Scruples Two Read online

  Still unwilling to disturb Vito, Billy scribbled the question and plunked it down in front of Sandy, who stopped flirting with Jack Nicholson for a second and murmured, “Human interest, she’s shooting everyone at home.”

  Billy retreated to the absolute privacy of her thirty-foot-square dressing room and the deep window seat on which she’d huddled yesterday when she realized that she was pregnant, when hours of soul-searching had revealed to her stubbornly disbelieving mind that she had wanted all along to have a baby without knowing it.

  It was two in the afternoon, more than twenty-four hours later, and she still hadn’t told Vito. Nobody knew. She was quivering, bursting, palpitating with her great news, and Vito couldn’t be pried away from the phone so that she could tell him first, before anyone else, as was right and proper. Until he knew, she had to stay silent. It was getting a little hard to hold on tight to that otherworldly happiness she’d carried intact from her dream into her life, Billy realized, and then she brightened. She would go and spend the next few hours at Scruples. If she didn’t actually see the camera crew invade her house, it would be as if they’d never been there.

  Billy dressed rapidly and managed to leave without causing Vito or Sandy to look up from their phones. During the eight-minute drive from her house to her sumptuous boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Billy realized that the exciting weather of early spring was the perfect match for her mood. Oscar weather, like Rose Bowl weather, was uncannily dependable. No one in the world-wide television audience had ever seen less-than-perfect weather in California on those two particular days. No one had ever seen the gloom of those endlessly foggy June mornings when the sun doesn’t fight through the clouds until afternoon; no one had ever seen the dark chill and frightening floods of the January rains or, far worse, the glare of the dangerous, flat white sunlight in the late-summer forest fire season … no, Hollywood always primped itself silly and presented its best face when the world was watching. Typical, thought Billy, typical. She was still enough of a Bostonian to be able to sneer slightly at a city that managed reliably to fool the public.

  She drove down Rodeo Drive and turned into the underground parking lot at Scruples, feeling the familiar, proudly swelling warmth of ownership. Scruples was the extravagant fantasy she had brought to life four years earlier, the most opulent and successful specialty store that had ever existed. Last night, during the Oscar ceremonies, Billy had decided to open new branches of Scruples all over the world, in the great capital cities where those rich women lived whose lives revolved around shopping and entertaining, that tiny but endlessly greedy consuming class born to become Scruples customers.

  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 mindset of a tourist from Pittsburgh, than she was besieged by a dozen women, some of them acquaintances, some total strangers. Each 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, and, at their frequent worst, made her into a laughingstock. 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, the butt of jokes and freak of the class, a girl of five feet ten inches who weighed two hundred and eighteen pounds.

  But then she had spent an all-important, transfiguring year in Paris and returned, thin, grown at last 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 Claridge’s, 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 entry into the Olympian level of society around the globe, and it would seem that they had dozens of friends.

  However, no one but Ellis and Billy ever penetrated to the single important truth behind the screen of the Stardust of privilege that radiated across their life. The closeness of their relationship was the only thing that mattered to them. Entertaining and being entertained, they never made a meaningful new friendship, for no one really caught their attention but each other. The charmed 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 semiparalyzed 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 was a born outsider; 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 to 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 couldn’t remotely be a member of the guerrilla wives, the early-thirtyish, firmly fleshed, desperately calculating beauties who had married rich, divorced men twice their age, who had signed prenuptial contracts that eliminated a division of community property, and whose chief interest in life was trying to get pregnant so that they would have hostages when their husbands began to consider dumping them for still younger flesh. 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 new widow and “extra” woman, she had thrown herself totally 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 on the set, because Dolly had no idea 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. Just because she wasn’t at ease in groups of women didn’t mean that she had no capacity for friendship. 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 do 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 him 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 double 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. In 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 they rushed 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 had 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 as high as kites. Don’t worry about the food, Sandy 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 sure of himself, 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 on a great wave 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 ten difficult months 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 the telegrams would all be sent to Vito’s office, she determined, tomorrow Josie would open all the cards on the flowers and make a list of people to thank. 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 taxi 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 this house. 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, when 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. “There are so many things I’ve never told you.… 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 mys
elf 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 didn’t last 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! 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 tell me there was never any peaceful time!”