Ambition

by Julie Burchill

  ‘What were you in before?’

  ‘I was with a publishing company.’

  ‘Did you like that?’

  ‘It was OK. Some cousins of my mother owned it. Leopold and Lehman.’

  ‘You mean this is the second family business you’ve been in? God, you’re really straining at the leash to do your own thing, aren’t you?’ It sounded so mean. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK.’ He threw himself on to the bed and lay on his back, smoking and looking up at the ceiling.

  She couldn’t resist a final jab. ‘What happens when you get tired of newspapers? Will you go and work for Mr Levin’s merchant bank? The son-in-law also rises?’

  He ignored her.

  ‘Do you see your mother often?’

  ‘I used to, when I was in New York. She’s about an hour upstate.’ He put out his cigarette. ‘I saw her last weekend, actually.’

  ‘You were in New York last weekend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She rolled over on to her stomach. ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘Michèle? Of course I did. She’s my girlfriend.’

  ‘Did you sleep with her?’

  He sighed. ‘Susan. You’re acting like a sixteen-year-old. Of course I slept with her. She’s my girlfriend.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Hey, come on.’ His voice was cajoling. ‘Don’t spoil what we’ve got.’

  ‘What have we got?’ she muttered into the pillow.

  ‘We’ve got the most incredible physical thing for each other I’ve ever had in my life. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hey, come on—’ He reached to touch her shoulder and she flinched away from him. ‘Hey.’ He turned on the spotlight over the bed and traced the red welts his belt had left on her back. He was instantly re-aroused, and, leaning down, whispered in her ear, ‘Say please.’

  She rolled over, jack-knifed her knees and kicked him away with such force that he fell sprawling on to the floor. Then she jumped to her feet, ran into the bathroom and locked the door.

  ‘Susan, for Christ’s sake come out of there!’

  ‘Go away!’

  ‘Come out of there and talk this thing over!’

  ‘NO!’

  ‘Come out right now or I’m getting dressed and going out.’

  She unlocked the door, pushed past him and slunk back to bed. ‘Well?’

  ‘Now what are you getting so upset about?’ He sat down beside her. ‘You know about Michèle now. Of course I have to see her when I’m in town.’

  ‘I want—’

  ‘Go on,’ he encouraged.

  Incredible; she’d got into bed with a big sexy Jew and woken up on a psychiatrist’s couch with a solicitous trick-cyclist. She took a deep breath. ‘I want to know why you love her and not me if this really is the best physical thing you’ve ever had.’

  He sighed. ‘Susan, sex and love aren’t the same.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Really, Susan.’

  ‘All right – not always. I know that. But sometimes they are.’

  He shook his head. ‘This isn’t love.’

  ‘Why? Because the sex is too good?’

  She’d hit a nerve; he looked at her, shocked. Then he smiled. ‘Yeah, a bit, I guess. Maybe you’re right. But I just don’t and can’t associate this kind of sex with marriage and kids and settling down.’

  ‘Isn’t that weird? – I couldn’t dream of marrying anyone I didn’t have this sort of sex with. Taking the dirt out of sex seems to me as self-defeating as taking the taste out of food.’

  ‘You’re a modern girl, Susan. You’re in a freefall and all you feel is a sense of your freedom. I’m in that freefall too and all I feel is the lack of ground under my feet. I have to feel there’s something secure in my life. And ever since I’ve known Michèle she’s seemed to me to be the one pure thing in a world of revisions and corruption. I need the vision of that thing to keep me going. It’s nothing personal against you.’

  ‘I see. So if I hadn’t let you fuck me the first time I met you, or whip me, or come in my mouth, or do it to me over a trash can, there is a chance you could have fallen in love with me?’

  He frowned. ‘It’s not that simple, Susan. I don’t see women as either virgins or whores; I just don’t see how real life can live alongside this sort of sex. Something’s got to give. Besides, if I dumped Michèle after all these years, and with her believing we’d get married some day, what sort of man would I be?’ He laughed. ‘My father’s son, that’s who.’

  She thought about Tobias Pope and his ugly, blunt, completely cliché-free way of looking at the world. It was strange; she’d been whoring for him with strangers just because she wanted the editor job, and yet when they weren’t in a sexual arena he spoke to her frankly, conspiratorially and with a certain degree of respect. She slept with David out love, and he treated her like a cross between a fallen woman and a child. She thought that maybe a touch more of his father in him wouldn’t go amiss.

  ‘OK, I give up.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I give up. It’s like arguing with a Catholic over the Virgin Mary. But will you remember one thing?’

  He laughed. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘When Bunny falls off her pedestal, I’m next in line.’

  ‘Susan, the only reason I’d put you on a pedestal would be so I could look up your skirt.’ He climbed on top of her.

  When Susan met Rupert Grey at Ye Olde Troute the next Monday and told him the news, giving him Gary Pride’s card with a personal message scrawled on it – ‘Hi kid! Call soonest and let’s make lots of money! Love on ya. Gaz’ – as proof, his eyes shone, his lips parted and in his head she could tell that he was hearing angel choirs choreographed by Douglas Sirk. He supped from his bar stool and faced her with all the single-minded spirituality of Jeanne d’Arc going to the stake.

  ‘I’m ready,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Susan. It’s Ingrid.’

  The voice was cool, collected and verging on contemptuous. Where were the five wet kisses which usually heralded Ingrid’s calls? She had always hated them; now their absence seemed ominous. ‘Hello, Ingrid.’

  ‘Dinner tonight, darling?’

  ‘What? Sorry – you know how it is. I have to book at least two weeks in advance. How about drinks on the twelfth?’

  ‘No – dinner tonight.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ingrid, that’s impossible.’

  ‘OK. Is it still hurting you, is that why you need an early night?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Is what hurting me?’

  ‘Your tattoo. Doesn’t it give you terrible headaches, being in such a sensitive area?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You most certainly do. Dinner now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK. That suits me. I’ve got a new friend. And it’s more than my life’s worth to ignore him. My life and our diary column. The best mole we’ve ever had. You wouldn’t believe the things he feeds me. Why – sometimes I think he must be telepathic.’

  Well, here it was. Her worst fears being used on her like an electric cattle-prod by someone who had every reason to want her wiped off the board. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Well, I’m sorry you’re tied up tonight. I’ll go out with my new friend instead. I’m afraid we do talk about you an awful lot! If your ears burn, you’ll know who it is!’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘By the way, Susan, do you have a b/w photo of yourself? A recent one?’

  Her stomach did a triple back somersault without a safety net. ‘No, I don’t. Why?’

  ‘Oh – just for our files. You never know these days when any of us will hit the headlines!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, never mind. Maybe I’ll send one of our snappers out to catch you unawares! Posed shots are so stiff, don’t you think? Our diary page has a strict policy of not using them these days. Spontaneous shots are so much more . . .
revealing.’

  There was a man’s laugh on the line. For the first time Susan became aware of an extension.

  ‘Whatever you want,’ she said slowly and deliberately. ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Good. Ciao, babes.’

  Then everyone hung up.

  TWELVE

  ‘To people who are neither, the words rich and fashionable go together like a horse and carriage, or divorce and marriage,’ said Tobias Pope to Susan Street’s back as she gazed beyond the glass wall of his East River penthouse to the Manhattan skyline in the late morning sun. She was weak in the presence of such beauty and wished she was King Kong so she could scale it, pull it down, leave her mark. She wished he’d shut up and leave her alone with this skyline, which was more beautiful and more inclined to make you believe in God than all the fields and trees and mountains and rivers, all the so-called natural wonders of the world put together. Nearer, my God, to thee, on top of the Woolworth Gothic.

  ‘But unless you leave out showbusiness, and then only a handful, they’re as strictly divided as any other tribes of New Amsterdam. OK, occasionally some industrialist will take up with some model, and she’ll take him to a few nightclubs, and he’ll take her to a couple of decent dinners, but his friends’ wives won’t talk to her, and her friends’ boyfriends won’t talk to him, and before you can say gold-digger she’s back in the arms of some black fag photographer and he’s back on the arm of Nancy Reagan’s sixth-best friend.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘Want some? Nicaraguan.’

  ‘You drink Nicaraguan coffee?’

  ‘But of course. It amuses me to think of all those European liberal volunteers who go out there to pick it getting blasted by the noble Contras. Yes, the rich are rarely fashionable and the fashionable are rarely rich. Right now, they hate each other as vilely as any other tribe of this barrio. As much as the blacks hate the Koreans or the Irish hate the Jews.’ He sniggered. ‘Or the women hate the men. Don’t you believe that bull about a melting pot – this is the most viciously segregated little fiefdom this side of Jo’burg.’ He chuckled happily. ‘Which is as it should be.’

  She knew that if she didn’t take positive action, she was going to be treated to a preprandial discourse on Tobias Pope’s Patent Theory Of Racial Superiority, an original body of thought rating the people of the world and their ability to govern on the performance of their female members in bed. She congratulated herself on adapting so quickly to his little ways and learning how to field them, and sidetracked him smartly into what sounded the least offensive and more interesting option, that of Rich v. Fashionable. Which also, come to think of it, had distinct possibilities as a piece for the Best’s style page. She could see it now – CASH OR DASH? By Candida Crewe.

  She turned around and leaned against the glass. ‘Tell me about the war between the rich and fashionable.’

  He looked at her, amused. ‘I bet you thought they were the same, didn’t you?’

  ‘I haven’t really thought about it. I suppose I thought there was quite a degree of miscegenation.’

  ‘Only in bed – never on the dotted line. Never where it matters.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘I’ll demonstrate what I mean by using a personal example. You’ve been here before – tell me what you’d do in an average day. For a start, where would you stay?’

  ‘OK. Well, last time I stayed at the Algonquin on West 44th Street.’

  He blew a raspberry. ‘It must have body-positive walls, all those fags dabbing their fingers in Dottie’s dust. What next?’

  ‘I’d have brunch.’

  ‘Brunch!’

  ‘At One Fifth. Mimosas and Eggs Millionaire.’

  ‘No millionaire would eat that garbage. They ought to call them Eggs Social-Climber. Or Eggs Counterjumper. Or Eggs Yuppie. Brunch – my point exactly. Go on.’

  She wouldn’t have countenanced such rudeness from anyone else for a full minute, but Pope was so much larger than life that he made a cartoon out of everything. His words could no more hurt her than Mickey Mouse could mug her. She grinned. ‘Then I’d go to Washington Square and watch the fire-eaters and the snake-charmers and that funny man who skips on a unicycle with a fourteen-inch sword down his throat.’

  He snorted. ‘Very improving. Go on.’

  ‘Some jazz in Central Park, then have lunch at the Russian Tea Rooms on West 57th.’

  He snapped his fingers and leaned forward exultantly in his chair.

  ‘Vodka and blinis, right?’

  ‘And caviar,’ she said triumphantly.

  He laughed, shaking his head. ‘Susan, eating croissants when not in France and caviar when not in Russia or Iran is a tell-tale sign of a true nouveau. When in Rome, eat spaghetti. And then you’d go shopping, yes?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said sulkily.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The department stores. The East Side is too expensive and the rest is too tacky.’

  ‘And what would you buy from these department stores?’

  ‘I don’t know – Adrienne Vittadini sweaters, Kay Unger silk dresses, Liz Claiborne fake Chanel suits.’

  He groaned. ‘Liz Claiborne! My secretaries wear those suits!’

  ‘See the lights go on from the Brooklyn Bridge,’ she ploughed on (Pope would probably tell her you weren’t anyone until you had a private box in River House for this purpose), ‘dinner at Indochine, dancing at Undochine, karoke at Lotus Blossom and then a night at Nell’s talking about how you never go to Area any more. Then maybe a drink at Save The Robots.’ She looked at him defiantly.

  He buried his face in his hands. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Exactly. That mooching, brunching, self-consciously insider number that all tourists with library tickets do here. I bet you even walk self-regardingly along the picturesque cobbled streets of the Village holding hands with that jerk you live with, am I right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted.

  ‘Right. That’s fashionable New York, Susan. And it sucks. No truly rich New Yorker would do those things. Being fashionable is for people who can’t be rich – the consolation prize in the big hoopla of life.’ He got up from his chair, turned her around and pressed her so hard against the glass wall that her nose and breasts concertinaed simultaneously. ‘Look. Nine million suckers live here, and only the inhabitants of these thirty blocks matter.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

  ‘It is. We can literally do what we like and get away with it. We can kill anyone.’ His eyes glinted.

  ‘That seems a very healthy measure of a man’s status,’ she said sarcastically.

  He laughed, releasing her. ‘It’s as good as any. But the point is that all those places you read about in your glossy magazines – TriBeCa, SoHo, NoHo, LoBro, the fag bars on the Upper West Side closing at a rate of knots – the people there don’t matter now, matter even less than they ever did. Some moron once said that there were nine million New York Citys, one for every sucker that lived there, but there are only four – rich, fashionable, bourgeois and poor – and that’s it. And soon, there’s only going to be one – rich.’

  ‘How do you work that out?’

  He was pacing the room, looking excited – the way he looked, in fact, when he was watching her fuck the local colour. Real estate is the new orgasm, Zero had said in her latest column. At the time, Susan had considered the statement rather facile and flippant. Now she reconsidered.

  ‘AIDS and development. Killing or pushing out the poor, the bourgeois and the fashionable. The carrot and the stick – or rather, the garret and the prick.’ He laughed unduly at his joke. ‘In ten years’ time what’s left of them will be in New Jersey or the Hudson. And the ones I personally will be gladdest to see go are the fashionables, those insufferably smug little prigs with more taste than money. Right now they’re being pushed out of their lofts in the Bowery by young brokers with more money than sense prepared to pay a quarter of a million for the privilege of gazing through their triple-glazing at the crack-crazed coloureds filing out of
the flop-houses. There are million-dollar flats coming up in Alphabet – a couple of years ago this was the worst drug dive on the island. But these yuppies don’t care – they’re desperate to hang on in there by their fingernails at the heart of the city and of course they can’t afford to live here or even over on Central Park West, with the Jews, shrinks and film actors. So they move into the Bowery and the East Village, which is extremely useful. As a type, I hate your yuppie – the men are boors, and the women wear running shoes and make appalling sex partners. But you can’t deny they make good shock troops. They move into shitholes and they clean them up a treat. Yes, when you’ve got yuppies, AIDS and developers, who needs goon squads? Like I say, in ten years’ time this town will be like it was in the Fifties. Heaven.’

  ‘Doubling as hell for the poor.’

  ‘You said that in Rio. And probably in Sun City. It’s getting a bit repetitive, my dear.’ He sighed. ‘Anyway, they’ll be in New Jersey. I told you. They’ll be happier there, where everything’s horrible. If New York can’t belong to you, it’s not worth living in.’

  ‘Some of New York belongs to everyone.’ She gestured at the spectacle beyond the glass wall. ‘The skyline does.’

  His eyes bugged, and then he gasped in delight. ‘Susan! The skyline, for your information, madam, belongs to a small band of men who reside on Park, Wall, Madison and Fifth, plus a couple in Texas. That’s it, period. The great unwashed can look, but if they loiter too long by any of these beauties they are very likely to be persecuted with extreme prejudice – beaten up to you – by one or other of the well-equipped armies employed by these men solely for that purpose.’ He shook his head, laughing. ‘The skyline belongs to everyone! You slay me. And I bet you think the best things in life are free too, yes?’ He looked at his watch. ‘No, of course not – you’re with me. My dear, I have the man from Forbes coming in half an hour. It might be a little difficult to explain your presence unless you get dressed.’

  ‘I could do Museum Mile.’

  He sighed. ‘Susan, there are more than four hundred art galleries and museums in this town, but not in one will you find anything to compare with the sight of yourself in a beautiful new black dress. Catch.’ He fished a battered black wallet from inside his jacket and threw it to her, not at her, she registered in a split-second. ‘Here you go. You’ve done very well at the fucking – here’s the shopping. No, don’t argue—’ (She hadn’t been going to: she was sure this had been said sarcastically.) ‘Think of it as an investment by Pope Communications Inc. Much as I love your Alalia, I’m getting awfully bored of seeing it. And dressing for the bedroom in the boardroom really is the height of bad manners.’