I'll Take Manhattan (38 page)

She slipped off the bed and started to walk in circles in front of the window, not even noticing the lights of Manhattan spread below as if she were an alien in a spaceship about to land in Central Park. Suddenly she jumped back on the bed and wrote quickly “The Ultimate Love-Hate Relationship: You and Your Hairdresser, by Boy George.” She skipped a few lines, groaned a few times and then grabbed the pencil again. “Real Men Never Fantasize About Thin Women, by … by … Clint Eastwood … no, Mel Gibson … no, Mikhail Baryshnikov.”

“Monthly column,” Maxi said out loud. “Monthly column.” She messed about with her hair, scratched her ears, tugged at her toes and finally wrote “Let’s Talk Sex, by Tom Selleck.” She smiled. The same amount of effort that went into thinking up a one-shot article could make a monthly column. It was an economy of effort, she realized, and decided to give it another try to see if it worked. She closed her eyes for a few minutes, poking around in her brain as if it were Santa’s big white bag. After a little while she rubbed her eyes vigorously, opened them and carefully inscribed the words “The First Twenty-five Things I Adore About Women Over Thirty, by Warren Beatty.” For another issue it could be women over
forty, or
fifty or twenty-five, with different writers like Richard Gere or Bill Murray or Sam Shepard or Prince or any particularly attractive man. Even if a reader weren’t over the age that was under consideration, she could look forward to it or figure that she was prematurely adorable. “The Best Divorce I’ve Ever Had, by Liz Taylor.” No column in that one, unless you added a Gabor another month and, no, it didn’t have staying power. Most people didn’t get divorced that often. Some people never got divorced even once, like the Queen of England for instance. Maxi wrote quickly “Queen: The Worst Job in the World, by Anthony Haden-Guest.” She paused, wondering if her readers would know who Haden-Guest was, and decided that they probably wouldn’t. She crossed out his name and wrote in its place, “by Prince Philip.” She sneezed vigorously. This was a dusty business. “Where Do
They Put the Kleenex Box? or What Five Famous Women’s Bathrooms Really Look Like When They’ve Finished Dressing, a photo essay by Helmut Newton.” With amazement she saw that she’d come to the bottom of the page. “Sex in a Moving Vehicle,” she scratched on the next page. By John De Lorean. No. By Paul Newman.

“Ma!” The door to her bedroom opened suddenly.

“What is it, Angelica? Can’t you see I’m working?”

“Come quick. Lucy’s pregnant. Nobody knows who the father is, or what this will do to her career. Hurry or you’ll miss it!”

“I can’t stop now. Let me know when you find out. And shut the door after you.”

“What happened to your compassion?” Angelica looked stunned. Was this the same mother whose only dream had been to be abandoned on a desert island with all the guys on the Hill?

“They’re just actors,” Maxi replied and wrote “Twenty Good Reasons Not to Have Children” at the top of another page.

Alone again, Maxi stretched cautiously. All her equipment was still surrounding her. She hadn’t made a dent in the dummy yet but she had a strange yet familiar feeling in her stomach. This was … making these lists was … almost exactly, in fact
exactly
exactly like … having … 
FUN
!

She popped off her bed in excitement at the realization and went to her bathroom mirror to take a good look at herself. She needed something familiar to calm her down from discovering that this thing that she had been avoiding even thinking about, this thing she hadn’t told Pavka she was utterly terrified of, this actual writing down of ideas that related to her concept of a magazine that liked its readers, in their natural, imperfect state, was possible after all. She looked pale and messy and all her makeup was gone. The mascara had smeared where she’d rubbed her eyes and if she didn’t know how pretty she was she’d have been worried.

“ ‘The Ten Top Models—What They
Really
Look Like,’ ” she said out loud. Justin could get those photos. Steal them … because no model would let him take a picture like that on purpose. But if he snapped them
quickly before the makeup people and hair people went to work, the girls would never notice when they automatically signed the usual release forms. That would make a good start for the beauty pages for the first issue and make millions of women happy. Beauty pages, she mused. Yes, there would be all those departments filling out
B&B
, Beauty and Decorating and Fashion and even Health. Health sounded so institutional … why not call it “Living Well: Eating, Drinking and Having Sex” and begin with “The Ten Best Hangover Remedies”? A true public service, that was what it would be. Decorating? She’d make Milton and Leon do a piece on “Think Twice Before You Redecorate,” with pages of horrible examples to illustrate the theme, and as for fashion, something soothing. Fashion always tended to make everyone so anxious. “The Ten Indispensable Things Every Woman ALREADY Owns, by Yves Saint-Laurent.” With pictures showing how to use them. Maxi tapped her teeth with her pencil as she thought about the pictures.

“Ma, Lucy had a miscarriage,” Angelica said sadly, popping her head in through the door. “She must have met a really wrong guy … she still won’t say who he was.”

“ ‘Wonderful Mr. Wrong Guy, the Essential Not-to-Be-Missed Fun Experience in Every Woman’s Life,’ ” said Maxi.

“I don’t get it,” Angelica said.

“You will, after Don Johnson explains it to you,” Maxi assured her.

Paper cuts. Nothing helps paper cuts. There is no unguent or pill known to medicine that relieves the tiny but maddeningly painful presence of dozens of paper cuts on every fingertip. Backache. Nothing helps backache except a change of position, exercise and massage, so, if your work
requires you to handle many pieces of paper while maintaining a certain back-straining position, you learned to endure backache and paper cuts. Eyestrain. When things got blurry you went to the bathroom and held a cold, wet washcloth over your eyelids, put in a few eye drops and returned to the task because the only thing that would remove eyestrain was to stop work, and that wasn’t possible. Not until the dummy was done, because without the dummy
B&B
wouldn’t be real.

“I suppose,” Maxi said wearily to Angelica who was hovering over her anxiously, “this has built my character.” She pushed the dummy aside, got up from her desk and flopped down flat on the carpet of her bedroom.

“You were perfect the way you were,” Angelica retorted. She was so accustomed to feeling slightly superior to her screwball of a mother that this new serious incarnation, which of course couldn’t possibly last longer than any other of Maxi’s fads, was a little frightening. It had all started when she’d canceled that trip to Venice … nothing had been the same since. It couldn’t possibly last more than another week, she thought. True, Maxi had stuck it out in the Border Country of Scotland for almost two years as Countess of Kirkgordon but this was different; that had been a marriage and this was just a magazine. Angelica shivered, remembering the biting winds of the moors, the drafts at Castle Dread, and then smiled, thinking kindly of her loony second stepfather. Had Ma understood he was nuts? Nicely nuts?

“When will it be finished, Ma?”

“What do you mean ‘when’? Can’t you tell it’s finished now?” Maxi asked indignantly. “Why do you suppose I’ve stopped working? Could you please rub my back? Please,
please
rub my back. Walk on it in your bare feet, do something about my back, Angelica, if you love me.”

“You’re lying on your back. Turn over.”

“I can’t. I don’t have the strength.”

“Ma, come on, just roll over.”

“I will, in a minute. Angelica, isn’t it gorgeous? Don’t you think my dummy is fabulous?”

Angelica took a look at the object she had grown to loathe. It didn’t look any different from the way it had in her mother’s first four attempts at making a dummy. It was hugely fat and bulgy and sloppy and exceptionally uninviting to the eye. Just looking at it, she felt that it would fall apart if she touched it. Obscurely it reminded Angelica of school. She was sure she’d made something very much like it in third grade, only smaller and a great deal more attractive.

“It’s awesome, Ma, really awesome. I like the red cover. That’s a very nice, bright red, definitely eye-catching.”

Maxi rolled over, groaning, and looked squarely at her daughter. “What’s wrong with it?” she demanded.

“Nothing’s wrong with it, honestly. It’s hot, I mean I don’t know what a dummy is supposed to look like anyway so I don’t have any basis for comparison, but the cover is a great red … a humpy red.”

Maxi stood up and went over to the desk on which the dummy sat.

“It looks like shit,” she said quietly. “A bundle of red shit. And it’s the best I can fucking do.”

“Ma!”

“I’m sorry, Angelica, but I’m not employing any words you don’t know … and use, from time to time.”

“It’s not your language, Ma, it’s what you said. You’ve worked so hard. It’s
got
to be good. You couldn’t be wrong about it—you’re just tired. You’re not a fair judge.”

“You don’t have to be a judge of shit. When you see it you know it. I need help. Specifically I need an art director. Who’s the best art director in the world, Angelica?”

“Why ask silly questions that you know the answer to as well as I do?”

“Who can always get your father on the phone, at any time of day or night?”

“Me, but you wouldn’t want
me
to ask
him
to help
you
! You’ve always said you wouldn’t ask him for a crust of bread if you were dying of hunger or a sip of water if you were dying of thirst.”

“I don’t want bread or water. I want the best art director in the world.”

“Would you settle for second best … please?”

“Angelica, that’s unworthy of you.”

“Well then, call him and ask him yourself. The two of you always talk on the phone. What’s the big deal?”

“We only talk about you, Angelica, and who is going to pick you up, and where and when. We never talk about anything else, not even the weather.”

“That’s too dumb for words.”

“But that’s the way it is.”

“Well. I don’t approve. And I’m late for my guitar lesson. Adults!” Angelica said in disgust and disappeared so quickly that when Maxi went running after her, all she saw were the doors of the elevator closing swiftly and soundlessly on the brown and beige carpet of the corridor.

Maxi marched back to her room, not bothering even to glance into any of the many rooms of her new apartment, each one so expensively appointed by Bizet and Ludwig, each one filled with the collection of furniture and paintings and sculpture she had tracked down all over the world, hundreds of quickly purchased objects that had seemed necessary to her until the minute she owned them. She hadn’t used any room of the apartment except her bedroom since she’d started work on the dummy a week ago. She’d had her meals standing up in the kitchen, eating whatever the new cook had seen fit to leave for her in the fridge and returning to work immediately with a quick wave to Angelica if her daughter happened to be home.

Her lips tight—talk about the ingratitude of children!—she dialed the number of Cipriani, Lefkowitz and Kelly. Rocco’s secretary told her that Mr. Cipriani was in a meeting with some gentlemen from General Foods and couldn’t possibly be disturbed. And after that he was due at Avedon’s studio. A Calvin Klein commercial.

“But this is an emergency, Miss Haft,” Maxi explained. She was put through immediately.

“What’s happened to Angelica?” Rocco demanded, in alarm.

“She’s fine. Impossible but fine.”

“Then … why did you call?” he asked coldly.

“Rocco, I need your help.”

“Something
has
happened to Angelica! Damn it, Maxi …”

“Rocco, your daughter is in perfect mental and physical health. But I have to have your professional assistance on a business matter and I need it fast. When can you come here? I can’t bring it to your office. You’ll understand when you see it.”

“Maxi, whatever it is you ‘have to have,’ get it from somebody else.”

“No.”

“I’m in a meeting. Goodbye.”

“Rocco—if you don’t come to my house and help me I’m going to … to … put Angelica on the pill.”

“She’s only eleven, for Christ’s sake!”

“Ah, but soon she’ll be twelve and she’s awfully mature—you know how precocious she is. Girls are ready for motherhood much earlier these days and with your rampaging Latin blood in her, well, anything might happen. Better safe than sorry. Have you read the latest statistics on teenage pregnancies? I remember when I was her age …” Maxi’s voice trailed off, full of improvised memories.

“Tonight at nine.” Rocco hung up without another word.

Humming happily, Maxi called her masseuse and made an appointment. Hilda would be over within a half hour. Then a long bath—she could wash her hair in the shower and take a nice nap. Why, she wondered, did men make life so difficult for themselves? If they would only always be pleasant and agreeable and helpful. But no, their characters were such that they simply forced you to employ alternative means of persuasion. It went against her better nature not to be direct, but in an emergency you had to use whatever methods were available. Angelica didn’t even like boys. It would be another, oh, at least six years before they had to think about the pill. Or perhaps she’d want to remain a virgin until she married. Virginity was coming back in. Maxi picked up her yellow pad and wrote absently, “Try Celibacy and See, by Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase.”

“It’s a
what
?” Rocco said incredulously, staring at the red heap.

“You heard me the first time. I want you to fix it and I want it to be the most beautiful fucking dummy ever made on the face of the earth,” Maxi said in a businesslike tone.

“I don’t do dummies anymore, Maxi. I believe you’re aware of that fact,” he said, shaking with rage. This rotten bitch needed a good spanking so badly that it made his teeth ache just thinking about it. To think that he had once married a creature so evil, so low, so utterly vile. So selfish, so self-centered, so … to say nothing of using outright blackmail. How Angelica managed to be as lovable, as perfect as she was, coming from a mother like this, was a miracle of the supremacy of his own gene pool. No wonder he’d never even been tempted to marry again. This—this disgrace to her gender would turn any man against marriage for life.