Ambition (22 page)

He ignored her.

‘Do you see your mother often?’

‘I used to, when I was in New York. She’s about an hour upstate.’ He put out his cigarette. ‘I saw her last weekend, actually.’

‘You were in New York last weekend?’

‘Yes.’

She rolled over on to her stomach. ‘Did you see
her
?’

‘Michèle? Of course I did. She’s my girlfriend.’

‘Did you sleep with her?’

He sighed. ‘
Susan
. You’re acting like a sixteen-year-old. Of
course
I slept with her. She’s my
girlfriend
.’

‘I see.’

‘Hey, come on.’ His voice was cajoling. ‘Don’t spoil what we’ve got.’

‘What
have
we got?’ she muttered into the pillow.

‘We’ve got the most incredible physical thing for each other I’ve ever had in my life. Isn’t that enough?’

‘No.’

‘Hey, come on—’ He reached to touch her shoulder and she flinched away from him. ‘Hey.’ He turned on the spotlight over the bed and traced the red welts his belt
had left on her back. He was instantly re-aroused, and, leaning down, whispered in her ear, ‘Say please.’

She rolled over, jack-knifed her knees and kicked him away with such force that he fell sprawling on to the floor. Then she jumped to her feet, ran into the bathroom and locked the door.

‘Susan, for Christ’s sake come out of there!’

‘Go away!’

‘Come out of there and talk this thing over!’

‘NO!’

‘Come out right now or I’m getting dressed and going out.’

She unlocked the door, pushed past him and slunk back to bed. ‘Well?’

‘
Now
what are you getting so upset about?’ He sat down beside her. ‘You
know
about Michèle now. Of
course
I have to see her when I’m in
town.’

‘I want—’

‘Go on,’ he encouraged.

Incredible; she’d got into bed with a big sexy Jew and woken up on a psychiatrist’s couch with a solicitous trick-cyclist. She took a deep breath. ‘I want to know why you love
her
and not me if this really is the best physical thing you’ve ever had.’

He sighed. ‘Susan, sex and love aren’t the same.’

‘Who says?’

‘Really, Susan.’

‘All right – not always. I know that. But sometimes they are.’

He shook his head. ‘This isn’t love.’

‘Why? Because the sex is too good?’

She’d hit a nerve; he looked at her, shocked. Then he smiled. ‘Yeah, a bit, I guess. Maybe you’re right. But I just don’t and can’t associate this kind of sex with
marriage and kids and settling down.’

‘Isn’t that weird? – I couldn’t dream of marrying anyone I
didn’t
have this sort of sex with. Taking the dirt out of sex seems to me as self-defeating as
taking the taste out of food.’

‘You’re a modern girl, Susan. You’re in a freefall and all you feel is a sense of your freedom. I’m in that freefall too and all I feel is the lack of ground under my
feet. I have to feel there’s something secure in my life. And ever since I’ve known Michèle she’s seemed to me to be the one pure thing in a world of revisions and
corruption. I need the vision of that thing to keep me going. It’s nothing personal against you.’

‘I see. So if I hadn’t let you fuck me the first time I met you, or whip me, or come in my mouth, or do it to me over a trash can, there is a chance you could have fallen in love
with me?’

He frowned. ‘It’s not that simple, Susan. I don’t see women as either virgins or whores; I just don’t see how real life can live alongside this sort of sex.
Something’s got to give. Besides, if I dumped Michèle after all these years, and with her believing we’d get married some day, what sort of man would I be?’ He laughed.
‘My father’s son, that’s who.’

She thought about Tobias Pope and his ugly, blunt, completely cliché-free way of looking at the world. It was strange; she’d been whoring for him with strangers just because she
wanted the editor job, and yet when they weren’t in a sexual arena he spoke to her frankly, conspiratorially and with a certain degree of respect. She slept with David out love, and he
treated her like a cross between a fallen woman and a child. She thought that maybe a touch more of his father in him wouldn’t go amiss.

‘OK, I give up.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I give up. It’s like arguing with a Catholic over the Virgin Mary. But will you remember one thing?’

He laughed. ‘What’s that?’

‘When Bunny falls off her pedestal, I’m next in line.’

‘Susan, the only reason I’d put you on a pedestal would be so I could look up your skirt.’ He climbed on top of her.

When Susan met Rupert Grey at Ye Olde Troute the next Monday and told him the news, giving him Gary Pride’s card with a personal message scrawled on it – ‘Hi
kid! Call soonest and let’s make lots of money! Love on ya. Gaz’ – as proof, his eyes shone, his lips parted and in his head she could tell that he was hearing angel choirs
choreographed by Douglas Sirk. He supped from his bar stool and faced her with all the single-minded spirituality of Jeanne d’Arc going to the stake.

‘I’m ready,’ he said.

‘Hello, Susan. It’s Ingrid.’

The voice was cool, collected and verging on contemptuous. Where were the five wet kisses which usually heralded Ingrid’s calls? She had always hated them; now their absence seemed
ominous. ‘Hello, Ingrid.’

‘Dinner tonight, darling?’

‘What? Sorry – you know how it is. I have to book at least two weeks in advance. How about drinks on the twelfth?’

‘No – dinner tonight.’

‘I’m sorry, Ingrid, that’s impossible.’

‘OK. Is it still hurting you, is that why you need an early night?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Is what hurting me?’

‘Your tattoo. Doesn’t it give you terrible headaches, being in such a sensitive area?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You most certainly do. Dinner now?’

‘No.’

‘OK. That suits me. I’ve got a new friend. And it’s more than my life’s worth to ignore him. My life and our diary column. The best mole we’ve ever had. You
wouldn’t believe the things he feeds me. Why – sometimes I think he must be telepathic.’

Well, here it was. Her worst fears being used on her like an electric cattle-prod by someone who had every reason to want her wiped off the board. ‘Really?’

‘Yes. Well, I’m sorry you’re tied up tonight. I’ll go out with my new friend instead. I’m afraid we do talk about you an awful lot! If your ears burn, you’ll
know who it is!’

‘Thanks.’

‘By the way, Susan, do you have a b/w photo of yourself? A recent one?’

Her stomach did a triple back somersault without a safety net. ‘No, I don’t. Why?’

‘Oh – just for our files. You never know these days when any of us will hit the headlines!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Well, never mind. Maybe I’ll send one of our snappers out to catch you unawares! Posed shots are so stiff, don’t you think? Our diary page has a strict policy of not using
them these days. Spontaneous shots are so much more . . . revealing.’

There was a man’s laugh on the line. For the first time Susan became aware of an extension.

‘Whatever you want,’ she said slowly and deliberately. ‘I’m ready.’

‘Good. Ciao, babes.’

Then everyone hung up.

‘To people who are neither, the words rich and fashionable go together like a horse and carriage, or divorce and marriage,’ said Tobias Pope to Susan Street’s
back as she gazed beyond the glass wall of his East River penthouse to the Manhattan skyline in the late morning sun. She was weak in the presence of such beauty and wished she was King Kong so she
could scale it, pull it down, leave her mark. She wished he’d shut up and leave her alone with this skyline, which was more beautiful and more inclined to make you believe in God than all the
fields and trees and mountains and rivers, all the so-called natural wonders of the world put together. Nearer, my God, to thee, on top of the Woolworth Gothic.

‘But unless you leave out showbusiness, and then only a handful, they’re as strictly divided as any other tribes of New Amsterdam. OK, occasionally some industrialist will take up
with some model, and she’ll take him to a few nightclubs, and he’ll take her to a couple of decent dinners, but his friends’ wives won’t talk to her, and her friends’
boyfriends won’t talk to him, and before you can say gold-digger she’s back in the arms of some black fag photographer and he’s back on the arm of Nancy Reagan’s sixth-best
friend.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘Want some? Nicaraguan.’

‘
You
drink Nicaraguan coffee?’

‘But of course. It amuses me to think of all those European liberal volunteers who go out there to pick it getting blasted by the noble Contras. Yes, the rich are rarely fashionable and
the fashionable are rarely rich. Right now, they hate each other as vilely as any other tribe of this barrio. As much as the blacks hate the Koreans or the Irish hate the Jews.’ He sniggered.
‘Or the women hate the men. Don’t you believe that bull about a melting pot – this is the most viciously segregated little fiefdom this side of Jo’burg.’ He chuckled
happily. ‘Which is as it should be.’

She knew that if she didn’t take positive action, she was going to be treated to a preprandial discourse on Tobias Pope’s Patent Theory Of Racial Superiority, an original body of
thought rating the people of the world and their ability to govern on the performance of their female members in bed. She congratulated herself on adapting so quickly to his little ways and
learning how to field them, and sidetracked him smartly into what sounded the least offensive and more interesting option, that of Rich v. Fashionable. Which also, come to think of it, had distinct
possibilities as a piece for the
Best
’s style page. She could see it now – CASH OR DASH? By Candida Crewe.

She turned around and leaned against the glass. ‘Tell me about the war between the rich and fashionable.’

He looked at her, amused. ‘I bet
you
thought they were the same, didn’t you?’

‘I haven’t really thought about it. I suppose I thought there was quite a degree of miscegenation.’

‘Only in bed – never on the dotted line. Never where it
matters.
’ He clicked his fingers. ‘I’ll demonstrate what I mean by using a personal example.
You’ve been here before – tell me what you’d do in an average day. For a start, where would you stay?’

‘OK. Well, last time I stayed at the Algonquin on West 44th Street.’

He blew a raspberry. ‘It must have body-positive walls, all those fags dabbing their fingers in Dottie’s dust. What next?’

‘I’d have brunch.’

‘Brunch!’

‘At One Fifth. Mimosas and Eggs Millionaire.’

‘No millionaire would eat that garbage. They ought to call them Eggs Social-Climber. Or Eggs Counterjumper. Or Eggs Yuppie.
Brunch
– my point exactly. Go on.’

She wouldn’t have countenanced such rudeness from anyone else for a full minute, but Pope was so much larger than life that he made a cartoon out of everything. His words could no more
hurt her than Mickey Mouse could mug her. She grinned. ‘Then I’d go to Washington Square and watch the fire-eaters and the snake-charmers and that funny man who skips on a unicycle with
a fourteen-inch sword down his throat.’

He snorted. ‘Very improving. Go on.’

‘Some jazz in Central Park, then have lunch at the Russian Tea Rooms on West 57th.’

He snapped his fingers and leaned forward exultantly in his chair.

‘Vodka and blinis, right?’

‘And caviar,’ she said triumphantly.

He laughed, shaking his head. ‘Susan, eating croissants when not in France and caviar when not in Russia or Iran is a tell-tale sign of a true nouveau. When in Rome, eat spaghetti. And
then you’d go shopping, yes?’

‘I suppose so,’ she said sulkily.

‘Where?’

‘The department stores. The East Side is too expensive and the rest is too tacky.’

‘And what would you buy from these department stores?’

‘I don’t know – Adrienne Vittadini sweaters, Kay Unger silk dresses, Liz Claiborne fake Chanel suits.’

He groaned. ‘Liz Claiborne! My
secretaries
wear those suits!’

‘See the lights go on from the Brooklyn Bridge,’ she ploughed on (Pope would probably tell her you weren’t anyone until you had a private box in River House for this purpose),
‘dinner at Indochine, dancing at Undochine, karoke at Lotus Blossom and then a night at Nell’s talking about how you never go to Area any more. Then maybe a drink at Save The
Robots.’ She looked at him defiantly.

He buried his face in his hands. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
Exactly.
That mooching, brunching, self-consciously insider number that all tourists with library tickets do here. I
bet you even walk self-regardingly along the picturesque cobbled streets of the Village holding hands with that jerk you live with, am I right?’

‘Yes,’ she admitted.

‘Right.
That’s
fashionable New York, Susan. And it sucks. No truly rich New Yorker would do those things. Being fashionable is for people who can’t be rich – the
consolation prize in the big hoopla of life.’ He got up from his chair, turned her around and pressed her so hard against the glass wall that her nose and breasts concertinaed simultaneously.
‘Look. Nine million suckers live here, and only the inhabitants of these thirty blocks matter.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

‘It is. We can literally do what we like and get away with it. We can kill anyone.’ His eyes glinted.

‘That seems a very healthy measure of a man’s status,’ she said sarcastically.

He laughed, releasing her. ‘It’s as good as any. But the point is that all those places you read about in your glossy magazines – TriBeCa, SoHo, NoHo, LoBro, the fag bars on
the Upper West Side closing at a rate of knots – the people there don’t matter now, matter even less than they ever did. Some moron once said that there were nine million New York
Citys, one for every sucker that lived there, but there are only four – rich, fashionable, bourgeois and poor – and that’s it. And soon, there’s only going to be one –
rich.’