Queen Takes King

by Gigi Levangie Grazer

  They’d taken the subway to the Upper East Side and emerged on a different planet.

  They stood in front of the monstrous entrance to the family town house. “I love you,” he whispered, because he felt his throat tightening. It was his first confession, although he’d felt love at first sight of Cynthia dashing through Washington Square Park, her scarf whipping behind her.

  “I know,” she said.

  Jackson’s father hadn’t greeted them at the door. There was a butler to perform that duty. Actually, there were three men, including a pair of sentries, standing like priceless urns on either side of the entryway. Jackson watched Cynthia carefully as he led her past the Cézanne, Picasso, Cy Twombly, Warhol…so many beautiful works that they canceled one another out.

  Jacks held Cynthia’s hand; she didn’t gawk or chatter nervously or any of the things he’d seen or imagined other women doing.

  He loved her even more; his heart stretched with each reassuring squeeze of the hand she gave him.

  Artemus Power presided at the head of the table. His hair, once red as the brick of his home, was platinum but still dense. He’d barely uttered a word to either his son or his son’s date. The chef had spent days preparing the meal for three; a twenty-three-pound turkey, platters of sweet-potato mousseline, haricots verts, and hazelnut stuffing that languished, barely touched, in the middle of the table. Artemus greeted Cynthia’s attempts at conversation by mumbling. Somewhere between the final spoonful of stuffing and the pie, Jackson summoned his courage.

  “Dad, I can take you being rude to me. In fact, I’m not sure I would recognize any other form of communication coming from you, but I won’t stand for you being rude to Cynthia.”

  His father’s gray eyes turned the color of a frozen lake. “Is that so?” he replied coolly.

  Torturing others, especially his son, was as much pleasure as it was sport.

  “I’m too old to take this shit,” Jackson said.

  “You’re old enough to make a stupidity out of your life,” his father snorted. He nodded to the De Kooning hanging over the mantle. His mother had bought this painting, the painting that made Jackson want to be an artist.

  “Finger paint,” Artemus sneered. Then, “Do you think I’m being rude, Cindy?”

  “It’s Cynthia.” Jackson rapped the table. China rattled. The servant holding out the pie started to blink uncontrollably.

  “Jackson, it’s fine, please,” Cynthia said.

  “I meant no harm,” his father said. He turned to Cynthia. “Did my boy tell you why he was kicked out of his last prep school or how many strings I had to pull to keep him at Harvard? I’d be careful with him, if I were you.”

  “Jackson is very kind,” Cynthia replied. “I’ve had no trouble.”

  “I’m sure you haven’t. You’ve probably handled a lot of his ilk, haven’t you, Cindy? I imagine it’s hard for you to keep track.”

  “You are way out of line.” Jackson’s fists clenched.

  “Mr. Power.” Cynthia stood. “Jackson and I must be going back to our shanty. Thank you so much for a lovely evening. Happy Thanksgiving. Go to hell.”

  Jackson knew right then and there. He was going to marry Cynthia Hunsaker.

  Artemus Power shook his head in amusement. “She’s got more guts than you do, son, I’ll say that for her.”

  Then he smiled into his drink, held steady as a mantra.

  “You’ll be back,” he declared.

  “KNEW this would happen.” Artemus Power pursed his large, clumsy lips together. At eighty-three, he still had most of his hair, but had taken to dyeing it a disturbing tangerine-covered-with-early-frost color. Jackson couldn’t look at it without thinking of a bad year for citrus growers.

  “Your mother and I were married until the day she died.”

  “She died early. I was there, remember?” Jackson said, “Twenty-five years beats your record by a long shot.”

  His father had been steadily fucking the Betty Grable–monkfish nurse while she’d been taking care of his mother for the last months of her life. She’d lived on in the house after his mother’s death, drinking his father’s good Scotch and wearing his mother’s jewelry when his father wasn’t looking, until one day she’d been escorted from the premises by security while his father hid in this very study. From inside his bedroom, Jackson had heard the skirmish, her heels kicking at the floor, the swearing.

  “I still wear my wedding ring.” His father rolled the heavy gold band over with his thumb. Artemus Power’s hands had been trained for physical labor. While Jackson wanted to use a size four flat brush, his father knew how to handle brick and mortar and rills and saws and cement and jackhammers. Artemus could still point out his signature on the lone block of stone at the bottom of buildings he had built with those rough-hewn hands. Before he bought them, of course.

  “I’m sure your mistresses appreciate the sentimentality,” Jackson replied.

  His father sat behind a massive oak desk in the formal study. The curtains, silk velvet the color of spilled claret, poured from woven gold cords onto the rich mahogany floors. Fourteen-foot ceilings inlaid with brass, ivory, ebony, and walnut were painstakingly reconstructed from a German opera house. The chair his father was sitting on was made for Louis XVI; the chair Jackson was sitting on was made for a member of his court. The rug, an antique tapestry, was threadbare on the unhappy path from the double doors. It featured a hunting party in their finest silks and furs, astride red-coated horses, accompanied by white Afghan hounds; they carried a boar’s body, arched back in surrender, blood seeping from its jaws and from patches of fur where arrows pierced its flesh.

  The room was his father’s absolute favorite.

  “You’ve called Penn,” his father said. Penn was the lead family attorney.

  “I have not,” Jackson replied, and now wished he had.

  “You haven’t moved out, obviously,” his father growled.

  “Well, actually, I do have a penthouse available at the Tower—”

  “What kind of idiot have I raised,” coughed Artemus.

  “I was about to say, no, I haven’t moved out,” Jackson said. “I left, but haven’t moved out.”

  “See that you don’t,” his father said. “If you had listened to me twenty-five years ago, you wouldn’t have been in this position.”

  “What position?”

  “Marriage. Do not lose that apartment. The Powers do not relinquish their holdings. Not even when they’re cold and buried in the ground.”

  Can we test that hypothesis? Jacks thought. “You care a lot about an apartment you’ve rarely set foot in,” he said. The Elder waved the accusation away. “I’ve never been disappointed by a building the way I’ve been disappointed by family.”

  Jackson imagined the rococo ceiling crumbling in on his father. “Fine. I won’t move. I’ll stay in the guest wing.”

  Jackson would still be living at 740 with his starter wife. The starter wife who had legal rights—he imagined her changing locks, selling off his art.

  He imagined Lara’s colorful response to Jacks’s still living with Cynthia.

  And then, for distraction, he imagined Lara’s breasts.

  “…the publicity!” his father was saying. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Mmmm.”

  “You’ve taken my good name and made a mockery of it. Now it’s associated with all kinds of unseemliness.”

  Jackson was amazed at how quickly he became a twelve-year-old boy in his father’s presence. He scratched his chin and was almost surprised to find stubble. He straightened his tie and patted his hair. He was well on his way to becoming a playground of tics.

  “Thanks for your time,” Jackson said, getting up from the ass-breaking French chair.

  “I’m coming back,” Artemus said.

  “Coming back where?” Jackson looked back at him, puzzled.

  “To my office.”

  He held those last three words until he was sure he had Ja
ckson’s attention. Artemus Power didn’t like shooting people in the back when he could do it face-to-face.

  Jacks felt the familiar, carbonated gurgling of resignation in his stomach. His father was through basting in retirement; he wanted the Power power back.

  “We could use a good man,” Jackson said finally. “When do you think—”

  “Today.”

  “Today,” Jackson repeated numbly.

  “I need to steer my company through this mess. Your emotional state is not conducive for business.” His father pulled those blubbery lips up into something resembling a smile. “I’ll be using my old office, assuming you haven’t annexed it yet. And I’ll be needing a secretary. Good legs, nice tits.”

  Jackson knew this wasn’t a whim based on his emotional state. Since when had his old man ever cared?

  “We can’t afford to let that idiot screw up the Bowery deal.”

  “That idiot” was the mayor. The liberal Samuel Krach (pronounced “crack”) was a native son who was proving to be a major pain in Jackson’s own native ass. Jackson had spent over a decade prying his way into downtown Manhattan. Now there was an opportunity to turn an entire block of eyesore—a zesty stew of broken brick, vermin, and pigeon shit—into a gold, phallic high-rise, a veritable monument to the power of Power. High-end shops with names that end in vowels! One hundred and twenty-five first-class condos! Rooftop pool! Indoor squash! Eight-table micro-eateries serving fifty-dollar crepes! Construction at cost! Not to mention tax abatements! The last mayor had been closer than a short hair to signing off before being unseated. But this Krach wanted to be a hero to a cadre of working-class tenants who should’ve had the good sense to move. Jackson was offering them more money than they’d ever seen in their sorry little lives. Team Power was back to square one on the Bowery.

  Artemus pushed back from his desk and stood. “I’m the one with the balls to stand up to him and finish this project. You’re too distracted by your personal life. You should have been a starlet, not a businessman. All looks, no brains.” Then his father grinned, and remarked, “And that’s a fact!”

  That hurt, Jacks thought. That really fucking hurt.

  JACKSON could feel the craving eyes of the Israelis upon him in the anteroom. Seconds later, in the backseat of the limo, a sheen of perspiration appeared on his forehead. Jackson Power felt as though he were drowning in a clear pool in the middle of his city. He wished he could be sure that the woman he loved would save him.

  8

  QUEEN’S COUNSEL

  IT’S YOUR mom,” said the girl with the bored expression standing in the doorway of Vivienne’s student apartment overlooking Washington Square Park.

  “Hello,” Cynthia said, stretching her neck and tilting her chin toward the ceiling, a turtle reaching for food. It was unconscious, as she always fell back on her training when she was nervous. Cynthia could see the tops of trees from the bay windows as she stood straighter, pulled everything in, shoulders back—she exerted more energy standing still than most women did running a marathon.

  Cynthia’s perfect Upper East Side armor—the two-piece Chanel, salmon and eggshell plaid, pearls, hair yanked back into a chignon—seemed a little off below Fourteenth Street.

  Especially since the girl at the door was naked. She turned as though wending her body through a wall of water. She had skin the color of burnt butter. Not a trace of sinew. Small breasts with nipples that looked like brown stars. Black hair chopped close to her scalp on a child-size head. A tattoo at the small of her back. And not one hair on her vagina. (“Oh, Cynthia!” she could hear Vivienne say, “it’s not your mother’s vagina anymore—the word is ‘pussy’!” Vivienne had addressed Cynthia by her first name since the day she turned twelve. What’s more annoying than a precocious twelve-year-old? Nothing.) Cynthia thought briefly of the Brave New World about to greet her—hairless vaginas and tramp stamps being just part of the sexual potpourri. She had a lot of catching up to do.

  The girl moved noiselessly on small, elegant feet down the hall. Cynthia was an expert on all things feet; her own were gnarled after years of punishment.

  She felt a jolt of jealousy.

  Cynthia had thought this space too dark when they were apartment hunting, but Vivienne had hopped from the Town Car and dashed inside. It reminded Cynthia of how many times she’d seen her daughter hop out of her car, away from her arms.

  “Vivienne never cries for me when I leave her at preschool,” she’d said to Jackson, when Vivienne was three.

  “That’s a good thing,” he’d said, with pride. “She’s Little Miss Independent.”

  “Other children cry,” Cynthia said insistently. She was a young mother, Vivienne was her first baby, she was worried. Why didn’t Vivienne need her? Now Cynthia perched uncertainly on the Chesterfield couch she’d bought for Vivienne, who hadn’t wanted it. Her daughter had the quaint idea that she could live on bare floors with nothing but a sleeping bag, an iPod, and a cappuccino machine. Vivienne, the professional student, was starting on her third degree. She’d begun in film at Tisch, then shifted to Gallatin and backed into a music degree. She’d formed an all-girl rock band, playing bass. They named themselves Ain’t We a Bitch.

  Yes, well.

  Now, Vivienne was going for her master’s in creative writing at the New School and playing chess in the evening against the hustlers in the chess park beneath her window—with moves handed down by Jacks to his daughter when she was still in elementary school.

  Cynthia’s smart, capable, strong-willed twenty-five-year-old daughter had yet to actually hold down a job.

  She heard muffled voices, Vivienne’s rising.

  “You are not the boss of me.” Cynthia could still hear her toddler. Full baby lips grimacing. Blue eyes sharp and defiant. Vivienne’s strawberry-blond curls a fortress against a mother’s reproach; try disciplining a child who resembles a cherub from The Birth of Venus. Cynthia smiled at the memory.

  “This is a nice surprise, Cynthia,” Vivienne said, as she bounded into the room and leapt into a chair. All six feet of her clothed, thankfully. She wore an antique silk wedding kimono Cynthia had bought on a trip to Tokyo, number 5,832 in a series of not-so-subtle attempts to feminize Vivienne’s taste. Not only Vivienne’s taste, Cynthia revised, but Vivienne herself, whose curls were now worn in a wild halo.

  Cynthia stood up, clutching her alligator Birkin to her chest, and announced, “Your father and I are getting a divorce.” And then she sat down again. Vivienne finished lighting a cigarette and tossed the match into a coffee shop ashtray. Not a Cynthia purchase.

  “About fucking time,” her daughter muttered. “I’ve been waiting for this since before my boobs hit double-D.”

  “Breasts,” Cynthia corrected automatically, then snatched the cigarette from her daughter’s hand and set it on her own lips. She inhaled, calling urgently upon her second-favorite vice. Which reminded her—how was she surviving this crisis without her silver/blue cans of diet Red Bull? Cynthia drew the smoke into her lungs, then cocked her head toward the bedroom door. “You picked a fine day to be a lesbian, Vivi,” she said. Not that she hadn’t been “aware”—just not so naked-hottie-in-your-face aware.

  Her daughter snorted. “Our timing has never been very good, Cynthia.”

  “I was going to ask you to coffee,” Cynthia said. “I didn’t want you to hear about the news from someone else, or read about it…” The Post photo popped into her head. She wondered if rage could keep her skinny. The Rage Diet.

  “I’ll have Aiko make breakfast,” Vivienne said.

  “I’ve already eaten,” Cynthia lied.

  “Cynthia,” Vivienne said pointedly, “did you read the Times piece on middle-aged anorexics the other day?”

  “Must have missed it. Sounds fascinating.”

  “You need Red Bull rehab,” Vivienne said, as she jumped up from her chair. “And make an appointment with your attorney!”

  “I will, I will.”

  Cyn
thia’s phone started ringing. She looked at the number. A name flashed—one of the board members.

  “When? Don’t be your usual trusting, naive self, Cynthia. You have to put yourself first. Use muscles you haven’t used in a long time. Like your brain?”

  Cynthia let that one go. “Have you talked to your father?”

  Vivienne laughed. “Oh yeah—it went something like this: ‘Hi, Vivienne, how am I?’”

  “I meant this morning.”

  “No, of course not. I’m on the emergency contact list somewhere below Liz Smith.”

  “Your father cares for you very much, Vivi.”

  “Mom, it’s me, Vivienne, your wayward daughter. This isn’t family therapy hour. You are getting divorced from one of the most powerful pricks in the country—”

  “Vivi. Stop. He is your father.”

  Cynthia’s phone rang again. Another board member.

  “Which is why I know,” Vivi said. “I have firsthand experience. Get a killer lawyer. Raoul Felder, or his wife—she’s the brawn in that operation. You should be meeting lawyers today. I guarantee Dad is. And you’re going to need a forensic accountant. Before he starts hiding his crap. You could wake up next week, and all of a sudden he owns nothing. ‘What buildings?’” she asked, impersonating her father’s voice.

  “Jackson wouldn’t do that,” Cynthia said. Unconvincingly.

  “If you can’t do it for you, Cynthia, do it for me. I’m into the pretense of poverty, not the actuality,” Vivienne said. “Did he move out?”

  “Well, no—but he left.”

  “Change the locks.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “You want the new Mrs. Power moving in?”

  Cynthia winced. Vivi had guessed she’d been replaced.

  “It’s not personal, Cynthia,” Vivienne said softly. “He just can’t be alone.”

  Had Vivi known about all the other affairs?

  “Of course I don’t want the other woman moving in.”