“You mean it is as if it didn’t exist? It doesn’t count?”
“Miss Amberville, please, don’t get so upset. It exists, it counts, it belongs to you. You just can’t borrow on it, because you can’t sell it to an outsider.”
“You’re saying that I don’t have any money.”
“You could put it that way, for the moment, yes, I suppose you don’t actually have any, well, any cash.”
“Thank you, Mr. Maypole.” Maxi was gone like lightning striking too close, leaving Lester Maypole sweating in alarm. She didn’t seem to understand the difference between money and cash and he, for once, had lost track of it himself. He looked in his wallet. Twenty-four dollars. He buzzed his secretary. “Linda,” he said, his heart beating ridiculously, “get me my investment portfolio, right away. And then take a check to the bank. No, I just want some cash in fives. And make it snappy.”
Maxi pushed her way through the crowds listening to a pianist and violinist playing “Alice Blue Gown” in the lobby of the Trump Tower. She didn’t notice the eighty-foot-tall waterfall which was running at the highest of its three speeds, or the walls and floor of shrimp-pink and mango-colored Breccia Perniche marble, nor did she spare a glance for thriving ponytail palms and the lovers kissing on the escalators. She took the first elevator to the right and went straight up to the large suite of offices from which the building was run.
“Louise,” she asked the warm, blond woman who was vice-president of Trump, “can I hock my apartment?”
Louise Sunshine didn’t look surprised. Years of working with restless, unpredictable Donald Trump had made her immune to shock of any kind. “The Residential Board doesn’t like liens on apartments, Maxi. What’s the matter, gal, want to buy the Pentagon?”
“More or less. Is Donald available?”
“To you, always. Just let me check and make sure he’s not on the phone.”
Maxi waited impatiently but her heart contracted as she looked out of the window. There, but at a much lower height than her sixty-third floor, was the view that she loved so intensely; the view invented to drive people to extremes of adoration or hate, a view of a city that everyone took personally, as an affront or as a challenge or as something to which it was virtuous to be indifferent. New York was never just a city, it was a place that had to belong to you or be chased from your consciousness. And from no other location could the city look so heartbreakingly beautiful, so truly the dream and not the reality.
“Go right on in,” Louise Sunshine said, startling her.
Donald Trump, the brilliant, ambitious young real-estate man whom even his enemies had to admit was disarmingly unaffected, rose to greet Maxi.
“Hey you, pretty girl, what’s the problem?”
“I need cash, and I need it fast.”
“That happens in the best of families,” he grinned.
“Can you sell my apartment, Donald? This week?”
“Hold on a minute, Maxi, are you sure you want to do that?” Suddenly he looked totally serious. “I’ve always got a waiting list for your apartment—next to mine it’s the best and biggest in the whole tower, but once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. And there will never be another great one like it. It’s an ‘L’ and an ‘H’ thrown together—almost four thousand square feet.” His concern was genuine. There was a certain normal amount of turnover in apartments in the building but generally they were those which had been bought specifically for investment. Maxi, who loved her apartment the way he loved his, as a part of herself, as an extension of her capacity for life, would never sell unless she was in serious trouble and had nothing else left to sacrifice.
“Can you promise I’ll get my money this week?”
“Maxi, how much money do you need exactly? Maybe there’s another way …”
“I don’t know the exact amount, a minimum of six million dollars—probably more.”
“That much? And right away?” He considered a moment and then he said, “No, there’s no other way. Look, it will take me a little time to make the best possible deal for you but if you want to turn the apartment over to me I’ll write you a check for six million. Then, if I can sell it for more, and I hope that I can, I’ll give you the rest when the deal closes.”
“Where do I sign?” Maxi asked.
“I just hope it’s worth it, whatever it is,” he said, shaking his head, and picking out a checkbook from his desk drawer.
“It’s worth trying, Donald, even if I don’t win. Give me your pen, damn it. And a fucking Kleenex.”
25
Once Maxi had found herself, after two hours of intense looking, at the far end of the great second floor of the Louvre, the longest gallery of paintings in the world. She had been overcome by a staggering case of total visual overload. She knew that if she saw another masterpiece she would never want to go into a museum again, yet three hundred and fifty yards separated her from the exit. She had solved the problem by walking back the length of the gallery as quickly as her tired feet would allow, with her head bent so far down that all she could see was the floor. Not even the edge of a frame entered her peripheral vision and she made it to the Winged Victory and down the marble steps to the exit without mishap.
It was in this fashion that she walked through her apartment, her ex-apartment, and headed straight to the telephone next to her bed, which was still her bed, and made arrangements for an expert from Sotheby’s to come as soon as possible to take inventory of every valuable she owned, including the objects in storage, and put them up for auction as quickly as possible. Now, she thought as she put the telephone back, she was sitting on her ex-bed, for the carved and gilded eighteenth-century lit à la Polonaise hung with its original crownlike pouf of embroidered silk would bring a good price. Was she sitting on her ex-mattress? Probably, she thought, not quite sure if she had ever seen a mattress up at auction with the bed it belonged to. Better not to know.
“Maxi? Where are you?” she heard a voice calling.
“I’m in here, in the bedroom,” she answered, suddenly unable to say “my bedroom.”
Angelica, flushed from her day’s adventures, appeared at the door.
“Have you hugged a mother today?” Maxi asked, in a small voice.
“You don’t look as if you need a hug,” Angelica observed, approaching her cautiously, “you look as if you need intensive care. Maybe a transfusion. You’ve been working too hard.”
“Try a hug,” Maxi advised. Angelica enveloped her in her strong, athletic grip, lifted her up, twirled her around a few times and then flopped back on the bed with her mother still pinioned in her arms.
“Did that help?” she asked Maxi anxiously, peering at her closely with her truthful, undefended eyes.
“Very much. Thank you, darling. I have something not nice to tell you.”
“You are sick!” Angelica said, stricken, sitting up abruptly.
“No, damn it. I’m not sick at all. I’m perfectly fine. But I had to sell the apartment. We can’t live here anymore.”
“You promise you’re not sick?”
“I swear on—what do I have to swear on for you to believe me?”
“My head.”
“I swear on your head that I’m a totally healthy mother. Satisfied?”
“Yup. So why did you sell the apartment?” Angelica asked, vastly relieved.
“It’s a long, very complicated story, but basically I need the money.”
Angelica’s face wrinkled up in an attempt to understand words she’d never heard her mother utter in her entire life.
“To buy something with?” she asked finally.
“Yes … and no.”
“Ma,” Angelica said patiently, “I really think it would be helpful if you’d tell me the whole story, long though it may be. I’m old enough to understand.”
When Maxi was finished there was a silence while Angelica considered the situation.
“The way I see it,” she said finally, “is that you did what you had to
do. This is just like real life. In fact—it is real life. That’s—interesting. It’s not exactly fun but it’s chewy. Now, the next problem is where do we live? I’d pick Columbus Avenue because that’s where it’s happenin’, but I know you’d never go for it. And anyway we should really live on nothing, right? So why not invite ourselves to Uncle Toby’s? It’s free, he’s got some extra room and the food will be great. He’d probably be glad of the company. And another thing, after school every day I can come down to B&B and work at anything that needs doing, delivering packages or mailing letters or helping out in the art department.”
“Don’t you go near the art department!”
“What’s in there, snakes? O.K., I won’t, but there’s no reason I can’t pitch in, lend a hand, is there?”
“None.” Maxi looked for Donald Trump’s damp pocket handkerchief, for he carried nothing as common as a Kleenex, and applied it as inconspicuously as possible to her streaming eyes.
“And the third and final thing, and I don’t care if you do disapprove of my choice of language,” Angelica pronounced. “In my honest opinion, Ma, Cutter eats shit.”
Maxi looked around and wondered what it was that was familiar about her surroundings. She and Angelica had been immediately welcomed at Toby’s but they’d had to cram themselves into the two small rooms on the fourth and top floor of his long but narrow brownstone. The first floor was devoted to the swimming pool and kitchen; the second floor was all one big living room. The third floor was Toby’s domain. Somehow Maxi had imagined that they would be given the big extra bedroom next to Toby’s but that was before she discovered that India and Toby were living together on alternate weekends. The extra bedroom’s closets were full of India’s clothes and, Lord have mercy, even some of India’s sheets. Not for anything in the world would Maxi want to be on the same floor as a couple delicately involved in tentative nest-building. In fact, if she had actually realized that India was spending so much time in New York she wouldn’t have called Toby at all, but once she had, he had insisted on her moving in with Angelica.
Did she feel as if she were their chaperone, she wondered? No, nothing that adult. Summer camp! That was it. She felt as if she and Angelica were at summer camp together, uprooted from their familiar surroundings and bunking in a strange place, with only a few stuffed animals of Angelica’s, her school books, and some of Maxi’s framed photographs to make them feel a sense of familiarity. Her own clothes hung on the cumbersome metal racks she’d had to buy because the closets weren’t big enough. Yes, a cross between summer camp and a tiny, overcrowded designer’s showroom, she decided.
Thank God she’d bought all her spring and summer clothes before the ax had fallen, Maxi thought, looking at the laden racks. They took up almost all the space in the room. She needed to look expensive and authoritative and totally carefree at the daily lunches she spent wooing potential advertisers, but fortunately for the female editors of many magazines, the public-relations people at most ready-to-wear houses will “do a personal” and bring up the designer’s clothes to the editor’s office for her to choose from, at wholesale, of course. But tonight she could relax, she thought, putting on Zoran’s baggy pull-on ivory cashmere pants and his ivory cashmere and silk boat-necked pullover, cut short and ribbed all over, ’the two pieces three times too expensive and worn, as they should be, about three sizes too big. Cashmere was as comforting as mother’s milk and a good deal easier to come by, Maxi reflected as she laced up her sneakers. She wasn’t anxious for the rainy April weather to turn into a warm spring. If she could, she’d wear six layers of cashmere at once until she won her battle with Cutter. Maxi sighed as she realized that the most costly wool couldn’t warm away the worry she lived with now. A wave of infinitely sad longing for Uncle Nat and Aunt Minnie swept over her. She could have confided in them as in no one else, but after Uncle Nat had died of a heart attack in his early fifties, Aunt Minnie had gone to live in the Landauer family compound in Palm Beach. Now it wouldn’t be fair to disturb her with the convoluted problems of B&B but, oh, how she missed the two of them.
Maxi padded downstairs and stopped outside the entrance to the kitchen-dining room in which Toby was busy cooking. She heard him say, “It’s a meat loaf, and you can consider yourself lucky to get anything that complex at a chef’s own table.” Was Toby talking to himself at such a young age? They were supposed to be having dinner alone together since Angelica was with Rocco and India was in Hollywood. Curious, Maxi peeked into the big double-purpose room. A trail of tattered leather oddments, shed here and there in the kitchen, informed her immediately of Justin’s presence.
Maxi swooped on him with joy, for she’d been so busy with Monty working on the budgets for future issues of B&B that she hadn’t seen him for days.
“I wanted to surprise you,” Toby said, pleased with the success of his invitation.
“Have you got anyone else up your sleeve?” Maxi asked.
“No, just the three of us. I don’t think that we’ve had dinner together alone like this since we were kids,” Toby answered. “After I went away to college and you got married there were always other people, mainly one or another of your husbands. This is a post-nursery evening for cultivated adults who like meat loaf, and have a certain special common interest.”
“Such as?” Maxi questioned.
“The future of Amberville Publications,” Justin answered. “You don’t think you’re the only one who’s concerned about it, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“You never came to us for help, Goldilocks,” Toby said seriously. “Don’t you think that you should have, before you went and sold your apartment and planned to strip yourself of everything you own?”
“No, I don’t,” Maxi countered. “It’s a fight I volunteered for. What’s more, I’m not at all sure that if I win it, you won’t be disappointed. Maybe each of you would rather have the cash you’d get if the sale goes through. That’s what I really should have asked you about.”
“Whatever it was you should have asked us about, you didn’t. And we’re both peeved, to put it mildly. This dinner is a setup, in case you haven’t realized it yet,” Toby said pleasantly, basting the meat loaf with a fresh-tomato-and-basil sauce.
“I was beginning to have my suspicions. So you wouldn’t mind if Mother sold the company? You want me to cave in and fold B&B and stop making a fuss and, in general, act like it’s all right with me?”
“Toby, have you noticed that Maxi has a tendency to overreact?” Justin asked.
“Actually, since you’ve brought it up, I’d say that the trouble with Maxi is that she jumps to conclusions,” Toby answered.
“Or,” Justin added, “you could say that the trouble with Maxi is that she jumps overboard and never looks around to see if there’s a life preserver on board.”
“No, that’s not quite it. The trouble with Maxi is that she confuses herself with General de Gaulle. L’Etat c’est moi, you know. Amberville, c’est elle, or something like that.”
“De Gaulle didn’t say that, Louis the Fourteenth said it,” Justin corrected. “He too had a tendency toward grandiosity, but that was so long before the Revolution that he could be forgiven, but Maxi, no.”
“I don’t think you’re as funny as you both seem to think you are,” she said, annoyed.
“The trouble with Maxi is that she doesn’t know when people are trying to lend her money,” said Toby.
“Oh, so that’s what this is all about. No way am I going to come to the two of you for money! You’ve got your own lives, you’ve got your separate interests, why should I expect you to lend me money for something that is totally a decision that I made myself? Keeping my magazine afloat until it can swim by itself is a personal problem, and the money has to come from me.”
“I work for B&B—doesn’t that give me a say?” Justin asked.
“Look, Justin, I know you hate doing magazine photography and that you’re only sticking with it for my sake. That�
�s as much of a contribution as I’d ever expect you to make and I’m very aware of what it costs you to be tied down like this,” Maxi said severely. “So don’t expect me to hit you up for a loan on top of that.”
“What about me? I’m your older brother, Goldilocks. You might have tried me,” Toby insisted.
“Come on Bat, you’ve never had the slightest interest in the magazines,” Maxi replied. “You can’t convince me that you do. No, Toby, this one is my baby. It just wouldn’t be fair to rely on either of you. Surely you two are sensitive enough to understand that, for once in my life, I want to win something on my own, by myself. I’ve had a free ride in life and I haven’t made much out of it. This time it’s different!”
“Hear, hear,” Justin said with a slanting, loving, ironic and surprised glance.
“The real trouble with Maxi,” she continued, “is that she’s always starving, always hungry, always needing to eat. Such a bore, that girl. She gets mad when she gets hungry, so butt out of my business, you guys! Back off, you bums. When is the overrated, probably overcooked meat loaf going to be ready?”
“Maybe you should have taken their money,” Monty said doggedly, for the third time, as he watched Maxi sign checks. “Or, at the very least, you could have asked them how much they had in mind.”
Maxi shook her head. She couldn’t explain to Monty that Lily was planning to sell the entire company. This meant that she couldn’t tell him about the hope she had pinned on the survival of B&B, about the possibility that Lily would change her mind. It was a thin possibility, she knew, but the only one she had. If she allowed herself to indulge in self-doubt now, all would be lost without question. Maxi changed the subject to lure Monty away from his lust for her brothers’ money.
“Monty, our last month’s circulation figures were hovering at four million copies. If we can maintain that number, when those six-month advertising contracts are up, we’ll be able to renew them at a huge hike in page rates, isn’t that so?”
“Yeah, if all your advertisers are willing to stand still for the size of the increases you plan to ask for, which is by no means certain and you’d better not count on it. After all, you still don’t really know precisely who those four million dames are, and what their income level and age level are. Demographics, Maxi, demographics. Madison Avenue buys specific audience with specific needs. But assuming that the advertisers do renew, you’ll start to begin to see daylight with the seventh issue. Right now every copy we’re selling at a dollar fifty is costing us two dollars and five cents to produce, not including the money Barney Shore is putting up for rack space. You’re such a raving success that you’re losing fifty-five cents a copy four million times a month or, to make it easier to understand, two million, two hundred thousand dollars monthly.”
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