I'll Take Manhattan (44 page)

“I can’t give you a final figure, not yet. Because it will cost one amount if it works and a very different amount if it doesn’t.”

“Then just tell me how much you’ve spent so far.”

“Somewhere close to five million dollars has been committed, over the next six months.”

“Is that a normal amount of money to spend before you know the results of your venture?”

“Absolutely. In fact it’s on the low side. Take Mort Zuckerman for example. He’s poured eight million into
The Atlantic
and doesn’t expect to see a profit for more than a year, and then there’s Gannett’s enormous investment in
USA Today
, even with that terrific Cathie Black publishing it, and the fortune it took to make
Self
work …”

“Spare me, Maxime. I can’t endure it when you talk numbers like that. You sound like a parrot of your father but at least he knew what he was doing. So you’ve spent five million dollars since you came back from Europe, five million dollars of Amberville Publications’ money.”

“Yes, Mother, I have. Five million and I wouldn’t try to pretend that I’ve finished yet. You won’t regret it, I promise.” If Lily had been studying Maxi’s face she would have recognized Zachary’s expression of eager resolution.

“You promise.” Lily shrugged her shoulders with a movement almost too faint for irony. “Well then, I won’t worry about it anymore. Can I give you another cup of tea?”

“No thanks, Mother. I really have to get back to the office.”

“I understand, dear. Give Angelica my love. If she’s free next week I have ballet tickets on Saturday afternoon.”

“I’m sure she’d love it.” Maxi kissed Lily goodbye. It was no good. It had never been any good. The trouble with you, Maxime, is that you’re insensitive, that you don’t appreciate Cutter, that you are a daddy’s girl, that you want
me to care about your work. The trouble with you, Maxime, is you expect too much from your mother.

As Lily rang for the maid to take away the tea tray she thought how wise she had been to have had this interview with Maxime. Her daughter was running true to form. Five million spent and nothing but a dummy to show for it. Lily might not like to talk business but she knew that if Maxi admitted that she’d not finished spending money yet there was no telling how much could be lost. A dangerous toy in the hands of a thoughtless extravagant child, who’d never had to make a penny in her life. Five million dollars thrown out of the window in a matter of a few months. There was no point in getting upset about it, not when Cutter assured her that the balance sheet was still healthy. It was merely a confirmation, if she had actually needed one, that with Zachary dead, the Amberville family should get out of the magazine business.

It wasn’t merely the loss of money, Lily thought, as she walked upstairs to her dressing room, it was the wear and tear on Cutter. It had been typically unselfish of him not to have told her the dismaying details of Maxime’s spending spree. He must have been wild with anger, and yet he hadn’t wanted to disturb her with the maddening account of her daughter’s pretensions. He was consideration itself, almost to a fault. He should have told her. Maxi running berserk as publisher of a magazine, indeed! She scanned her closets critically. How she missed darling Mainbocher. And just who, she asked herself, could tell what Toby and Justin, much as she loved them, would decide to do in the future? Together they owned thirty percent of the Amberville stock. No, thank you, she didn’t want her children for partners. She might not know much about business, Lily thought with the shrewd, self-centered practicality she had always managed to hide from everyone including herself, but she knew that much.

“Get away from here,” the man behind the pushcart snarled at Angelica.

“How come you’re selling leather whips?” she asked him curiously.

“Never mind, kid, just beat it.” Sadomasochistic paraphernalia would never move if brats hung around. This tall one with all that long hair would drive away trade. “Here,” he said, and gave her a dollar. “Go buy yourself a hot dog.”

“Thanks.” Angelica walked away to the Sabrett man directly in front of the entrance to the residential section of Trump Tower. She’d have to bring her gang, the Trump Tower Troops, to visit the pushcart tomorrow. A free hot dog each? Why not? As she ate her hot dog she inspected the various pushcarts on Fifth Avenue. Wallets, belts, scarves, jewelry, all made halfway across the world and laid out on the once-immaculate sidewalk in front of the finest retail stores in the world. The Troops had never seen Fifth Avenue in the days of its glory. That roving gang, who varied from eleven to fifteen members, were the only children who lived in the building, and to them the street vendors were a constant source of amusement and interest, part of their world, a natural counterpoint to their multimillion-dollar apartments.

The Troops knew everything about Trump Tower. They knew how to get through the concealed security booth, manned twenty-four hours a day, which led from the dignified, small, luxurious, basically beige lobby of their building into the vast, six-story-high, pink marble atrium of the building’s retail arcade where a truly marvelous waterfall ran by magic and there was always someone in a tailcoat playing the grand piano in the entrance. Tired New Yorkers gratefully entered to sit down for a while, listen to the familiar songs and perhaps eat a sandwich while in one of the many wildly expensive boutiques only a few floors above them, four-thousand-dollar nightgowns were being sold to women from many lands. The Troops knew every store, they knew about the floor where the live-in maids’ rooms were located, they knew the beautiful blond Mrs. Trump and had persuaded her to let them visit the garden of her triplex which covered the entire top of the Tower and was planted with full-grown trees.

Angelica was the leader of the gang because she was American and had the biggest apartment, an “L” combined with an “H.” Most of the others were foreign and their apartments were only considered
pieds-à-terre
by their
parents who were forever on the move from one capital city to another. However today Angelica wasn’t in the mood to seek out any of her cronies. She was worried about her mother, and she wasn’t exactly sure why.

For one thing, she mused, as she bought another hot dog with her own money, Maxi was getting so bizarrely organized. She’d found a cook who actually showed every sign of staying on the job since Maxi now left her detailed lists of everything that was to be done in the course of each day and had provided her with a cleaning woman to do the heavy work. Maxi—who had never planned anything—had started to plan meals a week ahead so that the shopping could be done efficiently. As a result Angelica was certain that they had the only cook in Trump Tower who didn’t just telephone Gristede’s but actually picked out the produce herself on Lexington Avenue. Where were the last-minute phone calls to the places that delivered? Angelica wondered. She remembered years of odd and ethnic improvised feasts, or former careless, carefree meals, often eaten right out of the cartons in which the food had been delivered. Her kind of eating.

And it wasn’t just the fact that she and her mother sat down to dinner together at night. Maxi had actually begun to supervise Angelica’s homework. Not to understand it necessarily, for today’s math naturally was beyond Ma, like yesterday’s math, but to make sure that it got done on time. What’s more, she had started to take an interest in Angelica’s wardrobe instead of letting her wear whatever she wanted to, charging it at any of the stores in town as she had been in the habit of doing since she was ten. “Appropriate clothes,” she’d said just the other day, “aren’t necessarily all bad.” Now what kind of macabre statement was that for Ma to make?

And then there was the matter of her love life. Ma didn’t seem to have any and she didn’t seem to care. Could she be in menopause? Angelica considered Maxi’s age and decided that twenty-nine was probably too young. But as long as she could remember there had been a man in Ma’s life, one right after another, and sometimes, Angelica suspected, two at the same time. Humpy guys as older men went. But
B&B
left her no time for anyone, humpy or not.
When she wasn’t at the office or with Angelica she spent every evening working with Justin or Julie or one or another of the people from the office, or, astonishingly, often alone, actually alone, in her own bedroom bent over a yellow legal pad, occasionally letting out great hoots of laughter, at her own wit, Angelica supposed, since the television wasn’t on. Was this what people meant by obsession? And wasn’t obsession supposed to be bad for you?

Yet she couldn’t see any signs that Maxi was beginning to fall apart, Angelica ruminated. It was just the opposite; she was getting it all together, going for it, totally going for it, and that was the worst part of all, because a Ma who was going for it wasn’t as much fun as a cute, crazy Ma who had to be
supervised
. A grown-up Ma with a whole bunch of grown-up ideas about how to do things wasn’t what Angelica had bargained for. Ma was changing, that was for sure, and Angelica didn’t like it. No. Not one little bit. Because, if Ma was the grown-up in this family, what did that make her?

No Cipriani in memory had ever bitten through his own bottom lip, Rocco suddenly realized and made himself ease up on the painful grip of his upper jaw.

“Obviously I’ve avoided the classic mistake,” Maxi said, attacking her codfish gumbo in its incendiary sauce as if it were as bland as mashed potatoes.

“Which classic mistake?” Rocco asked, wondering why he had let her talk him into having dinner. He supposed it was curiosity. After all the work he’d put into the dummy, after he’d found her Brick Greenfield, a stunningly good young art director, to carry on where he’d blazed the trail, he felt a reluctant interest in the future of
B&B
, but Maxi’s insouciance was turning his temper as hot as the Creole cuisine of Chez Leonie whose smiling Haitian proprietor had taken them under her wing and ordered for them.

Rocco had already heard, from entirely too many people, how Maxi had visited most of the major advertisers in person, using his—
his
—dummy as her calling card, and talked them into taking space in her magazine, using every bit of guile she possessed, every ounce of wile and winsomeness,
all of her Amberville credentials. Even he had to admit that the basic concept of
B&B
could sound logical when presented by Maxi at her most devious, if you had no previous experience with her. If she were a stranger, for example, and you could be conned into thinking that a reader-friendly magazine was what you needed to round out the kind of totally balanced media buy that a top agency like Cipriani, Lefkowitz and Kelly would provide with the help of a highly trained team of people whose whole life was media buying. If you happened to be some damn foolish horse’s ass of a national advertiser and some ditsy girl who called herself a publisher and acted as her own ad manager as well came along, bypassed your rightful ad agency, and sweet-talked you into making commitments you’d never have made in your right mind.

“Rocco, why are you doing that with your teeth? You’re drawing blood, or is it only this red sauce?” Maxi offered him her napkin in concern.

“Put that away, I’ve got my own napkin, damn it! I think I bit right through a giant hot pepper. Hell!”

“I warned you to be careful.” Maxi looked around Chez Leonie, a First Avenue restaurant only big enough to hold six tables but full of an atmosphere she loved: old records of old Caribbean melodies being played on an old phonograph somewhere in the back; candelabras everywhere, dripping wax as if it were a Cocteau movie; the softest, almost yellow walls on which Leonie’s family photographs were hung here and there. It made Maxi feel as if she’d gone on an Island holiday. Obviously Rocco had become so Madison Avenue that he didn’t understand the poetry of this place. And that from a man who used to live on hot peppers. Sad.

“Which classic mistake?” Rocco asked again, his dignity restored.

“Of not understanding that I have two customers for each copy: the reader and the advertiser. You can’t get the ads without the readers and you can’t get readers without ads, because they’re suspicious of a thin magazine. That’s why I practically
gave
away the advertising space for the first six months. Well, I didn’t give it entirely, but it is much,
much
cheaper than it should be. Absurdly cheap.
The first issue is going to be nice and heavy and reassuring, like a great plump chicken. My reader will be able to just heft it and know that at a dollar fifty she’s getting a bargain. Rocco, leave some room for the main course.”

“Isn’t this it?”

“Wait,” said Maxi with a particularly provoking smile, her beauty spot riding above the perfect bow of her upper lip in a way that made Rocco feel the impulse to give her a good slap and see what would happen.

“There’s only one problem you don’t seem to think you have all figured out,” he said, “and that’s how to get your magazine distributed. You can have the world’s most beautiful book, with every other page a four-color ad, and you still have to scare up those millions of readers you’ve been assuming you’ll get. And if people can’t find
B&B
how can they buy it?”

“Rocco, did you ever hear of a man named Joe Shore?”

“Nope.”

Maxi sighed. “He was a wonderful old man but he’s been dead for, oh, fifteen years I guess. I used to go to the track with him right up to the end. He let me have as many hot dogs as I could eat. He died the way he would have wanted to, in his box at Belmont Park, with a winner. Of course he’d only bet two dollars, but still he’d won.”

“Maxi, what are you talking about?”

“Uncle Joe, Uncle Barney’s father. Well, naturally I’ve never lost touch with Uncle Barney. He was awfully upset when I divorced Laddie Kirkgordon … he loved my being a countess. He and his wife came to visit us at Castle Dread and they had a wonderful time.”

“Uncle Barney? J. Bernard Shore? The head of Crescent?” Rocco waved away the enormous platter of braised pork ribs, chicken, yellow rice and roast duck. “
Crescent
?” His voice cracked.