I'll Take Manhattan (43 page)

“Three girls and two dozen boys.”

“You’re mad. Why so many boys?”

“That was Maxi’s idea too. Each girl is going to have a big bunch of assorted guys around her, darting flattering looks,” Julie said tartly. She hadn’t had time to go wholesale
for an entire week, thanks to the hunt for ancient bathing suits.

“What are you putting the boys into?”

“I have four dozen identical—objects—from Ralph Lauren Bodywear in a million different colors. Identical but not exactly old-fashioned. I don’t know if they’re bathing suits or underwear but they don’t waste fabric, do they?” Julie held up just enough of a garment to cover a man’s pelvis and give him something to put his legs through. “Bellybutton City. It’s a disgrace. We’re encouraging women not to buy new suits and men are allowed to parade around all but naked.”

“Where are we going to put that mob?”

“The girls get the dressing room to themselves—what with the hairdressers and makeup people they need all that space—the boys will just have to use your office, Justin. This studio isn’t big enough.”

“How often do you book twenty-seven models at the same time?” he asked reasonably.

“This is a first, but I still think you should find someplace with a second dressing room.”

“I probably will,” said Justin, knowing he wouldn’t. He had chosen the studio precisely because it demanded improvisation. This interior space set aside exclusively for his work made him nervous. The smaller it was the better, the less likely to seem to be a commitment or an announcement that he had come to stay. This place was only rented on a month-to-month basis, although Maxi had given him a free hand. His own office contained little more than a desk, a chair, a phone and a couch where he could flop and relax after a session was over.

The girls all arrived at once and Justin looked them over critically. Julie had booked them for the neutrality of their good looks. They were beautiful but not too beautiful. Their hair was new—no Farrah Fawcett flowing manes—but not so short as to be alarming, and the two makeup men had been instructed not to try anything outrageously different with their faces. “No pink eyelids and no blue lipsticks,” Julie had ordered. “We’re not trying to sell any one of those awful new looks in cosmetics. We’re trying for your
average American woman if she knew how to put on basic makeup.”

The three girls passed his inspection and as the two dozen anonymously handsome male models started to arrive, while the girls were being made ready, he busied himself with his cameras. Like many photographers, he never let his assistant touch the cameras before a shoot, and only permitted him to reload film while he was working. Soon the first girl was ready, and for the next half hour Justin, Julie and the models all worked steadily, yet without managing to achieve the certain rhythm that would make each girl, surrounded by a dozen almost unclad men, look perfectly at ease.

“Wet them down, Julie,” Justin finally said.

“Why?”

“They’re still too stiff. Bathing suits indoors look posed and that’s no good. There are some buckets in the darkroom. Boys, some of you go and fill the buckets with water and we’ll try it that way.”

“Are we going to get
wet
?” one of the girls asked in disbelief. “Nobody at the agency said anything about water. I’m going to call my booker.”

“Relax, I’m just wetting down the boys,” Justin said curtly. He wished he were back on some unknown street in some unknown city, free to take a picture or not, instead of here with twenty-seven of the most expensive-per-hour bodies in the United States, each refusing to flow naturally, the way real people did in real surroundings. The Ganges, that’s where he could shoot them. In fact it would be a pleasure to push them all in and hold them under for a while. Meanwhile he’d have to make do.

The water did the trick. It loosened them up as nothing else could have, turned them all into kids again, dumping buckets of water on each other and on themselves in a competition to get wetter than anyone else, creating the illusion of a swimming pool or beach that no amount of props could have achieved.

Jon, a male model with shaggy dark red hair and a grin full of animal vitality, was the ringleader. It was he who threw the first bucket of water on one of the female models.
“Don’t you dare!” she shrieked, and received another bucket of water over her head. After that it became a free-for-all, the two dozen boys and three girls awash, forgetting the camera totally, the hairdressers standing by shaking their heads but not discontented, since they could still be paid their usual seven hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Julie, at a nod from Justin, pulled out each dripping girl when he’d finished a shot and took her to change her suit, not an easy job on a wet body. She should have booked a dozen girls or at least brought towels, she thought, but who had anticipated a water fight?

Finally the sitting was over, all the wet suits were collected, the girls had been blotted with paper towels and dried down by the blow dryers and everyone including the assistants had been sent home. Julie looked wearily around the studio, pleased with what she knew would be an exciting set of pictures.

“Don’t worry. I’ll get it cleaned up tomorrow. Go on home, Julie,” Justin said gently.

“I should stay, but …”

“Don’t be silly, you’re beat. Out, love, out.”

Finally alone, pushing aside sheets of wet and dirty paper, Justin put his cameras away carefully. He opened the closed door of his office, wondering what kind of shambles the boys had left it in.

“You took your sweet time, Justin. I thought you were lost.” Jon, his red hair still slightly damp, sat behind the desk, his bad-boy grin appearing as he saw Justin enter. He looked as much at ease behind the desk as if it belonged to him.

“Couldn’t you find your clothes?” Justin asked quietly, his composed tone belying his stance, the posture of a man trained and ready to defend himself.

“They’re exactly where I left them when I came in.”

“Do you enjoy sitting around in a wet bathing suit?” he said sharply.

“I’m not. I took it off.” Jon smiled again and stretched, as lazily as a big jungle cat.

“You can’t be comfortable,” Justin said, his expression tightly vigilant. “And that happens to be my chair.”

“I’d be more comfortable on the couch, as a matter of fact,” Jon answered, but made no move to stand up.

“I’m sure you would be,” Justin said, as if decoding the statement with his deepest concentration. “But what makes you think that I want you there?”

“Justin,” Jon mocked him, half reproachfully, “do you think I don’t know what you want? Do you think I don’t know how much you want me? On the couch or on the floor or anywhere you can have me? Do you think I don’t know what you wish you could do to me, what I need—and intend—to do to you? Do you think I’m stupid?”

“Just what gave you that idea about me?” Justin asked, the menace with which he always moved more in evidence than ever, without his having to take a step in any direction.

“Nothing you said, nothing about the way you look, or walk or talk. Nothing ‘gave’ me that idea … I know it. I have very good instincts.”

“Do you? Are you really sure? Or aren’t you just trying it on for size? Something you pull with any photographer on the off-chance that you’ll be right? And that there’ll be something in it for you?”

“I don’t want anything, Justin, except the same thing you’re aching for. I love it, just as much as you do, only, unlike you, I’m not afraid to ask. I’ve been hurting for you since I walked in here … it wasn’t easy not letting it show in that bathing suit. I’m so hard now, Justin, I’m as hard as I’ve ever been before, and
so are you
. I can see just how much you want me all the way from behind this desk. So come here and stop playing games. Come, give it to me, Justin. Any way that makes you happy. Any way, anything—I can take it all.”

Wordlessly, Justin moved toward Jon, wordlessly and willingly.

“The trouble with you, Maxime, is that you’re too impulsive,” Lily said, her opal eyes narrowing as she inspected her daughter with her familiar air of withheld criticism.

“Mother, I know I have a history of recklessness and I’m not proud of it, I promise you, but
B&B
is something absolutely different. It’s not fair of you to assume that this is just another toy until you’ve seen how I mean to make it work. Look, I’ve brought you the dummy of the first issue so that you can see for yourself.” Eagerly, Maxi held the dummy out to Lily.

“No, Maxime, I can’t judge anything from looking at that. I’ve never been a clever judge of magazines, particularly new ones. Even your father had to admit that, try as he would. Put it back in your attaché case, dear, so you don’t forget it here when you leave.”

“Please, Mother, just take a quick look. It might make you laugh,” Maxi pleaded. Somehow she had to
reach
Lily. Since her return from Europe they had barely seen each other. Maxi had been too busy to meet her mother for the occasional lunch and ballet matinee that had, over the years, developed as the easiest and least abrasive way of maintaining their relationship. Today, however, she’d had to make time to accept her mother’s unmistakable summons to come for tea, the one resolutely British ritual that Lily had maintained since she’d arrived in Manhattan more than thirty years ago.

“I’d prefer not to, dear. Of course I’ll read it when it’s properly printed, but until then I’d rather wait. I’m hoping for a pleasant surprise. The reason I asked you to interrupt your work today, Maxime, is that I’ve been giving some thought to Amberville Publications recently and I was curious
to find out just how much money is being spent on this sudden whim of yours … this notion that you have turned into a publisher, or an editor, or whatever it is you think you are.”

“Do you mean Cutter hasn’t told you?” Maxi asked, astonished. It had been several days since her interview with Cutter in his office and she had assumed that he would have told her mother the whole story.

“No. As a matter of fact he was very vague about it. It seemed to me that he was avoiding the subject. That’s precisely what made me wonder what was going on, wonder if there weren’t something in the air—something between you—that I should know about.”

“ ‘In the air’? You mean am I having a problem with Cutter? Is that what you mean?”

“Precisely,” Lily answered, pouring Maxi another cup of tea.

“We’re having a bit of a hassle, Mother. He thinks that I’m spending too much money and I
know
that I can’t spend a penny less and hope to have a success. If I stop now all the start-up money will be a total loss. It’s either do it right or not at all and I haven’t been able to make him understand that. Father would have known exactly what I’m doing. It’s only fair to say that I haven’t been exactly tactful with Cutter—in fact, not tactful at all—but Mother, he’s just
not
a magazine person, he’s got a Wall Street balance-sheet mentality. That’s natural considering that he’s always been an investment banker but it makes a reasonable conversation impossible with him. If Father …”

“Maxime, your father is dead. Your problem with Cutter stems from your personal resentment of him, an illogical grudging resistance that’s made me very unhappy, a problem that doesn’t come from any lack of knowledge or interest on his part.”

“Mother, it’s not that at all …”

“Just one minute, Maxime. Let me finish. I’ve tried to understand your deep … antagonism … toward Cutter. I know that anyone at all who presumed to come into my life after your father died would have aroused those primitive feelings in you. You always were a daddy’s girl and you’ll never get over it.” An old, familiar bitterness had crept into
Lily’s voice, into that voice she kept under such delicate control; the voice that told Maxi that her mother was entitled to everything she wanted without having to even ask for it.

“You don’t appreciate what Cutter means to me,” Lily continued, “or, if by some miracle you do, you don’t care. I’m fifty years old, Maxime, and in January I’ll be fifty-one. I’m sure you think that I’m too old to be concerned with my emotions. What must fifty seem to you, at twenty-nine, with most of your life ahead of you and a past that wasn’t exactly uneventful? At twenty-nine what can you even guess of my feelings?”

“For God’s sake, Mother, fifty isn’t old! And I’m not stupid enough to think that you don’t have a heart and a body. Give me some credit at least. Maybe fifty sounded old to you when you were my age, but times have changed.” Maxi put her cup of tea down in such agitation that Lily flinched when the porcelain hit the table.

“Times have changed, but only in principle. Human nature remains the same,” Lily continued relentlessly. “And it’s human nature to classify your own mother as a bloodless antique. It’s inescapable, although, heaven knows, you’ve tried to avoid it with Angelica and so far you’ve succeeded. You’re so breathtakingly unpredictable that she just participates in your life and you take that for granted—she’s the tail to your comet. But one day she’ll classify you too, Maxime, mark my words.”

“How did Angelica get into this conversation?” Maxi said, deeply annoyed. “I thought you wanted to talk about the money I’m spending on B&B.”

“One day, Maxime, you’ll know what it feels like to be young forever in the trap of a body that grows older no matter what you do to preserve it,” Lily continued as if Maxi hadn’t answered her. “I look at the models in the fashion magazines and I think, ah, yes,
now—
but in twenty years those photographs will be
unendurable
. To
have been
beautiful is a life sentence, not a blessing. To have been
anything
wonderful that you’ve lost …”

“Mother, you’re getting morbid. You are beautiful, you were beautiful, you will always be beautiful. What does it have to do with this tea party?”

“I should have known it was hopeless.” Lily sighed and ran her hands over her smooth, heavy chignon. “I’ve been trying to explain something about Cutter and me, but your insensitivity, as usual, makes it difficult. Well, Maxime, how much is this whole magazine business costing?”