I'll Take Manhattan (16 page)

How old would a girl like Nina Stern be? Shit, but he felt
young
! He was thirty-five and he felt like his sixteen-year-old self at Columbia, waiting on tables for enough money for the subway and a hot dog … it hadn’t been all that long ago, a war ago, a marriage ago, but still, only nineteen years ago. And only six of the nineteen years spent as a married man. He frowned, his mood suddenly almost punctured. If he felt so young, how come he hadn’t made
love to Lily in the last few weeks? How come they made love so rarely, now that he came to think about it? As Nat, his brother-in-law, would say, who’s counting?

He was counting, that’s who. Lily had never been passionate and he’d accepted that about her … that was just the way she was … but she’d always been so willing. Sweet and delicate and docile. He’d had to make that be enough for him, although many and many a night he’d yearned for a wife who would match his hunger. But, in six years, he’d never played around. Funny about playing around: so many men did it, even when they loved their wives, even when their wives were, he imagined, available in a way that Lily, somehow, didn’t seem to be anymore, except at increasingly rare intervals. It occurred to him that mentally, if not physically, she had recently turned away from him when he came to her room and indicated in a subtle, graceful, wordless way that she really didn’t want him, not that night, not right now. Was there some inward drama, unguessed at, in her life?

Available. So many women were available in this town. But not all of them. A girl like Nina Stern for instance. She wouldn’t be available. She was probably married or engaged or had a list of hopefuls an arm long. Girls like Nina, nice and bright, were spoken for, it stood to reason. And she had a healthy appetite too, always an attractive thing in a woman. “ ‘We’ll go to Coney,’ ” he sang, “ ‘and eat baloney on a roll, through Central Park we’ll stroll, da dum.’ ” Someone turned around to look at him and he realized he was singing out loud again. He’d make sure to tell Hemingsway to bring her to the next Wednesday meeting. Do the girl good to see how the magazines were run from some other point of view than that of “Have You Heard?” Better yet, he’d send her a personal memo, a special invitation. Motivated, of course, by her deep interest in sales. “That’s not fair,” she’d said … and it wasn’t. He should make it up to her. Smiling he opened his front door and entered the gray marble house just as the butler finished crossing the hall. He had a flash of disbelief … could this be his own house, did it really belong to him? He felt so young again, so much the way he had felt when he ventured downtown from Columbia and walked all the
streets of his city, not even wondering what lay beyond the doors of houses like this one, splendid beyond the limits of his imagination. He passed the butler with a cheerful greeting and mounted the stairs to his private library where he preferred to work, rather than in the big library downstairs.

“Lily?” he said, astonished. She was standing at the window, looking across the garden, and turned impatiently as he entered.

“I’ve been waiting for you to come home, darling. I do wish you didn’t have to work on Saturday, especially after being away most of the week,” she said in her silvery, most loving voice.

“It was something that I had to think through, and I think better at the office. Also my desk was piled high with things I won’t have time for on Monday. But I love finding you here. What’s that? Champagne? Did I forget something? It’s not our anniversary, it’s not a birthday, what are we celebrating?” He opened the bottle and deftly filled the tulip-shaped glasses standing on the silver tray she had put on his desk.

“A toast, darling,” she said, as they touched the rims of the glasses together. “The best possible news … another baby.”

“Another baby! I
knew
something wonderful was going to happen!” he shouted for joy and grabbed her in his arms, all other thoughts forgotten.

Lily submitted to his hug, her eyes filled with tears. Courage, Cutter had said, and bravery. She would do anything for him. The most difficult part was over. Now the waiting began.

Only the blankness of deep shock and the veneer of basic, automatic manners carried Maxi and Toby through the moments in which they had to congratulate Lily and Cutter on
their marriage. Words were said, nods were exchanged but neither of them even tried to manage a smile. It was, Maxi thought, as if the four of them were engaged in trying to decently bury the nameless victim of a hit-and-run accident, a victim whose body was that of Zachary Amberville.

The consternation and astonishment that still filled the boardroom was actually welcome because it enabled the brother and sister to retreat quickly, clutching each other’s hands and slipping into the express elevator while Lily and Cutter were still engaged with those members of the Amberville editorial group untouched by the death of four magazines, who were able to offer their own good wishes with a naturalness that neither Maxi nor Toby had been able to muster. Elie took them both back to Toby’s town house on a quiet street in the East Seventies. Wordlessly Toby stalked to the bar beside his swimming pool which he had constructed out of the entire first floor and garden of the narrow but deep brownstone, and poured each of them a large drink.

“What is it?” Maxi asked.

“Brandy. I never drink it but if ever there was a time …”

“I simply don’t believe … I just can’t understand …” Maxi started to say but Toby cut her off.

“Shut up, drink it and have a swim. We can’t talk about this yet.” He stripped and dove into the pool with that fast, flat dive that had helped him become a swimming champion many times over. Maxi joined him, wearing only her black pearl, and they swam laps until she could feel some of the ball of emotions that filled her begin to dissolve into simple weariness. She stopped swimming and sat by the edge of the pool until Toby surfaced at last and easily hoisted himself up to sit beside her. He had splendid muscles and shoulders yet he was almost fragile at the waist, like many other great swimmers.

“Better?” he grunted.

“As much better as I’m going to get. Which is not a hell of a lot. I feel as if I’ve been hit by a hand grenade—all to pieces.”

“I wonder if we haven’t both been overlooking a lot about those two, if we aren’t naive to be so surprised.”

“Do you mean that obviously Mother had been lonely since … oh, God, since Dad’s death … and so she turned to Cutter and obviously they are both about the same age and no matter how much I don’t like or trust him, he’s objectively an incredibly handsome man and after all life and sex don’t stop in the late forties? And that it’s natural that she’d be embarrassed about getting married to her own brother-in-law and sneak off and do it without telling us in advance? After all, Toby, it was no accident that she told us about it in public.… The one thing I can’t imagine is that they just decided to elope on the spur of the moment. They’re not Romeo and Juliet.”

“Yes to all of that,” Toby said, “but there’s something else that I’ve noticed and haven’t really paid enough attention to … there’s a
complicity
between them … there always has been, to one degree or another, since Cutter came back from England. And when Dad went, so suddenly, last year, it’s gotten steadily stronger.”

“Complicity? What’s that supposed to mean, exactly … that they are partners in crime?”

“No, a deep sort of
involvement
, an intense interest in each other’s needs and wishes, an agreement that goes beyond agreement, so that it creates a bond that is stronger and more durable than the fact that he’s good-looking or she needs a man in her life or any of those self-evident things.”

“How come you’re such an expert?” Maxi asked rebelliously.

“I
hear
it. You know I hear things in people’s voices that you don’t catch. I hear it in the way they move when they’re together. When you’re blind, Goldilocks, you learn to hear people moving in hundreds of different ways, and each means something different. They’re deeply complicitous. I hear it and, by God, I
smell
it … under all the perfume and soap and after-shave in the world I can smell it on both of them.”

Maxi squirmed in a primitive resistance to his words.

“Why do you persist in calling me Goldilocks?” she asked, trying to change the subject.

“Because I like the word. If your hair were all white I’d just see tiny bits of it, now and then, so I call you whatever
I like. Just don’t go bald. Now, back to Mother and Cutter. He’s got her exactly where he wants her. It’s the first time I’ve ever known her like this, so dominated, so dependent. While Dad was alive I felt a certain set of things when she was with him, something utterly different. They were kind to each other … I supposed they’d come to terms. They were friends, or at least not enemies, but no complicity.”

“You’re revolting.”

He laughed and smacked her on her bare thigh. “Nice and fresh,” he said appraisingly. “You should be good for another ten, maybe fifteen years, before you start to lose that special springiness in the muscles.”

“Take your hands off me, you degenerate.”

“Do you love me, Goldilocks?”

“I love you, Bat.” It was their ritual. Tobias’s earliest memory was of touching the cheeks of baby Maxi and her first memory was of his hand picking her up when she tripped on an icy street.

“Oh, if only you could have seen those poor bastards at the meeting, Toby. Some of them looked as if they’d just been sentenced by a hanging judge.”

“I heard them. That was enough.”

“But how can we accept the way he said that he spoke for her? You know that Mother couldn’t possibly have made this decision on her own—she’s never been involved in running the company. She doesn’t think about profits, for heaven’s sake! It’s all Cutter’s doing, God knows why. But he cannot be
allowed
to kill four magazines all at once! We can’t let him do it! Our father would
never
have considered such a thing, not for any reason unless he were flat-out bankrupt. Toby, Toby!
Remember Dad
! It’s not euthanasia, it’s outright murder!” Maxi’s voice grew louder with every word.

“But what can we do about it, babe? Mother has the power, clearly, to enforce her ‘decision,’ whoever influenced her. Whatever she wants to do with the company she has the absolute legal right to do.”

“Moral suasion,” Maxi said slowly in a voice midway between inquiry and the dawning of an idea.

“Moral suasion? Obviously you’ve been away from your native shores too long. This is New York City, babe,
and moral suasion is found only on the op-ed page of the
Times.
”

“A special kind of moral suasion, Toby. Manhattan style. If you feed me lunch I’ll have the strength to pay our uncle a visit in his office.”

“Damned if I know what you’re up to.”

“Damned if I do … yet. But dig we must …” she chortled.

“For a better New York,” he added, joining in the line they both used to explain any and all inconveniences in the city that was, to them, the center of the universe.

“That would be most unwise, Maxi, and it wouldn’t get you anywhere,” Cutter said, sitting behind his desk in his Wall Street office. “Whatever you and Tobias feel, and believe me, I truly do understand your sentiments and I sympathize …”

“Leave out the hearts and flowers,” Maxi snapped. “Let’s go straight to the bottom line, since that seems to be your favorite place to operate.” She hadn’t been home to change since her arrival in New York, but the swim with Toby and the superb lunch he had cooked for her had restored her dauntless spirit, and during the ride downtown she had formed a clear idea of what to do, how to attack.

“I don’t care if Amberville is a privately owned company or not, Cutter, it’s still subject to public opinion. When Toby and I go to the press, as we plan to, with our minority shareholders’ report, we are going to tell them that we are convinced that you have obviously exercised undue influence over our mother, your most amazingly recent bride, and put four magazines to death without prior consultation with Toby or Justin or me, all of us shareholders and highly concerned parties.” Maxi stretched out her booted legs defiantly and slumped in her chair with every sign of confident relaxation.

“Perhaps your own skin is thick enough to ignore public opinion, but have you thought about your customers?” she went on. “What about your carefully low-profile partners? Have you thought about everyone in the magazine business, the Newhouses, the Hearsts, the Annenbergs
and all the others? What attitude will they have, what will they say about you, Cutter? They all know you are not a publisher, never have been, never will be. It’s going to be a juicy, big,
nasty
story for the media … four magazines folding at once, hundreds and hundreds of people thrown out of work, all based on the judgment of someone who’s never spent five minutes in magazines, someone whose only tiny perch in the business was given to him by his wife?”

Cutter turned over a paper knife, rearranged an inkwell, adjusted his desk clock. There was a brief silence before Maxi continued, since he obviously intended to say nothing.

“I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when we hold our press conference, Cutter. I’m certain Pavka will join us. I know he doesn’t have a piece of the company but the media adore him, they consider him a genius, which he is, and a grand old man. Remember the lines around the block for his retrospective at the Museum of Graphic Arts? He’s an institution and my father gave him his first chance, to say nothing of the fact that
Wavelength
was Pavka’s own idea. Zachary Amberville had faith in the future of those magazines, and people had faith in him—that’s what you seem to forget.
My father was a legend. He still is.
”

“You’re trying to blackmail me, Maxi, and it won’t work. Those magazines are out of business as of this morning. The decision was your mother’s to make and she made it.”

“You,” Maxi said slowly, “are a stinking, rotten, filthy liar. Mother didn’t decide anything. But you did. I don’t know why yet, but it’s all your work, Cutter.”