Judith Krantz (5 page)

“Sharon, what a great idea!” Phoebe exclaimed.
She
should have
told
him to marry Sharon, the best food stylist in the business. Now Sharon would know his shooting schedule and would always be available. Sometimes—not often but sometimes—Mel was smarter than she gave him credit for.

“Sharon! The last time you needed her for that
Bon Appétit
Christmas cover she was busy. I still remember the fit you threw. How come you decided to forgive her?” Pete wondered, amazed.

“That was kind of what did it,” Mel explained. “When she didn’t drop everything for that cover, I got too upset. I mean, let’s face it, she’s not the only food stylist in the business. I was overreacting. So I talked
about it and talked about it with my shrink, because I couldn’t figure it out. I don’t usually overreact, you can’t afford to with food, you have to have an unearthly patience. Anyway, I finally realized that I, uh, felt more than just professional regard for her.”

“What does your shrink think?” Pete wanted to know.

“I don’t give a shit,” Mel said calmly. “I haven’t even told him yet. He probably won’t say anything, anyway.”

“Mine would definitely be thrilled,” Pete affirmed. “He might even ask to see her picture.”

“She’s a wonderful girl,” Jazz said. “Now I understand a discussion we had recently. I was saying that Mel Gibson and Mel Brooks had the same first name but somehow Mel sounded completely different when you thought of them, because you thought of the whole person, not just the ‘Mel’ part, and she said she thought Botvinick went better with Mel than either of the others. At the time I thought it was just a taste for the exotic.”

“We should have a drink to celebrate,” Phoebe remarked, getting into the spirit, “but I don’t have any more iced tea.”

“Remember when iced tea replaced Perrier as the power drink in Hollywood?” Mel’s whole body quivered with happiness.

“Remember when Perrier replaced white wine?” Pete chimed in.

“Remember when white wine replaced the martini?” Jazz spoke dreamily. Her father still drank martinis.

There was a silence as they all remembered the martini, a drink lost in lore and fable. Maybe one day it would come back. In New York it had never disappeared, but those poor souls back there didn’t care what they put into their bodies. Phoebe recalled them to order.

“If no one has any other business, happy or unhappy, I have a last item to bring up. I have more storage room than I need in my office. It’s wasted
space and there’s a photographer who wants to come in and rent it. He’s a photojournalist, does nothing but location work, but he needs an office and a secretary. I assume you have no objections to that. Incidentally, I’ll be repping him.”

“Repping him?” Three voices shouted at her. Three bodies heaved themselves out of her sling chairs. Three photographers surrounded her desk and stared down at her in jealous fury.

“Hold it, children. Just hold it right there. No need to make such a thing out of it,” Phoebe said in a gentle voice of hidden gratification. She raised her tiny hands in a gesture of command that should have quieted them but didn’t. It was exactly as she thought. Sibling rivalry in great big so-called grown-ups. She had foreseen this reaction. What
would
they do without her when they reacted this way to the threat of having just a little bit of attention withdrawn from them?

“What do you mean, not a big thing? How many pieces do you think you can cut yourself into?” Mel said, madder than he’d ever been at Sharon.

“You’re overextended with just the three of us! You’ll have too much to do!” Pete shouted. “We’ll get the short end of the stick.”

“It’s not fair, Phoebe, and you know it,” Jazz accused her.

“I haven’t told you who the photographer is,” Phoebe said calmly. “I’m talking about Tony Gabriel.” She looked up at them with her most guileless and loving smile. They were all so deliciously predictable.

“Gabe—but—he’s in Europe, isn’t he? Or the Middle East?” Pete asked, suddenly speaking in an excited tone of voice.

“Tony Gabriel? How do you know Tony Gabriel?” Mel said, fury turning to awe.

“I know everybody,” Phoebe said smugly. “Gabe’s been working out of Paris for the last five years but now he’s coming back. He wants to establish a home base in L.A. He’ll be gone most of the
time, of course, but you guys can understand why I didn’t turn him down.”

“Wow, Gabe
here
. Great. That’s sensational! I can’t wait to talk to him,” Pete said.

“I’ve always wanted to meet him,” Mel said. “Tony Gabriel, wow, I’ve always admired the hell out of Tony Gabriel.”

“Then that’s settled and we can adjourn for this month.” Phoebe stood up as Mel and Pete moved toward the door.

“Just a minute,” Jazz said. “This meeting isn’t over.” Her voice was ringing with rage and she had become ten feet tall. “No way, Phoebe, no way you’re going to pull this scam, no way you’re going to railroad me into letting Gabriel into this building.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Phoebe blurted, genuinely astonished. Mel and Pete were silent in amazement at the metamorphosis that had turned Jazz into a pillar of wrath. What was biting her ass? Gabe was a genuine hero, one of the greats, to everyone in the business.

“Nothing’s wrong with me. I’m the only one of you with any sense. Tony Gabriel is pure trouble. He’s a taker, he’s a user, he’s a spoiler—he’s a sociopath who doesn’t happen to have murdered anybody.”

“Jazz, you’re completely nuts!” Phoebe sputtered.

“I don’t give a flying fuck for your uninformed opinion, Phoebe. When we bought this building together we decided that if any one of us felt strongly against some other photographer coming in here and using anyone’s space, that would be enough to stop it. So I’m stopping it. Cold stone dead. You cannot, repeat,
not
, rent or lend one inch of space to Gabriel. If he gets a foot in the door of Dazzle, he’ll ruin it for all of us. I can’t prevent you from repping him, that’s your business, but if you do, I’ll get another rep myself. It might even take me as long as one phone call. I mean that, Phoebe. Don’t make the mistake of thinking I don’t.”

“But Jazz, what the—”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you or anyone else. You can make your choice.” Jazz turned and slammed out of the office with a vicious bang of the door.

In the beginning, Jazz thought, as she rushed upstairs to her studio, shaking with fury, the Devil created the agent and the agent begat the rep.

Naturally he’s late, Phoebe Milbank thought, with patience unusual for her, as she waited to meet Tony Gabriel for lunch at 72 Market Street. She frequented the restaurant as often as ten times a week. All her lunches and dinners were business-related and it was imperative to have one excellent place that would always create a table for her at the last minute without question, one place close to her office that would never present her with a check, but keep a well-itemized running account for her, including tips, and send it to the office each week for her IRS files. At Market Street she could call five minutes in advance, knowing that no matter how busy they were, they would find a way to squeeze in the twelve automotive executives from Japan she’d just decided to invite to dinner.

She ordered another iced tea and settled down to wait for Gabe. She could have arrived a half hour later and still been on time, but she wanted some minutes of solitary reflection in which to speculate on Jazz’s bizarre performance earlier that day.

Obviously it was a personal matter and she’d get the truth out of Gabe when he came. But her own choice was clear. She didn’t intend to lose Jazz. Gabe couldn’t possibly make enough money out of photojournalism to replace her third of Jazz’s earnings, particularly with her unlimited future.

A photojournalist was the prototypical rolling stone, ready at a phone call’s notice to leave for any spot in the world where news was happening. Sometimes they got lucky and took a shot that would be reproduced in most of the newspapers and magazines of the world. It would become a classic. That could
indeed mean a bonanza, for the photographer and the rep, but it was a crapshoot. Even for someone as famous as Gabe.

He must be forty now, Phoebe ruminated. Nineteen years ago, when he first went to Vietnam to cover the war, he’d been a kid. Twenty-one years old when he got there, as every student in every photo school knew, and yet, over the next two years, his credit had appeared on more of the great Vietnam photos than that of any other of the army of photojournalists who’d lived through it. After that, his reputation made, he’d roamed the globe: Iran, Poland, Israel, Nicaragua—it made her feel travel-weary just to think of it, but that was the way of his special breed. They were never happy except when they were on the move.

Gabe had an uncanny way of placing himself, camera ready, exactly in the right square foot of ground for the unexpected: the explosion of the
Challenger
, the aftermath of the Jonestown massacre, the fall of Saigon. There was no place he couldn’t talk his way into, no plane he wouldn’t parachute out of, no assignment too rigorous or problematic. And he had the essential gift of invisibility, that weird ability that the greatest photojournalists must have to stand inches away from a subject and shoot, undisturbed by the subject’s awareness of a camera. Gabe had never covered anything as tame as the White House, but he was like that legendary Italian photographer who had managed, time after time, to become the undetected seventh man in the six-man official White House photo pool, the only one not pledged to share his shots with hundreds of other photographers.

“Phoebe mine, kiss me quick.” Tony Gabriel had materialized on the banquette next to Phoebe, although she hadn’t, she was certain, taken her eyes away from the restaurant door.

He kissed her lips twice, with careful attention, and then held her away from him at arm’s length and surveyed her.

“Younger than springtime, you rotten bitch. Can I sleep in the coffin with you tonight?”

“Gabe. Honestly.” Phoebe heard herself giggling like a teenager. She would have blushed if she’d had it in her.

Tony Gabriel hadn’t changed since the last time she’d seen him, at least two years ago. Still the same rumpled, careless soldier of fortune, still too thin, with weatherbeaten skin, pockets bulging with God knows what—certainly his passport—dark hair that seemed to be mostly cowlicks, victorious brown eyes, a big nose and those two deep vertical creases in his cheeks on either side of his lips that had driven a hundred women bananas. Two hundred. But that didn’t make him a sociopath.

“What’s that stuff in your glass?” he asked her.

“Iced tea.”

“You’re a sick, poor, beautiful, pitiful child, I’m going to put you to bed and make you feel all better soon. Better all over, I promise. Trust me, as you people say to each other. Waiter, bring me scotch, neat, double, any brand. What’s good to eat here, Phoebe? I’m starving.”

“Most people order the meatloaf. It’s what this place is known for.”

“Ah, Hollywood. The mothers of most of the people who live in this place served them meatloaf because they were poor, they left home because of that eternal meatloaf, they made millions trying to get away from the memory of that meatloaf, and now they come back for it. I’ll have a steak. Big, very rare. Now, what happened? Is it all set?”

“No, it is not. Just what did you ever do to Jazz Kilkullen? She doesn’t have a high opinion of you, sweetie. In fact she won’t let me rep you or even let you rent any space at the place.”

“Jazz? Who made her the boss of you?”

“It’s not that,” Phoebe objected, piqued at his choice of words. “It’s just the way we set things up when we bought the studio as partners.”

“The renting I can understand. But the repping?”

“She convinced the others that I wouldn’t have enough time to rep them properly if I took you on. What’s the real story on you and Jazz?”

“Honestly, if I understood it, I’d tell you. Basically Jazz was another groupie. You know about me and my groupies. I don’t do anything to encourage them, but how can I help it if they decide to turn me into something I’m not?”

“You’ve been known to fuck your groupies, Gabe,” Phoebe observed gently.

“I didn’t say I didn’t. That’s why God made groupies. But, Phoebe, what are friends for? Friends like us? Did you fight for me?”

“I totally went to bat for you. But it wasn’t happening. I’m truly sorry, Gabe. You’d better try one of the big photo agencies. They’d jump at you.”

“I don’t want a big agency. I’ve had Gama, I’ve had Sygma, I’ve been a part of the best of all that and now I want something else. I want those choice fat, juicy assignments that make a ton of dough and I want you to pick the best of them for me. I want
Smithsonian
magazine, I want the
National Geographic
, I want
Diversions
, and all the other slick travel magazines that you steal from doctors’ offices, magazines that send you to some luxurious resort and pay you in solid gold. Maybe I even want to be the Slim Aarons of the 1990s.”

“Jesus, Gabe, you’re a burnt-out case.” Phoebe was stunned. She’d heard him for years ranting on the depravity of such lush assignments.

“Right on. You’ve got it. I always said you were smart. I’ve hit the wall. Nineteen years of risking my ass and now there are teams of television cameramen in there before I can even get close to the action. There’s no room left for my kind of work, Phoebe. It’s on the news before I can get the film back to my editors. Nobody wants actuality photographs anymore. I’m a dinosaur but I have the wits to know it. So go back to Jazz and set her straight and point me toward
the mating of pandas, the joys of snorkeling, inside Wimbledon and ‘A Day in the Life of a Duchess.’ ”

“I can’t do it, Gabe.”

“She’s that good, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Well, what the hell, she should be. I taught her everything she knows. Look, don’t worry, eat your meatloaf, I’ll take care of it.”

“How?”

“Jazz is a problem. A female problem. And I never saw a female problem I couldn’t fix. Just leave it to me. This steak isn’t bad. How’s the meatloaf?”