Judith Krantz (49 page)

“Why don’t you get them for Casey too?” Red asked. “They don’t know each other.”

“No, somehow … they’re not Casey.
This
is Casey,” Jazz said, holding up a supple suede vest in a neutral shade of taupe, with oxhorn buttons. The back of the most pleasing garment was silk, printed with a tapestry-like design of a pheasant against dark green and red autumn foliage.

Red sighed in admiration of its elegance, understated from the front, flamboyant from the back. “He’d look wonderful in it. But look, it’s three hundred and ninety-five dollars—that’s too much to spend, according to your own law.”

“Ah, I know, Red, darling, but now the poor lout has to have something special for your wedding, and after all, he’ll never guess in a million years what it cost, I’m taking the price tag off myself right now, and you’ll never, never tell, you have to promise, and how can I pass it up, I’m so tired of shopping that I’m doing myself a favor, and my feet hurt. Look, I’ll give him this too.” Jazz held up a small book called
A Gentleman’s Wardrobe, or, Good Clothes Open All Doors
. “See, this makes it into a joke. He can’t take any gift too seriously if I give it to him with this book.”

“I see,” said Red. “Dimly.”

“That just leaves Dad and Mel,” Jazz gloated. “I’m almost done with the hardest part. Come on, let’s go into Georg Jensen.”

Even worldly Red was astonished at the expense of the great Danish handmade silver.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said to Jazz.

“Don’t you like the silver?”

“The prices!” Red exclaimed.

“I’m getting Mel that tea-and-coffee service.”

“Are you completely mad?”

“It’s a wedding present for him and Sharon, not just for Christmas. Mel gave me my first break, and I’ll never forget it. Just don’t look at the price tag.”

“I didn’t plan to.”

“But you do think it’s nice, don’t you? Mel and Sharon should like it, shouldn’t they?”

“It’s without question the most beautiful silver I’ve ever seen, except for that other set on the tray, which probably costs twice as much.” Red sounded limp.

“Red, darling, you look tired. Sit down over there and rest your feet while I give the salesman my Visa card. You can be my character witness, if I need
one.” Rapidly, Jazz bought one service for Mel and the more magnificent one for her father and Red. They were getting married too, weren’t they? And she could damn well afford it.

“That finishes my list,” Jazz said to Red as they left Jensen’s. “I’ll get Dad something in New York.”

“What about your nieces, your nephews, your sisters and their husbands?”

“I’ll buy the teenagers’ stuff in Beverly Hills too, more fun for them to exchange, which they always do, plus it will get them out of the house for a day, and I’ve just thought of a truly … compassionate present to give Fernanda and Valerie.”

“What?”

“Individual subscriptions to
Lear’s.”

“The magazine that says on the cover, ‘For the Woman Who Wasn’t Born Yesterday’?”

“The very one.”

“If I weren’t too happy to be as much of a bitch as you, sweetie pie, I’d go fifty-fifty on them.”

A
fter two busy days in New York, Jazz decided that she had made enough blood brothers and sisters among the Pepsi brass to cut her visit short by a day and return to Los Angeles on an early morning flight, picking up three hours on the flight west. She took a taxi from the airport directly to the studio, so that she arrived well before lunch on the Friday preceding the Christmas weekend.

Although Friday was nominally a day of business as usual, Jazz knew that at Dazzle, as in offices all over the country, the mood would have already swung to the holiday mode and no one would be making an attempt at work. The usual Christmas party had been voted down at the last partners’ meeting, but she wanted to tell her assistants to go home whenever they chose, and to give everyone a hug before she took off for the ranch, where she could stay for a four-day weekend. Christmas didn’t actually come until Tuesday of next week, and she’d drive back in leisure Wednesday morning. People would be digging themselves out from Christmas and beginning to think
about getting ready for the long New Year’s weekend. Perhaps, Jazz ruminated, the two-week holiday season of 1990–91 would turn out to be the final reason for the decline of the West, the excuse for never working a five-day week again.

As she opened the glass doors of Dazzle, she almost collided with Gabe, who was loaded down with two camera cases and a third case that held his collapsible lights.

“Why all the equipment? No rest for the weary?” Jazz asked pleasantly.

“Just a gig,” he said, pausing for a moment.

“With Christmas on a Tuesday and the whole country shutting down even as we speak, how come?” Jazz asked, more out of a desire to seem normally friendly at this time of the year than from real curiosity.

“Gigs don’t respect holidays, not this kind anyway. It’s a party, a Christmas housewarming.”

“You?
Shooting a party?”
Now she was truly disbelieving. Why should Gabe bother to lie to her about a job? The only kind of party he’d ever deign to shoot would be a Summit Meeting.

“Yeah. Listen, gotta go. I don’t want to be late.”

“O.K. Gabe. Anyway, merry Christmas and have a good time.” Jazz’s expression had changed from skepticism to a flash of astonishment that she quickly attempted to conceal with an overly bright smile. She had just realized, from his sheepish manner, that he truly had been seduced into shooting a party. It probably involved some major movie star and a gigantic fee, but still, for Gabe to rush off, at Christmas, for something so undemanding, so pathetically ordinary, showed her the extent to which he had lowered his standards since his return. Although he’d been getting an increasing number of good, if not great assignments since Phoebe had become his rep, apparently he couldn’t afford to turn this job down.

Gabe caught the expression she’d tried to hide, saw that her smile was false and that she was pitying him. To spare his pride Gabe tried to enhance his assignment
in a flurry of the very details he’d been pledged not to reveal.

“Seriously, Jazz, it’s a story every photo agency in the world would kill to cover. Magic Johnson is throwing a Christmas housewarming tonight in his new house. He didn’t want mobs of media attention so he’s kept the party a secret for months. He’s invited all the guys who play in the charity game he puts on every summer for that Negro College Fund—the top stars in basketball and their wives, plus all the Lakers, of course, including their kids. He’s flying them out to L.A., but nobody knows who else is coming, so it’ll be a surprise party … a gathering of the greatest. Naturally he’s got to have shots of the action so I was tapped for the job.”

“Hey, feel free to fantasize about a lot of things, Gabe, but not about something like that.” Jazz spoke with bravado mixed with the beginnings of incredulous suspicion.

“So don’t believe me. Anyway, I’d better hit the road. I can’t even bring an assistant, but naturally he wants shots minute-by-minute—the guys’ expressions when they walk into his place and see who else is there, the gorgeous wives getting to know each other, the pick-up game in the backyard court, the slam dunk contest, Magic and Michael Jordan playing one on one … you know, all that regulation, traditional stuff that everybody does, plus a few unique touches like Jack Nicholson and Arsenio Hall playing twin Santa Clauses, Jerry West and Jerry Buss costumed as Santa’s helpers and the Laker Girls in reindeer outfits—your average monster Christmas housewarming. Somehow I’ll survive it.”

“Just another Christmas housewarming?” Jazz asked Gabe, her voice unsteady. “That’s really all this means to you?”

“Come on, Jazz, you don’t expect me to pretend I’m emotionally involved, do you? It’s a question of the photo credits and the money—major money, major credits. For what I’m making … let’s just say that there isn’t a photographer alive who wouldn’t
take this gig. Merry Christmas, Jazz. See you next week.” Gabe turned and walked quickly toward the parking lot.

Jazz stood just inside the doors, looking blankly at the unmanned receptionist’s desk. She felt Gabe’s words take possession of her, leaving her filled with a clear vision of the wonderful surprise party; the new house overflowing with epic heroes, dozens of magnificent champions united in a special championship that they could find only among their peers, glorying in a rare few hours of mid-season relaxation with their beautiful wives and swarms of excited children. The thought of the great photographs she’d never get to take traveled down through her heart and landed in her belly, where she finally experienced it fully, as if she had received a violent punch from a huge fist. She walked slowly to an upholstered bench and sat down heavily, clumsy with a complex feeling of utter betrayal and outrageous disappointment. She felt like a three-year-old who had just been smacked across the face. The feeling grew and grew until she had to press on her stomach as hard as she could with both hands in an attempt to counteract an emptiness that existed with more reality than any pain.

Jazz sat and tried to make logical excuses, in a desperate effort to be adult, to be sensible, not to take this as a personal rejection by Magic who she had photographed more than half a dozen times during his glorious career. She didn’t own Magic, Jazz told herself, just as she didn’t own the Lakers just because she’d devoted a week to shooting them for an entire special issue of
Sports Illustrated
in 1988, the year in which they’d won the back-to-back championships; she didn’t have a right to
expect
to be treated as special just because she knew every team member personally, just because all the dramas and changes in the last two years of Laker basketball had been played out in her mind and heart. Just because she was as lunatic a fan as there was in L.A., just because she felt that each Laker was part of her own family, didn’t give her a guaranteed first crack at shooting Magic’s party.

Gabe would do a brilliantly professional job and the fact that he didn’t give a damn wouldn’t show in the pictures. She had no exclusive or official position with the team. She didn’t need the money or the credit. Gabe, a great, award-winning photojournalism was an understandable choice for Magic to have made, assuming he had made that decision. And Gabe certainly had every right to take the job when it was offered to him. Yes … every right.

When it was offered to him
. When, exactly when, had that been? How could she not have heard some rumor of it in a studio complex in which news of what each photographer was doing might well have been broadcast on loudspeakers every morning, for the amount of privacy that existed?

Where was everybody? Although Sandy, the receptionist, was not anywhere around, it was still far too early for the studios to be closed. Jazz sniffed the air and realized, from the smell of cooking and the sound of voices, that there were certainly people, many people, in Mel’s studio on the third floor of Dazzle. She’d been too deep in thought to notice. Now she took the stairs running, seeing as she passed that her own studio was deserted.

A crowd filled Mel’s studio, where a huge tree had been set up and decorated while Jazz was away. She pushed through the celebrating horde. Every assistant was there, as well as a large number of clients from all the ad agencies in town and a surprising assortment of her favorite models. It sounded as if the party was just getting started; there was a mob by the bar and Sharon and a group of free-lance food stylists were already busy serving up genuine hot dogs and cheeseburgers under a banner that proclaimed “REAL UGLY FOOD.”

“Jazz, great! You got back for the Christmas party we swore to each other we weren’t going to give! Hey, this is terrific!” Pete grabbed her and gave her a kiss on each cheek. “Mel was the first to crack. How come you’re here? Nobody expected you.”

“Pete, do you know anything about Magic’s big housewarming?”

“Magic’s giving a party? Where’d you hear that?”

“Some crazy rumor. Where’s Phoebe?”

“Over there in a corner talking business with a poor bastard she’s trapped from an agency. She hates Christmas, says it’s a waste of time and money but trust her never to pass up a free meal. Come on, pretty female, let’s do the dirty hula.”

“Later, Pete,” Jazz managed to smile at him. She looked in the direction he had indicated and spotted Phoebe, almost hidden by a man in a gray suit. Phoebe’s hand was poised persuasively on the man’s arm and she wore the dangerous look that all clients inspired in her, halfway between a needy orphan and a greedy strumpet. Jazz made her way rapidly through the Christmas merry-makers, waving at everyone who greeted her, but not stopping until she reached the corner of the studio.

“Excuse me,” Jazz said to the man in the gray suit. “Would you mind terribly if I had a quick private word with our little Phoebe?”

“No problem,” he said and took off in the direction of the bar.

“Jazz … you’re supposed to be in New York.” Phoebe’s animated face shaped itself into a concerned look. “Didn’t it go all right?”

“For an utterly unnecessary trip,” Jazz said, standing in front of Phoebe, backing her into a corner and spreading her arms toward each wall so that she had her rep trapped. “It went beautifully. I bumped into Gabe on the way in here. He told me about the surprise housewarming.”

“Oh. Yes. That party. Cute idea.”

“Thrilling.”

“Jazz, there’s someone over there I simply have to nab while I can. Let’s have a good chat later.” Phoebe bent rapidly, trying to duck under Jazz’s arm, but Jazz intercepted her move and forced her back against the wall.

“Phoebe, how did Gabe get that job?”

“Some fellow from the Laker management phoned on Magic’s behalf and asked if we had a photographer to cover the party. Since you were out of town, I talked Gabe into it.”

“Someone called you? Was that yesterday or the day before?”

“Yesterday. Unexpectedly. After all, it’s a surprise party.”

“And just asked if you had a photographer available?”