I'll Take Manhattan (9 page)

“Did I hurt you, darling?” he asked at last.

“No, of course not.” She opened her eyes and smiled at him. How could he know that her body had been trained to accept pain, to welcome it, to embrace it? How could he understand that the new set of feelings she had just encountered were as nothing compared to breaking in a pair of toe shoes? For many hours each day, from the age of eight, she had lived with constant pain, pain she was trained to smile through, pain that a dancer, like any other athlete, considers an inevitable part of life.

Lily had expected something different of her wedding night, something rough and exciting and unknown, something far wilder than the sensations she had when a strong
partner lifted her farther than she had ever been lifted before. She had expected a duel of two bodies that would leave them both sore, aching, sweating and exhausted, as after a great performance. Not this long, drawn-out cuddling, not the stealthy exploration of a body she had long ago stopped thinking of as anything but an instrument, a body about which she had not the slightest self-consciousness. Oh, but how much she had wanted and needed to be
taken
, used, overcome, relentlessly plunged head over heels into a world she had never known, a world she
sometimes
heard the other students giggling about, a world that had fascinated her even as she rejected it.

She couldn’t
do
more than she had, Lily thought, she didn’t know the right movements, the right positions to take, but surely her immobility must have indicated clearly that she would permit him anything? She could not endure feeling awkward, ill at ease with her muscles, yet there was no one to teach her except Zachary. He was the one with the experience, she thought, as she drifted into sleep. He was the one who had to make it important to her. She had done her best. Now it was up to him to make it wonderful, yes wonderful, even more wonderful than applause.

The Ambervilles returned to Manhattan after a ten-day honeymoon in Paris. Zachary had never been away from his offices such a length of time, almost six weeks from the day he first left for London, and aside from fleeting
visits to
his London and Paris bureaus, he hadn’t made the tour of inspection he’d planned. But he was much too happy to care.

Every night for ten nights he had made love to Lily, every night he had spent hours, hushed, halcyon hours, hours that were, to him, like the slow exploration, inch by inch, of a new, moonlit countryside. She was like a melody, he thought, an exquisite melody in a minor key that no one else could hear.

Lily never refused him anything except for one night, when he had first brushed his mouth between her thighs. She’d tentatively put her hands over her pubic hair and then taken them away. He’d immediately understood that
she wasn’t ready for that final intimacy and he had made no further attempt. He was certain that one day soon he would, by virtue of his patience and his tenderness, find the way to make her feel pleasure of her own. It was not that she had any distaste for sex, Zachary assured himself, but just that she hadn’t yet learned to let herself go. It was a question of time and of never allowing himself to forget what it must be like for an eighteen-year-old girl—scarcely more than a child—who suddenly finds herself married to a man of twenty-nine. The foreknowledge that Lily always opened herself to him each night enabled him to moderate any roughness, any haste, any gesture that might, he suspected, seem animal, too rough, too frightening to a girl of her sensibilities.

After that first night he found that he always needed to take her a second time; her very immobility aroused him as if it were the most potent aphrodisiac, and after he had reached that first satisfaction he was able to stay inside her for a far longer period, lying motionless, hearing her breathe, kissing her gently while his penis grew and grew harder without friction, with just the smallest rocking motion of his pelvis against hers at his climax, so as not to bruise that infinitely delicate, silently accepting creature who was his bride.

Cutter Amberville decided to go to college in California rather than spend four years at an Eastern school. He wanted to put as much distance between himself and his brother as he could, to leave behind that part of the world in which the name Amberville immediately caused people to ask him if he were related to Zachary. At Stanford, or “the Farm” as Berkeley students, from their traditionally intellectual perch within sight of San Francisco, mockingly
refer to their elite and non-egalitarian rival, he found companionship that wasn’t different from that which he’d nourished at Andover; rich boys, boys who had something he wanted.

At Stanford Cutter had to work harder at his studies than he had done at Andover but he soon learned the art of doing only the necessary minimum, leaving himself as much time as he could to continue in his chosen fields of excellence: tennis, squash, sailing, polo and skiing. They were indisputably a gentleman’s sports, they were a rich man’s sports; they required years of practice to do well; they inspired admiration and confidence when a young man was able to master all of them. They demanded skill, coordination, endurance and, particularly in the case of polo and skiing, an acknowledged willingness to put himself on the line as far as physical courage was concerned. There was no risk—no reasonable risk—that Cutter wouldn’t take on a horse or on skis, since physical courage, he deduced, with the measure of calculation he so carefully hid, was usually accepted as shorthand for courage, pure and simple. His brother, his enemy, had never learned to do any sport with skill.

Not the least of Cutter’s abilities were devoted to tennis and squash. While his other chosen sports demanded that he compete against an animal or the elements, racket sports were man-to-man competition. Winning took an effort, but it was nothing compared to the skill and the technique with which Cutter eventually learned to lose a few crucial games, brilliantly contested games with a few carefully chosen fathers of his friends; men who played exceptionally well for men of their age; men who were in investment banking, men who would, someday in the future, be in a position to give him a job in a business in which contacts often meant commissions. Losing at tennis, losing with good temper, convincingly and without arousing any suspicion that he wasn’t trying his hardest, became one of Cutter Amberville’s particular assets, as important as his good manners and his good looks, even more important than his unquestioned courage.

* * *

“Yesterday I went shopping with the first Mrs. Amberville,” Zelda Powers said acidly to Pavka Mayer as they had a drink together before lunch.

“Ah? You sound as mean as you look, my love. After all, Zelda, you have to remember that she’s very young and very British and has been protected almost from the day she was born, or so I gather from Zachary, by her total immersion in the ballet. If she doesn’t know how to dress, except in a tutu, that shouldn’t be a surprise to you.”

“But the Honorable Lily does know how to dress … now.” Zelda said with a rancorous, sideways look at Pavka.

“Bad taste? Or just dull, ordinary provincial taste? The British aren’t famous for their skill in self-adornment.”

“We went to Bergdorf’s, we went to Saks, we went to Bonwit’s, we went to every fine shop in New York because Zachary wouldn’t allow me to take her wholesale, and she looked at all our best designers’ dresses with as much interest as if I’d taken her to see an exhibition of earthworms,” Zelda said viciously. “There was just nothing she could even be bothered to try on, nothing at all. And she really needed clothes, Pavka, because her mother didn’t have enough warning of the wedding to buy her a complete trousseau nor did either of them have any idea of what young married women wear in New York. She was all done up in pastel tweed that looked like a cross between Alice in Wonderland and a very young Crowned Head on a State Visit to somewhere unfriendly.”

“But so very, very beautiful,” Pavka said quietly.

“I don’t deny that she’s beautiful … I just wanted to be helpful … you know I’d do anything for Zachary. Anyway, as a last resort, I took her to Mainbocher and she perked up, showed some signs of animation and by the time we’d left she’d ordered thirty-seven different outfits, almost the entire collection. The first fittings are in a week.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that? It solves your problem, doesn’t it?”

“It does something to my insides. Mainbocher at her age! Custom-made,
the
most expensive clothes in the entire United States … very quiet clothes, Pavka, very well-bred, absolutely perfect clothes that could be worn inside-out if you wanted to. The ladies who buy there are the
richest women in New York, they’re members of a particularly exclusive elite. You work your way
up
to Mainbocher, damn it! And I’ll bet not one of them has ever ordered so many things in a single visit. That, that
teenager
—she didn’t even ask what they cost … it just never occurred to her.”

“So what? Zachary can afford it.”

“It’s not the money, it was her attitude I couldn’t stand. Has he told you about the house he’s buying? The only house in the whole town that she condescended to like?”

“He mentioned something about it but I didn’t pay too much attention.”

“She took me to see it. Pavka, you know what sort of a guy Zachary is. Simple, down to earth, couldn’t care less about show? How do you think he’s going to like living in a pale gray marble palace that takes up half a block, spread out over three stories, with a ballroom, my dear, and a huge garden at the back? For just two people? It’s half the size of the Frick; it’s not a home, it’s an absolute mansion.”

“He’ll love it if it makes her happy,” Pavka said, enjoying being the devil’s advocate.

“But
why
should a kid like that need such a palace to make her happy, for God’s sake? Who lives like that anymore? Just think of the renovations, the interior decorating, the staff to keep it up, someone to tell the staff what to do because she won’t know, or want to be bothered. Think of the gardeners. Gardeners in New York! You really don’t have the slightest idea of what it’s going to cost, do you?”

“No. But we both know Zachary can afford it, a hundred times over. I don’t believe in deciding how other people should spend their money, Zelda, and I don’t think you do either … you never did before.” He softened his words with a tender, well-placed pinch.

“You’re trying to say I’m jealous, aren’t you, Pavka, my darling?”

“Well?”

“Of course I am. I should be ashamed. But I’m not.”

“Even Zelda Powers allows herself a perfectly normal female reaction. Careful, you may lose your uniquely original
touch. This could mean bad news for the circulation department of
Style.
”

“Don’t bet on it.”

“I won’t. And you must have another drink. I insist. I will even pay.”

In the days when they were young bachelors, right after the end of the war, Nat Landauer and Zachary Amberville spent many an afternoon at the track with Barney Shore, an amiable, carrot-haired young man in his middle twenties who had been Nat’s roommate at Syracuse. Just as Nat was destined to run the Five Star Button Company, Barney was the heir apparent to the family business, something he referred to casually as “the racks.”

“Dress racks?” Zack asked him one day.

“Nah, magazine racks.”

“You make them?”

“Nah, we fill them,” Barney said dismissively, not anxious to abandon his study of the
Racing Form
, a devout exercise which never did him any more good than it did Zachary. It was not until he began to publish
Style
that Zachary understood the importance of an institution called Crescent, founded by Joe Shore, Barney’s father, which, along with Curtis, Warner, Select and NICD was one of the major national distributors of magazines.

Without these powerful distributors the business of publishing magazines could not possibly exist. While Zachary owned only
Trimming Trades Monthly
he sold his copies by subscription, but when he created
Style
he signed a three-year national distribution contract with Joe Shore, which established a pattern for the future. For the first year of
Style
’s existence he paid Crescent ten percent of the cover price of each copy sold, and for the second and third years, six percent. In return Crescent acted as
Style
’s banker, paying him against the number of copies printed.

Joe Shore, deceptively mild-mannered man that he was, could make or break a magazine by deciding how many copies he would send on to the various local wholesalers, who would then deliver them to individual retailers, who eventually—and sooner rather than later, the magazine
publisher prayed—would put them out on the racks in prominent positions.

Zachary Amberville had instantly appealed to tough, quiet Joe Shore, whose approval was not easily gained, but, once gained, was never lost for any act short of not living up to a business deal. Murder, arson, loitering with intent to litter; none of these offenses would change Joe Shore’s mind about a man he liked who kept his word.

“Joe,” Zachary said to him one day in 1953, as they were having lunch together, “I want you to meet Lily. Would you and Mrs. Shore, and Barney and that new girl he’s seeing, have dinner with us a week from next Tuesday?”

“We’d like that, Zack. Wait a minute, did you say Tuesday?”

“Right. Not this coming Tuesday, a week from Tuesday.”

“Any other night, Zack, with pleasure, but not Tuesday, not
any
Tuesday. My wife would kill me.”

“A pussycat like you? I thought you had the ideal marriage.”

“Zack, don’t kid a kidder.”

“Come on. What’s Tuesday night?”

“Milton Berle. Tuesday at eight o’clock.”

“So what?”

“How many stories have you done on Milton Berle in
Seven Days
?”

“I’m not sure.… I keep seeing the damn things and wondering why, but my television editor tells me to trust him. Since I doubled his salary to get him to move over from
Life
I’ve tried not to second-guess the guy. Personally I’ve never had the time to watch much television, and Lily isn’t interested in it at all. Maybe,” Zachary grinned, “it’s just her language problem.”