Scruples Two by Judith Krantz Read Free Book Online Page B

with a flip since the day he went into business for himself and produced the straight, severe, geometric, face-hugging cuts that made his fortune. On the other hand, Vidal was six thousand miles away and horrible, scary Billy Orsini was almost sitting on top of her feet.
    “Mrs. Orsini, the only way to keep this hair out of the young lady’s eyes is to give her bangs. There’s just too much of it to hold back off her face any other way. And it wants to turn up a bit at the sides and back.”
    “That’s what I had in mind,” Billy said, smiling for the first time. “The flapper look. Louise Brooks with a flip.”
    “Louise Brooks?”
    “Before our time. An early movie star who disappeared after a few films. Her hairstyle was famous all over the world.”
    “You don’t say,” Sara mumbled in relief, bending over Gigi now that she had Billy Orsini’s accord. Talk about your control freaks! Her rival, Dusty Fleming, was welcome to her.
    Ten minutes later the haircut was finished. Gigi’s green eyes, under their pointed eyebrows, looked out at the world from a frame of wispy, multilayered bangs that revealed the shape of her oval forehead. When she moved her head quickly her hair moved too, with an enchanting, swaying freedom, and her pointed ears appeared and disappeared. When she held her head still, her hair still looked vitally alive down to the tips of each upward-flipping strand, each hair a tiny, independent arrow that seemed a lighter brown where it caught the light.
    “Wow,” said Gigi in awe. “I look … Wow! There’s no word for it, is there? But better … so much better that I can’t believe it. Oh, thank you, Sara!”
    “It’s my personal best,” said Sara proudly. “Mind if I take a Polaroid? I want to send it to Vidal. Wish I’d thought to do a ‘before’ shot.”
    “Of course not,” Billy said, giving her a fifty-dollar tip. Gigi looked perfect. Her elfin quality was clearly visible now. She wasn’t pretty in any usual, ordinary, average way, but she was deeply intriguing to look at. Or was she just deliciously impish? Elfin, impish? Impen? Elfish? In any case, she was astonishing and undeniably chic, which was something Billy simply hadn’t had the imagination to foresee. Chic at sixteen, chic , by God and by golly, the last thing Gigi had been at breakfast, chic, one of the great, good, miraculously permanent things you could never buy with any amount of money. That neck and head could go out to lunch in any great restaurant in the world for the next seventy years, if you wrapped the rest of Gigi in a cape down to the floor. Lunch .
    “What time is it?” Billy asked, incredulous at her sudden hunger.
    “Almost two,” said Sara.
    “Oh Lord, sorry, kiddo,” Billy said and gave her another fifty dollars for not complaining as she had been entitled to do. “ ’Bye, Sara. And thanks. Maybe I’ll come in next week and let you do your damnedest on me.”
    Billy and Gigi left the shop and a hairdresser who was both gratified—she never ate lunch anyway—and determined never to be trapped into a personal booking with Billy Orsini. But she’d do that kid again any time.

    “I feel like somebody else, as if an alien has taken over my head,” Gigi said to Billy after they had wordlessly gulped two small sandwiches each at the little lunch place hidden away in the gift department on the third floor of Saks Fifth Avenue. “I wish my mother could have seen me like this.” Her voice was full of sadness.
    “I do too, Gigi.” And it could have so easily happened, Billy thought regretfully, if only her blindly self-centered husband had brought his daughter out to visit while her mother was alive. But she mustn’t let the girl start looking backward or she might begin to ask some pointed questions about her father, and Billy knew that, try as she would, she might not be able to lie about Vito as effectively as Gigi’s mother had over the years. She was still far, far too