The Last Manly Man

by Sparkle Hayter

  Me? I was the one upon whom both Jerry and Solange focused all their irritation and spite. Go figure. Was it just a coincidence I was sent on the road a lot to scout new programs, make deals, do public relations stuff? I’d come back from the road, work at the office for a week or two, and suddenly, another business trip would materialize. Jerry and Solange had run out of places to send me after the last trip, but then discovered I hadn’t taken a vacation in a long time. My unused vacation at the All News Network had been transferred to WWN, but under company bylaws, I’d have to take my vacation before my anniversary date or lose it.

  I decided to take it. I just had to get through this last day.…

  The producers summarized their current productions. Our top-rated original-ish program was World of Soap, an hour that gave zippy synopses of our close-captioned soap operas from India, Iran, France, Bulgaria, and the USA. The soaps themselves were showing slow but consistent ratings’ growth, as was Jet Set Gourmet, the international cooking show, and our reruns of sitcoms featuring women. Women’s sports numbers were okay; the news and informational programming was lagging, in large part due to crappy time slots, usually wedged between paid programming for telephone psychics and personal-improvement messiahs. Reruns of Solange’s old pop-psych talk show were doing well (no matter where you go, it seems, people can’t get enough of reunited relatives and girls who date their mother’s toothless boyfriends).

  Overall, we were, in our first year, a modest ratings success, but were still bleeding money and making only incremental audience progress.

  After we went over some budget stuff, Solange dismissed us so she could run to Le Cirque for lunch with Barbara. Before Jerry could snag me, I fled to my office, my perky assistant, Tim, right behind me.

  “Here are the morning’s memos, and your mail,” he said. “I took the liberty of removing all the anthrax hoaxes and sending them to the police.”

  “Thanks. You busy?” I asked him. “I have a bunch of errands for you. Personal errands.”

  “I live to run errands.”

  “I’m staying at the Chelsea Hotel because of the fire, in my friend Tamayo’s apartment.” I gave him the room number and said, “Don’t tell Jerry and Solange where I am. If there’s an emergency and you need me, YOU call me.”

  I then gave him my account numbers for Con Ed, cable, insurance, and phone, so he could look after getting things cut off and forwarded and whatever. This was one of the great perks of an otherwise grueling executive gig, an assistant who sweats all the small stuff for you.

  “I guess I’d better call the maid and tell her not to clean your apartment until further notice,” Tim added.

  “You’re the best, Tim. How did I luck out and get you?”

  “You made a deal with the devil but you were drunk at the time and don’t remember it. Anything else I can do to make your life a more candy-colored place to be?”

  “No, thanks.”

  When he left, Louis Levin rolled in. Louis is a paraplegic and motors around in an electric wheelchair. He’s been known to use this for nefarious purposes, i.e., speeding toward a group of network censors in the narrow hallway, yelling, “She’s outta control!”

  “What is up with you, Robin? Why didn’t you say more to Jerry?” he asked. “He gave you so many openings to zing him. You’ve let him get away with it all week. Dillon and I have had to promote your feminist point of view in meetings or it doesn’t get said. Nothing against the sisterhood, Robin, but I feel funny having to be the biggest feminist in the place.”

  “I’m trying this new thing, being circumspect and turning the other cheek,” I said.

  “Right, sure you are,” he said. “What’s the deal, really? It’s like Chinese water torture, isn’t it? You’re making him guess when the next drop will fall …”

  “I swear, it’s not a plot against Jerry. I’m trying to be, you know, mature about stuff.”

  “Oh, woman, you’ve gone soft!” Louis said. “Ever since you’ve come back … It’s that man isn’t it? He tamed you.”

  “What man?”

  “The one in Paris you don’t want anyone to know about,” Louis said. “He called this morning and I happened to pick up. Evidently he had tried to call your apartment first and he got no answer. I think. It was very hard to understand him. He doesn’t speak English very well.”

  “Oh. He called?” I said, very cool.

  “God, you’re blushing! And what’s this?” He started pawing through a bunch of books and videotapes on my desk.

  “Virgin Queens and Lusty Consorts: Feminism and Romantic Love,” he said, reading the title off a book. He turned to the back flap and read, “‘Can the modern woman reconcile the conflict between being a feminist and being a heterosexual?’”

  “Someone sent that to me. I haven’t even read it. Jesus. Don’t jump to conclusions,” I said. “Don’t make connections where there aren’t any. The man in Paris was a—”

  “Fling,” he said.

  “A friend.” As casually as possible, I added, “Did he leave a message?”

  “Yeah, either he’s going to his lib to work on an ex-parent, or he’s off to the lab for his experiment. I’m not really sure. He’s gone for a month. He’d try to E-mail when he had time.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Lab? What’s this guy do?”

  “He’s a physicist.”

  “You’re blushing again.”

  “I’m tired and flushed,” I said. “Jesus.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. Nothing wrong with it. But why the secrecy? Is he married? Please tell me he isn’t married …”

  “No, of course not. We’re just friends. No big deal. He’s a friend of Tamayo’s, actually. She told me to look him up while I was there and I did.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with him.”

  “Oh. I get it. It’s unrequited. Your feelings aren’t being returned the way you want,” he said.

  “I don’t know.” Louis had almost worn me down. I almost said, Look, this is the deal, Louis. Pierre and I live on two different continents, he reads English but doesn’t speak it very well, and I have your basic bad-tourist French, which is amusing—for about a week. He’s a French genius with excellent table manners, from a proud Gallic family descended from minor nobility, and I’m a crude American chick. These things only work out in Fran Drescher movies.

  But though Louis is a good friend and an honorable colleague, he also runs the Jackson Broadcasting Rumor File, Radio Free Babylon, so I kept it to myself.

  “He’s just a friend,” I said.

  “If you say so,” Louis said. “But whatever he is, he’s made you soft. Jerry’s going to run roughshod over you in absentia while you’re on vacation. He thinks this is a trick, and he’s going to try a preemptive strike.…”

  “What can he do?”

  “Don’t underestimate him. He’s up to something. I’m just not sure what yet,” he said. “I’ll keep my ears to the pipes and keep you posted. You might try disarming him with a few bitchy comments, just to reassure him.”

  Before Louis left, he filled me in on the many other plots swirling about the office. The politics of a medieval court had nothing on those of WWN, or as Louis called it, The Holy Woman Empire. It took every bit of self-control to resist being drawn into the various intrigues.

  Being back in the office had been a challenge though. Every time I turned around, it seemed some plotting courtier was darting out of the shadows with a dram of poison about someone else. The executive producers were plotting against each other. The associate producers were plotting against each other. Even the interns were plotting against each other. Most of this plotting took place beneath a pleasant, pastel civility. This was the corporate culture Solange and Jerry had created. Before the day was through and I was freed, I’d have to dodge both the Evil Queen and her Cowardly Knave.

  About an hour before quitting time, Jerry tried to provoke me b
y telling me we needed a younger, prettier cohost on our after-school program, a grab bag of dating issues, school, and adventures. He added that its focus should shift completely to makeup, fashion, and how to get a boyfriend. I promised to think about it.

  I’ve never seen that guy look so miserable. If I’d known being mature and circumspect had this effect on him, I would have tried it long ago. What I told Louis Levin notwithstanding, I was doing this to Jerry on purpose. It hadn’t started out that way. It started because I came back, jet-lagged from the road, too exhausted to fight, and forced to rely on the little bit of diplomacy I learned in my travels. But when I noticed how much it bugged Jerry when I didn’t tongue-lash him, I started being mature and diplomatic just to, well, make his monkey crazy. It reminded me of one of my favorite old jokes: A masochist and a sadist are sitting on a bench. The masochist says, “Hurt me.” The sadist says, “No.”

  Evidently, my new maturity was getting to Solange too. A half hour or so later, just as I was about to leave, Solange came into my office and said, “Get a lot of rest on your vacation. You look tired. I’m very concerned about you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Relax. Don’t worry about anything. I’ll make sure Jerry doesn’t make trouble for you,” she said. “I’ll make sure Paula and Lucille don’t make trouble either. You just get lots of rest.”

  The last two were executive producers. We’d all gotten along okay in the brief times I was in the office, and it had never occurred to me that Paula and Lucille would want to make trouble for me—until now. I figured Solange was trying to pit me against them, and she was probably trying to pit them against me in a similar fashion. It was a favorite blood sport of hers, provoking people to attack each other, then stepping in after the bloodletting as the kindly voice of reason who would restore order.

  I was tempted to use my favorite passive-aggressive weapon against her, telling her about someone she disliked who was now happy. That always burned her butt. But as with Jerry, it was even more vexing to her if I just took the high road and acted mature and kind of … what’s the word … classy. Who knew? She hated people who took the high road over her even more than she hated people who were happy, which almost made taking the high road worth it. In any event, it was a good thing I was going on vacation, because torturing them was fun but that high-road thing is really hard to keep up for any extended period of time.

  Finally, it was quitting time. At the end of the day, when I left the pink-and-black granite Jackson Broadcasting Building, I felt a great relief and freedom, as the giant fingers that had been squeezing my chest for the past five days peeled back and let me go. No intrigues, no gossip, no gender politics for two whole weeks. Just rest and relaxation. Heaven.

  chapter three

  When I got back to the Chelsea, loaded down with cat food, new clothes, and other essentials, I called Nadia from the lobby as she had requested.

  “Who is it?” Nadia snapped.

  “It’s Robin, Tamayo’s friend. I’m downstairs. Is it okay if I come up?”

  “Give me half an hour.” She slammed down the phone.

  By now, I was really dragging my can. A half hour seemed an eternity—yet, ironically, not long enough to go somewhere and do something worthwhile.

  I took a seat in the lobby. There were just three people sitting in the lobby—an old man who slept in an armchair, a hip-looking young man with a brush cut and black-rimmed glasses slouched in a chair, and me. The lobby was eclectically decorated, to say the least, with artwork of different, sometimes conflicting schools covering every available space. The walls were full of paintings, and there was sculpture scattered around the seating area. A papier-mâché woman in a swing hung from the middle of the ceiling. The black-iron fireplace was guarded by two snarling black griffins. Above the mantel was a carved wood tableaux depicting different artists at work. On the mantel were two strange silver filigree vases that looked like ancient Phoenician cremation urns, flanking a bust of Harry S. Truman. Behind the lobby desk, where the mail was held in hundreds of tiny cubbyholes, there was more art—on the walls, even the ceiling. Some of the art was very good, by famous and nonfamous artists, some was very bad. The mix seemed democratic and nonjudgmental, like the hotel itself. It was otherworldly, yet warm and welcoming at the same time.

  It was easy to imagine you were in another time because the lobby had only barely been modernized over the years, and the mix of furniture and styles gave it a timeless quality. I imagined the place around the turn of the century, when Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt took tea in this marble-walled lobby. In the 1950s, Robert Oppenheimer, father of the A-bomb, brooded over his creation here, and Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. In the 1960s, Janis Joplin gave Leonard Cohen a blow job on an unmade bed upstairs “while limousines [waited] in the street,” inspiring him to write a song about it, and the delicate and doomed Edie Sedgwick, Warhol Superstar and Youthquaker, kept setting her room on fire. There is a famous picture of her sitting in the lobby with kohled eyes and bandaged hands, waiting for the management to find her a new room. Some of this I knew through Tamayo, and some just as a New Yorker who had long admired and been curious about the Chelsea.

  While I was daydreaming about a young Edith Piaf taking refuge here with composer Virgil Thomson, a man with dyed apple-red hair came in with a black-and-white dog, who yapped at me and wrenched me back into the present. They were followed by a man with a horrible black toupee, who stopped just inside the glass doors and looked around.

  After him came an elderly lady, elegantly dressed, accompanied by a solicitous young man who addressed her as Mrs. Grundy.

  “I’ve been experimenting with new textures and surfaces, Mrs. Grundy,” said the young man. “A fine-weave bleached denim instead of canvas, also a shaved velour stretched over a frame, if I could have a half hour to show you, Mrs. Grundy …”

  “I have to run now for a meeting. But call my assistant, Ben, and make an appointment to show me your portfolio,” she said. “And please, call me Miriam.”

  It was Miriam Grundy, the widow of the late, great poet Oliver Grundy, a well-known patron of the arts and a genuine Chelsea legend. Miriam Grundy—that explained why, though a tiny lady, she had such a big presence. Miriam Grundy was larger than life, the darling of the avant garde as well as the Old Guard. The details of her life had grown mythic. When she was in her twenties, her family fled Europe and the Nazis for America, where young Miriam met Oliver Grundy, a poet, scion of a wealthy WASP family, and a married man. Their affair had caused a terrible scandal, and details of the divorce appeared in the penny papers along with some of the steamy love letters Miriam and Oliver exchanged, the filthy parts replaced with dashes. After she and Oliver married, they abandoned high society and ran around with beats, surrealists, and other bohemian artist types. High society welcomed them back in the 1960s.

  Now, this rich widow’s name showed up, boldface, in the gossip columns all the time, attending everything from high society Museum of Modern Art benefits to downtown performance art shows at avant joints like P.S. 22 and Here. What a life she had had. She’d escaped certain death in Europe, had a grand love story, had become a benefactor of the arts, and was now widely imitated by drag queens.

  So distracted was I by Miriam Grundy, I almost missed the young man who came in behind her. When I did notice him, I had to look twice before I realized it was the manboy from the night before, walking determinedly to the elevator, which whisked him away before I could get my bearings.

  I called Nadia from the house phone in the lobby.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “I just saw him, your fiancé!” I said. “He’s on his way up. You can stop worrying.”

  “Oh, thank God,” she said.

  “You need some time alone with him now?” I asked.

  “No, no, we have to go meet someone,” she said.

  “Then may I come up?”

  “In about five or ten minutes,” she said, hanging up wi
thout saying good-bye.

  I gave her fifteen minutes before I hoisted my sorry carcass up and dragged it to the elevator. Just as the elevator doors were about to close, a man stuck his hand in, a very handsome man, fortyish, with a passing resemblance to Gregory Peck. At first, he didn’t seem to notice there was anyone else in the elevator, but around the third floor he smiled, and looked at me in a very seductive way, with a combination of Christlike empathy and manly desire. I got a buzz off the eye contact, I admit.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “You look familiar. Do you live here?”

  “No. I’m staying at a friend’s place.”

  “I’m Gerald,” he said.

  “Robin. Do you live here?”

  “Not anymore, but I used to. How long will you be here?”

  “I don’t know. You see, my apartment burned down—”

  I didn’t get a chance to finish. The doors opened at seven to another woman, around my age, with masses of frizzy brown hair. As soon as she saw Gerald, she started screaming.

  “You thieving bastard! Where have you been? I hope you brought my money,” she yelled, her accent either Scottish or Irish.

  “Maggie, I was delayed. I have to meet someone …” Gerald said.

  “Who?”

  “It’s confidential. I’ll be back with the money later tonight or tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be out tonight.”

  “Tomorrow then.”

  “You’d better not be lying, you bastard!” she shouted. “Or I’ll feed you to the dogs.”

  Mercifully, I was able to push past them and escape the fray. Gerald tried to escape too, but the woman with the frizzy brown hair got on the elevator and wouldn’t let him out. The doors to the elevator closed, shutting out their argument behind me.