I'll Take Manhattan (22 page)

Zachary had been too preoccupied to pay much attention to Nina at the Wednesday staff meetings, caught as he was between the problems at home and the problems at the office, for it was a time when all his magazines had to gird themselves to grow or to go out of business. But eventually, as she had always known it would, the classic moment presented itself: the unexpected dinner invitation, made casually when there are only two people left in an office after a hard, long, but satisfying day. Nina had not spent her life practicing for this minute in order to let the occasion pass and the next morning, when Zachary woke up in her bed, he finally knew why other men played around, knew it in pulverizingly precise and staggering new detail and knew that nothing could stop him from being with her.

During the first months of their affair he had been too obsessed with Nina to feel guilty about Lily and the children. But one day he realized that he could never ask Lily for a divorce, he simply couldn’t do that to the exquisite, brave, talented girl he had overwhelmed in a single month when she had still been in her teens, the girl who had abandoned her certain and marvelous future as a prima ballerina for him, who knew no other life than the one he had encouraged her to lead, who had given him his children; Lily who was such a marvelous mother to Toby and to little Justin and even kept her patience with Maxi. Lily Amberville had become a queen in New York and he owed her no diminution of that position. One of the results of Lily’s illness had been that they almost never made love, not because she was afraid of getting pregnant again, but because Justin’s birth seemed to have caused some profound psychic change in her. All the more reason why he could never abandon her.

Painfully, he explained all this to Nina, knowing that she couldn’t want to continue with a man who could offer her no future.

“So, I gather that your idea of my idea of a future is that I expect you to get a divorce and marry me?” she had
asked, after listening to him struggle to make his position clear.

“Well. Ah. Yes. I see what you mean, I guess. I mean I
don’t
see what you mean! Isn’t that more or less what a girl like you
would
expect … I mean isn’t it? Damn it, Nina, don’t you want … wouldn’t you want … you’re a ‘nice’ girl … your parents … any other girl … damn it, I guess I took too much for granted. I thought, well I felt, oh
shit.
”

“It’s not that I don’t love you,” she said, trying as hard as she could not to laugh but having little success.

“If you love me,” he said, grabbing her, amazed at the enormity of his relief, “why don’t you want to marry me?”

“I’m a weird case. I don’t like marriage, it’s too obvious, everybody does it and then it becomes something you have to do every single day, like brushing your teeth. What I like is what we do: making love and seeing each other at meetings in the office and knowing we’re thinking about each other, and sneaking around corners and getting away for weekends and making love some more when everybody thinks we’re someplace else, and all that great, corny back-street stuff. I like to talk to you, but not necessarily every night.”

“Are you
sure
you’re Jewish?”

“You sound like my mother. You’d better make love to me again, fast, to make me forget that remark,” she said threateningly through her tears of laughter at his shock.

Nina Stern liked her freedom as much as she liked her increasing power at
Style
, a power she knew everybody had to admit she had achieved by merit, not by sleeping with the boss. She adored working hard at work she did brilliantly, she enjoyed being able to work nights without worrying about a family, and she was firm about having no one to please but herself. Every day brought her more invitations than three people could accept; she was one of the half-dozen single women in New York who had achieved the same desirability as a guest at a party as a supremely attractive bachelor. Men of all ages had competed for her throughout her twenties, and now in her thirties she was even more mysteriously, definitively desirable than she had been when she was younger, and just as much a flirt. If anything, fidelity to Zachary made her alluring ways more
intriguing since they led to nothing and created a challenge few men could resist; surrounding her with the aura of a beloved, successful, deeply happy woman with a distinctly private, private life. When her mother grumbled about Nina’s lack of husband and children all Nina bothered to reply was that she had the most interesting life of any woman she knew, a remark that Mrs. Stern regarded as frivolous and totally irrelevant, but which satisfied Nina completely.

Cutter and Candice Standings were married as soon as possible after it was certain that she was out of danger. The degree of her recovery was still in question but within two years of intensive physical therapy she had almost recovered from her accident. Her back would always give her trouble and frequent pain, but it had not been broken. She would never again be able to participate in any active sports but she walked normally.

During these two years Cutter had not only earned the benefit of his in-laws’ almost incredulous gratitude, but Candice’s love for him had turned into an emotion that was close to worship. It was an emotion so embarrassingly powerful, she was so totally under his dominion, that she had to hide her feelings for fear of being thought ridiculous. As the years passed, her focus on Cutter grew into an obsession that took the tyrannical, feverish form of jealousy, for never, in her hearts of hearts, was she able to convince herself that Cutter really loved her.
Was
it a proof of love that he had married her when she might have been crippled for life? Or was it merely guilt? He had sworn that yes, he did blame himself for her accident, but blame alone, no matter how great, would never have led him to marry her without love, he had sworn it dozens of times, until, one day, she saw that she must appear to have stopped doubting him for his patience was wearing thin.

She mastered herself, with a strength no one knew she had, and to others, even to Cutter, she seemed to be like many another of those rich young married women who were her friends, women who acted as if they took their husbands for granted. But not for one half hour of one single
day was Candice free of a lifelong insecurity based on those many years in which men had ignored her. The jealousy that she drove severely underground possessed her spirit all the more ferociously for being unspoken. Cutter became the only meaning in Candice’s life and when they participated in the rites of San Francisco social life, into which she was locked by her birth and position, her eyes forever, secretly, sought him out, checking to see if he was talking to a pretty woman. The jealous words she couldn’t allow herself to say turned into a wrinkled glass, like a dirty yellow filter spotted with unnamable filth, through which she saw her privileged world as a place where only misery lay.

Candice Amberville started drinking earlier and earlier every day so that, by the time she had to get dressed for a party or the opera, she could feel relaxed enough to face herself in her mirror without comparing herself to every other woman in town, but it didn’t help. She spent a fortune on clothes and became one of the best-dressed women in the city, but it didn’t help. She went to the hairdresser every other day so that her good hair was always perfect, but it didn’t help. She paid her cook twice what anyone else paid and gave the best, most beautifully organized dinner parties of their group, but it didn’t help. She was diseased in a way that nothing could cure. When Cutter lay between her legs, even when he was pulsing inside her, she thought of him doing the same thing to another woman, so when she reached her difficult orgasm, even that momentary relief didn’t help. Jealousy was killing Candice Amberville and if Cutter had been faithful to her it would not have helped.

She was so befouled with jealousy that she felt as if she had some vile skin affliction that oozed from every pore—to herself Candice was unclean, tainted, crusty with sores and scabs, each one torn over and over until the blood and pus poured out invisible, disgusting.

In a frantic effort to fill her life with something other than her thoughts she bought a pair of golden retrievers. They gave her some surcease, some brief respite, for into their ears she could pour her suspicions, her words of loathing for her peers who had sat next to Cutter at dinner and
laughed with him, who asked him to be their partner at mixed doubles or to spend a day crewing for them in one of the many yacht club races. With no sign of her torment she encouraged him to go, to enjoy all the sports in which she couldn’t join. She pretended to be anxious to take ski vacations saying that as far as she was concerned, she welcomed the change, enjoyed walking in the snow and having time to read while he was on the slopes.

If she could have had her way Cutter would have played only polo, for there, in the stands, watching him, she could be sure for hours at a time that he belonged to no one else. But whenever he wasn’t playing polo her imagination invented scenarios: Cutter, still dripping with the clean sweat of a tennis match, finding an empty room at the club, stripping off his clothes and plunging, already erect, into his only-too-ready partner; Cutter in the cabin of a becalmed yawl, lying back naked on a bunk, his long, thick penis already half swollen, a woman on her knees before him, following his curt, precise directions; Cutter returning early from the mountain and going, unobserved, to the bedroom of any one of the women who skied with him, watching her undress while he explained exactly what she must do to him, exactly what he intended to do to her, while he grew harder with each word.

Candice enlarged her kennels, bought more champion golden retrievers and started to breed them. She now drank more heavily, keeping bottles in the kennels so that she had a place to go, a private place where she could drink unobserved and tell her dogs all the things she could never tell other people because they would think she was crazy. For Candice there could be no acceptance of her situation, no slow slide into resignation, no truce. Her arid, tortured sense of worth lay entirely in
seeming not to know
, in living as if all were well in her marriage, in presenting a perfectly groomed, superbly dressed, confidently smiling persona to the world in which she was convinced that everyone was aware that her husband was faithless.

Actually Candice Amberville was wrong. Cutter’s many affairs, though suspected by some, were not common knowledge. He had picked his partners well; they were outlaws like him, all anxious in their own self-interest to
leave no signs that could be read by their husbands; women who were part of an underground that exists in every city in the world.

Candice’s father, who advanced Cutter’s responsibilities every year, would never have believed that the wife of one of the other partners at Standings and Alexander met Cutter twice a week in a hotel room. Candice’s mother would have given the he to anyone who reported to her that her son-in-law had other women, dozens of them. Only one member of the Standings family knew Cutter for what he was: Nanette, who had been fifteen when Cutter and Candice married and who now was twenty-four, pouting, rosy Nanette who had grown up unscrupulous, amoral and game for anything; Nanette who used other women and cocaine with the same sense of defiant curiosity. Why not do it, if it existed? Life was so dull, San Francisco so provincial, and marriage—for she was married—so boring and predictable that it was worth having at least one hard run at anything.

All undergrounds, even the most clandestine, have grapevines, and that of promiscuity is no exception. Eventually Nanette heard enough hints about Cutter’s activities to form a new idea of this blond man, so invincibly cool and so darkly intent, this man who had always acted toward her as if she were nothing more than Candice’s baby sister.

How had he managed to convince her that he had overlooked her own sexuality, as visible as a brand on her forehead to the kind of man she now knew he was? Did he find her unattractive? she asked herself, deeply piqued. And just how much of what she’d heard about him was true? A man who needed no arousal, a man who always was ready, a man who left every woman satisfied but with a satisfaction that itched for more—a sexual pirate. Could Cutter be all that? Was her horrid sister, so calm and pulled together, so superior and snobbish and disapproving, so busy with those prizewinning dogs and her famous dinner parties—was Candice so smug because she was getting her fill of such a man? Nanette asked herself in petulant irritation.

Cutter resisted Nanette for as long as he could. She was too close to home, he told himself, refusing to admit that that was part of her attraction. He’d wanted her for
years, from the time she turned from another little teenager into a voluptuous woman who reeked of carnality, whose animalism was so wanton that whenever he saw her at family gatherings he had become inflamed, against his will and his judgment, wanting nothing more on earth than to take her immediately, to take her without a smile and without a word, take her the way he knew she wanted to be taken, with brutality and violence. How many nights, in the ski lodge at Aspen, had he thrust himself deeply into his wife’s untempting, yielding, yearning body while he thought of luscious Nanette, dark, juicy and flamboyant, whose bedroom was only two doors away?

They stalked each other like creatures in a jungle, each the hunter, each the hunted, until the day came when the only question left was
how soon
? Quickly, it had to be quickly. And after they had wallowed in each other, the only question was how soon
again
? Nanette was inexhaustible with a courtesan’s skill he had never known in another woman. She was as voracious as a wolverine and twice as vicious. Cunningly she introduced him to the only experience Cutter had never known with a woman before: the thunderous, forbidden rapture of having two women at the same time; wise Nanette who had understood that this was the only way she was sure to keep Cutter for as long as she wanted him; Nanette who didn’t mind sharing him with a woman she had already possessed; Nanette who felt a particular, puissant thrill in showing him exactly what it was like when one woman took another while he watched, watched and waited until she allowed him to take her, take the other, take them both. No matter.