Judith Krantz (75 page)

“Say that again.” Billy raised herself on one elbow. “Come on. You heard.”

“Oh, Gigi, I’m so delighted for you! That’s
wonderful!
Give me a kiss!”

“You’re not … upset?”

“Of course not! What kind of selfish person do you think I am? I’ve been wondering when you were going to spread your wings, get off this particular branch and fly away. Lord, Gigi, when I was your age, I’d spent a year in Paris on my own and lived in New York and held down an exciting job, I’d had all sorts of lovers and then I’d married Ellis and I’d been to state dinners at the White House in my Dior ballgowns and he’d bought me Empress Josephine’s emeralds and the ranch in Brazil and the place in Barbados and I was on the Best Dressed List—heavens, what
hadn’t
I done, years before your age! You’ve always been a late bloomer, and Zach is your first real romance. He’s wonderful, of course, but you haven’t really … well, had a lot of experience, shall we say?”

“Forget about my shortcomings, Billy,” Gigi pounced. “Let’s talk about your lovers—you’ve never mentioned that little item before. Could you be more precise? Some specific details.”

“They’ve passed into history,” Billy laughed. “You heard it once, but from now on, I’ll deny it,” she added with a renewal of her habitual energy. “I’ve been worried about you. Zach is away so much, and your job isn’t nearly enough for your scope, but you seemed so content to let things go on as they were … I didn’t want to stir things up in your little love nest. This is great news, just stupendous! What kind of agency? Is it that new place that was trying to recruit you before the babies were born? Frost something?”

“Right, same place. Archie Rourke, Byron Berenson Bernheim the Third, and Victoria Frost.”

“Oh yes, I remember, Millicent Caldwell’s daughter,” Billy said in a voice she used unconsciously when she spoke of those few women she considered her peers. “What’s the daughter like?”

“She could be … difficult. But the guys are wonderful.”

“Married?” Billy asked sharply. “No they’re not. God, you’re conventional.”

“You will be too, when you’ve been married three times. Just watch out for them. No office romances.”

“But weren’t you Ellis’s secretary?”

“That was the exception.” Billy shrugged and blushed faintly. “I still don’t recommend it. Does Spider know?”

“Yes, I have his blessing. He understood perfectly, even why I have to leave so quickly.”

“But, darling, we can’t let you go without a going-away party. Josie can arrange it in an hour.”

Gigi growled and complained, but Billy, already at the phone, dialing Josie at the office, paid no attention. As she heard the familiar sound of Billy issuing a long list of detailed instructions, Gigi realized that this was an opportunity to get away. She kissed the top of Billy’s head, waved, and disappeared down the corridor, closing the door behind her.

As soon as Gigi got back to Scruples Two, she made a lunch date with Sasha, who was free that very day. Sasha Nevsky was the last important person to whom she had to tell her news, except for Zach, who wouldn’t care where she worked as long as she was happy.

And her father, of course. Vito Orsini was in Europe for the moment, but as soon as he came home she’d have dinner with him and discuss the whole thing. Their relationship had grown close and warm in the past years, and often, when Gigi was alone, Vito would take her out, always to a different restaurant, and insist that she order the most expensive things on the menu, and talk over all sorts of things, with an intimacy she didn’t believe would be possible for a daughter who’d grown up normally in her father’s house.

“You look awfully pleased with yourself—did someone just give you a lifetime supply of perfect panty hose?” Sasha asked her closest friend, with whom she’d shared apartments in New York and West Hollywood until, little over a year ago, she’d met Josh Hillman, Billy’s lawyer, and agreed to marry him on their first date.

“I’m so excited and relieved I don’t know what to do,” Gigi admitted gaily. “I was dreading telling Spider and Billy that I’m leaving, but they both think it’s a great idea.”

“Leaving? Leaving Los Angeles?” Sasha looked bewildered.

“Of course not, leaving Scruples Two.”

“What?” Sasha shouted. “You’re doing
what?”

“Stop making that awful noise, for heaven’s sake, it’s not going to bother you. I’ve got that job at the ad agency I told you about, isn’t that terrific?”

“It’s the worst news I’ve ever heard! How can you do this to me, Gigi? Oh God, I don’t—I
won’t—
believe it, you’re just
springing this on me, as if it doesn’t matter? What ever happened to you to make you so cruel?”

Gigi looked at her in astonishment. Sasha, the famously hardhearted tormentor of the male sex; Sasha, who had brought Josh Hillman, the most eligible single man in Beverly Hills, to his knees in one evening; Sasha, the sweepingly tall, the domineering, the possessor of all the answers—weeping? She’d never seen a tear form in those eyes before.

“But, Sasha,” Gigi protested, watching more huge tears appear, “it shouldn’t make any difference to you. It won’t change anything between us, you’re always out of the office with your assistants, why in God’s name are you crying? Stop it, or at least get out a Kleenex, this is getting embarrassing … people are looking at you.”

“Let them look,” Sasha gulped as a narrow ribbon of tears dripped off her chin and hit the tablecloth. “I’m not ashamed of honest emotion.”

“If you’d just explain … What emotion, exactly? It can’t be that you’re going to miss me at Scruples Two, because we hardly catch sight of each other at work anymore, it can’t be envy of my new job, because you have a fantastic job of your own … What’s this all about?” Gigi demanded sternly, handing Sasha a napkin. She hadn’t gone through a morning of confronting Spider and Billy to let Sasha, of all people, make her feel like a betrayer.

“It … it just won’t
be
Scruples Two anymore if you go,” Sasha finally said, getting her voice under control, although the tears continued to come.

“Be reasonable! It’s a huge business and getting bigger every day. I’m not irreplaceable.”

“Sure, someone can copy your writing style, but you and me, oh, Gigi, we
were
Scruples Two before there really was one … it was just the two of us, me and my ratty old collection of Christmas catalogs and you and your idea of how to make a better one … If you leave, the spirit, the essence goes out of the whole thing.”

“Sasha,” Gigi said gently, “that spirit was gone ages ago, as soon as Scruples Two became a definitive success and the marketing guys came in and started to make the big-money decisions. You’re remembering the start-up time, when Spider and Billy and the two of us were all creating something together and taking a gamble that we were right. It’s like people in the third year of a Broadway success wishing they were back rehearsing before the first-night curtain went up.”

“Oh, Gigi, we had so much fun!”
Sasha spoke in a voice of loss and sadness that Gigi thought was strangely unjustified, considering
that her friend now had what any woman would consider a perfect life: a husband she adored, a heavenly baby girl, a job she did brilliantly, and all the money anyone could want.

“But aren’t we still having fun?” Gigi asked, deeply puzzled.

“No!
We’re grown up now
. Grownups don’t ever have fun the way we used to, and if you don’t know it now, Gigi, you will, just you wait.” Sasha seemed full of a strange, inappropriate grief.

“Good Lord, you’re twenty-six, you’re married and a mother, if you weren’t at least a little bit grown-up now you’d be in trouble,” Gigi said, trying to ignore her friend’s unaccountable misery and bring matters back onto a plane of reality.

“Do you think I don’t know all that?” Sasha flashed.

“Well, then?” Gigi challenged.

“Oh, it’s all right for you,” Sasha said. “You’re playing house with my loopy genius of a brother—you can flit around and try this and sample that—you’re nothing close to a grownup yet and you don’t have to live up to … to … live up to
things.”

“Are we talking about my quitting or the married condition?” Gigi asked tartly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sasha said in confusion, “whatever you say. You tell me, Gigi,” she implored.

“No, you tell me.”

“Oh, Gigi,” Sasha burst out, “Josh is
such
a grownup. The real, solid, serious, unchangeable thing. The first few months it didn’t seem to matter that he’s fifty years old, but … well, I guess I didn’t expect that he’d be so deeply involved in things I don’t really care about … I thought we’d be like every other newly married couple, just starting out together, but now … oh, hell!”

“Look, Sasha, be sensible,” Gigi said firmly. “Josh was the senior partner at one of the most important law firms in Los Angeles when you met him, he was a pillar of the community, you knew that going in, didn’t you? Did you expect to live in a small cottage by a waterfall as the wife of the most important lawyer at Strassberger, Lipkin and Hillman?”

“How about finding yourself suddenly filling the shoes of the wife of one of the leading fundraisers for the Music Center, Cedars-Sinai Hospital, the County Museum of Art, and at least a half a dozen other worthy organizations? How about getting to know all the top good-works wives in town and having to keep on excellent, lunching terms with them when they have daughters my age and they all know his first wife and adore her? How about black-tie benefit dinners three nights a week, with endless speeches, and you can’t sneak out early because your table is too
conspicuous or Josh is on the dais? How about he secretly thinks I should be home taking care of Nellie instead of going back to work, because that’s the way it is in his world, but he’s being understanding about it, very obviously understanding, because he knows that he has to compromise, considering all the things I’ve compromised about!”

“It sounds worse than awful!”

“Yeah,” Sashs sniffed in rebellious resignation.

“Can’t Josh stop doing some of those things?”

“He’s already disconnected himself from half of the stuff he used to do—I only mentioned the causes he’s so committed to that he won’t drop them. I can’t expect him to eliminate his social conscience … one of the things I love about him is that he’s such a good man, so genuinely good, so genuinely sweet … oh, shit! I wish he weren’t. Or rather, I wish he were the way he is,
without
being involved in doing all that stuff … does that make sense?”

“Not a hell of a lot.”

“Why should it be that the things men do best and that give them so much pleasure aren’t the things their wives wish they were doing?”

“Ask your ‘loopy genius of a brother,’ ” Gigi said grimly. “Not you too?”

“Me too.”

“Well, at least I warned you, you can’t say I didn’t,” Sasha reminded Gigi virtuously. “I told you not to get involved with him.”

“I remember distinctly. You admitted you were jealous. You said Zach was ‘yours.’
And
you called me a slut.”

“See? I told you we had fun!”