‘They’re all the way over on Columbus Circle—and I’d need a reason to visit. Too awkward otherwise.’
‘How many years did you work there? Surely they’d be happy to see you, no?’
He continued to toy with his chopsticks, tapping them together harder and harder. It was so quiet around them in this restaurant that Maggie could hear each clack.
She made a good argument, Henry had to concede. The thought of seeing his offices again made his anxiety return in a sharp little wave—he needed to reach for a drink, or preferably an Ativan, to steady himself against something so shaky.
But it also excited him, made him wonder if she would think better of him if she saw how conspicuously his years of hard work had paid off. How that work had inspired others, got them rallying around a shared cause, rather than simply himself.
He reached into his overcoat for his wallet. Not there. He’d paid for the taxi up here with the last twenty in his billfold.
‘I forgot my wallet,’ Henry said. ‘Have you got money?’
‘Dare you to walk out,’ Maggie said. ‘Quick. The waitress is going in the kitchen.’
Casual as anything, hands high in her jacket pockets, Maggie got up and left the restaurant. After searching his own pockets but finding nothing, Henry hurried after her.
She’d slipped in among the commuters on Madison and was halfway to the corner already. They walked fast two blocks over and ducked into the belly of the subway.
‘What the hell was that?’ Henry said.
‘Go back and pay them tomorrow, if it matters that much.’
‘Christ, you’re bad.’ He hadn’t intended this as a compliment, but picked up a faint hint of amusement in his own voice.
Maggie continued walking briskly, passing through the emergency exit and onto the downtown platform, holding the door for Henry. He hadn’t been on the subway in years. He’d forgotten what a decrepit old system it was, with its exposed wiring and cracked plaster, most of the infrastructure left to wear out for eighty years because nobody could contemplate upgrading it. The swampy, low-ceilinged mess lying just beneath Manhattan’s surface, the tangle of arteries contained by a thin sort of skin, felt alien to him. On the train, he found himself stuck between Maggie and a homeless woman, his nose pressed into the woman’s unwashed hair.
They got off at 59th Street and walked the rest of the way. It was strange to be in this part of town after months of absence—he hadn’t been up here since he’d left the magazine. Raw reminders of that time popped up on every block. As they passed Lavo, Henry almost saw himself and Timothy Fogel navigating the tightly packed tables on the terrace, holding onto each other and trying not to trip over, after a working lunch that had stretched across the whole afternoon.
They hadn’t reached the offices before Henry noticed another place, one he’d forgotten about: the bookstore around the corner from work, which he used to visit on his lunchbreaks. He remembered it as a tasteful oasis, all chandeliers, vaulted ceilings, oak shelves and iron railings. He lingered a moment on the kerb.
‘You want to go in there?’ Maggie said.
‘No. No, it’s been too long. Come on.’
‘I can tell you want to,’ she said, and pushed open the door.
Henry breathed in the expensive paper, the perfume of old times. Karl Lagerfeld had introduced him to this store, after they’d met for lunch around the corner at Lever House Restaurant, negotiating the commission for gatefold Chanel advertising and an accompanying feature. Lagerfeld had been a hurricane of decisive, opinionated energy, against which Henry’s own strong opinions stood no chance. Though it was a hot summer afternoon, not a single bead of sweat had appeared on the man’s high starched collar. They’d visited this store to find something new for Lagerfeld’s famous book wall. He seemed so far ahead of Henry—so refined in his taste, so sure of his passions—as to be untouchable. Their short window of time together had become a kind of touchstone, a memory Henry returned to with an embarrassing frequency.
The sales assistant recognised Henry, gave him a warm greeting. ‘How are things at Her, Mr Calder?’ he said. ‘We haven’t seen you in a while.’
‘That’s because I’ve left Her—moved on.’
‘That’s too bad—we miss you. Keep this to yourself, but we might be moving on as well. We’ve got hedge funds buying up the whole street. New condo tower goes up, this building gets slated to come down.’
Henry tried to hide his shock, but nothing could have upset him more. He browsed just long enough not to draw attention, unwilling to stay any longer than he had to. The building felt like a cancer ward, its future uncertain, purgatorial.
As he looked around for Maggie, a heavy coffee table book caught his eye. Kate Moss gave him a glazed, confrontational stare from its cover, her face appearing beneath her own name in outsized type.
His memoirs could be on the same display here one day, presented in the same tasteful packaging, released by the same publisher, the photograph from his editorial page—the one with the gold watch and the winning grin—printed on the front. Each page within those covers might as well have been blank.
‘Let’s go,’ he said when he found Maggie.
‘What’s up?’
‘I found out they’re tearing this building down, replacing it with condos.’
‘Oh. Why’s that such a big deal?’
Henry made it partway down the street, through the beginnings of a rainstorm, towards the glass tower where his office had once been, with its handcrafted Japanese desk and the kimono hanging on the wall, a gift from an heiress he’d done business with.
‘I need to go home,’ he said, trying not to sound panicky, as umbrellas popped up all around them and cabs were snapped up.
‘I thought we were going to see your offices.’
‘Forget that. I’m done here.’
HENRY ashed a cigarette on the curb outside Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, alongside a group of reporters and photographers who were also busy smoking. The bronze curtain wall above them shimmered gently in the heat. Park Avenue was exhausted, the green median strip turned brown, the patchy grass left still and thirsty while on either side cabs crawled past.
He needed this moment to compose himself, even though he was running late. A conference call with the West Coast that morning had left him nursing a few fresh wounds. Fogel, determined not to leave Los Angeles, was revelling in his recent promotion to the position of Henry’s creative advisor. Perhaps feeling bold because of this promotion, and no doubt fresh from a fingernail of cocaine, he’d attempted to derail a tactical discussion about the long-delayed launch of a European edition.
Fogel had argued in favour of appointing a permanent editorial staff in Paris, allowing the new edition to be run as a separate entity, the subtext of which Henry read immediately. He didn’t think Henry could handle the added pressures of producing a second edition every month. It was a betrayal, both professional and personal, and Henry was getting sick of chalking up his friend’s belligerent behaviour to the drugs. This in spite of their longstanding joke: Henry would ask, every time they spoke on the phone (which happened to be almost every day), if it was still snowing in LA.
Had it been anyone else, Henry would have wasted no time in getting rid of him. Could he communicate the problem and extract a promise that it wouldn’t happen again? How would his friend react? When Timothy did call him, not to apologise but to brag about how heavily it was snowing in his office and lay out plans for his next trip to New York, Henry was dumbfounded. As his friend described the meals and drinks they would share and inquired after Martha in too-intimate detail, Henry fumed in silence, giving only staccato one-word responses. The adrenaline hadn’t left him yet, his limbs numb, a slight quake running through his fingers as he pulled on the calming remnants of his cigarette.
He and Timothy were closer than they’d ever been, mostly as a result of Henry’s efforts, and driven by his fear that something terrible would happen
if they stopped speaking on a daily basis. But beyond this irrational reasoning, he wasn’t sure why he felt the need to maintain that closeness.
Cutting a sharp presence in his navy-blue linen jacket and white slacks, Henry entered the Four Seasons and went down Picasso Alley past the Tricorne curtain, then turned right towards the Grill Room, where he found himself face to face with a group of familiar women. No rarity in this business, in this city—in this restaurant, for that matter. Two of them he knew at once: Tina Brown and Liz Tilberis. Tilberis was undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, her thin hair carefully arranged to mask the effects. He’d met both of them several times before, but today they appeared not to notice him.
The third woman, who’d kept her head down and was walking fast ahead of Brown and Tilberis, was younger and had a distinctive glow to her—an air of sexiness and importance. Mint-green Chanel suit, standing out against an unnatural tan and a haircut Henry could have sworn he’d seen a million times, though never on anyone else.
Henry paused a moment and considered saying hello to Tina, but the women were in a hurry. It wasn’t until they’d cleared the front doors and the reporters outside sprang to frenzied attention that Henry realised he’d walked straight past Princess Diana. Henry watched from behind the glass as bodyguards rushed her towards a black town car, imagining her expression for the cameras to be available and yet remote at the same time.
Henry smiled to himself. A true professional at work. He entertained a brief fantasy of following her up to the Carlyle, where he’d heard she was staying. They would have a drink together at Bemelmans, where, accompanied by smooth jazz piano, he would ask her charged, intelligent questions about her charity work and find himself charmed by her shy seriousness. He’d had plenty of opportunities to insinuate himself into the sphere of beautiful (even famous) women over his years at Her, during photo shoots and boozy awards dinners. Once on a designer’s private jet to Las Vegas with Timothy and some escorts he hadn’t invited—all of them overdoing it on the cocaine. But he’d passed up every one of these opportunities. Few of them had any appeal for him beyond their looks, no matter how much he might admire them.
Henry felt moved along by a sharp point of nostalgia every time he entertained in the Grill Room, the youthful dream of making it not only to New York but to this restaurant revitalised whenever he set foot in Philip Johnson’s cavernous, holy space. Martha was waiting at his favourite booth, the one that often went to Harvey Weinstein over him. She was already deep in conversation with their latest objective: Ottelia del Biondo, designer and creative director at the skyrocketing Milanese label Sforza.
Henry had forged this connection, luring Ottelia away from a meeting with Diane von Furstenberg with the promise of something extraordinary. He and Martha had cooked up a pitch together, rushing through the details over late-night whiskies. Her was the perfect platform for Ottelia to gain exposure as an exciting designer for the new millennium.
He was disappointed to see that Martha hadn’t yet ordered drinks and had spread papers all over the tablecloth. The two women sat side by side on a banquette. Ottelia appeared to be interested in whatever Martha was saying, but perhaps she was only being polite. Beside the designer, with her dramatic curly hair and hot-pink reading glasses, his wife looked painfully dowdy in the kind of all-olive business suit he would have expected his sister to wear. Henry found himself squirming, disappointed as he thought of how many other outfits in her closet would have made a better impression.
Neither of them stood as he approached.
‘Ladies,’ he said, bending down to kiss them both on the cheeks before taking the lonely seat opposite them. ‘Sorry to keep you—my last meeting overran. What are we drinking?’ Without waiting for an answer, he waved the waiter over and ordered a bottle of Martha’s favourite montrachet and three dozen oysters.
Martha made no move to put the papers away.
‘Did you see Diana?’ he asked. The restaurant was boisterous, and he was forced to speak louder than usual from his position across the table.
‘We did,’ Ottelia said. ‘In that horrible suit. The English don’t know how to dress.’
‘Were you at Christie’s the other night?’ Henry asked, referring to the auction of Diana’s wardrobe, which had raised three million for cancer and AIDS charities. Henry hadn’t received an invitation; he wasn’t sure why.
‘I went to the advance viewing,’ Ottelia said. ‘Such ugly clothes, so dull. But I shouldn’t be cruel. She means well, povera cara, and she does not deserve to be hounded by the paparazzi. At home they would be waiting for me, but here in America I am no one. She will never be so free again.’
‘She’ll be all over the Post tomorrow like a doped-up Mets midfielder,’ Henry said, wishing Fogel could be there to understand the reference.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ Martha said. ‘They’ll squeeze a few paragraphs out of a picture of her leaving a restaurant and slap it on the front page, at the expense of real news.’
‘I thought you admired what she was doing?’
Martha hesitated, the way she always did when formulating a diplomatic response. Not the way she normally reacted when Henry asked her a question, and he was nervous, wondering what she was about to say.
‘She’s having it both ways,’ she said finally. ‘She wants to live like a princess, but she wants to be thought of as a saint too. She’s not Mother Teresa, but we all act as though she is. You can’t say in front of the cameras that you want to be treated like an ordinary person and then swan around the world with your billionaire boyfriend and expect to be taken seriously.’
‘Exactly,’ Ottelia said, as Henry was about to argue that nobody would listen to her unless she kept up a good public impression. ‘And she gets away with it. Henry, mio caro, this is why I love your wife—she is a real saint. I’ve read so much about her work, what she’s already accomplished for the hunger programme. Martha, is it true what I’ve heard, that you singlehandedly persuaded Blackstone to donate millions to HIV research? That kind of work deserves an award.’
As far as Henry was aware, those negotiations had also bumped his wife’s salary significantly. Award or no award.
He was also surprised. They’d come here to win Ottelia over, yet she was courting them, as if they had something she wanted—as if she were the buyer here, not the seller.
‘I can’t take all the credit,’ Martha said. ‘But it was an honour to be involved with such a meaningful cause. And I got to see the effects of our work firsthand when I went to visit the clinics in Zimbabwe last year…’
‘Oh, I know,’ Henry said, reaching around for Martha’s hand beneath the table. She gave it to him, after a judicious while. ‘And maybe I’m biased, Ottelia, but I don’t need to hear about that. What we’re really here to talk about is Ottelia’s work. Martha, you have no idea how lucky we are to be in the presence of this woman, the kind of legacy Sforza is building. She’s a creative genius. Sforza is going to be one of the biggest names in the business, up there with Armani and Versace—bigger, even.’ He turned to Ottelia. ‘I want to run a feature on you and your work, as the centrepiece of the September issue. We want to be the ones to introduce you to the American market.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Ottelia said, taking her glasses off and shaking them in his direction like a conductor’s baton as she spoke—the effect wasn’t friendly, but it was certainly energetic. ‘Martha and I have been discussing the details. I love the idea of doing something with UNICEF. I’d never thought about such a possibility, but a luxury brand like Sforza could do so much good. I agree with what your wife says: the women who read Her, they are not bad people. Fashion magazines treat the women who read them like vain, silly little girls—but you, Henry, you can change that. Her will be the first magazine to treat its readers like adult women.’
There was no room on the table for the oysters when they arrived. Martha let go of Henry’s hand and tidied her papers into a pile, though her briefcase remained
latched at her side.
‘Okay,’ Henry said, after a long pause, during which he tried to catch Martha’s eye several times. ‘I think I know what you’re talking about. Martha told me how much she wanted Sforza to become a UNICEF sponsor, and of course that’s something we would mention in the feature, if it happened.’
‘But you want this to be the main content of the article,’ Ottelia said. ‘No?’
‘Oh. Yes, possibly. Not at the expense of showcasing your incredible designs, though.’
‘Henry, we are past that. You have said yourself that you want Her to be on the cutting edge. Your magazine’s readership are women with money to spend, and we can persuade them to spend some of it where it’s most needed. This is the perfect opportunity—your wife is a visionary.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ Martha said. ‘A tie-in on this scale would be mutually beneficial, though. I know from talking to Henry and his friends that the people in this industry want to do things differently, but they’re far too frightened. We need a trailblazer, a magazine that’s not afraid to cover serious current events from a woman’s point of view.’
Henry seemed to have been privy to a lot of conversations he couldn’t remember. He tried to recall what he could have possibly said that she’d interpreted in this way. Their talk over dinner tended to follow a predictable template: a smattering of professional gossip; broad comments on politics, both domestic and international (wasn’t Clinton so fickle?); and finally plans for the weekend. Neither of them had exactly rhapsodised about current events or charity work.
‘Try the oysters,’ Henry insisted, using the change of subject to mask his growing fury. ‘Have you been here before, Ottelia? Let me tell you, this restaurant is basically America in one room.’
Ottelia mustn’t have liked oysters, because she didn’t touch them. They sat in silence for a moment, nobody knowing how to progress from the abrupt shift in tone. Martha remained serious, her brow knitted as she stared out the window, suggesting to Henry that she hadn’t finished yet. The thought of what else she might come out with terrified him, so much that he drank most of his wine in one go.
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