the sexual equivalent of a business lunch?

  “Why don’t you tell her, Victoria?” Archie countered. “It’s your baby, not mine.”

  “I don’t care who tells me what,” Gigi said, “if you’d manage to get to the point. I have so much to tell you about the Emerald.”

  “Gigi, it’s almost a year that you’ve been here,” Victoria said, launching, as she had planned to all along, into the role of leader that belonged to her by right.

  “You must know that you’ve proven yourself as a copywriter with the ability to get new business as well,” she went on. “We all realized that you were afraid of the smell of nepotism and favoritism when you insisted that we stay away from the Scruples Two account when you came to work here. However—”

  “ ‘However’?” Gigi broke in. “I don’t like the sound of that word.” Now she knew the reason for the caviar and champagne.

  “However,” Victoria continued with a small smile, as if she and Gigi had a secret between them, “you’ve undoubtedly realized that you’ve had more than enough success on your own to render that particular scruple, for want of a better word, utterly unprofessional and deeply unfair to us, as your employers.”

  “Are you telling me I’m unprofessional, Victoria?”

  “Just the reverse. When you were new and green, Gigi, indeed you were, but certainly not any longer. We all agree that you’ve become a true advertising pro.” Victoria’s smile deepened, as if the understanding between them were stronger than anyone realized. “Before you came here, before you understood the nature of the business, Archie and Byron made a hasty mistake. They allowed you to clip our wings and prevent us from going after an account we’re uniquely qualified to service. Last week I went to see Spider Elliott—he’s been unhappy with Russo and Russo for a long time—and he positively jumped at the chance to have us handle the Scruples Two account … he didn’t even want any other agencies to pitch it.”