Lovers (24 page)

As she wrapped a heavy quilted violet silk robe around her waist and made herself a drink, Victoria reflected on the day’s events. When she’d taken her position on the campaign Gigi and David had created, she hadn’t left herself room to follow the parade if it turned left instead of right, a mistake she’d never made before, an amateur’s mistake and a totally unnecessary one.

Ben Winthrop and his Enchanted Attic account still hadn’t turned up and became a solid reality, although Gigi had explained that he was in New York for the next few weeks. That excuse would undoubtedly turn out to be as real as the success of the Abbondanza campaign, Victoria thought, unaware that she had tightened her lips and narrowed her eyes in a grimace that made her face turn bleak and forbidding. That little bitch had led a charmed life since she’d appeared at the office, she didn’t seem able to put a foot wrong.

Why, Victoria asked herself, did she feel such an instinctive
hatred of Gigi? The redheaded tart was doing brilliantly well for the agency, yet somehow Victoria felt that any success for Gigi was a defeat for her. When she’d described Gigi to Angus, he’d said that Gigi sounded like Millicent Frost at the beginning of her career, a diminutive; vivacious charmer, a golden girl sparkling with ideas and energy, but that surely couldn’t be reasonable. It made no sense. No one sane would compare a twenty-three-year-old girl with no advertising experience to speak of—who had had exactly one lucky break, with a potential second—to a powerful woman who would soon be sixty and knew more about the agency business than did any other woman in the world. No, that couldn’t possibly be it, Victoria decided firmly, Angus’s intuitive guess about Gigi was simply wrong, just as wrong as her own first impression, her memory of her mother as a young woman.

As she walked around her living room and turned on the lights, Victoria, grim in her new defeat, asked herself what else Angus could be wrong about. Almost a year had passed since he’d persuaded her to leave Caldwell & Caldwell, and what had she to show for it? One-third of a partnership in a small agency—almost acceptably adequate for the minor, minor leagues, but a blip on a radar screen by Madison Avenue standards—an unwanted exile from the city of her birth, and a forced rupture with all the swains who had swarmed around her in New York. As for Angus and the marriage he promised her—nothing. She could detect no visible signs of real change, in spite of his constant reassurance that she was too far away to be a judge, that he never stopped planning for it, that he was laying the necessary groundwork, but that without their joint patience they stood to lose everything.

His words were like a metal nail file working away under her skin, severing tender nerves, making thin skin bleed; each phone call made her want to scream at him, scream vilely until he did what she wanted, yet he was so entirely convincing, he made so much sense, that she was
forced to agree with him and try to beat down her sense of panic.

They’d been together on a total of fourteen occasions during all of last year. On Victoria’s visits to New York, Angus had only been able to snatch a few hours for her on nine separate afternoons, coming to her hotel for a few hours before he was expected at home. The other five times they’d been together were here in Los Angeles, in her apartment, during brief visits he’d made to the West Coast.

The long weekends he’d promised her before she left, the trips up the coast to Ventana, the trips down the coast to Laguna, the trips out to the desert—none of them had materialized because there had never been enough time, no chance for him to be out of touch with the office, no reason for him to be in California without a full day of meetings, no excuse for disappearing for a weekend and leaving his wife alone at home.

His secretary and Millicent’s secretary had long ago formed a tight alliance, and both of them made sure that they would always know where to find him. They would suffer severe loss of face if he slipped the net for more than a few perfectly explained hours. He might as well be in a maximum-security prison, Victoria thought viciously.

Even phone calls of more than a few minutes were difficult to arrange. She couldn’t call him, either at home or at work. The time difference that puts New York three hours ahead of Los Angeles meant that by the time Angus got to the office where his secretary routinely placed all his calls, it was only 6:30
A.M
. in L.A., too early to phone. By 5:30
P.M
., when he was free of his secretary’s surveillance, it was afternoon in California, just after lunch, a period that was eaten up by business for Victoria. By the time her day ended, Angus was back home or already out for the evening.

In any case, Victoria thought vitriolically, did Angus imagine that a telephone call at three in the afternoon, in a busy office where a stream of other calls kept coming in,
could be the equivalent of his kisses? Did he believe that the few times he’d phoned her from his office before his secretary got in, awakening her from her sleep, gave her the equivalent of emotional satisfaction?

No, she’d taken care of herself, thank you very much. And not ineffectively either, Victoria thought, as she settled down in her favorite corner to watch the fruitwood fire she’d lit in the fireplace. Not ineffectively at all.

She’d arrived in Los Angeles with warm letters of introduction to a number of women who were connected to the busy social life she’d left behind in New York. They were women on the highest levels of Los Angeles society, members of The Colleagues, who raised funds for mentally retarded children, members of the boards of the Children’s Museum, Planned Parenthood, and the Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center. They worked in the leadership of the Zoo Committee, the Friends of the Joffrey Ballet, St. John’s Hospital, the President’s Circle of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Downtown Women’s Center, and the Host Committee for the Olympics. Victoria had approached each one of these philanthropic and powerful women as if she were a prospective client with a fifty-million-dollar account to award. Victoria had played that irresistible, undetectable customer’s game she’d learned how to play better than anyone of her age, and before the first meeting was over she’d mentioned her desire to be useful in her new community. Soon she’d been invited to join in the complicated dance of service to others on which these women spent so much of their time.

And after all, why not? She had everything to offer them, Victoria reflected. It soon became a coup to capture her to work—and so effectively!—for one’s favorite cause. Not only was she able to have her agency create and give them the copy and art for their invitations and party programs, but Victoria Frost had all the glamorous allure of someone who had been involved in a famous family rift about which there had been national speculation, but no hint of scandal. She was, as a matter of course, considered
the great heiress that every hair on her head proclaimed her to be. Yet she looked unthreateningly sexless in her relentless simplicity, and no hint of her well-leashed carnal cravings escaped as she charmed the women of those groups she quickly penetrated, groups many Los Angeles women had tried to get into for decades without success.

To a small number of her new friends, always the most influential woman in any charity, Victoria confided that she had “an understanding” with a man in London. With a minimum of words she conveyed that he was a titled, landed, but unhappily married man, and that her love was not without hope. It explained, they told each other—for they almost invariably knew each other, joined as they were at the many crossroads of the city’s good works—a quality of purity and dignity and slight sorrow that was rare in an eligible young woman who was still unmarried. It explained why she didn’t date the still unmarried young men of her age, it explained why Victoria Frost made a perfect extra woman who never flirted with their husbands or their married sons or their sons-in-law, why she was such a welcome addition to their private parties.

They never suspected that she was like a cowboy who rode into a herd of cattle and cut one steer out of the crowd for branding, Victoria thought as the flames of the small fire blazed higher. They never guessed that during the tennis matches at the Los Angeles Country Club, or at the Dinosaur Ball in the National History Museum—even on the occasions of her infrequent attendance at the All Saint’s Church in Pasadena—Victoria was looking over the possibilities. The man she picked was always a young married man, a very-much-married man with a wife who was one of the darlings of the community, a man who had everything to lose by boasting about Victoria to anyone, by even mentioning her name. They never guessed that when she found a man who appealed to her, a man she chose with the most scrupulous attention to his physical desirability and the shrewdest sizing up of his availability, she
waited observantly until she had the perfect opportunity, at a big party, to say a few quiet words into his ear.

“Would you be terribly shocked if I admitted I’m dying to fuck you?” That was all it took. Was it that easy for men with women, she wondered. Would any woman be as enormously flattered and as quickly aroused by a man who said those words as he sat next to her at one of those ubiquitous, convenient round caterer’s tables for ten or twelve, at which you couldn’t make out clearly what anyone was saying except the one person to whom you were talking? If a man said those words, it would sound like a bad pass, crude and cheap, Victoria mused. Any woman would feel insulted. When a woman said them, a man found it irresistible. God, what complacent, eager fools they were! How simple they were to pluck from their branches!

The arrangements were easy. Their wives weren’t Millicent Frost Caldwells. These were young, established businessmen who could get away for afternoon golf games or business lunches without Angus’s time constrictions. Victoria herself had only to say she was going to see a client to disappear without questions from FRB.

Many a long lunch, many a long afternoon, Victoria spent with some of the most attractive married men in all of Los Angeles. She used them mercilessly. If they weren’t sexually talented, if they came too soon or couldn’t get hard more than once in an encounter, she allowed them only a single second chance with her before she sent them back to their wives.

If they proved to be up to her standards, she made them confess their most cherished and powerful secret sexual desires to her, all their special needs, no matter how shameful they believed them to be, all the fantasies that they had never been able to act out with their wives. Just telling her what they wanted, just using the dangerous words while she lay there listening intently, her lips half open, her luscious body covered only by a transparent layer of the sheerest material, her hand—as if she were powerless to stop it—slowly straying between her legs as they
spoke, made them wild with lust. After she’d allowed them to play out the forbidden acts with her, Victoria taught them other things their wives would never accept or permit. She made herself into a mistress of erotic practice. There was nothing she wouldn’t do except allow herself to be hurt, physically or emotionally. She always took time enough to firmly establish a taste they could never again satisfy, before she dismissed them, enjoying the thought of their future frustrations even more than she had enjoyed their bodies and their credulous adoration.

Victoria demanded that the men she picked satisfy her before they satisfied themselves, and insisted on their silence as she rode closer and closer to her threshing orgasm, her eyes tightly closed as she imagined Angus filling her body. Her appetite was always for new men, fresh men, the unknown, the pursuit and the capture, rather than for repetition or familiarity. She was never as wild as after she’d seen Angus, after she’d returned to California with her lust for him still alive and unsatisfied and her anger at him making her impatient and hungry, an addict desperate for a fix.

Each man she took, whether only twice or for a period of weeks of frenzied afternoons, was given his leave with the same words, words Victoria knew would keep him friendly and silent for life. “If I weren’t’ so crazy about your adorable wife, I’d never be able to stop seeing you, but I’m terribly afraid of her finding out. She’d divorce you in a minute, you know that, don’t you? We must never do anything to hurt her, to hurt your marriage … but I’ll never forget you, darling. You were simply wonderful … oh, yes, so very, very good … the best, the very best I’ve ever known.”

Victoria Frost, one year after she left New York, was one of the most sought-after single women in Los Angeles.

A week after the Indigo Seas pitch, Sasha and Gigi met for lunch. They’d been on the phone frequently since Gigi had left Scruples Two, but between their jobs and Sasha’s busy
social weekends, this was the first time they’d actually managed to set aside enough time to see each other. They’d picked territory halfway between their offices, at the Bistro Gardens in Beverly Hills, where they had a prime seat on the long leather banquette facing the most coveted half of the long room as well as the French doors that opened out to the crowded, flower-filled terrace. There, under space heaters, large tables of elaborately suited and occasionally hat-wearing women were busily ordering chickenburgers with the sauce on the side and celebrating one another’s birthdays and anniversaries with piles of smallish, beautifully wrapped gifts.

“What a place for a food fight,” Gigi said, looking around at women, some of whose grooming drifted toward taxidermy. “Why do I imagine them throwing great gobs, absolute fistfuls, of caviar from one table to another? And then sloshing buckets of vodka over each other until they’re all dripping wet and their hair is ruined?”

“I’d pay cash on the barrelhead to see it,” Sasha agreed, her dry voice at variance with her manner of glowing self-confidence.

Gigi turned to inspect her friend. There was something odd about Sasha, she thought, although Gigi was familiar with Sasha’s boldest, highest, most lustrous presentation of herself, the gorgeous Lillie Langtry appearance she wore today so glowingly. She was sleek and vivid, her glossy hair swept high above her brow, her lipstick bright, seeming to fly a flag of undimmed success. She confronted the twittering mass of women with friendly indifference, waving here, smiling there, with a sort of benevolent social art that was new to Gigi.