Lovers (17 page)

“Victoria, don’t be utterly absurd,” Millicent Frost Caldwell said. “You have no special artistic gifts, and you’ve never shown a genuine flair for writing. You were a good all-around student, but advertising—well, it takes a certain touch, a special feeling, a unique something. If you
had it, even at Hill, you would have somehow popped up and been noticed. They would have offered you a permanent job when the summer was over.”

“They’re not big enough to need me. Look, Mother, I know I’m never going to write copy or be an art director. I’m aware of my inadequacies.”

“Well, that’s a relief. Then what is it you want to do here?”

“I know I can become an account executive, given time.”

“Indeed? Do you really?”

“I have the necessary abilities,” Victoria said with the kind of self-confidence that is so strong that it needs no emphasis of tone, no coloration of persuasion. “I’m not creative, but I get along with creative people. I appreciate what they do, and I respect it.”

“But, Victoria—”

“No, please don’t interrupt me, Mother, hear me out. Anybody who understands creative people can
learn
to be an account executive. It takes a person who is good at listening to the clients’ concerns, analyzing them intelligently, and communicating them clearly to the creative people. At the same time, you can’t allow the creative people to get upset when their favorite ideas are rejected.”

Her mother lifted her curly blond head in surprise. Victoria was dead right about account executives.

“It boils down,” Victoria continued, “to being a reliable, organized, detail-oriented go-between with whom everybody gets along. I’ll need training and seasoning, but I know it’s what I want to do, and that’s half of it. I’m young, but I don’t look particularly youthful and eventually—soon—I’ll be ready to start as account executive on something small. You always say that advertising is a young person’s business—you were writing copy and having a baby at my age. In fact, since I’m twenty-two, you were already supporting me with your work! All my life I’ve been doing what you want, Mother, now you have an
obligation
to give
me a chance. I want to make my own living, have my own apartment, live my own life.”

“How on earth can a job as an account executive be what you aspire to, Victoria?” Millicent was filled with disappointment and dismay at her daughter’s determination. “My God! Just look at the education I’ve given you, look at the marvelous places you’ve been to, your travels, your wonderful summers! Look at all the ideas you’ve been exposed to, all the people you’ve met—why, Victoria, why?”

“Oh, it’s your inspiration, Mother, what else could it have been?” Victoria said, giving Millicent an unusually generous smile that made her, for the moment, astonishingly beautiful. She knew she had won, as she had to, after all these dutiful years of learning and travel during which she had never once wavered in her perfectly hidden, endlessly growing love for Angus Caldwell.

Victoria Frost had never felt any real interest in any of the young men she’d met, a number of whom had been attracted to her interestingly unusual seriousness and her soundly reliable good looks, the quietly glossy radiance that her health and vitality gave her. Victoria Frost was so profoundly unavailable that many of them had pursued her, piqued and fascinated, unable to believe that their advantages, their wealth, their family backgrounds, their indisputable eligibility, could be overlooked by a girl who wasn’t, after all, when you came right down to it, a raving beauty. Oh, she had a good body, an excellent body, but she didn’t have a hint of a sexy attitude, which was more alluring than mere flesh, of which there was so much around. Still, Victoria was oddly … aristocratic, yes, aristocratic was the right word for her. She had the confidence to be exactly what she was, so utterly
present
, without using any of the female tricks of the trade, she belonged to herself in an infuriating way, as if she were better than you were. Victoria made you want to make an impression on her, make her sit up and take notice of you, make her change something about herself to please you, but even those minor hopes were doomed. She’d been known to let
a boy kiss her, of course, but as far as anyone knew, that was Victoria’s limit in the 1970s, when there weren’t supposed to be limits, and girls from the best families everywhere experimented with everything.

By 1978, Victoria was twenty-six. Only four years out of college, she had recently been made an account supervisor at Caldwell & Caldwell, where she was responsible for the four account executives who worked on the various Oak Hill Foods divisions. The food company had grown mightily in the ten years since it had become Angus Caldwell’s first client, and it now billed almost a hundred million dollars a year, a sizable chunk of the almost billion dollars a year that the giant agency did worldwide.

“I’m not happy with Victoria,” her mother said to her husband.

“Why? She’s doing a spectacular job. Joe Devane thinks the world of her.”

“How dense can you be, Angus? There are other things in life besides work. Victoria doesn’t date anyone in particular, she’s always being introduced to somebody new by all those girls she went to school with, every one of them married by now and some divorced and remarried—yet my daughter, as far as I know, is … 
celibate
, for Christ’s sake! If that isn’t enough to worry me, what is?”

“First of all, you don’t have any proof, it’s just a hunch of yours,” Angus said, raising an eyebrow at his frowning wife. “Not that Victoria would necessarily tell you if she were having a romance. Absolutely to the contrary, I expect. The two of you hardly ever see each other, much less talk about anything intimate. I rarely remember that you’re mother and daughter. Second, I don’t get that feeling about her at all, if by ‘celibate’ you mean asexual. In my opinion, Victoria’s merely exceptionally discreet—she always has been … an enigma, hasn’t she? But I’ve felt that there is a kind of—oh, a deep, glowing warmth there, an unexpressed emotional side to her, something very private, very personal, very positive. I’m sure it’s a question of
her finding the right man. She’s almost an old-fashioned girl, Millicent, and part of that is because of the way you brought her up.”

“I gave her all the things I yearned for and never had,” Millicent Caldwell said defensively.

“I didn’t mean that in an invidious way. Victoria has standards, she has a sense of self-worth, she’s focused in a way no other girls of her age are, at least none I’ve met. She’s far more mature than her age.”

Angus Caldwell looked wearily at his wife, off on yet another of her frequent and silly frets. Millicent was almost forty-eight now, and ever since she’d entered an early menopause, six years ago, she’d become increasingly irritable, argumentative, cranky, and difficult to live with, although it hadn’t affected her work. Millicent’s mother and aunt had both died of breast cancer, and therefore, to her bitter disappointment, the doctors wouldn’t give her estrogen therapy.

Millicent had had a facelift when she was forty-five, but that hadn’t changed the fact that the woman he’d married when he was barely twenty-eight and she could still claim to be in her thirty-seventh year, had changed more than he would have believed. She was, as people said, “pushing fifty” now, and he was a man still in his thirties, at the height of his powers. The nine-year difference in their ages, once so insignificant, was often on his mind.

Millicent was still, God knows, very blond and still pretty—he knew to the minute exactly what she went through every day to remain so—and she was more vivacious than ever. Yet, in her exquisitely feminine clothes and the monstrously valuable jewelry she always wore, making her collection of gems a trademark of her style and a sign of her success, she seemed to have become a brightly painted little bird, flying about with forced energy, twinkling and glittering and growing drier and more artificial every minute as she attempted to maintain that alluring golden aura she’d once inhabited so easily. A hummingbird, he thought broodingly, seemingly unable to stop flying
and settle anywhere, a hummingbird always in motion, a tiny, decked-out, but curiously unconvincing hummingbird.

It almost, Angus told himself grimly, came down to a matter of skin. Millicent had lost whatever essential juice that once kept her delicate skin so appetizing. A web of fine wrinkles surrounded her eyes; the skin under her chin was slightly lax, so that tendons showed clearly under its surface; she had too many frown lines between her eyes. Not even the most skillful surgeon could eliminate every sign of aging. Although Millicent clung fiercely to the slim outlines of her figure by dint of an hour’s daily exercise, although she could still wear a size six, there was an absence of firmness, a lack of freshness when he touched her, something he wanted to do less and less often.

The press was ever more fascinated by her, as the agency grew larger every year. Millicent Frost Caldwell was a major star of the establishment now, someone quoted as an authority, an elder of the advertising community. Angus was equally establishment, but as a woman Millicent attracted more attention than he, particularly since she had systematically created herself as if she were a product for which she was making a market. She never wearied of the work involved in choosing and wearing the most elaborate examples of American high fashion. She was responsible for buying and supervising the decoration of the three lavish, fully staffed estates they maintained in Southampton, Jamaica, and Cap Ferrat, and for their often-photographed Fifth Avenue duplex.

Both Caldwells traveled often, visiting the offices they had established in Canada, London, Japan, and Germany. Frequently they traveled separately, not wanting to leave the agency without one of them in charge. From the beginning of their partnership, one account, Oak Hill, had clearly “belonged” to Angus, and a cosmetics account had equally declared itself in Millicent’s domain, but otherwise much of their vast success rested on the fact that their largest accounts liked the fact that with Caldwell they
could count on the brains of both a top man and a top woman working together. Many large advertisers had finally accepted the fact that women made the majority of buying decisions in families, but the companies were almost always run by men who felt secure in Angus’s attention.

In the course of the past ten years, the Caldwells had become thoroughly woven into the texture of the life of the East Coast’s business and cultural elite. They cannily chose to turn their clients into personal friends, and they devoted almost every weekday night to their social life. Angus joined town clubs in Chicago, Detroit, and New York to which his clients belonged, he sailed at the New York Yacht Club with them, golfed and played tennis with them, and joined the Cavendish Club, where bridge reigned. Millicent and he invited clients and their families to stay at their various country places, where she brilliantly created an easy but worldly agenda, mixing clients with friends from international society. The wives of all their largest clients were utterly devoted to generous, hospitable Millicent, Millicent who was a great and powerful magnet in their lives. “The Caldwells” formed a glamorous couple whose private life, social life, and business success were inextricably intertwined.

Angus Caldwell had been sporadically unfaithful to Millicent for the past five years, yet he was too clever to get involved with any woman who might make a claim on him. His affairs were carefully anonymous; they always took place in cities other than New York and were conducted from the beginning as encounters that could never have a sequel. There was a certain sordid erotic excitement in their secretiveness, he admitted to himself, but they were unsatisfactory except for the physical relief they offered. A business partnership with his wife, Angus reflected, kept the money in the family, but it also obliged him to behave like a male version of Caesar’s unfortunate wife, who must be “not so much as suspected” of infidelity, for as Millicent
grew older and her queenly status increased, so did her discontent, her constant watchfulness, and her jealousy of the younger women in the business.

No romances for him, Angus told himself sternly, and felt, in increasingly frequent moments, that he had lost out forever on an experience that he had enjoyed but once in a lifetime, with a woman who no longer appealed to him, an experience he would renew if it were only possible, if it did not certainly mean the destruction of all he had built in his entire career.

As soon as Victoria got her first assignment as an account executive, less than a year after she joined Caldwell, she spent many hours searching for an empty apartment to move to from her furnished studio. She knew exactly what she needed and found it on a side street between Third and Second, on East Eighty-fifth Street. The building was old, the lobby was far from elegant, the elevators had been inexpensively modernized to eliminate the need for an elevator man, and the management of the building was offering the apartment “as is” without any allowance for its dilapidation.

However, the building possessed the quality of solidity she sought above all else, and it promised privacy, in a neighborhood too far east and too far uptown for her friends to frequent. Victoria bribed the superintendent with three thousand dollars in cash to get her name on the lease. Although the three rooms and kitchen hadn’t been touched in twenty-five years, she saw that the walls were thick, the ceilings were of a fine height and the good-sized rooms had pleasant dimensions.

From the moment she stood alone in this space of peeling walls and dirty windows, Victoria visualized it as it could be, as she would create it, guided by passion and instinct, until it became precisely the place in which Angus Caldwell would feel most happy. She knew, without ever having been told, that he would prefer a far simpler decor
than any place she could remember her mother considering fit for habitation.

As she supervised the transformation of her apartment, every choice was made with Angus in mind, every change was made for a tall, active man, imparting a kind of subtle, resolutely invisible comfort that few women would be concerned with for themselves alone. The living room was lined with bookcases from floor to ceiling; throughout the apartment the woodwork was painted in a warm terracotta, with more brown in it than pink; all the windows were framed in heavily lined, full-length draperies in a slightly deeper terra-cotta linen. The floors were stripped and stained in a dark honey tone; the deep chairs and couches were large, simply designed, and upholstered in mellow brown leather and solid fabrics in shades of deep red and rusts, with one or two touches of green and soft yellow, so that it seemed that early autumn had just arrived throughout the apartment. The wooden tables Victoria chose were country antiques, with a fine patina, the table lamps were plain and thoughtfully placed, and there were a few faded but beautiful rugs on the shining floors.