Julie was Maxi’s height, but she had little breasts and narrow hips that meant she would always look taller than Maxi in the same clothes. Her short hair was tinted an otherworldly color between Bordeaux and orange that stopped precisely short of punk. It was brushed back uncompromisingly from her forehead to reveal a face that belonged to an impertinent doe: huge challenging eyes, darkly rimmed in charcoal liner and shadow; a slender nose with nostrils so sensitive that they looked as if they could twitch at any minute; delicate lips painted a bright crimson; a chin that was just small enough to give the impression that she shared some forest animal’s timidity and yet firm enough to let the world know that Julie Jacobson didn’t let anyone order her around.
“But let’s discuss wardrobe later,” Maxi continued. “I’m going to look around my office. Then maybe you could show me the rest of the establishment?”
Julie sprang up and stood with her back protectively barring the door that led to Uncle Bob Fink’s former office.
“I don’t think you really want to go in there,” she said.
“I don’t?”
“It might not be the best way to start the day.”
“Don’t tell me he didn’t get rid of all his stuff,” Maxi sputtered. “He promised, damn it.”
“No, it’s all been carted away.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Maxi said blithely as she entered. She stopped in her tracks in shock.
The room was completely empty, except for one old black leather chair with a rump-sprung seat. The entire carpet was covered, many inches deep, with layer upon layer of half-disintegrated bits of paper, a mess ten times worse than Broadway after a ticker-tape parade. Cobwebs, she thought in a daze, real honest-to-God cobwebs hung in the corners of the room. Did New York have spiders? The walls, now that Uncle Bob’s nine towering desks no longer concealed them, were mottled and filthy. There had been leaks over the years and paint had fallen from the walls in long zigzag strips that lay. in pieces over the other debris. The windows were so dirty that scarcely any sun lit up the scene, but whatever light came through the grime was desolate.
“At least in Great Expectations Mrs. Havisham had furniture to hold up her cobwebs,” Maxi said when she could find her voice.
“The last desk, the one he was working at, collapsed when they tried to move it,” Julie explained.
“There isn’t a broom, there isn’t a vacuum cleaner, there isn’t any instrument known to man that could clean up this … I don’t even know what to call it,” Maxi said faintly.
“There’s always motivation.” Julie sounded as if she’d meditated on the problem.
“Motivation?” Maxi was horrified. “You don’t mean me!”
“In our clothes? I was thinking of Hank, from the building. He’s been known to become highly motivated by the palm of his hand. Do you have fifty bucks?”
“In cash … I don’t think so. Will he take a credit card?”
“I’ll lend it to you. You can pay me back tomorrow.”
“Bless you, Julie! Let’s get out of here. It’s morbid.”
“You’re the boss.”
“Right? Right! Now where can the boss sit down and discuss the future of Buttons and Bows with her staff?”
“Maxi, you don’t have a staff.”
“What about you?”
“No way. I don’t mind lending you money, but that’s as far as it goes. I’m purely temporary, not staff, God forbid, in this place.”
“Couldn’t you just pretend? Till the end of the week. You could put it on your resume, when you go for your next job.”
“I am planning on leaving Buttons and Bows off my résumé entirely. But if it makes you feel any better, you can call me a consultant and let me buy you a cup of coffee to cheer us both up. Don’t look for a coffee maker, it’s broken.”
“The nearest coffee shop?”
“You’re on.”
“Julie,” Maxi said earnestly, leaning over the table, “have you ever stopped to think of the possibilities? Every rock group in the world is trimming-crazy, tons of gold braid, uniforms, everything they wear is trimmed to high heaven. Medals are back all over the place. Shoulder pads have never been more important. Claude Montana. Just think of Claude Montana’s shoulder pads! The T-shirt craze. What is punk but the inspired use of trimming? And just look at the evening dresses this year … if they don’t glitter, forget them. Sonia Rykiel’s things—all trim. Why, we could do a whole issue on … on Joan Collins’s puffed sleeves!”
“Hmmm.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ve only been here two weeks because the assistant editor’s job I was supposed to have at Mademoiselle fell through at the last minute, but I do know who still subscribes to Buttons and Bows. Basically, it’s your Mr. Lucas who is worried about selling five thousand yards of passementerie and your Mr. Spielberg whose main business in life is fringe. I don’t think they would be intensely fascinated by Joan Collins’s sleeves. They would hardly notice if Joan Collins herself appeared stark naked on the cover of the magazine. Buttons and Bows, if it’s about anything, is about a few of the nuts and bolts of the fashion business. For fashion, Spielberg and Lucas stick to WWD. That’s not subject to change by you.”
“Then we have to widen our base of circulation, appeal to somebody other than Lucas and Spielberg.”
“Not we, Maxi, you,” Julie insisted. “You.”
“Anyway, that’s tomorrow’s problem,” Maxi said, pushing it away into the air. “Tell me about you. All the vital statistics you care to have known.”
“I’m twenty-two. I graduated from Smith last year. My mother always insisted that I have secretarial skills to fall back on. For three generations the women of my family have had secretarial skills and I’m the first one who’s ever had to fall back on them. I do not enjoy it. In two weeks I’m starting at Redbook as assistant to the assistant to the fashion editor.”
“Are you a New Yorker?” Maxi asked curiously. Julie was as businesslike a creature as she’d ever met and crisply self-confident.
“Cleveland, Shaker Heights. My father’s a neurosurgeon and my mother teaches English literature at the university. Her speciality is Virginia Woolf and the Blooms-bury Group. My sister’s working for a double Ph.D. in French and philosophy so that she can teach Pascal, Montaigne and Voltaire, heaven only knows to whom, and my brother’s a city planner and chief aide to the mayor of Cleveland. I’m my parents’ only failure.”
“What is your crime?” Maxi gaped. It must be the color of her hair. Everything else about her was so impressive.
“I’m nuts about fashion. No one in the Jacobson family thinks fashion is a proper way to spend the only life you have. It’s frivolous, poorly paid, and doesn’t add to universal knowledge.”
“It’s the fourth or fifth biggest industry in the country.”
“They don’t think much of industry either.”
“They sound a bit … Bostonian.”
“There’s another branch of the family that’s lived in Boston forever. They make the Cleveland Jacobsons look like television game show producers.”
“I didn’t even graduate from high school,” Maxi confessed.
“Is that why you’ve been sent to Buttons and Bows—to teach you what happens to people who fail to complete their education?”
“It was my own idea. And I’m not giving it up,” Maxi said grimly.
“I don’t understand why, with all the other Amberville publications, you should care what happens to pathetic old Buttons and Bows. In your place I’d be at Style like a shot.”
“Let’s talk about clothes,” Maxi suggested. She liked Julie but she wasn’t about to bare her heart and her loss to satisfy her curiosity. The reasons were too emotional, too bound up with her love for her father to explain.
“Clothes Milan? Clothes Bendel’s? Clothes American designers?” Julie’s eyes lit up with anticipation.
“You’re buying the coffee so you get to p
ick,” Maxi said generously.
For several hours that afternoon Maxi sat in what had once been the art department, where two bare L-shaped layout tables and several tottering chairs had been abandoned on a dirty, peeling linoleum floor. In the reception room, from time to time, she could hear Julie answering the phone and coping with the reluctantly motivated maintenance man.
Maxi had supplied herself with a yellow legal pad and a box of ballpoint pens and she decided that the first thing she had to do was to plot the future of a new, revitalized, expanded, explosive Buttons and Bows. She had the intention of making lists and sketches and more lists and more sketches. She walked around the room, looked out of the window, sat down, looked at her yellow legal pad, got up and walked around the room some more. Inspiration proved elusive. Maybe it was the fault of the decor, maybe it was the terrible ham-and-cheese sandwiches she and Julie had shared in a coffee shop that had been sold out of her favorite, tuna salad, maybe it was the antics of the full moon or the diabolical influence of Saturn or maybe it just wasn’t her day. Maybe it was Lucas and Spielberg. She wished that Julie had never told her about them. None of the ideas that came into her head seemed good when viewed from the Lucas-Spielberg angle, and they were, after all, the faithful core that was left of the readers of Buttons and Bows. The magazine, if it were to rise from the ashes, had to appeal to many thousands of Lucases and Spielbergs, wherever they were to be found. Hundreds of thousands. Millions!
“Jesus Christ Almighty!” Maxi said out loud.
“You spoke?” Julie asked, standing in the doorway.
“There aren’t millions of Lucases and Spielbergs!”
“One of each, I believe. On your subscription list in any case.”
“Julie, I’m going for a walk. I think better on my feet.”
“It’s nice outside,” Julie said, eyeing the virgin yellow pad meaningfully. “Oxygen stimulates the brain.”
“And it’s nice outside. See you tomorrow.”
Elie was waiting with the limo downstairs.
“The center of the universe, Elie,” she ordered. He made his rapid, illegal way to the corner of Fifty-seventh and Fifth, stopped and opened the door for her. “When will you need me tonight, Miss Amberville?”
“I’m not sure, Elie, but call in around six.”
She walked briskly down Fifth Avenue, breathing deeply, relishing the nimble temper of the September city, that perpetual urban high-wire act. She loved the incomparable tension of this island metropolis that felt as if it were perched on the top of an active volcano. “ ‘I’ll take Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too,’ ” Maxi sang, although she had known for years that the song her father had taught her had been skewed to suit his determination since the first three words of the lyric really were “We’ll have Manhattan.”
Never had Fifth Avenue seemed broader or brighter to her than after the dismal hours she’d spent in her new office, never had the passing throng, pushing and shoving and overtaking each other in the aggressive, con brio New York version of a stroll, seemed more fascinating and varied than after the fruitless afternoon she’d spent with her yellow pad. Everyone had a destination, a goal, a reason for being here, in this place, on this street, at this hour.
What, Maxi wondered, what did they all want? Wanting was the very essence of the New Yorker. She knew what she wanted. She wanted to make a smashing success of Buttons and Bows and quite suddenly she admitted to herself that she knew it could not be done. Not with Buttons and Bows. No way, nohow. There was no major demand in this city, where there was a market for everything, for a magazine that was devoted to articles, no matter how well executed, on the mystery of the hand-embroidered glitz on Julio’s three-thousand-dollar dresses or the ruffles on Prince’s clothes or the definitive word on Linda Evans’s paillettes. Probably there was a market for a magazine for contact lens wearers, or a magazine for left-handed people, perhaps even a magazine for people who collected string, but they would always be small magazines. Maxi wasn’t about to pour her energy into a small magazine.
Scratch trimming, she thought. She needed to find a new idea—a—a concept. That was all she needed, a concept, Maxi thought, as she almost danced down Fifth Avenue, in her red miniskirt, a smile on the perfect bow of her mouth. Just a new concept, merely a new, fresh concept that hadn’t already been done. That was all. As she sped by, every man who saw her ached to follow.
When Elie called in tonight she’d tell him that tomorrow morning she wanted him to make the rounds of all the newsstands in the city and bring her a copy of every single magazine on sale. She might as well know what was out there already before she invented her new magazine.
“Ma,” said Angelica in a voice of supplication, “when are you going to stop torturing yourself? I can’t take this much longer.”
“Tough shit, kid.”
“Ma, that’s not a nice way to talk to your little girl.”
“I don’t have time to be nice. If you want a nice person go find somebody else, I’m working.”
“Ma, why are you doing this to me?”
“Because. And stop whining … other girls have working mothers and they don’t complain.”
“Working mothers!” Angelica sputtered. “You’re like some kind of loony, a robot, a crazed robot.”
“Go play Trivial Pursuit.”
“You’ve been shut up with these magazines for three days now, you haven’t had more than a bite to eat, you read till you drop, you grind your teeth when you’re asleep …”
“How do you know?”
“Because you fell asleep on top of that pile of magazines last night and I heard you grinding away.”
“Just a little stress, just normal stress, Angelica.”
“But you’ve always avoided stress, you hate stress, Ma. Stop it!”
“To be stressed is human, kid, don’t you know that? Maybe you’re too young, but according to what I read, every female in this country is operating under unendurable stress and it’s getting worse even as we sit here and waste time talking. Now go away and let me get back to my work.”
“Ma, I’m going to call Toby and get you committed to an institution.”
“It takes three doctors to commit somebody and all the doctors in the country are busily writing articles on stress for magazines, so you won’t find any who have the time, but you’re free to try.”
Angelica folded her lanky frame in sections and sat down protectively next to Maxi. Three days before, when Elie had arrived at the apartment with the first shift of magazines, her mother had been like a kid opening Christmas presents. She had installed herself in her new library, with its solar-gray mirrored walls, its book-crowded shelves and its big armchairs covered in off-white glove leather. She had opened each new magazine with anticipation, pounced on it and leafed through it page by page, leaving out nothing from cover to cover. When she had wrung a magazine dry Maxi carefully added it to one or another of the piles of different types of magazines that were beginning to collect around her. Elie kept returning from his expeditions with his arms piled high. From expectation, Maxi’s mood grew more subdued. By lunch she began to look slightly dismayed and by the end of that first day she was annoyed. By the evening of the following day she had progressed to outrage, and her outrage had mounted ever since. Still the magazines kept coming, the piles now tumbling down the sides of all but the window wall of the room.
Many of them had been sent away, carried off by the weary Elie: the only-for-men magazines; the sports magazines; the computer magazines; the car-owner magazines; the audio-freak magazines; the motorcycle-nut magazines; the weekly news magazines; the movie magazines; the soap-opera fan magazines; the magazines for male homosexuals; the aerospace magazines; the business magazines of all kinds and sorts.
Maxi had, by now, cleared a place for herself on the red and white hand-loomed carpet and sat cross-legged, hemmed in by dozens and dozens of publications.
“I haven’t found one for lesbians yet,�
�� she said in a tired but thoughtful tone of voice.
“Ma! Is that what you’re planning?”
“It may be the only major virgin market left.”
“Would lesbians go out to a newsstand and buy a special magazine?” Angelica wondered. She heard the front door open. It must be Elie with more dreaded magazines, because the footsteps were those of a man.
“In a country with fifty-nine million single people and a magazine like Bride’s that claims to reach just over three million, it stands to reason that there’s got to be a big lesbian audience out there somewhere,” Maxi answered, trying for a tone of sweet reasonableness.
A man entered the carpeted library where they sat so engrossed in print that they didn’t hear him. He stood leaning on the doorjamb, casually poised. The mocking cock of his head, the tough jut of his chin, the skeptical glint in his eyes, the clearly bellicose way in which his short, pointy, ash-blond hair stood up from his head, all indicated someone who viewed the world with a certain disdain. He wore battered leather so worn that it seemed a collection of bits and pieces, three Nikons were slung around his neck, and his smile was both knowing and deeply loving. It was evident that he found both Maxi and Angelica very funny, objects of his benevolence, and it was just as evident that only a very few people in the world fell into that category.
“Could I interest you ladies in a subscription to Boy’s Life?” he said quietly.
“Justin!” Maxi whooped and launched herself across the room into his arms, scattering magazines in every direction. “Justin, you beast, where the fuck have you been for a year, you rotten bastard, you shithead! Justin, darling!”
“Give me a chance at him,” Angelica cried, and grabbed him tightly, trying to climb up him like a monkey as she used to when she was a little girl, almost toppling him over in the process. Eventually he extricated himself from the two excited, babbling creatures, separated them and put an arm around each of them. “Let’s look at you,” Justin said, and they immediately fell silent and subjected themselves to his scrutiny. “Still the ultimate best in the kingdom,” he said after a few seconds. He inspected his sister and his niece keenly, his dark gray eyes missing nothing, but whatever his real thoughts were he kept them, as always, to himself.
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