Lovers (4 page)

“Victoria! We didn’t expect you back till tomorrow,” Archie said. “Gigi, this is the Frost in FRB. Victoria Frost, Gigi Orsini.”

“Why this mass exodus?” Victoria Frost asked Archie, not greeting Gigi.

“Lunch at the Dôme,” Archie answered expansively. “Come with us, we’re celebrating.”

Gigi’s smile died as she watched them. Where she came from, people said hello, shook hands when they were introduced, and looked at each other in the process. They even smiled. In fact, they always smiled, for it was all but impossible to greet someone, even at a memorial service, without automatically turning up the corners of your mouth, however faintly. Victoria Frost’s severely lovely face remained expressionless except for her dark eyebrows, which indicated surprise.

“Indeed? And just what are you celebrating?” she asked evenly, finally looking down at Gigi as appraisingly as anyone ever had, taking her in with one swift glance and visually dismissing her.

“My first day on my new job here,” Gigi said firmly.
She had not spent half of her formative years in the home of Billy Ikehorn, who had no peer in the world of well-dressed women, to be intimidated by a look from any woman alive, although she recognized that Victoria Frost, in her pure sweep of espresso-brown wool, had conclusively nailed the too-simple-to-be-anything-but-perfect look as totally as an Olympic gymnast receiving marks of ten from every judge.

“Your what?” Victoria asked in cold astonishment.

“Victoria,” Byron broke in, “we probably forgot to tell you, there’s been so much else going on while you were out of town, but you must remember that we tried to hire Gigi away from Scruples Two.”

“When last I heard, she wasn’t interested,” Victoria retorted. “What changed her mind, Byron?”

“I doubt that
Byron
knows exactly,” Gigi answered. “But
I
have my reasons.”

“And I’m sure they’re valid. However, that offer was made some time ago, unless I’m mistaken. And turned down several times. Just exactly when did Gigi decide to grace us with her presence?”

Gigi spoke up. “Oh, I believe it was—let me see, exactly, in point of fact,
precisely
at nine-forty-five, last Thursday night, after one too many glasses of wine on an empty stomach. On the other hand, it may possibly have been five minutes later. Or earlier. I didn’t check my watch. Why do you ask, Victoria? Isn’t the offer still open? Am I unwelcome?”

“Victoria!” Archie said warningly.

“Gigi!” Byron implored at the same second.

Gigi ignored them, addressing herself directly to the tall, slim young woman with severe brown hair and severe brown eyes.

“Because if I’m unwelcome, to anyone, there’s still a tuna sandwich with my name on it waiting back at my desk at Scruples Two.”

“I don’t mean to sound ungracious …”

“You’ve succeeded remarkably,” Gigi interrupted.

“However, my partners and I agreed to consult each other on hiring and firing,” Victoria continued, as if Gigi hadn’t spoken. “I’m not personally familiar with your work. As far as I understand it, you haven’t had any advertising experience, and I wonder if this is the right moment to …”

“Victoria, shut the hell up,” Archie said, grabbing her by the elbow and marching her quickly down the hall and into another office.

“Well, well, well,” Gigi drawled, “I can see why I haven’t met Miss Frost before, Byron. She was your horrid little secret. Good-bye forever, Byron. Good-bye, David, oh, and say good-bye to Archie for me.” She tucked her handbag under her arm and started out of the door.

“Wait! Come on, Gigi, stop it!” Byron blocked her way. “Victoria has nothing to do with the creative side, Gigi, she’s strictly new business and keeping the clients happy. You’ll never,
ever
have to work with her, I promise! She’s just surprised that this happened while she was gone.”

“If this is the way she reacts to surprise, how does she act when she’s provoked?” Gigi asked, trying to get around Byron but finding it impossible.

“I’ve never seen her provoked,” Byron answered, moving quickly from side to side. “I’ve never seen her like this, either. She must have had a terrible trip. Please, Gigi, don’t leave,” he pleaded. “You know we want you madly, we adore your stuff, and God knows, we’re all in love with you. You sleep like an angelic baby and you wake up like a flower.”

“All well and good,” Gigi said, trying not to be softened by his words, “but the lovely Miss Vicky—”

“Don’t
ever
call her Vicky,” David said, trying without luck to keep from laughing.

“The lovely, welcoming, easygoing Miss Vicky isn’t my cup of tea. Byron, you can’t force me to work here, you know, so please get out of my way or I’ll be forced to knee you in the groin.”

“Knee
me
instead,” David said, planting himself in
front of Byron, his arms wide apart to show that he wouldn’t defend himself. “There’s a pecking order around here, and I’m paid to take the pain.”

“Oh God.” Gigi collapsed in a fit of giggles. “I’ve never had to cope with so many big silly men in one morning in my entire life; Are we bonding yet?”

“Still there? Good work, Byron, stout fellow, David,” Archie said, running back into the reception room. “Victoria is sorry she can’t join us for lunch, Gigi, and she begs you to accept her deep apology for the unforgivable way she behaved. She has a terrible migraine, PMS, and a ghastly cold coming on. Allergy attack too, pollen or whatever, something in the air, but she’s thrilled that you took the job.”

“What a shame she can’t join us,” Gigi said lightly, knowing that she’d met an enemy. “Perhaps it might help Miss Vicky’s symptoms if she took the poker out.”

L
ess than a week before Gigi joined Frost/Rourke/Bernheim, on a Wednesday morning in November of 1983, she had arrived at Scruples Two determined to fire her secretary, Sally Lou Evans, who never finished the work Gigi asked her to do, yet had such a maddeningly unlimited and imaginative repertoire of excuses that she somehow managed to squeak by. Pretty Sally Lou was wildly popular with the other secretaries in the office, always ready to offer her homemade brownies, a tip on mending broken fingernails, or a flattering opinion on a new haircut. She was an attractive nuisance, an excuse for gathering and loitering, the office equivalent of a hometown soda fountain or the best truckers’ diner on a long highway. Gigi had never fired anyone in her life, but when the office manager, Josie Speilberg, to whom she’d brought her complaints, offered to do it for her, she’d decided that she should take on the task herself.

“Come on, Gigi, it’s tough to fire people. That’s what
I’m here for,” Josie said in her self-appointed role as the most indispensable person in the entire company, relishing the prospect of a task that would be just one more item in her agenda as Vice-President in Charge of Sanity, the official title she had received as the price of turning down L. L. Bean when they’d tried to lure her away from Scruples Two.

“I hired her, I should fire her,” Gigi insisted, “it’s sort of a rite of passage.”

“I always fired people for Mrs. Ikehorn—I mean Mrs. Elliott,” Josie said, for she still wasn’t used to Billy’s new married name after many years of working for her as Ellis Ikehorn’s vastly rich widow. During Billy’s second marriage, to Gigi’s father, Vito Orsini, Josie had called her Mrs. O, which was as far as she was prepared to commit herself at the time. As it turned out, she’d been a visionary, for that marriage had lasted barely a year, leaving Gigi as Billy’s only meaningful and lasting legacy. Now Josie embraced the name of Mrs. Elliott, whenever she could remember it, for she took credit for being instrumental in promoting Billy’s blissful third marriage.

“Nope, thanks, Josie, but I’m going to be straight with Sally Lou. She’s just not getting the job done.”

“Can I give you a tip? There’s one perfect way to fire people that makes it easier all around. You start out by saying, sympathetically, ‘Sally Lou, I can see that you’re not happy here.’ Then, no matter what she says after that, you just keep repeating, ‘No, Sally Lou, I know you love the office, but trust me, you’re not happy here. I know you need the job, but you’re not happy here. You’d be happier somewhere else.’ ”

“Josie, she
loves
it here. She’s the office favorite, queen of the sorority. I’ll sound like a lunatic.”

“That’s not important. Just get the firing over with in a friendly way. You’re concerned for her, that’s the message.”

“I’m on my way,” Gigi said firmly. “Thanks, Josie. But
how will I ever be able to believe anything you tell me again, now that I know how your mind operates?”

“Well, what happened?” Josie asked Gigi when she spotted her in the company cafeteria at lunchtime.

“Sit down and I’ll tell you,” Gigi invited, looking dazed.

“Hard time, huh? It can be rough, but it’ll never be as hard again,” Josie sympathized. “It’s a trial by fire. Firing must be a gender thing. Men don’t have the same problems with it.”

“Sally Lou thanked me.”

“Say, you must have been good,” Josie marveled.

“She thanked me for
noticing
that she wasn’t happy. She said she liked me too much to say anything, but she’s been miserable working at Scruples Two. She’s been trying to make the best of it.”

“Why, the little ingrate! What a nerve, after all you’ve put up with.”

“Josie, she was just being honest. She was relieved that she didn’t have to quit … she has a phobia about quitting.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Sally Lou said, and I quote, sparing you her Bette-Davis-in-a-snit tone of voice, ‘This is a boring office. Boring, boring, boring. There isn’t a single available man around to flirt with, nobody but a lot of women, nice women, but women.’ What’s more, she’d expected something glamorous when she came here, because of the reputation of Scruples, the store, but the catalog business is repetitive. She thinks my writing is very nice but after all it’s not gripping, like ‘Dear Abby,’ and there’s an opening for a secretary at Creative Artists. Apparently the place is full of men, and who knows what it could lead to? She says her ‘people skills’ haven’t been utilized here. So she kissed me a tearful, grateful good-bye, collected her pay, and left. Now I have to get a new secretary.”

“Why didn’t you make her stay till you’d found a replacement?” Josie demanded.

“I didn’t have the heart to incarcerate her any longer. She wanted to zip right on over to CAA.”

“I knew you should have let me do it,” Josie said in righteous tones.

“Could you find me a new secretary, Josie, preferably a guy? Maybe he’d find a satisfactory social life here.”

That evening, after work, Gigi lingered over a solitary, pre-dinner glass of wine. She’d been living alone for over three weeks while Zach Nevsky was away on location, in preproduction for a film in Montana, and he wasn’t due back for another three weeks. A year ago they had rented an old house in the Hollywood Hills, on Laurel Lane, one of the many mysterious, little-known twisting streets that rise high behind the Chateau Marmont, an utterly charming semi-ruin of a more or less Spanish-Italian-French Provencal house that had been built in 1927, with three stories that climbed the steep hill, and a view of Los Angeles from every southwest-facing window.

The house had come furnished with a few basic pieces, and during the last year Gigi had remade its interior with romantic and whimsical finds from flea markets and swap meets, holding her extravagantly disparate choices together by stapling hundreds of yards of various evocative and slightly faded floral fabrics to all the walls, hanging every window in full, floating swags of white dotted swiss, and painting each floorboard in washable green deck paint so that each room had the frothy gaiety and relaxed ambiance of a summer house. She set a round table for herself inside a pair of French doors that led out to a large balcony, where the elaborate wrought iron was wreathed in white jasmine that was just beginning to bloom, scenting the air with richly potent nostalgia. On the other side of Sunset Boulevard, far below her, the lights of Los Angeles performed their traditional magic show with all the promise of city lights seen from a height anywhere in the world, and what’s more, the real-estate agent had been right. On a clear day you actually could see Catalina. And so what?

She felt bleakly gloomy, Gigi realized. Heavy-hearted. In fact, utterly depressed. Zach’s absence was getting to her, and it was worse every day. The last time he’d returned from a distant location shoot—and that hadn’t been so long ago—he’d promised her to try to accept only those jobs that would keep him in L.A., for he was in such demand as a director that he could decide among a multitude of offers. But he had quickly become so deeply fascinated by an offer to direct a movie based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about life a hundred years ago in Kalispell, Montana, that she hadn’t had the heart to ask him to turn it down. How could she refuse to marry Zach and yet expect him to reject projects that fulfilled his ambition and vision? If she were ready to leave her job, become a wife, and follow him from one shoot to another, they could be together full-time, Gigi reminded herself, but exactly what kind of a life would that be, besides peripatetic?