I'll Take Manhattan (39 page)

“Why the hell
should
I do it?” he asked. “There are dozens of guys I can recommend who can turn that thing into a dummy. There’s no mystery to it.”

“Because you’ll do a better job,” Maxi said inexorably.

“Better by a few degrees, maybe, but what difference does it make? What counts is what’s
in
the magazine, not just the dummy. People aren’t fooled by a pretty page, they look for content.”

“The content is O.K. I didn’t ask you for help on the content, only on the presentation.”

“Just like that, hm? O.K.? All from your little brain? Would it interest you to know that Time, Inc. has a super high-powered magazine-development group working on new ideas? They’ve got eighteen top people, including Stolley who founded
People
and Fier from
Rolling Stone
plus seventeen free-lancers and fifteen business types all working like crazy with a budget of over three million a year? Fifty people, headed by Marshall Loeb who made a success of
Money
, the best brains Time could buy. They’ve already got a finished dummy on something called
Women’s Week
and another called
Investors Weekly
, plus a number of others with covers and boards? What do you say to that?”

“It doesn’t bother me. I don’t believe in committees. Henry Luce probably didn’t believe in committees either, when he was alive. My father didn’t believe in committees. Do you have all night to sit around talking shop, Rocco, or
do you want to get started on my dummy?” Maxi said evenly. Her ruffled, artfully messed hair remained firmly on her head and Rocco couldn’t see her scalp prickling in horror. What if one of Time, Inc.’s brain trust had come up with
her
concept?

“I’m leaving here as soon as I’ve talked to Angelica about the pill and what taking it too young can do to her.”

“Don’t bother,” Maxi said indignantly. “I’d never let her near it, you ass. You never did know when I was joking, that was your problem. One of the many. Anyway tonight is the night Angelica is allowed to watch MTV and she won’t like to be disturbed.” She went over to the dummy, picked it up and thrust it into Rocco’s arms so quickly that he automatically held on to it.

“Shit!”

“I know, that’s why I need you. Sit down, and read it.”

“I’ll give you three minutes, you lying bitch. And only because Angelica knows I’m here and you’d bad-mouth me if I don’t look at this mess. What the hell is
B&B
? That stinks for openers. It’s a brand name of an after-dinner drink made by monks, not a magazine name,” Rocco puffed, struggling with the floppy mass.

He sat down at Maxi’s desk, put the thing on the desktop, and began leafing rapidly through the pages. Maxi held her breath, watching him closely for the sign of any reaction. She had not actually laid eyes on Rocco for over four years. When Angelica was seven she had been quite grown-up enough to be picked up and delivered from Maxi’s apartment to Rocco’s apartment by one or the other of them, or by Elie, without their having to have the slightest contact. Christ, she thought, the mistakes a girl can make because a man is impossibly beautiful. He looks almost exactly as he did when I first saw him and it just simply couldn’t matter less … it’s as if he were invisible. He has as little appeal as a bottle of gin does to someone who’s been in A.A. for twenty years. I wonder when he’ll start losing his hair and getting fat? It’s inevitable, just a question of time. There must be something fundamentally wrong with him anyway, all those girls he sees, the ones Angelica talks about, and he hasn’t managed to settle down. Yet he’s thirty-six if he’s a day. He’ll be a sad, lonely old bachelor soon … bad for
Angelica because old bachelors die young. Why isn’t he reacting? He looked right through the Kissinger article with all those blissfully snooty pictures of Nancy, and didn’t even blink, the son of a bitch. He just doesn’t want to give me the satisfaction. Well, I don’t give a fart about his opinion … 
B&B
is for women, not sell-out magazine men who’ve lowered themselves to make commercials. I’m glad he’s successful, for Angelica’s sake, but obviously the bugger couldn’t possibly enjoy his life, not with that pinched, set look he’s got on his face.

Rocco flipped through the dummy, came to the end and slapped his hand down on it, closing it firmly, and pushing it away.

“How much is this going to sell for?”

“Rocco! You mean it has a chance? Oh, Rocco! You’d never have asked me that if you didn’t think it was good.” Maxi jumped up and down, more relieved than she could have believed possible.

“It has a certain … quality. I don’t mean it has ‘quality,’ God knows, I mean there’s something catchy about it … a reflection of your twisted mind. It might sell a few copies.”

“I want it to sell for a dollar fifty.”

“You’re raving. Much too cheap.”

“That’s what
People
costs, and everyone buys it.”

“Maxi, I really don’t like to break this news to you but you’re talking about one of the biggest-circulation books in the country and it sits at the supermarket checkout counters at point-of-sale where women just automatically put it into their shopping carts.”

“That’s where
B&B
will be,” Maxi said calmly. “It’s meant for the same audience, plus the
Cosmo
audience and the
Good House
audience.
Women
, Rocco, women. There are a lot of women in this country who will buy a magazine that likes them
just the way they are
, a magazine that they can have fun with, a magazine that guarantees a good time.”

“Where’d you steal that concept?” Rocco demanded.

“Oh, it just came to me. One day. Out of the blue.”

“For a buck fifty you have to have enormous circulation—at least four—no, make that five million, to make
money. And ads and more ads. You’re living in a dream. You haven’t even got a distributor, I’ll bet.”

“I wouldn’t take your money,” Maxi said with dignity. “I’m quite aware that it’s a crapshoot, but then I like to gamble. I’m not interested in special groups;
Bon Appétit
this isn’t … I’m going for the mass market and if it doesn’t work, well, back to the drawing board.”

“Big talk, big talk. Whose money are you going to be losing? Lily’s?”

“I don’t intend to lose. Now let’s stop haggling. I want you to make this dollar-fifty magazine look like a million. You can do it with graphics even if the paper isn’t up to
Town & Country
standards, even if the binding is perfected instead of saddled. Think of it as a chance to do your tricks with white space again, to do the things you used to do without General Foods and General Motors getting into your act. Freedom, Rocco. I’m offering you complete artistic freedom! You can be honest again. I’m doing you a favor, Rocco, although you don’t seem to realize it. In fact, you might show a little gratitude.”

“Bitch!”

“But you can’t resist this challenge, can you?”

“Easily. I’ll send you a first-class free-lancer. I’ve got forty major clients to service. What kind of megalomania does it take for you to think that I have time to diddle around with the dummy of a new magazine—it’s a
huge
job.”

“No, I want you.”

“You still think you can have everything you want, don’t you? It’s really extraordinary, it’s almost admirable, to be so stuck in the past, like the survival of some prehistoric animal, still breathing even though it’s up to its ears in ooze.”

“Have it your way,” Maxi sighed. “Just send me somebody really good. Oh, and Rocco, before you go, I have some brochures to show you.”

“Brochures? What about?”

“Swiss boarding schools. There are about a half-dozen good ones. It’s time Angelica went away to school. It’s not just for the French and the skiing. She’s subject to all sorts of bad influences in the city. I don’t have to tell you that
they sell pot and LSD and angel dust in the playgrounds. And the kids she knows are too hip. She really should be in Switzerland. You can see her in the summer—when she is not at camp—even go over for Christmas, if you miss her.”

“You … you …” He was wordless with rage. He’d kill the creature.

“Oh, I
am
pleased that you changed your mind,” Maxi said, cooing. “When can I expect the finished product?”

“In three shakes of a lamb’s tail,” he said, between his clenched teeth.

“What exactly does that mean? A week? Two weeks?”

“I’ll show you,” Rocco screamed and grabbed her, turned her upside down on her bed and smacked her as hard as he could on her bottom. “
One
,” he shouted, “and
two.
” He hit her again. “And
three
!”

“Coward,” Maxi panted, and tried to punch him in the balls. He grunted and hit her again, falling on the bed from her strong blow which had landed on one knee. Maxi grabbed his hair and pulled it as viciously as she could while he tried to gain a purchase on the mattress to give her a shaking that would break her spine. She slithered away just before his hands could close on her shoulders, did a sort of semi-jackknife and grabbed his penis firmly in both hands. He went totally immobile. God knew what she might do, starting with emasculation. Neither of them moved a muscle, waiting in a silence broken only by their breathing, for the next move. The silence grew longer and, to his utter disgust, Rocco felt his penis hardening in Maxi’s unrelenting grip. Harder and harder. There was nothing on earth he could do to stop the damn thing from reacting. He tried mightily to pull away but she had him too tightly. After half a minute it became slightly less important to get out of her hands, and as soon as she felt the change in him she used one of her hands to unzip his fly while, with the other, her grip changed from that of a prison warden to that of a woman, opening and closing her fingers around him in a rhythm he’d never been able to resist.

“Bitch,” he grunted.

“Shut up,” she replied, and began to caress his penis with delicate feathery strokes, while she cuddled his balls with the hand that had unzipped his fly. He attacked his
belt buckle and pushed his trousers and tight jockey shorts down below his knees to give her more room to move in, but Maxi concentrated her attention on his penis, never straying away to touch the rest of his body. She didn’t intend to give him an instant to think. A penis, as every woman knows, has no brain. It was jerking strongly as it grew bigger, almost twitching away from her while she lapped it with her tongue until she heard his unwilling groan of pleasure. She dragged her tongue slowly up from the base of his penis, pausing every now and then as if wondering whether to go further, putting her entire open mouth around his shaft as far as it would go, sucking hard for just an instant, and then resumed her leisurely progress toward the full, pronounced and tender line at the base of the tip. There she paused and made her tongue into a hot little arrow that circled the swelling head, but she didn’t take it into her mouth. He’d have to ask for it, she thought, as she slid out of her underwear without his noticing her rapid movement beneath her skirt.

“Please,” she heard him breathe, “
please.
” At his words, she raised herself slightly and lowered her mouth down on the enormous head of his penis, first just holding it and exploring the hot pulsing shape with the whole of the inside of her lips and her now-flattened tongue. He pushed his hips up from the mattress in strong demanding movements and at that well-remembered signal Maxi began to suck with all the power she had, maddened now by the need to possess this flesh, to own it, to draw it into herself. From a distance she heard his breath coming faster and faster. At that she pulled her mouth away but still held his penis. With a quick move she slid upward on the bed, and put one knee on each side of his body. Quickly she lowered herself down onto him, so that he was totally enfolded in her wet, waiting nest. Savagely intent, she rode him, raising and lowering her pelvis, eluding his grasping hands that tried to slow her down, moving faster and faster, giving it to him, giving it to him good, caught up in a relentless rhythm as she felt her own orgasm growing with each thrust she made, with each time she plunged down onto his body and her clitoris came into contact with the base of his penis, rubbing quickly and deeply before she rose up again.
Madly they moved in unison, until their backs tensed, arched, held still for a tiny instant and then, bodies remembering, came together in a wildness, a long, drawn-out, shaking, heaving burst of magnificent release.

Maxi collapsed on top of Rocco. His eyes were closed and he had gone completely limp. She mustered up the force to roll off his body. Both of them still had their shoes on, she noticed in part of her mind, as well as all their clothes except for her panties. His lips moved but she couldn’t hear what he had said. She pulled herself up closer and his lips moved again.

“Grudge fuck,” he croaked.

“Mercy hump,” she hissed, and pushed him with the little energy she had left, so that he almost fell off the edge of the bed. Weaving, he managed to get to his feet. With difficulty he pushed his shirt into his trousers and zipped them and stumbled around, disoriented.

“You forgot the dummy,” Maxi murmured. He picked it up wordlessly and stumbled toward the door.

“How many ad pages can I count on from CL&K?” she called as he fumbled for the doorknob.

“God help me,” he muttered and tried to slam the door after him, with no success.

Maxi lay on the bed and rolled her eyes at the ceiling. Every man has a weak point, she thought, and it was the same one with all of them. If you understood that simple fact, you could beat the odds every time. What’s more, she had discovered the cure for paper cuts.

“Cut. And … print!” The director’s valedictory tone marked the final second, the final take of India West’s latest picture.

She almost ran to her dressing room, radiant with liberty and the unprecedented fact that her shrink, Dr. Florence
Florsheim, was on vacation at the same time as the picture wrapped. This conjunction of events hadn’t happened in the years since she’d become a star. She was at liberty to rush to the aid of Maxi whose last phone call had been so disturbing. There must be something seriously wrong. Maxi hadn’t called in two weeks and since that Sunday, whenever India tried to telephone her the only person she could reach was Angelica who had developed an interesting talent of lying convincingly. “Ma’s working and absolutely can’t be disturbed,” she’d said each time, and if India didn’t have a profound knowledge of her friend’s character she would have believed the child. Well, it was probably hereditary, that talent for lying. Angelica was as believable as Maxi herself.