Scruples (26 page)

“Holy Mary Mother of God!”

“I didn’t know you were Catholic.”

“I’m not—just bowled over. It’s an expression I save for really big events, like when the Rams win in overtime.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind—I’ll explain someday when I have six or seven hours with nothing else to do. Now you just get out and hustle lady—your work is so good I don’t even know how to tell you.”

The next day Valentine donned her persona of Monsieur Balmain’s former assistant and got in to see the assistants of several designers she hadn’t approached before. The first two assistants begged her to leave her porfolio so that they could look it over and perhaps, who knows, find a place for her. But she was wiser than that. At Balmain there existed a long list of people, including some American designers, who were never allowed in the door because their photographic memories could register an entire line in the course of a collection and reproduce it in detail before the first customer’s order had been filled in Paris. In any case, these assistants she talked to, Valentine suspected, might steal her ideas and never even mention her to their bosses.

The third firm she tried was a very new one called simply Wilton Associates. The designer was out of town, but the receptionist, miraculously, was young and new at her job. She invited Valentine to wait and see Mr. Wilton himself. “He’s not the designer, dearie, but he does all the hiring and firing—he’s the man to see, whatever it’s about.”

Alan Wilton was an impressive man. He was as well tailored as Cary Grant and quite untraceable in his looks. Anywhere in the Mediterranean Basin he would look like a rich, well-traveled native. In Greece he would be taken for a minor shipowner, in Italy for a prosperous Florentine, in Israel for a Jew but never a sabra. However, in England he would instantly be seen to be some sort of foreigner. In New York he looked like the spirit of the city incarnate. He had dark brown eyes, as impenetrable as a wildcat’s, olive skin, and beautifully tended, straight, black hair. He seemed to be about thirty-five, although he was actually eight years older, and his manners were superb. His deep voice gave no hint of his birthplace or his background.

As he sucked thoughtfully on a pipe he looked through Valentine’s sketches with care, occasionally nodding his head.

“Why did you leave Balmain, Miss O’Neill?” He was the first person who had bothered to ask her that question. Valentine felt herself turning white, as she always did, when other people would have blushed.

“There was no future there.”

“I see. And how old are you?”

“Twenty-six,” she lied.

“Twenty-six and already Balmain’s assistant. Hmm. I could call that a very promising situation at your age.” She realized from the way he bit on his full lower lip that he had seen through her from the beginning.

“The question is, Mr. Wilton, not why I left Balmain but whether you like my designs.” Valentine summoned all her Irish spunk and her most exaggerated French accent.

“They’re sensational. Perfect for today’s crazy market. Exactly what I need to start women buying again. The problem is that I already have a designer and he has an assistant with whom he has worked for years.”

“That’s—unfortunate.”

“But not for you. Sergio’s assistant will have to go. I don’t run this business to make people happy, Miss O’Neill. I’m not just the moneyman—I make all the decisions around here. When can you start?”

“Tomorrow?”

“No—not a good idea. I’ll have a bit of shuffling around to do first. Why don’t we say next Monday morning? By the way, can you sew?”

“Naturally.”

“Cut?”

“Of course.”

“Make samples?”

“Obviously.”

“Fit?”

“Certainly.”

“Make patterns?”

“That’s basic.”

“Supervise a workroom?”

“If I had to.”

“If you can do all these things you could make a great deal more than the hundred fifty a week I intend to pay you.”

“I’m perfectly aware of that, Mr. Wilton. But I am not a sample hand or a patternmaker. I am a designer.”

“I understand.” He gazed directly at her, his thick eyebrows raised in quizzical, knowing amusement. Her technical experience was too thorough to have allowed her time to assist Balmain, whose assistants were, in any case, always men, not young girls.

Valentine gathered up her portfolio as quickly as she could without losing her dignity.

“I’ll be here on Monday,” she said, walking out of Wilton’s large office with the businesslike air of someone quite accustomed to being hired. While she waited for the elevator, shaking with thanksgiving, she prayed that Mr. Wilton wouldn’t come out of his office after her and ask her any more questions.

Nothing in Valentine’s experience could have prepared her for Sergio, the designer for Wilton Associates. Her knowledge of the homosexual world as a whole had been largely confined to the last weeks she had spent making the rounds of wholesale firms. All she really knew about gay designers was that they were good at giving her the brush-off. At Balmain’s the prevailing atmosphere was one of intense, simmering femininity. The middle-aged male cutters and fitters had as much sexual definition, one way or another, as tame gray tabbies. Her own family life included no contact with the homosexual side of Paris, although she knew it existed, of course.

When she met Sergio on Monday morning as she reported for work, she found not just another queen but rather a very royal, very grand, very petulant princess. He was young, with a beautifully molded chin and neck. His lips were pouting and provocative, and he had a classically voluptuous face and fairly long, glossy brown hair. He dressed in the height of Italian fashion, his pure silk body shirt unbuttoned to the navel, showing a great deal of his smooth tan chest, and his slim waist clasped by a heavy solid-gold link belt. His trousers might not have seemed too tight in a Spanish bullring, but on Seventh Avenue they made a definite statement.

Sergio, at that moment, was a very, very angry princess who had come back dreadfully bombed out from a much too brief vacation to find that his dependable workhorse of an assistant had been replaced by some little tricky numero Alan had put over on him in his absence. You could trust nobody in this business! A French twat. How was that for sneaky?

“Stop whimpering, Sergio. The girl has talent and you need her. If you’re planning on stamping your teeny-weeny feet and having hysterics, do it someplace else.” Alan Wilton looked at Sergio with scarcely concealed contempt.

“You’ll regret this, Alan.”

“Don’t you dare threaten me, you little cunt. You know who’s boss around here, don’t you? Don’t you? So, get those tight, little, fancy pair of buns of yours into the studio and start working. And if you’re planning to pull any of your Miss Bitch ratshit with Valentine—I really and truly would
not
, if I were you.”

Sergio left, slightly mollified by Alan’s words. In some situations he had a weakness for—being told what to do. Alan could be such a tough son of a bitch. He’d be damned if he was going to work right away, not now, with his cock suddenly so stiff that he had to get off or come in his pants. Sergio took the fire stairs up two flights to a public men’s room, which was known all over Seventh Avenue, along with several others. He looked quickly in both directions, made sure that no one he knew was in the corridor, and slipped inside. A dozen men were there, a few in low conversation, others roaming around nervously, some just standing and smoking, their eyes flicking from side to side. Sergio recognized an important menswear buyer, a Puerto Rican stock boy, the vice-president of a major department store, a blond male model, and a young wrapper for a dress manufacturer. He didn’t greet any of them nor did they greet him. Sergio’s heart beat hard as he fumbled in his pocket as if for a cigarette, making sure that the outline of his stiff prick was emphasized by his manipulation of the thin, tight fabric. One of the men, a stranger as conservatively dressed as a banker, came over to him immediately with an outheld lighter.

“How do you like it?” he asked Sergio.

“Up the ass.”

“You’ve picked an awkward place for that.”

“Yeah—you can’t have everything—so, you want to suck?”

“How could you tell?” The stranger’s lips were open with lust.

“ESP. Go in that cubicle, the third from the end—it’s the right height.”

The stranger obeyed immediately, locking himself in. Sergio sauntered over to the cubicle, the door of which was neatly punctured by a hole about four inches in diameter, padded comfortably by a rim of foam rubber. All the doors in the room had similar arrangements, the “glory holes” varying only in their height from the ground. Sergio stood as close to the door as possible, his back to the room full of men, and unzipped his fly, sticking his hard penis through the hole until his balls pressed closely against the door. The man inside, who had dropped to his knees, took Sergio’s cock in his mouth with a muffled moan of ecstasy. His own half-stiff penis was already out of his tweed trousers, and while he grasped Sergio with one hand and sucked passionately, he used the other hand to rub himself with a hard, merciless stroke. Sergio stood perfectly still, his hands at his side, his eyes closed, lost in the delicious tugging, licking, pulling sensations he felt on the other side of the door. He knew dimly that he was going to disappoint the guy inside. He was so ready, after that tongue-lashing of Alan’s, that he came in less than a minute in a series of wildly relieving jerks. The stranger in the cubicle had barely started to really work on Sergio’s prick when his mouth was filled with sperm. He gulped it frantically, trying to hold the pumping cock in his mouth as long as possible. But, once finished, Sergio unceremoniously removed himself from the glory hole, zipped up, and was out the door in a practiced movement. The stranger, cursing under his breath, carefully eased his distended, purple, and aching penis back into his pants and left the cubicle. He was going to try his luck again—he couldn’t settle for a nothing quickie like that, not after coming in all the way from Darien for it.

Valentine would have liked to stay out of Sergio’s way. He wasn’t nasty to her in any straightforward manner to which she could, at least, have reacted, but his unfeigned air of absolute disdain seemed to fill and solidify the space around them. However, their work kept them together constantly, often bending over the same piece of fabric or paper, constantly needing to consult on this matter or that. He had taste, she granted, particularly in the firm’s specialty, women’s sports separates made in fine wools and cashmeres, leather, linen, and pure silk. Although Wilton Associates was only six months old, it was solidly capitalized by Alan Wilton, who had formerly been a partner in an enormous dress business. Valentine gradually learned, through office gossip, that Wilton had sold out his former partnership when he and his wife, the daughter of the bigger firm’s founder, had been divorced. No one seemed to know any details about his past since they were all, like Valentine, fairly recent employees. Sergio was the exception. He had worked for Wilton at his former business and had gone with him when he left it.

Sergio was engrossed in the preparation of Wilton Associates’ summer line, but not so involved with his own designs that he didn’t find time to incorporate large numbers of Valentine’s ideas in his own sketches. Often he re-sketched her drawings without bothering to make any changes in them at all.

One afternoon, about two months after Valentine had been hired, Alan Wilton asked her to come to his office.

“You haven’t asked, Valentine, but I want you to know that I think you’ve added something very important to the look of our line.”

“Oh, thank you! Has Sergio—”

“Sergio’s not famous for sharing credit—he’s said nothing. I just happen to have a very good memory.” The wildcat eyes looked steadily into hers. “Will you have dinner with me this Friday? I’d like that very much—or do you have to be somewhere for the weekend?”

Valentine felt a shock run right up into her hair. Until this minute Alan Wilton had treated her with pleasant formality on the frequent occasions when he came into the studio. She found him intimidating, although she would never admit it to anyone, not even to Elliott.

“No! That is—I’m not going anywhere for the weekend—I’d love to have dinner.” She was thoroughly confused.

“Perfect. I’ll pick you up at your place then?” Valentine had a vision of this exquisitely dressed man climbing six flights up to her loft in the light of the forty-watt bulb that lit her staircase.

“That might not be a good idea.” Idiot, she told herself, that doesn’t make sense. “I mean—the traffic—Friday night. Why don’t I just meet you somewhere?” What traffic she asked herself, mortified. On Friday night all the traffic was leaving the city.

“Whatever you say. Come for a drink at my place first and we’ll go on to Lutèce. You can tell me how it compares to La Tour d’Argent.” He looked at the white work smock she was wearing. “It’ll give you a chance to wear one of your Balmain dresses. And we can chat about dear, old Pierre. I haven’t had dinner with him in at least three years.”

“I think Sergio needs me,” she answered hastily.

“Well, there’s certainly no doubt about that. Shall we say eight o’clock? I live in the East Sixties, here’s my address. It’s an old town house. Just ring the bell on the outside and I’ll let you in. It’s the first door straight ahead.”