I'll Take Manhattan

by Judith Krantz

  “Something about this rush makes me nervous, Goldilocks,” Toby had said. “I smell trouble. I heard about it by chance. How come we weren’t notified? Can you make it on such short notice?”

  “Absolutely. As soon as I shower off the salt I can get the plane from Lorient back to Paris, spend the night and catch the Concorde while you people are still sleeping in New York. No problem,” she’d answered. And indeed, except for the hitch almost imposed by O’Casey, she would have been early rather than just barely on time.

  Now for the first time since the Concorde had landed, Maxi noticed that even though the day was cool for late August it was getting warmer minute by minute. As she took off her jacket she became conscious of something rubbing against her waist, under the belt of her jeans. With a perplexed look she fished inside and drew out a thin platinum chain that she had clasped there not more than six hours before in her favorite suite at the Paris Ritz. Dangling from the chain was an immense black pearl crowned by two plumes of diamonds from Van Cleef and Arpels. Well, bless my soul, Maxi thought as she hung the jewel around her neck. It was glowingly baroque, prodigally opulent and outrageously conspicuous. How could she have forgotten it so totally? Still, a penny saved is a penny earned, she gloated with the triumphant pleasure of someone who has won by cheating at Monopoly.

  2

  Elie slammed to a stop in front of the new Amberville Building at Fifty-fourth and Madison. Maxi didn’t wait for him to come around and open the door. Again consulting her watch, she jumped out of the limo and tore through the four-story-tall glass atrium, not noticing the dozens of trees that had each cost the price of a small car, not glancing at any of the hundreds of pots of hanging orchids and ferns. Botany was not on Maxi’s mind as she commandeered the express elevator up to the executive floor and her objective, the boardroom of the empire her father had started in 1947 with one small trade magazine. She pushed the heavy doors apart and stood stock still, surveying the assembled company with both hands on her hips, her booted legs spread two feet apart, a stance which she had often assumed since she had learned to stand upright. Frequently enough the world was up to something not entirely to Maxi’s liking to justify a basic skepticism.

  “Just why are we here?” she demanded of the group of senior editors, publishers, and business managers in the instant of silence that preceded their exclamations of surprise and greeting. But they were as ignorant as she and many of them had rushed into the city from interrupted summer vacations to attend the meeting. The difference was that they had been summoned back officially while Maxi had found out accidentally. Maxi had missed many an editorial board meeting, to all of which she was routinely invited, but it was unheard of that she should not have been informed.

  A tiny, exquisite, white-haired man detached himself from the others and came toward her.

  “Pavka!” Maxi exclaimed in delight, embracing Pavka Mayer, Artistic Director of all of the ten Amberville magazines.

  “What’s going on? Where’s my mother and Toby?”

  “I wish I knew. I don’t appreciate rushed trips from Santa Fe, to say nothing of missing last night’s opera. Your mother still hasn’t arrived,” Pavka replied.

  He had known and loved Maxi since her birth, understanding that her complicated life was dedicated to extracting the greatest amount of fun that could still be found on the planet Earth. He had watched her as she grew up, and she reminded him of a miner panning for gold, moving feverishly from one claim to another, here hitting an ounce or two of ore, there finding only worthless pebbles and passing quickly on, but forever searching for that vein of pure gold—pure fun—that major strike which, so far as he knew, still eluded her. But she believed that it existed, and Pavka Mayer was sure that if anyone were to find it, Maxi would be that person.

  “I find this all very strange,” Maxi murmured.

  “I too. But tell me, what have you been up to all summer, little girl?” he asked.

  “Ah, all the usual—breaking hearts, cutting capers, playboy bashing, not playing by any fair rules, getting up to speed, keeping up with the golden lads. You know about them, Pavka darling; my normal summer games, sometimes winning on the swing and losing on the roundabout, a spot of seduction here and there … nothing serious.”

  Pavka inspected her in one experienced art director’s glance. As well as he knew her he was always slightly amazed—and as if he had sustained a small electric shock—by her actual physical presence, for Maxi was, somehow, more real than other people, more there. She was only of medium height, somewhere around five feet six inches tall, and her beautifully boned body did not take up a lot of real room, yet she created a vibrating space around herself through sheer mesmerizing energy. Maxi was formed like a great courtesan of the Belle Epoque with a tiny waist, excellent deep breasts and sumptuous hips, yet she was not oppressively voluptuous and the masculine, piratical swagger of her garments only made her all the more feminine. Her surpassingly green eyes, the precise color of Imperial Jade—fresh, brilliant and pure—were unshadowed by any trouble.

  Pavka knew that no photograph would ever capture the essence of Maxi because she lacked the ruthless bone structure that a woman needed for photography, but he never tired of looking at her dark straight eyebrows that were always raised in faint surprise over her wickedly undeviating gaze. Her delicately molded nose would have been classic if it hadn’t turned up slightly at the tip, giving her a look of witty alertness, and the white streak in her hair only made her forever-tousled, capriciously falling mass of short thick hair seem darker by contrast. Yet to Pavka her mouth was her most compelling feature. Her lower lip was tenderly curved into a hint of a smile and her upper lip was unabashedly, undeniably bow-shaped, with a tiny beauty spot to the left of its deeply indented center, the mouth of a trueborn sorceress, he said to himself with the well-earned judgment of a man who had successfully loved women for more than fifty years.

  Pavka was still admiring Maxi when the boardroom doors opened again and Toby Amberville walked in. Maxi ran toward him.

  “Toby,” she said softly just before she reached him and he stopped in mid-stride and opened his arms to her, pulling her close. For a long, quiet minute she remained clasped to him, lifting up her face to his bent head so that they could rub noses. “What’s going on, Toby?” Maxi whispered to him.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been able to reach Mother for the last several days. It’s a mystery, but I guess we’re about to find out. You’re looking great, babe,” he added as he released her.

  “Says who?” Maxi whispered.

  “I do. I smell it in your hair. Your cheeks feel sunburned, high mountain sun, not Southampton. And you’ve put on weight, about three-quarters of a pound, give or take an ounce, right here on your butt. Very cozy.” He pushed her gently away and she watched from the hallway as he continued on into the room, her older brother, by barely two years, a brother who could tell more about her from touching her palms or listening to her say three words, than anyone else in the world.

  Toby Amberville was a tall, seemingly tireless man with an absorbed inward-listening manner that made him look older than his thirty-one years. At first glance he didn’t have any particular physical feature in common with Maxi yet there was a similarity in the way in which they both fully occupied the space in which they found themselves. Toby’s mouth, tender and full, seemed to contradict the strength of his chin, the obstinate determination that made him intimidating to many people, in spite of his easy laugh and his robust, healthy handsomeness. He had amber-brown eyes around which lines were beginning to show, lines which, to a casual observer would have been the sign of a man who squinted, a man who was possibly nearsighted and refused, out of vanity, to wear glasses.

  Maxi hung back to scrutinize him as he walked easily and confidently ahead, sitting down in the chair that had been left empty for him by decree of his father since his twenty-first birthday, a chair that waited for him at each editorial board meeting, a chair he occupied mo
re and more rarely, as the advance of his disease of retinitis pigmentosa made his eyesight increasingly limited. Was his tunnel vision still relatively stable? Maxi wondered. It was never easy to know what Toby saw or didn’t see since one of the characteristics of his disease was that his vision varied from hour to hour, depending on the set of conditions in which he found himself, the distance and angle from which he looked at something, the brightness or dullness of the light, and a dozen other variables that had a maddening inconsistency so that at times he had moments of accurate seeing which only made the return of his condition of near-blindness more difficult to endure. But he had endured, he had made his peace with his condition as much as any man could, Maxi thought as she listened to him greet the various people in the room, immediately recognizing and turning to them at the sound of their voices. For a moment Maxi forgot why she was here in this large room, and lost herself in loving contemplation of her brother.

  “Maxime.” Her name was spoken in a voice that had a faint British accent, a silver voice whose beauty caused Maxi to shiver. Her mother’s voice was the only one in the world that could make her jump and yet it sounded as if it had never been raised to give an order or ask a favor, much less express anger. It was a voice of such an assured and graceful pitch, of such cool, supple charm that it had obtained everything—or almost everything—that its possessor had ever wanted. Maxi turned to greet her mother, bracing herself.

  “When did you get in, Maxime?” Lily Amberville asked betraying some surprise. “I thought you were still skiing in Peru. Or was it Chile?” She pushed her daughter’s bangs to one side, a familiar caressing gesture that indicated permanent disapproval of the way Maxi wore her hair. Maxi felt a futile anger that she had stopped expressing years earlier. Why, she thought, can no one make me, feel ugly except my mother?

  Lily Amberville, who had lived the last three decades of her life in the aura of homage that surrounds a very few of the rich and powerful great beauties of the world, embraced her daughter with vice-regal dignity, an embrace to which Maxi submitted as she always had, with a mixture of resentment and longing.

  “Hello, Mother, you’re looking glorious,” she said truthfully.

  “I wish you’d let us know that you were coming,” Lily replied, not returning or acknowledging the compliment. She almost seemed nervous, Maxi realized, although that wasn’t a word she had ever thought of in relation to Lily. Nervous and a little tense.

  “I think there’s been some sort of mix-up, Mother. Nobody told me about today’s meeting. I wouldn’t have had any idea if Toby hadn’t phoned.…”

  “Obviously there’s been some sort of communications problem—but hadn’t we better sit down?” Lily Amberville said vaguely and drifted away, leaving Maxi standing in the doorway. Pavka Mayer came up to her.

  “Sit next to me, you devil. How often do I get this opportunity?”

  “ ‘Devil’? You haven’t seen me for two months,” Maxi protested, laughing again. “For all you know, I may have reformed.”

  “Devil,” Pavka insisted as she followed him into the room. How else, he thought, to describe the quintessence she distilled, a nimble, feisty, inquisitive, wide-awake ability to cause trouble, fascinating trouble that he couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything to change?

  “Reformed? My Maxi?” he quizzed her. “May I assume that the seven dwarfs gave you that amazing black pearl because you were so innocent, so untouchable, so pure, so much like Snow White?”

  “There was only one of him, actually, and he was of a perfectly normal height,” Maxi said, unblushingly, tucking the again-forgotten pearl quickly inside her blouse. It most certainly wasn’t daytime jewelry.

  Before she had settled into the chair next to Pavka a hand grasped her too firmly by the arm. She swung around, stiffening with displeasure. Her uncle, Cutter Dale Amberville, her father’s younger brother, bent down and kissed her on her forehead. “Cutter,” Maxi said coldly, “what are you doing here?”

  “Lily asked me to come. I’m surprised to see you, as a matter of fact. I was convinced that you’d abandoned us for more interesting places. I’m so glad you’re home, Maxime.” His voice was warm and welcoming.

  “Just where did you think I was, Cutter?” Only an effort at control kept the dislike she felt out of her voice.

  “Everyone thought that you were skiing in Peru or Chile, somewhere quite unreachable. Something to do with helicopters and glaciers.”

  “Is that the reason that I wasn’t notified of the meeting today?”

  “Naturally, my dear. There didn’t seem to be any point in trying. We didn’t have a phone number. But I’m delighted to see I was wrong.”

  “You should never listen to rumors, Cutter. Toby knew where I was if you’d thought of making that most obvious inquiry. But apparently even he wasn’t told. I find that very odd indeed. What’s more, even if I’d been up the Amazon I don’t like to be out of touch,” she stated crisply.

  “It must just be a simple mistake.” Cutter Amberville smiled, a smile that reached the depths of his youthful blue eyes, a smile that redeemed his features from being impossibly distinguished, a smile so wide that it disarmingly revealed one crooked tooth and transformed his elegant head from that of an ambassador to that of a roustabout. He owed his fortune to the undeniable power of his smile and he had long forgotten the prep-school days when he used to practice it in front of a mirror, forcing warmth, and thus sincerity, to mount from his lips to his eyes by subtle alterations of his facial muscles.

  Cutter Amberville had spent the last three years in Manhattan, returning in 1981 after an absence of more than twenty-five years punctuated only by a few brief visits. He had changed surprisingly little during all that time, never losing the spare fitness of the superb athlete he was. His still-blond hair was closely cut, his gaze a slash of blue, his manner never less than disarming. He was a compellingly alluring man who had bewitched many women, yet there was a darkness of some inner purpose in his manner, a hint of something hidden. He seemed to have little need for humor or for people whom he didn’t find useful. During his entire lifetime Zachary Amberville had loved his brother deeply.

  Cutter continued to beam down at Maxi with the unanswerable weapon of his smile. His hand still held her arm in a firm, even a protective way. Abruptly she jerked away, not caring if it looked rude, and popped herself down near Pavka. Cutter, unrebuffed, touched her hair with a small yet clearly intimate movement that made Maxi’s nose twitch briefly in disgust. Just what the devil, she wondered, had brought Cutter to the meeting? He had never attended one before.

  She watched as her mother, with the distinctive floating walk, the unshakable proud distinction of the ballerina she had once been, went to the head of the table. Lily sat down next to the chair that had remained empty since Zachary Amberville’s death, a chair different from the others in the room, a worn, battered chair that achingly reminded everyone there of the laughing, daring, eager, gutsy, earthy man who had gone so suddenly.

  She must not allow her tears to fall, Maxi told herself angrily. Every time she saw her father’s chair she was so vividly aware of him that, try as she would, tears rushed to her eyes. God knows, she’d wept and wept during this last year for the father she had adored but she always tried to keep her outbursts private. People were always embarrassed by the outward expression of another’s grief and such emotion had no place in a boardroom.

  Holding her breath and concentrating fiercely, Maxi made herself retain her composure. Her eyes were bright but the tears did not fall. Safe now, from a public display of her deep loss, she watched as Cutter followed Lily. Just where was he planning to sit? Maxi asked herself. There didn’t seem to be an extra chair for him. She watched, incredulously, as her mother made a gesture as precise as it was astonishing and with one slender hand indicated to Cutter that he should take the chair that had never been occupied by anyone but her husband.

  How could she! How dared she let Cutter sit there? Maxi cried to hers
elf, her heart thudding. Next to her she heard a muffled sound of disbelief escape Pavka’s lips and all around the table there were hastily stifled sounds of shock. The atmosphere in the room quivered with the impact of this unexpected act of Lily’s and people exchanged surreptitious, bewildered glances. However, Cutter seemed oblivious to them and sat down without any change in his expression.

  Zachary Amberville had dominated his privately owned company, assisted by the group of people who were all in the room today. After his death his widow had started to appear at the board meetings that she had never attended during her husband’s lifetime. She was now the majority shareholder of the company. Lily had been left seventy percent of the voting shares in the corporation; the other thirty percent had been divided among Maxi, Toby, and their younger brother, Justin.

  Maxi and occasionally Toby had both tried to attend board meetings when they were in town. However, Maxi had never heard her mother express any opinion or take part in any decision, nor had she done so herself. The editors of each magazine, the publishers and the business managers, headed by Pavka Mayer, had continued to run the huge enterprise as they had done under Zachary, with devotion, competence, great expertise and no diminution of zeal.

  There was a moment of silence. Since no one knew the agenda of this meeting, they waited for Lily Amberville to announce it to them. But Lily still said nothing, her eyes cast down toward the table. Maxi watched, dumbfounded, too amazed to take a breath, as Cutter pushed her father’s chair a few inches out from the table, leaned back comfortably, perfectly at ease and took over the meeting.

  “Mrs. Amberville has asked me to speak to you today,” he began quietly. “First of all, she regrets that she had to bring some of you into the city on such short notice, but she has an announcement to make that she felt you should all know about as quickly as possible.”