I'll Take Manhattan

by Judith Krantz

  “Lily, the magazines are all doing well … at the moment … but the reality of 1985 publishing economics will include great increases in paper costs and much higher distribution expenses. That doesn’t have to mean that we’ll make less money next year than we did this year, but it makes it a damn sight more difficult. Right now our profit-and-loss statement, our balance sheet, is still perfectly healthy. I can’t begin to imagine how much money you could get tomorrow for Amberville Publications—a great deal. However, in a few years … who knows? I don’t have a crystal ball, and I hate like hell to see you chained to something that doesn’t even interest you, even if Maxi is infatuated by it to the point of …”

  “Maxi?” Lily questioned. “What’s she up to now?”

  “Nothing for you to worry about—a little of her usual overenthusiasm. I’ll manage Maxi, darling, so that she doesn’t get burnt. Of course, if you sold, the children would all be able to realize their inheritances.”

  “But what about you, Cutter? Are you trying to say that you don’t want to be in the magazine business? That you wished you hadn’t left Booker?”

  “If it’s what you need, my love, then I’m more than willing to stick it out. I never wanted to join Zachary, you know that. He suggested it a dozen times but I always refused. However, since that phone call from UBC today, coming out of the blue, I’ve been asking myself if it weren’t some kind of sign, some kind of … turning point … something to which we should pay attention.”

  “Sign? Sign of what?”

  “A new life. A life for us together, without being tied down to worrying every month about page rate increases and the rising cost of pension plans and the million and one other details involved in Amberville Publications. You could sell, darling, if you wanted to. And then we’d both be free. There wouldn’t be anything in the entire world you couldn’t do. You could have your own ballet company … no?… we could spend the best months of the year in England, we could buy the most wonderful house in the South of France, we could start to become serious collectors of everything you love. Oh, Lily, there’s got to be more to life than my sitting in an office in New York, able to be with you only after a long day’s work is done. But it’s not my stock, it’s not my company, it’s for you to decide if you’re even interested in the possibility. That’s why I had to talk to you about that phone call. Business, ‘boring’ business, if you will, but I could hardly keep it a secret.”

  “No, no, you couldn’t,” Lily said slowly.

  “Think about it, darling, or don’t think about it. It’s entirely up to you. You’ve given as much of your blood and your heart to Amberville Publications as anyone possibly could, and perhaps you should keep on that way. I only want to see you happy.”

  “I will think about it. I promise. It’s not something … I could decide about right away … is it? No, of course not.”

  “It’s important to take all the time you need, Lily. It’s a very serious step,” Cutter answered, and rose to make himself another gin and tonic.

  Amberville Publications, he thought, Amberville Publications, that enormous creation of his hated brother, would soon be just another item on the balance sheet of a giant conglomerate; its identity lost, its key employees scattered, its real estate sold, and, most important, Zachary Amberville himself quickly forgotten, with the disappearance of his name. Within a matter of years it would only evoke a nod of recognition from a few people with long memories. Thank God he was still young enough to wipe out Amberville Publications, to fling it to the winds, to rid himself of its hold, to be free of his brother at last, to destroy what was left of him. As for UBC, he’d call its president tomorrow and make a lunch date, find out if they really were in the market. There were dozens of potential suitors out there. That much was absolutely true. He had foreseen this day when he’d shut down publication of all the magazines that were losing money. All except one.

  “You know, Justin, it isn’t easy being fashion editor of a magazine that exists to tell women that they’re just fine the way they are. Fashion is what hasn’t been seen before, damnation. Fashion pages should make you itch to buy.”

  Julie spoke rebelliously but her voice was like a slightly electrified love song. Her infatuation with Justin had reached the point where she could list each separate and virtually identical piece of clothes he wore, she could even tell each of his three Nikons apart. She knew when he’d cut his nails. Every detail of the man was under her constant but imperceptible scrutiny and the very fact that her emotions seemed to be unreciprocated made them more profound. If Justin had shown a lively interest there would have had to be a progression, for better or worse, in their relationship. She would have been miserable, or in some stage of happiness. But in the weeks they’d worked together he treated her with a pleasant and maddeningly un-fraught mixture of friendliness and working cooperation that Julie Jacobson of Shaker Heights, who had never, since first grade, failed to get her man, no longer regarded as a challenge. It had become a painful longing for some sign that they might have a future.

  “Do you wish you were on a conventional magazine?” Justin asked idly. “Do you regret not taking that job at Redbook?”

  “Never. But this idea … I mean after all, imagine a whole fashion feature that tells about why you should never, ever throw away your favorite bathing suit? How am I going to explain that to Cole and Gottex and O.M.O. Kamali and all the other bathing suit manufacturers who’ve given us ads?”

  “Explain Maxi’s theory—that when a woman feels good about herself, after she’s read an issue of B&B, she’s got to react to their advertising in a positive way, even if the editorial material doesn’t make the reader believe that she has to rush out and spend money just to survive the weekend.”

  “Do you believe that? Or is it just Maxi?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do too. Basic, acquisitive human nature will take care of the shopping instinct and B&B will put women in the right mood to pay attention to the advertising.”

  Justin surveyed his studio, the first he’d ever had, with well-hidden consternation. He’d always shot on location before, traveling light with just a couple of duffel bags and camera cases, but in order to turn out the work Maxi asked of him for B&B he’d rented a studio with all the infinite variety of equipment it contained, and hired the necessary assistants to answer the phone, work in the darkroom, and help him with lights and props. Of course it was all paid for by B&B but it was the first time in his life that he’d had the impression of being attached to a particular place of work. It made him uneasy and restless, but since he’d taken a proprietary interest in the success of B&B, he couldn’t just disappear again until he was sure that Maxi had managed to get the magazine off the ground and running smoothly. Or until it turned out to be a failure. And either possibility, he thought, was still very alive. He was used to Maxi’s new projects, he’d observed the frenetic pace of her life, the ceaseless search for something that was more fun than the last thing, and he was far from convinced that she had the staying power to do more than launch a magazine. She’d probably be sick of the thing in six months.

  No one, he often thought, understood her better than he did, for he was like her. He too had never found whatever it was that could tempt him to settle down and stick around. He too was an impermanent person with few long-lasting attachments. He had loved his father deeply and his death had been a tragedy to Justin. He would always miss Zachary Amberville, yet they had rarely had intimate conversations. Justin had avoided them and Zachary, understanding, hadn’t sought them out, hadn’t forced them on him. There had been a mutual but unspoken understanding between the two of them that Justin’s desire for privacy must be respected.

  On the other hand, he thought grimly, his mother seemed to have been after his soul from the day he was born. “Justin, come here and talk to me.” Every day when he’d come home from school he’d heard her irresistibly lovely voice, so grave, so poignant, calling to him from her sitting room. There hadn�
��t been any choice but to go in and give her the kiss she reached up for and let her smooth his hair and try, without squirming, to give satisfactory answers to all the questions she persisted in asking him. “How was the math test, Justin? Weren’t you cold in just that sweater? Why didn’t you take your coat? Who’s your best friend this year? And who’s your second best? What about that new boy who moved from Chicago? Do you like him? When do you have to turn in your English paper? If you need any help you can always show it to me, you know that, don’t you?” Her constantly probing, gentle, devoted, poetic voice, wanting to know everything he did, everything he thought.

  He had never told her that he didn’t have a best friend, or a second-best friend, or really any friends he cared about at all because that would only have led to more questions, to concern, to trying to do something about it, when he wanted only to be left in peace to try to deal with his fears of growing up, to learn to live with the idea that there was no one he could count on to solve his problems except himself. Yet he had never refused to lend his presence, never had the heart to turn his back on his mother because he sensed keenly how deeply needy she was, how somehow bereaved, like a young widow, in spite of her beauty and her jewels and her never-ending social life. In her devotion to him Lily was, he knew without words, really begging that he take care of her. And he had done his best.

  Only when he’d discovered the martial arts and started taking lessons, had he managed to spend the late afternoons free of the burden of the maternal emotion that his mother hadn’t shown his sister; a kind of emotion that seemed tinged, even tainted, by a feeling he couldn’t quite define but had learned to hate in spite of his love for her. Almost a kind of … worship. It was because he was the youngest child, he had decided. Maxi had been in constant trouble with their mother and Toby had been so independent, so special, in spite of his slowly approaching blindness, that perhaps he had been the only one left for her to lavish her feelings on … but still he, Justin, had had to bear the particular burden of that special child, the favorite.

  As soon as he knew clearly that B&B was either a failure or a success, he’d be off again, to someplace he’d never been before, resuming the only role in which he’d learned to feel comfortable: that of the inconspicuous observer, a part of every scene, the quiet outsider who nevertheless, because of his camera, was at home everywhere. And nowhere.

  “Justin,” Julie cried, holding up a flowered bikini that could only have been made in the late 1950s, “do you believe this? And it’s still in such perfect shape that it probably never even hit the water.”

  “Maybe most favorite bathing suits don’t,” he said, shrugging.

  “That’s what Maxi says. ‘If a woman ever finds a suit that really flatters her, that hides what she wants to hide and shows off what she wants to show off, she won’t get it wet unless she’s forced to, and even if she gets too fat to wear it, she’ll keep it somewhere, with the idea that eventually she’ll fit into it again,’ ” Julie quoted. “Maxi is just encouraging magical thinking, if you ask me,” Julie added in disapproval.

  “Whatever you think, love, we’ve still got those dozen old suits to shoot. How many models did you book?”

  “Three girls and two dozen boys.”

  “You’re mad. Why so many boys?”

  “That was Maxi’s idea too. Each girl is going to have a big bunch of assorted guys around her, darting flattering looks,” Julie said tartly. She hadn’t had time to go wholesale for an entire week, thanks to the hunt for ancient bathing suits.

  “What are you putting the boys into?”

  “I have four dozen identical—objects—from Ralph Lauren Bodywear in a million different colors. Identical but not exactly old-fashioned. I don’t know if they’re bathing suits or underwear but they don’t waste fabric, do they?” Julie held up just enough of a garment to cover a man’s pelvis and give him something to put his legs through. “Bellybutton City. It’s a disgrace. We’re encouraging women not to buy new suits and men are allowed to parade around all but naked.”

  “Where are we going to put that mob?”

  “The girls get the dressing room to themselves—what with the hairdressers and makeup people they need all that space—the boys will just have to use your office, Justin. This studio isn’t big enough.”

  “How often do you book twenty-seven models at the same time?” he asked reasonably.

  “This is a first, but I still think you should find someplace with a second dressing room.”

  “I probably will,” said Justin, knowing he wouldn’t. He had chosen the studio precisely because it demanded improvisation. This interior space set aside exclusively for his work made him nervous. The smaller it was the better, the less likely to seem to be a commitment or an announcement that he had come to stay. This place was only rented on a month-to-month basis, although Maxi had given him a free hand. His own office contained little more than a desk, a chair, a phone and a couch where he could flop and relax after a session was over.

  The girls all arrived at once and Justin looked them over critically. Julie had booked them for the neutrality of their good looks. They were beautiful but not too beautiful. Their hair was new—no Farrah Fawcett flowing manes—but not so short as to be alarming, and the two makeup men had been instructed not to try anything outrageously different with their faces. “No pink eyelids and no blue lipsticks,” Julie had ordered. “We’re not trying to sell any one of those awful new looks in cosmetics. We’re trying for your average American woman if she knew how to put on basic makeup.”

  The three girls passed his inspection and as the two dozen anonymously handsome male models started to arrive, while the girls were being made ready, he busied himself with his cameras. Like many photographers, he never let his assistant touch the cameras before a shoot, and only permitted him to reload film while he was working. Soon the first girl was ready, and for the next half hour Justin, Julie and the models all worked steadily, yet without managing to achieve the certain rhythm that would make each girl, surrounded by a dozen almost unclad men, look perfectly at ease.

  “Wet them down, Julie,” Justin finally said.

  “Why?”

  “They’re still too stiff. Bathing suits indoors look posed and that’s no good. There are some buckets in the darkroom. Boys, some of you go and fill the buckets with water and we’ll try it that way.”

  “Are we going to get wet?” one of the girls asked in disbelief. “Nobody at the agency said anything about water. I’m going to call my booker.”

  “Relax, I’m just wetting down the boys,” Justin said curtly. He wished he were back on some unknown street in some unknown city, free to take a picture or not, instead of here with twenty-seven of the most expensive-per-hour bodies in the United States, each refusing to flow naturally, the way real people did in real surroundings. The Ganges, that’s where he could shoot them. In fact it would be a pleasure to push them all in and hold them under for a while. Meanwhile he’d have to make do.

  The water did the trick. It loosened them up as nothing else could have, turned them all into kids again, dumping buckets of water on each other and on themselves in a competition to get wetter than anyone else, creating the illusion of a swimming pool or beach that no amount of props could have achieved.

  Jon, a male model with shaggy dark red hair and a grin full of animal vitality, was the ringleader. It was he who threw the first bucket of water on one of the female models. “Don’t you dare!” she shrieked, and received another bucket of water over her head. After that it became a free-for-all, the two dozen boys and three girls awash, forgetting the camera totally, the hairdressers standing by shaking their heads but not discontented, since they could still be paid their usual seven hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Julie, at a nod from Justin, pulled out each dripping girl when he’d finished a shot and took her to change her suit, not an easy job on a wet body. She should have booked a dozen girls or at least brought towels, she thought, but who had antici
pated a water fight?

  Finally the sitting was over, all the wet suits were collected, the girls had been blotted with paper towels and dried down by the blow dryers and everyone including the assistants had been sent home. Julie looked wearily around the studio, pleased with what she knew would be an exciting set of pictures.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll get it cleaned up tomorrow. Go on home, Julie,” Justin said gently.

  “I should stay, but …”

  “Don’t be silly, you’re beat. Out, love, out.”

  Finally alone, pushing aside sheets of wet and dirty paper, Justin put his cameras away carefully. He opened the closed door of his office, wondering what kind of shambles the boys had left it in.

  “You took your sweet time, Justin. I thought you were lost.” Jon, his red hair still slightly damp, sat behind the desk, his bad-boy grin appearing as he saw Justin enter. He looked as much at ease behind the desk as if it belonged to him.

  “Couldn’t you find your clothes?” Justin asked quietly, his composed tone belying his stance, the posture of a man trained and ready to defend himself.

  “They’re exactly where I left them when I came in.”

  “Do you enjoy sitting around in a wet bathing suit?” he said sharply.

  “I’m not. I took it off.” Jon smiled again and stretched, as lazily as a big jungle cat.

  “You can’t be comfortable,” Justin said, his expression tightly vigilant. “And that happens to be my chair.”

  “I’d be more comfortable on the couch, as a matter of fact,” Jon answered, but made no move to stand up.

  “I’m sure you would be,” Justin said, as if decoding the statement with his deepest concentration. “But what makes you think that I want you there?”

  “Justin,” Jon mocked him, half reproachfully, “do you think I don’t know what you want? Do you think I don’t know how much you want me? On the couch or on the floor or anywhere you can have me? Do you think I don’t know what you wish you could do to me, what I need—and intend—to do to you? Do you think I’m stupid?”