“You’re starved, let’s find something before you pass out,” and off they go looking for lunch. Back in the old Fordham Road era, as she recalls, you could at least find a decent knish in the neighborhood, a classic egg cream. Around here there’s a Domino’s Pizza and a McDonald’s, and a possibly make-believe Jewish delicatessen, Bagels ’n’ Blintzes, which is of course where Cornelia simply must do lunch, having heard of it no doubt from some Junior League newsletter, and where they are presently in a booth, surrounded by a dumpsterload of Cornelia’s purchases, which “impulsive” is maybe too kind a word for.
At least this isn’t some midtown ladies’ tearoom. The waitress, Lynda, is a classic deli veteran, who only needs to hear two seconds’ worth from Cornelia to start muttering, “Thinks I’m the downstairs maid,” Cornelia meantime making a point of asking for “Jewish” rye bread for her turkey-pastrami and roast-beef combo. Sandwich arrives, “And you’re quite sure this is Jewish rye bread.”
“I’ll ask it. Hello!” Holding the sandwich up to her face, “You’re Jewish? The customer wants to know before she eats you. What? No, she’s goyishe, but they don’t have kosher so maybe this pick-pick-pick is what they do instead,” so forth.
Maxine introduces Cornelia to Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, pours it in a glass for her. “Here, Jewish champagne.”
“Interesting, a bit on the demi-sec side—excuse me, oh Lynda? would you happen to have this drier, brut perhaps…?”
“Sh-shh,” goes Maxine, though Lynda, recognizing WASP jocularity here, ignores.
In the course of lunchtime yakking, Maxine gets an earful of Slagiatt marriage history. Though the attraction was perverse and immediate, Cornelia and Rocky, it seems, did not so much fall in love as stumble into a classic NYC folie à deux—she, charmed at the notion of marrying into an Immigrant Family, expecting Mediterranean Soul, matchless cooking, an uninhibited embrace of life including not-quite-imaginable Italian sex activities, he meanwhile looking forward to initiation into the Mysteries of Class, secrets of elegant dress and grooming and high-society repartee, plus a limitless supply of old money to borrow against without having to worry too much about debt collection, or not the kind he was used to anyway.
Imagine their mutual dismay on learning the real situation. Far from the Channel 13 upper-class dynasty he expected, Rocky discovered in the Thrubwells a tribe of nosepicking vulgarians with the fashion sense and conversational skills of children raised by wolves, and with a collective net worth Dun & Bradstreet barely acknowledged. Cornelia was equally stunned to find that the Slagiattis, most of whom were distributed along a suburban archipelago well east of the Nassau line, and for whom the closest thing to an Italian feast was to order in from Pizza Hut, did not “do warmth,” even among themselves, regulating the children, for example, not with the genial screaming or smacking around one might have expected from an adolescence spent at the Thalia watching neorealist films but with cold, silent, indeed one must say pathological glaring.
As early as their honeymoon in Hawaii, Rocky and Cornelia were exchanging What-have-we-done gazes. But it was heaven there, with ukuleles for harps, and sometimes heaven has its way. One evening, as they watched a postcoital sunset, “WASP chicks,” declared Rocky, an adoring note already throbbing in his voice. “Well.”
“We are dangerous women. We have our own crime syndicate, you know.”
“Huh?”
“The Muffya.”
A sort of compassionate clarity dawned, and grew. Cornelia went on insisting dramatically that for Thrubwells most of the Social Register was rather too impossibly ethnic and arriviste, and Rocky went on singing “Donna non vidi mai” while ogling her in the shower, often eating a Sicilian slice as he sang. But in growing closer they also came to know who it was they thought they were kidding.
“Your husband tends to run to extra dimensions,” Maxine supposes.
“Down in K-Town they call him ‘4-D.’ He’s also psychic, by the way. He thinks you’re having some trouble at the moment, but he’s reluctant to what he calls ‘put in.’” Cornelia with one of those WASP eyebrow routines, possibly genetic, sympathy with a subtext of please, not another loser to deal with…
Still, however unintended, a potential mitzvah should be looked into. “Without getting too cute, it’s some video I’ve come across. I wouldn’t even be wondering how worried I should get, except it’s political in the worst way, maybe international, and I guess I’m to the point where I really could use some advice.”
With no hesitation Maxine can see, “In that case you must get in touch with Chandler Platt, he has a genius for facilitating outcomes, and he’s really very sweet.”
Which sets off a game-show buzzer, actually, for if Maxine’s not mistaken, she’s already run into this Platt customer, a financial-community big shot and fixer of some repute with upper-echelon access and what strikes her as a sense, finely calibrated as an artillery map, of where his best interests lie. Over the years they’ve met at various functions at the junction between East Side largesse and West Side guilt, and as it’s coming back to her now, Chandler may even once have grabbed her tit briefly, more of a reflex than anything, some cloakroom situation, no harm no foul. She doubts he even remembers.
And, well, there are fixers and fixers. “This genius of his—it extends to knowing how to dummy up?”
“Ah. One cannoli hope, as the Godfather always sez.”
CHANDLER PLATT HAS a roomy corner office midtown, at the high-muzzle-velocity law firm of Hanover, Fisk, up in one of the glass boxes along the Sixth Avenue corridor, with a view conducive to delusions of grandeur. Dedicated elevator, a traffic-flow design that makes it impossible to tell how much, forget what kind of, business is afoot. There seems to be a lot of deep amber and Czarist red in the picture. An Asian child intern shows Maxine into the presence of Chandler Platt, who is installed behind a desk made of 40,000-year-old New Zealand kauri, more like a piece of real estate than a piece of furniture, leading the casual observer, even one with a vanilla view of these matters, to wonder how many secretaries might fit comfortably beneath it and what amenities the space would be furnished with—restroom conveniences, Internet access, futons to allow the li’l cuties to work in shifts? Such unwholesome fantasies are only encouraged by the smile on Platt’s face, uneasily located between lewd and benevolent.
“A pleasure, Ms. Loeffler, after how long’s it been?”
“Oh… last century sometime?”
“Wasn’t it that clambake at the San Remo for Eliot Spitzer?”
“Might be. Never could figure you at a Democratic fund-raiser.”
“Oh, Eliot and I go back. Ever since Skadden, Arps, maybe longer.”
“And now he’s Attorney General and he’s going after you guys as much he ever went after the mob.” If there’s a difference, she almost adds. “Ironic, huh?”
“Costs and benefits. On balance he’s been good for us, put away some elements that would have eventually turned and bit us.”
“Cornelia did imply that you have friends all over the spectrum.”
“In the long run, it’s less to do with labels than with everyone coming out happy. Some of these folks really have become my friends, in the pre-Internet sense of the term. Cornelia, certainly. Long ago I briefly courted her mother, who had the good judgment to show me the door.”
Maxine has brought Reg’s DVD and a tiny Panasonic player, which Platt, not sure of where the wall outlets are exactly, allows her to plug in. He beams at the little screen in a way that makes her feel like a grandchild showing him a music video. But about the time the Stinger crew get set up,