“Thank you, Miss Williams. Well done.”
“Oh, you’re so welcome, Mr. Mayer. Any time.”
Pavka beamed at Nina. “Can I help it if women adore me?”
Maxi was in heaven. Every summer of her life she had been forced into banishment in the country. Beaches, lakes, trees, fresh air and group sports, all were considered to be absolutely necessary for her well-being. Left to herself, a quick trip to Central Park was more than enough contact with nature.
On those rare occasions when she’d been in New York in the summer, for a few hours she’d been conscious of another Manhattan, one that was a hot tropical island where everything moved to a different beat, a city whose rhythm had somehow altered and, in its transformation, had become languid, mysterious, more exciting than ever. Although the office buildings seemed to have the same number of people dashing in and out, there was something different about the people themselves. They dressed differently and they smiled more. A sense of holiday, of a potential party just about to happen reigned in the business district, and in the residential parts of town there was a lazy emptiness, as well-dressed housewives, well-dressed children and well-dressed nannies vanished as completely as if plague stalked the streets.
Now this alluring, throbbing Manhattan in its summer metamorphosis was going to be hers, except for weekends when she and her father would join the family in Southampton. She would go to work with her father in the morning and then—lovely conspiracy—drift away from his side without a goodbye and take another elevator to the offices of Savoir Vivre where she would be known as Maxi Adams. Both Pavka and Nina had insisted on the necessity of concealing her identity from everyone but Carl Koch, the Editor-in-chief of the magazine. If her co-workers knew she was Zachary Amberville’s daughter, at best they would think she was a spoiled rich bitch who was slumming her way into the magazine business, and at worst they would suspect her of being a spy, planted by the management to see what they were up to, reporting back to her father. Since Savoir Vivre was a magazine that had been published for only a little over two years, Maxi was unknown to everyone who worked there and they had decided to plant her in the art department, where she could be put to work on layouts. “She should be able to do wonders with glue and rubber cement and Scotch tape and a ruler,” Nina had assured Pavka.
“Maxi and a pot of glue? It won’t last two days,” Pavka muttered. “But better that than the test kitchens or, God forbid, the wine department. Glue you can always clean up. Glue you can re-glue.”
On that first Monday morning of July Maxi woke early and began to prepare herself for her entrance into the world of major corporative responsibility. She was enchanted with the idea of a job, a grown-up job. She had decided to add two necessary years to Maxi Adams’s age and tell everybody that she was nineteen.
She walked around in her biggest closet, looking for her oldest pair of jeans, the most paint-splotched, the ones that spoke the most of real work of all the many jeans she owned. She had worn them while painting scenery at her next-to-last school and it seemed to her that they gave off an artistic aura, for was she not going to be working in an art department? With them she put on a clean, pale blue, but equally well-worn denim shirt which seemed to say that she had never spent an unproductive minute in her life, a shirt that she felt was sensible, down-to-earth and adult, above all adult. She wanted so much to make a good first impression. Maxi bound a thick silver-and-turquoise Arizona Indian belt tightly around her eighteenth-century waist. After all, any art department would expect that even its most humble employee would still have a sense of decoration. Shoes? No. She put on one of her many pairs of treasured high-heeled Western boots, four hundred and fifty dollars by mail order from Tony Lama, boots that she was convinced added three inches to her height.
Satisfied with her body she attacked her face and hair. No female, in 1972, ever considered that she had enough hair. Maxi had let hers grow down long beyond her shoulders and liked to fling it around, often adding to it with one of the many hunks of fake hair she had accumulated in the last few years. But today called for seriousness and dignity. She combed all her hair back from her face so that her streak of white was prominent. Makeup? Maxi had as much experience with makeup as any demonstrator on the first floor of Bloomingdale’s. Today she wanted to look old. The less makeup she used, the younger she looked, so she set about skillfully applying base, powder, blusher, mascara, eye liner, lipstick and eye shadow with a steady hand born of long hours of solitary practice. She added chunky nuggets of turquoise earrings and studied the finished product. She used an eyebrow pencil to darken the beauty mark above the bow of her upper lip.
No, still not quite old enough, Maxi decided, and dove into her closet and produced a pair of large horn-rimmed glasses she always wore when she played poker. They had plain glass for lenses but it helped to have some sort of mask, no matter how transparent, when bluffing. Something was still missing, she fretted, looking into a triple mirror. It was all that hair, of course. What good did it do to have white hair in front if the rest of it all hung down in the back? She pulled it all into a neat chignon and fastened it securely. Perfection, she thought. The portrait of the artist as an almost-middle-aged woman.
Zachary greeted her appearance at the breakfast table as impassively as possible. Perhaps, he thought prayfully, she didn’t look any different from any other girl of her age … he didn’t go around staring at them so he didn’t know for sure. But wasn’t there something almost … depraved?… about the way her jeans and shirt clung to her body? Didn’t Maxi realize that she looked sexier in those damn jeans than if she’d pranced around in black lace panties? Shouldn’t a girl with such a tiny waist and such … a well-developed … pair of tits, for want of a less parental phrase, not wear a limp denim shirt that hugged each blossoming inch of her? And those glasses? Since when did she need glasses? They only made the rest of her more—whatever it was that disturbed him. And what had she done to her face? And her hair? Nothing he could figure out for sure, but there was something different about his daughter this morning. Was he going crazy or did she look almost … mature? No, not Maxi. Not mature, it couldn’t be. Ripe. By God, ripe!
“Maxi, you look ripe, damn it.”
“Thank you, Daddy,” she said demurely.
“Don’t you think you should wear a dress … maybe?”
“Daddy, nobody wears dresses anymore,” she said with gentle reproof.
She was right, Zachary realized. Nina wore pants, his secretary wore pants, all his female editors wore pants. The last woman he had seen in a dress was Lily, and hers were all that new mid-calf length. He sighed, hoping dresses would come back soon, and returned to his eggs.
“This is Maxi Adams, your summer trainee,” Carl Koch, Editor-in-chief of Savoir Vivre, said to his clever, capable art director, Linda Lafferty. “Do with her what you will.” He disappeared hastily, and with considerable relief, leaving Linda, who was close to six feet tall and still managed to be dumpy, to cope with the trainee.
Carl Koch had good instincts and he’d been immediately convinced that Maxi was a problem. He just wasn’t sure of what magnitude. Those summer kids always were a pain in the ass to deal with. But Pavka had given him firm, not-to-be-questioned orders and Savoir Vivre was stuck with her for the summer. But now she was Linda Lafferty’s problem.
Linda inspected Maxi with growing wonder. This young person looked to her like a budding intellectual who had somehow become a hooker in Santa Fe, or perhaps an apprentice Simone de Beauvoir who’d strayed into a stag party.
“Howdy pardner,” she said finally.
“Howdy, Miz Lafferty.”
“Where do you … hail from?”
“The East,” Maxi answered, skillfully avoiding this leading question.
“East?” Linda persisted. “Far East or Near East?”
“East Seventies,” she admitted.
“Oh. Any art training?”
“Only school and camp.”
“Camp?”
“Summer camp,” Maxi murmured, suddenly unable to find a substitute that would sound more impressive.
Why me, thought Linda Lafferty. Why me?
Nothing she had ever done in her life, Maxi decided after a week of work, could compare to the office for sheer fun. The potential for making merry in the art department of Savoir Vivre was beyond anything she had imagined. How come she had never guessed that people went to work in order to stand around and tell each other much better dirty jokes than she’d ever heard at school—really good ones—and horse around like crazy and get friendly with each other and goof off and sneak joints in the john and gossip like wild about sex? They all seemed to be making it with each other. To do that all day and get paid for it too—this was the secret grown-ups never told you when they spoke so seriously of something called “business.” Business was play on a major scale.
All her new friends worked on layouts, which reminded her of kindergarten, pasting pictures on heavy paper. She loved helping them, leaning over their shoulders and straightening out edges, handing them Magic Markers and sharpening their pencils and making them laugh if they ever got too annoyed with some photograph that wouldn’t fit right on a page. She’d shown them things they’d never thought of—the story on foie gras for instance, with photographs of seventeen different slices of foie gras, each one from a different French restaurant—nobody had been able to tell which part of which slice was the top and which was the bottom by the time she’d finished rearranging them.
Maxi’s very favorite part of the day was when the bagel-and-doughnut wagon came around, and everybody stopped pretending to be busy and gathered around like nomads stoking up before a trek across the desert. She even came back from lunch early for the afternoon bagel wagon halt at three o’clock. Nobody really needed her till then anyway. Lunch was such a groovy invention! Three free hours to shop. She was on a diet so she didn’t bother to eat. Instead, she systematically combed the stores, boutiques as well as department stores.
Maxi had been picking out her own clothes for years but always before she’d had to wait till September to shop. But now the city was full of early fall merchandise and there wasn’t anything Maxi didn’t try on. When she finally finished her daily bout of pillage and plunder, all charged to Lily’s accounts, she brought stacks of packages back to her brightly lit cubicle and pulled all her purchases out of their boxes and modeled them for her co-workers who had such terrific taste about things like colors and shapes and were teaching her a lot about what to wear. She’d stopped using her glasses and doing dumb things to her hair once she’d been firmly established as nineteen, going on twenty, and part of the gang.
The idea of starting her last year of high school in September was too revolting to think about. Maxi had decided to go to art school instead and everyone had advice for her about which school to pick and they were so great about coming back to her office and sitting around telling her about their days in art school and the hell-raising they’d gotten up to there. She hated the end of the day when she had to refuse all the offers of drinks at the bars that surrounded the office and disappear back home, even though she could usually con her father into taking her out to dinner with him.
Linda Lafferty simmered with midsummer rage. Productivity in her art department—her department!—had fallen off precipitously since the advent of Maxi. All her workers, who at best had never been as dependable as she would have liked, had turned into randy goats who spent most of their time thinking up excuses to have yet another long conversation with that … that … she couldn’t think of the right word. Maxi was outside of her previous experience, and none of the words she knew managed to satisfactorily categorize that sexy, funny, absolutely lawless, disruptive and yet somehow, in spite of it all—admit it, Linda, you like to talk to her too, she told herself in disgust. The kid was a daily bacchanal. She must be Miss Seagram’s or Miss General Foods or Miss Coca-Cola to be allowed such a range of nuisance value, for Carl Koch simply refused to listen to her complaints about the new trainee.
However, Linda Lafferty had a department to run, a department that had always been the single most overworked department at the magazine. Much of the body of the book was given over to photographs and the rest of the thick magazine was stuffed with ads for luxury products. The readers of Savoir Vivre were rich people and the magazine, printed on glossy, thick, fifty-pound paper, was expected to drip visual riches that would make its rich readers feel even richer. All the responsibility for the quality and originality of this monthly cornucopia lay squarely on the art department. The text barely mattered although the food and wine articles were all written by top literary figures who were paid enormous sums of money by magazine standards.
She needed a new assistant art director, Linda Lafferty decided in desperation, someone fast and good who would be tough enough to speed things up. A lot of severe ass-kicking could do wonders to kill Maxi-lust, she thought, but something about being so tall made it almost impossible for her to kick ass effectively. She hadn’t decided if it was her desire to be liked or fear of killing someone, but at least she was smart enough to know when she needed help.
When she put her request to Carl Koch she was surprised at how quickly he agreed to let her hire a new top assistant. Although Savoir Vivre was clearly a money-machine, Koch, like most editors, didn’t like to add any staff if he could help it. In her last job Linda had worked with a young man who was as single-mindedly work-oriented as he was brilliant. She had wanted to hire him for a long time and now Maxi Adams, queen of the rubber cement, Lorelei of paste-up, catnip sorceress of the ruler, was going to give her the opportunity to offer Rocco Cipriani a salary he couldn’t resist, for he had always said that only a lot of money could get him away from Condé Nast. Maxi Adams would serve a purpose, would make a contribution in spite of herself.
Linda Lafferty looked at Rocco Cipriani severely. “I’m taking a vacation. I haven’t had one minute off since I came to Savoir Vivre. I won’t be there when you start tomorrow. I don’t want people coming to me about you and complaining. You’re going to be in absolute charge. They’ll all have memos to that effect.”
“You want a new broom, mixed with Captain Queeg and a few floggings?”
“Precisely. There isn’t one of my bums who’s doing a full day’s work. I have a major discipline problem on my hands. I’m absolutely counting on you to beat and whack and knock them back into shape while I’m away having that thirty-day nervous breakdown Carl said I was entitled to, and when I get back I want to be ahead of schedule … or else.” She had decided not to pinpoint Maxi as the source of the trouble. Let him find out for himself. On-the-job training.
“You’re cute as hell, Linda, when you get threatening.”
“That’s why I’ve hired you, that’s why we’ve spent all weekend going over this disgusting backload of undone work. You’re going to save my ass because you’re not at all cute.”
“And I thought you liked me.”
“You’re all right for a kid,” she said primly, cursing her never-give-up Irish lust that didn’t have the good sense to stop raging at the sight of that young and completely untouchable Rocco Cipriani. She looked at him closely, trying to decide how any man so absurdly gorgeous could still command as much respect as he did. He had an indecent chaos of black curls, heavily hooded dark eyes that were both dreamy and glowing in their intensity, as well as the nose of a Medici prince. In his strong features, for all her acuteness, she could find no single fault. She didn’t even dare to look at his mouth. A girl had only so much self-control. Everything about Rocco worked together, relentlessly, powerfully, insistently. It was difficult to turn away from him. He was, she decided, like the model for a great Renaissance painter’s masterpiece, a vision of a proud Saint Sebastian. All that was lacking were the arrows piercing his body at those interestingly vulnerable places. Rocco Cipriani explained as much about the high period of Italian art as a trip to the Met.
Yet, at barely twenty-three, he was doing so well at Condé Nast that it was only a question of having a little more seniority, a little more seasoning before he would be the art director of his own magazine. She knew full well that he would never stay at Amberville. This was simply one of those sharp, strategic, sideways moves that some of the best and most ambitious art directors made in order to go ahead faster than they would if they stayed at one company during their entire career … she’d done it herself. It made you more appreciated than total loyalty ever did, and it was only risky if you were not very, very, very good. Rocco had nothing to worry about.
There are as many kinds of art directors in Manhattan as there are publications and agencies and commercial-makers. Rocco was one of a very special kind, one who never wanted to work on anything but magazines. He harbored no itch to work in advertising in spite of the desirable big bucks those poor bastards who called themselves “creative directors” made. They were bound by the demands of clients and he was bound by nothing but the limits of his own imagination. For Rocco the ultimate joy in life was pages and pages of an empty magazine, pure glorious white space, space without end, space renewed each month by advertising department magic, waiting for him to fill it with layouts that had never been dreamed of before, combinations of type that had never been put together since typography was invented, graphics that would make history, photographs hitherto unimagined, cropped in ways no one had ever cropped before, drawings commissioned from artists who had never been thought of except in terms of gallery and museum walls. Each page of editorial space was to him like a blank canvas to a painter: a new chance to impose his vision of what could be, and like a painter, he was never totally satisfied.
Rocco was the not-yet-satiated Alexander the Great of the magazine world, still on the rampage, not with armies but with torrents of talent. He worked at least ten hours a day at his desk and then went home to empty his mailbox into which were stuffed magazines from all over the world, each one of which he devoured page by page, cursing horribly when he saw a new idea he hadn’t thought of himself, raping the magazines of the pages he wanted to study, which he taped to the walls of his big Soho loft until they went from floor to eye level, and were gradually covered over by other pages so that being in the room was like living inside a collage of the best international graphic design.
I'll Take Manhattan Page 19
