Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,34

he care? He’s Gina’s boss, not mine.”

“Try telling him that.” She made a sour face. “As far as he’s concerned, he’s the boss of everyone. And you better not keep him waiting.”

Robin stood up; if her cubicle had contained a door, she would have been holding it open. Casting an eye across my outfit, she produced a little frown. “You do know you have to use up your entire clothing allowance before the end of every year?”

This did not exactly lend me confidence.

I was still trying to acclimate to the opulence of my new office at 4 Times Square. Even larger than it had looked on paper, the airy, open space stretched up Broadway for much of the block between 42nd and 43rd Street. The honey-colored table gleamed, the carpet was thick and soft, the chairs were comfortably upholstered. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked down at the tourists scurrying across Times Square, making me feel like a princess in a tower. Compared to Florio’s, however, mine was a hovel. I found him ensconced in an enormous leather chair, his expressive face framed by a view stretching across Manhattan to the Hudson River and New Jersey beyond. Both the office and the man radiated confidence and money, and as the scent of expensive aftershave wafted toward me, I had a quick vision of the roly-poly banker on the get-out-of-jail-free card in Monopoly.

“I’m sorry we haven’t had a chance to talk before.” His face was tan, his cuff links gold, his shave so smooth around the big mustache I would have bet a barber showed up daily. “You know, you’re very fortunate to have Gina as your publisher.”

So that was why I was here.

“You know she’s in the family?”

I nodded, silently beginning to sweat.

“Did she tell you they gather for family dinner every Sunday?”

Where was this going? “She did tell me that.” In a rare moment of candor, Gina had groused about the Newhouse New Yorker ritual. Advance copies of the magazine were delivered on Sunday morning, and to her disgust you had to arrive at dinner prepared to discuss every detail. The meal, as she described it, sounded like the exam from hell.

“The man’s impossible!” Steve boomed. I jumped, startled. “Calls me at all hours of the day and night. There I was, in the hospital, barely alive, tubes everywhere, and he’s calling to discuss ad pages….”

For the next fifteen minutes Florio regaled me with tales of life with Si, growing more loquacious by the minute. “You know that Roy Cohn was his closest friend?” I shook my head, unable to imagine Si hobnobbing with America’s fiercest red-baiter. “Roy, of course, was a closeted homosexual.”

Florio let that hang in the air as he moved on to Si’s children (“He’s so mean to them”), and his elegant wife, Victoria (“Did you know her first husband was a count?”).

I kept waiting for him to get to the point, tell me my job was in jeopardy unless I began kowtowing to my publisher. Instead, he complimented me on my clothing (“You look just like a little China doll”) and asked about my office (“I must come see what you’ve done with it!”).

Overwhelmed by his oratory, I let the words pour over me. I’d never met anyone remotely like this large, loud man, and I didn’t understand why I found him so appealing. He was launching into Victoria’s fervent dedication to the Catholic faith (“So why did she marry a Jew?”) when his words came screeching to a halt. I turned, seeking the reason, to find Truman striding toward us. Refusing a chair, he stationed himself at the window, just behind Florio.

Florio smoothly switched gears and began talking about food. “I am an extremely talented cook!” he announced, bursting into an epic recitation of a recent visit to a three-star Napa Valley restaurant. “Here’s this fabulous place run by a world-famous chef, and the guy doesn’t know the first thing about making Bolognese! So”—he demonstrated—“I rolled up my sleeves and showed him how to do it.”

“Really?” He was a fabulous raconteur; I could almost smell the pork, the milk, the slowly caramelizing tomatoes.

“Yes!” Florio nodded his head vigorously, smiling with unabashed delight as he savored his own brilliance. Behind him, Truman was vigorously shaking his head in the opposite direction. I watched this pantomime, amazed. I stifled the urge to laugh: Steve remained utterly oblivious.

“Not one word of that was true!” Truman said as he walked me down the long corporate hall to