Lovers (6 page)

Her voice wasn’t apologetic and her words were irrefutable, Spider rioted ruefully. Already someone else’s needs were coming first with her. Archie! Archie indeed! What kind of name was that? Did he have a butler named Jeeves?

“I thought about it all during breakfast,” Gigi continued rapidly, “and since I’m leaving, I should let them know today, leave here … tomorrow … so I can be there by next Monday.”

“Jesus, you’re a heartless bitch. What about the big going-away party, the gold watch for two and a half years
of faithful service, or would you rather have a silver tea service?”

“I was hoping to avoid exactly that. Please, Spider, no fuss. Josie will slime me with a guilt trip that’ll break my heart.”

“I could too, if I wanted to. A guilt trip you’d never recover from.”

“But I knew you wouldn’t. That’s why I told you first of anybody. Do I have your blessing?” Gigi’s impudent mouth, with its upper lip that curved naturally in a hint of a smile, was frankly laughing at him now, and so were her large, beautifully shaped green eyes that reminded him so much of Valentine’s.

“You have my blessing, my wholehearted blessing, combined with my wholehearted wish that you’d stay. But you’re not wrong to want to try something else, you’ve picked your time wisely, and although you can never really be replaced, we’ll just have to be good soldiers and carry on without you—I know there’s no real room for major career growth in a catalog, Gigi, but an advertising agency’s something else.”

“Oh, Spider, thank you!”

“Do you want me to tell Billy for you?”

“No, I’ll go and see her now, at the house. I’m afraid she won’t be as open-minded as you are, but I wouldn’t feel right about not telling her in person.”

“Brave little Gigi. Still, you never know. Billy took a few risks in her day too, she’s grabbed her life in both hands and changed it more than once. Maybe she’ll understand, in spite of the fact that she counts on you.”

“Maybe,” Gigi said doubtfully. Billy, even with the softening influence of marriage to Spider, was still the most demanding woman she’d ever had anything to do with, and Billy had many perfectly valid reasons to feel that she’d singlehandedly invented Gigi. Abandoning Scruples Two would be much less of a trauma if it didn’t mean letting Billy down as well.

Spider leaned down, grasping her shoulders, and shook
her hard and briskly for a minute, like a friendly lion expressing a number of unutterable and complicated thoughts to a pussycat. Then he took her face tenderly in both of his hands. “Remember what you said when you first met me, way back when?”

“Of course. ‘Congratulations.’ ”

“Congratulations to you,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “And good luck, Gigi darling.”

“Mrs. Elliott’s in her sitting room, she said to go right up,” Burgo O’Sullivan said to Gigi. “Hey, kiddo, you’ve got that look on your face that you had when I told you a girl couldn’t get into my poker game.”

“Yeah, well, I was sixteen then, and starting high school, so naturally even your penny-ante weekly game sounded like a better idea than meeting new kids.”

“Fresh, still as fresh as ever. So did you wreck the car? Seduce another chef right under my nose, the way you did that poor English fellow?”

“Burgo, when will you start treating me like a adult?” Gigi gave an unconvincing smile to wise Burgo, who filled a multitude of undefined but indispensable jobs at the great house in Holmby Hills.

“I’ll give it some thought,” he answered, “and let you know. How about a cup of tea? It might steady your shaky nerves. You look the way you used to when I first tried to teach you to make a left in heavy traffic.”

“Burgo, you’re imagining things. I’ve got to go talk to Billy.”

“It’s an emergency, then. You never refuse a chance to visit the kitchen.”

“Sort of. I’ll come by afterwards and tell you all about it.”

“Is that a present for me?” Burgo asked, looking with interest at the white box with a blue satin ribbon on it that Gigi carried.

“No, it’s for Billy, for having the babies. It’s not fair that people send things to newborn children who don’t
know the difference, and not to the mother, who did all the work.”

“I see, a bribe.”

“Burgo, you have an innately suspicious mind, you should be ashamed of yourself. See you later.” Why did he always see right through her, Gigi wondered as she left him. The present she had brought, from her precious collection of antique lingerie, might, just possibly, soften Billy’s reaction. But a bribe? Never! … Or … maybe?

In spite of the need to hurry that she had impressed on Burgo, Gigi found herself dragging her steps as she walked through the spacious rooms, which fairly vibrated with color and freshness, and in which every corner offered intriguing places to stop and linger and inspect the fascinating multitude of objects and antiques and flowers that seemed to have been placed there by a happy chance, instead of by Billy’s constant rearrangement of her treasures.

Upstairs, at the end of a long corridor, the door to Billy’s sitting room was open.

“I’m in here,” Billy’s voice called faintly. Gigi found her flopped heavily on a couch in an attitude of complete exhaustion, her crop of short, heavy, dark curls drooping messily around her face, the lids falling wearily over her smoky eyes, her skin pale and bare of makeup. She wore one of Spider’s old shirts over a pair of baggy jeans, and it was impossible to believe, at the moment, that this wiped-out scrap was the magnificent Billy Ikehorn, the embodiment of the groomed-to-perfection, the exquisitely dressed, the splendidly bejeweled kind of woman of whom the world possesses perhaps several hundred, with only two or three as internationally famous as she.

“Spider didn’t say you weren’t feeling well,” Gigi said in concern. “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known I was going to disturb you.”

“Whatever are you talking about? I’m perfectly fine,” Billy said, too weakly to sound indignant. “I’ve just finished putting the boys down for their nap, that’s all. This is the
best possible time to see me. Come sit down here next to the couch.”

“Did Nanny Elizabeth leave?” Gigi asked in concern, putting the box down on a table. She hadn’t seen Billy at home more than four or five times since the twins, Max and Hal, were born, and then only on the weekends, when they were showing off the babies, with Spider expertly performing fatherly chores, as well as the experienced nanny hovering in the background.

“Of course not, she’s around here somewhere, probably doing their laundry.”

“I don’t get it. I thought that with a great full-time, live-in nanny you wouldn’t have to do all the scut work, and just look at you … Why don’t you get another nanny if she can’t handle it?”

“She can, Gigi, she can. Nanny Elizabeth’s the best in the West, and I’m afraid I may be driving her crazy because I won’t let her do everything. But if I don’t feed the boys, and burp them and change them and put them down and get them up, they’ll end up thinking she’s their mother, not me. This is the most important time of their lives, crucial time, Gigi, and if I miss it I can never get it back. Did you know that if people grew at the same rate as babies do in their first year, we’d all be about a hundred and eighty feet tall? So you see …” Billy’s voice trailed off at the thought of the immensity and importance of her task.

“But, Billy, twins … Aren’t you
supposed
to have help with twins?”

“In theory, of course, but the people who decided that never stopped to think that one twin could end up not getting as much maternal attention as the other. I can’t risk that. They’re four months old, a very impressionable age.”

“Personally,” Gigi said, prudently suppressing a smile, “I don’t remember anything about being four months old.”

“You think you don’t, but everything that happened made a difference.
Everything
, believe me.”

“No doubt, but it’s too late now. Listen, Billy, there’s something I want to tell you …”

“Gigi, it’s more important for you to listen to me now. There’s something you’ve really got to understand before you have children yourself.”

“I’m not planning any, trust me.” Gigi allowed herself a giggle at Billy’s new piece of bizarre thinking, since it was directed at her.

“You never know, and unless I make you realize the truth this minute, there’s a chance that I might not remember, because people forget the first months of their children’s lives the way they forget childbirth … having them is already a blur.” Billy spoke in a voice that a prophetess might envy. “Now listen carefully.
Babies are a lot smarter than anybody realizes.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sure they are, especially Hal and Max, but, Billy, I came to …”

“Gigi, how do you think babies
control
you?”

“Huh?”

“Control. They can’t talk, they can’t walk, but they control you. I’ll bet you haven’t the slightest idea of how they do it.”

“You can’t leave them alone and you won’t let the nanny do it, so you
think
they control you,” Gigi said, trying to restore reason.

“Wrong!” Billy sat up. “That’s just what everyone says, because they know nothing, nothing!” Her voice lowered to an intensity that made Gigi lean forward in amazement.
“They control you with their eyes, yes, just their eyes!”

“Sure, Billy,” Gigi agreed quickly. Like purple aliens from another planet, spaceship residents visiting in the middle of the night, of course they did. Hal and Max controlled reckless, impulsive, billionairess Billy Ikehorn with their wondering baby eyes. Should she make an immediate excuse to leave the room and phone Spider, she asked herself. Did he not realize how totally obsessive Billy had become—just obsessive, or was it really crazy? Or did her weirdness seem natural to him, since the twins were his first children too?

“I can tell that you don’t believe me,” Billy said, brushing
her hair back in a gesture too tired to be impatient. “Just bring me that blue book over there on my desk, the one that’s open.”

Gigi hastened to do as she was told.

“Thanks,” Billy said, trying to find a particular page in the book, which was entitled
The Interpersonal World of the Infant
. “Now listen. This is about what happens during the first three-to-five month period in a baby’s life, and that’s exactly where the boys are. Are you paying attention to me?”

“Yes, Billy.”

Billy looked at her sharply to make sure. “Okay … here it is. ‘The infant takes control—over the initiations and terminations of direct visual engagement in social activities …’ What’d I tell you? There’s more, and I’m quoting here, ‘The visual-motor system, is … virtually mature …’ Did you hear that, Gigi,
mature
, and then he says that ‘when watching the mother and infant during this life period, one is watching two people
’—people
, Gigi—‘with almost equal facility and control over the same social behavior.’ So! What did I tell you?
Equal facility!
They’re four months old and I’m forty and we’re equal! And it gets worse,” Billy said dolefully, and read on. “ ‘They can avert their gaze, shut their eyes, stare past, become glassy-eyed. And through the decisive use of such gaze behaviors’—
decisive
, Gigi!—‘they can be seen to
reject, distance themselves from, or defend themselves against mother.’
Isn’t that terrible! Oh, God help me,” Billy cried; sighing deeply, “they can reject me.” She took a deep breath and shook her weary head sadly.

“But they don’t!” Gigi almost shouted.

“Well, that’s up to them, Gigi. Listen,” Billy said, reading again. “ ‘They can also
reinitiate
engagement and contact when they desire, through gazing, smiling, and vocalizing.’ That’s the only thing that keeps me going, the reinitiation part.” Billy fell back on the pillows.

“Who wrote this?” Gigi demanded suspiciously, picking up the book.

“A famous infant psychiatrist. Daniel Stern. It’s my bible. I wish I could understand everything in it, but it gets very complicated. Still, you see I’m right. Hal and Max control me, I can’t help it.”

Gigi bent over the page Billy had been reading from. “Wait a minute, Billy, he says that ‘the mothers
give
the infant control’—you left that out. You don’t
have
to give them control.”

“Yes you do. You’ll see. Try to force a baby to look at you when he doesn’t want to. It absolutely, positively cannot be done. Or just try to make them look away when they’re giving you that teary, outraged, utterly pitiful glare because they’re unhappy. Oh, I adore them, Gigi, but they’re
fiends
, utter fiends …”

Gigi got up, took the book away from Billy, and removed it to the desk. She spoke in the voice of a psychiatric nurse dealing with someone who was fractious and disoriented, but who needed encouragement rather than coddling. “Billy, I’m sure they’ll grow up and be perfectly nice kids. Not fiends. This, as they say, is but a phase. Meanwhile, on another front, I’m leaving Scruples Two to work in an advertising agency, writing copy. Tomorrow’s my last day.”

“Say that again.” Billy raised herself on one elbow.

“Come on. You heard.”

“Oh, Gigi, I’m so delighted for you! That’s
wonderful!
Give me a kiss!”

“You’re not … upset?”

“Of course not! What kind of selfish person do you think I am? I’ve been wondering when you were going to spread your wings, get off this particular branch and fly away. Lord, Gigi, when I was your age I’d spent a year in Paris on my own and lived in New York and held down an exciting job, I’d had all sorts of lovers and then I’d married Ellis and I’d been to state dinners at the White House in my Dior ballgowns and he’d bought me Empress Josephine’s emeralds and the ranch in Brazil and the place in Barbados and I was on the Best Dressed List—heavens,
what
hadn’t
I done, years before your age! You’ve always been a late bloomer, and Zach is your first real romance. He’s wonderful, of course, but you haven’t really … well, had a lot of experience, shall we say?”

“Forget about my shortcomings, Billy,” Gigi pounced. “Let’s talk about your lovers—you’ve never mentioned that little item before. Could you be more precise? Some specific details?”