I'll Take Manhattan (29 page)

After Maxi’s first timid venture into introspection she brooded long and often about her future. She had discarded the category of young divorcée almost as quickly as she had thought of it. There were so many other divorced women in Manhattan, forming a vast, unchartered club she’d rather not join. With far more art and discipline than she had employed in preparing herself for her first day at work, she carefully went about creating a new Maxime Emma Amberville Cipriani, one who would be immediately recognizable as a
widow
. Widowhood—early, cruel, accidental and mysterious widowhood—was a condition so much more desirable than any other open to her. It was a state that combined a certain mournfully elegant status with a distinction and an aura of—poetry?—yes, poetry, if you did it right, she thought, her lips quivering with a suppressed grin.

Maxi worked her way toward widowhood by the elegiac tempering of her smile; by the suddenly tremulous silences into which she fell unexpectedly; by a finely tuned, brave dignity in which she wrapped herself. She dimmed the field of energy in which she usually moved and turned it inward, so that it was obvious—but never immediately or painfully obvious—that she was suffering from an unspoken sorrow with which she would trouble no one. Now she dressed in black at all times: quiet, serious, expensive, indecently becoming black. The only jewelry she wore had been her parents’ wedding present, a glorious double strand of Burmese pearls, graduated from twelve to nineteen millimeters, each perfectly round globe radiating a matchless luster, and of course, the widow’s necessary ornament, a modest, plain wedding band she longed to throw in the garbage. As soon as Maxi found herself alone at home she changed immediately into old jeans and worn T-shirts but she never left the house unless she was raven-clad from head to toe, even if she were going to the country in black pants and a black silk blouse. Maxi used her makeup skills to achieve a delicious pallor, she threw away her collection of blushers and lipsticks and concentrated on demurely
darkening the area around her eyes with smoky grays and taupes. If only India were around to appreciate her efforts, she thought longingly, as she staged her effects.

Just as Maxi forbade herself her belly laugh she made a rule never to talk about herself. Instead she grew adept at drawing people out on their all-time favorite subject: themselves. She learned to subtly sidestep all questions about her private life and automatically refused two out of every three of her many invitations—for the sardines had worked marvelously well—in order to stay home with Angelica. Although she was deeply, constantly tempted, she never went so far as to tell anyone that Rocco Cipriani was dead—stone-cold dead—but she never referred to a former husband, or a previous marriage.

Since the length of time people bother to remember details of each other’s private lives in Manhattan is determined by how much fuel is flung on the fire, Maxi achieved established widowhood within a year, by her twenty-first birthday.

It was not a widowhood without distractions. She took with utmost discretion, a baker’s dozen of lovers, in not too rapid succession; each one impeccable, eligible, eager to marry her and free of any problems presented by an alliance with a man who might not understand that her money was her own to spend as she liked. Yet not one of them had seemed somehow
necessary
enough to keep longer than a few months. Maxi became convinced that she’d never fall in love again and the thought, although melancholy, was balanced by the freedom it gave her. She had become, she flattered herself, an updated Henry James heroine, a woman with a past that was only dimly known; whose present was tantalizingly private yet illuminated by the blaze of her independence, her family, her fortune, and—why not be blunt—her face; a woman whose future held infinite promise.

One fragrant August in 1978, Maxi drifted toward the entrance to the Casino in Monte Carlo. She idled along alone in the darkness, relaxed in the knowledge that the principality had one policeman for every five visitors and
every woman could safely wear all her jewelry in public on the darkest street of the little city. In her bones she felt there was a lucky seat at the chemin de fer table just waiting for her but she wasn’t in a hurry to get into the action.

This was Maxi’s first evening in Monte Carlo and literally the first time in her life that she was utterly free to come and go as she pleased, alone and on her own, unquestioned, unaccounted for and accountable to no one. Her parents were in Southampton. Rocco had finally been able to arrange matters at the magazine so that he had August off and he had taken Angelica to visit his parents in the country outside of Hartford.

Maxi had refused a number of proposals to be a house-guest or to join traveling friends, and quietly reserved a suite for herself at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, a corner suite, majestically proportioned, with a great semicircular balcony off the sitting room from which she had watched the sunset. Far below her she could see the crowded port of Monte Carlo; beyond it on a jutting, rocky promontory, rose the palace and beyond the palace was the remarkable sky, meeting the remarkable sea on which dozens of pleasure craft were coming into the harbor. There was no hint from the view from Maxi’s suite that every week one more of the charming Edwardian villas that, for so long, were the enchantment of the city, was demolished, each to be replaced by yet another, Miami-modern high-rise apartment building; no hint that every last square inch of Grimaldi territory was being exploited with an unsentimental thoroughness that was far more Swiss than Mediterranean.

August, no matter how hot, is
the
season for Monte Carlo, the month of balls and fireworks, of ballet and of a gathering together of a particular—and often peculiar—assortment of royalty-groupie rich from all over who never miss that once-a-year visit to Monaco. August is the one thirty-one-day bonus period during which those tax exiles from ninety-nine countries whose lawyers and accountants command them to become residents of Monaco, can rent their expensive dwellings and make enough to pay for their upkeep during the other eleven months; the one month during which the harbor yacht moorings are at a premium,
the one month in which the myth of Monte Carlo is annually reborn.

Maxi felt intoxicatingly reborn herself. In anticipation of her trip she had assembled a new wardrobe that filled seven suitcases, a wardrobe from which all black was banished; she had armed herself with an enormous letter of credit to a local bank and just that afternoon she had changed so many dollars into francs that her evening bag bulged.

A certain Beekman Place high-stakes poker game, which took place nightly in New York, had occasionally enlivened her sumptuous early widowhood, but Maxi had always had a yen to visit a real casino that would in no way resemble Las Vegas. Gambling, she thought, was a little like shopping … you couldn’t really do it right as part of a couple. Call it what you will—a question of skill, a matter of luck, or even just picking numbers—all gambling boiled down to choice, and choice was not a collaborative or a cooperative pursuit, arrived at with someone looking over your shoulder and making suggestions. It would be good for her, Maxi thought virtuously, to have a fling. Widowhood was so constricting. She
deserved
a fling, and obviously everyone in the crowd that pressed toward the entrance to the Casino felt equally festive.

The first large rooms of the ornate building were disappointing; filled with casually clad tourists playing slot machines, the high, painted ceilings seeming to look down in grief on such ignoble goings-on. But once past the stern men who guarded the entrance to the private rooms, Maxi discovered that the legend of the Casino of Monte Carlo still existed, as uncompromisingly authentic, as firmly locked into history as if it were a four-masted sailing ship that had somehow sailed out of the past. An Edwardian glamour, voluptuous and unashamed, showered down in gilded splendor; a sweeping waltztime drowned out the mad jazz tempo of the first rooms, a pink glow replaced the popping lights of the slot machines. Low-voiced, purposeful, well-dressed people moved here and there in the air that was charged with an almost unbearable excitement, the thrill that can only be imprinted on a space devoted to
gaming, wagering, playing, betting, in short, gambling. No one was immune to its spell, least of all Maxi Amberville.

Curbing her quick New Yorker’s pace, Maxi moved into the Casino with felicitous poise, with the self-assurance that can never be feigned, of a beautiful woman who is perfectly at ease
without
an escort. She wore a long, strapless, chiffon dress that was one shade lighter than the green of her eyes and diaphanous to the point of cruelty. Her black hair, which she wore pulled back severely from her face in New York, had been allowed to fall freely over her shoulders. She had transformed her double strand of pearls into one long rope that hung down over her bare white back, she’d thrust a spray of tiny white orchids between her breasts. Nothing about her suggested widowhood … nor maidenhood. She looked as fastidiously haughty as she felt; a fine feline female out on the town.

It was too early in the evening for baccarat or chemin de fer she decided. She’d try roulette just to warm up and orient herself. She’d never played it but it looked like a silly, easy kids’ game in which no skill was involved.

Maxi went to the cashier and bought chips for ten thousand dollars, receiving a hundred big black chips in exchange, each worth five hundred francs. She couldn’t do much damage with that little lot, Maxi thought, as she slid into a chair at the nearest roulette table. She decided to play her age and asked the croupier to put ten chips on twenty-three black. The wheel spun, finally stopped and Maxi was a thousand dollars poorer. Perhaps her next birthday? The twenty-four black yielded nothing. Nevertheless, she thought, if it had come up, she would have made thirty-five thousand dollars since all the numbers paid off at thirty-five to one. Where was the beginner’s luck to which she was entitled? On the other hand, roulette was not normally considered an investment, she reminded herself as she pondered her next choice. The man next to her spoke to the croupier.

“Ten on zero,” he said in an accent that Maxi couldn’t identify. She glanced at him curiously. He was slumped on one elbow as if only that bone was holding him up and he wore the most miserably threadbare dinner jacket that she had ever seen. His dark hair needed cutting, his hollow
cheeks needed shaving, and his eyes needed opening, for his lids were so low and his black lashes so long that it seemed impossible that he could see. He looked like a scarecrow, a bored yet oddly elegant scarecrow who had been left out in the fields until the birds had picked him almost to pieces. She drew slightly away. Obviously this was the sort of riffraff to whom a foolhardy fling at roulette was the final episode in a sordid history of debauchery. Surely there was something decadent about his finely cut profile? Yet he had the most beautiful hands she’d ever seen, with immaculate nails. A professional cardsharp? Probably not, for what self-respecting professional could dream of looking so down at the heels, so pathetically scruffy?

Maxi absently lost seventy more chips as she continued to take inventory of the man who had only given her the briefest of glances. Somewhere in his thirties, she decided, and probably Irish, for who but the Irish combined such white skin and such black hair? If his eyes were blue that would be final proof, but they were still hooded. He lost his ten five-hundred-franc chips and lazily put the equivalent of another thousand dollars on the zero again. His expression didn’t change and he seemed to take no interest in the rollicking dance of the ball as the wheel turned, first quickly, then gradually slowing to a stop. Maxi lost again as she noted, fascinated, that the man wore ancient tennis shoes and baggy white socks, and that his dinner jacket was worn over a white T-shirt over which he’d looped the necessary tie as casually as if it were a piece of string. It probably
was
a piece of string, and frayed string at that.

Maxi realized that she had only ten chips left. She beckoned to the attendant who hovered by the table and gave him the money to buy another fifty chips. Her neighbor looked up at the sound of her voice.

“Ten for me, please,” he said casually, without offering money. Obviously he was hoping for credit from the Casino, Maxi realized.

“Sorry, sir,” the attendant said, refusing his request.

“No more?”

“I’m afraid not, sir.”

“Not my night.” He offered the comment in infinite expressionlessness.

“No, sir,” the attendant agreed, going to get Maxi her chips.

So he was Irish, she thought. There was no disguising the classic deep blue of his eyes during the brief exchange. An Irish wharf rat, probably off the crew of one of the yachts in the harbor, who’d come to the Casino in a borrowed dinner jacket and lost his last franc or dime or farthing or whatever he’d had when he came in. Still there wasn’t an Irish lilt to his voice but some other accent—English but not British, whatever that meant she thought confusedly.

He reached into his socks and pulled out five black chips from each one with the kind of supremely indifferent look that Maxi knew must mean that he had been saving this stash for just this moment. She felt sorry for the feckless creature, she realized. There was something gallant and touching in the way he refused to show his absolute desperation. He was obviously at the end of the line. Who knew what fate awaited him after he’d lost his last chips? He’d probably borrowed the money he had been playing with. Or even stolen it. Yet he’d put all ten big chips on the zero again, not even holding back a single one to give himself a chance to play one more time. She held her breath as the wheel slowed, as the little ball finally dropped to rest. On the zero. Maxi clapped both hands loudly in delight. Thirty-five thousand dollars—that should keep him from shooting himself. She smiled at him in congratulation and saw, to her disbelief, that his eyelids were not even raised. Should she nudge him? Hadn’t he seen?