Scruples (57 page)

“Aw, Val, you’re not fair! That stinks! I never treated you without respect—you’re my best friend.”

“Don’t be absurd.” She tossed her small bonfire of curls so that she didn’t have to look at Spider’s hurt eyes. “Nobody believes that a man and a woman can be just best friends. Do you imagine for a minute that people won’t assume I’m just another of your many girls, just another in the famous parade? I refuse to be taken for that, Elliott, especially now when we are practically in each other’s pockets as it is—we share an office, even a desk, for heaven’s sake.”

“An office that I’m almost never in, and you have your studio all to yourself, Valentine. But if you like, I’ll find another place for my desk.” Spider looked as stunned as if she’d lunged at him with her sketching pencil. “Don’t worry—I won’t come to see you without an invitation. All I wanted to do was bring you a housewarming present and show you a funny letter I got—my first fan mail.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Elliott—just call before you come over, that’s all.” Valentine retreated hastily from her studied indignation. She had carried it too far. What a baby he was under all that masculine strut. She touched his hand. “I’m sorry—will you still give me my present?”

“Ask your fancy doorman for it—a fucking heavy case of champagne—he helped me lug it all the way to the elevator. Let’s hope he doesn’t get a thirsty hernia and drink it all up before you get home.”

“Oh, Elliott, thank you! Come and drink some with me tonight—please?” She tilted her bright head and peered demurely up at him from behind the twin fringes of her eyelashes and her hair. Somewhere, he thought, she’s finally learned how to flirt. Bad-tempered bitch.

“If I have time.”

“Please try—I want you to see my place. And what was your funny letter about?”

“Oh, it’s just from the sexy broad I took free pictures for in New York when I didn’t have any other work, remember? She called herself Cotton Candy? She saw a picture of us in
People
last week, that story they did on Scruples, and she recognized me. She wrote that my pictures changed her luck and now she has her own business, thanks to them. She took the best one of all and made it into a sort of calling card—take a look at this! Phone number and all. I should have asked for a percentage of her action.”

Valentine took the photograph he handed her and gazed at it, wide-eyed. “Compared to her, I look like a boy. I like your fan mail better than mine. I got a letter from Prince, that bastard, saying how glad he was that I had become such a success. What nerve—Elliott, you
will
come tonight, won’t you?”

“Of course I will.”

He did, and stayed on for dinner, as he used to, just as she had expected him to, but Valentine knew that the warp and woof of their friendship had changed to make room for the secret of Josh in her life. It was the first thing, except for the facts about Alan Wilton, that she had had to hide from Elliott, and it altered their relationship in subtle ways, making her guarded, tentative, and withdrawn in small matters that she didn’t think he’d notice, but which he saw as clearly as he saw the new double bed in her bedroom.

When the evening was over, Valentine felt queerly hollow, unexpectedly depressed. She had to expect it, after all, she told herself with firm logic. One cannot have it all. And what she did have, ah, that was worth giving up a great deal to guard. Valentine gloated over her thoughts of Josh, wrapping her knowledge of his love around her like a snug blanket that she could pull right up over her head if she wanted to. He worried furiously that she might resent the fact that he couldn’t dare take her to a really good restaurant because of the risk of being seen together. If they didn’t eat at the 94th Aero Squadron or some obscure place in the Valley, Valentine cooked for him in her kitchen. Once a month or so they even managed a weekend together without ever leaving her apartment. He was afraid that she might grow restless, but the very lack of any open arrangement between them suited Valentine perfectly. For the first time in her life, and she was now twenty-five, she was settled with a man, and she felt no need to pin this joy up for public inspection, to make this romance official by telling even one other person. Her love for Josh was all the sweeter for being unknown, like a secret garden blooming away in the middle of a city.

Their only quarrel had been over his offer, his expectation, actually, that he would pay her rent.
“Ah, ça jamais!”
she had shouted in unexpected fury, so surprised by rage that she lapsed into French. “What the hell do you think I am—a kept woman? You do not keep me, like men used to keep their mistresses. I have my independence, my own life. Never mention that again!”

The skin tightened over his high Slavic cheekbones, and he bent his serious head in consternation.

“Valentine, sweet love, I’m so sorry—I’ve never done anything like this before—I thought—It was unforgivably stupid—” She took his bowed head in her arms and pulled it close, ruffling his short, dark, graying hair with her breath, finally kissing his sad mouth.

“You thought it was the correct thing to do in such circumstances. Do you get these ideas from your lawbooks? Do they teach the proper conduct of a love affair at Harvard? Where is your sense of romance? They must have left it out of the curriculum, eh? We must make up for that—and quickly.”

Several days later, right after she obtained her California driver’s license, Valentine, moved by a curiosity she thought she hadn’t felt, drove her new, little Renault past Josh Hillman’s house on North Roxbury Drive. It was on a corner lot, with high walls, behind which she could see the mesh of a tennis-court fence and the tops of many large trees. The whitewashed brick facade of the huge house spoke of absolutely rock-solid wealth, the hundreds of blooming rosebushes bordering the low wall around the property and the path to the front door spoke of loving maintenance and at least two gardeners. Valentine couldn’t connect it with Josh; still less could she connect it with herself. The house had a permanence, a right to be where it was, that was so unquestioned that she couldn’t envision the man who was the master of that house living anywhere else.

She roused herself from the memory of the house she had never returned to look at again to thoughts of the weekend to come. It was the Fourth of July and she had been invited to Jacob Lace’s great annual party. Billy and Spider had been invited too, but they weren’t going. Valentine hadn’t been able to resist, even though it meant flying three thousand miles for just a few days. All the world of fashion would be there, and now that she too was an indisputable member of that world, Valentine of Scruples, she wanted to go back to New York and see how it looked to her from the vantage point of a peer.

Since Miss Stella of I. Magnin had retired in November 1976, Valentine was the only designer running a custom-couture operation in any large store in the United States. True, Scruples wasn’t a department store (and Bergdorfs in New York was reproducing some custom copies from the Paris collection), but her workrooms, swelled by the addition of many of Miss Stella’s former seamstresses, patternmakers, and cutters, bustled with the orders of the many West Coast women to whom ready-to-wear still was three dirty words. Billy had been entirely right about the prestige that expensive custom design would bring to Scruples. And they did much better than break even, thought Valentine gleefully. Thank God she’d held out for a piece of the profits.

Josh was coming with her to Lace’s party. Precisely how he was managing it, she didn’t ask, what excuses he had made to his wife, she didn’t want to know, but he was determined to take her to the party, arguing that in such a large crowd they wouldn’t appear to be necessarily together as they would in a restaurant, and there was never any press coverage of Lace’s yearly festival.

The only cloud on Valentine’s horizon was the prospect of packing. For a woman whose profession consisted, in part, of totally organizing other women’s wardrobes, she found herself in the grip of a doom-laden, nervous constriction when it came to filling a suitcase for herself. Only yesterday she had sent a customer off completely outfitted for a summer that was to span a tour of the Greek Islands, a conference in Oslo, and a semiroyal wedding in London; and Valentine had designed clothes to carry her through it all in splendid style without requiring more than two suitcases. She looked at the dress she had made for herself for Lace’s party: a pleated blouse of apple-green chiffon, with an off-the-shoulder neckline and full sleeves, tucked into a vast, poufed skirt of eight separate layers of pale lilac-lawn with a wide, stiff sash of a green velvet the color of her eyes. Very
fête champêtre
, thought Valentine, appalled, but how do you pack it? In its own suitcase, of course, she could imagine Elliott informing her in his new role of fashion dictator.

While Valentine packed, Spider Elliott was feeling sorry for himself for no reason he could imagine, a state of affairs as foreign to him as an outbreak of boils on his ass. He stretched out by his pool with a large Friday-night drink in his hand and decided to change his mood by counting his blessings.

There was his newly rented house, for example. Just around the corner from Doheny Drive, north of Sunset, tucked into an easily missed cul-de-sac, it was an inspiring example of just how superbly a man can arrange to live when he has neither wife nor child to cater to. It had been remodeled by Spider’s landlord, a famous director, father of nine, who had taken a vow of non-chaste, non-celibate, bachelorhood immediately after his fifth divorce. This vow, written in his business manager’s blood, was symbolized by the large, plant-bordered Jacuzzi in one corner of the two-story living room. Something must have gone wrong, or else exceptionally right, in that Jacuzzi, Spider suspected, because the director was now married again, and his sixth wife refused to live in a house in which she sensed the aura of too much forbidden fun and games.

Fun and games, thought Spider morosely. Did anyone really have fun and games or were they just kidding themselves? He grimly resumed the list of his blessings. Scruples was the hit of the world of retailing and it was largely due to him. Hooray for Billy Ikehorn Orsini, since the store belonged to her. The women of Beverly Hills and places north, south, and east of Beverly Hills were invading Scruples and clamoring for Spider to tell them how to look at themselves with another pair of eyes. He was more important to them than their hairdressers, their house-plant doctors, even their tennis pros. Hooray for the good women of Beverly Hills. Perhaps one day he would become as indispensable as a good analyst or even a plastic surgeon. No, strike the plastic surgeon. His friend Valentine was riding high, coming into her own as a top designer, the talk of
WWD
and
Vogue
and
Bazaar
. Hooray for Valentine O’Neill and her mysterious little secret, whatever it was, and not that he gave a fuck, not even a fart did he give, if she chose to shut herself up in style with as many guards to keep people out as a rock star. Rotten, irritable, chit of a girl, a secretive, cunning French broad. Thank God he hadn’t gotten mixed up with her. Another blessing to count.

His phone rang. Spider hurried to answer it. Probably Valentine checking to make sure he was there to mind the store tomorrow while she was in flight, off to show off at Lace’s party. But it was his telephone answering service with two messages, which had come in during the day. One was from Melanie Adams saying that she just wanted to say hello, and the second was from Melanie Adams, cancelling the first message. The service was not sure if he wanted the messages or not, so they thought they’d better give him both of them, just in case. Spider hung up. Hooray for them too. Was there no end to his blessings? He was the only man in Hollywood with an efficient answering service.

Melanie Adams. The thought of her didn’t lash him anymore. He’d even gone to see her first film, just to make sure. He supposed he should be glad for her—although it seemed as if that were asking a bit much of himself—but she had been born for the camera to make love to. Exquisite though she had been in fashion photos, the genius of cinematographer John Alonzo had doubled her beauty as it captured her grace of movement.

Now, in the last two weeks or so, she had taken to phoning when he was sure not to be at home, leaving noncommittal little messages with his service and invariably cancelling the messages within an hour. He didn’t know what sick, childish game she imagined she was playing, but whatever it was, he was not about to be involved. He had never returned a single call. Was it really only a year since that last Fourth of July, the night they had gone together to Lace’s party? It felt like ten years. Spider had been invited to five parties this Fourth of July weekend and he had decided to go to every one of them. If he spent any more time counting his blessings he might decide to drown himself in his blessing of a swimming pool.

The phone rang again. This time he let it ring six times before he finally answered.

“Spider?” There was no mistaking that voice, smoking ice, haunted by the inviting ghost of a lascivious, wickedly prim southern belle. He couldn’t answer. “Spider?” she repeated. “Spider, I know it’s you and not the service because they always talk to me.”

“Hello, Melanie. Good-bye, Melanie.”

“Don’t hang up!
Please
. Just let me talk to you for a minute. I’ve been thinking about you for so long, Spider, but I didn’t have the nerve to call when you’d be home.”