Lovers (67 page)

Gigi had sighed and dropped the matter. There was a blind side to Ben, a totally uncompromising attitude that allowed him to go light-years in any number of extravagant directions yet not bend the slightest in another. It was his way, as they said about Lee Iacocca—or was it Frank Sinatra?—or the highway.

Gigi no longer thought this quality was an example of the oddball, often amusing frugality of the very rich. Billy would have seen at once that visiting Venice on the cuff without free gondolas just … 
missed
. Not enough to spoil the junket in any important way, but still enough to shadow the experience with a tiny degree of incompleteness. The price demanded by the gondoliers’ union, no matter how unfair, wouldn’t even be noticed in the vast total that Winthrop Development was spending on the whole elaborate affair.

Ben regulated his life by some system of his own that he lived by, with no exceptions, a system that continued to be an enigma to her. What, for instance, if she’d wanted to break his Rule of One on their first visit to Venice? What if she’d been in the mood to spend a whole afternoon looking at pictures—would he have dragged her bodily out of the Accademia while she begged piteously for just one more little Giorgione?

After the fistfight with Zach at her party, she and Ben, with cautious tact, had managed to tuck the episode away. He’d teased her that she’d dressed like a temptress and behaved like a prude; she’d responded that he was an exhibitionist who’d gotten the black eye that he deserved, and she’d pretended to have forgotten it. But she knew she was right to dislike being groped in public, and she was privately as exultant that Zach had so excessively overreacted in defending her as she was irritated by Ben’s behavior.

Her problems with Ben, Gigi frowned, aside from the gondolas, all seemed to be about something relatively minor: his fixation—that was the only word for it—on her ass;
that embarrassing night in the Vineyard; his insistence on buying the earrings she hadn’t wanted; even their first kiss. He had a way of taking advantage of his position to assert himself, to take possession.
Complete possession
.

It wasn’t selfishness in the ordinary sense of the word; it seemed to Gigi that nobody could be as generous, as wildly extravagant, as Ben was when he was in the mood. It was some other quality, some deep internal pattern, something she couldn’t manage to give a name to, try as she had since their love affair started.

Granted, it had been wildly romantic, but would every woman have been thrilled to have been skyjacked to Venice, come to think of it? Probably. She was just being inordinately picky, Gigi reproached herself. A man’s and a woman’s ideas of romantic timing might easily not coincide. Most females would kill for someone who threw emeralds at them and swept them off to magic places and didn’t mind showing their loving possessiveness, no matter where or when or who was watching.

The thing was that he didn’t possess her. Not yet, anyway.

“I have this problem,” Archie said to Byron, as they sat in a bar at two in the afternoon. “I can’t decide if this is what it feels like to be drowned, to have slivers of bamboo stuck under my fingernails, or to be burned at the stake.”

“Try to be betrayed, to be castrated, to be sodomized,
and
to be robbed at gunpoint of everything you own … yeah, I think it’s more like that,” Byron said, striving for conciseness.

“Are we losing perspective? Are we overreacting, By? After all, we still have our health, we still have our hair, we have our suits and our talent. All we’ve lost is the fruit of the hardest-working years in our prime of life and our reputations in the business.”

“We knew we were taking a risk, Arch.”

“You mean we
deserve
this?”

“No, just that it happens.”

“Byron, if you get philosophical on me, if you say one mellow, shit-eating, rat-eyed word, I’m going to break every bone in your body with my own hands.” Archie croaked with the lack of menace of someone who knew he had only enough strength to lift a glass to his lips.

“Gigi in Venice for God knows how long, Miss Vicky in Tokyo forever … how many accounts have we lost, Archie? I keep losing count.”

“All three of our very own low-cal babies from Oak Hill Foods, Indigo Seas, Beach Casuals, and, now that we’ve heard from Spider Elliott in Paris, Scruples Two.”

“You can’t count Indigo Seas,” Byron said fretfully. “We resigned them. And that’s where the trouble started.”

“No, the trouble started when we left Caldwell and Caldwell with that double-dealing ice-queen bitch-goddess, Victoria Frost,” Archie pronounced his opinion in small, biting words.

“Should we have foreseen that she’d dash home to mummy and daddy the instant they asked her nicely, without even giving us a word of warning? Was that our big mistake?” Byron wondered.

“I don’t know, but she was uncomfortable enough with it to telex from Japan. She didn’t even have the guts to phone us before she left and talk to us, while we were trying to hunt up Gigi. At least Gigi had a reason—unprofessional as it was—for leaving, and she didn’t take any accounts with her. You can’t blame Elliott for pulling the plug when he’d been led to expect to get Gigi back … can’t even blame that foxy grandpa, Harris Reeves … is this what they call white-collar crime?”

“I believe it’s known as ‘business as usual,’ ” Byron responded. “Also known as reality.”

“In that case, I have an idea,” Archie said, running his hands through his black curls and sitting up straighter. “We still have a group of semi-respectable accounts, plus, for the moment at least, The Enchanted Attic and the Winthrop Line. Why don’t we go see the Russo boys and suggest a merger? Billy Elliott gave the Russos another
chance at Scruples Two, and we’d bring new blood to the account—if we got together with them, we’d make a decent small agency. They’re good steady guys, just not as hot as we are—as we were—but then who is? Or should I say
was?”

“Hmmm. Russo, Russo, Rourke and Bernheim … no, I don’t like the sound of that,” Byron said peevishly.

“If we could make it Russo, Rourke, Russo and Bernheim, would you like it better?”

“I think I could begin to consider Russo, Bernheim, Russo and Rourke. I think I could swallow my pride to that point,” Byron answered. “At least we don’t have to work with Miss Vicky anymore.”

“Toss you for who gets to make the phone call,” Archie said.

“I’m only a great art director, Arch, you’re fair with words, or so they say. You make the call. And wake me when it’s settled,” Byron said, signaling the waiter. “Another bottle of Evian, please, we’re going to hell with ourselves.”

The magnificent weather held as the press arrived and checked into their rooms. The next day they disappeared into Venice, drifting invariably into the Piazza San Marco before lunch, after lunch, and during the afternoon.

Gigi had put together a group of the yellow wicker tables at Florian’s and surrounded them with chairs. While Ben worked all day with Renzo Montegardini, planning how to speed up the refitment of the
Emerald
, she sat at Florian’s, accompanied by the entire public-relations department of Winthrop Development. Sooner or later their journalist guests would come by to sit down, say hello, order tea, coffee, mineral water, and every kind of sweet cake, some of them perfectly content not to leave, until their informal party grew until it almost filled the ranks of the outdoor tables of the large café.

One particular business reporter, a
Boston Globe
business writer on the verge of retirement, known as Branch T.
Branch, took a particular liking to Gigi, whom he took to be a junior member of the PR department. Diminutive, almost fleshless, and deeply wrinkled, the reporter wore a thin wool shirt, a heavy sweater, and a battered tweed hat, even though the day was fairly hot and the sun was high.

“You can’t be too careful here,” he told Gigi in his low, confidential rasp. “Know the place well, love it, but wouldn’t go out without a sweater for anything in the world. Caught a terrible cold here one beautiful July day, waiting for a
vaporetto
—a breeze off the water, another chill coming up from the canal, three minutes’ wait, that’s all it took, hung on for weeks. Miasma, my dear, miasma. Death in Venice, that’s no joke, happens all the time to tourists. These canals are full of things you don’t want to think about. At night, on a dark bridge, don’t look behind you, walk briskly, that’s my advice. Very little crime here, mostly pickpockets, but lots of ghosts, more than make up for criminals. The real Venetian—a dying breed, only eighty thousand of them left, you know—will tell you that if you’re not born here, it’s courting your death to stay longer than two weeks. And don’t ever get sick in Venice, that’s my advice. The doctors here come from the school of cupping and leeches. Got stung by a bee here once, had an allergic reaction, leg blew up three times its size, doctor told me it was impossible because Venice doesn’t have any gardens, so how could there be bees? Damn place has hundreds of little window gardens, and what about the flower market at the Rialto, eh?”

“Where are you staying, Mr. Branch?”

“Branchie, call me Branchie. I’m at the Gritti. Don’t think I’ll take that trip to see that keel ceremony, hate to miss young Winthrop’s speech, doing a book on the Winthrops, you know, but why risk coming back by night? Much too cold, much too long a trip for my taste, you should have held it in a more civilized location, that’s my advice. Mestre, of all places. Plague center, Mestre.”

“But the ship can’t be moved out of drydock. Oh, dear, I don’t want you to miss it,” Gigi cried, feeling the
Boston
Globe
coverage slipping away. “If I come to pick you up at the hotel, will you go out on the
vaporetto
with me? It’ll be perfectly warm at that time of day. Coming back, I’ll arrange a special
motoscafo
at the railroad station just for you. You can sit inside the cabin and close the doors. You’ll be perfectly snug, and you’ll get back long before the others.”

“Good of you. Take you up on it, yes, thanks.”

“What’s your book on the Winthrops?” Gigi asked curiously.

“Historical study, not your kind of thing, my dear. Been working on it for years. Sort of a hobby with me. Young Winthrop, now he’s interesting, he’s why I came on this jaunt, normally would have sent my assistant, but young Winthrop, he’s blazing his own trail, fascinating business story there, he could have been a Venetian, a merchant prince of the old school.”

“I think he would have liked to be,” Gigi said, smiling at the fancy. “Is the book finished?”

“Years to go,” Branchie said waving a tiny hand. “Retirement project, keeps me young, no illusions on need to publish. Too many books in print already, that’s my advice to myself, but I keep my ear to the ground, know what’s going on. That’s for sure. Keep it to myself, my own material, pride myself on that.”

“I’ll be at the Gritti tomorrow, Branchie,” Gigi promised him, “and I guarantee you won’t catch the plague in Mestre.”

Later, as Gigi and Ben took Sasha and Vito to La Madonna, an authentically bustling, non-tourist fish restaurant, for dinner, she told him about her special arrangements for Branchie.

“I’m delighted that you talked him into it,” Ben said. “The man knows everybody, and he’s a force at the paper, he has more influence than you’d imagine to meet him. He enjoys making himself out to be more of an eccentric than he really is, but he’s written detailed stories about everything I’ve done, starting with my first mall. Sometimes I
think he knows more about my business than I do. Branchie the Branch, my favorite biographer and hypochondriac—did he tell you about the time he caught his death of cold?”

“Yes, indeed. And the bee sting.”

“He held both of them against Venice for years. He carried on a personal vendetta against the city in print, believe it or not, as if they cared, but eventually he couldn’t resist coming back. He’ll probably wear an overcoat and a couple of scarves tomorrow, so don’t laugh when you see him. Actually, it makes perfect sense for you to pick him up, since I’ll be out at the shipyard checking the bleachers and the sound system a couple of hours before the press arrives.”

“Don’t you have PR people for that?” Vito asked.

“A dozen of them. But I like to make sure for myself. I hate surprises.”

“I know exactly how you feel. Surprises, even good ones, make producers unhappy, unless they’re the reason for them.”

“Is this sort of a dry run for the christening of the ship next year?” Sasha asked.

“Very much so,” Ben agreed, smiling thoughtfully at the clear picture of that day in the future. “Only next year there will be at least five times as many people; all the local dignitaries, the diplomatic community, visiting celebrities, the crew, the families of all the workmen, everything but a marching band, and there’s no reason we can’t have that too, from the Mestre high school. The refitting of the two other ships should be well under way by then.”

“What are are you going to name them?” Sasha wondered. “The
Diamond
, the
Sapphire?”

“I may not use the jewel theme again,” Ben answered her, “although it’s memorable. How about the
Winthrop Gigi
or just the
Graziella Giovanna?
Would you like that, darling?”

Gigi shook her head vaguely, evading the question.
“Branchie told me he thinks you could have been a Venetian.”

“Does he? All things considered, knowing how the man feels about Venice, it’s hard to tell if that’s a knock or a compliment. And with Branchie, it’s always a toss-up. He knows more than he chooses to say.”

The next day Gigi dressed in tennis shoes, black jeans, a black turtleneck, and a black velvet blazer. It wasn’t her idea of suitably casual drydock apparel, but Ben had asked her to wear the emerald earrings during the ceremony itself, for good luck, and she couldn’t think of anything informal except all black that wouldn’t make the addition of enormous emerald drops set in diamonds look plain silly. The earrings and the silver dollar were tucked securely into an inside pocket of her shoulder bag, since Ben hadn’t wanted to worry about carrying them around on his inspection tour of the dry dock.