Ambition (23 page)

‘How do you work that out?’

He was pacing the room, looking excited – the way he looked, in fact, when he was watching her fuck the local colour. Real estate is the new orgasm, Zero had said in her latest column. At
the time, Susan had considered the statement rather facile and flippant. Now she reconsidered.

‘AIDS and development. Killing or pushing out the poor, the bourgeois and the fashionable. The carrot and the stick – or rather, the garret and the prick.’ He laughed unduly at
his joke. ‘In ten years’ time what’s left of them will be in New Jersey or the Hudson. And the ones I personally will be gladdest to see go are the fashionables, those
insufferably smug little prigs with more taste than money. Right now they’re being pushed out of their lofts in the Bowery by young brokers with more money than sense prepared to pay a
quarter of a million for the privilege of gazing through their triple-glazing at the crack-crazed coloureds filing out of the flop-houses. There are million-dollar flats coming up in Alphabet
– a couple of years ago this was the worst drug dive on the island. But these yuppies don’t care – they’re desperate to hang on in there by their fingernails at the heart of
the city and of course they can’t afford to live here or even over on Central Park West, with the Jews, shrinks and film actors. So they move into the Bowery and the East Village, which is
extremely useful. As a type, I hate your yuppie – the men are boors, and the women wear running shoes and make appalling sex partners. But you can’t deny they make good shock troops.
They move into shitholes and they clean them up a treat. Yes, when you’ve got yuppies, AIDS and developers, who needs goon squads? Like I say, in ten years’ time this town will be like
it was in the Fifties. Heaven.’

‘Doubling as hell for the poor.’

‘You said that in Rio. And probably in Sun City. It’s getting a bit repetitive, my dear.’ He sighed. ‘Anyway, they’ll be in New Jersey. I
told
you.
They’ll be happier there, where everything’s horrible. If New York can’t belong to you, it’s not worth living in.’

‘
Some
of New York belongs to everyone.’ She gestured at the spectacle beyond the glass wall. ‘The skyline does.’

His eyes bugged, and then he gasped in delight. ‘Susan! The skyline, for your information, madam, belongs to a small band of men who reside on Park, Wall, Madison and Fifth, plus a couple
in Texas. That’s it, period. The great unwashed can look, but if they loiter too long by any of these beauties they are very likely to be persecuted with extreme prejudice – beaten up
to you – by one or other of the well-equipped armies employed by these men solely for that purpose.’ He shook his head, laughing. ‘The skyline belongs to everyone! You slay me.
And I bet you think the best things in life are free too, yes?’ He looked at his watch. ‘No, of course not – you’re with me. My dear, I have the man from Forbes coming in
half an hour. It might be a little difficult to explain your presence unless you get dressed.’

‘I could do Museum Mile.’

He sighed. ‘Susan, there are more than four hundred art galleries and museums in this town, but not in one will you find anything to compare with the sight of yourself in a beautiful new
black dress. Catch.’ He fished a battered black wallet from inside his jacket and threw it to her, not at her, she registered in a split-second. ‘Here you go. You’ve done very
well at the fucking – here’s the shopping. No, don’t argue—’ (She hadn’t been going to: she was sure this had been said sarcastically.) ‘Think of it as an
investment by Pope Communications Inc. Much as I love your Alalia, I’m getting awfully bored of seeing it. And dressing for the bedroom in the boardroom really is the height of bad
manners.’

She opened the wallet and surveyed the library of plastic within. ‘That’ll do nicely,’ she said.

‘Get a good suit, some cashmere, some decent handbags. Don’t bother with the West Side – stenos shop there. Walk when you can. If you get lost, or hit a bad barrio, just keep
moving; the neighbourhoods change every ten blocks.’ He sniggered. ‘Or six months, thanks to the yuppies. The Bronx is up and its batteries are down. Don’t come back till
you’ve spent a year’s wages. Now kiss me. Chastely. Come back before dinner and I’ll take you out.’

‘The Rainbow Room?’

‘What? Art deco and cigarette girls and the assembled media of the Western world watching us? Act your age, girl, not your dress size. No, somewhere dark. We’ll see a bit of local
colour. You love local colour, don’t you?’ He laughed and patted her hair. ‘Run along now.’

She went into her bedroom, pulled on some Barely Black Lycra tights, some plain black Emma Hope heels and a charcoal wool Joseph button-through. She looked at herself in the mirror as she dabbed
a little Amazone cologne –
the
Designer Dyke scent, a predictable present from Zero (‘Duty free. The story of my life’) – at the base of her throat. The pulse there
was jumping.

Local colour. Tobias Pope wasn’t interested in local colour – at least not when it was vertical. Tobias Pope said that all local colour was Nicespeak for foreign poor people, and
foreign poor people, pigmentation apart, were all the same from the Bronx to Bombay, Bologna to Birmingham; they conned you out of money and sold you salmonella. He was interested in one aspect of
local colour. And that was the horizontal hold.

Never mind. It was expecting too much to think he’d brought her here for the sole purpose of shopping. Never mind; come on down, little Susan Street from Nowhere-on-Sea, into the city that
never sleeps or says sorry, armed with a collection of cards that say more about you than money ever could – that you’re whoring for the boss, for a start. She laughed at her own
lyricism and stepped out on to the street, ready to shop till she dropped.

On Madison Avenue, at the soft-tech, Italo-Japanese, black-beige Armani shop, she bought black label, and at Krizia she bought sportswear that would have had a nervous
breakdown if one did anything more rigorous than hail a cab in it. She avoided Walter Steiger but did succumb to a pair of pewter, lace and plastic Vittorio Riccis for Zero. She snapped up a brace
of six-hundred-dollar sweaters at Sonia Rykiel and half a dozen pairs of cashmere tights at $178 a throw at Fogal, thinking of their less extortionate cousins that David Weiss had wiped his velvet
cosh on that night over the dustbins behind the Kremlin Club. She wondered what he was doing, then stopped. It hurt too much. She found Ylang Ylang to be Butler and Wilson by another name and
didn’t see why she should transport across continents what she could pick up in her lunchtime, but at Helen Woodhull she bought an armload of jewellery that could have been handed down from
the Mrs Pope who came over on the Mayflower. She bought forty-dollar earrings that looked as though they cost four thousand at Gale Grant’s and four-thousand-dollar earrings that looked as
though they’d cost forty at Back In Black.

On Fifth Avenue she ignored Gucci as a matter of principle, bought lots of Micheal Kors black at Bergdorf’s and Donna Karan cashmere and a Rifat Ozbek tuxedo dress for under four hundred
dollars at Sak’s. On East 57th Street she bought a Chanel suit, against her better judgement, for just over two thousand dollars, a three-thousand-dollar handbag at Prada and, after browsing
in La Marca for two minutes, understood completely why it was Cher’s favourite shop, made her excuses and left.

On Park Avenue she went to Martha, where all first ladies hope to go when they die, and flicked through the Bill Blass, Galanos, David Cameron and Carolina Herrera before deciding she
didn’t want to look like any First Lady, living or dead, and ignoring Pope’s advice she took a cab to West 56th Street where she bought a Norma Kamali dress as blue-black as a bruise
and tighter than Nancy Reagan’s smile. She self-consciously ordered a Manhattan at the Four Seasons and caught a cab down to Wall Street past the new, beautiful, terrifying skyscrapers: the
AT & T, CitiCorp, the Woolworth Gothic and the CBS Black Rock. Then she made her way to the penthouse on the East River, to a man more violent than all the drug dealers in Alphabet City and
more vicious than all the art hags in TriBeCa, wondering what was on the menu this evening.

The venue for the menu was a small, unmarked club on the despised Upper West Side, and the proprietress was a woman with the profile of Nefertiti and the figure of Jane Russell
– back in the days when men had physiques and women had figures instead of everyone being a body. Tobias Pope left Susan in her hands with a laugh and a leer. ‘Maria, Susie. Susie,
Maria.’

‘What’s happening?’ she whispered.

‘Well, my dear, you’ve had the shopping – now for the fucking. Don’t worry – it’s the safest sort of sex there is.’ He looked into her eyes, laughed
again and disappeared into a long, bare room furnished only with a chair and a long window which covered all of one wall.

The window corresponded with a mirrored wall, Susan calculated as she followed Maria into the bar proper. As a bar it was nothing to write home about – unless your sisters were raving
dykes. Because every patron of the bar was a woman.

And hanging from the ceiling was a naked girl, suspended by the wrists and ankles as if in a swallow dive, her long blonde hair hiding her face. She had a strange dark mark on her left thigh, a
miniature pineapple, and her small breasts, pointed with sharp pink nipples, were the lowest part of her.

As Susan stared, a middle-aged woman in leather reached up casually with a riding crop and flicked them, never missing a beat of her conversation with a cool, business-suited redhead. ‘Oh
yeah, Julian’s definitely lost it now. He should never have left Mary . . .’

Maria turned to Susan and smiled a smile that could have kept the
Titanic
out of trouble. ‘Like what you see?’

‘Very nice.’ She kept cool. ‘Could I have a drink, do you think?’

‘Sure.’ A consensual path cleared as Maria walked to the bar, not quite a swagger, with her arm around Susan’s waist. ‘What’ll you have?’

‘A vodka martini, straight.’
Straight
, that’s a laugh. About the only thing in this bar that is.

‘Set ’em up, Joanna,’ said Maria to the bartender. ‘My usual.’ She was given a glass of milk with an olive on a stick, which she ate, gesturing vaguely. ‘See
anything you especially like?’

Susan kept her eyes rigidly from the human mobile. ‘I love your banquettes.’

‘Well, let’s go and utilize one, shall we?’ They took their drinks and sat down. ‘So, you work for Tobias?’

‘Yes. In London.’

‘Right.’ Maria nodded thoughtfully. As an after-thought she added, ‘Do you like to eat pussy?’

‘Who, me?’ Feeling naive, Susan recovered herself with an effort, though goodness knew what she had been expecting. ‘Sometimes. Sometimes in the past.’

‘Didn’t we all, in our wild youth? Before we discovered the masochistic appeal of men, and made life complicated for ourselves?’ Maria laughed easily, her expensive teeth
flashing ultra-violet in the stage-managed dark. ‘And are you still living in your wild youth, Susie?’

‘Sometimes. Sometimes on weekends.’

‘I thought so. Strip.’

‘What?’

‘Strip. Just leave your clothes with me and I’ll guard them as if they were my own.’ She twinkled. ‘Which, as a fellow protégée, they are in a way. Take off
every stitch – jewellery, the lot.’

‘Are you crazy?’ But even as she said it, she feared that Maria was an all too sane mistress of the situation.

Maria smiled without irritation and gestured at the long mirror. ‘OK. Tobias says strip.’

She sat and thought for a moment, hearing her heart beat. She thought about what she’d been through, and then she thought about where she was going. Then she reached up, her eyes closed,
and unwound her dress from her neck, her breasts, her hips. It came off like a black bandage on a dry wound. Which was just what she was. She sat there in her shoes, tights and Back In Black
earrings, thinking.

‘All off,’ said Maria, looking at her watch.

‘Don’t rush me,’ said Susan slowly. People were looking. Madonna Ciccone was singing ‘Dress You Up’, which was obviously someone’s idea of a joke.

Maria sighed. ‘Susie, I’m not trying to get into your pants. I’m trying to do a job, which is to get you out of them. Now
strip.
’

She thought about Pope behind the mirror, laughing at her reserve, relishing her past, weighing up her future. She was fucked if she’d buck at this fence. She wriggled out of her tights,
kicked off her heels.

‘Earrings off.’

She took them off one by one, laid them gently on the table. Then she looked into Maria’s eyes. The nearness and beauty of the strange woman made her realize with a jolt that she was
aroused and ready to fuck.

The sensual side of Susan Street was as strong as ever and at that moment she wanted nothing more – well, maybe the editorship – than for this woman, Maria, to push her down on the
dog-ended floor and take her by hand or mouth or dildo. But that part of Maria had died a long time ago, assassinated by necessity, and she merely looked at Susan approvingly as if at a child that
has eaten its greens.

‘Good girl.’ She tipped the vodka martini into the milk and drained it in one. ‘Same again, please.’

Susan stood up and smoothed down her hair nervously; Maria pulled a tiny comb from her breast pocket and, incredibly, began to fluff up Susan’s pubic hair maternally. ‘There you
go,’ she said after a moment. ‘Perfect.’

Susan walked out from behind the table and padded down the three steps from the banquette to the bar. The room was very quiet. Madonna had stopped singing. The whole club, more than thirty
women, was looking at her.

Thirty women and one man . . .

The crowd parted a little, but not for long. As she reached the bar, the black glass cold against her stomach, they closed around her. One hand explored the contours of her behind. Another hand
came around and tightened possessively on her right breast. A knee was thrust between her thighs from behind. And then a hand slid in straight to the meat of the matter.