I'll Take Manhattan (24 page)

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“Telling you.”

“Then it’s worth a try.”

Amberville Publications now included three more successful magazines.
Savoir Vivre
, a magazine devoted to the art of living well through cultivation of ever more sophisticated taste buds;
Sports Week
, which had become rapidly
indispensable to every man, woman and child in America who had ever worn out a pair of sneakers, and
Indoors
, a magnificent monthly for well-heeled masochists that made its buyers, no matter how rich, feel that they lived like pigs and attracted large numbers of fans who looked at the photographs in each issue with a magnifying glass so as not to miss a single mortifying detail of other people’s homes.

Pavka Mayer, who was on the masthead of each of the publications as Artistic Director, sat in his office and contemplated Nina with relish. Even her latest idea hadn’t astonished him. He thought Nina capable of anything.

“It boils down to where Maxi can do the least harm,” he said thoughtfully.

“
Style
is out because it’s fashion and fashion leads to photographers and photographers lead to sex,” Nina brooded.

“We can’t hide her on
T.V. Week
—those gangsters there won’t put up with her. And they might send her to interview Warren Beatty just as a gag,” Pavka added.

“On
Seven Days
she’ll meet too many other kids. We don’t want to encourage our darling’s ringleader tendencies and all the editors at
Sports Week
are jocks or ex-jocks or would-be jocks and I don’t think it would be a good idea to expose Maxi to so many older men all at once.”

“You can’t mean you think she’s still a virgin?” Pavka asked, shocked.

“I don’t know. I’ve made it a point never to ask. It’s none of my business, Pavka. Nothing is impossible no matter how unlikely,” Nina replied.

“So that leaves only
Savoir Vivre
and
Indoors
,” Pavka realized. “You decide.”

“No, you decide. I don’t want to be totally responsible.”

“Neither do I,” Pavka said stubbornly. He pushed a button and spoke to his secretary. “Miss Williams, would you rather work on
Savoir Vivre
or
Indoors
?”

There was a long pause and finally his secretary blurted, “Have I done something wrong, Mr. Mayer?”

“No, just answer my question. Please, if you would be so kind.”

“Does this mean I’m fired?” she quavered.

“Oh, my Cod. No, it’s just an election bet.”

“Did you win or lose?”

“Miss Williams, I beg of you. Toss a coin if you don’t have an opinion.”

“I’d rather work on
Savoir Vivre
because I’d rather see pictures of roast pork than of somebody’s dining room.”

“Thank you, Miss Williams. Well done.”

“Oh, you’re so welcome, Mr. Mayer. Any time.”

Pavka beamed at Nina. “Can I help it if women adore me?”

Maxi was in heaven. Every summer of her life she had been forced into banishment in the country. Beaches, lakes, trees, fresh air and group sports, all were considered to be absolutely necessary for her well-being. Left to herself, a quick trip to Central Park was more than enough contact with nature.

On those rare occasions when she’d been in New York in the summer, for a few hours she’d been conscious of another Manhattan, one that was a hot tropical island where everything moved to a different beat, a city whose rhythm had somehow altered and, in its transformation, had become languid, mysterious, more exciting than ever. Although the office buildings seemed to have the same number of people dashing in and out, there was something different about the people themselves. They dressed differently and they smiled more. A sense of holiday, of a potential party just about to happen reigned in the business district, and in the residential parts of town there was a lazy emptiness, as well-dressed housewives, well-dressed children and well-dressed nannies vanished as completely as if plague stalked the streets.

Now this alluring, throbbing Manhattan in its summer metamorphosis was going to be hers, except for weekends when she and her father would join the family in Southampton. She would go to work with her father in the morning and then—lovely conspiracy—drift away from his side without a goodbye and take another elevator to the offices of
Savoir Vivre
where she would be known as Maxi Adams. Both Pavka and Nina had insisted on the necessity of concealing
her identity from everyone but Carl Koch, the Editor-in-chief of the magazine. If her co-workers knew she was Zachary Amberville’s daughter, at best they would think she was a spoiled rich bitch who was slumming her way into the magazine business, and at worst they would suspect her of being a spy, planted by the management to see what they were up to, reporting back to her father. Since
Savoir Vivre
was a magazine that had been published for only a little over two years, Maxi was unknown to everyone who worked there and they had decided to plant her in the art department, where she could be put to work on layouts. “She should be able to do wonders with glue and rubber cement and Scotch tape and a ruler,” Nina had assured Pavka.

“Maxi and a pot of glue? It won’t last two days,” Pavka muttered. “But better that than the test kitchens or, God forbid, the wine department. Glue you can always clean up. Glue you can re-glue.”

On that first Monday morning of July Maxi woke early and began to prepare herself for her entrance into the world of major corporative responsibility. She was enchanted with the idea of a job, a grown-up job. She had decided to add two necessary years to Maxi Adams’s age and tell everybody that she was nineteen.

She walked around in her biggest closet, looking for her oldest pair of jeans, the most paint-splotched, the ones that spoke the most of real work of all the many jeans she owned. She had worn them while painting scenery at her next-to-last school and it seemed to her that they gave off an artistic aura, for was she not going to be working in an art department? With them she put on a clean, pale blue, but equally well-worn denim shirt which seemed to say that she had never spent an unproductive minute in her life, a shirt that she felt was sensible, down-to-earth and adult, above all adult. She wanted so much to make a good first impression. Maxi bound a thick silver-and-turquoise Arizona Indian belt tightly around her eighteenth-century waist. After all, any art department would expect that even its most humble employee would still have a sense of decoration.
Shoes? No. She put on one of her many pairs of treasured high-heeled Western
boots
, four hundred and fifty dollars by mail order from Tony Lama, boots that she was convinced added three inches to her height.

Satisfied with her body she attacked her face and hair. No female, in 1972, ever considered that she had enough hair. Maxi had let hers grow down long beyond her shoulders and liked to fling it around, often adding to it with one of the many hunks of fake hair she had accumulated in the last few years. But today called for seriousness and dignity. She combed all her hair back from her face so that her streak of white was prominent. Makeup? Maxi had as much experience with makeup as any demonstrator on the first floor of Bloomingdale’s. Today she wanted to look
old
. The less makeup she used, the younger she looked, so she set about skillfully applying base, powder, blusher, mascara, eye liner, lipstick and eye shadow with a steady hand born of long hours of solitary practice. She added chunky nuggets of turquoise earrings and studied the finished product. She used an eyebrow pencil to darken the beauty mark above the bow of her upper lip.

No, still not
quite
old enough, Maxi decided, and dove into her closet and produced a pair of large horn-rimmed glasses she always wore when she played poker. They had plain glass for lenses but it helped to have some sort of mask, no matter how transparent, when bluffing. Something was
still
missing, she fretted, looking into a triple mirror. It was all that hair, of course. What good did it do to have white hair in front if the rest of it all hung down in the back? She pulled it all into a neat chignon and fastened it securely. Perfection, she thought. The portrait of the artist as an almost-middle-aged woman.

Zachary greeted her appearance at the breakfast table as impassively as possible. Perhaps, he thought prayfully, she didn’t look any different from any other girl of her age … he didn’t go around staring at them so he didn’t know for sure. But wasn’t there something almost … depraved?… about the way her jeans and shirt clung to her body? Didn’t Maxi realize that she looked sexier in those damn jeans than
if she’d pranced around in black lace panties? Shouldn’t a girl with such a tiny waist and such … a well-developed … pair of tits, for want of a less parental phrase, not wear a limp denim shirt that hugged each blossoming inch of her? And those glasses? Since when did she need glasses? They only made the rest of her more—whatever it was that disturbed him. And what had she done to her face? And her hair? Nothing he could figure out for sure, but there was something different about his daughter this morning. Was he going crazy or did she look almost … mature? No, not Maxi. Not mature, it couldn’t be.
Ripe
. By God,
ripe
!

“Maxi, you look ripe, damn it.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” she said demurely.

“Don’t you think you should wear a dress … maybe?”

“Daddy, nobody wears dresses anymore,” she said with gentle reproof.

She was right, Zachary realized. Nina wore pants, his secretary wore pants, all his female editors wore pants. The last woman he had seen in a dress was Lily, and hers were all that new mid-calf length. He sighed, hoping dresses would come back soon, and returned to his eggs.

“This is Maxi Adams, your summer trainee,” Carl Koch, Editor-in-chief of
Savoir Vivre
, said to his clever, capable art director, Linda Lafferty. “Do with her what you will.” He disappeared hastily, and with considerable relief, leaving Linda, who was close to six feet tall and still managed to be dumpy, to cope with the trainee.

Carl Koch had good instincts and he’d been immediately convinced that Maxi was a problem. He just wasn’t sure of what magnitude. Those summer kids always were a pain in the ass to deal with. But Pavka had given him firm, not-to-be-questioned orders and
Savoir Vivre
was stuck with her for the summer. But now she was Linda Lafferty’s problem.

Linda inspected Maxi with growing wonder. This young person looked to her like a budding intellectual who had somehow become a hooker in Santa Fe, or perhaps an apprentice Simone de Beauvoir who’d strayed into a stag party.

“Howdy pardner,” she said finally.

“Howdy, Miz Lafferty.”

“Where do you … hail from?”

“The East,” Maxi answered, skillfully avoiding this leading question.

“East?” Linda persisted. “Far East or Near East?”

“East Seventies,” she admitted.

“Oh. Any art training?”

“Only school and camp.”

“Camp?”

“Summer camp,” Maxi murmured, suddenly unable to find a substitute that would sound more impressive.

Why me, thought Linda Lafferty.
Why me
?

Nothing she had ever done in her life, Maxi decided after a week of work, could compare to the office for sheer fun. The potential for making merry in the art department of
Savoir Vivre
was beyond anything she had imagined. How come she had never guessed that people went to work in order to stand around and tell each other much better dirty jokes than she’d ever heard at school—really good ones—and horse around like crazy and get friendly with each other and goof off and sneak joints in the john and gossip like wild about sex? They all seemed to be making it with each other. To do that all day and get paid for it too—this was the secret grown-ups never told you when they spoke so seriously of something called “business.” Business was play on a major scale.

All her new friends worked on layouts, which reminded her of kindergarten, pasting pictures on heavy paper. She loved helping them, leaning over their shoulders and straightening out edges, handing them Magic Markers and sharpening their pencils and making them laugh if they ever got too annoyed with some photograph that wouldn’t fit right on a page. She’d shown them things they’d never thought of—the story on foie gras for instance, with photographs of seventeen different slices of foie gras, each one from a different French restaurant—nobody had been able to tell which part of which slice was the top and which was the bottom by the time she’d finished rearranging them.

Maxi’s very favorite part of the day was when the bagel-and-doughnut wagon came around, and everybody stopped pretending to be busy and gathered around like nomads stoking up before a trek across the desert. She even came back from lunch early for the afternoon bagel wagon halt at three o’clock. Nobody really needed her till then anyway. Lunch was such a groovy invention! Three free hours to shop. She was on a diet so she didn’t bother to eat. Instead, she systematically combed the stores, boutiques as well as department stores.

Maxi had been picking out her own clothes for years but always before she’d had to wait till September to shop. But now the city was full of early fall merchandise and there wasn’t anything Maxi didn’t try on. When she finally finished her daily bout of pillage and plunder, all charged to Lily’s accounts, she brought stacks of packages back to her brightly lit cubicle and pulled all her purchases out of their boxes and modeled them for her co-workers who had such terrific taste about things like colors and shapes and were teaching her a lot about what to wear. She’d stopped using her glasses and doing dumb things to her hair once she’d been firmly established as nineteen, going on twenty, and part of the gang.

The idea of starting her last year of high school in September was too revolting to think about. Maxi had decided to go to art school instead and everyone had advice for her about which school to pick and they were so great about coming back to her office and sitting around telling her about their days in art school and the hell-raising they’d gotten up to there. She hated the end of the day when she had to refuse all the offers of drinks at the bars that surrounded the office and disappear back home, even though she could usually con her father into taking her out to dinner with him.