Queen Takes King

by Gigi Levangie Grazer

  The principal’s office. How many times had Lara felt this splash of anxiety in her stomach? Sarah Kate hadn’t offered Lara a seat, but one glance at the guest chairs stacked with self-help, political, and summer reads would tell anyone the offer would have been empty.

  “You’re angry.”

  “Y’think?” Sarah Kate said, shaking the copy of the Post at her. “The whole building’s up in arms. America’s Sweetheart is not allowed to be a Jezebel Hoo-er.”

  “They haven’t slept together in a year. They don’t talk. They’re married in name only,” Lara said. “And yes, I am a cliché. Worse than that. I’m a shit. I’ve got to end it.”

  “So help me, I’ve about wiped my hands of you, Chicken,” Sarah Kate said.

  “Lie,” Lara whispered. Sarah Kate was softening; “Chicken” was her pet name for Lara—something to do with running around like a chicken with her head cut off during her first months of employ. Lara rocked back and forth in those fuck-me heels the network brass made her wear despite the considerable inches she wielded over the coanchor, a man whose grave demeanor counterbalanced his stint as a game show host. She sorely wanted to check her BlackBerry. Why did she have to be in love with Jacks Power?

  Sarah Kate continued to stare her down. Her eyebrow had crawled up her dollishly smooth forehead. Sarah Kate possessed much that was beautiful about the feminine form—pouty lips, voluptuous breasts, a high, firm ass—in a body that hovered at two hundred pounds. She looked like Marilyn Monroe, if Marilyn had been soaked in water for a long time.

  Sarah Kate didn’t care about her attractiveness. She thought men were useless, except to move things.

  Lara envied her. I should break up with Jacks, she thought, the guilt is killing me.

  “Let’s go, Chicken,” said Sarah Kate. Lara marveled at how fast those legs could power the rest of the grand machine. “I got things to say, and you got things to listen to.”

  WAY TOO EARLY in the day, Lara sat on a high black bar stool, her knees wedged between the bar and Sarah Kate’s thigh. One sound was like no other, Lara thought: the last of a drink through a straw.

  “Where are you?” Sarah Kate demanded.

  “Sorry,” Lara said. “I’ll have another.” She raised her hand toward the bartender; he was new, Latino, though paled by city life. The first Bloody Mary was good, not as good as her usual—maybe he’d get the next one right. Hope springs eternal, Lara thought. As does vodka.

  “You’re not listening to me,” Sarah Kate said. “I said, we’re gonna polish up this shitpile for you. Jackson Power was in your lobby last night because you’re pursuing him for that big story about the Bowery hotel fight, okay? You will deny any extramarital relationship. You will make sure he denies any extramarital relationship. We will get this gone. I don’t care if you eventually marry and pop out two papooses. No one likes a home wrecker, even if that home was wrecked long before you sashayed in.”

  “I hate that I’m a part of this.”

  Sarah Kate waved her off. “If you hated it so much, you’d stop. But, I’m not here to lecture you on morals. You know how valuable you are to the network. And to me. Georgia’s contract is up in less than a year. They’ll be after her to coanchor the nighttime news. Her kids are almost all in college, her husband is the missus of that familial organization. She’ll go for it. That leaves you and a couple other girls who’ve been dancing around that spot. But no one else has your TVQ. You act like you’d rather have Ebola, but you are a star, sugar. People watch you, they want to be your friend, your husband, your mother, your sister—”

  “I can be everybody’s crazy relative!” Lara kissed the smooth glass and sucked another third of the drink into her mouth.

  “You know what you’re looking at? Fifth Avenue penthouse, full-time driver, seven mil a year.” Sarah Kate leaned back on her stool. “Yes, okay, interviewing pop stars gone awry with small children. But…also the heads of state you’ve been dying to interview. Iraq. Iran. Afghanistan. Darfur. Real news. The real shit. Everything you and I have been working toward for almost a decade. All because you were born with something only three, four other people in the world possess.”

  Lara was still staring into the mottled red, picking out the specks of pepper clinging desperately to ice cubes.

  “Jim wants you to have it. He wants this more than he wants his wife to have her tits done. Jane Pauley, Katie Couric, Lara Sizemore. That’s how he sees it. So keep it together. For both of us.”

  “My dream is to die in New York City,” Lara said, “on a bar stool.”

  “You don’t want to die ugly, honey,” Sarah Kate replied. “You’re thirty years old. You make a very, very nice salary. You’re running around with a married billionaire. And blowing off your interviews. The hell do you think you’re doing? I know what you think you want, Lara Sizemore. You think you’ll die if you have to do jumping jacks on national television with one more Mrs. America Aerobic Fitness winner. Do you really want to blow it all sky-high when you’re so close to calling your own shots?”

  “I hate jumping jacks,” Lara said. “They make my boobs sore.”

  “Well, then, do you really want to take away my mother’s only source of bragging rights? She’s not getting a doctor son-in-law; she’s not getting grandkids. Why are you aching to walk away so badly? What is it you want?”

  Lara licked at the sudden tears running down her cheeks.

  “If you’re so bent on destroying this opportunity, you’d better know why,” Sarah Kate said. Her cheeks were equally splotchy; a teardrop had rounded the slope of her nose and had nestled just under one delicate nostril, somehow accentuating Sarah Kate’s beauty—the saline equivalent of Cindy Crawford’s mole.

  “You’re crying like a big ol’ baby,” Lara said.

  “Look what’s talkin’,” Sarah Kate said. Their sudden embrace was interrupted by the buzz-bark of a BlackBerry.

  “If it’s the People’s Billionaire, tell him this people wants him dead,” Sarah Kate said.

  Lara read Jacks’s new message, marked urgent, and rubbed the ribbed patch of skin between her eyebrows. This situation was going to turn her into a Shar-Pei.

  “Jacks said he’s sorry,” Lara said. “He’ll do anything to make it up to me.” She showed Sarah Kate the screen.

  “Fine. Tell him to buy me an island,” Sarah Kate said. “This isn’t fun and games and romance, Chicken. This isn’t even his life. This is your life.”

  7

  THE KING MAKER

  CIRCLE THE block!” Jacks yelled. “I need more time to think!”

  Harry the Russian glared at Jacks in the rearview mirror. “No reason to shout!” Harry shouted back.

  “I need a second to think.” Jacks’s voice sounded defeated and flat. Not even eight in the morning, and already he was exhausted. “Busy day,” he coughed out. Jacks often used the phrase “busy day” instead of an apology with his wife, his driver, his flotilla of scurrying assistants. “I’ve got a lot of things on my plate this morning, Harry. That’s a fact.”

  “So I read, boss,” Harry pouted, as he pulled out into traffic. He wasn’t one to let go of a grudge, even one so freshly born.

  Harry pushed out into heavy rush-hour traffic. They’d been circling past a five-story town house on Sixty-fifth and Madison for the past eight and a half minutes; Jacks had monitored the time on his black-face Patek chronograph, a birthday gift from Cynthia fifteen years ago. Happier times. Cynthia had summoned him home early. They’d enjoyed a candlelight dinner on the terrace. After eating the apple pie she’d made for him, Cynthia had presented him with the watch and a blow job. He remembered how lucky he felt that night, to be with this woman. He remembered peace.

  Now even happy scenes, Jacks feared, would take on the sheer coating of tragedy. With a front-page photograph, Jacks had changed not only his future (Christ, how much would the lawyers alone cost?), but his history. When he thought of it, he felt the earth bob and weave beneath his feet. He was
afraid he would faint if he stood.

  Jacks hoped the outside security cameras hadn’t picked him up sitting in front of his father’s home. There were six cameras, covering corners, doorways, windows, gilded façade. Since becoming super-wealthy, his father had developed two big fears: robbery and kidnapping. (Jacks felt certain his father’s potential kidnappers would send him back, pronto.) Inside, there’d be the Israelis. Young, tightly muscled, cartoonishly handsome, eager for a silent, choreographed skirmish to show off their Krav Maga skills.

  Who needed the Israelis when you had Harry the Russian? Krav Maga this, motherfucker.

  Jacks caught the morning sun dashing off the tarnished copper slats on the town-house rooftop. His father had lived here forty years. There were bigger places, grander places in New York—740 Park, naturally—there were none more beautiful.

  One-hundred-year-old spiral wrought-iron awnings topped by iron pineapples (a sign of hospitality!) graced the walkway. Tennessee marble columns laced with silver streaks countered the dark, heavy oak doorway carved with fleur-de-lis. The nine-foot doors had been imported from the Belgian Congo on a nineteenth-century slave ship; they’d been treated better than the human cargo. “And for good reason,” his father had boasted to his young son. “They were worth more.” The exposed brick that pulled the eye skyward until it huddled under sheets of copper roofing conveyed warmth, wealth, and stateliness. The building managed to be imposing and welcoming at once.

  Jackson had grown into his admiration of his father’s home, as he had grown into his begrudging—extremely begrudging—admiration of his father.

  A bout with scarlet fever as a child had left Artemus Power the runt of five brothers. The unusual boy with the unusual name—his mother, Blanche, originally of County Cork, had been free to choose after her husband failed to show up at the hospital to greet his next “mouth to feed”; Artemus Power was fated to stand out.

  Blanche attended church every morning, even as her Lord and Savior was failing to save her from consumption. Dead at thirty-six after raising her boys and working three jobs—factory work, seamstress, bookkeeper for the local numbers runner. She’d died to get some rest, is what Jacks’s father said.

  The father, the original Power, tried to beat ambition into his kids, the runt most of all. The other children eventually scattered across the country. The runt stayed, and became the conduit for his father’s ambition. (There were buildings in Manhattan that bore the fingerprints of the first Power to cross the Atlantic on a steamer.) Jackson’s father didn’t talk about his dad, who’d build things by day and tear down his own life by night. Jackson’s grandfather spent his time and earnings on whiskey, on working girls lining Broadway, at gaming tables. He’d finally made some money in real estate, then lost it all on Black Tuesday, and disappeared for good.

  But not before leaving his young son with the love of building. Artemus Power did everything quickly, darting rather than walking, snapping rather than talking. When he was barely in his twenties, he scraped together enough capital to build one garage next to a house in a modest Queens neighborhood, then built a house, then bought one run-down apartment building and fixed it up, then another, then dozens. All in Queens. By twenty-five, he owned several buildings in Harlem, convinced there was money to be made there, then gave them up cheap when the heroin trade took a toll on tenants—when he literally could be killed on the third of every month just for the statement: “Rent’s due.”

  It was the last and only time he had lost money. And don’t think he didn’t remember the blow. Jackson’s father would never trust Manhattan again.

  By contrast, Queens was dependable: blue-collar, proud, reliable, the equivalent of the man who rolls up his sleeves and gets to work, come hell or hangover.

  Shortly after he built the sprawling Queens Parkway Projects, Artemus Power consummated his marriage to Vivienne Langford of the Park Avenue Langfords. She was everything he wasn’t: educated, sophisticated, refined. Vivienne was a Vassar graduate, a world traveler, a strong-willed woman with a tongue that made Swiss cheese of steel, flesh, ego. The Original Vivienne was the only person Jacks’s father had ever been afraid of. In short order, Artemus Power acquired the wife, then the address. He had arrived, would stay arrived. God help anyone who got in his way.

  Jacks’s relationship with his father bore all the signs of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of Parenting: Abandonment, Fearmongering, Manipulation, and, when neglect wore thin, Belittlement.

  “Why must you get into trouble all the time?” his mother would ask. After Andover, after Choate, Dalton (moving in alphabetical order)—

  “Why must you get caught?” his father would demand.

  Because I want to, Jackson thought. He wasn’t afraid of jumping off a second-floor balcony on a drunken dare, or diving into icy water wearing nothing but white socks, just because some kid hinted that it couldn’t be done. But he had no courage in his soul. He was afraid to speak the truth: he didn’t want to go into the family business. Jacks didn’t give a shit about “holdings.” In college, his father drove him around blocks and blocks of soulless utilitarian housing and said, “Look around, son. All of this will be yours someday.” Jacks felt doomed.

  “I want to paint,” he’d blurted out. It helped that he’d thrown a few back. “I don’t care about buildings. I care about canvases.” Jacks charged on. “My professors say I’ve got talent.”

  “They’re bullshitting you, boy,” Artemus Power said.

  “That’s not true,” Jacks said.

  His father smiled, a cold look in his eye. “They just want me to write a check for a goddamned wing. Don’t be a fool.”

  They were standing outside this very town house.

  “That’s not true,” Jacks protested, waving his father’s words away.

  “The provost called, we had a nice chat,” his father said. “We’re having lunch at La Côte Basque on Tuesday. I can tell you, that’s going to be one goddamned expensive vichyssoise.”

  “You’re a fucking asshole,” Jacks said, pointing at his father.

  “I am an asshole,” his father agreed, “shelling out my hard-earned money to turn you into some candy-ass artiste—”

  “If you just looked at my work,” Jacks said wearily, “just once.”

  His father laughed. “Your work, your work. You don’t know the first thing about work—”

  Maybe it was the vodka running through his veins, or the look on his father’s face as he mocked him, but Jacks found himself holding his fist back.

  “Go ahead, boy,” his father said, with his arms flung out, “take a swipe at your old man. It’ll be your last.”

  His father’s driver had dashed around the car, and was putting a hand on Jacks’s shoulder. “Calm down, son,” he said. “Just calm down.”

  Jacks shrugged him off, still staring at his father. Finally, he turned and walked away.

  “I didn’t think so,” Artemus Power yelled, lobbing a final insult at his son.

  “YOU HAVE family?” Cynthia had asked him. “Here? In the city?”

  He could see her young face, held in his hands as though she would break if he let go. Her large eyes were untouched by cynicism, by the hard reality that was his family.

  “C’mon,” he’d said to Cynthia, “you had to have known. Are you telling me you’ve never heard of the Powers?”

  She’d looked at him, puzzled. He loved that expression; Cynthia was still in the process of discovery. He, like many children of fortune, had already discovered and found much to be lacking.

  “Well, doesn’t matter,” he’d said. “We have to do Thanksgiving with my father.”

  “Great,” she’d said. He felt her waver.

  “You don’t want to?”

  “Why wouldn’t I want to?” she’d said, none too convincingly. “What about your mother?”

  “My mother’s dead.”

  “Oh, Jackson,” she’d said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  H
e couldn’t answer. He didn’t even know why himself.

  Jacks loved the sound of his name rolling from her mouth. He loved the whiteness of her teeth, the way her pink tongue darted in and out between her lips as she spoke. The way she’d pronounce every consonant of every syllable of every word with a sharp, precise clip at the end. He’d found comfort in her calm, steady Midwestern nature. With Cynthia, he could be himself—bellow, dance naked, forget to eat, paint through the morning, live as an artist without obligation except to the canvas; she was his moon, exerting a gravitational pull that kept him from spinning out into the void. In those last months, with Cynthia Hunsaker, Jackson didn’t need to drink until he blacked out, or coke himself up to feel as important as his name. He didn’t even need to fuck the way he used to—many women, most days, all hours.

  Whenever Cynthia had asked about his family, he’d laugh, kiss her warm mouth, change topics, ignore her questions, twirl her around by her waist—until finally she stopped asking. Jackson didn’t want their love tainted. What if her ardor shifted from Jackson the Painter to Jackson the Power?

  Their first Thanksgiving at the Power manse. Cynthia had scrimped for a dress. Crushed red velvet. A bow at the back, riding her small hips. Her hair pulled into a loose chignon. She made Holly Golightly look like a Meat Market tranny.

  Cynthia brushed a strand of hair from her face, a simple, breathtaking gesture that could bring a tear to his eye. She insisted Jackson wear dress slacks. They compromised on a clean pair of jeans and the only white shirt that bore no colorful evidence of his painting.

  She baked an apple pie.

  He remembered the aroma, apples and cinnamon and sugar and butter. Cynthia hadn’t used a recipe; cooking was part of her genetic memory. Jackson had dated so many girls who survived on a diet of cigarettes and coke and double espresso. He couldn’t remember his own mother putting a home-cooked meal in front of him. Cynthia making scrambled eggs in the morning had been a revelation.