Lovers (66 page)

“I hope I’ve packed the right things,” Sasha murmured.

“The official tourist season ended three weeks ago, in mid-October,” Gigi said, “and the local gentry make it a
point to dress in the most polished and sophisticated European elegance, so you’ll stand out like a sore thumb no matter what you wear.”

“You’ve always been a comfort to me, Gigi,” Sasha responded with a smile that curled dangerously at the corners of her mouth. “What are you wearing for the keel hauling, or whatever it’s called?”

“I told you to bring jeans and sweaters, didn’t I? Wear them out to Porta Margera. At the shipyard, everybody’s going to be issued warm jackets to wear and keep as souvenirs, because it might get chilly while they watch the ceremony. Early November can be tricky in Venice. Then we all go back to the hotels, and change for the party.”

“Why do I feel as if I’m going to look like a Munchkin?” Sasha asked suspiciously. “Is Ben going to wear a jacket? Is Vito? Will the
Vogue
travel editor put one on?”

“Only if they want to, Sasha,” Gigi said, “It’s a voluntary thing, we’re not inducting you into the army.”

“I suppose they’re green, like those awful shiny satin things Celtics fans wear.”

“You suppose semi-correctly. They’re white with green letters,” Gigi replied waspishly. “And yes, the letters do say
Winthrop Emerald
on the back. For a girl who sleeps in a T-shirt that says ‘Kennedy Before New Hampshire,’ that shouldn’t be too hard to understand.”

“Used to sleep, Gigi, used to sleep. Now I sleep in a
‘Mirrors
Wins Best Picture’ T-shirt, I’m proud to say. And I’d like to point out that the Kennedy T-shirt wasn’t mine, somebody gave it to me. I cast my first vote for the Libertarian Party candidate, whoever he or she was at the time. Ma insisted on it.”

“Isn’t your vote supposed to be your own decision?” Ben asked.

“Not with a Ma like mine.”

“Why couldn’t you tell her you’d voted her way and just do your own thing in the voting booth?” Ben probed.

“She’d know,” Sasha said darkly.

More power to Ma, Ben thought, pleased to hear that someone could scare this infuriating friend of Gigi’s. Even worse than a best friend—her father’s wife. It was going to be an excellent thing for Gigi to be removed by three thousand miles from Sasha’s influence, he congratulated himself. He hadn’t known what to expect when he met Vito and Sasha, but at least he knew what Vito looked like from magazine and newspaper photographs of him taken over the years of his producing career, and so far the man seemed pleasant enough.

Somehow he’d vaguely expected Sasha, though Jewish, to be a slightly older and far less delectable version of Gigi, rather than a formidably sleek Queen of Sheba with a breathtaking profile and, when she chose, the manners of an offended British duchess. A rude duchess, Ben Winthrop knew from personal experience, could be as quietly rude a woman as any that had emerged in the evolutionary process since the first man made the first knife. Or had it been a first woman?

Her loser hoodlum of a brother would be no problem in the future. He was simply a lout, and had been dealt with as one deals with louts. But what if Sasha took it into her head to invite herself to visit them after he and Gigi were installed in New York? When a California woman has a close friend with a large place in New York, the California friend is notorious for finding excuses to spend at least a few weeks in the spring and the fall in Manhattan, shopping and having to be taken to see the new plays and exhibitions. That would be a problem until he put a stop to it, which he intended to do quickly and efficiently.

He had very different plans for Gigi’s time, after they were married, than a continued association with Sasha. He could see, in his mind’s eye, precisely the kind of ultimate East Sixties town house they’d buy and redecorate in New York; the sex and number of children they’d have—but not for at least seven or eight years; the carefully selected philanthropic committees to which Gigi would donate breathtaking sums of money and lend her name and time; the
small and exquisite parties they’d give, the parties they’d go to and, equally as important a decision—perhaps more important—the parties he would decide they shouldn’t attend.

Of course there’d be a real knockabout big old summer house, outside of Edgartown, perhaps, although they’d go to Venice as often as possible. He’d be flexible, Ben told himself, as flexible as she could desire. If there was some other place in Europe where Gigi wanted to set down roots—if, for example, she fancied a Queen Anne manor house with land and horses and gardens not too far from London—why not? Or a chateau on the Loire or a villa in Tuscany? Or all of them—she could have
anything
. Just as long as she realized that he came first, that each of these houses had to have a thoroughly responsible majordomo in residence all year long; as long as she didn’t waste any of the time that belonged to him in dealing with the details of upkeep, he could be as flexible as any man on earth.

She was to complement him, as a wife was intended to complement her husband, in the old-fashioned meaning of the word in which she would complete his life and make it perfect. He’d reached an age in which a wife was a necessary fulfillment, in which a wife gave a man a finished totality he could never possess without one.

He simply hadn’t felt the need for a wife before, Ben realized. He’d been too busy moving around the country, buying land and building malls, to feel the lack of a home base other than his bachelor place in New York, the chalet in Klosters, and the little palace on the Grand Canal that was the outlet for his feelings for beauty. But something about that weekend he’d spent in Martha’s Vineyard with Gigi and his college friends and their children had made him aware of the passage of time.

It was one thing to be the fancy-free and eligible object of their admiration, but quite another to become ‘poor old Ben, isn’t it a shame that he never got married.’ He knew that they were all horribly envious of him in their heart of hearts—how could they escape envy when his personal
wealth was proclaimed in
Forbes’s
unutterably vulgar list every year, when his eight hundred million dollars had grown by another hundred million dollars this year, and yet nothing about the way he behaved with them changed, when he remained the Ben Winthrop they thought they knew? They couldn’t even accuse him of having the poor taste to display any signs of the nouveau riche. That alone must make them as sick as did the fortune he’d made. Obviously his friends would jump on any excuse to imagine themselves happier than he was, because he’d lagged a bit too long in any stage of the footrace of life. He’d seen it happen many times, seen this sort of self-congratulatory emotional superiority spring up almost overnight, although a man could hold out for years and years, almost indefinitely, as long as he didn’t become a recluse, whereas a woman, no matter how rich, would be quickly pitied.

He could never have married one of the Boston girls he grew up with; they were so familiar that they seemed like sisters—cheery, bookish, bossy, non-erotic. He didn’t care for any of the multitude of New York girls he’d met; they were, by and large, too formed, too sophisticated, often too neurotic. They had been spoiled by their parents and had acquired too hard a veneer too early in life.

Gigi had been made for him.

Her background was impossible, that went without saying. An Irish musical-comedy dancer for a mother, and a showbiz father of Italian heritage! Fortunately he had background enough for the two of them. His marriage would be one in the eye for ever-critical Boston, one in the eye for his father, who persisted in his disapproval of his way of life, one in the eye for all his smug Winthrop relatives, although the fact that Gigi could boast Billy Winthrop Elliott as her “stepmother,” or at least her former legal guardian, provided her with a certain stamp that would soften any edge of genuine disapproval they might feel. His taking of an unconventional bride would seal all his other triumphs as no additional financial success could.

Gigi herself was so winsome, so original, and so charming
that she would win them over. Everyone who had known him as a young man would be forced to acknowledge, once again, that, unlike them, he was no pale copy of his ancestors. Gigi was—and it was a large part of her charm that she didn’t know it—
distinguished
. The quality of her imagination, put to use in the world of philanthropy, would quickly bring her to the attention of the inner circle of older women who ran New York, and one day she would be an important figure in their ranks, a primary figure. Yes, Gigi was the perfect—not “compromise”—he would never compromise in marriage, but the perfect … well … for want of a better word … the perfect choice.

And, of course, he was in love with her. “Madly” in love? No, he didn’t have the desire ever to lose himself in any essentially irrational emotion, he was thankful to say. But as much in love, far more in love, than he had ever believed he could be, now or ever again.
Deeply
in love. He could ask no more than that of life.

No one had yet informed the Adriatic Sea or the lagoons and canals of Venice that the official tourist season was over. The water flickered, dappled and silver, under a celebratory sun in the city that even Dickens had said he was afraid to describe. No filigree of mist had yet flung itself over the dusky ochres of the smaller canals, the miraculous pinks of the Doge’s Palace, or the golden grays, beige grays, the plum grays, and mauve-burgundy grays of the marble palaces that lined the Grand Canal.

In the blue air, all sounds seemed to hang suspended overhead except for the ringing of bells and the lapping of water. There was no longer any wisteria in blossom, trailing in loops from window to window; the occasional oleander trees hanging over tall walls, sending tantalizing messages from tiny hidden gardens, were denuded of their pink and white blooms; but that lack was more than made up for by the sense of freedom and space created by the departure of most of the five million tourists who came to Venice each year.

Venice was ripe on the day of their arrival, an autumnal ripeness in a city of stones where there could be no harvest. Thoughts of the
acque alte
, or high tide of November, that often flooded the red and white marble of the Piazza San Marco, seemed impossible. Somehow the rocking, lounging water seemed to croon with a humming readiness, a welcome for the press who were due to deplane tomorrow from their staging point of departure in New York. There had been almost no refusals from the two hundred invited guests. Everyone of major importance who wrote about the booming businesses of commercial real estate and travel in the American media was expected tomorrow, along with groups of Canadian and British journalists. Ben’s researchers had discovered-that when the French took vacations, rich or poor, they preferred to stay in France, and that the Italians, when they took cruises, did so on Italian-owned ships.

The travel agency with which Gigi had been working had made all the complicated arrangements to fly the press to Venice in first-class comfort. A fleet of four dozen
motoscafi
, with their sleek lines and shining decks, flying white and green flags, had been chartered for their entire visit. Their rooms would be waiting for them at the Gritti, the Danieli, and the Cipriani, filled with flowers, fruit, and buckets of iced champagne, mini-bars unlocked and fully stocked. A handsomely engraved and personalized letter of welcome from Ben Winthrop was placed on each night table, along with the schedule of events, guidebooks, and maps of Venice.

During their first full day the press was free to use the speed-boats to visit Venice, Murano, the Lido, or Torcello, stopping whenever they felt hungry at elaborate buffets that would operate around the clock for the entire duration of the junket, in private dining rooms set up at all of their three hotels. On the second day of the junket, after lunch, they would be transported on specially decorated
vaporetti
from their hotels to the railroad station at the far end of the Grand Canal, where they would board buses for
the trip across the bridge to the mainland, and from there to Porta Margera. Once inside the shipyard, more buses would take them to the three rows of bleachers set up along the drydock itself, where they would listen to a short speech that Ben would make, explaining the exchange of coins, and then they’d watch Gigi make the exchange itself, and see the plate rewelded into the hull of the
Winthrop Emerald
.

On the trip home, the
vaporetti
, now illuminated with strings of lights, carrying musicians and waiters with trays of drinks, would return to the hotels in time for the journalists to dress for the ball and dinner at the specially decorated Municipal Casino, the Palazzo Grimini, where there would be dancing and gambling until the last member of the media felt like leaving. During the next two days the press would be at liberty to enjoy themselves, as they had been on the first day, with their return flights scheduled for the morning of the fifth day.

“Three and three-quarter days of whatever pleases their fancy in Venice, the fastest and most expensive transportation, food, drink, and only one brief event plus a party to cover—if that doesn’t make them go home happy, what will?” Ben had asked when Gigi had shown him her plans.

“They’re blasé about being well-treated,” Gigi worried. “I still think you should have fifty gondolas available twenty-four hours a day, flying a green and white flag, so they’d be able to tell which ones were yours.”

Ben had given a negative shake of his head. “It’d mean negotiating for days with the gondoliers’ union—even getting a job as a gondolier means you have to be born to a gondolier in a direct line going back generations—they’re a hundred times worse than the Teamsters. If members of the press want to take a gondola, let them pay for it themselves, darling—after all, everything else is free.”

“I know, but why stop at the gondolas? They represent Venice, they’re identified with it as nothing else is.”

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re a rip-off, and I won’t do business with them,” he’d said stubbornly.