I'll Take Manhattan

by Judith Krantz

  “Nobody here?” Rocco asked, looking around the big, white-walled, well-shaped room, all brown and terra-cotta and burnt umber, furnished in a way he immediately liked although he didn’t know exactly why.

  “They must be somewhere,” Maxi said, wandering away from him toward a hallway. “Anybody home?” she called.

  “Don’t you think we should wait in the living room?”

  “Come on, sweetheart, they must be here somewhere,” Maxi answered from the hall, and Rocco followed her as she flitted through charmingly furnished but unpeopled rooms: a baby’s room, a huge bedroom with a four-poster bed covered with an antique quilt, and a shining kitchen, where the maid was cooking busily. In the red-walled little dining room, where the round French provincial table was laid for two, he finally grabbed her and tried to make her stop. “Sit down and wait. You can’t just go through someone’s house like this, not even you. Or is this some kind of a surprise party?” She eluded him, still carrying Angelica.

  “Wait, there’s one more room. Maybe they’re in there, hiding.” She opened another door and Rocco found himself standing in a well-lit room bare of all but his work table, his chair and all his working equipment, everything arranged perfectly, not one familiar item missing.

  Maxi faced him, absolutely delighted with herself. “Don’t think this happened overnight,” she said proudly.

  “This … ?”

  “Is our house. ‘Surprise party!’ You aren’t as smart as I thought,” she teased.

  “You know what I said about not taking anything from your parents … how could you do this, Maxi?” Rocco asked quietly.

  “I fully respect what you said. This has nothing to do with it,” she answered, beaming with satisfaction.

  “Then where does it come from?”

  “Me. From me to you, from me to me, from me to Angelica.”

  “What do you mean, ‘me’?”

  “My very own trust fund. The one Daddy set up when I was born. I came into it on my last birthday. There’s another one I’ll get when I’m twenty-one and another when I’m twenty-five … Justin and Toby have them too, of course. It’s a way to give your kids something while you’re still alive so that the government doesn’t get it all when you die,” Maxi explained, not too sure of the precise details.

  “Your father, knowing you, gave you a large sum of money?” Rocco said, disbelief clear in his voice.

  “Oh, once it was set up there wasn’t anything he could do to change it. Otherwise I guess he might not have trusted me with so much. But, you see, he would have been wrong, wouldn’t he? I haven’t done anything wildly extravagant, considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “That I got five million dollars.”

  “Five million dollars.”

  “Honestly, Rocco, including the price of buying the apartment, all I’ve spent isn’t even three-quarters of a million.”

  “Three-quarters of a million.”

  “Well, it’s not a big apartment … just enough for the three of us,” Maxi explained patiently. Rocco didn’t seem to be too bright tonight. “We’ll move when we have another baby.”

  “Are you expecting another baby?” Rocco asked in a tightly neutral tone of voice. “Is that another surprise for tonight?”

  “Not yet, for heaven’s sake!”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Back to Soho. If I won’t take anything from your parents, how could you possibly imagine I’d take this … this place … from you?” he asked, pale with outraged fury, insulted to the marrow of his bones.

  “But it has nothing to do with my parents. It’s totally different—I bought and furnished this apartment with my own money. Surely I have a right to spend my own money, Rocco? After all, it’s for us, for us to share.”

  “I can’t do it. I’m sorry, Maxi, but there is no way I can do it. It goes against everything I believe in.”

  “You’re just being stubborn and old-fashioned Italian, and typically male,” she said, her patient tone wearing thin.

  “I’m being me. You should have known me better when we got married. I haven’t changed.”

  “Neither have I,” Maxi flashed at him, outraged.

  “And that,” said Rocco, “is the whole problem. One of us is going to have to change.” His hands were balled into fists. He should have known. He’d had warning after warning but ignored them, soft fool that he was, not wanting to believe that she was so deeply spoiled, so thoughtlessly capricious.

  “Don’t look at me, Rocco Cipriani,” Maxi shouted.

  “Goodbye, Maxi,” he said briefly, afraid that any other words would be irremediably cruel, even more cruel than the end of their marriage. He’d feared this minute from the beginning, but he had tried to overlook his uneasy intuition of Maxi’s true character. “I’ll send for my stuff.”

  Openmouthed, Maxi looked at the empty room. She heard the front door close quietly, she waited a few minutes for the doorbell to ring and then she carried Angelica into the lovingly furnished living room and sat down on one of the big, russet velvet sofas. “He’ll be back, Angelica,” she said to the baby. “He just needs to understand that he can’t boss me around like that. Who does he think he is, anyway? Nobody talks to me like that, do you hear, nobody!” and she burst into tears of a fearful grief, for she knew already that neither one of them was going to change, neither was capable of change. He couldn’t even try, because of his absurd, unnecessary pride, that stubborn bastard, and she would not, would, absolutely, not! She was Maxi Amberville, after all. So why the hell should she?

  13

  Maxi never spent so much as one single night in the apartment she had decorated with such disastrous joy. She arranged for Rocco’s work table and supplies to be sent back to him the next day and instructed her real estate agent to sell everything, including the last copper-bottomed saucepan, as quickly as possible, at whatever price was first offered.

  The divorce was handled with tactful dispatch and without publicity by the Amberville corps of legal experts. Once Rocco had achieved joint custody of Angelica he agreed that the baby should live with Maxi on a full-time basis. He had returned to work at Condé Nast, and the only alternative arrangement possible for him was to hire a nurse to care for Angelica while he was away at the office, which made no sense since the baby had a perfectly good mother. However, as often as possible, he exercised his right to take Angelica for the weekend, joining the legion of divorced fathers in the park nearby with the doubtful distinction of having the youngest child in his group.

  Maxi tried to get through the period of her divorce by concentrating ferociously on each detail of raising her daughter. She became an expert on denial; not thinking, not remembering, not asking herself questions, not wondering “what if” while she conferred with six different but patient Madison Avenue grocers on the quality of their juice oranges and the provenance of their chicken breasts. Nevertheless an appalling, punishing pain located in the very middle of her being vibrated like a tuning fork except when she was actually communing with Angelica, but that healthy baby spent far too much of her first year asleep. Maxi endured the raw torment with silence, for she understood that she had no alternative. Meanwhile she would bathe and feed Angelica and take her downstairs to visit with Lily and Zachary. She had returned home the night Rocco had walked out of the new apartment, seeking the surest refuge she knew.

  This period of mourning lasted throughout the fall of 1973 and the winter of 1974. It wasn’t until late in the spring of her nineteenth year that finally there came a day on which Maxi realized that she could now dare to take stock. She prepared herself for this process by piling her bed high with pillows and lying back on them after she’d applied the warm, sweet-smelling sleeping body of Angelica on her chest like a mustard plaster. The little girl was over a year old and satisfactorily big enough to provide considerable protection for an adult unfortunate enough to have to examine her own mental condition.


  What was her exact position in life? Maxi wondered. How should she define herself? She had a daughter, she was divorced and in a few months she’d be twenty. She was no longer an adolescent, she would never be a debutante, she was not a college girl, nor was she an unwed mother. On the other hand she wasn’t a working woman with a career. It seemed that she was left with only one category to fill: that of the interesting, no, make that the fascinating, young divorcée. If people still used that word.

  What then were the options of this young divorcée who possessed millions from her first installment of her trust fund? In principle the world must be full of endless options for someone with so much money and so much time. Obviously she could stay on living in this great gray house, safe, secure and cared for, yet able to come and go as she chose, since she now had the status of adult rather than that of schoolgirl. Using her parents’ home as a base she could venture forth at will to … to … do what?

  In the first place she could—and probably should—go to college in Manhattan, Maxi ruminated, but damn it, first she’d have to finish high school. Years of bouncing around the backwaters and byways of the educational system had taught her that there would always be a high school that could be persuaded to accept her for the senior year she’d missed. Therefore college was a distinct possibility. But did she really feel like taking on the burden of any additional education? Wasn’t it now somehow too late and yet too early to return to academia? Scratch college.

  Of course there was travel. She could take Angelica and hire a nanny and spend six months or a year in England where her grandparents would introduce her to the world. Maxi’s eyes almost closed as she imagined herself conquering London. She’d buy the wildest dresses Zandra Rhodes had ever designed, she’d rent a big flat on Eaton Square, she’d keep a Rolls—no, a Bentley—no, a Daimler, the kind of car the Queen always used that was too wide for American roads, and she’d plunge into all the delights of London society that her mother hadn’t bothered about, with the help of the good offices of the nineteenth Baronet and second Viscount Adamsfield. Ah, if only the sixties weren’t over. Yet somewhere they must still be lurking, even if the swinging had stopped. Yes … London … Maxi smiled into the dimness of canopied chintz above her bed until suddenly her eyes popped wide open in surprised pique as reality returned. Rocco, that impossible, doting Italian papa, would never allow her to take Angelica away from him for six months at one time. Never. So travel was not an option except for a week or two at the longest. Scratch travel.

  A job? A willingness to do the lowliest task in the art department had landed her where she was now. Perhaps the working world was not for her? Anyway she had a child to take care of. Scratch work.

  She seemed to be stuck right here, lying on her bed back at home. And that was out. Out! It felt wrong, no matter how much her parents obviously wanted her to stay.

  Maxi blew carefully into Angelica’s hair and nibbled on one dark curl. Her parents didn’t trust her to exist on her own. She could see it in their eyes although they were careful not to say anything to indicate that the present arrangement was anything but temporary. But she could read their anxious minds. They’d like her to stay here until another man, a more appropriate one, appeared to lure her back into a domesticity that Maxi had no intention of attempting again.

  The process of elimination had left her with only one option. She must have her own place in Manhattan. Out! If she didn’t move she’d fall back into the comfortable, familiar, but decidedly outgrown role of the daughter of the house. Maxi felt a licking, brief bite of apprehension. She’d never lived alone. She had gone right from her father’s house to her husband’s house and then straight back to her father’s house.

  All the more reason, Maxi thought, her lips tightened defiantly, to get on with it. She’d start house hunting tomorrow. She wanted a town house since she couldn’t have London, a dear little brownstone in which she could entertain her friends. What friends? Since that day—oh diabolic day—that she’d walked into the art department of Savoir Vivre, two years ago, she’d been so involved in the unfolding drama of her own life that she’d lost touch with everybody she knew of her own age except India who had so selfishly gone to college. Still, she must know someone. Hadn’t a famous hostess once said that all you had to do to attract guests was to open a can of sardines and spread the word? She would buy a can opener, Maxi resolved, and a case of sardines. If life had taught her anything it was that one thing led to another. If there had been any other lessons along the way, she’d missed them.

  Once Maxi had resolved to leave her parents’ protection she’d quickly found the perfect small town house and discovered a team of decorators, Ludwig and Bizet, to help her turn it into a setting that had nothing to do with chronology. It was not the home of an impulsive girl but of a serene heiress with a leaning toward eclectic interiors that cunningly defrosted Louis XV with Venetian touches of high fantasy, the combination mellowed with English chintz.

  After Maxi’s first timid venture into introspection she brooded long and often about her future. She had discarded the category of young divorcée almost as quickly as she had thought of it. There were so many other divorced women in Manhattan, forming a vast, unchartered club she’d rather not join. With far more art and discipline than she had employed in preparing herself for her first day at work, she carefully went about creating a new Maxime Emma Amberville Cipriani, one who would be immediately recognizable as a widow. Widowhood—early, cruel, accidental and mysterious widowhood—was a condition so much more desirable than any other open to her. It was a state that combined a certain mournfully elegant status with a distinction and an aura of—poetry?—yes, poetry, if you did it right, she thought, her lips quivering with a suppressed grin.

  Maxi worked her way toward widowhood by the elegiac tempering of her smile; by the suddenly tremulous silences into which she fell unexpectedly; by a finely tuned, brave dignity in which she wrapped herself. She dimmed the field of energy in which she usually moved and turned it inward, so that it was obvious—but never immediately or painfully obvious—that she was suffering from an unspoken sorrow with which she would trouble no one. Now she dressed in black at all times: quiet, serious, expensive, indecently becoming black. The only jewelry she wore had been her parents’ wedding present, a glorious double strand of Burmese pearls, graduated from twelve to nineteen millimeters, each perfectly round globe radiating a matchless luster, and of course, the widow’s necessary ornament, a modest, plain wedding band she longed to throw in the garbage. As soon as Maxi found herself alone at home she changed immediately into old jeans and worn T-shirts but she never left the house unless she was raven-clad from head to toe, even if she were going to the country in black pants and a black silk blouse. Maxi used her makeup skills to achieve a delicious pallor, she threw away her collection of blushers and lipsticks and concentrated on demurely darkening the area around her eyes with smoky grays and taupes. If only India were around to appreciate her efforts, she thought longingly, as she staged her effects.

  Just as Maxi forbade herself her belly laugh she made a rule never to talk about herself. Instead she grew adept at drawing people out on their all-time favorite subject: themselves. She learned to subtly sidestep all questions about her private life and automatically refused two out of every three of her many invitations—for the sardines had worked marvelously well—in order to stay home with Angelica. Although she was deeply, constantly tempted, she never went so far as to tell anyone that Rocco Cipriani was dead—stone-cold dead—but she never referred to a former husband, or a previous marriage.

  Since the length of time people bother to remember details of each other’s private lives in Manhattan is determined by how much fuel is flung on the fire, Maxi achieved established widowhood within a year, by her twenty-first birthday.

  It was not a widowhood without distractions. She took with utmost discretion, a baker’s dozen of lovers, in not too rapid succession; each one impeccable, eligib
le, eager to marry her and free of any problems presented by an alliance with a man who might not understand that her money was her own to spend as she liked. Yet not one of them had seemed somehow necessary enough to keep longer than a few months. Maxi became convinced that she’d never fall in love again and the thought, although melancholy, was balanced by the freedom it gave her. She had become, she flattered herself, an updated Henry James heroine, a woman with a past that was only dimly known; whose present was tantalizingly private yet illuminated by the blaze of her independence, her family, her fortune, and—why not be blunt—her face; a woman whose future held infinite promise.

  One fragrant August in 1978, Maxi drifted toward the entrance to the Casino in Monte Carlo. She idled along alone in the darkness, relaxed in the knowledge that the principality had one policeman for every five visitors and every woman could safely wear all her jewelry in public on the darkest street of the little city. In her bones she felt there was a lucky seat at the chemin de fer table just waiting for her but she wasn’t in a hurry to get into the action.

  This was Maxi’s first evening in Monte Carlo and literally the first time in her life that she was utterly free to come and go as she pleased, alone and on her own, unquestioned, unaccounted for and accountable to no one. Her parents were in Southampton. Rocco had finally been able to arrange matters at the magazine so that he had August off and he had taken Angelica to visit his parents in the country outside of Hartford.

  Maxi had refused a number of proposals to be a house-guest or to join traveling friends, and quietly reserved a suite for herself at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, a corner suite, majestically proportioned, with a great semicircular balcony off the sitting room from which she had watched the sunset. Far below her she could see the crowded port of Monte Carlo; beyond it on a jutting, rocky promontory, rose the palace and beyond the palace was the remarkable sky, meeting the remarkable sea on which dozens of pleasure craft were coming into the harbor. There was no hint from the view from Maxi’s suite that every week one more of the charming Edwardian villas that, for so long, were the enchantment of the city, was demolished, each to be replaced by yet another, Miami-modern high-rise apartment building; no hint that every last square inch of Grimaldi territory was being exploited with an unsentimental thoroughness that was far more Swiss than Mediterranean.