Justin retreated farther into his room, speechless.
“O.K., if you don’t want to discuss it, I do. I think it’s too important to just let matters stay as they are. This separation from your mother is as bad for her as it is for me. She loves me deeply, Justin, and I love her far more than she knows. We have a long, happy future together if only she can be made to see it. I know she said that she doesn’t want to lay eyes on me again, but by now, and I know my Lily, she wishes that she hadn’t been so hasty. Still she’s a proud woman and won’t make the first step. That’s why I’ve come to you. You’re the one person I think she’d listen to with an open mind.”
Justin turned and looked out of the window, his shoulders tense with the effort not to say anything to Cutter, not to dignify his presence in any way.
“Justin, just consider the situation. Isn’t your mother going to be a very lonely woman without me? She’s never existed without a man to guide her, to be devoted to her happiness, to protect her. As soon as my brother died she turned to me in such need, in such utter loneliness, that it broke my heart. I never failed her, not for an instant.” Cutter took a step toward the window and then stopped as he saw the tight control in which Justin’s slender, powerful body was clenched, a study in utter rejection.
“Look, Justin, you’re never around town for more than a few weeks at a time. Toby is getting married and probably moving to California and Maxi, God knows, is going to be busy with running the company.… Who will have time for Lily if I’m not there for her? Justin, I came here to ask you to do something, not for me, but for your mother. I want you to go to her and ask her to talk to me … just talk to me.”
Justin moved away from the window, picked up a camera, sat down, and began to examine it closely.
“I don’t blame you for giving me the silent treatment, Justin. For some reason we’ve never managed to have a decent, warm relationship, but we should have been friends a long time ago … more than friends.” Cutter stood over Justin, speaking quietly, as if to gentle down a wild animal.
“I have a right to come here and talk to you, Justin. I would never have intruded on your privacy if I didn’t have that right. I would never tell you what I’m going to tell you if I didn’t think that the time had come for you to know the truth, to know why I feel entitled to ask you to do something for me and for your mother that I wouldn’t ask anyone else in the family to do. No, don’t shake your head, Justin, don’t refuse to listen, don’t shut me out.”
Cutter’s voice took on a pleading tone. Justin sat tensely, only looking at the camera now, using all the fierce concentration of his martial arts training to remain absolutely immobile.
“Justin … this is not easy to say. I know how much you love your mother. She’s a woman who’s impossible not to love. Years ago, when she and I were very young, both of us no more than twenty-four, younger than you are now, we fell in love with each other.”
Justin dropped the camera he’d been holding, stood up and turned toward the blank wall, like a prisoner in a cell.
“We fell in love, we loved each other in all the ways a man and woman love each other, and we had a child … you, Justin. You’re my son.”
“I know.” Justin spoke quickly, throwing the words away.
“What! Did Lily tell you?”
“I read that letter you wrote to her when you left her to go to California. I figured it out from the date on the letter and my birthday. I was just a kid, sneaking around looking at things in her desk the way kids do and I found it, hidden away. After I read it I put it back. It’s probably still there.”
“But … then, if you know … if you’ve known! Why did you never … how could you have … just, just kept it all to yourself?”
Justin turned around and walked toward the door. At last he raised his eyes to Cutter. “Zachary Amberville was my father. He was the only father I ever wanted, the only father I’ve ever had. He is still my father and he always will be. Please leave.”
“Justin! You know the truth and you don’t even deny it! Blood is blood, I’m your father, Justin! And I’m alive … doesn’t that mean anything to you, for God’s sake?”
“Just get out of here. Go away.” Justin opened the door and gestured toward it with a shaking hand. Slowly, reluctantly, Cutter moved toward it and then, when he stood next to Justin, he hesitated. Suddenly, playing his last card, he clasped his arms around his son.
“NO!” With an instinctive movement, swift and powerful, Justin pulled away and, using all his dangerous strength, chopped the edges of his hands down on the arms that tried to hold him. Cutter staggered backward, his broken forearms dangling uselessly, unable to steady himself or regain his footing.
As he fell backward, screaming in pain, down the long, steep staircase, above him a door was closed and bolted.
28
A few days later, when the excitement over Toby and India’s wedding, which was planned for the following weekend, was at its peak, Maxi left Toby’s house without being noticed. India, Angelica and Lily were too deep in conversation about what they would wear to see her slip out after dinner and Toby had taken refuge in one of his restaurants to avoid the fuss.
Maxi had put on an old pair of jeans and a plain white T-shirt. Her feet were bare, in flat sandals, and she wore no makeup. A sublime sprite, battle-ready. She made a stop on the way to her destination and finally arrived at Rocco’s apartment carefully carrying a large, flat package.
“What’s in that box?” Rocco said suspiciously, as he answered the doorbell and she foamed into the room. “And how come you dropped in? New Yorkers don’t just drop in. They telephone first.”
“I simply had to get away from Toby’s … they’re going loony over there talking about heirloom lace and white satin slippers and all that nonsense … weddings seem to drive even sensible women crazy. I thought that since you were home—Angelica told me you were in tonight—you wouldn’t mind if I came by and discussed some things. Her relationship to Dunk for instance. I mean, Rocco, he’s going to be an usher, for goodness’ sakes.”
“That’s hardly a lifetime commitment.” Rocco sniffed deeply. “Is that a pizza?”
“Oh, just a little one. I thought you might be hungry. Shall I go put it in the kitchen?”
“What kind of pizza?” Rocco demanded.
“With everything on it. Would I ever bring you any other kind of pizza, Rocco?” Maxi asked. Her enchantress eyes, her straight dark eyebrows, even her bow-shaped upper lip all expressed innocent reproach.
“No, I guess not. You were always very good at pizza. A consummate artist. By the way, congratulations, sincere congratulations. I think you’ll be a great publisher. I mean it. You needed the right outlet for your energies and at last you’ve got it. I’m happy for you, Maxi. You’ll do a terrific job. Just don’t try to make another dummy by yourself.”
“Thank you,” Maxi said modestly. “Should we eat this right away while it’s still hot?”
“So we’re going to share it, are we?” Rocco shrugged. “In that case I’m not in favor of reheating it. The cheese will get all stringy and the crust will get too dry. Anyway I didn’t have any dinner. I’ve been too busy working to stop to eat.” Rocco deftly set the kitchen table and cut large slices out of the enormous pizza for both of them. For a while they ate in the reverent, utterly greedy silence that a really good pizza commands, prudently leaving the crusts for later when there would be nothing else left, for no pizza, however disappointing, had ever remained unfinished by Rocco Cipriani and this was a prime pizza, a definitive pizza. With it they drank beer out of the bottle and the pile of paper napkins in the center of the kitchen table steadily diminished.
“Funny thing about pizza,” Rocco said, “you can actually feel your stomach saying ‘thank you’ to the rest of your body. It’s not like regular food, it’s more like a transfusion. I guess that’s what soul food does … although it never does it for me.”
“Hot dogs at the track, th
at’s what works for me,” Maxi said dreamily. “With tons of icky yellow mustard, those lukewarm white buns and that tepid flabby pink sausage … nothing can ever replace them.”
“Maybe it’s a religious difference.”
“Childhood, it all has to do with childhood. Or so I believe,” Maxi replied.
“How do you feel about soup?” Rocco asked earnestly.
“Soup? I’m not against soup, by any means, but it’s still not my number-one thing.”
“If you were sick, or cold, or just needed comforting?” Rocco persisted.
“And there wasn’t any alcohol around?”
“Right … for some mysterious reason you can’t get any booze. Then would you go for soup?”
“Only out of a can,” Maxi said decidedly. “It would have to come right out of a can, none of the homemade, it’s-good-for-you stuff. That’s too European.”
“ ‘I’m in the mood for soup,’ ” Rocco sang off-key to the tune of “I’m in the Mood for Love.” “ ‘Only because you’re near me, darling, and when you’re near me, I’m in the mood for soup.’ ”
“What’s the background?” Maxi asked, sensing the creation of a commercial. Rocco never used to sing in the kitchen.
“Lovers, every kind of lovers, all ages, sizes, shapes, white, black, yellow, brown, red, extraterrestrials, animals, three seconds on each pair, kissing, hugging, caressing, with Julio Iglesias singing the lyric.”
“Do you see the product?” Maxi asked.
“Never. It’s for the American Soup Canning Association. A full minute. Like it?”
“I think it’s brilliant. But not Julio … I like him but his English just isn’t convincing. What about Kenny Rogers? No, too Western. It’s a ballad and Ol’ Blue Eyes is too obvious—to say nothing of what he’d charge to do it—I know—Tony Bennett!”
“Perfect! Romantic, warm, familiar—perfect. So you like the concept? You really like it?”
“It would make me go into the kitchen, like a brainwashed zombie, and open a can of any kind of soup and heat it up and drink it before I knew what had happened,” Maxi assured him, giving him the last slice of pizza, and all the crusts.
“That’s what I’ve been working on,” Rocco said, between bites. “I just wasn’t sure if people really liked soup, or if they just thought it was good for them.”
“What does that matter to the Soup Canning Association?”
“I have to feel emotional about a commercial before I get it right. And my mother always made her own soup. She’d never let us touch the canned kind, so I couldn’t trust my gut on this.”
“Your mother did make the most incredibly good soup. She gave me her recipe for chicken soup once but it started with buying a whole chicken and a veal knuckle. I wasn’t ready for that. So I went out and bought Campbell’s instead,” Maxi remembered sadly.
“Well, you were only eighteen, after all. Or were you seventeen? I never was absolutely sure.”
“I don’t think I was, either. Anyway, I still can’t cook.”
“My mother can’t run a publishing company. To each his own,” Rocco said fairly, putting the plates in the sink and finding two more bottles of beer. “But damn it, she made her own wine too—I’m having problems with the Gallo account but I’ll get over them. Thank God Mama couldn’t make beer, or cars or soap. Let’s go in the living room. What about Dunk? I thought he seemed like a good guy when Angelica dragged him over to meet me. You can’t really believe that Angelica’s in danger of being seduced by him?”
“Probably not. My mother pointed out that she’s a different and wiser teenager than I was. I guess I should relax.”
“Would you have been seduced by him when you were twelve?” Rocco wondered, standing by the window and looking out at all of Central Park, spread before him from his tall windows.
“Of course not. I was waiting for you.” There was great art in her simple statement.
“Wouldn’t you even have necked with him?… Dunk’s pretty attractive.”
“I never necked. Not with kids,” Maxi answered, gazing at the reflection of the fine, well-lit room that floated in front of the windows, the Isis suspended in midair, timelessly queenly; the majestic croup of Rocco’s Han Dynasty horse visible on a table. “You were the first man I ever kissed,” she added after a pause. She batted her lashes until they quarreled but avoided looking at him.
“Oh.”
“You always knew that.”
“No I didn’t. I thought you had experience—not real experience since you were a virgin, but something. You were a hot number, as we used to say in the old neighborhood.”
“All an act,” Maxi confessed, hanging her impertinently frivolous head.
“No, you were a hot number,” Rocco insisted.
“The experience part—that was an act. The hot part—that was you.” She raised her head and subjected him to her unruly matchless green gaze, the lips of her sorceress’s mouth slightly parted, suddenly girlish, mysterious, as if every minute of their mutual past had been abolished, as if they were meeting for the first time.
“Oh. Well, thanks.”
“Rocco—”
“No, Maxi. Absolutely not!”
“No? How do you know what I was going to say?” Maxi said, beautifully indignant. “How can you be so negative when you don’t even know if I was going to say something that required an answer?”
“I’ve gotten smarter over the years. When you pop up on my doorstep in virtually the same clothes you used to wear to my loft the summer we met, looking young enough to be jailbait and so fucking pretty that it’s criminal—except to someone who knows you as well as I do—and then you bring me a pizza with everything on it, and are so interested and sweet and helpful about my soup commercial, do you honestly think that I wouldn’t have to know that you’re setting me up for something? A major con? Come on, Maxi. Admit it.”
“Don’t you believe that people can change their characters as they grow up?” she asked reasonably, tugging her white streak. “Don’t you think that I might just want to have a better relationship with the father of my child, a friendly interchange between two adults, a laying to rest of all the anger and hostility that has come between us? A new start, Rocco, so that aside from Angelica and our mutual love for her, we could coexist in the same city with some kindness and regard? Do I have to be coming over here with anything else in mind?”
“Maxi, shape up. Who blackmailed me—viciously—into making the dummy for B&B? Who got me drunk when I had a head cold and raped me three times? Well—the first time anyway.”
“That’s absurd!”
“Maybe it can’t be proved but I know what I know. You never show up unless you want something. What is it this time? Wait, let me guess. Pavka is going to retire in a few years and you want me to come over and get ready to take over for him. That’s it, isn’t it? Actually I’d do it too, except it would mean working for you, no matter how much freedom you gave me. So I won’t. No way. What else could it be? Maybe—”
“Rocco! You’re absolutely right, I admit it. I am a con artist. It’s my nature, it’s always been more fun to get places by twisting the odds. I can’t seem to stop trying to bend the truth in my favor, and what’s more, sometimes I have a bad temper when I don’t get what I want.”
“That’s hard to believe,” he grunted.
“But I have changed. In this last year I’ve changed more than in the rest of my whole life put together. I’ve learned so much, Rocco, I’ve discovered that if I work very hard and sink my teeth in and don’t give up, I can get what I want the honest way, right down the middle—with a lot of help from my friends.”
“And you want me to be one of them?” he asked suspiciously.
“No.” Maxi faced him, standing squarely but, at last, speaking the unadorned truth, looking him straight in the eye, all determination, all conviction, all fire. “I want you to love me again, Rocco.”
“Why?” He didn’t move a fraction of an
inch toward her. Did she think that all she had to do was ask and he’d fall at her feet?
“You don’t have any idea, do you, how I yearn for you? Oh, Rocco, it started way back when I first laid eyes on you and now it’s a thousand times worse than it ever was when I was seventeen. It’s such a yearning, such a need—it’s unspeakable, impossible to find the right words. It’s more than I can stand anymore, Rocco, for you not to love me,” Maxi cried out in a voice that concealed no tricks, nothing but her pure emotion. “There’s never been another man I’ve cared about, not deeply, not truly. Oh, if only I’d met you when I was older! I wouldn’t have been so impossible, I wouldn’t have made all the thoughtless, teenage, rich-girl mistakes I made. I wouldn’t have made that one unforgivable mistake—I would have understood you better and realized how proud you were. We could have managed, we’d still be married to each other. Please, Rocco, please at least give me another chance. Just a chance, that’s all I’m asking for. Oh, how can you look at me like that, as if you haven’t any idea how I’m feeling? I love you so much I can’t endure it.”
Rocco continued to stare at Maxi impassively, brooding darkly down at her with a long, slow look that confirmed everything he already knew about this fantastical creature he had been unable to forget, unable to replace, since the day he had walked out on their marriage. She’d ruined him for other women, deliberately of course. Once you’d been wholly in love with Maxi you were done for, he guessed. He knew. She’d always had good stuff. She’d always be trouble, outrageous trouble, sure, but nothing that he couldn’t handle. Anyway, who was he kidding, he adored her. He worshiped this wonderfully surprising little fiend with her bottomless bag of tricks. He’d died each time she’d married those two fruitcakes. There wasn’t anyone else for him either. Never had been, never would be.
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