Scruples (16 page)

As soon as one of Eileen’s assistants laid eyes on Melanie she decided to bypass all that preparation and find out immediately how this stupendously beautiful girl photographed. She phoned Spider and asked him to take some test shots, since Melanie’s own pictures were hopeless. She’d never done any professional modeling before and all she had were some out-of-date family-album snapshots and her high-school yearbook photograph.

Melanie stood just inside the open door of Spider’s studio until he noticed her. “Hi,” she said shyly, pushing back the heavy curtain of her hair with one hand. “The Ford people told me to come over for tests—”

Spider thought his heart might truly stop. He just stood there, looking at her. It was as if every other girl in his life had been part of a montage of pictures flashing under the opening titles of a movie. Now the camera had finally focused on the star, and the film was about to start. Had started.

“Right. They called me. I’ve been expecting you.” He spoke automatically, out of sheer habit. “Let’s get started. First I want some shots in natural light—just throw your coat on the chair and go and stand over by that window and look out.” Jesus, he thought, there have to be thirty different shades of color in her hair, everything from curry to maple sugar—there aren’t even names for some of them. “Now, move a little closer to the window and lean on the sill with your right elbow, profile toward me. Chin up. Little smile. A little more. Now, turn toward me, lower your hand. Good. Chin down. Relax.” He was aware that fortunately there was no possible way to get a bad angle on this girl. The way his hand was trembling he’d be lucky if the pictures were in focus. “OK. Come over here now and sit on that chair where the lights are set up. Just look around the studio as much as you want and don’t pay any attention to the camera.”

As she turned her head this way and that, Spider, considering her, was almost idiotically stunned at the violence of his emotions. He was bedazzled. His brain struggled vainly to make any logic out of his feelings. He considered himself the last man in the world to be affected by mere beauty in a girl. He
expected
beauty and looked past it for the person. But now he felt as if he could spend the rest of his life trying to understand what made this face so significant. Why were her eyes placed in her flesh so that they seemed to have meaning beyond meaning? Why did the molding of these particular lips make him ache to trace them with his finger, as if a touch would explain their mystery? Her smile was wanton, delicately wanton, yet full of hidden withdrawal. Something in the way her bones lay under her skin told him he would never possess her. She was so perfectly
there
, yet her reality eluded him in some maddening, incomprehensible way.

“I’ve got everything I need,” he told her as he turned off the lights. “Here—come and sit here.” He guided her to a couch and sat down next to her. “Listen, how old are you? Do you love your parents? Do they understand you? Was anyone ever mean to you? What are your favorite things to eat? Who was the first boy you ever kissed? Did you love him? Do you dream a lot—?”

“Now, just stop!” Her voice was offhandedly southern, with just exactly enough sweetness, the warm ice of the archetypical belle. “Nobody at Ford’s warned me that you were mad! What on earth are you asking me all that for?”

“Look, I’m—I think I’m in love with you. No,
please
don’t smile like that. Oh God! Words! I’m not playing games. It’s something I have to tell you right now at the beginning because I want you to start thinking about it—don’t look so suspicious. I’ve never told a woman I loved her before, not until you walked in here. Please! I don’t blame you for looking that way but try to believe me.” Spider took her hand and placed it on his chest. His heart was beating as violently as if he’d run a mile for his life. She lifted her eyebrows in acknowledgment, finally looking directly at him. Her irises were the clear, warm color of a glass of rich, sweet sherry held up to the light, and her look seemed to be seeking some ultimate truth with a yearning yet gentle anguish.

“Tell me what you’re thinking right this minute,” Spider implored.

“I hate it when people ask me that,” Melanie answered gently.

“So do I. I’ve never done it before. Just promise me you won’t get married to somebody right away, give me a chance.”

“I never make promises,” Melanie laughed. She had learned not to box herself in years ago. It always saved a great deal of trouble, sooner or later. “Anyway, how can you say things like that? You don’t know me at all.” She wasn’t really caught up in this game, but she was enjoying it, as she had enjoyed the dozens of declarations that had been made to her since she was eleven. Her earliest memories were of being told how beautiful she was. Something in her never believed the words, never felt satisfied. It wasn’t modesty; it was a craving for more proof than anyone had ever yet given her. Her mind worked constantly at trying to understand for herself
exactly
what other people saw when they looked at her. She could never grasp it whole and living. Her deepest fantasy was to step outside of her skin and look at herself and find out just what people were talking about. She spent her life experimenting with people to see how she could make them react, as if, in their response, she could discover herself. “I never make promises,” she repeated, since he didn’t seem to have heard her, “and I don’t answer questions.”

Her poise was almost Victorian, straight-backed and attentive, like a good, demure little girl. Yet the faint, unmistakable invitation of her smile was set in a timeless quietude, as if she were certain of triumph. She started to stand up.

“No! Wait! Where are you going?” Spider asked frantically.

“I’m starving and it’s lunchtime.”

Spider felt enormous relief. Food was familiar ground. If she could get hungry, she had to be human.

“I’ve got a whole refrigerator full of food. Just wait one minute and I’ll make you the best liverwurst and Swiss on rye you ever had in your life.” As he made the sandwiches, Spider thought that if he could just lock the door and throw away the key and keep her there, it would be the most splendid thing the world had to offer. He wanted to find out everything about this girl from the day she was born. A hundred questions tumbled about in his mind and were rejected. If she would only tell him everything, he thought, he might eventually make some sense out of the way he was feeling.

Spider had never been introspective. He grew up just living his highly enjoyable stretch of life without self-analysis. He didn’t realize that basically he was a man who kept himself hidden from himself, partly through liking so many other people and being so warmly available to them. He fell in love the way someone might fall through a gaping hole in a floor that had been solid the day before. He was as unprepared for passion as a schoolboy.

They ate without banter. Everything Spider wanted to say seemed, even before he said it, to go against her rules. She was not at all bothered by the silence between them. Melanie had always been quiet, serenely, evasively so. Her absorption in herself was such that she had little curiosity to discover things about other people. They always ended up telling her more than she was interested in, in any case. But she gazed at Spider intently, trying to catch a glimpse of herself in his eyes. The image would be distorted, but it might tell her something she needed to know. Sometimes, alone, she could get a feeling of being a certain person, of possessing a certain face, of having a certain clearly outlined image, but it was always the image of some actress she had seen in a movie. She would smile like that woman and feel that other face fall like a mask over her own. For that moment she would sense what it was to be in the real world, and then the moment would pass, and she would be left with her endless quest.

The light in the studio changed as the afternoon sun left the room. Spider looked at his watch.

“Christ! In five minutes three tiny tots and their mommies are going to be here—I’m shooting party dresses—and nothing’s set up.” He jumped up and headed for the other end of the studio as Melanie put on her coat. He stopped short and spun around, disbelieving.

“Hey, what did you say your name was?”

Two weeks later, in front of a long mirror in Scavullo’s dressing room, one of Spider’s former girls said to another, “Have you heard the news?”

“What do you mean,
the
news? There’s plenty of it around.”

“Our divine mutual Spidy has been caught at last—he’s going down for the third time.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Love, that poor darling fool is in love with the new Garbo. You know who I mean—Eileen’s latest, El Misteriosa Magnolia Blossom.”

“Who told you? I just don’t believe it.”

“He told me—otherwise I wouldn’t believe it either. But Spider can’t shut up about her. You’d think he invented love. The way he carries on it’s Cole Porter time in Dixie. I find it absolutely stomach turning, particularly when you remember how he never—wouldn’t ever—”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

“I had a feeling you would.”

“Oh—the little southern cunt!”

“I’ll drink to that.”

W
hen Billy Winthrop returned to Boston three months before her year in Paris was supposed to be up, she told her Aunt Cornelia that she had been homesick. She said she had felt a sudden desire to spend the summer with the family in Chestnut Hill before she had to leave for New York to begin studying at Katie Gibbs. Convincingly, Cornelia accepted this lie, the enormity of which might well have been overlooked by most Bostonians, whose love of their city and its surrounding countryside makes the charms of even Paris pale. However, Cornelia knew better. The last letter from Lady Molly had told her the whole story of the despicable way in which that Côte de Grace boy had dropped her niece flat. Her good maternal heart ached to tell Honey—Billy—how unhappy she was for her, but the girl’s absolute dignity prohibited any intimate conversation.

And the way she looked!
All of Boston—the part that counted—buzzed with it. Brahmin mamas, looking at their own uninspiring daughters, almost forgave Billy her long, sleek body, her mass of black hair, her magnificent way of walking, her perfect skin, but did so slowly, feature by feature, and, even then, only because she was, after all, a Winthrop. After thinking of her as that pathetic, fat, hopeless Honey for so long, it was wrenching for even the most-good-natured woman to have to accept the fact that Honey had returned from France a raving beauty. If she had been born a beauty—but now, this transformation was almost unfair. One had to do entirely too much mental readjustment. It was as if a perfect stranger had come to town, a dashing, lovely stranger who didn’t look like anyone they were used to and didn’t somehow dress like a Boston girl was supposed to, but who calmly proceeded to greet them all with the unawed familiarity of a member of the family. As indeed she was. Most unsettling.

The girls of Billy’s own age found the change even more irritating. Duckling into swan was all very well and good for the Brothers Grimm, but in Boston it was downright theatrical, you could call it—well, frankly—showy. Even a tiny bit—vulgar?

Cornelia waded into the fray, “Amanda, shame on your daughter, Pee-Wee, for her sour grapes. I happened to hear what she was saying about my Billy at Myopia yesterday. So it is ‘absurd’ to change your first name at her age, is it? You might do well to remember that she was named after your own second cousin, Wilhelmina. She did not ‘change’ her name—she merely resumed it. And so Billy ‘doesn’t know how to dress to watch polo.’ If Pee-Wee ever took her riding britches off we might find out if she knows how to dress for anything else. And does she intend to be called Pee-Wee until she’s a grandmother? If I were you, Amanda, I’d write to Lilianne de Vertdulac and find out if she has room for your daughter next year. It wouldn’t do that girl any harm to find out that there is a life outside a stable.”

With Billy, Cornelia was very direct and very kind.

“Billy, I have the feeling that your year in Paris may have cost you more than you expected.”

“I’m afraid so, Aunt Cornelia. I got carried away—”

“Nonsense. Any girl who looks as glorious as you do deserves to make the most of Paris. I don’t blame you for a second for buying those clothes. You wear them well and, after all, it was your own money. I would have insisted on sending you off with a nice check for a new wardrobe, myself, but when you were so plump it didn’t seem worthwhile.”

“Plump. How dear you are, Aunt Cornelia. I was a disgustingly gross cow. Admit it.”

“Now, let’s not quibble over words. You were another girl altogether. The problem isn’t that—it’s the future. Wouldn’t you like to stay in Boston and go on to Wellesley after all?” Cornelia asked hopefully. This new Billy could marry anyone she liked. No need for her to go to Katie Gibbs to study to become a dreary secretary.

“Good God, no! In the fall I’ll be twenty, much too old to start school all over again.”

Cornelia sighed. “I hadn’t even thought about that aspect of it. But there is still no need to leave home surely? You know how your uncle and I love to have you here with us.”

“I do, and I’m deeply touched, Aunt Cornelia. But I have to get away from Boston, at least for a while. I’ve known everybody here all of my life and I don’t have one close friend, only you and Uncle George. Father’s buried in his research—he took one look at me, said ‘I always knew you had the Minot bones’ and went back to work. Oh, damn, it’s hard to explain, but as soon as I came back I began to feel like a freak again, not the way I used to be, but still out of place. The French would say I’m not at home in my skin here. I want to go somewhere where no one comes up to me and says ‘My God, what’s happened to you? How much weight did you lose? I can’t believe it. Fat Honey Winthrop!’ ”