Dozens and dozens of girls managed to qualify for these three jobs at Style. Two of them who held the jobs were true to the Hemingsway mold, and the third, who was secretly ambitious and thus the cleverest of all, was able to work late and still keep a half-dozen boyfriends entangled in her web. Fortunately Nina Stern needed very little sleep and worked quickly.
Nina Stern was twenty-five and of all the beautiful, rich, unmarried Jewish girls anyone in 1958 had ever heard of, by far the oldest. People had even stopped trying to probe at this problem with her mother. It was taken for granted among the many friends of the Stern family that there was something invisibly but unquestionably wrong with Nina. Even a hint of a hint would be cruel and, what was worse, would have no result. The poor thing didn’t even have a broken engagement to her credit. Why meddle if it couldn’t help? It was more productive to meddle where there was still some hope.
Marriage, in Nina Stern’s opinion, was the end of the line. She had probably flirted with the doctor who delivered her, and certainly with every living creature she had encountered after that minute. The only form of communication Nina knew was one form or another of flirtation; but accused of flirting she truly wouldn’t have understood what people were talking about. She flirted with children, teenagers, all adults of both sexes, homosexuals of any persuasion, and any animal she came across. She had never flirted with a rock but she had flirted with many trees and flowers. Her flirtation wasn’t specific, neither sexual nor romantic, but merely an instinctive approach to any situation in which she found herself, a general, permanent, immutable inclination toward courtship. Her flirtatiousness was not “correct” in the French sense, meaning proper; it was great, even noble. It was also essentially harmless and it explained why, like businesses that are depression-proof, Nina Stern at any age would always be proof against any shortage of males. Just as she knew her name was Nina she knew that there would always be men for her and she adored variety too much to even consider settling down with just one man.
She liked to meet her college friends for lunch and admire the photographs of their fast-growing families; she felt only sincere admiration when the much younger sisters of these friends displayed their engagement rings, but monogrammed towels reminded her of straitjackets, and new sheets of shrouds. The only shopping in New York she couldn’t endure was on the second floor of Tiffany’s, where she often was forced to buy yet another baby present. There, certain interior decorators were given a free hand with the vast stock of the store and vied with each other in arranging china, crystal and silver in ways that tables had never been laid before. When Nina confronted the glittering, fantastic tables as she left the gray-velvet-lined elevator, all that filled her mind were images of women standing in line for the butcher’s personal attention at Gristede’s, cluttered kitchens and dirty dishes. Otherwise she had no time for gruesome fantasies, unless it was to report on the newest horror film for Style.
She was, at first sight, the embodiment of the happy medium, although nothing about her was average. Her shoulder-length hair was light brown, but of the irresistible and indescribable shade called marron glacé, the color of candied chestnuts. Her height was five feet five and a half inches, mysteriously just the right height for every activity except professional basketball. Her face wasn’t distinctively heart-shaped or round or oval, but its shape pleased every eye. It was simply the right shape and her features were the right features and her body was the right body, and her voice was the right voice, in the sense that the slightest alteration in them would have been wrong. Seven full pages in the Oxford English Dictionary are devoted to definitions of the word “right,” but one close look at Nina defined rightness in a flash.
This great flirt, with her definition-defying rightness, sometimes had to work on Saturday if she’d had a particularly full week fending off all the men who wanted to marry her without driving them away for good. One particular Saturday in June of 1958 when the only possible activity for a self-respecting New Yorker was opening up the beach house or painting the shutters in Fairfield County, on a day on which no Manhattanite should have been caught in Manhattan, Nina Stern was forced to go to the office to finish a last column for “Have You Heard?” She took the newly automated elevator to the fifteenth floor. Somewhere between the tenth and eleventh floors the elevator stopped, with a particularly final grinding sound.
“Now what?” asked Nina of a male unknown to her, the only other passenger.
“There’s a phone … I’ll call for help,” Zachary Amberville said.
Whoever was supposed to be on the other end of the phone was evidently out to lunch. The only sound was Muzak as Zachary tried repeatedly to get an answer.
“I wouldn’t mind so much,” Nina said surveying him, “if it weren’t for that noise. Death by Muzak. They’ll find us here on Monday morning, out of our minds, singing ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ for the rest of our lives.”
“Do you like rye bread?” Zachary asked.
“Corn rye or regular rye with caraway seeds?”
“Regular. I stopped at Reuben’s and picked up a sandwich before I came to the office.” He unwrapped the enormous crusty oval-shaped sandwich, sliced on the diagonal in three sections, filled with thick layers of pastrami, Swiss cheese, corned beef, cold slaw, and Reuben’s own mustard.
“You even have a pickle,” Nina marveled.
“It stimulates the brain,” Zachary said with authority. “Better than fish. Why don’t we sit down?”
“If only there were some way to turn off the Muzak.”
“There is. You have to climb on my shoulders and push that little switch on the top of the door to the left.”
Nina surveyed the stranger. He couldn’t be a mad rapist or he would have raped her by now. He obviously was kind-hearted since he was willing to share his perfect sandwich when they might have another day and a half before they were released. In spite of childhood conditioning she wasn’t afraid that he was in the white slave trade. Her mother had never let her go to the movies on Saturday afternoon except to the Trans-Lux on Eighty-fifth Street, where a matron patrolled the aisles with a flashlight, because it was well known that any nice New York girl, alone in the movies, would be pricked with a hypodermic by any man who took the seat next to her, pass out and, a week later, wake up as a white slave in Tangiers. Nina thought she would be rather well treated in Tangiers, if it came to that, and anyway this man did not look like the type. He was wearing an expensive tweed jacket, even if it didn’t fit him. He had very clean black hair, even if it needed a cut. His flexible, quirky mouth was kind, his dark eyes bright with amusement, and his shoes were handmade.
She nodded agreement to Zachary and he bent down, like a fullback, and she took off her shoes and hopped on his shoulders. “Get up very slowly. I’ve never done this before,” she ordered. Zachary rose inch by inch, while Nina clutched his hair. She eliminated the Muzak with a quick flick of the switch and he carefully lowered her to the floor of the elevator. They both sat down. It was a clean elevator and the only one they had.
“That gave me an appetite,” Nina said.
“You can have the middle piece,” Zachary offered generously, spreading out the silver foil. The middle section of a Reuben sandwich was always the most succulent.
“Thank you,” Nina said. All her life men had given her the best piece, just as she’d always been offered the white meat of every chicken and the crispest piece of bacon and the female lobster with the delicious coral in it, but although she was always grateful she was no more surprised than Morgan Le Fay would have been. She smiled at Zachary. Of all the utterly right things about Nina Stern, her smile was the rightest. Of all the flirtatious things about Nina Stern, her smile was the most flirtatious. What a nice girl, Zachary thought. “Where do you work?” he asked.
“At Style, in ‘Have You Heard?’ What about you?”
“Sales,” he said dismissively, with a shrug.
“Unexciting? Horribly boring? Drea
ry and dull?” she sympathized.
“Necessary,” Zachary said stoically. “But nothing you’d want to hear about. I’ve just spent three days in Chicago at a sales convention and enough is enough.”
“Oh, go on, bore me. Tell me about dismal sales, all about pokey, stuffy old sales, everything about tedious, monotonous, unfortunately necessary sales. Stop when I go into a coma.”
“I never bore a lady on purpose,” he grinned. “Tell me about ‘Have You Heard?’ ”
“If you won’t bore me, I refuse to bore you … it’s all just a lot of chat, basically unimportant. Anyway, wouldn’t you rather eat than talk?” Nina’s work was too vital to her to discuss with the many men in her life and she had just realized that this stranger was unquestionably going to be a man in her life. It usually did not take her more than a split second to make such a decision but until today she had been terrified of being trapped in elevators and her reflexes were slower than normal.
“We could do both,” Zachary said, “at the same time.”
“Should we try to make this last as long as possible in case they don’t rescue us, or should we just … ?” Nina pondered.
“Big bites. You can’t enjoy a sandwich and hold back at the same time.”
“I’ll remember that … you’re so wise.”
Really a bright girl, Zachary thought. Exceptionally bright. I think I’ll invite her to the next Wednesday meeting. We can use her kind of brain. And there’s something nice about her, can’t exactly put my finger on it.
The elevator started just as they were finishing the sandwich. Nina got off at her floor. She held out her hand and smiled at him again.
“Nina Stern,” she said.
“Zachary Amberville.”
“That’s not fair!” she laughed as the door closed. She was still laughing as she opened her office door. Nina, she told herself, you’ve just blown the chance of a lifetime.
For a smart girl she could sometimes be very dumb.
“ ‘This great big city’s a wondrous toy,’ ” Zachary sang out loud as he walked home much later that day, his work done. “ ‘Just made for a girl and boy.’ ” As always he hit a false note on the word “boy.” He jaywalked expertly across Madison as he reached the last lines of his song. “ ‘We’ll turn Manhattan into an isle of joy.’ ” He hadn’t felt like this in a long time, he realized. He hadn’t sung his song in months, years. How did he feel exactly? he asked himself, his steps slowing. Was it the brisk, blowing spring evening with the promise of something brightly thrilling in the air that only New Yorkers feel as the days grow longer? Was it the satisfactory afternoon’s work shaping a new magazine no one else knew about yet? Was it just New York, intoxicating center of the galaxy, where his ambitions were born and fulfilled? Good. He felt good. Why the hell shouldn’t he feel good? What man wouldn’t feel good who was worth so many millions he hadn’t counted them lately, what man wouldn’t feel good who had the power he had, who had the fun … “sales” he remembered, and laughed out loud. Sales, divine sales!
How old would a girl like Nina Stern be? Shit, but he felt young! He was thirty-five and he felt like his sixteen-year-old self at Columbia, waiting on tables for enough money for the subway and a hot dog … it hadn’t been all that long ago, a war ago, a marriage ago, but still, only nineteen years ago. And only six of the nineteen years spent as a married man. He frowned, his mood suddenly almost punctured. If he felt so young, how come he hadn’t made love to Lily in the last few weeks? How come they made love so rarely, now that he came to think about it? As Nat, his brother-in-law, would say, who’s counting?
He was counting, that’s who. Lily had never been passionate and he’d accepted that about her … that was just the way she was … but she’d always been so willing. Sweet and delicate and docile. He’d had to make that be enough for him, although many and many a night he’d yearned for a wife who would match his hunger. But, in six years, he’d never played around. Funny about playing around: so many men did it, even when they loved their wives, even when their wives were, he imagined, available in a way that Lily, somehow, didn’t seem to be anymore, except at increasingly rare intervals. It occurred to him that mentally, if not physically, she had recently turned away from him when he came to her room and indicated in a subtle, graceful, wordless way that she really didn’t want him, not that night, not right now. Was there some inward drama, unguessed at, in her life?
Available. So many women were available in this town. But not all of them. A girl like Nina Stern for instance. She wouldn’t be available. She was probably married or engaged or had a list of hopefuls an arm long. Girls like Nina, nice and bright, were spoken for, it stood to reason. And she had a healthy appetite too, always an attractive thing in a woman. “ ‘We’ll go to Coney,’ ” he sang, “ ‘and eat baloney on a roll, through Central Park we’ll stroll, da dum.’ ” Someone turned around to look at him and he realized he was singing out loud again. He’d make sure to tell Hemingsway to bring her to the next Wednesday meeting. Do the girl good to see how the magazines were run from some other point of view than that of “Have You Heard?” Better yet, he’d send her a personal memo, a special invitation. Motivated, of course, by her deep interest in sales. “That’s not fair,” she’d said … and it wasn’t. He should make it up to her. Smiling he opened his front door and entered the gray marble house just as the butler finished crossing the hall. He had a flash of disbelief … could this be his own house, did it really belong to him? He felt so young again, so much the way he had felt when he ventured downtown from Columbia and walked all the streets of his city, not even wondering what lay beyond the doors of houses like this one, splendid beyond the limits of his imagination. He passed the butler with a cheerful greeting and mounted the stairs to his private library where he preferred to work, rather than in the big library downstairs.
“Lily?” he said, astonished. She was standing at the window, looking across the garden, and turned impatiently as he entered.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come home, darling. I do wish you didn’t have to work on Saturday, especially after being away most of the week,” she said in her silvery, most loving voice.
“It was something that I had to think through, and I think better at the office. Also my desk was piled high with things I won’t have time for on Monday. But I love finding you here. What’s that? Champagne? Did I forget something? It’s not our anniversary, it’s not a birthday, what are we celebrating?” He opened the bottle and deftly filled the tulip-shaped glasses standing on the silver tray she had put on his desk.
“A toast, darling,” she said, as they touched the rims of the glasses together. “The best possible news … another baby.”
“Another baby! I knew something wonderful was going to happen!” he shouted for joy and grabbed her in his arms, all other thoughts forgotten.
Lily submitted to his hug, her eyes filled with tears. Courage, Cutter had said, and bravery. She would do anything for him. The most difficult part was over. Now the waiting began.
8
Only the blankness of deep shock and the veneer of basic, automatic manners carried Maxi and Toby through the moments in which they had to congratulate Lily and Cutter on their marriage. Words were said, nods were exchanged but neither of them even tried to manage a smile. It was, Maxi thought, as if the four of them were engaged in trying to decently bury the nameless victim of a hit-and-run accident, a victim whose body was that of Zachary Amberville.
The consternation and astonishment that still filled the boardroom was actually welcome because it enabled the brother and sister to retreat quickly, clutching each other’s hands and slipping into the express elevator while Lily and Cutter were still engaged with those members of the Amberville editorial group untouched by the death of four magazines, who were able to offer their own good wishes with a naturalness that neither Maxi nor Toby had been able to muster. Elie took them both back to Toby’s town house on a quiet street in the East Sevent
ies. Wordlessly Toby stalked to the bar beside his swimming pool which he had constructed out of the entire first floor and garden of the narrow but deep brownstone, and poured each of them a large drink.
“What is it?” Maxi asked.
“Brandy. I never drink it but if ever there was a time …”
“I simply don’t believe … I just can’t understand …” Maxi started to say but Toby cut her off.
“Shut up, drink it and have a swim. We can’t talk about this yet.” He stripped and dove into the pool with that fast, flat dive that had helped him become a swimming champion many times over. Maxi joined him, wearing only her black pearl, and they swam laps until she could feel some of the ball of emotions that filled her begin to dissolve into simple weariness. She stopped swimming and sat by the edge of the pool until Toby surfaced at last and easily hoisted himself up to sit beside her. He had splendid muscles and shoulders yet he was almost fragile at the waist, like many other great swimmers.
“Better?” he grunted.
“As much better as I’m going to get. Which is not a hell of a lot. I feel as if I’ve been hit by a hand grenade—all to pieces.”
“I wonder if we haven’t both been overlooking a lot about those two, if we aren’t naive to be so surprised.”
“Do you mean that obviously Mother had been lonely since … oh, God, since Dad’s death … and so she turned to Cutter and obviously they are both about the same age and no matter how much I don’t like or trust him, he’s objectively an incredibly handsome man and after all life and sex don’t stop in the late forties? And that it’s natural that she’d be embarrassed about getting married to her own brother-in-law and sneak off and do it without telling us in advance? After all, Toby, it was no accident that she told us about it in public.… The one thing I can’t imagine is that they just decided to elope on the spur of the moment. They’re not Romeo and Juliet.”
I'll Take Manhattan Page 12
