Scruples Two by Judith Krantz Read Free Book Online

leaves, water, deadhead the flowerbeds, weed any weed that has had the nerve to spring up overnight, remove annuals that are past their bloom and plant new ones.”
    “How do they know what to plant?” Gigi’s question was accompanied by a look of candid curiosity. Her knowledge of plantlife was limited to parks and sidewalk flower stands.
    “There’s a head gardener who tells them what to do. Every week I get together with him and we walk around and plan things—we make lists. Something always needs work. Years ago this part of California was a desert, and without constant attention and water it could revert in no time.” Billy shuddered at the thought of nature.
    “Do those men come every week?”
    “Actually … every weekday.” And they were just the basic work crew, Billy thought. The head gardener, who had been trained by Russell Page himself, and his assistant lived at the house. In addition there were two men in charge of the orchid house and the greenhouses in which the blooming houseplants were boarded between seasons; another man did nothing but lawns; a part-time specialist kept a sharp eye on the temperamental rose gardens, and two women fed, watered and groomed the hundreds of houseplants three full days a week. Even a few days without intensive maintenance of her gardens was unthinkable.… but hard to explain, especially to Gigi.
    “Wow. That’s neat. Never a dead leaf, is that the idea?” Gigi’s smile, now that she thought she understood how it all worked, was enchanted and amazed, like a child seeing its first huge, helium-filled Mickey Mouse balloon.
    “Right, dig we must for a better Holmby Hills,” Billy answered, remembering that Josh Hillman, her lawyer, had standing orders with every major realtor in town to let him know before anyone else if one of the properties on the street came on the market. She intended to snap them up, one by one, bulldoze the houses, and lure Mr. Page back to extend her gardens. In addition to the unique pleasure of living with his work, these purchases would put even more distance between her place and Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, which was located down her street, Charing Cross Road. Billy couldn’t actually hear the inmates there doing whatever it was they did, but she didn’t like living on the same winding, narrow street as the Mansion without the widest cordon sanitaire money could buy.
    As they talked, Billy observed Gigi as casually as possible. Her eyes, which had seemed a neutral gray last night, were discovered to be an unexpectedly fresh and hopeful pale green, as young as an opening bud on a New York tree in the early spring before a speck of soot has fallen, a green that lasts only a day in nature. Billy remembered that particular green from the days before her marriage, when she and Jessica and their boyfriends would come staggering home at daybreak and realize that spring had arrived overnight. But Gigi had pale eyelashes that didn’t call any attention to her eyes, and her incredibly uninteresting mess of dull, plain brown hair flopped over her eyes and hid them most of the time. First: Haircut, Billy thought, beginning a mental make-over. Next: Light brown mascara, I don’t care if she’s only sixteen, it’s criminal not to wear a touch of mascara. After that, clothes. Everything, from the sneakers up. It didn’t matter if Gigi chose to live full-time in jeans and ratty sweaters, but the girl needed new ones, or at least new ones that looked worn and tattered in the right way instead of the wrong way. Billy didn’t know how she was so sure that Gigi’s clothes were beat up in the wrong way, since teenagers were an enigma to her, but she was never mistaken about clothes. She was certain that she could walk through Peking and tell you which Chinese women had done a certain secret and invisible—and probably forbidden—little something to their identical jackets to give them an extra allure.
    But it would all have to wait. She