Lovers (9 page)

“You don’t really give a shit about swimsuits, do you?”

“No team spirit, sir, that’s always been my problem.”

“It’s a seven-million-dollar account, small for some people but major for a boutique like us. And Indigo Seas is a solid company with terrific growth potential.”

“Oh, wow!”

“You have the vocabulary of an eight-year-old.”

“Seven million, hey, that’s almost enough to make a
really cheap movie,” Gigi teased. The poor benighted guy was just too serious. She owed it to him to make him smile.

“Gigi, we’re still wasting time.”

“On the contrary, we’re getting to know each other, getting the personal stuff out of the way, as Archie suggested. Or was it Byron?”

“I don’t want to hear how you lost your virginity, Gigi, I’ve changed my mind. I
never
want to know.”

“Ah, gee, that hurts my feelings. If you won’t listen now, you’ll just have to go through it later. It’s not a subject we can skip, like third grade. But okay.” She grabbed a yellow pad and a pencil.

“Davy, you keep calling the target customer for this client ‘large.’ I know and you know that you really want to say ‘fat.’ We probably agree that ‘fat’ is not a word that will sell this product. Even ‘plump’ won’t do. So could we think of our customers as ‘abundant’? Abundance is a lovable concept, lots of good things to eat and drink, plenty for everybody, joy and comfort all around.”

“Sure. I’m just the art director here. Never large, always abundant, as far as I’m concerned.”

“At Scruples Two we sell tons and tons of dresses for abundant women. We call them ‘Dolly Moons.’ ”

“How the hell did you manage to use Dolly Moon’s name? Her last movie with Dustin Hoffman was the best!” David sat up straight.

“As usual, Dolly was trying to lose weight, so she decided she’d be motivated to diet by wanting to stay
out
of wearing Dolly Moons, and gave us permission to use her name. And she’s Billy’s best friend, that helped. A lot.”

“We obviously can’t get her for Indigo Seas.”

“No. But my point is that in the catalog we didn’t shoot the Dolly Moons on thin models, we used real abundant women. Abundant women know damn well they’re abundant. They’re deservedly suspicious, and get infuriated when they’re being shown size-six models wearing clothes meant for them. There’s nothing wrong with being abundant, some women naturally are, some not. In any other
century—even early in this century—it was a non-issue. Many men, a surprisingly large group, have no objections at all to abundance. You can
never
underestimate the charms of abundant women. But when they buy swimsuits they’re gritting their teeth and hating the idea, so they put it off as long as possible. In order to merely get them into the stores we have to make swimsuits at least a somewhat
desirable
purchase—but yearning is out of the question.”

“I’m listening.”

“The Nina Blanchard Agency has a whole list of former models who grew too abundant to work. That’s where we found them for Scruples Two. Why don’t we show the product on the most proudly abundant and prettiest model we can find? Make her our Indigo Seas poster girl?”

“Well … yeah … maybe,” David said slowly. “It’s never been done, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be.”

“Maybe a guy with her?” Gigi wondered.

“No, I see her alone in a pool, a lush Venus in lush turquoise water … she’s … she’s not floating … she’s bursting up out of the water, straight up from the bottom of the pool, lush sparkles of water flying through in the air all around her, lush shoulders, lush hair slicked back off her face, and a lush smile, terrific teeth—all you see of the product is where it’s doing a sensational job of holding up a lush pair of abundant boobs—big boobs weren’t on the list of complaints.”

“And the copy line is ‘Are You
Woman Enough
for Indigo Seas?’ ”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all we need.”

“ ‘Woman enough’ … don’t you want to amplify on that? Do a riff? About the designers who understand what to minimize?”

“No,” Gigi said firmly. “Once we get women curious enough about being ‘woman enough’ to venture into the swimsuit department, they’ll find that out for themselves. The hard part is getting them there at all.”

“Okay. Here’s the look.” David used a marking pen on
a sheet of special tissue paper and passed the sketch over to her. Gigi looked at it quickly. “You’re really good,” she told him.

“Yeah. That’s why they let me work with you. It’s a reward—instead of a raise.”

“How many other ideas do we need?”

“How many do you have?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m just starting. ‘Woman Enough’—that could be ‘For the Woman Who’s
All
Woman—Indigo Seas.’ Or how about using ‘abundant’ in Italian—
abbondanza!
—a line that asks, ‘Have You Got Abbondanza?’ and then a checklist of things like—oh, you’re learning to tango, you cook in four languages, all the neighborhood kids hang around, you whistle at construction workers, you’ve won prizes for your barbecue, you have five terrific red dresses, you sing like Dolly Parton, you give great head—and then we say, ‘Indigo Seas, the Swimwear for Women With Abbondanza!’—and get Sophia Loren to pose in Indigo Seas. She does eyeglass ads, she’s got great cleavage, she’s the incarnation of
abbondanza
, why shouldn’t we take a shot at getting her?”

“ ‘Great head’! You can’t put that in the copy!”

“Davy, for heaven’s sake … I think I shocked you. You’re blushing!” Gigi rolled her eyes in wicked delight. “I was just making sure that you were paying attention.”

“I was.” He must have gotten an unfocused look, David thought, while he was visualizing Gigi taking off a tiny little shrunken Indigo Seas suit.

“I’m trying for a sort of what-the-hell, let’s-not-get-too-serious-about-swimsuits kind of mood. Women love to take checklist tests, I always do when I see one anywhere. Damn! I just realized I don’t have
abbondanza
. I never whistle at construction workers.”

“Don’t change the subject just when you’re cooking,” David begged. “We need at least four ideas that we think really work, plus others we don’t have as much confidence in, for Arch and By to shoot down. Not only that, but when we get to the pitch meeting we have to show we’ve tried a
lot of different approaches, explored various alternatives. But not too many, never confuse the client.”

“I see what you mean about banging our heads against the wall. If I weren’t a woman and didn’t know Dolly Moon and how she feels about her body, I might be wondering where to go next,” Gigi said thoughtfully. She stood up with sudden determination.

“We’ve got to take a look at some real, live swimsuits, Davy. Come on, let’s go to Nordstrom’s sports department for some on-site, in-depth research. And then let’s drop in at the Department of Motor Vehicles and talk to the ladies waiting in line for their eye tests. My old dad always told me they make the best focus groups. You don’t have to pay them, and they love to talk.”

“Listen, Gigi, I’m sorry that I said you weren’t serious, that you didn’t give a shit about swimsuits.”

“You know the Chiat/Day motto, ‘Don’t take your work seriously, but take it passionately’? That’s what I’m striving for, step by step. Hey, Davy, stop! Don’t you dare look for your keys. I’m driving you in my new little red wagon.”

“Did you know I had a cousin who’s a shopping-mall almost-billionaire?” Billy asked Spider, as they sat having drinks in front of the fire before dinner, alone now that the twins were finally stowed in their cribs.

“Nope. What’s his name?”

“Winthrop, Ben Winthrop. In fact, Benjamin Warren Saltonstall Winthrop, no less. Ring any bells?”

“Loud and clear. He’s one of most aggressive of the businessmen of the eighties, according to
Forbes
, although they’re more polite about their terminology. I didn’t know you were related. He operates out of New York, not Boston.”

“Maybe, but he’s also one of the awful tribe of evil cousins who persecuted me when I was growing up in Boston. There were dozens of them, all beastly. I don’t remember anyone named Ben, but he called this afternoon
and identified himself convincingly. The Warrens are part of the family tree that came over on the
Mayflower.”

“It sounds to me as if his blood hasn’t thinned out too much, in spite of all that genealogy.”

“He said he was out here on business and would love to come calling. I haven’t been back to Boston since Ellis was alive, and I haven’t seen any of my cousins since Aunt Cornelia’s funeral, when I was twenty-four. I certainly don’t remember a Ben Winthrop back then.”

“Did you invite him over?”

“Of course, sweetheart. Would I miss a chance to show you off to any of that snobbish, clubby, self-satisfied gang that made my life a misery when I was a poor little poor girl? Would I pass up an opportunity to show off the twins?”

“I think you’ve reversed the order of your areas of pride,” Spider said, temporarily willing to come second.

“Not by much. Anyway, he’s coming to dinner tomorrow. Let’s ask Gigi, she’s all alone and I’m dying to hear about her new job.”

“She’s only been there two days.”

“True, but what about the importance of first impressions? You decided I was a frosty bitch the minute we met.”

“Weren’t you?”

“Damn right I was. And I’m proud of it. At least I have that period of my life on my résumé, now that I’m brainwashed, barefoot, tied to the kitchen stove, and pregnant.”

“Again?” he asked mildly.

“Just an expression.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Don’t you want more children?” Billy asked piteously. “No little girl?”

“Of course I do, but not right yet, darling, not until Max and Hal stop controlling you with their eyes and start verbal interaction in which you might be able to get the better of them.”

Did his cousin Billy Winthrop also take a pair of bodyguards with her wherever she went, Ben Winthrop asked himself in mild surprise as he leaned out of his car to give his name to the guard at the gatehouse that stood squarely at the driveway entrance to Billy’s estate in Holmby Hills. This was almost like Houston, that great boomtown, he thought, where one of his richest friends had built a watch-tower on top of his house, manned round-the-clock by men with machine guns. Hugely rich people in Boston and New York, including people who had as much money—well, almost as much—as Billy Ikehorn, were known to walk the streets, take taxis, even subways. Surely this was excessive? Or perhaps not? He still knew little, after all, about the intricate local rituals of Los Angeles wealth, although he intended to become a quick expert on the subject.

Los Angeles had fascinated Benjamin Winthrop for years. It was the last American frontier before Hawaii in his plan to pinpoint certain privileged parts of the world with his malls. Now thirty-five, he had entered his teen years in the 1960s, a fact that might have sidetracked a boy with less focused ambition, but Ben had zoomed right through those tempting, throbbing years without feeling the slightest temptation to drop out, tune in, turn on, or acquire flower power. He’d homed in young on real estate, the way millions of his generation had homed in on rock ‘n’ roll, and singlemindedly he had started to acquire mall sites while he was a freshman at Harvard, by borrowing against the funds he could expect to come into at twenty-one.

Most un-Bostonian, his father had considered it, disapproving of something that deviated so far from what he considered a proper use of a sound business mind. “You should plan to go into the family trusts, many of them eventually your own, Benjamin, instead of trying to cover good land with ugly parking lots and hideous shopfronts,” he’d said dryly, as he sat in the library of his Bulfinch mansion
on Mount Vernon Street. “Brains like yours should be used for the conservation and growth of family capital and the protection of the public institutions that depend on our support. Certainly not on something as essentially vulgar and aesthetically immoral as those repulsive malls. That’s why I’ve decided not to invest with you.”

Clearly his father was not the stuff of which clipper ship captains were made, Ben told himself, no matter how many such rip-snorting, rough-and-ready pistoleros had founded the family’s fortune. So much the worse for the old fellow. He’d been obligated to give his own father a chance to get in on the ground floor, but now that he’d missed his shot, there wouldn’t be another.

Ben Winthrop took his father’s refusal as final proof that his own plan to base his future operation in New York was sound. The Boston financial decision-making climate was frequently influenced by moral judgments. Ben considered himself warned by Lewis Carroll in
Alice in Wonderland
. “Tut, tut, child,” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral if only you can find it.”

Early in his life, at the age when people were still giving him children’s books, he’d decided that he didn’t have a minute to waste and morality didn’t intrigue him. No man ever made a fortune by seeking moral opportunities, and in the course of the last decade and a half, Ben Winthrop had become a millionaire eight hundred times over, both from his malls and other investments he made on the side, particularly in shipping. His eye was always on the alert for opportunity, and the gods of opportunity, so flatteringly courted, rewarded him richly.