Lovers (62 page)

Gigi had first considered decorating the house in an all-white bridal theme that would be doubly effective against the colorful confusion of her own multipatterned floral chintzes, but discarded the idea after some thought, in view of the fact that these were hardly first nuptials for either Sasha or Vito. Instead she’d gone to the wholesale flower market downtown and loaded a borrowed van with twenty dozen pots of the palest pink cyclamen and twenty dozen pots of the white and pink English primroses that had just come into full bloom. She’d made another trip to the Farmer’s Market to buy pink fruit, but except for pink grapefruit, if it existed, it was hiding from her.

Apples, Gigi decided, crates and crates of them, in every variety of red. She could conceal the bottoms of the crates with flower pots, Gigi reflected, but some final grace note was still lacking. She wandered through the market, smelling and touching, until she found tiny bunches of green-leaved, pink and white radishes that looked pretty enough to be pinned on a lapel. She bought every last bunch available, hundreds of them, and tucked them, like frilly grace notes, into the crates of apples that her caterers piled up in carefully picturesque disorder wherever she found an appropriate spot.

Where to put the bar, Gigi wondered. Her catering experience at Voyage to Bountiful had taught her that every bar was a potential traffic jam. There were so many unnecessary rooms in her house that she was able to set up bars
in four different doorways, in spots too small to encourage people to linger.

After much searching for something original to serve, Gigi had decided to be sensible and fall back on the time-tested safety of a classic hearty Italian buffet, Vito’s favorite food. Was there anybody who wouldn’t find something to his liking amid the variety of hot and cold antipasti, the five kinds of pasta, the osso bucco, the chickens with black olives, the sausages with peppers, and the roasted legs of lamb? And wedding cake, of course. If so, let those picky souls drag themselves out to eat after the party, she decided.

Gigi had been able to find rental tablecloths that had boughs of flowering pink and white apple blossoms printed on a deeper pink background; the napkins were pale pink, the candles were white, and more clay pots of low white primroses made the simple centerpieces. She’d told her caterer to use forty-eight-inch tables for each group of eight people, and set them up all over the rambling house. Tight tables, as Emily Gatherum had said, gave animation to any group.

Animation
. Gigi moaned out loud in an excess of preparty nerves. Why had she, who knew the sheer terrifying hell of hostessing from the viewpoint of a dispassionate professional, volunteered to give a party herself? A party for hundreds of people, half of whom had absolutely nothing in common with the other half?

The people Sasha had invited from Scruples Two had never encountered anyone on Vito’s list of
Le Tout
Hollywood. No wonder Sasha and her father had never met earlier; the only single guest they knew in common would be Zach. And Josie Speilberg and Burgo, Gigi amended. She could count on Josie and Burgo, both lively talkers, to work to make small bridges across the vast gap between the two groups, but certainly not on Zach, who would, she hoped, have the good taste to make a token appearance and then disappear.

Zach had once told her that the only thing to concern
herself with in planning a party was the enjoyment of the guests, that the happiness of the hosts was unimportant because they were nothing more than the producers of an evening.

That had sounded reasonable at the time, but now that she was giving a huge party on her own, and a family wedding reception to boot, the philosophical distance he’d conjured up was impossible to achieve. On the other hand, the house, much too big for her, was much too small for all the guests, and maybe sheer physical proximity would give the party the
joie de vivre
it needed. Elsa Maxwell, the famed party-giver of the world between the wars, had always insisted on overcrowding as the key to any good party. Gigi prayed fervently for the ghost of Elsa Maxwell to bless her as she jittered with anticipatory “klung.” This useful word that Sasha had taught her, even if it couldn’t be found in any dictionary, meant a swift rush of shit to the heart.

As Gigi confirmed the twelve valet parkers from Chuck’s Parking, and the eight violinists who would play romantic melodies from the largest of her balconies, and the dance band that would alternate with them in the courtyard, she blessed the day that Sasha had negotiated a contract with poor Mr. Jimmy for his reproductions of her antique lingerie. After his death, that contract had been taken over by Scruples Two, and her royalties, religiously saved for years, now amounted to a sum she’d never have dreamed she could call her own. It was no longer possible to think of it as a nest egg, unless the nest belonged to a particularly enormous and fertile dinosaur who laid huge eggs in large batches. Even if this party was the expensive disaster she expected it to be, she could afford to pay for it without thinking twice.

Gigi dressed for the party with cold hands that fumbled with every button and almost caused her zipper to jam. At Neiman-Marcus she’d found a chiffon dress of a color she called “waternixie green,” a light green that made her
think of mermaids disporting themselves mischievously with a school of lusty mermen on the banks of a river in the early springtime. It had a closely cut bodice with tight, concealing sleeves that ended in tiny cuffs at her wrists, and a deeply cut neckline that somehow managed to begin exactly where the pink of her nipples abruptly interrupted the blue-veined whiteness of her breasts. The bodice clasped her torso tightly all the way to her slim waist, where it was secured by a simple chiffon belt. The skirt, made of three layers of chiffon cut on the bias, undulated as she moved, to reveal every curve of her lower body, although its slightly flared hemline gave her the freedom to move easily. It ended a hair above the middle of her knee, at exactly the length that proclaimed that it was late 1984, not a day earlier, not a day later.

When your father marries a woman who is only three years older than you are, Gigi told herself, as she bought the most audaciously daring and provocative dress she’d ever owned, you have a duty to make sure that your new stepmother won’t feel that she’s been burdened by a stepchild who’s too innocent to take care of herself. Or too modest. This dress would be modest only for a woman who believed that her arms were her primary erogenous zone.

Anyway, who’d ever heard of a modest waternixie, Gigi wondered, as she layered her eyelashes with more mascara than usual and stood in front of her full-length mirror looking as poised as she wished she felt. Perhaps it was obvious for a green-eyed girl to wear green, but this was Hollywood, after all, where a subtle effect might be wasted.

This dress had nothing in common, except for the fabric, with the lavender chiffon dress, that dream she’d worn to Sasha’s wedding to Josh Hillman, that balletic bridesmaid’s dress. Nor, she brooded, forgetting the party for a minute, was she the same person she’d been roughly two and a half years ago. So much had happened to her: she’d pushed herself out of the nest of Scruples Two; she’d made the hard decision, the all-but-unthinkable decision, about her lack of a future with Zach; she’d discovered her first
enemy in Victoria Frost, and learned the limits of what she was willing to do for success; she’d had two lovers and been roughly initiated into the dangerous whirlpools of masculine jealousy and possessiveness; she’d begun to develop a knack for inventing twists on existing businesses; she’d even brought herself to buy a grown-up dress instead of putting together her usual bits and pieces. Whatever it all added up to, she’d changed, Gigi realized, and if one of the changes had been like taking a saw and cutting off a limb, it had not been avoidable. Was change ever avoidable, once you’d seen the need for it, she asked herself, as if the mirror could give her an answer.

Pushing aside fruitless philosophical speculation, Gigi turned away from her questioning eyes and stood sideways, inspecting herself critically. Tonight she looked shamelessly sinuous and as unblushingly voluptuous as any essentially slender girl could look, she realized with a rush of pleasure. She’d let her hair grow longer than it had ever been since she came to California. Now it reached between her chin and her shoulders, and like a bright fall of autumnal plumage it ruffled in a winged swaying movement whenever she moved her head. There was no need to add one more thing besides her gilded sandals, Gigi resolved, as she put away her jewelry. This dress had a statement to make, and even a bracelet would dilute that statement of—what, exactly? Of course … the perfect hostess: collected, composed, unflappable, welcoming, self-possessed, and adult. Especially … adult.

An hour later, with the party in full swing, and dinner still to be served, Gigi was able to relax and move through the crowded rooms with that particularly heady satisfaction that only a triumphant hostess knows—a sense of victory over all the mingled inner fears and self-doubts that hospitality on any grand scale produces; over the complications of logistics and invitation lists; over whether a party can be carried off as it has been imagined, or whether it will miss in spirit or execution.

This party had been a smash from the minute the first guests arrived. The Scruples Two people, who, like everyone else in Los Angeles, thought of themselves as being in two businesses, their own and show business, were thrilled to meet the Hollywood crowd, who were equally pleased to find a new and eager audience for their sense of their own importance. The guests had all dressed up in their best, unusual in this casual town, but something about the idea of a wedding reception had appealed to their normally defective dress code.

The sense of occasion was almost visibly hanging in the air, as real as the lanterns and the full moon, and Gigi’s mood waltzed and eddied and spun to the music as she flew from guest to guest in her gilded sandals. She felt as if the champagne she’d been drinking had lifted her a few inches above the ground. She should give more parties! Yes … this could be her First Annual Harvest Moon Ball … at Christmas she’d have a Twelfth Night party, just when people were feeling the post-New Year’s Eve letdown … on April Fool’s Day she’d have a masked ball at which everyone had to dress in red … she paused for a moment, near the front door, between one group and another.

Her giddy sense of insubstantiality suddenly shattered as Zach appeared, almost filling the doorway with his shoulders. Gigi felt a deep shock, an unmixed shock of pure glad remembrance, as the party disappeared around her. There was a moment in which neither of them did anything but stare at each other. Braced as they both had been for this meeting, nothing had prepared them for the disappearance of the passage of time. As if their year of separation had never existed, they found themselves deep inside the unquestioned middle of a long intimacy.

“Waternixie green,” Zach blurted in surprise, startled out of his determined cool. “You never dared to wear it in public.”

Gigi gasped, speechless. She had forgotten the color of a costume he’d had dyed especially for Ariel in a production
of
The Tempest
, a fabulously effective collection of scraps and straps, so revealing that she’d been too shy to borrow it for a costume party, but not too shy to wear it for him.

“It wasn’t the color, it was the f-fit,” she justified herself, stuttering slightly.

“You’ve let your hair grow,” he said, half-admiring, half-wistful.

“So have you.”

“My producer won’t give me time for a haircut.”

“Why don’t you complain to your agent?”

Gigi remembered the times she’d circled him in the bathroom, dodging his kisses, giving him an emergency trim with her manicure scissors when his hair had, as hair does, grown too long overnight.

“Well,” Zach said, and stopped.

Without a stage direction, without a line, without a prompter, his mind went blank. She was intolerably lovable, but if he couldn’t, at the very least, tell her that, what would be safe to say? If he looked closely into her eyes, it would be worth his life, it would be like taking bare electric wires in his hands.

“Well,” Gigi echoed, swaying toward him slightly, wondering frantically what she could say next that wouldn’t trigger another memory of their life together. Automatically she thrust her champagne glass at him.

“What should I do with it?” Zach asked.

“Drink it.”

“This glass seems to be empty.”

“Oh, sorry—here, give it back to me. Why don’t you go greet the bride and groom and get a drink?”

“Bride and groom?” He looked at her in confusion. From the minute he’d walked in the door, he’d forgotten the reason he was here in the unbounded sweetness of looking at Gigi again.

“Sasha and Vito,” she managed to remember, thinking that she’d never seen Zach confused before, not Zach, who habitually dominated any occasion with his firecracker
laugh and his long-shoreman’s build and his flaming focused will.

“Oh … them. Right! I should say hello. That’s why I came, isn’t it? Where are they?”

“At the head of the stairs, in the living room.”

Gigi blushed so deeply that she could see the flood of color reaching her breasts. The head of the stairs was where she had last set eyes on Zach, that was where she had told him to leave.

“I’ll find them,” Zach said. “You have more guests coming.”

The front door opened behind him and Ben Winthrop walked into the hallway. In his purposeful, rapid way he ignored Zach, going straight up to Gigi.

“Hello, my darling,” he said, kissing her lightly on the lips. “Sorry I’m late—I couldn’t end the meeting a minute sooner. You look enchanting, but if ever a dress cried out for emeralds, this one does. Why didn’t you tell me what you were going to wear? I’d have brought them over.”

“Ben, this is Zach Nevsky. Zach, Ben Winthrop.”

“Nevsky? You must be the brother of the bride,” Ben said affably, as they shook hands. “I’ve heard so much about Sasha from Gigi that I can’t believe I haven’t met her yet. Or Gigi’s father, for that matter,” he added with his slow, confident smile. “I suspect her of hiding me from her family. Come on, darling, lead me to the guests of honor so I can finally congratulate them.”