I'll Take Manhattan (33 page)

“Done. I’m absolutely dead serious about this, India.”

“I know you are. Oh, Maxi, I did hope that this time you’d settled down for good.”

“India,
me
? You should know better than that!”

In spite of the discouragement in which she had briefly wallowed over the weekend and on the phone with India, Maxi approached the offices of
Buttons and Bows
on Monday with a tickle of irrepressible excitement. After her long therapeutic talk with her best friend she had convinced herself that the former editor, Bob Fink, was simply too superannuated to understand that something could be made of her magazine, no matter how low it had fallen. He didn’t believe in it anymore, if indeed he ever had, he had no competitiveness left, he lacked vision, he had made too much money in real estate to be hungry for improvement, except when it was time for his daily free lunch, Maxi assured herself as she opened the door to the suite of offices, a door that she resolved to have painted as soon as possible.

She stood inside and surveyed the unprepossessing chamber. On the walls of the reception area were framed covers of
Trimming Trades
when it had still been the thriving, prosperous magazine on which Zachary Amberville built his empire. The old-fashioned covers from the forties and fifties just reinforced her conviction that bringing the magazine back to life was a question of using her imagination.
The skimpy, recent issue of
Buttons and Bows
that she had put into her handbag and taken home had a cover that was basically similar to those on the walls. Surely something as important as a cover could have been, should have been, totally changed in the course of forty years?

“Miss Amberville, welcome to hard times.”

Maxi spun around. It was the receptionist who had announced her arrival last week.

“You’re still here? Bob Fink said everyone couldn’t wait to leave.”

“My salary is paid through the end of the week, and I’m not old enough to retire.”

“What’s your name?”

“Julie Jacobson.”

“Call me Maxi,” she said, sitting down in front of the battered desk. “About your clothes, Julie, shall we put our cards on the table?”

“I guess that would be best,” Julie answered carefully.

They were wearing identical outfits: miniskirts in a screaming red, with crisp white blouses and exaggeratedly long, black men’s ties around their necks. They both had on black tights and high-heeled black pumps. A wool Chesterfield that matched the skirt was hanging behind the receptionist’s desk. Maxi was wearing its double. The ensemble was Stephen Sprouse’s newest, freshest, and brightest, exactly what a fashion addict with superb legs would choose to wear on this particular day of this particular month of this particular year. Since they were roughly the same height, the two young women looked absolutely alike from the chin down.

“I think we should stop meeting like this,” Maxi said, “or else try to make a point of it.” Bob Fink had said that his receptionist was overpaid but this suit and blouse had cost over a thousand dollars, not counting the shoes. Just how overpaid was she?

Julie was Maxi’s height, but she had little breasts and narrow hips that meant she would always look taller than Maxi in the same clothes. Her short hair was tinted an otherworldly color between Bordeaux and orange that stopped precisely short of punk. It was brushed back uncompromisingly from her forehead to reveal a face that belonged
to an impertinent doe: huge challenging eyes, darkly rimmed in charcoal liner and shadow; a slender nose with nostrils so sensitive that they looked as if they could twitch at any minute; delicate lips painted a bright crimson; a chin that was just small enough to give the impression that she shared some forest animal’s timidity and yet firm enough to let the world know that Julie Jacobson didn’t let anyone order her around.

“But let’s discuss wardrobe later,” Maxi continued. “I’m going to look around my office. Then maybe you could show me the rest of the establishment?”

Julie sprang up and stood with her back protectively barring the door that led to Uncle Bob Fink’s former office.

“I don’t think you really want to go in there,” she said.

“I don’t?”

“It might not be the best way to start the day.”

“Don’t tell me he didn’t get rid of all his stuff,” Maxi sputtered. “He promised, damn it.”

“No, it’s all been carted away.”

“Then what’s the problem?” Maxi said blithely as she entered. She stopped in her tracks in shock.

The room was completely empty, except for one old black leather chair with a rump-sprung seat. The entire carpet was covered, many inches deep, with layer upon layer of half-disintegrated bits of paper, a mess ten times worse than Broadway after a ticker-tape parade. Cobwebs, she thought in a daze, real honest-to-God cobwebs hung in the corners of the room. Did New York have
spiders
? The walls, now that Uncle Bob’s nine towering desks no longer concealed them, were mottled and filthy. There had been leaks over the years and paint had fallen from the walls in long zigzag strips that lay. in pieces over the other debris. The windows were so dirty that scarcely any sun lit up the scene, but whatever light came through the grime was desolate.

“At least in
Great Expectations
Mrs. Havisham had
furniture
to hold up her cobwebs,” Maxi said when she could find her voice.

“The last desk, the one he was working at, collapsed when they tried to move it,” Julie explained.

“There isn’t a broom, there isn’t a vacuum cleaner,
there isn’t any instrument known to man that could clean up this … I don’t even know what to call it,” Maxi said faintly.

“There’s always motivation.” Julie sounded as if she’d meditated on the problem.

“Motivation?” Maxi was horrified. “You don’t mean me!”

“In
our
clothes? I was thinking of Hank, from the building. He’s been known to become highly motivated by the palm of his hand. Do you have fifty bucks?”

“In cash … I don’t think so. Will he take a credit card?”

“I’ll lend it to you. You can pay me back tomorrow.”

“Bless you, Julie! Let’s get out of here. It’s morbid.”

“You’re the boss.”

“Right? Right! Now where can the boss sit down and discuss the future of
Buttons and Bows
with her staff?”

“Maxi, you don’t have a staff.”

“What about you?”

“No way. I don’t mind lending you money, but that’s as far as it goes. I’m purely temporary, not staff, God forbid, in this place.”

“Couldn’t you just pretend? Till the end of the week. You could put it on your resume, when you go for your next job.”

“I am planning on leaving
Buttons and Bows
off my résumé entirely. But if it makes you feel any better, you can call me a consultant and let me buy you a cup of coffee to cheer us both up. Don’t look for a coffee maker, it’s broken.”

“The nearest coffee shop?”

“You’re on.”

“Julie,” Maxi said earnestly, leaning over the table, “have you ever stopped to think of the possibilities? Every rock group in the world is trimming-crazy, tons of gold braid, uniforms, everything they wear is trimmed to high heaven. Medals are back all over the place. Shoulder pads have never been more important. Claude Montana. Just think of Claude Montana’s shoulder pads! The T-shirt craze. What is punk but the inspired use of trimming? And just look at the evening dresses this year … if they don’t
glitter, forget them. Sonia Rykiel’s things—all trim. Why, we could do a whole issue on … on Joan Collins’s puffed sleeves!”

“Hmmm.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ve only been here two weeks because the assistant editor’s job I was supposed to have at
Mademoiselle
fell through at the last minute, but I do know who still subscribes to
Buttons and Bows
. Basically, it’s your Mr. Lucas who is worried about selling five thousand yards of passementerie and your Mr. Spielberg whose main business in life is fringe. I don’t think they would be intensely fascinated by Joan Collins’s sleeves. They would hardly notice if Joan Collins herself appeared stark naked on the cover of the magazine.
Buttons and Bows
, if it’s about anything, is about a few of the nuts and bolts of the fashion business. For fashion, Spielberg and Lucas stick to
WWD
. That’s not subject to change by you.”

“Then we have to widen our base of circulation, appeal to somebody other than Lucas and Spielberg.”

“
Not we
, Maxi, you,” Julie insisted. “
You.
”

“Anyway, that’s tomorrow’s problem,” Maxi said, pushing it away into the air. “Tell me about you. All the vital statistics you care to have known.”

“I’m twenty-two. I graduated from Smith last year. My mother always insisted that I have secretarial skills to fall back on. For three generations the women of my family have had secretarial skills and I’m the first one who’s ever had to fall back on them. I do not enjoy it. In two weeks I’m starting at
Redbook
as assistant to the assistant to the fashion editor.”

“Are you a New Yorker?” Maxi asked curiously. Julie was as businesslike a creature as she’d ever met and crisply self-confident.

“Cleveland, Shaker Heights. My father’s a neurosurgeon and my mother teaches English literature at the university. Her speciality is Virginia Woolf and the Blooms-bury Group. My sister’s working for a double Ph.D. in French and philosophy so that she can teach Pascal, Montaigne and Voltaire, heaven only knows to whom, and my
brother’s a city planner and chief aide to the mayor of Cleveland. I’m my parents’ only failure.”

“What is your crime?” Maxi gaped. It must be the color of her hair. Everything else about her was so impressive.

“I’m nuts about fashion. No one in the Jacobson family thinks fashion is a proper way to spend the only life you have. It’s frivolous, poorly paid, and doesn’t add to universal knowledge.”

“It’s the fourth or fifth biggest industry in the country.”

“They don’t think much of industry either.”

“They sound a bit … Bostonian.”

“There’s another branch of the family that’s lived in Boston forever. They make the Cleveland Jacobsons look like television game show producers.”

“I didn’t even graduate from high school,” Maxi confessed.

“Is that why you’ve been sent to
Buttons and Bows—
to teach you what happens to people who fail to complete their education?”

“It was my own idea. And I’m not giving it up,” Maxi said grimly.

“I don’t understand why, with all the other Amberville publications, you should care what happens to pathetic old
Buttons and Bows
. In your place I’d be at
Style
like a shot.”

“Let’s talk about clothes,” Maxi suggested. She liked Julie but she wasn’t about to bare her heart and her loss to satisfy her curiosity. The reasons were too emotional, too bound up with her love for her father to explain.

“Clothes Milan? Clothes Bendel’s? Clothes American designers?” Julie’s eyes lit up with anticipation.

“You’re buying the coffee so you get to pick,” Maxi said generously.

For several hours that afternoon Maxi sat in what had once been the art department, where two bare L-shaped layout tables and several tottering chairs had been abandoned on a dirty, peeling linoleum floor. In the reception room, from time to time, she could hear Julie answering
the phone and coping with the reluctantly motivated maintenance man.

Maxi had supplied herself with a yellow legal pad and a box of ballpoint pens and she decided that the first thing she had to do was to plot the future of a new, revitalized, expanded, explosive
Buttons and Bows
. She had the intention of making lists and sketches and more lists and more sketches. She walked around the room, looked out of the window, sat down, looked at her yellow legal pad, got up and walked around the room some more. Inspiration proved elusive. Maybe it was the fault of the decor, maybe it was the terrible ham-and-cheese sandwiches she and Julie had shared in a coffee shop that had been sold out of her favorite, tuna salad, maybe it was the antics of the full moon or the diabolical influence of Saturn or maybe it just wasn’t her day. Maybe it was Lucas and Spielberg. She wished that Julie had never told her about them. None of the ideas that came into her head seemed good when viewed from the Lucas-Spielberg angle, and they were, after all, the faithful core that was left of the readers of
Buttons and Bows
. The magazine, if it were to rise from the ashes, had to appeal to many thousands of Lucases and Spielbergs, wherever they were to be found. Hundreds of thousands. Millions!

“Jesus Christ Almighty!” Maxi said out loud.

“You spoke?” Julie asked, standing in the doorway.

“There
aren’t
millions of Lucases and Spielbergs!”

“One of each, I believe. On your subscription list in any case.”

“Julie, I’m going for a walk. I think better on my feet.”

“It’s nice outside,” Julie said, eyeing the virgin yellow pad meaningfully. “Oxygen stimulates the brain.”

“And it’s nice outside. See you tomorrow.”

Elie was waiting with the limo downstairs.

“The center of the universe, Elie,” she ordered. He made his rapid, illegal way to the corner of Fifty-seventh and Fifth, stopped and opened the door for her. “When will you need me tonight, Miss Amberville?”

“I’m not sure, Elie, but call in around six.”

She walked briskly down Fifth Avenue, breathing deeply, relishing the nimble temper of the September city, that perpetual urban high-wire act. She loved the incomparable tension of this island metropolis that felt as if it were perched on the top of an active volcano. “ ‘I’ll take Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too,’ ” Maxi sang, although she had known for years that the
song
her father had taught her had been skewed to suit his determination since the first three words of the lyric really were “We’ll have Manhattan.”

Never had Fifth Avenue seemed broader or brighter to her than after the dismal hours she’d spent in her new office, never had the passing throng, pushing and shoving and overtaking each other in the aggressive,
con brio
New York version of a stroll, seemed more fascinating and varied than after the fruitless afternoon she’d spent with her yellow pad. Everyone had a destination, a goal, a reason for being here, in this place, on this street, at this hour.