Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  “Victoria, the elevator!” Archie announced suddenly, startling her. She glared at him as they squeezed into the overcrowded express elevator that would take them to the fortieth floor of the building, where Beach Casuals occupied three entire floors. Why had Archie imposed his own tension on her ability to immerse herself in a mood of business-as-usual?

  Harris Reeves sported an attitude of vast self-satisfaction, reinforced by his immaculate grooming. If ever she could imagine a man spending longer on getting dressed in the morning than any woman, it was this burnished and buffed little bantam cock with his magnificent head of carefully arranged white hair, Victoria decided, as she smiled at him across a coffee cup. In his first appraising glance she had amortized the cost of her new suit.

  Harris Reeves had pale, clever eyes that missed nothing even as he played the host, his secretaries passing silver trays of coffee, tea, and an assortment of coffee cake that they all accepted but put aside. Only a fool or a far richer man than Harris Reeves would actually bite into a piece of cake at this first stage of an important meeting.

  A few minutes passed in art talk, inspired by Byron’s immediate interest in the three Modiglianis and the two Picassos that adorned the walls of Reeves’s handsome office.

  “You’ll all have to come to my home to see the rest of my collection,” he said, pleased at Byron’s admiration. “I only keep a few of my particular favorites here. Manufacturing swimwear is merely my way of being able to buy art. My wife and I spend every Saturday afternoon doing the rounds of the galleries and the auction houses, whenever there’s anything interesting coming up. And we never miss a big auction in Europe. But tell me, where are the others? I hope their taxi isn’t stuck in traffic, it’s impossible to get anywhere in this neighborhood.”

  “What?” Victoria asked.

  “Their taxi. This New York law of only three people to a taxi makes getting around more difficult every day. Personally, I always use a car and driver, it pays for itself in the end.”

  “What others?”

  “But I told you on the phone that I wanted you all to come to New York, and obviously that included Gigi Orsini and David Melville, the creative team. Surely you understood that.”

  “Mr. Reeves … David Melville hasn’t been with us for at least six months. Lisa Levy, a very bright young talent, has been the art director on Indigo Seas ever since he left. When we talked on the phone, I stupidly failed to realize that you’d want her to be here at this early stage of our learning curve. My partners here are our creative directors—Lisa isn’t at their level. I’m terribly sorry for the misunderstanding,” Victoria said quickly, through dry lips. “I’ll call and have her on a plane within a few hours. She’ll be with us tomorrow, of course. Again, I apologize, I feel terribly foolish.”

  “Well, don’t,” Harris Reeves said heartily. “It comes under the heading of an understandable mistake. I don’t usually make phone calls to a new agency myself, as you can imagine, but I was so fed up with our old agency that I just grabbed the phone. My vice-president in charge of advertising would have straightened it all out with you. This little mix-up will make his day, prove I don’t know everything. More coffee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You didn’t leave Gigi Orsini behind too?” Reeves’s question was sharp and sudden.

  “As a matter of fact—”

  “Well now, damn it, that does annoy me. The Indigo Seas ads depended entirely on the copy, on the concept. Those graphics just underline the terrific sell. You should have brought her, damn it. Gigi Orsini created the campaign that made all the difference for Eleonora Colonna and her boys, surely you realize I know that? We’re a small community in swimwear, and we watch each other closely. Cole, Gottex, we all try to be constantly aware of what the others are doing. Indigo Seas isn’t in our league, but we never ignore them, especially now that they’re selling so brilliantly. Gigi Orsini should have been here today! Here, take my phone, and make that call.”

  “Mr. Reeves, when you gave us your account, you knew that we had Indigo Seas,” Victoria said, fighting for reasonableness.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “We had to resign Indigo Seas, it was a clear case of client conflict.”

  “What difference does that make to me?”

  “When … Gigi was told about the conflict … she, ah, she left the agency.”

  “She did what?”

  “She quit,” Victoria said firmly, feeling the ground open beneath her feet, but determined to present her most tranquil professional face. “Apparently she’d formed a close personal attachment to Eleonora Colonna and the Collins family, and she was upset enough about our having to resign the account to leave Frost Rourke Bernheim.”

  “Well, get her back, damn it! Wherever she is, pay her double, triple, whatever it takes, but get her back! What I’d like to know is why you bothered to show up here without her. She should be immersed in our business from day one. You’ve had more than enough time to get her back. This is a very bad beginning!”

  “Mr. Reeves,” Archie said, “I’ve been supervising Gigi’s copy from the very beginning of her employment with us. I discovered her and brought her into FRB for the express purpose of getting the Indigo Seas account. I can assure you that the quality of the copy for Beach Casuals will be just as good as, if not better than, anything that Gigi ever produced for the Collins brothers.”

  “I’m not interested in anything ‘just as good, if not better’—I’m only interested in using Gigi Orsini’s copy for my company. Nothing else! I’m a collector and I buy originals, not copies, thank you very much! Why the hell do you think I hired your agency? For the services of you three people, when I don’t know anything about you? No, thank you very much! I don’t care if you supervised Gigi Orsini twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Mr. Rourke, you didn’t write her stuff, did you? No, I didn’t think so. A woman wrote it, not a man. Get her back. There’s no point in any further discussion until you do.”

  He pushed his coffee cup away in an unmistakable gesture of dismissal. Archie and Byron stood up, looking at Victoria. Would she tell Reeves that Gigi had left advertising for good?

  “Mr. Reeves, I apologize again,” she said, rising gracefully. “We won’t call you until Gigi Orsini is back at FRB. I fully appreciate your position. I’m more distressed than I can ever say that we had to disappoint you this morning. This bad beginning, as you rightly call it, will have a fresh start, an excellent one, I promise you that.”

  “Good-bye, Miss Frost, gentlemen,” Harris Reeves said angrily. “My secretary will see you out. I’m telling my ad VP to find out where Gigi Orsini is. I’ll give you till the end of the week to get her back. After that, I’ll get her myself.”

  “Jesus, what the fuck are we going to do?” Byron moaned, as they sat huddled together in the back of the taxi they’d finally managed to find. “I wish I could say I’ve been thrown out of better offices, but I haven’t.”

  “There’s only one thing we can do, By,” Archie said. “We’ve got to get Gigi back at any price, isn’t that obvious?”

  “Archie’s right,” Victoria agreed. “You two go to the airport this minute, and wait for the next plane. Don’t waste time checking out of the hotel, I’ll take care of that. Find her and persuade her … offer her anything. You’ll have a better chance without me. She doesn’t like me and I don’t like her, but she can write her own ticket. Don’t hesitate to make any promise, including a partnership.”

  “The thing I’m worried about,” Archie said heavily, “is that Reeves is going to figure out, if he hasn’t already, that he doesn’t need us. He could hire Gigi himself, set up his own in-house agency, build it around her, pay her a sky-high salary, and still save a bundle on the agency commission.”

  “And he’s just the guy to do that,” Byron added from the depths of his gloom. “Any art collector knows enough to try to buy from the artist in his studio rather than from the deale
r—the price is better and they love all that personal contact, makes them feel like patrons, not customers.”

  “His VP in charge of advertising is going to discourage it,” Victoria said. “The guy could easily find himself out of a job if it should ever happen. I refuse to worry about that possibility until you’ve talked to Gigi. She must have cooled off by now. Ten to one she’ll listen to reason.”

  “Why don’t you come back with us today?” Archie asked, panic only half-repressed in his voice. “Even if you don’t talk to Gigi, we need you in L.A.”

  “I have to see Joe Devane this afternoon,” she said with composure.

  “Can’t he wait?” Archie snapped.

  “No, Joe hates to have his appointments changed, even by a half hour. Let’s not forget that Oak Hills bills twenty-five million, let’s not neglect our first account, boys, management can never afford to get sloppy. We’re having a fire drill here, Archie, not a fire.”

  There had been no message from Angus at the hotel, Victoria thought. She wouldn’t leave New York until she’d talked to him and found out what had happened with her mother. Nothing, no ninety-million-dollar account that they were bound to hang on to, one way or another, no Harris Reeves, with his teased coif and second-rate Picassos, was going to prevent that.

  Victoria waited no more than a minute in the reception room at Oak Hill Foods. It was no less old-fashioned than Joe’s own office, but old-fashioned in a reassuring way that impressed everyone with his lack of a need to impress. The events of the morning had been shut out of her mind with her usual firm ability to compartmentalize. Her only interest now was in quickly fulfilling her obligation to Joe and then getting things clear with Angus, even if it meant going to confront him in his office.

  “Mr. Devane asked if you’d care to wait in his office,” his secretary said, approaching Victoria.

  “Isn’t he here, Gloria? How are you, by the way?” Victoria asked the woman she’d known for years.

  “Fine, thanks, Miss Frost. Mr. Devane’s not in, but he’ll be along in just a minute. You’ll be more comfortable in there,” Gloria said, as she ushered her in and closed the door.

  Millicent Frost Caldwell sat behind Joe Devane’s desk.

  “Good, you’re right on time,” she said evenly, glancing at her jeweled watch. “Sit down, Victoria.” She smiled pleasantly and pointed to the chair next to the desk.

  “What—why—why are you here?” Victoria stopped inside the door, too shocked to move.

  “Joe has kindly let us borrow his office, Victoria. He understands that we’re making an attempt at a family reconciliation, and he realizes that it would be difficult to conduct it in privacy at Caldwell and Caldwell.”

  “Family reconciliation? The bloody hell it is!”

  “But that’s exactly what it is,” Angus Caldwell said, stepping out of the deep recess in a window, where Victoria hadn’t seen him.

  “Angus! Why didn’t you leave me a message at the hotel?”

  “He didn’t leave a message because we wanted to talk to you together, Victoria,” her mother answered. “Please sit down.”

  Victoria felt Angus’s hand on her shoulder, guiding her to the chair, and she drew strength from the warmth of his touch. It was going to be all right. If her mother was here, it could only mean that she had resigned herself to a divorce and was going to try to handle it in the way that would cause her the least humiliation. Wouldn’t it be best, wouldn’t any sensible woman want to take that course, to leave her husband rather than be left by him?

  Victoria felt herself grow steady and sure again as she looked her mother over closely, not bothering to hide her cold inspection. The woman still overdressed, she thought with an immediate shiver of physical disdain. The woman still thought that she could compensate for her fifty-three years by wearing a flattering pale pink silk blouse with a high neckline. She still deluded herself that she could distract the critical eye of a much younger husband by the grossly oversized ruby and diamond bird she had pinned to the lapel of her deep violet suit, by the unsuitably heavy ruby and diamond bracelets she wore on her fragile wrists, on which the veins were large and visible. She must spend hours every day working doggedly on her aging muscles, not realizing how dried up she appeared, in spite of her absurdly girlish outline. She had even had her hair freshly set for this encounter, Victoria saw with contempt as she noted the new wrinkles under her mother’s eyes.

  Victoria looked at Angus, who had seated himself in a chair pulled up and turned slightly sideways, so that she was between him and her mother. She sought his eyes, thinking how often she had deliberately dressed for him in the unadorned black that she wore today, so that he could force himself on her while she was fully clothed, playing at rape and taking her standing up behind a door. Oh, how cunningly she had learned to fight him off, delaying, delaying, so that he was aroused to real belief in her unwillingness, so that she heightened the fainting bliss of her final surrender. If he would only look up, he would know exactly what she was thinking, but he directed his gaze firmly beyond her, to a point over her mother’s head, as if he couldn’t allow himself really to see the beauty he worshiped until this was all arranged and agreed upon.

  “Victoria,” Angus said loudly, after clearing his throat, “your mother knows that you and I have been having an affair for five years.” Victoria hardly recognized his voice, so hard and harsh that it showed that he would stop for no interruption.

  “Millicent knows how you led me into it,” Angus continued, like a motor with a voice. “She knows how I lost all my judgment and allowed myself to make love to you, and she knows that this affair has never stopped, even when I tried to get rid of you by sending you to California. She knows how I’ve given in, time after time, to my sexual obsession with you, to my insanity. She knows exactly how crazily I’ve behaved, how criminally weak and foolish I was not to resist you when it first started. I told her everything after you phoned me in Southampton.”

  “But we love each other!” Victoria clung to that certainty in a passion of refusal. “You want to marry me! Have you told her that too?”

  Angus’s inhuman voice continued, his words marching one after the other with a determination that brooked no discussion.

  “I thought I loved you, those first few years—” He took a deep breath, and now he directed his gaze toward his wife. “Yes, Millicent, I was in love with her, madly in love, so deeply in love that I couldn’t think with any clarity at all. But from the time she began to urge me to divorce you, I’ve feared her—love and fear don’t go together.”

  “Did he tell you I was a virgin when he fucked me?” Victoria shrieked at her mother.

  “I always believed there was something unnatural about you, Victoria,” Millicent Caldwell said placidly, in her charming voice. “I didn’t know that particular touching detail, no, but what difference does it make what form your neurosis took? You would have been far better off spreading your charming long legs for every man you met than keeping yourself a virgin for your stepfather, wouldn’t you say?”

  Millicent Caldwell’s curly blond head was held high on her short neck, and she spoke with the clarity and imperturbable precision of all her years of uncontested authority. The feminine fussiness of her clothes and jewelry suddenly seemed symbols of her power rather than signs of weakness.

  “Stepfather? Don’t try to pull that crap on me!” Victoria panted. “You know damn well that I never was Angus’s stepdaughter, that nothing happened until I was twenty-seven—what the hell does his being miserably married to you at the time have to do with a love affair between two adults?”

  “Oh, Angus,” Millicent Caldwell said quietly, with sadness in her voice. “I couldn’t truly credit it when you told me that she had no comprehension … no comprehension at all—”

  “No comprehension of what?” Victoria screamed, twisting her head from one to another, her features set in a hideous grimace of disbelief. “An imaginary relationship? Not even a relations
hip—you know, don’t dare tell me you don’t, that ‘stepfather’ is nothing but a fiction, a convenient word you’re trying to use, without the slightest legal or moral justification. For Christ’s sake, I was sixteen before I ever laid eyes on Angus!”

  “Poor Victoria,” her mother said. “Do you imagine that anyone but you and Angus—and I—would believe that there wasn’t anything sexual between you for eleven whole years? You were such a mature young girl, he was such a lusty man … who would believe that the two of you weren’t sneaking off behind my back and sleeping with each other for years and years? The only question would be when it started and where … in New York, in Southampton, in Jamaica, or in the South of France? ‘How long did they wait?’ That’s the only question people will ask. You two had every opportunity … and I was much older than Angus, wasn’t I? In fact,” she said smiling gently at herself, “I still am.”

  Millicent Caldwell examined her bracelets briefly. “That’s what they’d say, you know, no matter how I insisted that there wasn’t one word of truth in it. They’d think I was trying to protect you both, but people will never let me play the saint, even if I wanted to. They’d so much rather believe the worst, don’t you understand that by now? A juicy international sex scandal? An incest scandal? Really, Victoria, where’s your common sense? The trouble with you is that you don’t see things from any point of view but your own. There’s not one person I know who wouldn’t remember seeing something going on between you and Angus. The telephones would be jammed with divinely gossipy calls between my best friends and my best friends. No one’s good-natured or high-minded enough to be cheated out of that satisfaction.”

  “So they’d talk! So what? Angus, do you give a shit what people say when they’d be totally wrong? Well, do you, for the love of God?” There was the first note of urgent terror in her inextinguishable defiance. As she had listened to her mother’s words, so relentlessly logical, so loaded with implacable worldliness, Victoria had finally become aware of the beginning of a change in the air of the room, as if oceans had turned into ice, as if mountains had melted.