Lovers (22 page)

“I don’t mind all the speculation in the trades,” Archie commented to Byron, “but I expected Victoria to be a little bit less of Our Lady of the Perfect French Twist with us after that dinner at her place.”

“Do you think that outfit was all part of a come-on? A one-time-only event? An offer never to be repeated?”

“It could well have been, tight red pants and all. But it’s not about clothes, it’s about her manner. She’s reverted to her usual impenetrable self. Even though we’re partners, she’s still subtly behaving as if she’s our immediate superior. That burns my ass.”

“Sounds like you were nursing a little thing for her.”

“ ‘Little thing,’ Byron? No wonder you can’t put words on paper. No wonder you’re just an art director.”

“The hots, a yen, the urge to stick it to her—”

“Listen, Archie, I admit I wouldn’t mind sticking it to her and neither would you, only I’m smart enough to worry that once she got it, she’d never give it back.”

“She’s honestly not my type, By, but I want to be treated as an equal, that’s the deal we signed on for.”

“You agreed to move the agency to L.A.,” Byron reminded him.

“That makes sense. You agreed to call it Frost Rourke
Bernheim or FRB, depending on how fast you’re talking, does that make you a patsy?”

“Nah, it sounded better, came more trippingly off the tongue. Anyway, people’ll call it FRB, it’s still an unwieldy name. And L.A. makes sense to me too. There’s nothing here I need to hang around for, and my folks are in San Francisco … new start, new coast.”

Soon after the move to California, FRB picked up a number of smallish new accounts: an excellent vineyard in the Napa Valley, Bugattini Gourmet Pasta, the Association of California Artichoke Growers, a Bay Area herbal tea company, an importer of expensive balsamic vinegar and olive oil, and several others—all, frustratingly, in the food business. They had started as a packaged-goods agency, and they seemed destined to stay there unless they could manage to break out of that mold. Their new accounts, in total, billed ten million dollars, just enough to make them feel that they were making progress, but it was less than brilliant progress for people used to the excitement of a large agency and huge accounts.

FRB spent a few cramped months in sublet quarters. Soon, in determined anticipation of additional growth and to accommodate the new people they had hired, Victoria took a long-term lease on offices that were larger than they actually needed, and hired a decorator to renovate and redecorate on a scale that would impress future clients. Although she continued to function as account supervisor on the Oak Hill accounts, Victoria spent most of her time traveling, scouting accounts for the agency, the noncreative area of “new business coordinator” she had staked out firmly and entirely for herself, leaving Byron and Archie to concentrate on what they did best.

Even with all her travel, Victoria managed to see Angus far less than she had counted on. Millicent was making things difficult, he explained, more difficult than he had expected, and if he rushed her, she would dig in her heels and make things impossible for them. They had already
accomplished so much that they only needed a little more patience, a little more time …

More time, Victoria thought grimly as she pushed aside the fruit salad Polly had put on her desk. More patience. As if she hadn’t given Angus more patience and yet more patience, until she thought she’d die from hemorrhaging patience. They hadn’t been able to manage a minute together on her trip to New York, not one single meeting. He’d been unable to see her, and her heart and body felt lacerated, flayed, raw with hatred of her mother and disgust with Angus for his inability to extricate himself from his endless obligations.

And when she’d returned, what had she found? Archie and Byron, the only people she could count on, the only two people who knew who she
was
, who knew her before her lonely California exile had started, were off to frolic and feast and waste time with Gigi Orsini, who was entirely too well dressed and obviously knew nothing, nothing at all, about the advertising business. A girl who, for some reason that she couldn’t identify, reminded her of her mother when she’d been young.

I
met a man named Tom Unger while I was in New York,” Josh suddenly remarked to Sasha, shortly after a silent and tense dinner during which Sasha tried unsuccessfully to convince herself that he was merely preoccupied with a difficult case. He’d cut short their usual pilgrimage to watch Nellie sleep in her crib and had led her into the library.

“Well, thank the Lord!” Sasha exclaimed, in relief mixed with anger. “So that’s it! Don’t you ever do this to me again, Josh Hillman—I thought you’d discovered that you had some terminal disease and were trying to decide how to break the news. You have no idea what you’ve looked like since you came back from New York yesterday—doom piled on gloom. I’ve been frantic with worry … but I didn’t dare ask because I was too afraid of the answer.”

“Tom … used to be your lover.” Josh pronounced the words heavily, with a weighty sigh he couldn’t conceal.

“Well, of course he was,” she responded immediately, tossing her long black hair in annoyance. “Is that what you’re so upset about? The thing I find disgusting is that Tom actually told you about me when he knew we were married. What a lowlife he turned out to be! And you’ve put me through hell because of your silly retrospective jealousy. Men! You all make me sick!”

She got up from the chair in which she’d been sitting and flounced furiously around the room, scrutinizing Josh as if she’d never really seen him before. His clever mouth, his Slavic cheekbones, his distinguished skull covered with short gray hair, his height and the sardonic yet kindly lines of his face suddenly seemed unfamiliar to her, made strange by the tormented expression in his eyes.

“Do you mean to sit there and tell me that you expected me to be a virgin when we got married?” Sasha finally burst out, since he didn’t utter another word. “Did you think that a woman of almost twenty-four had spent her whole life locked in a chastity belt, waiting for you to come along?”

“No. I assumed you’d had romances just as I’d had romances … love affairs, relationships, whatever you want to call them. I assumed that, and then I put it out of my mind.”

“Then why bring up Tom Unger now? Am I supposed to apologize? And what the hell did you say to him when he dropped this charming little bit of ancient kiss-and-tell? Did you turn on your heel in dignity, or did you pop the guy?”

“He didn’t know we were married.”

“What?
You mean Tom Unger is just going around gratuitously dropping my name as one of his ex-conquests? ‘Oh, by the way, I had an affair with Sasha Nevsky?’ I’m going to call him up, that filthy, slimy bastard, and give him such hell that he’ll forget his own name, much less that he ever knew mine. He’s as sick as he’s cheap! And to think I once really liked him.”

“That wasn’t the way it happened.”

“You’d better tell me the way it happened, Josh, and right now, every word. I won’t put up with this shit. I won’t let you sit there accusing me of God knows what with every pore in your body. Having a romance with Tom Unger isn’t a crime—even if he’s joined the criminal classes.”

Painstakingly, in deliberate detail, Josh told her everything that had happened during his downtown lunch in New York, not leaving out a single of the damning words he had been listening to in his mind since the minute he left the offices of Westcott, Rosenthal, Kelly and King.

When he had finished, Sasha sat looking at the carpet, rubbing the cord of her sash between her fingers, but otherwise motionless. The silence lengthened between them. Finally she raised her head and looked at him with compassion.

“I’m sorry, darling. Of course you’re upset. I can never tell you how sorry I am that I never told you myself. If I’d ever dreamed you’d hear it in such an awful public way … oh, I should have known, I should have told you—”

“You’re sorry because of
how
I learned that you used to have three lovers at one time? You think that the
way
I heard about that—the
manner
in which I was enlightened—is what’s important?”

“Isn’t it?” She rose to her feet, pacing the carpet, measuring him up and down with her eyes, as if he were a bedraggled stranger who had knocked on her door and asked to come in to use the phone. “Isn’t it?” she repeated with a sharp edge to her voice.

“No, by Christ, it’s not!”

“Then what is? Just what is more important, Josh?”

“You, for God’s sake, you!
You did this … 
thing!
You never even tried to hide it. Unger said each man knew about the others, you thought it was your right, you still do,” he cried in a passion of anguish.

“Oh no. I do not.” Sasha stopped and looked at him with deep seriousness. She brought her hands together, thumbs and fingertips touching and then opened them, like
a blossoming flower, her noble wide brow clear and untroubled.

“I always knew,” she said quietly, “from the day I first slept with a man, that when I got married that part of my life would be over. Absolutely over. I have a double standard for sex. Don’t you? Don’t other men? Don’t most people keep a double standard in their hearts about something important, if it isn’t sex? I believe that what is perfectly acceptable for an unmarried girl is never acceptable for a happily married woman. It can destroy a marriage.”

“Oh God, why can’t I make you understand? Three men—three lovers—three men having the right to … do … things to you—and you, like a juggler keeping three oranges in the air, no more meaningful than that? One on one day, another the next … oh, Christ …” He buried his head in his hands.

“That’s the way it was, Josh, I’ll never apologize for that. I had the right to dispose of myself as I wished. If you’re waiting for me to feel ashamed, you’ll have to wait forever.” Sasha was not defiant, simply conscious of the plain propriety of her actions as she saw them, of her fidelity to her own beliefs.

“You really
don’t
see,” he realized in utter despair. “You just don’t want to see.”

“I see that I was a Great Slut, as I used to call it, and what of it? I hurt no one. I’ll never regret using my freedom for as long as it belonged to me. I never slept with a man I didn’t genuinely like. I never slept with a man to get anything out of it but pleasure. I never deceived them. Exclusivity was exactly what I was avoiding. I’d still be doing it if I hadn’t met you and fallen in love.”

She paused, waiting for him to look at her, wanting to see his expression, but he sat hiding his face, rigid in his chair.

“Try to give me one good reason, Josh, why I shouldn’t have lived as I did?” Sasha persisted, determined to get through to him. “What has it taken away from you, what has it taken away from the way I love you? I’m the same
person you fell in love with, the same human being you married. My days as a Great Slut are definitively over, never to be repeated, but otherwise I’m me, I’m Sasha. Tell me why you think you have a right to blame me
now.”

“How … how many … were there?” He spoke as if the words had been dragged out of him with tongs thrust into his entrails.

“I don’t know.” Sasha’s voice rang out indignantly. “I didn’t count. Now you’re trying to degrade me, but you’re only degrading yourself. You should be
disgusted
to ask a question like that. It’s beneath you.”

“But it wasn’t beneath you to go from man to man to man?” he shouted.

“No, it was not
. I was true to myself.”

Sasha’s simplicity took his breath away. Josh shook his head, hunching over even further, trying to clear his mind, attempting to see something—anything—from her perspective, but it was as if they lived on opposite sides of a wide chasm and were trying to scream delicate, nuanced subtleties across to each other in a high wind.

“Josh, for heaven’s sake, stop sitting there like Job. Get your head out of your hands! This has nothing to do with us
in the present
. It’s ridiculous.”

He lifted his head and she saw his contorted face, his eyes, which couldn’t bring themselves to meet hers. With a terrible lurch of her heart, Sasha saw how far it was from ridiculous. Into her heart flew the knowledge that no matter how strong an intimacy is, it can be overturned by facts that are meaningful to only one of the two people involved.

“Josh!” she cried. “Josh!” Her world could not be ruined, she promised herself as she flew to him and tried to cradle his head. All she needed was time. A just man
must
be able to understand, and Josh was just.

“Oh, Davy, we did it, we really did it!” Gigi exulted over and over in the living room of her house, where she had carried him off with the intention of having a drink to celebrate before going out to dinner. She was in a rapture
of euphoria, flying higher and higher in the glory of having won, a clean win, a soaring win, a huge—no, a
gigantic—
win, a full-out Barnum-and-Bailey win that settled forever any unacknowledged doubts that she was meant for the advertising business.