Scruples (40 page)

But Josh Hillman didn’t like the odds: There was never more than one Jewish Justice on the Court at any one time and Supreme Court Justices seem to live forever, longer than anyone except the widows of rich men.

He had more than a passing interest in making money, after living on scholarships for the last seven years. Only twice in that time had Josh Hillman been able to return home on holidays to see his parents, who still lived on Fairfax Avenue. He had earned enough money during the summers to clothe himself, get his hair cut, and buy those two round-trip plane tickets. He had missed most of the social life of a Harvard undergraduate because he couldn’t afford it, and if there was fun to be had during law school, he didn’t know about it. He joined Strassberger & Lipkin in 1957 and now, twenty years later, although he was the junior partner in terms of age, he was the senior partner in terms of real power.

He was a serious man who thought romance was something invented in the Middle Ages to keep ladies at court occupied at home during the Crusades. He enjoyed sex, but he saw no reason to make a big deal out of it. He felt smugly superior to other men of his age who ran around getting divorced because their wives bored them in bed and then proceeded to make horses’ asses of themselves with young girls. The whole business was overrated. His wife bored him too, almost from the beginning, but was that a reason to play around? Not for a serious man it wasn’t.

Josh Hillman had married seriously and intelligently. Joanne Wirthman was Hollywood royalty—the genuine article. Her grandfather had founded one of the great movie studios. Her father was one of the great movie producers. Behind her were two generations of private screening rooms. Not her mother, but her grandmother, had had the first all-Porthault bathroom in Bel Air.

Joanne Wirthman had never even heard of belly lox until she met Josh Hillman, but she soon discovered that it was tastier than Scotch salmon, just as he was more impressive, more of a
mertsch
, than the rich boys she had grown up with. To their amazement, they discovered that both their grandfathers had been born in Vilna. Not that the genealogical fact—which, who knew, might make them distant cousins?—was necessary to quell any objections on the part of the Wirthman family to Joanne’s marrying a poor boy from Fairfax Avenue. They were only too happy to see their hefty, placid, well-organized daughter carrying off a
Harvard Law Review
editor who also happened to be tall and handsome, in a somewhat not-fy-finished-growing way; and with a shining future like his, he was obviously not interested in her money alone.

Actually, it wasn’t just Joanne’s money he was interested in. To be fair, Josh told himself, he liked her well enough, and the year that he had allotted himself to marry and settle down was almost over. He was serious when it came to sticking to schedule. He was very serious about just about everything.

Joanne proved to be disappointing in bed but great at pregnancy, producing two sons and a daughter. She was superb at winning women’s tennis tournaments at the Hill-crest Country Club and positively triumphant at raising money for the Music Center, the Childrens Hospital, Cedars-Sinai, the Arts Council, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. By thirty-five, she was a leader among that very tightly knit group of women in Los Angeles who are indispensable to both Jewish and Gentile charitable endeavors, thus socially bridging the gap between old California society and the wave of Jewish businessmen looking for sunshine, that the invention of the movie camera had brought to the land where money was supposed to come from land grants, lumber, railroads, and oil, not the sound stage.

Over the years that separated him from the rather untidy, overgrown student he had been, Josh Hillman had grown into a lithe, trim man with the look of power about him. His dark gray eyes slanted slightly upward at their outer corners, giving him a permanently quizzical look, which did nothing to detract from his reputation for cleverness. His smile was rare but full of sardonic humor. He had high Slavic cheekbones and a straight, broad nose, about which both his grandmothers argued, each delightedly accusing the other’s mother of having been raped by Cossacks. Dozens of them. He wore his graying dark hair short and dressed in ultra-conservative custom-made suits with matching vests from Eric Ross and Carroll and Company, made from the finest British cloth in subdued colors and cut. He had his shirts made for him at Turnbull and Asser whenever he was in London. His ties were remarkable only for their price. None of this was vanity, merely a feeling of how it was necessary for a lawyer to look.

Until he saw Valentine, Josh Hillman had considered himself satisfactorily married. His mother, a lady of the old school, had repeatedly and solemnly warned him that there is a yellow-haired, blue-eyed shiksa lying in wait for every good Jewish boy, and if he listens to her siren’s call, he will be lost and disgraced. However, Josh had never been attracted to the classic Anglo-Saxon type; he thought blandly beautiful girls were boringly alike; he considered
Portnoy’s Complaint
an example of sick, fetishistic thinking, attaching as it did sexual attraction to snub noses and blond hair. But, alas, his mother had been limited in her imaginative forebodings. She could not have conceived of the spark struck in her serious son by the lure of a flaming French-Irish damsel with pale green mermaid eyes and a witty, delicate look, which made Joshua, that least romantic man, leap instinctively to his feet as Valentine entered his office. Spider seemed only a tall blur behind her as she advanced toward him with her positive step. Josh Hillman felt something that he found impossible to name, except he knew that he’d never felt it before.

Valentine noticed the tall lawyer’s slight confusion as they shook hands and attributed it to some change of heart on Billy’s part after Spider’s outrageous behavior of the morning. Instinctively she intensified her slight French accent, further nibbling away at Josh Hillman’s composure and making him endure impossibly distracting subliminal flashes of Paris in the spring.

While the three of them waited for the secretary to bring in the contracts, Hillman’s mind raced.

When Billy had first told him about the contracts she had agreed to with Valentine over the phone, he had been horrified. He had considered his client too sensible to give away a percentage of her profits in Scruples as well as these enormous salaries to some young designer she had only met a few times and to a man about whom she knew nothing. He had advised her to add a cancellation clause to the contracts, which would allow her to terminate their employment as well as their profit sharing within a period of three weeks’ notice. He patiently explained that it didn’t matter that Scruples was leaking money like a burst dam or that there were no profits to protect. It was the principle of the thing. She had to have control over these people. Billy had seen his point at once. Now he wished he hadn’t been quite so clever. The idea that Miss O’Neill might find herself fired at the whim of his most dominating, most spoiled, most demanding client was not a pleasant thing, but at this point it was too late to change.

While Spider and Valentine read the contracts, Hillman studied her from behind a tent he made of his hands. By resting his thumbs on his cheeks and his index fingers just above his eyebrows, he was able to hide a large part of his face while maintaining a contemplative look, a trick he employed often. He watched the play of expression on Valentine’s small face with fascination, so bemused that he paid no attention when Spider stopped reading and said, “There’s something wrong here.”

But when Valentine popped out of her chair with a loud cry of
“Merde,”
he came out of his dream with an undignified jolt.

“What is this merde—this shit?” she demanded, smacking the contracts on the desk, gone so pale with rage that if it hadn’t been for her hair she would have looked like a photo in black and white. “This clause that we may be fired on three weeks’ notice! That was not in the conversation I had with Mrs. Ikehorn. How dare she? What kind of woman does a thing like that? It is dishonest, dishonorable, vile, disgusting! I did not expect it of her, but I should have known! We will
never
sign these contracts, Mr. Hillman. Call her up and tell her that immediately! And tell her what I think of her. Come on, Elliott—we’re leaving!”

“It wasn’t her idea,” Josh Hillman said urgently. “I suggested it—just ordinary lawyers’ prudence. Don’t blame Mrs. Ikehorn. She had nothing to do with it.”

“Ordinary lawyers’ prudence!” Valentine’s wrath was enough to make him blink in amazement. “I spit on lawyers’ prudence! Then it is
you
who should be ashamed of yourself. It was contemptible!”

“I am,” he answered. “Please, believe me!” His chagrin and dismay were written large on his face. He hadn’t looked so helpless or so appalled since the day of his Bar Mitzvah speech, when all knowledge of Hebrew deserted him for one long unforgettable moment, a memory that still made him shudder. Valentine just glared at him balefully, all of her tempestuous nature seething in her eyes.

“Val, baby, shut up a fucking minute, will you,” Spider ordered pleasantly. “Now, Mr. Hillman, if it was your prudent idea to put the clause in, is it now your prudent idea to take the clause out? Sir?”

“I’ll have to talk to Mrs. Ikehorn,” the lawyer admitted reluctantly.

“We’ll wait outside while you reach her,” Spider said, pointing at the telephone with a stern finger. “Maybe you could prevail on your secretary to bring us some coffee.” He took Valentine’s arm in a bruising grasp and led her, willy-nilly, to the door before she could turn the offer down again.

Josh Hillman silently punished the leg of his desk with his shoe for a minute before he leafed through his private phone book, found a number, and made a call on his private line. He talked rapidly and intently for a short while and then buzzed his secretary to bring Valentine and Spider back in.

“All settled,” he announced, with a relieved smile. “I’ll have those changes made in the contracts in five minutes. One year, guaranteed, no strings.”

“Hah!” Valentine sounded scornful and suspicious. When the papers were brought back she read every word with a look of historic French skepticism. Once Spider was satisfied that there were no more trick clauses, they finally signed.

As soon as the two of them left, Josh Hillman told his secretary to hold all his calls. He would need at least a half hour, maybe more, judging from past experience, before he could track down Billy Ikehorn and inform her that in spite of everything he had tried to do or say, in spite of his best efforts, those two had not been willing to sign the contracts until he took out the offending clause. He estimated that it might take another ten minutes alone to persuade her that the cancellation clause actually had never been absolutely necessary, but he knew he could do it. He could persuade anyone to do just about anything. Or, so he had thought until this afternoon. “Merde,” he said to himself, smiling at the memory, as he told his secretary to start calling around and find Billy Ikehorn, on the double.

When Valentine arrived back in her room early that evening, on the coffee table stood a low basket woven in Ireland. Seeming to grow from the green moss that filled the basket were seven tall stems of white butterfly orchids, some fully opened, some just in bud. They were all of springtime in one swoop of heartbreaking grace. On the card next to them was written, “With my most humble apologies for the contretemps of this afternoon. I hope I may be allowed to invite you for dinner after an appropriate period of penance. Josh Hillman.”

Valentine forgave him immediately but would have forgiven him twice over if she had known the trouble he had had in spelling “contretemps” to the salesperson at David Jones, the best florist in Los Angeles. The order had been given over the phone earlier that day while she and Spider had been sipping coffee in his secretary’s outer office right after they had discovered the three weeks’ notice clause in the contracts.

That same night, at three o’clock in the morning, Spider, still awake, heard a faint tap on his hotel door. He opened it to find a woebegone Valentine, huddled in her deep blue robe. He bundled her into the room, deposited her in a chair, anxious and surprised. “What’s wrong, Val—my God, don’t you feel well?” She looked like a terrified child; great green eyes, without their usual frame of heavy black mascara, swam in unshed tears, even her farouche curls seemed to have lost some of their fight.

“Oh, Elliott, I’m scared shitless!”

“You
, darling? How do you think I feel?”

“The way you acted today, I thought—you were so nervy, so sure of yourself, so impudent to Billy.”

“And what about you, almost walking out of that lawyer’s office, going up in smoke like that. I’ve never seen you so angry, not even at me.”

“I still don’t know what happened—when I get mad I don’t think. But, Elliott, I’ve been lying in bed thinking now, and I just realized that we’re a couple of complete fakers, both of us. I’ve never bought for a store in my life, but I know enough from working with buyers to realize that they have years and years of training behind them. And you, you don’t know one single thing about retailing. Nothing! I was just so mad when Billy telephoned that I asked for the moon because I didn’t have anything to lose and now that I’ve got the moon I’m petrified that I’ll lose it. Elliott, what are we
doing
here?”