Judith Krantz Read Online Free

continued.
    “What the fuck?” he whispered, when the building stopped moving. Jazz jumped quickly to her feet with the aplomb of a native Californian, checked first for broken glass and ran to the window, still wearing only her skirt.
    “I’m getting the hell out of here,” Sam Butler shouted.
    “Stay where you are! It’s not safer in the street. These old buildings can fall on you. We’d better look and see if a tidal wave is coming—in this neighborhood there’s always that possibility.”
    “Tidal wave?”
His voice rose.
    “Damn right, it should be right out there,” Jazz answered with conviction, pointing toward the ocean and leaning out of the window so he wouldn’t see her lips twitch upward at the corners. Aftershocks, for certain, she thought, but not a tidal wave. Not this time, anyway. It hadn’t been the Big One. From thedressing room she heard the unmistakable sounds of a man cursing as he hastily stuffed himself into his clothes.
    “If you need more pictures, we’ll do them on high ground,” he yelled at her as he headed toward the door.
    “And in a crowd,” Jazz shouted after him. “Now I know why you have a reputation for being irresistible.”
    He turned, indignantly. “You haven’t been very nice to me. Not at all. If I weren’t too much of a gent, I’d tell you to go fuck yourself.”
    “You
, Sam Butler, will never get another chance,” Jazz laughed, arms covering her breasts. “And hey, throw me my hat, will you, on your way out?”

2
    W hat
would
they do without me? Phoebe Milbank, partner in Dazzle, and business representative for Jazz Kilkullen, Mel Botvinick and Pete di Constanza, asked herself that familiar question as she spread a thick layer of cream cheese on an onion bagel. She envisioned herself wearing the trim, starched uniform of a proper old-time British nanny, pushing a large, gleaming, navy blue baby carriage, a Rolls-Royce of baby carriages. As she came to a street crossing, with her three infantile charges safely tucked under a monogrammed coverlet, cooing and burbling to each other, she would merely gesture with one hand and a policeman would salute her respectfully, bringing a line of impatient, speeding cars to a total halt until she had safely, and in her own good time, reached the opposite curb and remounted the sidewalk.
    In her sharply critical mind, which was entirely free of any trace of an inferiority complex, there was no doubt that left to themselves her photographers would all starve. She was their all-knowing guide in ahowling, unfriendly wilderness, that of the treacherous, complicated world of advertising and magazines in which photographs were offered for sale. All their creative powers would be as nothing if she were to desert them, for they were essentially helpless and hopelessly unable to manage their own affairs, like children in a burning building waiting for a fireman to come and save them. This situation was exactly as it should be and as she intended it to remain.
    These pleasant thoughts occupied Phoebe during the first of the ten minutes that she scheduled for reflection, right before the monthly Saturday-morning meeting of the partners in Dazzle. This pre-meeting time with herself was sacred. It put her in the right frame of mind for any problems that might arise during the conference to come.
    Phoebe got up and bounced around her office, rearranging the low-slung chairs that enabled her to look down upon everyone else from the tall chair that stood behind her desk. She was a tiny, shrewd, moppet-headed figure, with layer upon layer of bright yellow hair that had been fashionably distressed, at great cost, almost but not quite to the point of being ruined.
    She was satisfied with her world. Her hair was ideal. Her pert, witty face that gave no clue to her crafty brain, was ideal. Her lean body was as close to ideal as any Twentieth Century Californian female could dream of. Every single one of her vertebrae was visible under her