Lovers (57 page)

“That doesn’t sound like him,” Sasha pronounced, more and more troubled.

“And then he’s forgetful. Forgetful! Would you believe that yesterday the first AD had to tell him that he was shooting a finished scene twice? And that’s not the only time it’s happened. If I leave the set for five minutes I start to worry.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about all this before?” she demanded.

“I didn’t want to worry you, sweetheart. I hate to bring the business back home with me, the way I used to do. Officially we should still be on the honeymoon we never had. On Friday, when he called Ma—”

“WHEN WHAT?”

“When Zach phoned your mother to check in like a good son, the way he’s been doing a couple of times a week—”

“Oh, Jesus, Vito! You mean to sit there and tell me he’s calling Ma and he’s not in a depression? He must be like the walking dead! Calling Ma is the last resort—we only
call Ma if we’re feeling absolutely suicidal! Oh, my God, look at what you’ve been saving me from—a brother who doesn’t date—Zach without a girl!—who acts like he’s getting divorced, who’s suddenly lost his short-term memory, who listens to sob stories from the past, WHO CALLS MA—when were you planning to let me know, after he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger?”

“Sasha, you’re exaggerating,” Vito said patiently. “You told me you’ve always been a little overboard about Zach.”

“I know I am, but calling Ma! Vito, he’s severely depressed!”

“Come to think of it, he hasn’t been the same old Zach for a while now,” Vito said, thinking back. “When I went up to Kalispell, and that was about ten months ago, this … change … had already started. It hadn’t affected his work, so I didn’t pay that much attention, or maybe it’s just that we had so much damage control to do that I didn’t notice … but no, you’re right, he
is
depressed.”

“Ten months?” Sasha echoed. “I’ve been so preoccupied with Josh and the divorce and meeting you that I’ve barely been able to see Zach in all that time, but ten months of depression, getting worse all the time? Well, we know what miserable, vicious bitch we have to thank for that, don’t we?”

“We do?” Vito asked in astonishment.

“Your daughter, your darling baby Gigi, that’s who!”

“Hey, watch who you call a miserable, vicious bitch!”

“Sorry, darling, but she is. And what is she doing now, that ungrateful, spiteful, cruel tease, but toying with the affections of Mr. Wonderful, who’s clearly nothing more to her than another scalp to hang from her belt, having already screwed that poor boy Davy Melville right into the ground and out of the office—”

“Wait! Hold it right there! Gigi’s been having affairs with one guy after another, which isn’t her style, and Zach’s not fucking around, which isn’t his style either, so—”

“How come when it’s your daughter she’s having affairs, when it’s my brother, he’s fucking around—”

“Have a little respect, Sasha, darling, and don’t miss the point. Are you listening?”

“Breathlessly.”

“Gigi and Zach are still in love.”

After a silence, Sasha nodded her dark head up and down in respect and admiration.

“I’ll never forgive myself for not putting my finger on it before you. And you’ll always remind me, won’t you, Vito? For the rest of our lives you’ll hold this over me as proof of your superiority.”

“Only when I have to,” Vito said. “What are we going to do?”

“Fix it, obviously,” Sasha said with her usual proud confidence in her powers.

“But how? This has been going on for almost a year.”

“So much the better. If they haven’t gotten over each other in that long, it’s serious.” Sasha closed her eyes and concentrated. “Let’s not monkey around, we’ll fix it the usual way.”

“We abandon them on a desert island for a week?”

“Oh, darling, that’s such a typical boy solution.
We
don’t do anything. You hint to Zach that Gigi’s still in love with him and I hint to Gigi that Zach’s still in love with her. But be subtle! Remember, they’re almost as smart as we are.”

“The
Much Ado
ploy? I didn’t realize that was still in use.”

“It was working tens of thousands of years before Shakespeare, and it’ll be working when they colonize Mars.”

“But what if it doesn’t work with Gigi and Zach?”

“We’ll worry about that if it happens. Or I’ll have to call Ma and let her fix it.”

F
or two days following his fight with Billy, Spider Elliott lived in a monotonous, repetitious trance of self-justification, repeating her final words to himself over and over while his mouth seemed to shrink as it grew tightly bitter at the edges. His eyes were narrowed and their Viking blue was darkened in a frown of defiance; his normally open features were shadowed by the unmistakable hardness of someone nursing a killing rage and resolved not to show it. No one now, watching him bent ferociously over the work on his desk, would have imagined him as the prototype of the carefree California surfer he once had been. He was so elaborately polite to his assistant, Tommy Tether, that the self-assured fellow decided that Spider must be getting ready to fire him; on three occasions he inquired solicitously of Josie Speilberg about how her adored nephews were getting along in school, the first time he’d shown more than a passing interest
in them, and he braked for traffic lights that had suddenly turned yellow a mere twenty feet away.

He spent every waking minute reviewing each terrible thing Billy had done since he’d known her, from calling him “a cock without a conscience” when she’d accused him of making a play for Gigi on the basis of a few innocent kisses, to trying to add a three-week cancellation clause to his employment contract when he’d first come to California in 1977 to work for her at Scruples. Oh, yes, even way back then, at first sight he’d been aware of Billy’s potential as a pussy-whipper, way back then he’d told Valentine that there was no success he would accept if it meant working for a pussy-whipping woman, and by Christ, nothing had changed, not in Billy and certainly not in him. How could he have been fool enough to marry her, knowing what he knew?

In the middle of the third night, after forty-eight hours of self-perpetuating fury, Spider woke up from a dream about sailing that left him with a vivid sense memory of the feeling of the tiller in his hand and the sight of an endless expanse of ocean. As he lay in bed, trying to recapture the dream in all its details, memories of his days at sea flooded over him.

After Valentine’s death in 1980, Spider had bought a small sailing boat and disappeared, with his two-man crew, sailing ever westward, dropping anchor at countless islands in the many bodies of water that lay between Los Angeles and Greece, fleeing introspection and blunting his pain by plunging himself into a daily contest with the power of nature.

During that almost two-year voyage of mourning and recovery, he had written only two letters, and they had both been to Billy. He had sent his mother postcards from various ports, but Billy had been the only person he’d felt the need to communicate with, the only person he’d continued to feel close to during that necessary trip into an oblivion of sky, sea, and sun, through which he had succeeded in accepting his loss and envisioning a future.

Now, wide awake, with his anger burned out, he realized in shock and terror that he felt a monstrously urgent need to talk to Billy, to put things right between them. There was no one in the world he could go to for comfort from the things Billy had said to him—and the things he’d said to her—but Billy herself.

In the last letter he’d sent to her during his voyage, Spider remembered, he’d written that when he returned there’d be no point in going back into business because he’d never find another partner like her, never find anyone who’d be as much fun to fight with as she was. Granted, he’d written from a remote Greek island in the Aegean Sea, Spider reflected with despairing anguish, but his brain cells must have been reduced to ashes for him to have written that.

Nothing had ever been more exactly, precisely, specifically
not
“fun” in his entire life than his fight with Billy. Whatever the dictionary opposite of fun was, that fight had been it.

As he paced the floor, he told himself that he would give anything to find himself back inside the thick bubble of thorough-going depression he’d felt when he and Valentine had fought, long before their marriage, over her mysterious lover.
That
had been fun, compared to the way he felt now. That had been merely a muting of all his senses, a free-floating grayness cast over all the good things in life, a self-pitying sense that he might as well be dead for all the reason there was to go on living.

That fight with Valentine, Spider suddenly remembered, was the first time in his life that he’d been deliberately cruel to a woman. And the last, until he’d been cruel to Billy.

Well, he’d more than broken his brief record now, hadn’t he? He’d really gone for broke, he had about as much reason to be proud of it as the hunter who’d bagged the last lion on earth, or shot the last nightingale and cooked it for dinner. And sucked on its bones when he was finished.

Where the fuck
was
she? It was still too early to call her at Jessica’s in New York, or in Maine where she might be with Dolly, Spider thought, getting dressed because there was no way he could possibly go back to sleep. People as conspicuous as Billy don’t just disappear, he told himself as he made scrambled eggs for breakfast and discovered that he couldn’t touch them. He swallowed cup after cup of instant coffee and watched the clock until 5:00
A.M
., when he started phoning. Jessica, he soon found out from her housekeeper, was in Florence, and Dolly, in Maine, hadn’t heard a word from Billy in a week. By nine-thirty Spider was in the office, waiting to grill Josie Speilberg as soon as she arrived for work. There was no point in standing on his pride and pretending to her that he’d somehow mislaid his wife, and was trying to find her out of idle curiosity.

“Spider, if I knew anything, I swear I’d tell you. I haven’t talked to her in five, maybe six days.”

“Could you try to track down Jessica Strauss in Florence for me, Josie? And anyone else you can think of?”

By the end of the day they had exhausted everyone who might know Billy’s whereabouts, from John Prince in New York to the concierge at the Ritz and his fellows at every other major hotel in Paris, London, and New York. Billy, it was clear, had taken a limo to LAX and vanished.

“She’ll be back Spider, remember the twins are here,” Josie said comfortingly.

“Don’t think I haven’t been saying that to myself all day long.”

“Nanny Elizabeth! I’ll bet she knows something!” Josie said, and Spider went racing home.

“Mr. Elliott, you know I’d tell you if I could,” Nanny Elizabeth assured him, “but there hasn’t been a single sign from her. I’m beginning to worry myself. But in my experience, these … misunderstandings … they don’t last long when there are little ones in the house. She probably had to take a few days away from everybody in the world—it’s been almost a year since their birth, and that’s a long
haul for any woman, no matter how many people she has helping her.”

“We should have taken a vacation,” Spider said. “Damn, why didn’t I think of that?”

“Mrs. Elliott wouldn’t have left,” Nanny Elizabeth replied flatly. “There was no chance you could have made her take a vacation unless you’d taken the twins with you. I’ve rarely seen a mother so … well, devoted to her children.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Spider asked.

“Too much of anything isn’t good. I always tell my parents to get away together, even if it’s just a weekend now and then. The children won’t know the difference so long as I’m here, and the parents need time alone. I said as much to Mrs. Elliott, several times, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”

“She has a mind of her own.”

“Ah, yes, indeed, and a will of her own. She’s an unusually stubborn woman, that’s for sure, but I love her dearly.”

“So do I,” Spider said. “Oh, God,
so do I.”

By the end of a week, Spider was so frantic that he was beginning to consider bringing in the police, although Josh Hillman’s advice was to sit it out.

“What could the L.A. police tell you? We know she’s not here. On the possibility that she might have doubled back from wherever she went, we’ve searched the records of every possible hotel and apartment hotel in the city.”

“Maybe … if I went to the media?”

“Spider, for heaven’s sake, you don’t want to broadcast your private disagreements to the world! Don’t go near the media. Billy would hate that more than anything.”

“You’re right, Josh, but I keep imagining …”

“You’re being unnecessarily morbid. Billy is not the kind of woman who’s self-destructive, I promise you. She’s tough, Spider. Go home, play with the kids, and remember that in a few days this will all be a bad dream.”

“Do you bill for that stupid advice, Josh? Shit, I’m
sorry, I know you’re doing your best. And I am going home—Nanny Elizabeth will just have to take care of me too.”