Lovers (40 page)

“On second thought … why don’t we make it a big lunch, to celebrate the new account? I’ll call Byron and find out if he’s free to come with us,” Archie said, laughing helplessly. “I’m not sure I trust myself to live up to your moral standards. Oh, and when Byron asks you out, as I happen to know the bastard is planning to, can I count on you to tell him the same thing?”

“Gee, I hope I’ll remember,” Gigi said earnestly. “But if there’s a full moon—well, all bets are off. That Orsini Curse I told you about? You see, Archie,” Gigi said, scurrying to the door of his office, “it’s stronger than any individual, and,” she added, as she escaped into the corridor, “the women in my family are helpless victims of their own fatal power. It could happen to Byron—it could even happen to you,
sweetheart.”

Victoria Frost stared at the pile of issues of
Adweek, Advertising Age, The New York Times
and
The Wall Street Journal
that lay on her desk. Each of them carried a story on the projected Winthrop Cruise Line that Ben Winthrop had
announced at a press conference. Although none of them credited Gigi with the idea for inspiring the type of cruise ship he described, all of them, in the part of the story that concerned the award of the account to Frost/Rourke/Bernheim, mentioned Gigi as a “rainmaker” and included a few paragraphs on The Enchanted Attic, Indigo Seas, and the small but promising Beverly Hills Beauty Bar cosmetic accounts, a recent line Gigi and David had pitched and won, as well as the designer perfume account on which Gigi and David had been the creative team.

Until today, she had been considered the rainmaker for FRB, Victoria thought, but from now on she’d be forced to share that position with Gigi in the minds of the advertising community. The Winthrop Line account was budgeted at fifteen million dollars; the first all-copy “teaser” ads would start to run as soon as possible on the premium-priced back covers or the inside front covers of every top prestige magazine in the United States and Europe. Ben Winthrop had told the press that he aimed to make the Winthrop Line, beginning with the
Winthrop Emerald
, into the equivalent of a string of five-star international resorts.

The agency had added over thirty-three million dollars to its billings since Gigi had arrived on the scene, Victoria estimated. Archie and Byron hadn’t waited the customary year to review Gigi’s salary, but had put their heads together and decided to give her an immediate bonus and triple her compensation. When they’d told Victoria what they thought FRB should do for Gigi, she had accepted it; the money Gigi earned wasn’t a battle she could win. They couldn’t afford to lose Gigi, but all the rationality in the world couldn’t change a bitterness that her discipline in hiding her emotions had barely enabled her to mask.

The luck of that creature! The Enchanted Attic and Winthrop Line accounts were the result of Ben Winthrop’s raging hard-on for her, did anyone doubt that? The smaller Indigo Seas, perfume, and Beauty Bar accounts showed only that people would always fall for flash and trash; Gigi’s big accounts had come from her willingness to play
the sex game, and that could turn against her as quickly as it had turned toward her. The chit was out of the office playing at spending Ben Winthrop’s money far more often than she was in the office doing the job she’d been hired for, Victoria reflected savagely. Winthrop had given her the opportunity to excuse her absences on the grounds that he needed her to make a host of decisions, when it was obvious that what he really wanted was to have her easily available even when he wasn’t working in Los Angeles. Victoria’s animosity toward Gigi had grown with each of Gigi’s triumphs, but she made herself treat the girl with an even correctness, a seamless lack of overt hostility.

Victoria had slowly come to understand that Angus Caldwell was the problem that drove her almost unbearably wild with impatience, not Gigi, who had used her twat so cunningly to conjure millions out of Ben Winthrop.

It was almost a year and a half since Angus had persuaded her to move to California, and he was still hesitating, still finding a multitude of reasons why it wasn’t the right time to make the definitive break with New York. Yet, whenever they were together, no matter how brief it was, he made her realize that every other man she had anything to do with was third-rate, good only for minimal physical release.

Sometimes, Victoria brooded, she’d caught herself wishing Angus would die. She had loved him so utterly for so long, and with such absolute singlemindedness, that she knew that nothing less than death could force her to give him up. If he were dead she could probably go on with her life, such as it was, but while he was alive, and married to her mother, she would never know a moment’s happiness. If Angus were dead, her love would never die, but it would become peaceful and painless, a source of timeless tenderness and memories, instead of a daily dagger-wound of jealousy and need and hunger. Perhaps, in time, she would find a place in which to feel gentle.

Oh, if only she had her life to live over again! By Christ, she would have picked the richest boy she met and married
him. Love would have had nothing to do with it, so long as she was certain she could dominate him. Today she’d be the youngest social leader of the most desirable gilded communities, a triumphantly reigning young matron whose biggest problems would be deciding on the interior decoration of her fifth house, picking the name of her third child, and choosing her next lover. She would have led the life her mother had bred her for, and led it with such supreme style that she would have risen far above either envy or imitation. She would never even know how lucky she had been not to fall in love, hopelessly and permanently in love, with a man named Angus Caldwell.

But she didn’t have her life to live over again, Victoria thought bleakly. She was thirty-two and she had nothing.

There was the usual pile of all the latest magazines on her desk, collected weekly by her secretary so that she could check out the ads of companies that might be vulnerable to a cold pitch. Victoria opened the latest edition of
Cosmopolitan
, finding herself on a page that was devoted to yet another quiz.
Cosmo
editors, she had noted, loved quizzes, or was it the
Cosmo
readers? Automatically, as she read the questions, she found herself answering them in her mind.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Being with Angus openly and forever.

What is your greatest fear?
That Angus will never leave my mother.

What living person do you most admire?
No one.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Stubbornness.

What is your greatest regret?
Not belonging to Angus.

Who is the love of your life?
Angus.

On what occasions do you lie?
When I tell Angus I’ve never fucked another man.

When and where was your most perfect moment?
The first time Angus and I made love.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Giving up.

Which living person do you most despise?
Myself.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
To stop belonging to Angus.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Belonging to Angus.

What is your current state of mind?
I am in Hell.

I
n early September of 1984, Zach Nevsky completed postproduction on
The Kalispell Chronicles
and immediately started work on Vito’s new movie,
Long Weekend
. The film-business comedy was going to be filmed in and around Malibu. Most of the action during the twelve-week production schedule was going to take place in three separate houses in the Malibu Colony, a private, gated enclave of the rich beyond rich.

“We could have bought three beach houses for the rentals we’re having to pay,” Zach complained to Vito as they arrived on the site on the first morning of the shoot.

“Not in the Colony, unless you bought there years ago. You have to pay five or six million now to get a house on a sliver of land that’s cheek-by-jowl with your neighbors. It’s the most expensive beach property in the world.”

“There’s no privacy,” Zach commented. “You’d think that’s what people would want, but here everybody can
come and picnic or sail a kite on the beach in front of the houses, so long as they stay below the high-tide mark.”

“The State of California owns the coastline, and the public has its rights. To me, the thing that’s most ridiculous is that you can see into your neighbor’s rooms through all the windows on both sides of most of the houses. And who are they? The very same hell-spawned pricks you’ve been doing business with all week. God, I hate this place,” Vito said happily.

It had been a nightmare to arrange the furnished rentals, and only the fact that the official summer was over had made it possible. The houses they had been able to negotiate for were suitably spacious, and whatever was missing in their decor, the set dressers would supply. Vito felt as relaxed about the prospects of this picture as he could remember feeling at this particular nerve-racking stage of waiting, when everything was set and nothing had actually started to happen. Such deceptive peace—the peace of a film on which nothing has yet gone wrong, the peace of a certain war in which the first shot has not been fired—was doomed to be fleeting, even nerve-racking for anyone with imagination, yet on this golden September morning he couldn’t help giving in to the sheer animal joy of finding himself on the edge of the North American continent, about to turn it into a mess of cables and lights and trucks and trailers.

Yeah, he loved this ridiculous, awful business, Vito reflected as he sat on the beach and watched from a distance as Zach dealt with the sixteen members of the cast who would be working on this first day, a party scene in which none of the principals were present yet. He was able—at least today—to keep himself from hanging around maddeningly close to the action in the style for which he was infamous among directors, who wanted a producer to be neither seen nor heard. Vito’s blazing energy level was so high that he found it physically unbearable not to poke his nose into every nook and cranny of a film, staying on top of everything that happened, as tightly aware of whether the
star’s vegetarian lunch had been properly prepared, as concerned about the color of the star’s wigs, as he was of how many pages of the script had been filmed by the end of each day.

Vito knew he drove directors up the wall, and he’d never worried about it. If they didn’t like his style of producing, they didn’t have to work for him. But in the case of
Long Weekend
, he had resolved to keep out of Zach’s hair as much as possible. When Zach had first come to Hollywood from Off Broadway, he’d all but perched on Zach’s shoulder during the entire production of
Fair Play
. Now Zach had become such an assured and brilliant film professional that Vito felt it was a sign of respect to lounge around on the sand with his sneakers off as if he didn’t have a care in the world, as if he, the producer, weren’t the man on whom all ultimate responsibility rested, for it was he who had found the property, arranged financing, and hired the cast and crew as well as Zach himself.

So, if he was so sure of Zach’s ability, how come he hadn’t taken his eyes off him in the last hour, Vito asked himself. Deliberately, and with a feeling of self-imposed physical duress, he turned his back on the scene in progress and forced himself to scan the horizon.

As usual, the Pacific at Malibu was flat and boring, without even a flock of kids playing to supply animation. They must all be back in school now, he thought, spying only one other person sharing the beach with him and watching the actors. Wouldn’t you know it, he thought, filmmakers can’t even work a couple of hours without attracting a rubbernecker. By tomorrow there’ll be a whole group of them and by Wednesday there’ll be a crowd that will have to be kept back by some sort of barrier. He looked at his watch. Still a while till the lunch break, when he planned to grab a bite with Zach and find out how the first morning had gone.

Vito got up and strolled in the direction of the solitary watcher. If he didn’t talk to someone, he knew he’d be unable to keep himself from stealthily approaching closer
to the temptation of the set, and he wanted to have at least one morning of noninterference under his belt on which to congratulate himself.

“Mind if I sit down?” he asked the woman, who was sitting, as he had been, on the sand, clad, as he was, in jeans and a faded denim jacket.

“It’s a public beach,” she said, agreeably enough, without looking at him, her eyes intent on the filming.

Vito sat down and glanced at her, looked away quickly, and then, cautiously, looked back. Could you fall in love with a profile, he asked himself in total wonder and total terror.

“It’s a nice day,” he heard himself saying. Maybe she would turn around and he’d see her full face and it would all be over, an illusion, a trick of the light and the angle, or else she was the one girl he’d been looking for all of his life without knowing he’d been looking.