“Just what gave you that idea about me?” Justin asked, the menace with which he always moved more in evidence than ever, without his having to take a step in any direction.
“Nothing you said, nothing about the way you look, or walk or talk. Nothing ‘gave’ me that idea … I know it. I have very good instincts.”
“Do you? Are you really sure? Or aren’t you just trying it on for size? Something you pull with any photographer on the off-chance that you’ll be right? And that there’ll be something in it for you?”
“I don’t want anything, Justin, except the same thing you’re aching for. I love it, just as much as you do, only, unlike you, I’m not afraid to ask. I’ve been hurting for you since I walked in here … it wasn’t easy not letting it show in that bathing suit. I’m so hard now, Justin, I’m as hard as I’ve ever been before, and so are you. I can see just how much you want me all the way from behind this desk. So come here and stop playing games. Come, give it to me, Justin. Any way that makes you happy. Any way, anything—I can take it all.”
Wordlessly, Justin moved toward Jon, wordlessly and willingly.
20
“The trouble with you, Maxime, is that you’re too impulsive,” Lily said, her opal eyes narrowing as she inspected her daughter with her familiar air of withheld criticism.
“Mother, I know I have a history of recklessness and I’m not proud of it, I promise you, but B&B is something absolutely different. It’s not fair of you to assume that this is just another toy until you’ve seen how I mean to make it work. Look, I’ve brought you the dummy of the first issue so that you can see for yourself.” Eagerly, Maxi held the dummy out to Lily.
“No, Maxime, I can’t judge anything from looking at that. I’ve never been a clever judge of magazines, particularly new ones. Even your father had to admit that, try as he would. Put it back in your attaché case, dear, so you don’t forget it here when you leave.”
“Please, Mother, just take a quick look. It might make you laugh,” Maxi pleaded. Somehow she had to reach Lily. Since her return from Europe they had barely seen each other. Maxi had been too busy to meet her mother for the occasional lunch and ballet matinee that had, over the years, developed as the easiest and least abrasive way of maintaining their relationship. Today, however, she’d had to make time to accept her mother’s unmistakable summons to come for tea, the one resolutely British ritual that Lily had maintained since she’d arrived in Manhattan more than thirty years ago.
“I’d prefer not to, dear. Of course I’ll read it when it’s properly printed, but until then I’d rather wait. I’m hoping for a pleasant surprise. The reason I asked you to interrupt your work today, Maxime, is that I’ve been giving some thought to Amberville Publications recently and I was curious to find out just how much money is being spent on this sudden whim of yours … this notion that you have turned into a publisher, or an editor, or whatever it is you think you are.”
“Do you mean Cutter hasn’t told you?” Maxi asked, astonished. It had been several days since her interview with Cutter in his office and she had assumed that he would have told her mother the whole story.
“No. As a matter of fact he was very vague about it. It seemed to me that he was avoiding the subject. That’s precisely what made me wonder what was going on, wonder if there weren’t something in the air—something between you—that I should know about.”
“ ‘In the air’? You mean am I having a problem with Cutter? Is that what you mean?”
“Precisely,” Lily answered, pouring Maxi another cup of tea.
“We’re having a bit of a hassle, Mother. He thinks that I’m spending too much money and I know that I can’t spend a penny less and hope to have a success. If I stop now all the start-up money will be a total loss. It’s either do it right or not at all and I haven’t been able to make him understand that. Father would have known exactly what I’m doing. It’s only fair to say that I haven’t been exactly tactful with Cutter—in fact, not tactful at all—but Mother, he’s just not a magazine person, he’s got a Wall Street balance-sheet mentality. That’s natural considering that he’s always been an investment banker but it makes a reasonable conversation impossible with him. If Father …”
“Maxime, your father is dead. Your problem with Cutter stems from your personal resentment of him, an illogical grudging resistance that’s made me very unhappy, a problem that doesn’t come from any lack of knowledge or interest on his part.”
“Mother, it’s not that at all …”
“Just one minute, Maxime. Let me finish. I’ve tried to understand your deep … antagonism … toward Cutter. I know that anyone at all who presumed to come into my life after your father died would have aroused those primitive feelings in you. You always were a daddy’s girl and you’ll never get over it.” An old, familiar bitterness had crept into Lily’s voice, into that voice she kept under such delicate control; the voice that told Maxi that her mother was entitled to everything she wanted without having to even ask for it.
“You don’t appreciate what Cutter means to me,” Lily continued, “or, if by some miracle you do, you don’t care. I’m fifty years old, Maxime, and in January I’ll be fifty-one. I’m sure you think that I’m too old to be concerned with my emotions. What must fifty seem to you, at twenty-nine, with most of your life ahead of you and a past that wasn’t exactly uneventful? At twenty-nine what can you even guess of my feelings?”
“For God’s sake, Mother, fifty isn’t old! And I’m not stupid enough to think that you don’t have a heart and a body. Give me some credit at least. Maybe fifty sounded old to you when you were my age, but times have changed.” Maxi put her cup of tea down in such agitation that Lily flinched when the porcelain hit the table.
“Times have changed, but only in principle. Human nature remains the same,” Lily continued relentlessly. “And it’s human nature to classify your own mother as a bloodless antique. It’s inescapable, although, heaven knows, you’ve tried to avoid it with Angelica and so far you’ve succeeded. You’re so breathtakingly unpredictable that she just participates in your life and you take that for granted—she’s the tail to your comet. But one day she’ll classify you too, Maxime, mark my words.”
“How did Angelica get into this conversation?” Maxi said, deeply annoyed. “I thought you wanted to talk about the money I’m spending on B&B.”
“One day, Maxime, you’ll know what it feels like to be young forever in the trap of a body that grows older no matter what you do to preserve it,” Lily continued as if Maxi hadn’t answered her. “I look at the models in the fashion magazines and I think, ah, yes, now—but in twenty years those photographs will be unendurable. To have been beautiful is a life sentence, not a blessing. To have been anything wonderful that you’ve lost …”
“Mother, you’re getting morbid. You are beautiful, you were beautiful, you will always be beautiful. What does it have to do with this tea party?”
“I should have known it was hopeless.” Lily sighed and ran her hands over her smooth, heavy chignon. “I’ve been trying to explain something about Cutter and me, but your insensitivity, as usual, makes it difficult. Well, Maxime, how much is this whole magazine business costing?”
“I can’t give you a final figure, not yet. Because it will cost one amount if it works and a very different amount if it doesn’t.”
“Then just tell me how much you’ve spent so far.”
“Somewhere close to five million dollars has been committed, over the next six months.”
“Is that a normal amount of money to spend before you know the results of your venture?”
“Absolutely. In fact it’s on the low side. Take Mort Zuckerman for example. He’s poured eight million into The Atlantic and doesn’t expect to see a profit for more than a year, and then there’s Gannett’s enormous investment in USA Today, even with that terrific Cathie Black publishing it, and the fortune it took to make Self work …”
“Spare me, Maxime. I can�
�t endure it when you talk numbers like that. You sound like a parrot of your father but at least he knew what he was doing. So you’ve spent five million dollars since you came back from Europe, five million dollars of Amberville Publications’ money.”
“Yes, Mother, I have. Five million and I wouldn’t try to pretend that I’ve finished yet. You won’t regret it, I promise.” If Lily had been studying Maxi’s face she would have recognized Zachary’s expression of eager resolution.
“You promise.” Lily shrugged her shoulders with a movement almost too faint for irony. “Well then, I won’t worry about it anymore. Can I give you another cup of tea?”
“No thanks, Mother. I really have to get back to the office.”
“I understand, dear. Give Angelica my love. If she’s free next week I have ballet tickets on Saturday afternoon.”
“I’m sure she’d love it.” Maxi kissed Lily goodbye. It was no good. It had never been any good. The trouble with you, Maxime, is that you’re insensitive, that you don’t appreciate Cutter, that you are a daddy’s girl, that you want me to care about your work. The trouble with you, Maxime, is you expect too much from your mother.
As Lily rang for the maid to take away the tea tray she thought how wise she had been to have had this interview with Maxime. Her daughter was running true to form. Five million spent and nothing but a dummy to show for it. Lily might not like to talk business but she knew that if Maxi admitted that she’d not finished spending money yet there was no telling how much could be lost. A dangerous toy in the hands of a thoughtless extravagant child, who’d never had to make a penny in her life. Five million dollars thrown out of the window in a matter of a few months. There was no point in getting upset about it, not when Cutter assured her that the balance sheet was still healthy. It was merely a confirmation, if she had actually needed one, that with Zachary dead, the Amberville family should get out of the magazine business.
It wasn’t merely the loss of money, Lily thought, as she walked upstairs to her dressing room, it was the wear and tear on Cutter. It had been typically unselfish of him not to have told her the dismaying details of Maxime’s spending spree. He must have been wild with anger, and yet he hadn’t wanted to disturb her with the maddening account of her daughter’s pretensions. He was consideration itself, almost to a fault. He should have told her. Maxi running berserk as publisher of a magazine, indeed! She scanned her closets critically. How she missed darling Mainbocher. And just who, she asked herself, could tell what Toby and Justin, much as she loved them, would decide to do in the future? Together they owned thirty percent of the Amberville stock. No, thank you, she didn’t want her children for partners. She might not know much about business, Lily thought with the shrewd, self-centered practicality she had always managed to hide from everyone including herself, but she knew that much.
“Get away from here,” the man behind the pushcart snarled at Angelica.
“How come you’re selling leather whips?” she asked him curiously.
“Never mind, kid, just beat it.” Sadomasochistic paraphernalia would never move if brats hung around. This tall one with all that long hair would drive away trade. “Here,” he said, and gave her a dollar. “Go buy yourself a hot dog.”
“Thanks.” Angelica walked away to the Sabrett man directly in front of the entrance to the residential section of Trump Tower. She’d have to bring her gang, the Trump Tower Troops, to visit the pushcart tomorrow. A free hot dog each? Why not? As she ate her hot dog she inspected the various pushcarts on Fifth Avenue. Wallets, belts, scarves, jewelry, all made halfway across the world and laid out on the once-immaculate sidewalk in front of the finest retail stores in the world. The Troops had never seen Fifth Avenue in the days of its glory. That roving gang, who varied from eleven to fifteen members, were the only children who lived in the building, and to them the street vendors were a constant source of amusement and interest, part of their world, a natural counterpoint to their multimillion-dollar apartments.
The Troops knew everything about Trump Tower. They knew how to get through the concealed security booth, manned twenty-four hours a day, which led from the dignified, small, luxurious, basically beige lobby of their building into the vast, six-story-high, pink marble atrium of the building’s retail arcade where a truly marvelous waterfall ran by magic and there was always someone in a tailcoat playing the grand piano in the entrance. Tired New Yorkers gratefully entered to sit down for a while, listen to the familiar songs and perhaps eat a sandwich while in one of the many wildly expensive boutiques only a few floors above them, four-thousand-dollar nightgowns were being sold to women from many lands. The Troops knew every store, they knew about the floor where the live-in maids’ rooms were located, they knew the beautiful blond Mrs. Trump and had persuaded her to let them visit the garden of her triplex which covered the entire top of the Tower and was planted with full-grown trees.
Angelica was the leader of the gang because she was American and had the biggest apartment, an “L” combined with an “H.” Most of the others were foreign and their apartments were only considered pieds-à-terre by their parents who were forever on the move from one capital city to another. However today Angelica wasn’t in the mood to seek out any of her cronies. She was worried about her mother, and she wasn’t exactly sure why.
For one thing, she mused, as she bought another hot dog with her own money, Maxi was getting so bizarrely organized. She’d found a cook who actually showed every sign of staying on the job since Maxi now left her detailed lists of everything that was to be done in the course of each day and had provided her with a cleaning woman to do the heavy work. Maxi—who had never planned anything—had started to plan meals a week ahead so that the shopping could be done efficiently. As a result Angelica was certain that they had the only cook in Trump Tower who didn’t just telephone Gristede’s but actually picked out the produce herself on Lexington Avenue. Where were the last-minute phone calls to the places that delivered? Angelica wondered. She remembered years of odd and ethnic improvised feasts, or former careless, carefree meals, often eaten right out of the cartons in which the food had been delivered. Her kind of eating.
And it wasn’t just the fact that she and her mother sat down to dinner together at night. Maxi had actually begun to supervise Angelica’s homework. Not to understand it necessarily, for today’s math naturally was beyond Ma, like yesterday’s math, but to make sure that it got done on time. What’s more, she had started to take an interest in Angelica’s wardrobe instead of letting her wear whatever she wanted to, charging it at any of the stores in town as she had been in the habit of doing since she was ten. “Appropriate clothes,” she’d said just the other day, “aren’t necessarily all bad.” Now what kind of macabre statement was that for Ma to make?
And then there was the matter of her love life. Ma didn’t seem to have any and she didn’t seem to care. Could she be in menopause? Angelica considered Maxi’s age and decided that twenty-nine was probably too young. But as long as she could remember there had been a man in Ma’s life, one right after another, and sometimes, Angelica suspected, two at the same time. Humpy guys as older men went. But B&B left her no time for anyone, humpy or not. When she wasn’t at the office or with Angelica she spent every evening working with Justin or Julie or one or another of the people from the office, or, astonishingly, often alone, actually alone, in her own bedroom bent over a yellow legal pad, occasionally letting out great hoots of laughter, at her own wit, Angelica supposed, since the television wasn’t on. Was this what people meant by obsession? And wasn’t obsession supposed to be bad for you?
Yet she couldn’t see any signs that Maxi was beginning to fall apart, Angelica ruminated. It was just the opposite; she was getting it all together, going for it, totally going for it, and that was the worst part of all, because a Ma who was going for it wasn’t as much fun as a cute, crazy Ma who had to be supervised. A grown-up Ma with a whole bunch of grown-up ideas about how to do things wasn’t what Ang
elica had bargained for. Ma was changing, that was for sure, and Angelica didn’t like it. No. Not one little bit. Because, if Ma was the grown-up in this family, what did that make her?
No Cipriani in memory had ever bitten through his own bottom lip, Rocco suddenly realized and made himself ease up on the painful grip of his upper jaw.
“Obviously I’ve avoided the classic mistake,” Maxi said, attacking her codfish gumbo in its incendiary sauce as if it were as bland as mashed potatoes.
“Which classic mistake?” Rocco asked, wondering why he had let her talk him into having dinner. He supposed it was curiosity. After all the work he’d put into the dummy, after he’d found her Brick Greenfield, a stunningly good young art director, to carry on where he’d blazed the trail, he felt a reluctant interest in the future of B&B, but Maxi’s insouciance was turning his temper as hot as the Creole cuisine of Chez Leonie whose smiling Haitian proprietor had taken them under her wing and ordered for them.
Rocco had already heard, from entirely too many people, how Maxi had visited most of the major advertisers in person, using his—his—dummy as her calling card, and talked them into taking space in her magazine, using every bit of guile she possessed, every ounce of wile and winsomeness, all of her Amberville credentials. Even he had to admit that the basic concept of B&B could sound logical when presented by Maxi at her most devious, if you had no previous experience with her. If she were a stranger, for example, and you could be conned into thinking that a reader-friendly magazine was what you needed to round out the kind of totally balanced media buy that a top agency like Cipriani, Lefkowitz and Kelly would provide with the help of a highly trained team of people whose whole life was media buying. If you happened to be some damn foolish horse’s ass of a national advertiser and some ditsy girl who called herself a publisher and acted as her own ad manager as well came along, bypassed your rightful ad agency, and sweet-talked you into making commitments you’d never have made in your right mind.
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