Lovers (51 page)

“You left out the best part,” Archie complained.

“She did it on purpose. She wants us to lick her feet,” Byron chimed in. “Take off those panty hose, Victoria, I’m all yours.”

“By. I’m touched, but no thanks. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll give you a rain check.”

“Screw the rain check, Victoria, give us the best part!”

“The account bills ninety million dollars a year.”

“Ninety million,” Archie breathed reverently.

“Ninety million,” Byron repeated, “ninety fucking million. What a fucking
win!”

“No,” Archie protested, “You can’t call it a win because there was no competition, what a fucking
steal!”

“No,” Victoria said. “No, children, we didn’t steal it from anyone. It’s a fucking
windfall!
That’s the beauty part. Nobody gets ninety million on a windfall, not even my mother!”

“Jesus, Victoria, I’m glad you were the one Harris Reeves talked to,” Archie said. “I’d have had a heart attack—if you can get one from good news.”

“I got the impression of a man who wasn’t happy with his VP in charge of advertising,” Victoria said, almost to herself, “a man who has simply taken over the situation, a man who runs a very tight ship and doesn’t let anyone have any real power but him. You can imagine how that VP felt when Reeves made the call. He started Beach Casuals from nothing more than thirty years ago, and he’s right, his advertising has become institutional.”

“Are you going to call the Collins boys and resign the account,” Archie asked, “or do you think Gigi should?
She’s the one with the relationships up in S.F., maybe that’d be the best way to do it.”

“Archie, resigning an account for a conflict that’s at least ten times bigger than they are is strictly a management responsibility,” Victoria told him sharply.

Did Arch or By think that she would give anyone else in the world the pleasure of telling Indigo Seas that they weren’t big enough for Victoria Frost, she wondered. And, oh, when Gigi came back, all full of herself and that overpriced cruise ship her boyfriend was building, wouldn’t she have a nice first day back at the office?

Victoria poured them all another glass of champagne and made a toast.

“Here’s to Frost Rourke Bernheim, the agency that understands business reality.”

“Business reality!” They lifted their glasses, clinked them together, and drained them.

“I’m opening another bottle,” Victoria announced. “You greedy kiddies hogged the first two.”

A
s soon as Billy stepped through the high gates and set foot on the cobblestones of the spacious courtyard of her private house, her
hôtel particulier
on the Rue Vaneau in Paris, she knew she had fled to the only place where there was hope of finding some ease for the plucking physical pain in her heart and for her ceaseless contemplation of the wounds to her spirit. The purchase of this house, almost four years ago, this house she had never lived in, had been a capricious action, even in her own judgment, but at the time she had been ripe to surrender to the first object of temptation that came her way after her divorce from Vito Orsini. She had bought it within days of seeing it, at the inflated asking price of eight million dollars, a willful act of pure folly, because she had known at first sight that it was destined to be hers, this welcoming gray stone nobleman’s residence that had been built hundreds of years ago for a Parisian family and had never changed hands until she fell in love with it.

“Madame will be pleased with the condition of the house,” Marie-Jeanne, the wife of the
gardien
, Pierre Dujardin, both of whom lived in the gatehouse, assured her, after they had greeted each other. “Every morning I said to Pierre, ‘What if Madame Ikehorn drops in today, without warning, just as she did while she lived in Paris?’ And believe me, Madame, every night before we went to sleep we were satisfied that everything, from the last pipe in the cellar to the last slate on the roof, all was in order.”

“Thank you, Madame Marie-Jeanne. I’m very grateful, I knew I was leaving my house in good hands.”

“It has been too long, Madame, since we have seen you.”

“Yes, I agree,” Billy replied, “but my life is complicated.”

“Of course, Madame,” the
gardien
’s wife responded.

Did Mrs. Ikehorn not realize that to abandon such a house, to leave it standing absolutely empty in the middle of the most desirable and aristocratic residential neighborhood of Paris, to leave the stables with their stalls crammed with a veritable treasure of antiques, still packed in their crates, was the sign of a life that was not just complicated but unquestionably crazy? However, she and Pierre were paid well and promptly every month, and their own gatehouse, in which Madame Ikehorn had installed the same modern heating and new kitchen as she had in the great house, was the envy of every
gardien
in Paris. Nevertheless she was delighted to see Madame Ikehorn again, it was reassuring that she had returned and not sold the house to strangers.

“Does Madame intend to stay in Paris long?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” Billy answered. “Certainly for a while. Madame Marie-Jeanne, I’ll visit the house alone, if you don’t mind.”

“But naturally, Madame.”

As soon as the double doors had closed behind her and she found herself in the circular entrance hall, Billy was
caught again by the special atmosphere of her house, a rare fragrance of civilized lives at their most charming and leisurely. The house was as graciously lavish with its perfect proportions as it was touchingly human in its calm acceptance of the work of time. The cobwebs and peeling paint that had disguised the house when she first saw it had been swept away, the sagging parquet floors and the moldings, crumbling with damp, had all been carefully restored to their original classic elegance, yet there was no hint of newness. The thick old glass of the French doors lent its lavender tint to the flood of gentle morning sun that spilled onto bare, gleaming floors and well-swept, if empty, fireplaces. The original mirrors, set into their paneled frames on the walls, still offered reflections that traveled backwards to a slower, more glorious time; the floors still creaked slightly with every step she took, with a sound of welcome and a promise of peace.

Billy toured all twenty rooms in a trance of rediscovery that gave her stripped soul some release from pain. Eventually she reached the new winter garden that she had built at the back of the house, through which she could see over the walls of her own evergreen garden into the vast park of the Hôtel Matignon, the residence of the Prime Minister of France. She sat down on the wide, built-in window seat and lost herself in reflection.

The last time she had set foot in this room was before Christmas of 1981, and all her thoughts had been concentrated on moving in and celebrating the holidays here with Sam Jamison, the sculptor from San Francisco, who had known her only as Honey Winthrop, a schoolteacher from Seattle.

She had lived that deception successfully for almost a year, so that Sam wouldn’t know who she was and treat her with the special attitude all men used toward her when they realized she was that envied and scorned oddity, that gossip-attracting freak, that both more and less than human creature that the world makes out of any independent woman of vast personal wealth.

All
men, she had believed at the time, with the exception of Spider Elliott, the very same man who had sneered at her a day ago as the “princess of the eight-thousand-dollar armchair” and mocked her so scornfully, so belittlingly with his characterization of her financial stupidity based on her “hard-earned money” when he knew that the last time she’d worked for a paycheck was twenty-two years ago, and a junior secretary’s paycheck at that.

Christ, what was there to choose between them, Billy asked herself. Sam and Spider both, when you got right down to it, fatally factored her money into their love for her. Spider had been able to hide it for years, behind an attitude that she was, as he’d put it in a letter to her, a “basic creampuff” whom it hadn’t taken long to “whip into shape.” Sam had seen her one night at the Paris Opera and discovered her true identity. He had instantly withdrawn from her, rejected her absolutely, even after reading the agonized letter of explanation she had sent him the next day. He was convinced that she had arranged for the amazing success of his new exhibition by getting her friends to buy his sculptures. He hadn’t given her a chance, not the benefit of a single doubt. But, she thought, at least Sam had the excellent excuse that she had consistently lied to him for nine months.

Which was better, a man like Sam who rejected you because you hadn’t treated him as an equal, or a man like Spider, who treated you as if you couldn’t possibly be his equal, as if all your struggles to achieve anything would have been doomed without his help? No, not which was better, but rather, which was worse?

Let them both rot in hell, Billy thought, as she marched through the house and looked for the
gardien
.

“Monsieur Pierre, I have decided to sleep here tonight. Please be kind enough to search in the stables and find an armoire, a table or two, a mirror, some vases, candlesticks, and two chairs, and arrange them in one of the smaller bedrooms, one next to a bath.”

“But, Madame,” he protested, realizing that his formal
greetings must be postponed for the moment, “there are only antiques to be found in the stables, certainly no bed for Madame to sleep on.”

“It will arrive within a few hours,” Billy said.

“In Paris? Hah! That would be a miracle.” He laughed out loud at the mere idea of such promptness.

“You’ll see. And thank you, Monsieur Pierre, the house looks marvelous.”

“Thank you, Madame, you too look marvelous. It gives me joy to see you return.”

“Until later, Monsieur Pierre,” Billy said, hurrying through the gates to the car and driver that waited for her outside.

“Until later,” he echoed. Madame did not look marvelous. Madame looked … if it was possible for such a beautiful woman … Madame looked ravaged.

In the furniture department of the Galeries Lafayette, Billy secured the services of a harried saleswoman by the simple method of pressing a thousand franc note into her hand and saying that she would like immediate service.

“What can I do for you?” the saleswoman asked, with her first smile of the day.

“I have need of a bed with a good mattress, two pillows, good lamps, bulbs, candles, bed linen, towels, light-proof curtains for two windows, a rug—oh, a hamper for a bathroom—if I think of anything else, I’ll tell you.”

“But these things are all to be found in different departments, all over the store,” the woman said, scandalized by this list. “I work in furniture only.”

“I also want someone to hang the curtains, install the bed, and do anything else that’s necessary. I live on the Rue Vaneau. All this must all be delivered at once, so that the work is completed by the end of the day. There will be another two thousand francs for you when it is done, and something generous for the deliverymen and installers.”

“Of course, Madame, it will be my pleasure to serve you. I shall accompany you to the other departments.”

“You understand,” Billy said in her perfect French, “I am a crazy American, that explains all, does it not?”

“Oh, but no, Madame is not crazy, only perhaps, a little impulsive.”

“That sounds exactly like what they’ll put on my tombstone,” Billy said. “Let’s start, I have no time to waste.”

As she raided the great department store, Billy reflected that it would have been a great deal easier to stay at the Ritz, where she had lived in the four-room Windsor Suite for so long, but that was the first place where anyone looking for her would telephone. She had spent the first night in Paris in the airport hotel and arranged to be picked up today by the same discreet car-and-driver agency she had used during her months with Sam Jamison, when she had lived a double life of such maddening complexity that it was made bearable only by a wild sexual and emotional passion.

What I did for love
. There’s a song like that, Billy thought, as she tested a mattress, and it must have been written for other women as foolishly deceived as I am, but surely not one of them was as hopelessly mistaken in her emotions. And, quite probably, none of them was French.

No more than four years ago, Billy had discovered how to manage to preserve two separate identities. In one of them she was the American millionairess Billy Ikehorn, who occupied the best suite at the Ritz, a flighty socialite who spent her time being fitted for clothes, shopping for antiques, attending parties, and spending most of her nights, scandalously, who knew where? In another she was simple Honey Winthrop, a Seattle schoolteacher on sabbatical, who spent her days doing research on Voltaire and slept, five nights a week, with Sam Jamison in his rough studio near the Place des Vosges, a vibrant, offbeat part of Paris.

Now, in the capsule she had created around herself, she had a single life and a single bed, now she was expected nowhere, she had no shopping, no lunch parties, no fittings at Dior or Givenchy, no lover, no lies to tell, no car and
driver—nothing but an almost empty house and caretakers who were discreet enough never to question her comings and goings. Within two days Billy felt certain that she was slipping through the cracks of Paris like smoke, observing but never observed.