Queen Takes King

by Gigi Levangie Grazer

  The black boat slid off into traffic. Jacks took a sidelong glance at the papers folded up on the seat next to him. The Post was there, but he wouldn’t allow himself to open it, even though, for a second, he wanted to stare at that picture, to see the two of them together. They really did make a great-looking couple, he and Lara.

  Jacks hadn’t called Lara yet, even though she’d called and BlackBerried him. He wanted to reassure her, but he needed to strategize, to think, to fucking breathe.

  Calls to make before addressing his irate girlfriend:

  He’d have to call his lawyer.

  He’d have to call his business manager.

  He’d have to call his publicist. That ninny.

  He’d have to call his father.

  Jacks did not want to call his father.

  Jackson Power wasn’t afraid of anyone—except for Dear Old Dad, who was anything but Dear. And had barely been a Dad. Old, old he was.

  Jackson knew what his father would say. “Whatever you do, hang on to the apartment. A Power never sells.”

  Jacks wouldn’t lose the apartment. He wouldn’t lose 740. He couldn’t lose 740. Seven-forty, the most important residential address in all of Manhattan. Seven-forty, harder to get into than a virgin bride, had been home to Bouviers, Rockefellers, Chryslers, and of course, Powers.

  Here, in Manhattan, the building made the man. And Jacks Power wasn’t about to be unmade.

  “Harry,” Jacks said to his driver as they idled at the red light.

  “Hunh.” Harry’s black eyes barely flickered.

  “You read the paper?” Jacks said casually.

  “No,” Harry said.

  “The Post?”

  “No. No.”

  “You don’t have to sound so annoyed.”

  “But I am annoyed,” Harry huffed. He squeezed the steering wheel, then scratched at the skull tattoo on his middle finger. Harry the Russian lived in an irony-free zone, without any sense of boss-employee etiquette. When you’re packing 295 on a six-foot-three frame, etiquette becomes seasonal—the season being whenever you damn well feel like being polite to your boss.

  “Just…take a look.”

  Jacks unfolded the Post and slid it through the Plexiglas partition. Harry took it without bothering to look at him; he glanced at the paper, then slid it back.

  “Well?” Jacks asked.

  “Well what?”

  “Did you see the picture well what?”

  “I see no picture,” Harry said. “What picture?”

  “The one of me!”

  “Yeah. That one. Okay, I see it.”

  Beat.

  “So?!”

  “So, I see you every day, so?!”

  Jacks simmered in the backseat. “Well. I think I look pretty damned good, so!”

  “Oh yeah, you real beauty queen, boss!” Harry the Russian started laughing.

  “Fuck you!” Jacks kicked at the front seat, then slipped, his ass landing on the floor of the limo.

  Harry erupted. “Where you want me to take you, Mr. Sharon Stone?” Irony might not have been his strong suit; comedy, he knew.

  “My father’s house,” Jacks said softly, acknowledging defeat as he climbed back onto the seat.

  Harry almost spit a tooth as he turned the corner, he was laughing so hard. His whole life, he’d never known anyone as funny as Jacks Power.

  5

  IT’S WAR. WHAT SHOULD I WEAR?

  TALK TO me, padded cell,” Cynthia Power said, as she stood in third position in her giant wardrobe closet. She leaned back on one foot with the other arched forward, anticipating the next twenty-four hours like a general on the verge of a great war. Jackson would fight hard and dirty and win the first battle. But the Hundred Years’ War? Welcome to Cynthia’s domain. What were Jacks’s basic necessities of life? Immediate gratification, instant recognition, and constant reassurance (she’d learned this from her twenty-five-year marriage and parenting-your-toddler books). Cynthia had the discipline for the long haul, to beat him in the trenches. After all, she had squeezed her once-chubby body into a tutu at four. Cynthia could endure years of pain; she’d danced on a torn Achilles, ruptured cartilage, and shattered toes. Growing up, it was her habit to be in bed before dusk, a hollow ache in her stomach infiltrating her sleep. She’d sacrificed any semblance of normality—no first kiss in middle school, no Friday night boys in leather jackets. While other girls were playing spin the bottle, she was camouflaging her bruises with makeup.

  And sex? Cynthia had been a virgin until nineteen. She’d had only one lover, an Argentinean soloist, before she’d met Jackson. Could Jacks have waited that long? Could he have postponed desire, sublimated his urges for art? For beauty? Hell no, he couldn’t have done it even for money.

  Cynthia flashed on her wedding ring, the size of a marble, reading it like a crystal ball. She could see Jacks, feel him. He would already be on the phone, gathering the troops. Would he call his publicist first? His lawyer? His girlfriend? (Would she be his future wife, Cynthia wondered, or just a fling?)

  No, no, and no. Jacks’s first call, she knew too well, would be to his father. “Daddy, what do I do?”

  Unfortunately, as Cynthia’s father was out of the picture, she’d have to make her own calls. First, find a lawyer. Second (maybe first?), call the accountant to prevent Jacks from freezing accounts, and figure out which assets she could mobilize to her side of the chessboard.

  For all this, she’d need the right outfit.

  Cynthia sighed. Valentino, Armani, Jil Sander, or Prada? What would be her suit of armor today? Her closet was a source of pride and guilt; its mere size—larger than the main dining room at ‘21’—rendered her speechless the first time she’d sat there, on the floor. No one had even noticed that she’d gone off by herself—not her husband, his father, the obsequious real estate agent, the family interior decorator. She was ill, she couldn’t eat or laugh. She could barely speak. What was the reason she and her new husband were here in this monstrous apartment? Why was he paying attention to fourteen-foot ceilings, hundred-year-old moldings, names like Roosevelt and Rothschild, nicknames like Muffy and Bax, ancient scandals, tragedies, and triumphs?

  A baby.

  Not yet even a baby. The ultrasound images resembled a guppy, swimming in a vat of embryonic fluid. The guppy was calling the shots. Even before Vivienne was born (“Vivienne” the name of Jacks’s dead mother), Cynthia knew she had been “the boss of me.”

  How long had it been since the former Cynthia Hunsaker had been her own boss? She’d left Aurora, Missouri, for St. Louis immediately after graduation from Hoover High. She hardly knew a soul in Missouri anymore. The first half of her life had become a dreamscape, a series of charming and mutable stories to be doled out at dinner parties. “Missourah,” she liked to say, knowing it sounded quaint. Being from “Missourah” meant she knew how to sew a dress, hang a line of clothes, ride without a saddle, skin the deer she and her father had hunted with a bow and arrow. What Missouri also meant: watching her mother dive into a tallboy after her father left her for a cocktail waitress he’d fallen for on his trucking route.

  It meant standing out in a place where no one and nothing was supposed to. Cynthia had left St. Louis for New York at nineteen, a hundred dollars in her pocket, the name of a famous choreographer on her lips. She debuted with the New York Ballet Theater the following summer. The stage became the boss of her. She’d gone with lightning speed from the corps de ballet to dancing the lead in Giselle and Carmen. She’d met Jackson Power on the morning of her twenty-first birthday, cutting through Washington Square Park. This young guy, cigarette dangling from his mouth, covered in paint, was playing chess against a regular, Charles, a wiry black man with matted hair. Cynthia waved at Charles, and stopped to watch. The morning air was damp. She pulled her sweater tighter around her body.

  The painter made his final move on the board.

  “Damn!” Charles exclaimed, as he watched. “Damn!”

>   “Queen takes king,” the painter said. “Can’t believe it.”

  “She good luck, boy,” Charles replied, nodding toward Cynthia.

  The painter eyed her. “My good luck charm wears leg warmers.” He turned back to Charles. “May I?” he asked, his hand hovering over the game.

  “G’head,” Charles said, “ruined it for me, anyway.”

  The painter grabbed the ivory queen and handed it to Cynthia. “Queen for a queen,” he said. Cynthia smiled and tucked the piece into her sweater pocket.

  “Take a walk?” he asked. His voice felt like hot, smooth stones rolling up and down her back. Cynthia fell in love. From that moment, her heart was the boss of her.

  A few weeks later, Jackson Power moved into her tiny apartment; he told Cynthia he was getting evicted from his loft. Jacks didn’t talk about his childhood. They talked about ideas, they talked about their future, when they weren’t fucking—every moment and everywhere: her Murphy bed; her kitchen bathtub; the restroom at Caffe Reggio; a back row seat in the old movie theater on Houston; a graffitied wall; backstage at the Academy School; a random folding chair. Jacks didn’t tell her he was one of “those Powers.” Wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Ballerinas were too busy to read the business page.

  Cynthia Hunsaker was pregnant before her twenty-second birthday.

  Cynthia became Mrs. Jackson Power.

  Vivienne showed up.

  Chase showed up. Cynthia’s career as a ballerina ended not with injury, but with maternity. Her husband. Her children. This apartment. This frikkin’ closet. They’d all been the boss of her.

  SUDDENLY, Cynthia’s hand went to her mouth. Oh my God, Vivienne. She had to call Vivienne. What was Cynthia thinking? Her poor daughter—had she seen the photographs?

  “Ma’am?”

  A maid was standing in the doorway, dressed in a uniform straight out of a Joan Crawford movie: starched white apron, white cap, nurse’s shoes. “What is it, Esme?”

  “Telephone call for you, Ma’am. Mr. Stegler.”

  Cynthia winced. The ghoulish Morris Stegler—finance impresario/vivisectionist known for cutting up the dying bodies of companies and feeding them to the sharks on the Street, the all-around dullard whose one blazing streak of personality was his fevered taste for Chinese food and Korean hookers—was the last person she wanted to talk to. Cynthia sighed and picked up the extension.

  “Morris, sweetie? How are you?”

  “Fabulous party last night, Cynthia. Incredible turnout. Gave the board a great idea.” Click. Morris made a clicking sound from the back of his throat when excited, as though recording his words for posterity.

  “Can we do this later?” Cynthia asked. She didn’t want to hear about ballet board matters. She could read all about it in the Times—commingling of funds, sponsorship losses, sexual harassment. What next? Murder? Only preschool admissions were more savage than getting on the board of the New York Ballet Theater: a bunch of rich men rubbing up to the arts—and the dancers.

  “We ran it through the nominating committee.” Click. “Howard’s on board, David’s with us.” Click. “Harriet Feingold is in total agreement.” Click. “The Finance Committee’s a go.” Morris was head of the Finance Committee.

  “Morris, could we please—”

  “—the Audit Committee, I don’t even have to tell you where they stand. And Marketing’s ecstatic, coming in their fucking leotards.” Click. Morris sounded like a Gatling gun.

  “Morris, what are you talking about?” Cynthia said.

  “We want you to be chairman of the Executive Board.” Click.

  “Fred Plotzicki is the chairman,” Cynthia said. “And will be for time immemorial.”

  “Fred’s made fools of us, Cynthia,” Morris said. Click. “We’ve given him a year. That endowment he promised? Where is it? And the fat fuck, excuse me, fat sweaty bald fuck is shtupping that past-her-prime ballerina.”

  “Suzenka,” said Cynthia.

  “Screwzenka, you mean…” Click.

  Cynthia flashed on a photo in the Sunday Style section: Fred and the aging Belorussian ballerina. The woman looked like a ninety-pound amuse bouche next to Fred, the slippery Wall Street icon and political kingmaker who had all the physical heft and social graces of a manatee.

  “Yes, well, I don’t know and I don’t give a fuck,” Morris said. “But come on. It’s embarrassing.”

  She heard the announcer’s voice: “In this corner: Cynthia Hunsaker Power, weighing 110 pounds, our very own Upper East Side Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In the opposing corner, he’s big, he’s bad, he’s the billionaire T. Rex.”

  The billionaire T. Rex, Cynthia thought, who squeezed nursing home operators, oil company chairmen, and hedge fund CEOs to subsidize the ballet, but neglected to open his own personal bank account. As promised.

  Fred wouldn’t give up without a fight. He liked the coating of culture that being chairman of the Executive Board gave him. And he liked the dancers…

  “We’ve given Fred more than enough time to deliver. We’ve got a sixty-year-old company teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. We can’t wait any longer. We want you to be the new chairman,” Morris repeated. Click.

  “I’m not qualified,” Cynthia said.

  “Bullshit. You’re beautiful and elegant, you have a wonderful reputation,” Morris said, “and you pay your endowments. You’re exactly what we need.”

  How many times, Cynthia thought, can one hear the words “beautiful and elegant” before it gets tired?

  Try never.

  What am I afraid of? Cynthia thought about the piece of advice her father gave her when she’d had crippling stage fright. “What’s the worst that can happen?” Tommy Hunsaker said in his Missouri drawl. “To hell with ’em. They can’t kill ya.”

  That was just before he’d left. He was right—that didn’t kill her, either.

  Cynthia had spent eleven years on the board; she’d sponsored favorite ballerinas and underwrote the ballet academy that fed sleek new bodies to the NYBT. She knew the members of the Executive Board intimately, and she was the only one who had a background in dance. Most important, Cynthia needed an identity—pronto. Now that her “Mrs. Jackson Power” ID was about to be confiscated—

  Why not her?

  Cynthia held on a moment longer. Oh God. The monster would eat her alive. But maybe he’d end up with a mouthful of beautiful and elegant gristle.

  To hell with ’em, she thought. They can’t kill me.

  “Morris, for God’s sake stop clicking, you sound like you’re about to go off,” Cynthia told him. “I’m in.”

  She hung up. Click.

  She returned to the war room, her closet. The day was only hours old and already Cynthia was locked in mortal combat with two of the most powerful men in New York.

  She hesitated, then grabbed a bulletproof Chanel.

  6

  CONNECTED PAWNS

  NOW WE’RE pleased to welcome to Sunrise America the author of an exciting new book on longevity, 100 Is the New Middle Age!” Lara trilled at the camera. Before her was an emaciated woman with rutted cheeks, arguing that human beings could live to be 120 years old if they consumed no more than nine hundred calories a day.

  The problem, Lara thought, is that you look like you’re 120 when a speeding cab flattens you at thirty-eight. Jackson. Untimely death made her think of Jackson. She was going to kill him.

  “Do you ever get…hungry?” Genius! Lara gave a forced smile, thinking, There goes my Daytime Emmy.

  The cadaver mumbled an answer.

  Beat his head into a wall…

  “Uh-huh,” Lara said. She was concerned the interviewee would need an IV once they went to commercial.

  Mercury in his tennis shoes?

  “Okay, when was the last time you ate a Snickers?” Lara asked. Maybe she would just maim him.

  “A Snickers? I wouldn’t eat a—” The woman’s eyes darted about the studio. Lara wanted to pin the woma
n to the ground, burrow her knees into her bony chest, and shove the craft services table into her gaping maw.

  “Tell me,” Lara said, “this starvation diet—”

  “I’m not starving,” the cadaver retorted.

  “So. This incredibly restrictive diet,” Lara said. “What does it do to one’s sex life?”

  Lara could hear Sarah Kate, the producer she’d taken with her from Tucson, screaming into her earpiece. She was pretty sure half of America could hear as well.

  “Well,” the cadaver replied. “It does cut down on certain needs.”

  “You don’t have energy for an orgasm?” Lara asked.

  Sarah Kate began to speak in tongues.

  SEVENAYEMTHISISNOTTHETIMEFORTHISKINDOF TALKESPECIALLYFROMYOU!

  “I happen to think orgasms are overrated,” the cadaver said.

  “Preaching to the choir.” Lara winked, then smiled to the camera. “Next up, winter fashions for your dog—what the posh pooch will be wearing when the weather turns chilly!”

  ONCE again, Lara had been called into the principal’s office. “The hay-ell did you just do?” Sarah Kate demanded as she stared a hole through Lara’s force field of blasé from behind her desk, which was covered with teetering piles of videotapes, DVDs, books, lipstick-stained coffee cups from towns across the United States (Warrens, Wisconsin! The Cranberry Capital!), and far too many pictures of her three cats.

  “Sarah Kate,” Lara said.

  “Door!” Sarah Kate barked.

  Production assistants and interns were lingering outside—overhearing on behalf of their bosses. Lara reached over and flipped the door shut.

  “First you’re on the front page of the Post, then you’re caught asking an anorexic nutbag about orgasms on camera. Are you fixing to get me fired?” When Sarah Kate Baxter, Ole Miss ’88, Kappa Kappa Delta, was angry, her Southern came out fierce. “Yew fixin’ t’ git me fahred?”