Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  “Why didn’t you check with me in New York before pitching Spider?” Gigi demanded hotly.

  “Check with you? Come on, Gigi, as a pro you certainly realize that management doesn’t find it necessary to ask your permission to go after an account. We took your agreement for granted.”

  “When did all this happen?” Gigi asked, her cheeks flaming.

  “About a week ago—what difference does it make?”

  “A week ago? Spider and Billy knew how I felt. They haven’t called to tell me … you’d think that in a week …” Gigi felt utterly confused as she looked around and saw that Archie and Byron were beaming sunnily at her in spite of the solemn promise they’d broken.

  “Undoubtedly the Elliotts agree with us that you’re a big girl now and don’t need to be babied.”

  “I can see why you can’t write copy, Victoria, you have a knack of choosing offensive words,” Gigi snapped.

  Victoria ignored her. “You’ll be working with Byron as art director,” she said, “and you’ll get a chance to do innovative copy for the catalog.”

  “I did innovative copy for the catalog for years, thank you very much,” Gigi said, standing up, “One of the main reasons I came here was to get away from catalog work.”

  “Gigi, it’s something you can do with one hand tied behind you,” Victoria said impatiently. “Why is it so hard for you to admit that you’ve been standing in the way of our getting an account that wants us as much as we want them?”

  “Thanks for the breakfast,” Gigi said, “but you didn’t need to fatten me up to cushion the news.”

  Quickly she turned toward the door so that she wouldn’t have to look at Archie and Byron’s smirking, betraying, self-satisfied faces. She’d believed that they were stand-up guys, but now she knew she’d been wrong, charming though they were. Wasn’t charm an essential part of creative directors’ equipment? She was astonished and deeply disappointed that they’d gone sneaking behind her back or, at best, colluded with Victoria.

  If Victoria honestly considered her such a pro, she would have met with her about the best way to go after the Scruples Two account, instead of waiting to pitch it when she was safely out of town. And, Gigi thought, if such a meeting had taken place, she now felt confident enough in her own abilities to agree with Victoria that Scruples Two was fair game.

  “There’s more news, Gigi. Sit down, don’t rush off,” Victoria said quickly.

  “What kind of news?” Gigi turned back and saw that the three of them had identical expressions on their faces, expressions of gleeful victory.

  “Great news! Incredible news!” Archie said, “We’ve got Beach Casuals!”

  “I don’t fucking believe it,” Gigi said, stunned. She knew the swimwear industry inside out by now, and she knew what this meant.

  “Believe it!” Archie exalted. “Believe ninety million bucks a year!”

  “Oh, my God—that’s fabulous … glorious … but … but …”

  “But what?” Byron said. “You know there are no ‘buts’ with a ninety-million-dollar account.”

  “But … it’s a conflict with Indigo Seas.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Gigi, that’s not a ‘but,’ ” Byron laughed.

  “Nevertheless, there is a conflict,” she insisted.

  “Of course there is,” Archie said, “That’s why we resigned Indigo Seas.”

  “The most incredible thing was that Beach Casuals happened the same day as Scruples Two—we all sat around in here and got drunk, we were so stunned,” Byron told her. “You should have been here.”

  “I guess you had to be here,” Gigi said quietly, looking at their excited, elated faces. “Did you have any problem breaking the news to the Collins brothers?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle,” Victoria said smugly.

  “Did they ask if I knew about it?”

  “I told them you were out of town. I’m sure they understood, they’re in business like the rest of us.”

  “Not all of us,” Gigi said slowly. “Count me out.”

  “What are you talking about?” Archie asked incredulously. “You’ve got to be kidding—count you out, what the hell does that mean?”

  “A moment of truth, Arch. I’ve just realized that I’m not built to be in the advertising business. I haven’t become the professional it’s so convenient for you to tell me I am, I—”

  “Victoria, didn’t I warn you she’d be upset—” Archie sputtered.

  “It’s not about Scruples Two, Archie, it’s about duplicity. It’s about breaking a promise to me—a promise you and Byron made before I’d agree to take this job—breaking it because there was an opportunity to get the account and you didn’t want to risk it by trusting me—”

  “Wait, that was Victoria’s idea, not—”

  “It doesn’t matter who planned it, you all went along, didn’t tell me about it for a week, and then hoped that lox and flattery would make it okay.”

  “Shit, Gigi, don’t you have any faith in yourself?” Byron asked.

  “Tons of it, Byron, and I’d even have helped pitch for Scruples Two if I’d been asked.”

  “So that’s the big problem—we didn’t show enough faith in you,” Archie rallied.

  “This isn’t about my ego, Arch, it’s about my fitness for advertising. You guys are in a business that demands that when a big fish comes along, the little fish get dumped out of the aquarium. I get inconveniently attached to my little fish, I get attached to people who’ve been good to me, like Eleonora Colonna and her sons, and I’m proud of the way we’ve built the Indigo Seas business. I know they trusted me … you’ve destroyed that. You all knew how close I’ve grown to the whole family. I understand that you had to resign the account, but couldn’t you—at the very least—have given me a chance to explain it to them?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Victoria said furiously. “You’re not part of management.”

  “It’s not ridiculous, and you know it. This separation of management and creative is totally artificial, a convenient way for you to get and keep power, Victoria. Do you think I can put everything I’ve got into being merely creative—understanding the products, really getting to care about the clients—and then leave them to your tender mercies when there’s a business decision to be made?”

  “That happens to be the way things are in this shop,” Victoria raged. “This agency doesn’t belong to you.”

  “That’s why I’m out of here, Miss Vicky. I can’t live with the way things work in this business—or maybe it’s only in this particular agency. Don’t bother to send me my personalized coffee mug.”

  Gigi walked out of the office, down the hall, and out of the building, and got into her car and drove home.

  “So my poor baby’s out of a job,” Vito said, stroking Gigi’s hand tenderly as she sat having dinner with him and Sasha that same night.

  “Looks that way,” Gigi said, giving him an unconstrained smile. “I may end up sharing Nellie’s room.”

  “What’s a family for?” Sasha asked. “Does that mean I can fire Nanny?”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” Gigi advised her. “I quit catering, I quit advertising, but I don’t have the guts to take up nannying. Anything except that, but thanks for thinking of me.”

  “Would you like to direct?” Vito asked.

  Gigi snorted with amusement. Everyone in Hollywood—sometimes it seemed that everyone in the world, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi of Israel—wanted to direct.

  “I could use you,” he said, only half-jesting.

  “What’s the matter with your current director?” she asked, finding that, as usual, she preferred not to use Zach’s name if she didn’t have to.

  “There’s something going on with him,” Vito said, “that I don’t understand. Long Weekend is written as a black comedy about Hollywood. Many of the characters are far from being lovable—they’re in the industry, and you know what that means.”
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br />   “People like you, Dad?” Gigi grinned impenitently, basking in the happiness that surrounded him and Sasha with enough left over for anyone in their vicinity to be warmed by it. “Regular Boy Scouts?”

  “Don’t laugh, some of them are being directed to lean in that direction. The original blackness is turning bittersweet, and the original bittersweet is getting positively romantic. Once or twice, Zach’s even verged on the sentimental … directing a valentine … and when I scream at him, he tells me he’s directing it the way he feels it. God save me from directors! Who asked him to feel?”

  “Can’t we talk about something else?” Sasha asked peevishly. “After all, he’s my brother and I feel vaguely responsible for him. Now I know why they say you should never do business with family. Let’s talk about Ben Winthrop, boy billionaire.”

  “Gigi,” Vito said, “wait a minute here, you’re the person who thought up The Enchanted Attic and the Winthrop Line, aren’t you? That has to mean, at the very least, that you have a great deal to say about the choice of an advertising agency. You don’t intend to leave those accounts with FRB after the way they’ve treated you, do you?”

  “I’m not going to try to take them away,” Gigi said. “Nothing would be easier, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there’s a big problem involved, something more important than letting FRB keep them.”

  “What could possibly be that important?” Vito stared at her, deeply offended in his well-developed sense of righteous revenge.

  “Oddly enough, the very fact that I do have power over the accounts. I don’t want to ask Ben to move them for my sake.”

  “Why not?” Sasha asked, openmouthed.

  “I don’t want to … owe him. If I ask him, he’d do it in a minute, but then I’d be … oh, damn, how can I say this and make you understand? … I’d be in his control, even more than I am now.”

  “Wait a minute,” Vito said. “You control the accounts, but if you move them to another agency, you’d be in Ben Winthrop’s control … because you used your control? Have I got it right, so far?”

  “Exactly. But only so far.”

  “What your daughter is trying to explain, darling, is that Ben Winthrop’s money is being spent on Ben Winthrop’s advertising, and she doesn’t want to be in control of the way he spends his money.”

  “But Gigi wasn’t shy about getting him to invest in the stores and the ships,” Vito protested.

  “But, Dad, that was suggesting how he spend his money, giving him an idea he was free to accept or reject. Once he’d made his decision, then the agency I worked for deserved the accounts, but I hadn’t controlled his decision.”

  “Hmmm.” Vito thought it over. “So, in other words, you’re not planning to marry him, right? You’re not going to become the client’s wife. Otherwise you’d move those accounts so fast Victoria Frost wouldn’t have time to shit a single ice cube.”

  “Sasha, how can you put up with this?” Gigi asked, laughing, but not denying Vito’s insight.

  “It gets easier with practice. Oh, Gigi, are you sure you aren’t going to marry him? How can you let the man who has everything get away?”

  “Oh, it’s not over yet. I keep trying to imagine myself married to Ben five years from now, or ten years from now, but I can’t manage to get a vision of it, clear or unclear. Something sort of blocks me, my imagination won’t work …”

  “Mine does,” Sasha cried. “I see you and Ben leading the most glamorous life, all over the world—couldn’t you borrow my imagination?”

  “When you met Dad, did you imagine yourself married to him?”

  “That’s not fair! You know that’s the first thing all unmarried women think about when they meet a new man. Is he or isn’t he ‘the one’? And if he isn’t, would I sleep with him anyway?”

  “Sasha?” Gigi repeated insistently. “Answer my question.”

  “I intended to marry him from the minute Zach introduced us.”

  “I rest my case.”

  “What Gigi’s trying to say is that the jury’s still out,” Vito pronounced. “Don’t give up on her, darling, maybe you’ll get to fly in Winthrop’s jet someday. I wish you’d break down and admit that’s why you’re so in favor of this guy—it only goes to prove what the industry has always known; the secret to any woman’s heart is in transportation. If you have a jet and a limo, it doesn’t matter what you look like or how horrible a person you are, you have to beat off the nooky with a stick.”

  “What about a yacht?” Gigi asked. “Or a cruise ship with a helicopter on board?”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Vito said, paying the check. “But sailboats, forget it. Sailboats are a turn-off. Transportation’s gotta have a motor.”

  “Honestly, Sasha,” Vito sighed, as they got into bed, “I don’t know what’s come over these kids—your brother and Gigi, they’re both so full of lofty sentiments and tender, finicky feelings—this younger generation, they’re just too pure to cope with the real world.”

  Sasha giggled.

  “What’s so funny?” Vito asked.

  “Zach’s my older brother.”

  “I can never remember that. There’s something distinctly grown-up about you. I bet you’d never leave those accounts with Victoria Frost.”

  “I’d snatch her baldheaded with a song in my heart. Listen, darling, what’s really going on with Zach? I stopped you from talking about it in front of Gigi, but I’ve got to know.”

  “Damned if I understand it. With any other director I’d say that he’d let himself lose his edge, that he wasn’t hungry anymore, that he was coasting, or that his reputation had gone to his head. None of that could possibly be true about Zach, he’s too fine a director, too committed to excellence, but this material demands constant, unrelenting bite, and his bite goes missing from time to time. I’m having to spend too damn much time on the set trying to second-guess him, with very little result. I lived to do that until I met you and found something that’s more fun.”

  “Could he be having a midlife crisis?”

  “Isn’t he too young?”

  “Not necessarily. Is he behaving like somebody going through a horrible divorce?” Sasha asked, more and more concerned.

  “Yeah, a little, and a little like somebody falling in love with the absolutely wrong person, none of which applies, since he hasn’t dated in months and months … in fact since I can’t remember when.”

  “Good Lord!” Sasha said, sitting up in horrified surprise at this unprecedented news. “Would you say he’s depressed?”

  “He certainly doesn’t seem to be having any fun. Instead of spending his lunch break with me, he keeps listening to Elsa Worthy, who plays the matriarch, a bit part—she was a big star forty years ago and she’s still got some of that old fire, that old charm—she’s giving Zach daily installments of the story of her life in all its misery, like a soap—you don’t suppose he’s fallen for her?”

  “That doesn’t sound like him,” Sasha pronounced, more and more troubled.

  “And then he’s forgetful. Forgetful! Would you believe that yesterday the first AD had to tell him that he was shooting a finished scene twice? And that’s not the only time it’s happened. If I leave the set for five minutes I start to worry.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about all this before?” she demanded.

  “I didn’t want to worry you, sweetheart. I hate to bring the business back home with me, the way I used to do. Officially we should still be on the honeymoon we never had. On Friday, when he called Ma—”

  “WHEN WHAT?”

  “When Zach phoned your mother to check in like a good son, the way he’s been doing a couple of times a week—”

  “Oh, Jesus, Vito! You mean to sit there and tell me he’s calling Ma and he’s not in a depression? He must be like the walking dead! Calling Ma is the last resort—we only call Ma if we’re feeling absolutely suicidal! Oh, my God, look at what you’ve been saving me from—a brother who doesn’t
date—Zach without a girl!—who acts like he’s getting divorced, who’s suddenly lost his short-term memory, who listens to sob stories from the past, WHO CALLS MA—when were you planning to let me know, after he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger?”

  “Sasha, you’re exaggerating,” Vito said patiently. “You told me you’ve always been a little overboard about Zach.”

  “I know I am, but calling Ma! Vito, he’s severely depressed!”

  “Come to think of it, he hasn’t been the same old Zach for a while now,” Vito said, thinking back. “When I went up to Kalispell, and that was about ten months ago, this … change … had already started. It hadn’t affected his work, so I didn’t pay that much attention, or maybe it’s just that we had so much damage control to do that I didn’t notice … but no, you’re right, he is depressed.”

  “Ten months?” Sasha echoed. “I’ve been so preoccupied with Josh and the divorce and meeting you that I’ve barely been able to see Zach in all that time, but ten months of depression, getting worse all the time? Well, we know what miserable, vicious bitch we have to thank for that, don’t we?”

  “We do?” Vito asked in astonishment.

  “Your daughter, your darling baby Gigi, that’s who!”

  “Hey, watch who you call a miserable, vicious bitch!”

  “Sorry, darling, but she is. And what is she doing now, that ungrateful, spiteful, cruel tease, but toying with the affections of Mr. Wonderful, who’s clearly nothing more to her than another scalp to hang from her belt, having already screwed that poor boy Davy Melville right into the ground and out of the office—”