“Yes to all of that,” Toby said, “but there’s something else that I’ve noticed and haven’t really paid enough attention to … there’s a complicity between them … there always has been, to one degree or another, since Cutter came back from England. And when Dad went, so suddenly, last year, it’s gotten steadily stronger.”
“Complicity? What’s that supposed to mean, exactly … that they are partners in crime?”
“No, a deep sort of involvement, an intense interest in each other’s needs and wishes, an agreement that goes beyond agreement, so that it creates a bond that is stronger and more durable than the fact that he’s good-looking or she needs a man in her life or any of those self-evident things.”
“How come you’re such an expert?” Maxi asked rebelliously.
“I hear it. You know I hear things in people’s voices that you don’t catch. I hear it in the way they move when they’re together. When you’re blind, Goldilocks, you learn to hear people moving in hundreds of different ways, and each means something different. They’re deeply complicitous. I hear it and, by God, I smell it … under all the perfume and soap and after-shave in the world I can smell it on both of them.”
Maxi squirmed in a primitive resistance to his words.
“Why do you persist in calling me Goldilocks?” she asked, trying to change the subject.
“Because I like the word. If your hair were all white I’d just see tiny bits of it, now and then, so I call you whatever I like. Just don’t go bald. Now, back to Mother and Cutter. He’s got her exactly where he wants her. It’s the first time I’ve ever known her like this, so dominated, so dependent. While Dad was alive I felt a certain set of things when she was with him, something utterly different. They were kind to each other … I supposed they’d come to terms. They were friends, or at least not enemies, but no complicity.”
“You’re revolting.”
He laughed and smacked her on her bare thigh. “Nice and fresh,” he said appraisingly. “You should be good for another ten, maybe fifteen years, before you start to lose that special springiness in the muscles.”
“Take your hands off me, you degenerate.”
“Do you love me, Goldilocks?”
“I love you, Bat.” It was their ritual. Tobias’s earliest memory was of touching the cheeks of baby Maxi and her first memory was of his hand picking her up when she tripped on an icy street.
“Oh, if only you could have seen those poor bastards at the meeting, Toby. Some of them looked as if they’d just been sentenced by a hanging judge.”
“I heard them. That was enough.”
“But how can we accept the way he said that he spoke for her? You know that Mother couldn’t possibly have made this decision on her own—she’s never been involved in running the company. She doesn’t think about profits, for heaven’s sake! It’s all Cutter’s doing, God knows why. But he cannot be allowed to kill four magazines all at once! We can’t let him do it! Our father would never have considered such a thing, not for any reason unless he were flat-out bankrupt. Toby, Toby! Remember Dad! It’s not euthanasia, it’s outright murder!” Maxi’s voice grew louder with every word.
“But what can we do about it, babe? Mother has the power, clearly, to enforce her ‘decision,’ whoever influenced her. Whatever she wants to do with the company she has the absolute legal right to do.”
“Moral suasion,” Maxi said slowly in a voice midway between inquiry and the dawning of an idea.
“Moral suasion? Obviously you’ve been away from your native shores too long. This is New York City, babe, and moral suasion is found only on the op-ed page of the Times.”
“A special kind of moral suasion, Toby. Manhattan style. If you feed me lunch I’ll have the strength to pay our uncle a visit in his office.”
“Damned if I know what you’re up to.”
“Damned if I do … yet. But dig we must …” she chortled.
“For a better New York,” he added, joining in the line they both used to explain any and all inconveniences in the city that was, to them, the center of the universe.
“That would be most unwise, Maxi, and it wouldn’t get you anywhere,” Cutter said, sitting behind his desk in his Wall Street office. “Whatever you and Tobias feel, and believe me, I truly do understand your sentiments and I sympathize …”
“Leave out the hearts and flowers,” Maxi snapped. “Let’s go straight to the bottom line, since that seems to be your favorite place to operate.” She hadn’t been home to change since her arrival in New York, but the swim with Toby and the superb lunch he had cooked for her had restored her dauntless spirit, and during the ride downtown she had formed a clear idea of what to do, how to attack.
“I don’t care if Amberville is a privately owned company or not, Cutter, it’s still subject to public opinion. When Toby and I go to the press, as we plan to, with our minority shareholders’ report, we are going to tell them that we are convinced that you have obviously exercised undue influence over our mother, your most amazingly recent bride, and put four magazines to death without prior consultation with Toby or Justin or me, all of us shareholders and highly concerned parties.” Maxi stretched out her booted legs defiantly and slumped in her chair with every sign of confident relaxation.
“Perhaps your own skin is thick enough to ignore public opinion, but have you thought about your customers?” she went on. “What about your carefully low-profile partners? Have you thought about everyone in the magazine business, the Newhouses, the Hearsts, the Annenbergs and all the others? What attitude will they have, what will they say about you, Cutter? They all know you are not a publisher, never have been, never will be. It’s going to be a juicy, big, nasty story for the media … four magazines folding at once, hundreds and hundreds of people thrown out of work, all based on the judgment of someone who’s never spent five minutes in magazines, someone whose only tiny perch in the business was given to him by his wife?”
Cutter turned over a paper knife, rearranged an inkwell, adjusted his desk clock. There was a brief silence before Maxi continued, since he obviously intended to say nothing.
“I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when we hold our press conference, Cutter. I’m certain Pavka will join us. I know he doesn’t have a piece of the company but the media adore him, they consider him a genius, which he is, and a grand old man. Remember the lines around the block for his retrospective at the Museum of Graphic Arts? He’s an institution and my father gave him his first chance, to say nothing of the fact that Wavelength was Pavka’s own idea. Zachary Amberville had faith in the future of those magazines, and people had faith in him—that’s what you seem to forget. My father was a legend. He still is.”
“You’re trying to blackmail me, Maxi, and it won’t work. Those magazines are out of business as of this morning. The decision was your mother’s to make and she made it.”
“You,” Maxi said slowly, “are a stinking, rotten, filthy liar. Mother didn’t decide anything. But you did. I don’t know why yet, but it’s all your work, Cutter.”
“How dare you speak to me like that?”
Maxi had never seen Cutter really angry before. She smiled right into his eyes, which were frozen and savage with fury. If it had been her mother’s decision in any degree, he would never have let such words escape him, not Cutter, always so tightly, beautifully controlled, always urbane.
“And I deny the charge of blackmail,” Maxi said, her smile widening, as insolent as a tomcat on its own turf. “Can’t you even recognize moral suasion when you hear it?”
“Moral suasion—coming from you that’s not funny, it’s absurd. All right, just what do you want, Maxi?”
“A magazine. I want one of the four magazines and I want a year in which you leave me absolutely alone to do anything I like with it. No strings, no looking over my shoulder, no budget cutting. Particularly no budget cutting.”
“Apparently you think you’ve inherited your father’s touch. So you’re going to
save a whole magazine single-handed? Why, you’ve barely done a single consecutive week’s worth of honest work in your life, and the only time you did work was one summer when you were a teenager. But let’s stop fighting,” he said, regaining his temper, “it’s unproductive. If Lily can be persuaded to give you a magazine, because she’s the one who would have to agree, you and your brothers would have to guarantee not to bring the media into a family affair.”
“Then we’d be giving you a free hand with the other three,” Maxi said, suddenly glum.
“I don’t need your free hand, I don’t approve of giving in to blackmail, whatever you choose to call it, and I don’t think that a press conference held by a well-known playgirl and a man who, because of his unfortunate handicap, can never so much as scan a magazine layout, would be taken very seriously. But, for the sake of family harmony, and because you undeniably have a certain amount of nuisance value, if Lily should approve, which magazine would you single out for your amazing resuscitation attempt?”
“Buttons and Bows,” Maxi answered promptly. She hadn’t the slightest doubt that if her father were still alive his first publication, his talisman, would be the magazine he would care about most of all.
“I’ll do my best with your mother, Maxi, but I can’t promise anything until I’ve talked to her.”
“Bullshit.” Maxi rose quickly and walked to the door. “I consider myself Editor-in-chief of Buttons and Bows,” she said as she left his office, “as of this minute. No, don’t bother to see me to the elevator.”
* * *
Wearily, but with a sense of triumph percolating in her veins, Maxi arrived home at her apartment on the sixty-third floor of the Trump Tower. She hadn’t been at all sure that she could crack Cutter, whose reputation as a sound, if not particularly successful investment banker, might have sustained an attack on his business judgment. Many magazines had died in the last decade, been briefly mourned and forgotten. As Maxi turned the key in her lock, she thought that if Cutter had ever been a member of the editorial board of Amberville Publications, she could never have gotten away with her threats of a press conference. Exactly how, she wondered, do you “call” a press conference?
“Yeow!”
Maxi collapsed to the floor under the weight of a lanky, barefoot, shrieking creature, burdened by a backpack and three tennis rackets, a creature that howled and hugged her until she screamed for mercy.
“Mother, my little mother, my very own tiny little mother,” the creature yodeled for joy, “you’re home! I just got in and looked in the fridge. There’s absolutely nothing to eat in this place, but I know you won’t let me starve, oh, little mother of all the Russias.”
“Angelica, baby, please get off my bones,” Maxi begged. Her eleven-year-old daughter had grown a yard at tennis camp. “What are you doing here? You weren’t supposed to come back till next week.”
“I split camp when I was eliminated in the eighths finals. It’s so tacky to be eliminated in the eighths … it’s O.K. if you don’t get that far and O.K. if you’re eliminated in the semis, but the eighths, no way, José.”
“Angelica, how did you get back from Ojhi? You didn’t … oh, my God, you didn’t hitch did you?” Maxi asked, horrified.
“I called Dad for money. I flew, of course, and he met me at the airport. But he didn’t have time to feed me … that is he didn’t feed me enough, just a few hamburgers and a couple of chocolate milkshakes … did you see how I’ve grown? Isn’t it great? I’m not going to be a dumb, normal-sized person like you. Maybe I can be a model. Do you think I need a nose job, everyone at camp is having a nose job, where are we going for dinner, did Dad call you in Europe to say I was coming back? I’ve got a nickname, you have to call me Chip from now on, and I’m going to call you Maxi, it’s more mature.”
“Call me anything,” Maxi groaned as Angelica leaned on her lovingly, “but don’t expect me to call you Chip. Somebody has to draw a line somewhere.” Maxi put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders, pushed her a few inches away and inspected her closely. What particular combination of genes, she wondered, had assembled to create this breathtaking, classic promise of exceptional beauty? The Ambervilles, the Adamsfields, the Andersons, the Dales, the Cutters, had contributed to the amazingly poetic, romantic mixture that was Angelica Amberville Cipriani, and yet the dominant traits in the girl’s face were those of her father, Rocco Cipriani; magnificent Rocco, Renaissance Rocco, fascinatingly brooding, darkly luminous Rocco whose ancestors had left Venice—probably the only Venetians who had ever left Venice voluntarily—for the United States less than a hundred years ago.
“Are you also planning a nickname for your father?” she asked, making, as she always did, a point of being polite about her first ex-husband, with whom she shared custody of Angelica.
“Oh, Maxi, you gross me out, you really do. A person doesn’t call her father by a nickname. Sometimes I wonder about you.”
“I see the double standard still prevails,” Maxi murmured in resignation. “And don’t ask me what that means because you’ll find out soon enough.”
“Now about dinner …” Angelica said, strewing the contents of her backpack around the room. “I thought maybe Thai, or sushi. Tennis camp food was strictly for out-of-towners and you know what that means … horrendous squishy white bread, orange-yellow sliced plastic cheese, pale pink baloney … I haven’t had a decent meal in two months.”
“Angelica, we’ll get back to your stomach in a second, but how about asking me how I am?”
“How are you, Ma?” Angelica said amiably, trying to find a pair of clean socks.
“I’m the new Editor-in-chief of Buttons and Bows.”
“Come on … how are you? Did you meet some wonderful human being? I haven’t had a stepfather recently.”
“You will never, ever have another stepfather, Angelica. I’ve told you that a thousand times. I’m serious about Buttons and Bows. I’m taking it over.”
“Trimming Trades Monthly?” Angelica stopped her fruitless quest in astonishment at Maxi’s words. “What do you want with poor, old Trimming Trades?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Buttons and Bows … Grandpa always told me that its proper name was Trimming Trades Monthly … it says so right on the cover, in tiny little letters. Buttons and Bows is just the name some desperate editor slapped on it to try and jazz it up. Not that it helped. He said he only kept publishing it out of pity for the people who’d been there for so long … he didn’t think they could get other jobs, and a lot of them had been there all of their working lives, but he’d lost interest in it ages and ages ago. Seriously, Ma, when was the last time you saw a copy? I think they’re practically collector’s items. It must have a circulation of at least two hundred and ten. Boring.”
“Angelica, how do you know all of this?”
“Grandpa and I used to talk about the business … he said I was the only one of the whole family with a head for publishing. Do you happen to have any socks I can borrow, Maxi?… Hey, Ma, do you feel all right? You look a little funny. It can’t be jet lag or did you fly a regular airline? Maybe you’re just starving, like me. Listen, Ma, when do we leave for Venice?”
“Venice?” Maxi repeated vacantly.
“Ma, we are going to spend two weeks in Venezia—you know, the one in Italy—before my school starts,” Angelica explained patiently and slowly as if to a very elderly person. “Don’t say ‘Venice?’ as if you didn’t have the tickets and the reservations because it was all planned months ago.”
“We can’t go.”
“But you said!”
“No Venice. I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you. I have to go to work. At Trimming Trades Monthly.”
“Jesus! You’re serious. Have we lost all our money?”
“I’ve made a fool of myself.”
“Is that worse or better?”
“Worse, much much worse, infinitely worse. Oh, fuck!”
“Ah, Ma, don’t
feel bad.” Angelica enveloped her in a bone-crushing hug. “We can have dinner at Parioli Romanissimo—so what if I don’t get to see the land of my ancestors—a restaurant’s almost the same thing as Venice without the canals … the pigeons … the Piazza San Marco … the Gritti …” her voice trailed off with pitiful poignancy.
“I can’t even have dinner with you tonight, Angelica. I’ll call Toby and he’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” Maxi said, hating herself.
“You have a date?” Angelica brightened.
“A promise. And it’s not one I can break. Call it a debt of honor. I have to be at P.J. Clarke’s at eight sharp.” Maxi sank back into a chair and curled up into a ball of misery.
“Angelica, do you happen to like black pearls? Because if you do, I’ve brought you one back from Europe.”
“Ah, give me a break, Maxi … come off the guilt trip. It’s strictly not your style,” Angelica said kindly.
A customs inspector certainly knows his way around the female human body, Maxi thought cheerfully as she tried to wake up the next morning. Was there a man on earth who could make love like a really straightforward Irishman at the peak of his form? And O’Casey was in the prime of his prime. Her second husband had been Australian but his ancestors had come from Ireland, sweet Bad Dennis Brady, a lovely boy as they would have said in the Old Country, but with an unfortunate habit of combining iced tequila and Buffalo Grass vodka in equal quantities and absorbing several generous glasses of the mixture before trying, without the captain’s help, to berth his ship in the harbor of Monte Carlo. Perhaps the marriage might have worked if he hadn’t been so otherwise bone-lazy or if the boat hadn’t been an oceangoing eighty-meter yacht with its own helicopter pad. Perhaps if the helicopter had been properly fastened down the crash—or was it a shipwreck?—wouldn’t have been as embarrassing. Maxi had jumped that particular ship of fools after six months, she remembered sleepily, sadder, but not much wiser.
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