I'll Take Manhattan (15 page)

Lily read the letter once. She folded it and put it in her handbag and proudly walked out of the empty room. How much, she thought, Cutter must love her, to have thought
only of how the baby would change
her
life. If only he were here, so she could tell him that there was no reason for him to be ashamed. Hate him? How could she possibly hate him? Every word of his letter told her how much she meant to him. Didn’t he realize that their child meant that they would be linked forever? And oh, how well she knew how to wait.

Every Wednesday afternoon there was a meeting of the people on whom Zachary Amberville relied to run his magazines. The group didn’t have any formal name, since, as in many privately owned companies without stockholders, there was no board of directors, but Zachary gave a lot of thought to the invitations he tendered. It was understood that anyone who attended one meeting would, from then on, attend all of them. In a magazine business, where top editors are not infrequently wooed by the competition, and issues are planned five months in advance, secrecy about future plans is vital. Zachary waited a long time before asking any employee to come to the Wednesday planning session.

Zelda Powers, Editor-in-chief of
Style
, had some eighty people working for her of whom a handful had their own clearly defined areas of responsibility; among them: fashion, beauty, accessories, shoes—almighty shoes whose manufacturers advertise mightily—and features. Features included all the major articles in
Style
and a front-of-the-book catchall for whatever was new in the worlds of movies, art, television, music, and books, called “Have You Heard?” To have a job in the “Have You Heard?” section of
Style
, a job that paid less than that of any self-respecting saleslady at Macy’s, was the equivalent of the honor bestowed on Jean Lannes, Duke of Montebello, the only one of Napoleon’s twelve
Maréchals
who was allowed to address the Emperor in the familiar form as “thou.”

No poor girl could afford to work for “Have You Heard?” nor would a rich but not terribly bright girl stand a chance. She had to be both well enough off to support herself from outside income, and enormously smart, for the competition for these three assistant editors’ jobs started
early on the campuses of the Seven Sisters, the Ivy League women’s colleges. Young editors were hired by the features editor, John Hemingsway, who enjoyed every second of the power he wielded, for it was he who decided which personalities would have profiles written on them for the main section of the magazine; which American man or woman was ripe to be explored in color photos and three thousand words; it was he who decreed that any given human being merited merely a thousand words and a black-and-white photo, or determined that any particular topic had suddenly become worthy of notice by
Style
and should be assigned as an article.

For his three “Have You Heard?” assistants Hemingsway hired only unmarried women; only those who dressed well; only those who were shorter than he; only those under thirty; because if they were over thirty and still unmarried they were bound to be too neurotic to work as well as he expected them to; and only those who were willing to work nights because if they had too many boyfriends he knew they would be more interested in marriage than in “Have You Heard?” No matter how hard they worked, he hired only girls who were not ambitious enough to want his job, for he didn’t trust women at all.

Dozens and dozens of girls managed to qualify for these three jobs at
Style
. Two of them who held the jobs were true to the Hemingsway mold, and the third, who was secretly ambitious and thus the cleverest of all, was able to work late and still keep a half-dozen boyfriends entangled in her web. Fortunately Nina Stern needed very little sleep and worked quickly.

Nina Stern was twenty-five and of all the beautiful, rich,
unmarried
Jewish girls anyone in 1958 had ever heard of, by far the oldest. People had even stopped trying to probe at this problem with her mother. It was taken for granted among the many friends of the Stern family that there was something invisibly but unquestionably wrong with Nina. Even a hint of a hint would be cruel and, what was worse, would have no result. The poor thing didn’t even have a broken engagement to her credit. Why meddle if it couldn’t help? It was more productive to meddle where there was still some hope.

Marriage, in Nina Stern’s opinion, was the end of the line. She had probably flirted with the doctor who delivered her, and certainly with every living creature she had encountered after that minute. The only form of communication Nina knew was one form or another of flirtation; but accused of flirting she truly wouldn’t have understood what people were talking about. She flirted with children, teenagers, all adults of both sexes, homosexuals of any persuasion, and any animal she came across. She had never flirted with a rock but she had flirted with many trees and flowers. Her flirtation wasn’t specific, neither sexual nor romantic, but merely an instinctive approach to any situation in which she found herself, a general, permanent, immutable inclination toward courtship. Her flirtatiousness was not “correct” in the French sense, meaning proper; it was great, even noble. It was also essentially harmless and it explained why, like businesses that are depression-proof, Nina Stern at any age would always be proof against any shortage of males. Just as she knew her name was Nina she knew that there would always be men for her and she adored variety too much to even consider settling down with just one man.

She liked to meet her college friends for lunch and admire the photographs of their fast-growing families; she felt only sincere admiration when the much younger sisters of these friends displayed their engagement rings, but monogrammed towels reminded her of straitjackets, and new sheets of shrouds. The only shopping in New York she couldn’t endure was on the second floor of Tiffany’s, where she often was forced to buy yet another baby present. There, certain interior decorators were given a free hand with the vast stock of the store and vied with each other in arranging china, crystal and silver in ways that tables had never been laid before. When Nina confronted the glittering, fantastic tables as she left the gray-velvet-lined elevator, all that filled her mind were images of women standing in line for the butcher’s personal attention at Gristede’s, cluttered kitchens and dirty dishes. Otherwise she had no time for gruesome fantasies, unless it was to report on the newest horror film for
Style
.

She was, at first sight, the embodiment of the happy medium, although nothing about her was average. Her
shoulder-length hair was light brown, but of the irresistible and indescribable shade called
marron glacé
, the color of candied chestnuts. Her height was five feet five and a half inches, mysteriously just the right height for every activity except professional basketball. Her face wasn’t distinctively heart-shaped or round or oval, but its shape pleased every eye. It was simply the right shape and her features were the right features and her body was the right body, and her voice was the right voice, in the sense that the slightest alteration in them would have been
wrong
. Seven full pages in the
Oxford English Dictionary
are devoted to definitions of the word “right,” but one close look at Nina defined rightness in a flash.

This great flirt, with her definition-defying rightness, sometimes had to work on Saturday if she’d had a particularly full week fending off all the men who wanted to marry her without driving them away for good. One particular Saturday in June of 1958 when the only possible activity for a self-respecting New Yorker was opening up the beach house or painting the shutters in Fairfield County, on a day on which no Manhattanite should have been caught in Manhattan, Nina Stern was forced to go to the office to finish a last column for “Have You Heard?” She took the newly automated elevator to the fifteenth floor. Somewhere between the tenth and eleventh floors the elevator stopped, with a particularly final grinding sound.

“Now what?” asked Nina of a male unknown to her, the only other passenger.

“There’s a phone … I’ll call for help,” Zachary Amberville said.

Whoever was supposed to be on the other end of the phone was evidently out to lunch. The only sound was Muzak as Zachary tried repeatedly to get an answer.

“I wouldn’t mind so much,” Nina said surveying him, “if it weren’t for that noise. Death by Muzak. They’ll find us here on Monday morning, out of our minds, singing ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ for the rest of our lives.”

“Do you like rye bread?” Zachary asked.

“Corn rye or regular rye with caraway seeds?”

“Regular. I stopped at Reuben’s and picked up a sandwich
before I came to the office.” He unwrapped the enormous crusty oval-shaped sandwich, sliced on the diagonal in three sections, filled with thick layers of pastrami, Swiss cheese, corned beef, cold slaw, and Reuben’s own mustard.

“You even have a pickle,” Nina marveled.

“It stimulates the brain,” Zachary said with authority. “Better than fish. Why don’t we sit down?”

“If only there were some way to turn off the Muzak.”

“There is. You have to climb on my shoulders and push that little switch on the top of the door to the left.”

Nina surveyed the stranger. He couldn’t be a mad rapist or he would have raped her by now. He obviously was kind-hearted since he was willing to share his perfect sandwich when they might have another day and a half before they were released. In spite of childhood conditioning she wasn’t afraid that he was in the white slave trade. Her mother had never let her go to the movies on Saturday afternoon except to the Trans-Lux on Eighty-fifth Street, where a matron patrolled the aisles with a flashlight, because it was well known that any nice New York girl, alone in the movies, would be pricked with a hypodermic by any man who took the seat next to her, pass out and, a week later, wake up as a white slave in Tangiers. Nina thought she would be rather well treated in Tangiers, if it came to that, and anyway this man did not look like the type. He was wearing an expensive tweed jacket, even if it didn’t fit him. He had very clean black hair, even if it needed a cut. His flexible, quirky mouth was kind, his dark eyes bright with amusement, and his shoes were handmade.

She nodded agreement to Zachary and he bent down, like a fullback, and she took off her shoes and hopped on his shoulders. “Get up very slowly. I’ve never done this before,” she ordered. Zachary rose inch by inch, while Nina clutched his hair. She eliminated the Muzak with a quick flick of the switch and he carefully lowered her to the floor of the elevator. They both sat down. It was a clean elevator and the only one they had.

“That gave me an appetite,” Nina said.

“You can have the middle piece,” Zachary offered generously, spreading out the silver foil. The middle section of a Reuben sandwich was always the most succulent.

“Thank you,” Nina said. All her life men had given her the best piece, just as she’d always been offered the white meat of every chicken and the crispest piece of bacon and the female lobster with the delicious coral in it, but although she was always grateful she was no more surprised than Morgan Le Fay would have been. She smiled at Zachary. Of all the utterly right things about Nina Stern, her smile was the rightest. Of all the flirtatious things about Nina Stern, her smile was the most flirtatious. What a nice girl, Zachary thought. “Where do you work?” he asked.

“At
Style
, in ‘Have You Heard?’ What about you?”

“Sales,” he said dismissively, with a shrug.

“Unexciting? Horribly boring? Dreary and dull?” she sympathized.

“Necessary,” Zachary said stoically. “But nothing you’d want to hear about. I’ve just spent three days in Chicago at a sales convention and enough is enough.”

“Oh, go on, bore me. Tell me about dismal sales, all about pokey, stuffy old sales, everything about tedious, monotonous, unfortunately necessary sales. Stop when I go into a coma.”

“I never bore a lady on purpose,” he grinned. “Tell me about ‘Have You Heard?’ ”

“If you won’t bore me, I refuse to bore you … it’s all just a lot of chat, basically unimportant. Anyway, wouldn’t you rather eat than talk?” Nina’s work was too vital to her to discuss with the many men in her life and she had just realized that this stranger was unquestionably going to be a man in her life. It usually did not take her more than a split second to make such a decision but until today she had been terrified of being trapped in elevators and her reflexes were slower than normal.

“We could do both,” Zachary said, “at the same time.”

“Should we try to make this last as long as possible in case they don’t rescue us, or should we just … ?” Nina pondered.

“Big bites. You can’t enjoy a sandwich and hold back at the same time.”

“I’ll remember that … you’re so wise.”

Really a bright girl, Zachary thought. Exceptionally bright. I think I’ll invite her to the next Wednesday meeting.
We can use her kind of brain. And there’s something nice about her, can’t exactly put my finger on it.

The elevator started just as they were finishing the sandwich. Nina got off at her floor. She held out her hand and smiled at him again.

“Nina Stern,” she said.

“Zachary Amberville.”

“That’s not fair!” she laughed as the door closed. She was still laughing as she opened her office door. Nina, she told herself, you’ve just blown the chance of a lifetime.

For a smart girl she could sometimes be very dumb.

“ ‘This great big city’s a wondrous toy,’ ” Zachary sang out loud as he walked home much later that day, his work done. “ ‘Just made for a girl and boy.’ ” As always he hit a false note on the word “boy.” He jaywalked expertly across Madison as he reached the last lines of his song. “ ‘We’ll turn Manhattan into an isle of joy.’ ” He hadn’t felt like this in a long time, he realized. He hadn’t sung his song in months, years. How did he feel exactly? he asked himself, his steps slowing. Was it the brisk, blowing spring evening with the promise of something brightly thrilling in the air that only New Yorkers feel as the days grow longer? Was it the satisfactory afternoon’s work shaping a new magazine no one else knew about yet? Was it just New York, intoxicating center of the galaxy, where his ambitions were born and fulfilled?
Good
. He felt good. Why the hell
shouldn’t
he feel good? What man wouldn’t feel good who was worth so many millions he hadn’t counted them lately, what man wouldn’t feel good who had the power he had, who had the fun … “sales” he remembered, and laughed out loud. Sales, divine sales!