I'll Take Manhattan (34 page)

What, Maxi wondered, what did they all want?
Wanting
was the very essence of the New Yorker. She knew what she wanted. She wanted to make a smashing success of
Buttons and Bows
and quite suddenly she admitted to herself that she knew it could not be done. Not with
Buttons and Bows
. No way, nohow. There was no
major
demand in this city, where there was a market for everything, for a magazine that was devoted to articles, no matter how well executed, on the mystery of the hand-embroidered glitz on Julio’s three-thousand-dollar dresses or the ruffles on Prince’s clothes or the definitive word on Linda Evans’s paillettes. Probably there was a market for a magazine for contact lens wearers, or a magazine for left-handed people, perhaps even a magazine for people who collected string, but they would always be
small
magazines. Maxi wasn’t about to pour her energy into a small magazine.

Scratch trimming, she thought. She needed to find a new idea—a—a
concept
. That was all she needed, a concept, Maxi thought, as she almost danced down Fifth Avenue, in her red miniskirt, a smile on the perfect bow of her mouth. Just a new concept, merely a new, fresh concept that hadn’t already been done. That was all. As she sped by, every man who saw her ached to follow.

When Elie called in tonight she’d tell him that tomorrow morning she wanted him to make the rounds of all the newsstands in the city and bring her a copy of every single magazine on sale. She might as well know what was out there already before she invented her new magazine.

“Ma,” said Angelica in a voice of supplication, “when are you going to stop torturing yourself? I can’t take this much longer.”

“Tough shit, kid.”

“Ma, that’s not a nice way to talk to your little girl.”

“I don’t have time to be nice. If you want a nice person go find somebody else, I’m working.”

“Ma, why are you doing this to me?”

“Because. And stop whining … other girls have working mothers and they don’t complain.”

“Working mothers!” Angelica sputtered. “You’re like some kind of loony, a robot, a crazed robot.”

“Go play Trivial Pursuit.”

“You’ve been shut up with these magazines for three days now, you haven’t had more than a bite to eat, you read till you drop, you grind your teeth when you’re asleep …”

“How do you know?”

“Because you fell asleep on top of that pile of magazines last night and I heard you grinding away.”

“Just a little stress, just normal stress, Angelica.”

“But you’ve always avoided stress, you hate stress, Ma. Stop it!”

“To be stressed is human, kid, don’t you know that? Maybe you’re too young, but according to what I read, every female in this country is operating under unendurable stress and it’s getting worse even as we sit here and waste time talking. Now go away and let me get back to my work.”

“Ma, I’m going to call Toby and get you committed to an institution.”

“It takes three doctors to commit somebody and all the doctors in the country are busily writing articles on stress for magazines, so you won’t find any who have the time, but you’re free to try.”

Angelica folded her lanky frame in sections and sat down protectively next to Maxi. Three days before, when Elie had arrived at the apartment with the first shift of magazines, her mother had been like a kid opening Christmas presents. She had installed herself in her new library, with its solar-gray mirrored walls, its book-crowded shelves and its big armchairs covered in off-white glove leather. She had opened each new magazine with anticipation, pounced on it and leafed through it page by page, leaving out nothing from cover to cover. When she had wrung a magazine dry Maxi carefully added it to one or another of the piles of different types of magazines that were beginning to collect around her. Elie kept returning from his expeditions with his arms piled high. From expectation, Maxi’s mood grew more subdued. By lunch she began to look slightly dismayed and by the end of that first day she was annoyed. By the evening of the following day she had progressed to outrage, and her outrage had mounted ever since. Still the magazines kept coming, the piles now tumbling down the sides of all but the window wall of the room.

Many of them had been sent away, carried off by the weary Elie: the only-for-men magazines; the sports magazines; the computer magazines; the car-owner magazines; the audio-freak magazines; the motorcycle-nut magazines; the weekly news magazines; the movie magazines; the soap-opera fan magazines; the magazines for male homosexuals; the aerospace magazines; the business magazines of all kinds and sorts.

Maxi had, by now, cleared a place for herself on the red and white hand-loomed carpet and sat cross-legged, hemmed in by dozens and dozens of publications.

“I haven’t found one for lesbians yet,” she said in a tired but thoughtful tone of voice.

“Ma! Is that what you’re planning?”

“It may be the only major virgin market left.”

“Would lesbians go out to a newsstand and buy a special magazine?” Angelica wondered. She heard the front door open. It must be Elie with more dreaded magazines, because the footsteps were those of a man.

“In a country with fifty-nine million single people and a magazine like
Bride’s
that claims to reach just over three
million, it stands to reason that there’s got to be a big lesbian audience out there somewhere,” Maxi answered, trying for a tone of sweet reasonableness.

A man entered the carpeted library where they sat so engrossed in print that they didn’t hear him. He stood leaning on the doorjamb, casually poised. The mocking cock of his head, the tough jut of his chin, the skeptical glint in his eyes, the clearly bellicose way in which his short, pointy, ash-blond hair stood up from his head, all indicated someone who viewed the world with a certain disdain. He wore battered leather so worn that it seemed a collection of bits and pieces, three Nikons were slung around his neck, and his smile was both knowing and deeply loving. It was evident that he found both Maxi and Angelica very funny, objects of his benevolence, and it was just as evident that only a very few people in the world fell into that category.

“Could I interest you ladies in a subscription to
Boy’s Life
?” he said quietly.

“Justin!” Maxi whooped and launched herself across the room into his arms, scattering magazines in every direction. “Justin, you beast, where the fuck have you been for a year, you rotten bastard, you shithead! Justin, darling!”

“Give me a chance at him,” Angelica cried, and grabbed him tightly, trying to climb up him like a monkey as she used to when she was a little girl, almost toppling him over in the process. Eventually he extricated himself from the two excited, babbling creatures, separated them and put an arm around each of them. “Let’s look at you,” Justin said, and they immediately fell silent and subjected themselves to his scrutiny. “Still the ultimate best in the kingdom,” he said after a few seconds. He inspected his sister and his niece keenly, his dark gray eyes missing nothing, but whatever his real thoughts were he kept them, as always, to himself.

Soon after Zachary Amberville died so suddenly, so horribly, Justin had taken off without a word to any member of his family. He had a record of disappearing for months at a time since he was fifteen, and the Ambervilles had become accustomed to his comings and goings. He
never wrote or telephoned while he was away but, from time to time, photographs would crop up in a variety of publications with the photo credit “Justin”: photographs from tiny islands so distant that no travel agent knew them, from mountaintops so unexplored that they had no names, from jungles that were only empty space on most maps; photographs of surfers in Australia, of Brazilian transvestites in the Bois de Boulogne, of the inside of the Royal Enclosure at Ascot; photographs that had nothing to connect them to each other except the unexpected viewpoint of the brain beyond the lens of the camera that captured images that couldn’t be skipped over, even in an era when it seemed that the
most
extraordinary photographs must all have been taken.

His last “trip,” as the family called Justin’s mysterious wanderings, had been longer than any other he had made, and his photographs had been infrequent, but still no one worried, for by now it was accepted as a fact that Justin was invulnerable.

In his early teens, he had seemed utterly ill at ease in his own skin, jumpy, awkward, and seeking every opportunity to avoid attention. Then, when he was twelve, he had started to study the martial arts and self-defense, embracing a schedule of relentless training that had reminded Lily of the single-mindedness of the ballet. Slowly Justin’s bearing, even when he stood still, began to convey an unstated menace. Everything that had earlier seemed vague and alienated in him had been collected into the strength and speed with which he knew he could move. Today he was a presence to reckon with, all dexterity, all sinewy grace; a man of twenty-four, of medium height, whose lean body nevertheless had more density than that of other young men.

Justin looked both lionhearted and unpredictable although he disdained any outward trappings of toughness. His familiar leathers were not studded body armor, just relaxed, well-worn, shabby garments in which he could travel anywhere. When he could be coaxed into a game of croquet in Southampton he exuded the same potential for dauntlessness, wearing white linen trousers and a pastel crew sweater; the quality was built into his hard muscles,
into his lack of relaxation, as if he were ready to do battle at any minute.

Maxi had never seen Justin touch another person except with tenderness, yet she often realized that she knew remarkably little about her younger brother although they loved each other unreservedly. He was the most highly defended man she had ever met and whatever went on behind his high rounded forehead, whatever unspoken need made him drift away from home so often was a bafflement to her. Even Toby, with the acuity of his senses, with his way of reading unspoken thoughts, had no clues to the perplexing conundrum of Justin’s motivations. It seemed to both of them that he stalked some invisible goal that eluded them, a goal he never had explained, never had described, yet a goal that inexorably lured him on and on.

“What,” Justin demanded, grinning, “are the two of you doing? I want an explanation. Toby said I’d find you here but he didn’t say in what condition. He said you’d tell me all about it.”

“Ma’s looking for a new magazine concept,” Angelica answered with a shrug of her shoulders, “and I’m trying to make sure she doesn’t starve to death in the process. The new cook quit yesterday.”

“Maxi, why?” Justin said, astonished. “Who needs another magazine?”

“I’m not sure yet, that’s the problem. But the rock-bottom reason has to do with Cutter, and a matter of not letting him make an ass out of me.”

“In that case, you can count on my full cooperation,” Justin said with as much overt ferocity in his voice as he ever displayed.

While Maxi and Toby could have explained in detail what they distrusted and disliked in their uncle, only Justin had always hated Cutter and yet could not have said why. It was an instinctive loathing that went too deep for words, a question of absolute mutual antipathy. Justin had been curious, as they all were, about his father’s brother who never seemed to leave San Francisco. When Justin was almost eleven, Cutter and Candice Amberville finally came through New York, stopping for a few days on their way to Europe. The first time Justin met Cutter his curiosity had
been transformed into a visceral disgust, a disgust he didn’t try to understand. It existed as solidly as a boulder, it was not something to question or ponder, it just
was
, as powerful as his love for Zachary, as obvious as his caring for Toby and Maxi.

“I accept your offer,” Maxi said delightedly. For the last three days Angelica had been her only sounding board. Julie was busy at the office winding up the business of putting
Buttons and Bows
into the limbo where all dead magazines still float, items of rare, plaintive nostalgia and trivia quizzes. Maxi had not called on any of the professionals at Amberville Publications who would have been glad to lend her a hand. Pride had prevented her, pride and an irresistible need to do this thing
by herself
, to see it through to the absolute end and then, if she ran dry after giving it her unreserved best, to admit defeat if necessary. But she didn’t want to lean on the obviously available expertise of Pavka or Nina or Linda Lafferty, or any of many others who were among the editorial board members. She was twenty-nine and she’d never accomplished much alone in her life except bringing up Angelica. However, Justin’s help was different. He was family.

“Where do we start?” Justin asked, shedding several layers of soft leather and making a place for himself on the floor with Maxi and Angelica.

“Don’t you want to know why I’m looking for a concept?” Maxi demanded.

“Not necessarily, as long as it has to do with screwing Cutter. How far have you come? Do you have a glimmer of a glimmer?”

“I know what I can’t do. I have eliminated all the glossy magazines: the
Vogues
and
Architectural Digests
and
House & Gardens
. Not only are they too expensive to publish, but Amberville already has
Style
and
Indoors
and I don’t want to compete with the company. Also they make me so
angry
!”

“Since when? I thought you loved them.”

“I used to, I was addicted to my monthly fix of slippery paper, but the more I looked at them, the more I read them, the more furious I got. Justin, do you realize that the glossy books just make you feel like a piece of
junk
? Almost
nobody can look like that; wear those damn clothes; use that crazy new makeup; have houses like that or gardens like that … you can aspire, you can spend the rest of your life trying to be someone photographed in that one perfect minute, which is the only thing they
ever
show, but you’ll never make it for real. They’re not selling dreams, they’re selling putdowns. They’re selling heartache, dissatisfaction with what you have, above all they’re selling
envy.
”