Bandbox (10 page)

“Right. Spots,” said Harris. “Anyway, the pictures are excellent. Now, how was Lindstrom? Cooperative?”

“MUCH better once he’d had his LUNCH. Your pal Roma sent over two silver tins of magnificent STUFF.”

“Yeah,” said Harris, who avoided thinking too deeply about the efforts Malocchio’s owner had been making to get into Waldo Lindstrom’s trousers ever since Harris had brought the model to the restaurant, for the first and last time, about six months ago. “He’s, uh, an admirer of his artistry, I suppose. As I am of yours. Now I’ll tell you what I’d like next. We’ve got to do some more neckwear soon. How about decking some ostriches out in ties and ascots?”

“A FINE idea,” said Arinopoulos.

“See what we’ve got back there.”

“A PLEASURE,” declared the flamboyant photographer, already on his feet. Arinopoulos had much invested in his image as a great lover and artist, though his success with women and pictures tended to be as random as the accented syllables in his loud, rushed conversation.

“Don’t forget your pith helmet,” said Harris, handing Arinopoulos what was actually an Australian army slouch hat.

The editor-in-chief’s afternoons usually got washed away by late lunches at Malocchio, but he made up for that by putting in a full day every morning. Now, at 8:00
A.M.
, Harris had already been at his desk for over an hour; and he felt fine.

Leopold and Loeb lay in pieces in the wastebasket, while the photograph with the showgirl’s hand in Jimmy Gordon’s lap lay face up on the blotter. Harris assumed it had been taken at some joint they’d all gone to after a sales conference, and that Houlihan had recalled it was lying around here on the premises. Well, fine, though one useful flicker of activity wasn’t going to absolve Cuddles of the past two years of lovesick goldbricking.

He was about to dial Betty when Hazel’s voice sawed through the closed door. “Go on in,” she told the arrivals. “He ain’t busy.”

Andrew Burn and Norman Spilkes entered the office.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Harris. “It was such a beautiful morning, too.”

“No, no,” said Spilkes, his mirthless smile coming and going as fast as a salute. “Everything’s fine. Or certainly will be.”

“You need to see this,” said Burn, who never soft-pedaled. “Some numbers from GME.”

Each quarter the Gotham Magazine Editors gathered up and distributed advertising and circulation figures throughout the industry. Spilkes was all in favor of this efficient innovation, but the GME had now begun making graphic, invidious comparisons, and when Andrew Burn handed Harris the same sheet of numbers Jimmy Gordon had just seen, the editor-in-chief could only grumble: “Why can’t they stick to giving awards?”

He put on his glasses. Harris could read the figures with only a little more skill than Chip Brzezinski, but he felt the meaning of the graph like the point of a sword.

“There’s nothing to panic over here,” said Spilkes. “But as a precaution, just to keep from losing our edge, I’ve commissioned a little market research. We’ll be getting together some groups of subscribers
and asking them to discuss whatever they like or don’t like about the magazine. It’s what we did at the phone company a couple of years back. We talked to customer clusters in Fairfield County and New Hav—”

“ ‘Customer clusters’?” asked Harris. “And what precisely did you find out?”

“They indicated a near-uniform preference for lower charges.”

“Thanks for the revelation. When I get back the monopoly
I
used to enjoy, I’ll have you do your market research. Let me tell you something, Norman—there’s only one way to edit, and it’s not by sticking your finger into the wind. You’ve got to go by the seat of your pants, be decisive. You don’t want Hamlet for an editor. Othello—now
there’s
an editor-in-chief.” Harris looked at Andrew Burn. “You, Iago, what’s the story?”

“It isn’t good,” said Burn. “Marmon and Pierce-Arrow are thinking about doing business with Jimmy’s man unless we drop the ad rate.”

The doctored Composograph might already be yesterday’s victory, but one more glance at it emboldened Harris to raise his voice: “Go back to each of the car guys and tell ’em to take
two
pages in
Cutaway
, if they want. Jimmy Gordon will be all they can afford after a few more ideas of mine kick in. Like this one. Remember?” He went into his top drawer for Rosemary LaRoche’s perfumed, pink note accepting their lunch date. He held it up so that Burn and Spilkes could get a whiff. “Have a little patience, you two. Have a little faith. Once she’s on the cover, our line on that graph will look like Rothstein’s
schvantz
—on a very happy night.”

A smile wiggled onto, and then off, Spilkes’s face. “You’re right, I’m sure. ‘Rosemary and time’ will take care of things.”

Harris asked, after several seconds: “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Spilkes followed Burn out of the office, and before they could
close the door, Harris yelled to Hazel: “Do you have my car ordered for the Plaza?”

“No,” she said, before cracking a piece of hard candy with her molars. “Betty says you’re too fat. You have to walk. She also says to keep your eyes above that floozy’s neck.”

“You look tired, my boy.” Nelson Merrill, the magazine’s lone surviving fashion illustrator, tried offering some grandfatherly comfort to Allen Case, as the two sat in Merrill’s corner of the Art Department, sipping cups of lemon tea.

“I did work v-very late last night,” said Allen, just above a whisper.

Their gentle exchange was interrupted by Gardiner Arinopoulos’s loud, exasperated entrance: “Where IS Mr. Lord?” he asked.

“I’m afraid I’ve no idea,” said Merrill.

“Well, then, WHERE’S Mr. ——, you know, the fashion fellow, the ONE that’s skinny as a whippet?”

“You mean Brian K-Keene,” said Allen.

“Yes,” said the photographer, no less impatient. “Where IS he? I’ve got to find some damned ascots BACK THERE, when I need to be THINKING about bulls and bears.” He left as abruptly as he’d entered.

“Is your tea too hot?” Nelson Merrill asked Allen. “You look flushed.”

“No,” said the copyeditor, whose color came from the alarm he was feeling over Arinopoulos’s mention of two new species. “It’s just … h-him.” What humiliating plans did the photographer have for bulls and bears?

“Ah, yes,” said the illustrator. “Mr. Arinopoulos—and all he represents.”

Nelson Merrill, born in 1860, could remember seeing Lincoln’s funeral procession come up Fifth Avenue when he was not quite five
years old. Sixty years later, he was a roly-poly white-haired gentleman, more or less the opposite of the young male ideal he still inked onto a few of the magazine’s pages. His beautiful, attenuated drawings, much admired by the great Leyendecker, were sometimes made even more splendid with a color wash, but no longer did they appear on
Bandbox
’s cover, nor even with much frequency inside. The office’s only link to the pre-Harris regime, Merrill was allowed to come in late and go home early. A naturally cheerful man, he nevertheless kept to himself, as if afraid of being singed by Flaming Youth. He had confided to only a few, such as Allen and Nan O’Grady, the sorrow he felt over his replacement by the camera.

Now, as always, he kept sketching, even as he kept up his end of the conversation: “Terrible business yesterday. I felt sorry for the Columbia boy.”

“Yes,” said Allen. “The p-p-poor ocelot bit the wrong behind.”

Merrill smiled. Beneath his fast-moving hand, a soulful whippet was coming into view.

Allen went back to the Copy Department and asked Nan if she had heard anything about bulls and bears.

“It’s on the lineup sheet,” she answered. “Some Wall Street piece that’s due in tomorrow. They’re supposed to shoot a little koala bear being chased by some big Black Angus. Optimism overpowering pessimism, I gather.” She rolled her eyes. “I heard Mr. Lord talking about it with the Greek shutterbug.”

A bull could be obtained anywhere, Allen knew, but this meant that some illegally imported koala must now be tied up, with Arinopoulos’s other exotic fauna, at that garage in Queens.
What is to be done?
he could hear one part of his mind pamphleteering to the other. He already knew what that was, but could not ask Nan for the help he needed; she would guess he was up to something. So he returned to the Art Department.

“Mr. M-Merrill,” he asked. “You know Queens, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes. It’s what Miss O’Grady and myself have in common. Woodside and taking care of our mothers.” In telling the story of Lincoln’s funeral, the illustrator liked to point out that the now-eighty-nine-year-old Mrs. Merrill would have been old enough to
vote
for Lincoln, had the ladies had the franchise way back then.

“Right,” said Allen. After a last moment’s hesitation, he reached into his pocket for a folded slip of paper. “Do you know the easiest w-w-way for me to get to this address?” He had obtained it late last night by rifling through some invoices in the Art Department. The trucker who transported the animals to and from Arinopoulos’s shoots listed their pickup point on his bill.

Merrill set the little sheet beside his penciled whippet. “That’s a street in Long Island City,” he said. “I should think I can give you pretty good directions.”

“Of
course
she’s not twenty-three,” said Becky, struggling with her scarf and gloves.

Newman put a nickel into the codcake window for her.

“Put one into the pie slot,” said Cuddles, “and I’ll bet you she coughs up LaRoche’s real name.”

“Lucille Monahan,” said Newman, as the three of them slid their trays along. “Born in Hutchinson, Kansas.”

“Nope,” said Becky.

Newman handed her a nickel, which she used to get a cup of coffee for Cuddles.

“Do I absolutely have to?” Houlihan asked, while Newman got a cup for himself.

Once the three were settled at a table, Becky brought Stuart up to speed: “She’s at least thirty, and she was doing those two-reel comedies
more
than ten years ago. I heard all this from a friend who writes contracts in the Paramount Building. Lucille Monahan was her first
fake
name. She disappeared after a couple of years in Los Angeles. My friend thinks she was in the clink—maybe for shoplifting. When she got out, she rechristened herself
again
. She hadn’t made enough of an impression the first time round so that anyone would notice.”

“No Parisian music master?” asked Newman. “No French?”

“No Hutchinson?” cried Cuddles.
“Zut alors!”
He forced down a sip of coffee.

“Nobody,” explained Becky, “knows where she actually came from or what her real name was.” She turned toward Cuddles: “You look as if you’re developing a theory.”

“No,” he said. “I’m just wondering about all these helpful old boyfriends. The
Graphic
, the Paramount Building—where else have you got them stashed? The boardroom of American Radiator? The Fulton Fish Market?”

“If I had one there, I’d tell him about
this
.” Becky pushed away the codcake. “The only other boyfriend I can think of is the current one,” she said, looking straight at Cuddles. “The ‘monk’ at the Cloisters. Remember?”

Newman lit a cigarette and glanced at the clock. He was thinking how much simpler things would be if he were just starting another “Bachelor’s Life” column: “When You Take Your Girl to the Automat.”

“Are you running late?” asked Becky.

“The opposite,” said Newman. “I’ve got another hour to kill before I’m supposed to present myself at the Plaza.”

“Try not to bring Il Duce back to the premises until after four,” Cuddles instructed Newman. “And make sure he’s well oiled.”

“So he won’t notice you’ve gone to the ‘home office’?” asked Becky, using Houlihan’s term for his couch over in Brooklyn. “Nothing
doing. Not after I hauled you back up over the rail yesterday.” Putting on her scarf, she took a look at Stuart’s handsome hollowed eyes and wondered how long it would be before someone had to throw him a life preserver, too.

“Yessir,” said Harris. “He may be late, but there he is.” He directed Rosemary LaRoche’s attention to George M. Cohan, now sitting down at his regular corner table in the Oak Room.

“Yeah,” said the film star, peeking through the smilax-wrapped trellis that shielded her from too much public view. “Give
my
regards to Broadway.
Fuck
Broadway,” she declared, before putting a last bite of strip steak into her mouth.

Disappointed at the failure of what he had hoped would seem an authentic New York treat to this sun-bronzed captive of the film colony, Harris tried soothing her. “Of course,” he said, recalling a fragment of autobiography she’d imparted during the soup course. “You’re remembering those shortsighted rejections when you were trying to get started here.” He sympathetically imagined the scene. “A beautiful girl being mistreated by those Broadway wolves.”

“Wolves?” cried Miss LaRoche, tossing her napkin onto the remains of the steak. “In the whole six months I was up here, I never met
one
who wasn’t a nellie. I practically shoved my melons into their kissers, but you’da thought they was live grenades the way those guys would flinch. Here,” she said, extracting for a third time the small silver flask she kept in her garter. “You’re still not completely thawed.”

After his enforced walk from the office, and having puffed his
way past the skaters near the fountain, Harris had arrived at the hotel exhausted. He now accepted a little dividend in what he and Rosemary and the waiter were pretending was his water glass. Her Hollywood hooch was a lot better than what he got from the countess back at the office, and when Rosemary swung her legs out from under the table to replace the flask inside her garter, there was the visual bonus of her splendid right thigh.

“Bingo,” she said, upon accomplishing the storage. Once more Harris was face-to-face with her blond bob, stratospheric cheekbones, and blazing green eyes, which were bordered by the faintest tracery of wrinkles. He was more smitten than he had imagined, or Betty had feared. For the past hour and a half, the more profane this siren got, the more courtly and avuncular he’d found himself becoming.