“I don’t get it,” Angelica said.
“You will, after Don Johnson explains it to you,” Maxi assured her.
17
Paper cuts. Nothing helps paper cuts. There is no unguent or pill known to medicine that relieves the tiny but maddeningly painful presence of dozens of paper cuts on every fingertip. Backache. Nothing helps backache except a change of position, exercise and massage, so, if your work requires you to handle many pieces of paper while maintaining a certain back-straining position, you learned to endure backache and paper cuts. Eyestrain. When things got blurry you went to the bathroom and held a cold, wet washcloth over your eyelids, put in a few eye drops and returned to the task because the only thing that would remove eyestrain was to stop work, and that wasn’t possible. Not until the dummy was done, because without the dummy B&B wouldn’t be real.
“I suppose,” Maxi said wearily to Angelica who was hovering over her anxiously, “this has built my character.” She pushed the dummy aside, got up from her desk and flopped down flat on the carpet of her bedroom.
“You were perfect the way you were,” Angelica retorted. She was so accustomed to feeling slightly superior to her screwball of a mother that this new serious incarnation, which of course couldn’t possibly last longer than any other of Maxi’s fads, was a little frightening. It had all started when she’d canceled that trip to Venice … nothing had been the same since. It couldn’t possibly last more than another week, she thought. True, Maxi had stuck it out in the Border Country of Scotland for almost two years as Countess of Kirkgordon but this was different; that had been a marriage and this was just a magazine. Angelica shivered, remembering the biting winds of the moors, the drafts at Castle Dread, and then smiled, thinking kindly of her loony second stepfather. Had Ma understood he was nuts? Nicely nuts?
“When will it be finished, Ma?”
“What do you mean ‘when’? Can’t you tell it’s finished now?” Maxi asked indignantly. “Why do you suppose I’ve stopped working? Could you please rub my back? Please, please rub my back. Walk on it in your bare feet, do something about my back, Angelica, if you love me.”
“You’re lying on your back. Turn over.”
“I can’t. I don’t have the strength.”
“Ma, come on, just roll over.”
“I will, in a minute. Angelica, isn’t it gorgeous? Don’t you think my dummy is fabulous?”
Angelica took a look at the object she had grown to loathe. It didn’t look any different from the way it had in her mother’s first four attempts at making a dummy. It was hugely fat and bulgy and sloppy and exceptionally uninviting to the eye. Just looking at it, she felt that it would fall apart if she touched it. Obscurely it reminded Angelica of school. She was sure she’d made something very much like it in third grade, only smaller and a great deal more attractive.
“It’s awesome, Ma, really awesome. I like the red cover. That’s a very nice, bright red, definitely eye-catching.”
Maxi rolled over, groaning, and looked squarely at her daughter. “What’s wrong with it?” she demanded.
“Nothing’s wrong with it, honestly. It’s hot, I mean I don’t know what a dummy is supposed to look like anyway so I don’t have any basis for comparison, but the cover is a great red … a humpy red.”
Maxi stood up and went over to the desk on which the dummy sat.
“It looks like shit,” she said quietly. “A bundle of red shit. And it’s the best I can fucking do.”
“Ma!”
“I’m sorry, Angelica, but I’m not employing any words you don’t know … and use, from time to time.”
“It’s not your language, Ma, it’s what you said. You’ve worked so hard. It’s got to be good. You couldn’t be wrong about it—you’re just tired. You’re not a fair judge.”
“You don’t have to be a judge of shit. When you see it you know it. I need help. Specifically I need an art director. Who’s the best art director in the world, Angelica?”
“Why ask silly questions that you know the answer to as well as I do?”
“Who can always get your father on the phone, at any time of day or night?”
“Me, but you wouldn’t want me to ask him to help you! You’ve always said you wouldn’t ask him for a crust of bread if you were dying of hunger or a sip of water if you were dying of thirst.”
“I don’t want bread or water. I want the best art director in the world.”
“Would you settle for second best … please?”
“Angelica, that’s unworthy of you.”
“Well then, call him and ask him yourself. The two of you always talk on the phone. What’s the big deal?”
“We only talk about you, Angelica, and who is going to pick you up, and where and when. We never talk about anything else, not even the weather.”
“That’s too dumb for words.”
“But that’s the way it is.”
“Well. I don’t approve. And I’m late for my guitar lesson. Adults!” Angelica said in disgust and disappeared so quickly that when Maxi went running after her, all she saw were the doors of the elevator closing swiftly and soundlessly on the brown and beige carpet of the corridor.
Maxi marched back to her room, not bothering even to glance into any of the many rooms of her new apartment, each one so expensively appointed by Bizet and Ludwig, each one filled with the collection of furniture and paintings and sculpture she had tracked down all over the world, hundreds of quickly purchased objects that had seemed necessary to her until the minute she owned them. She hadn’t used any room of the apartment except her bedroom since she’d started work on the dummy a week ago. She’d had her meals standing up in the kitchen, eating whatever the new cook had seen fit to leave for her in the fridge and returning to work immediately with a quick wave to Angelica if her daughter happened to be home.
Her lips tight—talk about the ingratitude of children!—she dialed the number of Cipriani, Lefkowitz and Kelly. Rocco’s secretary told her that Mr. Cipriani was in a meeting with some gentlemen from General Foods and couldn’t possibly be disturbed. And after that he was due at Avedon’s studio. A Calvin Klein commercial.
“But this is an emergency, Miss Haft,” Maxi explained. She was put through immediately.
“What’s happened to Angelica?” Rocco demanded, in alarm.
“She’s fine. Impossible but fine.”
“Then … why did you call?” he asked coldly.
“Rocco, I need your help.”
“Something has happened to Angelica! Damn it, Maxi …”
“Rocco, your daughter is in perfect mental and physical health. But I have to have your professional assistance on a business matter and I need it fast. When can you come here? I can’t bring it to your office. You’ll understand when you see it.”
“Maxi, whatever it is you ‘have to have,’ get it from somebody else.”
“No.”
“I’m in a meeting. Goodbye.”
“Rocco—if you don’t come to my house and help me I’m going to … to … put Angelica on the pill.”
“She’s only eleven, for Christ’s sake!”
“Ah, but soon she’ll be twelve and she’s awfully mature—you know how precocious she is. Girls are ready for motherhood much earlier these days and with your rampaging Latin blood in her, well, anything might happen. Better safe than sorry. Have you read the latest statistics on teenage pregnancies? I remember when I was her age …” Maxi’s voice trailed off, full of improvised memories.
“Tonight at nine.” Rocco hung up without another word.
Humming happily, Maxi called her masseuse and made an appointment. Hilda would be over within a half hour. Then a long bath—she could wash her hair in the shower and take a nice nap. Why, she wondered, did men make life so difficult for themselves? If they would only always be pleasant and agreeable and helpful. But no, their characters were such that they simply forced you to employ alternative means of persuasion. It went against her bet
ter nature not to be direct, but in an emergency you had to use whatever methods were available. Angelica didn’t even like boys. It would be another, oh, at least six years before they had to think about the pill. Or perhaps she’d want to remain a virgin until she married. Virginity was coming back in. Maxi picked up her yellow pad and wrote absently, “Try Celibacy and See, by Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase.”
“It’s a what?” Rocco said incredulously, staring at the red heap.
“You heard me the first time. I want you to fix it and I want it to be the most beautiful fucking dummy ever made on the face of the earth,” Maxi said in a businesslike tone.
“I don’t do dummies anymore, Maxi. I believe you’re aware of that fact,” he said, shaking with rage. This rotten bitch needed a good spanking so badly that it made his teeth ache just thinking about it. To think that he had once married a creature so evil, so low, so utterly vile. So selfish, so self-centered, so … to say nothing of using outright blackmail. How Angelica managed to be as lovable, as perfect as she was, coming from a mother like this, was a miracle of the supremacy of his own gene pool. No wonder he’d never even been tempted to marry again. This—this disgrace to her gender would turn any man against marriage for life.
“Why the hell should I do it?” he asked. “There are dozens of guys I can recommend who can turn that thing into a dummy. There’s no mystery to it.”
“Because you’ll do a better job,” Maxi said inexorably.
“Better by a few degrees, maybe, but what difference does it make? What counts is what’s in the magazine, not just the dummy. People aren’t fooled by a pretty page, they look for content.”
“The content is O.K. I didn’t ask you for help on the content, only on the presentation.”
“Just like that, hm? O.K.? All from your little brain? Would it interest you to know that Time, Inc. has a super high-powered magazine-development group working on new ideas? They’ve got eighteen top people, including Stolley who founded People and Fier from Rolling Stone plus seventeen free-lancers and fifteen business types all working like crazy with a budget of over three million a year? Fifty people, headed by Marshall Loeb who made a success of Money, the best brains Time could buy. They’ve already got a finished dummy on something called Women’s Week and another called Investors Weekly, plus a number of others with covers and boards? What do you say to that?”
“It doesn’t bother me. I don’t believe in committees. Henry Luce probably didn’t believe in committees either, when he was alive. My father didn’t believe in committees. Do you have all night to sit around talking shop, Rocco, or do you want to get started on my dummy?” Maxi said evenly. Her ruffled, artfully messed hair remained firmly on her head and Rocco couldn’t see her scalp prickling in horror. What if one of Time, Inc.’s brain trust had come up with her concept?
“I’m leaving here as soon as I’ve talked to Angelica about the pill and what taking it too young can do to her.”
“Don’t bother,” Maxi said indignantly. “I’d never let her near it, you ass. You never did know when I was joking, that was your problem. One of the many. Anyway tonight is the night Angelica is allowed to watch MTV and she won’t like to be disturbed.” She went over to the dummy, picked it up and thrust it into Rocco’s arms so quickly that he automatically held on to it.
“Shit!”
“I know, that’s why I need you. Sit down, and read it.”
“I’ll give you three minutes, you lying bitch. And only because Angelica knows I’m here and you’d bad-mouth me if I don’t look at this mess. What the hell is B&B? That stinks for openers. It’s a brand name of an after-dinner drink made by monks, not a magazine name,” Rocco puffed, struggling with the floppy mass.
He sat down at Maxi’s desk, put the thing on the desktop, and began leafing rapidly through the pages. Maxi held her breath, watching him closely for the sign of any reaction. She had not actually laid eyes on Rocco for over four years. When Angelica was seven she had been quite grown-up enough to be picked up and delivered from Maxi’s apartment to Rocco’s apartment by one or the other of them, or by Elie, without their having to have the slightest contact. Christ, she thought, the mistakes a girl can make because a man is impossibly beautiful. He looks almost exactly as he did when I first saw him and it just simply couldn’t matter less … it’s as if he were invisible. He has as little appeal as a bottle of gin does to someone who’s been in A.A. for twenty years. I wonder when he’ll start losing his hair and getting fat? It’s inevitable, just a question of time. There must be something fundamentally wrong with him anyway, all those girls he sees, the ones Angelica talks about, and he hasn’t managed to settle down. Yet he’s thirty-six if he’s a day. He’ll be a sad, lonely old bachelor soon … bad for Angelica because old bachelors die young. Why isn’t he reacting? He looked right through the Kissinger article with all those blissfully snooty pictures of Nancy, and didn’t even blink, the son of a bitch. He just doesn’t want to give me the satisfaction. Well, I don’t give a fart about his opinion … B&B is for women, not sell-out magazine men who’ve lowered themselves to make commercials. I’m glad he’s successful, for Angelica’s sake, but obviously the bugger couldn’t possibly enjoy his life, not with that pinched, set look he’s got on his face.
Rocco flipped through the dummy, came to the end and slapped his hand down on it, closing it firmly, and pushing it away.
“How much is this going to sell for?”
“Rocco! You mean it has a chance? Oh, Rocco! You’d never have asked me that if you didn’t think it was good.” Maxi jumped up and down, more relieved than she could have believed possible.
“It has a certain … quality. I don’t mean it has ‘quality,’ God knows, I mean there’s something catchy about it … a reflection of your twisted mind. It might sell a few copies.”
“I want it to sell for a dollar fifty.”
“You’re raving. Much too cheap.”
“That’s what People costs, and everyone buys it.”
“Maxi, I really don’t like to break this news to you but you’re talking about one of the biggest-circulation books in the country and it sits at the supermarket checkout counters at point-of-sale where women just automatically put it into their shopping carts.”
“That’s where B&B will be,” Maxi said calmly. “It’s meant for the same audience, plus the Cosmo audience and the Good House audience. Women, Rocco, women. There are a lot of women in this country who will buy a magazine that likes them just the way they are, a magazine that they can have fun with, a magazine that guarantees a good time.”
“Where’d you steal that concept?” Rocco demanded.
“Oh, it just came to me. One day. Out of the blue.”
“For a buck fifty you have to have enormous circulation—at least four—no, make that five million, to make money. And ads and more ads. You’re living in a dream. You haven’t even got a distributor, I’ll bet.”
“I wouldn’t take your money,” Maxi said with dignity. “I’m quite aware that it’s a crapshoot, but then I like to gamble. I’m not interested in special groups; Bon Appétit this isn’t … I’m going for the mass market and if it doesn’t work, well, back to the drawing board.”
“Big talk, big talk. Whose money are you going to be losing? Lily’s?”
“I don’t intend to lose. Now let’s stop haggling. I want you to make this dollar-fifty magazine look like a million. You can do it with graphics even if the paper isn’t up to Town & Country standards, even if the binding is perfected instead of saddled. Think of it as a chance to do your tricks with white space again, to do the things you used to do without General Foods and General Motors getting into your act. Freedom, Rocco. I’m offering you complete artistic freedom! You can be honest again. I’m doing you a favor, Rocco, although you don’t seem to realize it. In fact, you might show a little gratitude.”
“Bitch!”
“But you can’t resist this challenge, can you?”
“Easi
ly. I’ll send you a first-class free-lancer. I’ve got forty major clients to service. What kind of megalomania does it take for you to think that I have time to diddle around with the dummy of a new magazine—it’s a huge job.”
“No, I want you.”
“You still think you can have everything you want, don’t you? It’s really extraordinary, it’s almost admirable, to be so stuck in the past, like the survival of some prehistoric animal, still breathing even though it’s up to its ears in ooze.”
“Have it your way,” Maxi sighed. “Just send me somebody really good. Oh, and Rocco, before you go, I have some brochures to show you.”
“Brochures? What about?”
“Swiss boarding schools. There are about a half-dozen good ones. It’s time Angelica went away to school. It’s not just for the French and the skiing. She’s subject to all sorts of bad influences in the city. I don’t have to tell you that they sell pot and LSD and angel dust in the playgrounds. And the kids she knows are too hip. She really should be in Switzerland. You can see her in the summer—when she is not at camp—even go over for Christmas, if you miss her.”
“You … you …” He was wordless with rage. He’d kill the creature.
“Oh, I am pleased that you changed your mind,” Maxi said, cooing. “When can I expect the finished product?”
“In three shakes of a lamb’s tail,” he said, between his clenched teeth.
“What exactly does that mean? A week? Two weeks?”
“I’ll show you,” Rocco screamed and grabbed her, turned her upside down on her bed and smacked her as hard as he could on her bottom. “One,” he shouted, “and two.” He hit her again. “And three!”
“Coward,” Maxi panted, and tried to punch him in the balls. He grunted and hit her again, falling on the bed from her strong blow which had landed on one knee. Maxi grabbed his hair and pulled it as viciously as she could while he tried to gain a purchase on the mattress to give her a shaking that would break her spine. She slithered away just before his hands could close on her shoulders, did a sort of semi-jackknife and grabbed his penis firmly in both hands. He went totally immobile. God knew what she might do, starting with emasculation. Neither of them moved a muscle, waiting in a silence broken only by their breathing, for the next move. The silence grew longer and, to his utter disgust, Rocco felt his penis hardening in Maxi’s unrelenting grip. Harder and harder. There was nothing on earth he could do to stop the damn thing from reacting. He tried mightily to pull away but she had him too tightly. After half a minute it became slightly less important to get out of her hands, and as soon as she felt the change in him she used one of her hands to unzip his fly while, with the other, her grip changed from that of a prison warden to that of a woman, opening and closing her fingers around him in a rhythm he’d never been able to resist.
I'll Take Manhattan Page 30