Lovers (65 page)

Millicent Caldwell examined her bracelets briefly. “That’s what they’d say, you know, no matter how I insisted that there wasn’t one word of truth in it. They’d think I was trying to protect you both, but people will
never let me play the saint, even if I wanted to. They’d so much rather believe the worst, don’t you understand that by now? A juicy international sex scandal? An incest scandal? Really, Victoria, where’s your common sense? The trouble with you is that you don’t see things from any point of view but your own. There’s not one person I know who wouldn’t remember seeing something going on between you and Angus. The telephones would be jammed with divinely gossipy calls between my best friends and my best friends. No one’s good-natured or high-minded enough to be cheated out of that satisfaction.”

“So they’d talk! So what? Angus, do you give a shit what people say when they’d be totally wrong? Well, do you, for the love of God?” There was the first note of urgent terror in her inextinguishable defiance. As she had listened to her mother’s words, so relentlessly logical, so loaded with implacable worldliness, Victoria had finally become aware of the beginning of a change in the air of the room, as if oceans had turned into ice, as if mountains had melted.

“Are you truly mad? Of course I care. What’s wrong with caring about the good opinion of everyone you know?” Angus said in a passion of wild obedience to his self-preservation.

“How could that be more important than living your life with her?” Victoria shrilled, pointing at her mother. “Good opinion can’t make you happy, good opinion can’t make your cock hard, good opinion can’t make you come, you fucking bastard. Are you as dried up as she is? When did she cut off your balls?”

“There’s nothing to be gained, Victoria, by being abusive,” Millicent Caldwell said, sniffing daintily. “It doesn’t become you, it doesn’t suit your style.”

“Do you think I’ve ever
cared
what you think? Or what your so-called friends think?”

“Ah, but you see, Victoria,
Angus does
. He’s just told you that he does. He hasn’t explained everything, of course. He hasn’t told you that he can’t imagine leading
the rest of his life as an exile—a dishonored exile—in California, sunny as it may be. He hasn’t told you that there are too many deeply important satisfactions for him here in New York, to ever give them up for that little hot shop you’ve made such a success with, as I never doubted you could.”

“Is that true?”
Victoria stared at Angus and realized that he had no intention of replying to her question. The answer was written clearly on his features, written on that deceptive schoolboy’s face. She couldn’t see his eyes because they were still turned away from her, locked to her mother in desperate fealty.

“You’ll die here, Angus, you’ll die of wanting me, you know that, don’t you?
Don’t you, you pathetic fool? It’s the end of you as a man, don’t you understand that?”

“Oh, I doubt that, Victoria,” her mother answered with a tinkling laugh. “Angus and I haven’t had a sexual relationship since you started with him. I knew he must be seeing someone, and I’d been resigned to it for some time. It simply never crossed my mind that you were that woman. As far as I’m concerned, Angus can satisfy his sexual needs with any woman he chooses, so long as it isn’t with anyone in the agency or anyone with whom I’m personally friendly.
Or with you. No, not ever again.”

She tapped on Joe Devane’s desk with her delicate hand. “Angus will be discreet, and I—I won’t think about it. There are worse ways to live together, I promise you. I used to be jealous, I used to make silly scenes, but that’s a waste of time. What I intend to have, what I
insist
on keeping, is a husband by my side for the rest of my life, a devoted husband and an excellent business partner.”

“Devoted? You think he’s devoted to you?” Victoria shook her mother off on a breath of contempt and scorn. “Have you any idea how he hates the life he’s been forced to live with you? Any idea how he planned and plotted to get away from you?”

“I think the proof that what you say simply isn’t true—and correct me if I’m wrong, Angus—is the fact that my
husband intends to keep on living exactly the life you say he hates. You have no idea how meaningful and satisfactory it is, especially as you grow older. There is more than one way to be married, but at thirty-two you haven’t understood that yet. You called Angus a liar, Victoria, and you were right. He lied to both of us so that he could have it all. You in bed, me at home. But finally, when he had to choose—it was me, Victoria, not you. And he made that choice in no time at all. Am I right, Angus?”

He nodded.

“I think Victoria would like to hear it from your own lips,” Millicent Caldwell said with a soft insistence.

“Your mother is right,” Angus conceded, without pausing or exhaling, his voice dull and low. Millicent had let him off so easily that he couldn’t expect her not to exact some humiliation. She was too intelligent to continue to rub his nose in it—in a few weeks it would be as if it had never happened.

“Say it again,” Victoria demanded. “Try to look at me and say you lied, try to say that you want her, not me.”

This time his voice was like a hammer, and he looked at her with vicious concentration.

“I lied to you. I lied to Millicent. I don’t want you. I want her. I want to keep my life. I will never be alone with you again.”

Victoria sat straighter than ever in her chair. Angus had looked at her with hatred. With disgust. With revulsion. His pride had been destroyed, and he blamed her for it. She was now the cause of his shame, and he would make himself forget her as quickly as he could. The pride of a weak man is more dangerous to destroy than the pride of a strong man, because without it, he is nothing. She had never known that till this minute.

“Now, my dear, now that we’ve gotten past this miserable moment, shall we get on with it?” Millicent Caldwell asked.

“I have nothing to say to you. Thank Joe for the use of his office.”

“No, no, don’t be hasty, Victoria. We have some business to discuss, don’t we, Angus? I never realized until yesterday how Caldwell and Caldwell lost those three Oak Hill accounts. Now
that’s
something I cannot forgive, not in a million years. That’s something you
may not
do to me. You or anyone else. It’s not personal, Victoria, it’s a matter of professional pride. Angus and I have proposed to service those accounts gratis for three years, using our best people. Joe, needless to say, was delighted. So you’ve lost them, Victoria.”

“How petty, how horribly cheap of you! You don’t need those accounts, they’re a drop in the bucket to you, for Christ’s sake!”

“Not at all,” Millicent observed with a generous smile. “I did it for your benefit, Victoria.”

“That’s enough,” she said, starting to get up from her chair.

“When you come back to Caldwell and Caldwell, you’ll be bringing the Oak Hill accounts back with you. The agency world would expect that. It will save your face, my dear, and in your position you’ll need to save whatever you can.”

“You’re insane! Why would I come back? It’s the last thing I’d do!”

“Because if you don’t, we’ll ruin you, Angus and I. We can, you know, and we will. All it would take are a few words in the right ears about our unfortunate,
delusional, paranoid, blackmailing
daughter, and your agency would be finished—and as for you, you’d never have another job offer.”

“You’re a monster!”

“Sticks and stones, Victoria, sticks and stones.” Millicent shook a slender finger at her daughter. “Aren’t you a better judge of copy lines than that? I want you where I can keep my eye on you, I want to know where you are every day of your life until you manage to get yourself married, and even then I’ll keep my eye on you. As long as
I live. When you have as much money as I do, Victoria, that isn’t hard to arrange.”

“But why?” Victoria cried in anguish. “Why? You’ve got what you want. Why can’t you leave me alone?”

“I have a responsibility to you, Victoria. You’re my only child and you’ve been running wild for years. But there’s hope for you yet. What you need is something to keep you steady, something hard and challenging. I’d be remiss if I didn’t try to help you. Perhaps you imagine that I neglected you as a child? Heaven knows I did my best, but with children you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Everybody agrees on that. In any case, I partly blame myself for the mess you’ve made of your life.”

“We’ve decided to send you to the Tokyo office, as manager.” Angus pronounced her sentence quietly. His eyes moved toward her for a brief, blackened instant and she saw nothing in them. Nothing at all except a desire to finish this conversation quickly.

Victoria never remembered how, like a fatally wounded animal, she lurched out of that room, but she never forgot hearing her mother’s ruthless, petty voice behind her, commenting complacently on her daughter’s doom.

“I think this little family problem is behind us, don’t you, Angus? Joe
will
be pleased.”

N
onstop?” Ben said, answering Sasha’s question. “We can do Washington, D.C., to Anchorage or Brasilia, Moscow to Peking, Melbourne to Guam—”

“So why can’t you fly from L.A. to Venice without refueling?” Sasha asked.

She’s been on this plane less than an hour, Gigi thought, and she’s already found something to complain about.

“We can’t carry that much fuel,” Ben said in surprise. “This is as big as a private jet gets; it’s designed to fly three thousand six hundred nautical miles with eight passengers and baggage, but Venice is more than five thousand nautical miles from L.A.”

“But there are only four of us,” Sasha sighed, with only the slightest whisper of a hint of criticism. “Shouldn’t that make it go farther?”

“Even if the ship were empty, you could get only two
hundred extra miles in an emergency. Tell you what, Sasha, if you’re still awake when we get to Frobisher Bay to refuel, you can get out and stretch your legs.”

She’d freeze to death at the Iqaluit Airport in the eastern Arctic if she stayed outside for half the hour it took to refuel, which might not be an undesirable incident, Ben thought, not undesirable at all. Even a small case of frostbite would be welcome. The tip of her haughty nose might be improved by turning a shade of gray-white.

Ben Winthrop was accustomed to first-time guests being all but speechlessly impressed by the luxury and size of the plane, with its forty-one-foot cabin. He’d had it custom-designed so that six people could sit in the forward part of the aircraft in deep-cushioned swivel armchairs while, at the same time, two people could sleep on the convertible sofas in the curtained-off compartment at the rear of the plane, but so far Sasha had seemed more amazed by the discovery of the trash compactor and oven in the galley than by anything else about the jet.

“I suppose the crew has their own bathroom,” Sasha said with a crystalline queenliness that would have made her mother proud of her.

“Actually, no, they use the one we use.”

“Well, it
is
nice and roomy,” Sasha replied quickly, leaving such a faint touch of a merely fleeting impression of surprise that absolutely no one could be sure that it had been in her voice.

I hope she never gets mad at
me
, Vito thought, repressing a grin of admiration. Sure, Zach had thrown that first punch, but nobody who punched Sasha’s brother, even in self-defense, could ever expect forgiveness.

However, that fistfight, now ten days in the past, hadn’t made the slightest difference in Sasha’s plans to go to Venice as Ben’s guest. One thing, she explained to Vito, had nothing to do with the other. Since Gigi said she didn’t have any idea what the fight was about, and Zach refused to tell her what had started it, no one could expect her to give up this experience out of family loyalty. He could live
happily, Vito reflected, without an unnecessary jaunt to Venice for a couple of days, even if the flight was only going to take fourteen hours, including the refueling stop, but he’d never disappoint Sasha, who was like a kid about this trip. As soon as
Long Weekend
was in the can, he’d take Sasha on a real trip, a honeymoon to remember.

But in any case, this gave him a chance to see more of Ben Winthrop. The fellow, after all, had the clear-cut intention of carrying off his daughter and marrying her, but, for all his experience of human beings, Vito found it hard to get a handle on Ben. He had an attractive surface, no question about that, he seemed to have no noticeable faults besides being overly pleased with himself, downright smug if you will, but generous and madly in love with Gigi. What’s more, unlike Curt Arvey, who’d also owned a Gulfstream III before his death, he didn’t work the conversation around to the fact that it had cost him close to fifteen million dollars to buy one, plus a yearly fortune in maintenance and salaries.

Yet there was an atmosphere Ben Winthrop carried with him, inside of which he lived and thought and felt, an atmosphere something like a wall and something like a deep mist, that Vito, sensitive as he was to essences, found almost impossible to penetrate. Ben Winthrop was fucking inscrutable. There was something profound and important about him that he didn’t reveal—would, Vito suspected, never reveal—and in that he reminded Vito of one or two of the old-time Hollywood studio bosses whose ruthlessness was so natural to them, so subcutaneous, that you didn’t know it was there until it had destroyed you. As far as he was concerned, Vito thought, the jury on Winthrop was not only out, but at this particular moment they were hopelessly deadlocked. Not that there was much he could do about it anyway. Gigi would make up her own mind when she saw fit, and he doubted that she’d consult him.