I'll Take Manhattan (17 page)

“
How dare you speak to me like that
?”

Maxi had never seen Cutter really angry before. She smiled right into his eyes, which were frozen and savage with fury. If it had been her mother’s decision in any degree, he would never have let such words escape him, not Cutter, always so tightly, beautifully controlled, always urbane.

“And I deny the charge of blackmail,” Maxi said, her smile widening, as insolent as a tomcat on its own turf.
“Can’t you even recognize moral suasion when you hear it?”

“
Moral
suasion—coming from you that’s not funny, it’s absurd. All right, just what do you want, Maxi?”

“A magazine. I want one of the four magazines and I want a year in which you leave me absolutely alone to do anything I like with it. No strings, no looking over my shoulder, no budget cutting. Particularly no budget cutting.”

“Apparently you think you’ve inherited your father’s touch. So you’re going to save a whole magazine single-handed? Why, you’ve barely done a single consecutive week’s worth of honest work in your life, and the only time you did work was one summer when you were a teenager. But let’s stop fighting,” he said, regaining his temper, “it’s unproductive. If Lily can be persuaded to give you a magazine, because she’s the one who would have to agree, you and your brothers would have to guarantee not to bring the media into a family affair.”

“Then we’d be giving you a free hand with the other three,” Maxi said, suddenly glum.

“I don’t need your free hand, I don’t approve of giving in to blackmail, whatever you choose to call it, and I don’t think that a press conference held by a well-known playgirl and a man who, because of his unfortunate handicap, can never so much as scan a magazine layout, would be taken very seriously. But, for the sake of family harmony, and because you undeniably have a certain amount of nuisance value, if Lily should approve, which magazine would you single out for your amazing resuscitation attempt?”

“
Buttons and Bows
,” Maxi answered promptly. She hadn’t the slightest doubt that if her father were still alive his first publication, his talisman, would be the magazine he would care about most of all.

“I’ll do my best with your mother, Maxi, but I can’t promise anything until I’ve talked to her.”

“Bullshit.” Maxi rose quickly and walked to the door. “I consider myself Editor-in-chief of
Buttons and Bows
,” she said as she left his office, “as of this minute. No, don’t bother to see me to the elevator.”

* * *

Wearily, but with a sense of triumph percolating in her veins, Maxi arrived home at her apartment on the sixty-third floor of the Trump Tower. She hadn’t been at all sure that she could crack Cutter, whose reputation as a sound, if not particularly successful investment banker, might have sustained an attack on his business judgment. Many magazines had died in the last decade, been briefly mourned and forgotten. As Maxi turned the key in her lock, she thought that if Cutter had ever been a member of the editorial board of Amberville Publications, she could never have gotten away with her threats of a press conference. Exactly how, she wondered, do you “call” a press conference?

“Yeow!”

Maxi collapsed to the floor under the weight of a lanky, barefoot, shrieking creature, burdened by a backpack and three tennis rackets, a creature that howled and hugged her until she screamed for mercy.

“Mother, my little mother, my very own tiny little mother,” the creature yodeled for joy, “you’re home! I just got in and looked in the fridge. There’s absolutely nothing to eat in this place, but I know you won’t let me starve, oh, little mother of all the Russias.”

“Angelica, baby, please get off my bones,” Maxi begged. Her eleven-year-old daughter had grown a yard at tennis camp. “What are you doing here? You weren’t supposed to come back till next week.”

“I split camp when I was eliminated in the eighths finals. It’s so tacky to be eliminated in the eighths … it’s O.K. if you don’t get that far and O.K. if you’re eliminated in the semis, but the eighths, no way, José.”

“Angelica, how did you get back from Ojhi? You didn’t … oh, my God, you didn’t
hitch
did you?” Maxi asked, horrified.

“I called Dad for money. I flew, of course, and he met me at the airport. But he didn’t have time to feed me … that is he didn’t feed me
enough
, just a few hamburgers and a couple of chocolate milkshakes … did you see how I’ve grown? Isn’t it great? I’m not going to be a dumb, normal-sized
person like you. Maybe I can be a model. Do you think I need a nose job, everyone at camp is having a nose job, where are we going for dinner, did Dad call you in Europe to say I was coming back? I’ve got a nickname, you have to call me Chip from now on, and I’m going to call you Maxi, it’s more mature.”

“Call me anything,” Maxi groaned as Angelica leaned on her lovingly, “but don’t expect me to call you Chip. Somebody has to draw a line somewhere.” Maxi put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders, pushed her a few inches away and inspected her closely. What particular combination of genes, she wondered, had assembled to create this breathtaking, classic promise of exceptional beauty? The Ambervilles, the Adamsfields, the Andersons, the Dales, the Cutters, had contributed to the amazingly poetic, romantic mixture that was Angelica Amberville Cipriani, and yet the dominant traits in the girl’s face were those of her father, Rocco Cipriani; magnificent Rocco, Renaissance Rocco, fascinatingly brooding, darkly luminous Rocco whose ancestors had left Venice—probably the only Venetians who had ever left Venice voluntarily—for the United States less than a hundred years ago.

“Are you also planning a nickname for your father?” she asked, making, as she always did, a point of being polite about her first ex-husband, with whom she shared custody of Angelica.

“Oh, Maxi, you gross me out, you really do. A person doesn’t call her
father
by a nickname. Sometimes I wonder about you.”

“I see the double standard still prevails,” Maxi murmured in resignation. “And don’t ask me what that means because you’ll find out soon enough.”

“Now about dinner …” Angelica said, strewing the contents of her backpack around the room. “I thought maybe Thai, or sushi. Tennis camp food was strictly for out-of-towners and you know what that means … horrendous squishy white bread, orange-yellow sliced plastic cheese, pale pink baloney … I haven’t had a decent meal in two months.”

“Angelica, we’ll get back to your stomach in a second, but how about asking me how I am?”

“How are you, Ma?” Angelica said amiably, trying to find a pair of clean socks.

“I’m the new Editor-in-chief of
Buttons and Bows.
”

“Come on … how are you? Did you meet some wonderful human being? I haven’t had a stepfather recently.”

“You will never,
ever
have another stepfather, Angelica. I’ve told you that a thousand times. I’m serious about
Buttons and Bows
. I’m taking it over.”

“
Trimming Trades Monthly
?” Angelica stopped her fruitless quest in astonishment at Maxi’s words. “What do you want with poor, old
Trimming Trades
?”

“What are you talking about?”

“
Buttons and Bows
 … Grandpa always told me that its proper name was
Trimming Trades Monthly
 … it says so right on the cover, in tiny little letters.
Buttons and Bows
is just the name some desperate editor slapped on it to try and jazz it up. Not that it helped. He said he only kept publishing it out of pity for the people who’d been there for so long … he didn’t think they could get other jobs, and a lot of them had been there all of their working lives, but he’d lost interest in it ages and ages ago. Seriously, Ma, when was the last time you saw a copy? I think they’re practically collector’s items. It must have a circulation of at least two hundred and ten. Boring.”

“Angelica, how do you know all of this?”

“Grandpa and I used to talk about the business … he said I was the only one of the whole family with a head for publishing. Do you happen to have any socks I can borrow, Maxi?… Hey, Ma, do you feel all right? You look a little funny. It can’t be jet lag or did you fly a regular airline? Maybe you’re just starving, like me. Listen, Ma, when do we leave for Venice?”

“Venice?” Maxi repeated vacantly.

“Ma, we are going to spend two weeks in
Venezia—
you know, the one in Italy—before my school starts,” Angelica explained patiently and slowly as if to a very elderly person. “Don’t say ‘Venice?’ as if you didn’t have the tickets and the reservations because it was all planned months ago.”

“We can’t go.”

“But you said!”

“No Venice. I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you. I have to go to work. At
Trimming Trades Monthly.
”

“Jesus! You’re serious. Have we lost all our money?”

“I’ve made a fool of myself.”

“Is that worse or better?”

“Worse, much much worse, infinitely worse. Oh, fuck!”

“Ah, Ma, don’t feel bad.” Angelica enveloped her in a bone-crushing hug. “We can have dinner at Parioli Romanissimo—so what if I don’t get to see the land of my ancestors—a restaurant’s almost the same thing as Venice without the canals … the pigeons … the Piazza San Marco … the Gritti …” her voice trailed off with pitiful poignancy.

“I can’t even have dinner with you tonight, Angelica. I’ll call Toby and he’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” Maxi said, hating herself.

“You have a date?” Angelica brightened.

“A promise. And it’s not one I can break. Call it a debt of honor. I have to be at P.J. Clarke’s at eight sharp.” Maxi sank back into a chair and curled up into a ball of misery.

“Angelica, do you happen to like black pearls? Because if you do, I’ve brought you one back from Europe.”

“Ah, give me a break, Maxi … come off the guilt trip. It’s strictly not your style,” Angelica said kindly.

A customs inspector certainly knows his way around the female human body, Maxi thought cheerfully as she tried to wake up the next morning. Was there a man on earth who could make love like a really straightforward Irishman at the peak of his form? And O’Casey was in the prime of his prime. Her second husband had been Australian but his ancestors had come from Ireland, sweet Bad Dennis Brady, a lovely boy as they would have said in the Old Country, but with an unfortunate habit of combining iced tequila and Buffalo Grass vodka in equal quantities and absorbing several generous glasses of the mixture before trying, without the captain’s help, to berth his ship in the harbor of Monte Carlo. Perhaps the marriage might have worked if he hadn’t been so otherwise bone-lazy or if the
boat hadn’t been an oceangoing eighty-meter yacht with its own helicopter pad. Perhaps if the helicopter had been properly fastened down the crash—or was it a shipwreck?—wouldn’t have been as embarrassing. Maxi had jumped that particular ship of fools after six months, she remembered sleepily, sadder, but not much wiser.

WISER! The word echoed in her mind and brought her out of bed in panic. Wiser? Who was wiser? What time was it? She had to get to work immediately. The staff at
Buttons and Bows
must have heard all about yesterday’s meeting, undoubtedly they were sitting around in doubt and tears waiting for the official ax to fall. She had to get there, wherever it was, and reassure them and take over and do … and do … whatever was necessary. Yes,
do
, take action, make decisions, take stock, take over, do something, do
anything
. She scampered around trying to draw the curtains open so that she could find a clock or a watch, but she was disoriented, not sure how the heavy draperies worked or where the light switches were.

Maxi had not slept in her new apartment before she had left for Europe two months earlier. At that time, like many of the apartments in Trump Tower, it hadn’t yet been finished although Maxi had bought it from floor plans several years earlier from her pal, Donald Trump, when the apartment was no more than his vision of what to do with an all-but-priceless piece of New York airspace. Finally she located the right cords and opened the heavy, interlined, apricot silk draperies.

Maxi stood in front of the windows immobilized by surprise. Was this Manhattan, the familiar, loved and hated city or, while she slept, had her new apartment been dropped gently onto another planet? The sun, which was just rising in the East, behind her, cast its rays across Central Park, which was still in partial darkness, and lit the peaks and spires and towers of the city for as far as her eye could see; north to Harlem; west, across the Hudson River to New Jersey; south, down beyond the Trade Center, to the open Atlantic. Lord have mercy, she thought, it is Manhattan and I’ve
bought
the whole damn town! She was filled with glee, the kind known as unholy. Manhattan belonged to her! She must be the only person awake this early, the
only person with this view, that had been carved out of sky. Perhaps there were taxis and buses and fire engines down there but Maxi couldn’t hear them on the sixty-third floor. She was floating, but not adrift, anchored in a nest that had cost her more than four million dollars, a nest that was almost as high as the wispy white Fragonard-like clouds that were turning pink over the park. As she watched the sun rise higher in the sky, flashing on windows which, one by one, sent messages directly to her, messages of a new day, tidings of a new morning, Maxi realized how lucky she was to possess a view that altered the spirit.

“ ‘I’ll take Manhattan,’ ” she sang, “ ‘the Bronx and Staten Island too.’ ” And she danced and danced by herself to the song her father had taught her.

“Angelica, I have nothing of a publisher-nature to wear,” Maxi realized at breakfast.

“I thought you were the new Editor-in-chief, Ma. Have you been promoted already?”

“In the middle of the night I woke up and suddenly realized that
Buttons and Bows
must already have an Editor-in-chief, and it would be an unpopular way to start by waltzing in and taking over somebody’s job, so I made myself publisher. Since Grandpa died the publications haven’t had a publisher.”