She’d made a resolution, Billy reminded herself, not to jump too quickly into building the new branches, not to make a single important move without the advice of Spider Elliott and Valentine O’Neill. She intended to make them her partners in the new Scruples company that Josh Hillman, her lawyer, would set up. Spider, the former fashion photographer who now managed Scruples, had been the one to supply the key inspiration that had set the right, lighthearted tone for the store’s success, and, God knows, she couldn’t operate without Paris-bred Valentine, her head buyer and designer of the brilliant custom-made clothes that gave Scruples much of its cachet. She couldn’t wait to tell them her plans, Billy thought, as the elevator mounted to the third floor, where the executive offices were located.
Strangely, neither Spider nor Valentine was to be found. Spider’s secretary ventured that he and Valentine had gone shopping. Of all the bizarre ideas, Billy thought; gone shopping where, she’d like to know, when Scruples was the shopper’s chief mecca in the world? Frustrated once more but clinging doggedly to her good temper—probably they’d gone to buy Vito a victory present, something you couldn’t find in a woman’s store—Billy decided to tour her domain, as she often did, pretending that she was an out-of-town visitor seeing it for the first time. But no sooner had she begun to drift as inconspicuously as possible through the ground floor of Scruples, conjuring up the mind-set of a tourist from Pittsburgh, than she was besieged by a dozen women, some of them acquaintances, some total strangers. Each one of them wanted to share vicariously in Vito’s Oscar by congratulating her, by being able to go home and say to as many friends as possible, “I told Billy Orsini how thrilled I was for her and Vito today.” Instinctively, with polite smiles scattered in every direction, Billy fled to her own office and locked the door behind her.
Billy sat at her desk and considered the situation. She couldn’t possibly go home for hours; she didn’t feel like doing a Joan Didion and taking her classic Bentley on a long freeway drive to nowhere, so clearly she had to remain sequestered in here simply because she couldn’t face the barrage of women downstairs. Wouldn’t another woman, on a similar winning day, have stayed to bask in the generous, largely well-meant babble of goodwill from which she had just run away?
Damn it to hell, would she ever stop being shy, Billy asked herself, finally admitting why she was unable to enjoy compliments and congratulations without painful self-consciousness. She’d had good reason to be shy while she’d been growing up, a chubby, embarrassingly dressed, motherless poor relation of all the aristocratic and financially secure Winthrops of Boston, exposed to a score of happily adjusted cousins who, at their kindest, ignored her. She’d had more than good reason to be shy when she’d been sent off to Emery Academy, an exclusive boarding school for future debutantes, where she had spent six unendingly cruel, searingly lonely years as the designated outsider and freak of the class, a girl of five feet ten inches who weighed two hundred and eighteen pounds.
But then she had spent a magical year in Paris and returned, thin and finally grown into possession of her dark and dominating beauty, returned to go to New York and work as a secretary for Ellis Ikehorn, the mysterious multimillionaire whose Ikehorn Enterprises owned businesses all over the world. She had made the very first friend of her life, Jessica Thorpe, with whom she shared an apartment. Jessica lived in New York now, but Billy still spoke twice weekly on the phone to one of her only two real women friends in the world. Dolly Moon was the other.
Two close women friends, Billy mused, not much for thirty-five years. When she was twenty-one she had married Ellis Ikehorn, and from that day until his stroke seven years later, she and Ellis had led a life of international travel during which Billy, with her staggering sense of style and princely jewels, had become a fixture on the Best Dressed List. When they weren’t roving on business they settled for pleasure at their villa at Cap Ferrat, they visited their ranch in Brazil, they stayed weeks at a time in London in their suite at Claridges, then flew off to their seaside house in Barbados or the manor house of their vineyard in the Napa Valley. Their New York headquarters were in their Sherry Netherland tower apartment; their photographs appeared constantly in scores of magazines, they were among the few who had entree into the Olympian level of society around the globe, it would seem that they had dozens of friends. However, no one but Ellis and Billy ever penetrated to the truth behind the screen of the Stardust of privilege that radiated across their life to its single important reality: the closeness of their relationship was the only thing that mattered to them. Entertaining and being entertained, they never made a single new friendship that really mattered, for no one really caught their attention but each other. The magic circle they created of their life, as surely as it protected them, kept other people severely out.
When Ellis had the stroke that incapacitated him in 1970, Billy had just turned twenty-eight. For the next five years, until his death, she had lived almost as a recluse in a Bel Air fortress where all life gravitated around the paralyzed man. Her contacts with other women were limited to the members of her exercise class, women whose poorly concealed curiosity about her had warned her off any possibility of a deeper friendship. Yet, Billy thought, naturally they had been curious, for had she not still been a freak? A supremely well-dressed, thin, and beautiful freak whose wealth actually created her freakishness?
Face it, she just didn’t fit into any of the groups that formed among the women of this one-industry town. She was too preoccupied with her dying husband to join in their gossipy, dressy luncheons, which were often based on the excuse of planning a charity ball. She didn’t belong with the set formed by the wives of studio executives in which each woman’s position was totally determined by her husband’s power in the film business, a fierce Hollywood version of Washington, D.C.’s, political wives pecking order. She wasn’t remotely a member of the guerilla wives, the early-thirtyish, firmly fleshed, desperately calculating beauties who had married for money, who had signed prenuptial contracts that eliminated a division of community property, whose chief interest in life was collecting jewelry for resale in case their already-twice-divorced husbands dumped them. And she would never make a friend among the handful of women writers, producers, and stars of the film business who respected only their working peers and had no time for civilians.
She might have discovered potential friends in Hancock Park or Pasadena, Billy thought, where the quietly elegant, old-money set lived, rarely deigning to cross to the “Westside,” where all the movie money settled; but even without knowing them she was sure they’d be California versions of those conservative, predictable Winthrop cousins who had made her childhood so miserable.
When Ellis had died and she had been released from her solitude, rather than accepting the role of the new widow and extra woman, she had thrown herself obsessively into making a success of Scruples, until, two years later, she had married Vito and been immediately caught up in the whirl of making Mirrors. She hadn’t been shy with Dolly Moon when they met, because Dolly had no idea of who she was and didn’t let it make a difference when she found out.
Dolly and Jessica. Two true, eternal women friends out of a lifetime. Perhaps that wasn’t really such a low number. Perhaps it was about average, perhaps most women fooled themselves about how staunch their good friends were? Billy put her feet on her desk and hugged her knees. She was just feeling like a misfit because this day, which was to have started with her telling Vito about their baby, had gone so abruptly and immediately off course. She was a fool to remember the ghosts of so many lost and lonely years, to allow them to intrude on the wonder of her new life. Her aunt Cornelia would have told her to pull up her socks, Billy reflected, as she swung her feet back to the floor and bent over her desk, where there was more than enough work to keep her busy until the coast was clear back home. She was glad to have the work to distract her a little from feeling the growing feverish ache to be with Vito, to have his full attention, to lie in his arms and tell hi
m her news and watch the happiness on his face, to get him off the fucking phone!
As she drove up to the gatehouse at five-thirty, one of the gatemen assured Billy that the television people had just left. But some other visitors had arrived, he added, people Mr. Orsini had told them to admit.
Who in holy hell could they be, Billy asked herself in a wave of disappointment and irritation. It was evening, she had been gone for more than four hours, the business day was finished even for Oscar winners. Visitors! She’d throw the pack of them out, whoever they were, double quick! She didn’t care if it was Wasserman, Nicholson, Redford, and the ghosts of Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, and Jean Hersholt, with Harry Cohn and the brothers Warner thrown in for good measure. She’d have them out of her house!
Billy glared incredulously at two dozen cars parked in front of the house, threw open the front door, and stood riveted at the sight and sound of at least forty people talking and laughing at the top of their voices, beginning to fill up the two living rooms. She refused to believe what she was seeing. A roaring party, what promised to be a hurricane of a party, was taking place and Vito was the center of it. From the mob she spotted Fifi Hill, the director of Mirrors, the stars, the editors, the composer, and a score of others who’d been involved in the making of the movie from the beginning. And behind her, pushing their way through the door, came more people, all crew and cast members, every one of whom kissed and hugged her quickly before rushing over to Vito.
Billy pushed through the crowd until she reached her husband.
“How … why … Vito, what the hell … ?”
“Darling! About time! I wondered what happened to you. We’re having the wrap party for the picture—remember the first one was cut short, so I had an inspiration and decided to have it over again. Everybody’s still high as kites. Don’t worry about the food, Janet called Chasen’s and told them to send over everything. Isn’t this a great idea? Listen, I’ve got to find Fifi, I still haven’t congratulated him on getting Best Director.”
“You do that,” Billy said to the spot where Vito had been standing. Had Alexander the Great ever been as blazingly exuberant, as triumphant, as consumed with energy and excitement after any of his victories, she wondered, following her bold, bronzed Caesar of a husband with her eyes as he dashed into the throng. She had married Vito out of passionate love, hardly knowing him. Only after their marriage had she realized how much of his own passion was reserved for his work, how obsessed he was by filmmaking. Now, after a difficult year of compromise and adjustment, Billy thought she had come to terms with it. Yes, she certainly had come to terms with it, she assured herself as she slipped through dozens of people to reach the staircase; she accepted him exactly as he was, and tonight was as it should be, a blaring, riotous celebration of a unique achievement no one but Vito had believed possible for a low-budget movie.
As Billy threaded her way across her sitting room she noticed teetering piles of unopened telegrams tossed between the baskets of flowers that covered every surface, including the floor. Tomorrow they’d all be sent to Vito’s office and opened, she determined, tomorrow they’d open all the cards on the flowers. But right now she’d put on something festive and join the party. Sooner or later the guests would have to leave and she’d be alone with Vito and the only other news that could possibly matter on this day of jubilation and rejoicing.
Vito and Billy were wearily saying good-bye to their last guests when one of the gatemen called the house to say that another person had arrived, asking for Mr. Orsini.
“Tell whoever it is I’m sorry but it’s too late, Joe, the party’s over,” Vito said. “What? What? You’re sure? No, it’s all right, let the car through.”
“Totally impossible,” Billy muttered, “even the catering crew on the picture was here tonight. Vito, make an excuse, don’t dare let anyone in. If I can find the strength to climb the stairs I’m going to bed, I’m beat.”
“Go on, darling, I’ll handle it.”
Ten minutes later, after Billy had stripped off her clothes, put on a robe, and was starting to take off her makeup, Vito entered her dressing room and closed the door behind him.
“Who on earth was it?” Billy asked, drooping with exhaustion in front of the mirror.
“It’s … a long story.”
There was a note of utter disbelief and shock in Vito’s voice that told her this had nothing to do with a guest who was too late for the wrap party.
She spun around and looked at him searchingly. “It’s bad news, isn’t it?”
“Don’t look so frightened, Billy. This isn’t about us, this isn’t about you.”
“Then it’s about you! Vito, what’s wrong?”
“Oh, Jesus,” he said, dropping onto a chair and looking past her, his eyes seeming to focus on the wall. “I’ve never told you so many things about me … it’s unforgivable. From the second we got married I’ve been so fucking preoccupied with the picture, not a minute to spare, I kept promising myself that as soon as all this craziness was over I’d tell you the whole story, the minute we had some peaceful time together.… I should have told you the day we met but it was the last thing on my mind, it didn’t seem to matter then because I didn’t know we were going to get married … the only thing that I could think of was the present, the past was the past, and then everything happened between us so quickly.…”
“Vito, if you don’t get to the point—”
“My daughter’s here.”
“You can’t have a daughter,” Billy said flatly.
“I can. I do. I was married before. It lasted just over a year. We were divorced and she’s lived with her mother ever since.”
The shock of his words kept Billy’s voice almost even. She struggled so hard to keep from shouting that she almost whispered.
“A child. I wouldn’t care if you’d had ten other wives, but a child, Vito? In the year that we’ve been married, are you trying to make me believe that there was never, ever a single minute when you could have told me this, for Christ’s sake? My God, so what if you’ve been divorced, but a child! You must be insane. We’ve had hours and hours, you could have told me during any one of hundreds of meals, before we went to bed, when we got up in the morning … don’t give me that shit about never having peaceful time!”
“I was always going to tell you, it just didn’t happen,” he mumbled.
“No way, Vito, give me a fucking break. You let it go too long and then you didn’t want to rock the boat. You should have told me before we got married, it wouldn’t have made any difference; but now, springing it on me now? I just can’t believe this is happening. What’s her name?”
“Gigi.”
“Why did she come here tonight?” Billy asked, fighting the desire to scream. She had to remain calm because Vito looked as if he were going to faint. “Because of the Oscar?”
“Her mother … her mother died.… She was buried … yesterday. In New York. Gigi sent me a telegram. It must be with all the others. When she didn’t hear anything from me she got on a plane and just … came.”
“Where is she now?”
“In the kitchen. I gave her a glass of milk and some cake and told her to wait until I’d talked to you.”
“How old is she?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen,” Billy screeched. “Sixteen! My God, Vito, that’s not a child, that’s a teenager! Practically a woman. Don’t you know anything about sixteen-year-olds? Vito, get me a brandy, a large brandy. Never mind, just bring the bottle.” Billy scrubbed off the cream that was still on her face and hurried toward the door.
“Billy …”
“What?”
“Shouldn’t we talk more before you meet Gigi?”
“About what, Vito?” Billy said furiously. “She wouldn’t be here if she had another place to go, would she? She hasn’t seen you in at least a year because I’d know if she had, so if she flew all the way across the country without even hearing a word from you, y
ou’ve got to be her only refuge, wouldn’t you say?”
“Oh, Christ! Billy, you’re not giving me any credit for anything, this is an old story, it was over fifteen years ago and you’re being as judgmental as if it had just happened.”
“I’m being realistic,” Billy said viciously. “It has just happened—to me.” Billy turned and quickly made her way down to the big kitchen. She hesitated only a second before pushing open the double doors, hearing Vito still on the staircase.
A small figure was sitting very still on a high stool behind the big butcher block table. In front of her were an empty glass and an empty plate. When Billy walked in Gigi looked up and slid off the stool, standing wordlessly, without moving. Billy’s first thought was that Vito must be wrong, she didn’t look old enough to be a teenager. And she didn’t look like Vito. What was visible of her face through a mess of plain brown hair was delicate, oddball, somehow immediately and indefinably elfin. In the several baggy, rather ragged sweaters she wore layered indiscriminately over her jeans she seemed to be a waif, a scrap, a sprite, blown into this grand, bright kitchen by a teasing gust of wind.
Gigi remained still and speechless for a long minute, enduring Billy’s inspection. In her straightforward stance, poised squarely on her cowboy boots, standing as straight and tall as she could. There was nothing of apology nor of defiance yet somehow, tiny and nondescript as she was, she had presence, immediate, undeniable presence. She was tired and very sad but not pathetic, she was alone but not needy. Something about her was deeply interesting. Gigi’s eyes met Billy’s, Gigi smiled—and a piece of Billy’s heart she didn’t know she possessed fell in love.
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