There were only two men in the world whom Rocco Cipriani envied: Alexander Liberman, the genius who was Artistic Director of Condé Nast, and Pavka Mayer. One day he felt sure he was destined to replace one or the other of them, but he also knew he still had a lot to learn, so Linda Lafferty’s job offer had an additional allure: he’d be working for Pavka for the first time, indirectly it was true, but still there was always the potential opportunity of picking the man’s great brain.
Rocco started at Savoir Vivre on a Monday in mid-July. By Friday, Linda couldn’t stand it anymore and let herself give in to the temptation to telephone him and find out how things were going.
“We’ve cleared up all that major lot of undone work and Monday I’m attacking the November issue,” he said.
“Already? Are you sure?”
“Well, nobody was thrilled about working till midnight every night all week, but they did it.”
“What about the Maxi problem?”
“ ‘Maxi problem’? You mean my trainee?”
“If you want to describe her that way, yes.”
“Christ, Linda, she’s no problem at all. I can’t believe what a help that kid is. Doesn’t even take her lunch hour, just bolts a hard-boiled egg out of a paper bag and goes right back to sweeping up and getting rid of eraser crumbs and making sure that everyone has fresh supplies when they come back from lunch. She seems very grown-up for only nineteen. In on time every morning, last one out at night, doesn’t fool around in the bagel breaks, brings coffee just before anyone begins to itch for it, keeps my Magic Markers arranged just right, in fact I’ve never had such an organized desk anywhere. Doesn’t smoke, wears those demure little dresses, doesn’t indulge in idle chat and doesn’t even seem to take time to pee. Maybe she’s a Mormon? She’s always there when I want her … yet she’s never a nuisance. A good lady, that one. Not bad-looking too, now that I come to think about it … in fact … not bad at all …”
“Oh SHIT.”
“What’s that about?”
“Forget it. Just forget it. Carry on, Rocco. I’m going back to the beach and walk into the ocean until I drown.”
“If you’re planning on working all weekend, Rocco, maybe I can help out?” Maxi suggested casually, holding her breath. She would die for him, she would not just walk on burning coals for him, she would cover herself with them and lie down quietly until it was all over. There wasn’t anything in the lexicon of human behavior that she would not do for Rocco Cipriani beginning with leaving home and crossing continents on foot and starving in the wilderness. He had only to ask.
“I don’t want to interrupt your weekend plans,” he said.
“I don’t have any actually. And I could learn a lot while I kept your stuff straight. You know how your layouts disappear under each other when you’re working hard. And … I could go out for pizza,” she added, a suggestion that grew from every bit of wisdom she had absorbed in her life.
“Good thought. I usually forget to eat. And there’s that pizza place right next door that takes so long to deliver that the cheese is always cold. O.K., come by on Saturday morning about nine. I’ll give you the address.”
She took the paper and put it in her handbag to keep forever. She already knew where he lived, she knew his phone number, she knew all about his big family in Hartford, his scholarship to art school, his prizes, his promotions. The advent of Rocco had started a storm of speculation in the art department of Savoir Vivre and Maxi had listened carefully, saying nothing but registering every morsel, weeding out the bits that overlapped or didn’t seem to go together and ending up with a fair idea of the truth. She knew he had had a lot of girls but no long-lasting one, she knew his enemies and his friends, she knew as much about this stranger she had met for the first time five days before as it is possible to learn and intuit. Maxi’s intuition of Rocco was far more than the act of mental contemplation or recognition or consideration. It went deeper than that philosophical definition which claims for intuition a spiritual perception and immediate knowledge that can be ascribed to angelic or spiritual beings. Hers went further and was a good deal shorter. It was Hawthorne’s definition: “A miraculous intuition of what ought to be done just at the right time for action.”
The first Saturday and Sunday Maxi spent in Rocco’s loft were busy ones. Whenever she saw that Rocco was lost in thought before his drawing table she moved about the room, so quietly that he never heard her, finding out where he kept his household supplies. She made his bed with fresh sheets and bundled up all his dirty linen and shirts for a trip to that laundromat which, for the first time in her life, she was sure she would be able to find and figure out. She washed her first sinkful of dirty dishes and put them away; she went through his pantry and made lists of the basics that were missing; but she didn’t have time to tackle his drawers or closets. While she bent to these divine tasks she always had one eye on him, and whenever he looked up, needing something, she had it ready for him, with much of the expertise of an operating-room nurse. He gulped down the pizza and sandwiches she brought back for him, sharing them with her of course, but silently, as he thought about the design problems that confronted him. Now that the backlog of old work had been cleared up, Rocco wanted to impose his own style on Savoir Vivre before Linda Lafferty came back from her vacation.
He was immediately concerned with the problems created by a magazine devoted to food and wine. He had worked with models and clothes so long that the presentation of objects, whose main relation to the readers was to cause them to salivate, provided him with a challenge which made him oblivious to all else.
“One grain, just one grain,” he muttered as Maxi sliced another pizza on Sunday night.
“Not hungry?” she asked, worried.
“One single grain of golden caviar, on a full-bleed double spread. The obvious thing to do would be to have Penn photograph it but Penn means Condé Nast and anyway I don’t do the obvious. Laser photography? Photomicrography? You can’t draw caviar—or can you? Maybe, yeah, maybe … with gold leaf covering both pages and Andrew Wyeth to draw the caviar … maybe … is that pepperoni?”
“I asked for everything on it.”
“Good.” He lapsed back into silence and soon afterwards, seeing that he was about to stop working, Maxi left, so quietly that he didn’t notice she was gone.
During the following week anyone coming into the art department of Savoir Vivre might have thought himself in the manuscript room of a medieval monastery as the workers bent over their desks with concentrated industry, trying out all the ideas that Rocco flung at them in his search for ever newer, ever more exciting pages.
Zachary was thrilled as Maxi told him about her modest but necessary part in this work and even more delighted when she asked him questions that showed how closely she had been watching the whole process of putting a magazine together. Yet he was slightly concerned by the sheer intensity of her interest … if she were so involved, might it not all be over as quickly as it had started? He didn’t trust Maxi’s enthusiasm. He was relieved that at least she had spent the weekend visiting her school friend India West, in Connecticut, and was going back there again this coming Saturday.
Sunday night Rocco put down his tools, yawned and stretched.
“That’s it! That ought to be it,” he said victoriously to Maxi who had just finished putting his recently washed and dried and rolled socks in military order in a drawer where he couldn’t miss them. The loft was as immaculate as she could make it without actually disturbing any of the magazines or books or portfolios.
“Pizza time?” she asked.
“Not again. Not another one. I couldn’t stand it.” He grinned at her. Best assistant he’d ever had, he thought. And he could swear that she’d done something, he couldn’t figure out what, which made it easier to get dressed in the morning.
“I could cook a steak, make a salad and put a potato in the oven to bake,” Maxi offered.
“Where are you going to find all that
stuff on Sunday night?”
“In here,” Maxi said, opening the refrigerator which she had stocked the day before. Wilderness survival camp had included basic cooking lessons.
“Great. I’m beat. I think I’ll grab a nap while the potato bakes. Wake me in time for dinner, O.K.?”
“Sure.”
Rocco sank into a deep sleep almost immediately. It was so late in the day that the setting sun just dusted the air of the loft, but midsummer light still filled the room. Maxi crept close to Rocco’s bed and carefully sank to her knees beside it. She had to clench her fists to prevent herself from reaching out and touching his hair. What if he woke up as suddenly as he had fallen asleep? She had never before been able to gaze directly at him for more than a few seconds except when he was talking to someone at the office, and even then she had been aware that if he looked up and caught her staring she would blush humiliatingly. During their two Saturdays and Sundays in the loft she had been particularly circumspect, knowing that if she distracted him in any way he’d throw her out.
Maxi was so much in love and so much in awe of Rocco that her normal reaction had been frozen. She realized that she hadn’t been herself since she first laid eyes on him but she didn’t know how to become herself with this man, who certainly had not been affected by her in the same way as any other man or boy she’d ever met. Love had generated in Maxi a condition in which every ordinary act of Rocco’s was invested with absolute charm. If he scratched his head she was charmed. If he bit on his knuckles in thought she was charmed. When he hummed to himself she caught a glimpse of paradise. Maxi’s eyes traced the perfect lines of his lips with a mixture of reverence and desperate longing. Her heartstrings pulled her toward him but she stayed immobile, wildly yearning, yearning with a violence that she knew she would never feel for any other man as long as she lived. She was filled with all the unutterable confusion and single-minded passion of first love. If she could just lift one of the soft black curls on his forehead and touch, just touch the skin underneath. If she could just rub the back of her hand against his cheek. But she didn’t dare. The risk was too great.
As she knelt there, paralyzed with longing, Rocco’s words suddenly hit her.
“Well, that ought to do it,” he’d said, and stopped working. She knew him well enough to realize that he had finished with the November issue. Of course the December issue would be attacked next week but without the same need to invent a new graphic style that had been pushing him to work seven-day weeks. She had never thought about this moment before. Somehow she had let herself believe that these weekends in the loft would continue on … but her summer job would last only another five weeks. Panic struck Maxi. Tomorrow she would go back to work, just another body in the crowded art department, fetching and carrying and bringing coffee, and that right minute she had never been able to clearly imagine would never present itself—that absolutely necessary minute when Rocco would finally see her.
With panic Maxi became Maxi again. The enchantment that had rendered her ineffective, inert, was lifted, a spell broken. Her motto, discovered in French class, was the words of Danton: “Boldness, again boldness and ever boldness.” For a minute she paced silently about the loft, and then, whispering “Boldness” to herself, she stripped off her T-shirt and her jeans and her underwear in a few silent but resolute motions. She untied her espadrilles and stood naked, as rosy and voluptuous as a Boucher, with her full, well-separated breasts that were so young that in spite of their weight they tilted upward from her narrow rib cage. Below her tiny, firm waist, where her white flesh was marked by the belt she had just dropped on the floor, her hips swelled out deliciously, in an excellent yet immoderate curve.
Nakedness was as natural to Maxi as to Eve. She was so perfectly proportioned that without clothes she seemed taller than when she was dressed. She ran her fingers through her long hair, shaking her head slightly, unable to move for a second. Boldness, she thought, boldness! She tiptoed over to the bed and bent over Rocco, reassured to see that he was in the deepest possible sleep. Carefully, as lightly as a flower, she lay down next to him, her delicate yet lavish body finding a place to nestle. She lifted herself up so that she hung over his face. Boldness, she prayed as she began to kiss him awake, so softly, so sweetly, so gently that it was many minutes before he began to stir and mutter complainingly. She undid the buttons of his shirt and kissed his chest and his throat until he floated up to consciousness, and when she saw him open his eyes she finally kissed him on his mouth, kissed him once and then kept on kissing his lips, moving higher so that her breasts rested on his bare chest, lightly holding his shoulders down on the bed until he woke up completely and tried to sit up.
“Maxi? Maxi?” he said in amazement.
She rolled over on her back and looked up at him through the tangle of her hair, looked right into his astonished eyes. She laughed her great, deep, free, joyous laugh that he’d never heard before.
“I hope you weren’t expecting somebody else,” she answered as he bent toward her and eagerly pulled her to him.
12
“As we used to say in the RAF,” India West remarked thoughtfully, “you’ve bought the farm, Maxi.”
“And just exactly what does that mean?” Maxi asked anxiously. India West was never, never wrong. She was only fifteen, two years younger than Maxi, but from the moment the two of them had met in school, while trying, as usual, to avoid gym class, they had been best friends, joined by an instantaneous appreciation of each other which included a decided preference for heightened versions of the truth. People sometimes took them for liars, as Maxi once explained to India, but they were only rearranging life to make it more interesting for everybody, a public service, as it were.
“Crashed your plane,” India said absently, looking at herself in the mirror. “I think I’m getting rather … well, beautiful. What do you think?”
“You know you’re beautiful. When haven’t you been divinely beautiful? Stop trying to change the subject. We were talking about me.”
India had just come back from Saratoga where she had spent the summer with her family. Lily Amberville, the boys and the servants were expected back from Southampton at the end of August. Finally Maxi had somebody she could talk to about Rocco. Rocco was besotted, infatuated, fascinated, her captive. They had been together every minute of the summer, at work and after work, since the first night in July. He was in love with her, truly in love, seriously in love. He had told her so, and Rocco, unlike Maxi, never told anything but the truth. Maxi, in her rapture, couldn’t understand why India, usually so insouciant, saw a problem in her flawless love.
“Seventeen is not nineteen. An Amberville is not an Adams,” India said.
“My birthday’s tomorrow, I’ll be eighteen, and I’m exactly the same person he’s in love with,” Maxi protested.
“Not really.”
“You mean you think he won’t love me when he finds out? India! That’s ridiculous.”
“No, I mean something else, and you know perfectly well what I mean. Just because we go to a school which is politely called ‘an alternative form of education’ doesn’t mean that either of us is an idiot,” India said severely.
“So, O.K. My father is a rich man …”
“Ha!”
“One of the richest men in America, all right? And I don’t go to Vassar, after all. I’m still in high school. Do two mere years and a father with tons of money make me a leper?”
“You lied to him.”
“I he to everybody.”
“So do I … but you said Rocco always tells the truth. That means he won’t trust you anymore. How can a self-respecting, hardworking young man from a nice conservative Italian family with a strong sense of his own values carry on a flaming affair with teenaged Miss Amberville, his boss’s daughter? What does that make him? You’re supposed to be his ‘trainee.’ What does that do to his career? Apparently the man cares a lot about his work. How can he ever trust you again? You’ve tak
en him in completely, poor sucker, and if it had started a year ago you’d be jailbait. And God knows what the consequences will be when Pa and Ma Amberville find out.”
India used her voice as effectively as a master bell-ringer, ringing changes in tones so that no one of any age could ignore her when she spoke. Even Maxi felt effectively subdued, accustomed as she was to the India phenomenon.
“I wish you wouldn’t talk to me like that,” Maxi said, taking her streak of white hair and twisting it between her thumb and forefinger and pulling it until it hurt. She was, in spite of her bravado, aware that she’d painted herself into corners before, but this corner didn’t have any floor left.
“India, I need you,” she said nervously. “I have a terrible practical problem. My family’s due back here in a week and my freedom will be gone. I’ve been telling Rocco that they’re still in Europe. If I tell him they’re back he’ll expect to meet them … he’s old-fashioned about things like meeting parents.”
“Ah, so,” said India impassively.
“School doesn’t start for three more weeks,” Maxi continued. “I can tell him they’re still away until then if you’ll cover for me. I’ll tell them I’m with you when I’m with Rocco, and on the nights when I simply have to show my face for dinner at home, I’ll tell Rocco I’m with you. Does that make sense?”
“If he’s so old-fashioned, wouldn’t he expect you to introduce him to your best friend?”
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