by Star Jones
“Well, what’s the problem, darling?” Heather said. “Are they trying to get you to change things in the book?”
“Change things, delete things, justify things, prove things! You name it,” Missy said. “I think all of a sudden everybody in the company is getting cold feet. They told me that with the state of the economy and the publishing industry, they can’t afford to have any legal troubles with this book or, heaven forbid, have to pull it from the shelves. Everybody’s pushing to make this a bestseller.”
“Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess. But I’m starting to get kinda nervous. What if Maxine comes after me? Maybe I should just give P and W the money back and go back to my honey. Forget about all this stuff.”
Heather sighed. Missy had been in desperate need of pep talks from Heather at various points during the writing of the manuscript and even after the book was done. Now was not the time to back down. Heather could hear the trepidation in Missy’s voice. It wasn’t something that Missy let many people see, a vulnerable side. Certainly no one saw it when she was the ultrasuccessful assistant U.S. attorney down in Atlanta, specializing in child pornography and sex trafficking, at one point racking up thirty convictions in a row. She got her big break when she won the conviction of a former NFL star accused of running a prostitution ring out of his multimillion-dollar mansion in Buckhead, Atlanta’s wealthiest neighborhood. Missy began popping up all over the television dial, offering commentary and wooing fans with her golden-girl good looks, facile legal mind, and ease in front of the camera. Her conservative politics didn’t hurt either. After Riley Dufrane tapped her to join the couch, Missy became a bona fide star when she made a startling confession on The Lunch Club during a show on sexual violence: that she had been raped by a black man when she was a teenager and had gotten pregnant, but because of her staunch opposition to abortion had birthed and raised her biracial child by herself. Not only did glowing profiles spring up on the pages of conservative magazines, but Missy became a regular in pop-culture bibles like People magazine. She now was an honest-to-goodness celebrity. The religious right loved her antiabortion politics; she not only talked a good game but lived it too—actually mothering a black child in the process! The less strident right-wingers loved her prosecutor background—the woman sent perverts and child molesters to prison, for heaven’s sake!
As she became more and more famous—in some Republican circles, her name was even mentioned as a possible senatorial or even vice-presidential candidate—she drew more and more ire from the doyenne of The Lunch Club. Maxine couldn’t stand the acclaim that was directed Missy’s way. She didn’t trust it, thought Missy was somehow too good to be true. When she got her chance to do something about it, Maxine pounced.
“Missy. You have to stay focused, girl!” Heather said, a bit of nervousness evident in her voice. “Think about how you felt, what Maxine did to you.”
Heather brought Missy back to her final days on The Lunch Club, the way Maxine brutally forced her to walk the plank. Through her sources, Maxine had heard that the Innocence Project, a New York–based nonprofit that fought on behalf of convicted felons that many people believed to be innocent of their crimes, was trying to reopen the case that sent Missy’s rapist to prison. They had reason to believe the rapist may have been wrongly convicted. The Innocence Project was having a hard time finding a judge who would order a DNA test of a child and reopen the case based merely on new advances in DNA testing since the man had been sent to prison sixteen years earlier. But Maxine Robinson could go places the Innocence Project couldn’t. She was still friendly with a couple of the longtime aides on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, where her former husband was now one of the most senior senators. One day, Maxine snuck into Missy’s office and found a baseball cap that belonged to Corey, Missy’s adorable teenage son. A few phone calls and several weeks later, Maxine had in her possession a piece of paper that spelled Missy’s disgrace. She had compared Corey’s DNA with that of the man convicted of raping Missy. According to the test results, they were not a match; the man in prison had not been Missy’s rapist.
“That woman went into your office and stole your son’s DNA!” Heather reminded Missy. “She took something that belonged to your baby so she could get rid of you. Then she didn’t even give you time to have a smooth exit. There was no reason for her to make you leave the next week! It made you look like some kind of criminal or something!”
Heather had been watching from afar, having left the show several years earlier to start Heather’s Hope. She couldn’t believe the things that Maxine put Missy through in those last days, releasing a vague, accusatory statement to the press that made it look like Missy had done something horrible. And to Missy’s shock, no one on the show came to her defense. They all gave statements to the press that made it look like they thought she deserved her fate.
“Remember the way Whitney just dismissed you on the show, saying that the show wouldn’t suffer at all when you were gone, that we all have to take responsibility for our actions, some kind of bullshit like that?” Heather said, getting riled up all over again. “When she had been running off to hotel rooms with the fucking president of the network? And Molly, with her pill addiction, making all those jokes at your expense? And Callie Sherman, making it look like the network might have had something to do with your dismissal? Callie was supposed to be your friend, Missy! How would all the people at the network feel if they knew that Callie had given birth to the executive producer’s child and was covering it up with some bullshit story about a sperm donor? Imagine the sexual harassment suits and countersuits!”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Missy said, her voice sounding a bit stronger now. “They do need to pay for what they did.”
Heather exhaled a long, cleansing breath. Had she been holding her breath that whole time? She hadn’t even realized her body had been so tense. She was spooked by even the remote chance that Missy would run scared. Heather couldn’t have that. Not when they were all so close to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to disgrace the queen bee herself. Heather strongly believed that people reaped what they sowed. Maxine had been destroying people for so long, with seemingly no remorse, that Heather was starting to see it as her duty to make sure some of that karma started coming back to Maxine. That was one of the driving forces on her show, to make sure that justice was served. Here was a chance to bring some justice to Mrs. Robinson. As she let Missy hang up, Heather could hear the Simon & Garfunkel song “Mrs. Robinson” playing in her head.
“So here’s to you . . .”
When Lizette reached the West Side studios of The Lunch Club, she raced upstairs to find Maxine. The ladies were in the postshow debriefing with the producers, in a small lounge next to the makeup room. Lizette peeked inside the doorway and saw bored expressions around the room—except for Maxine, who looked annoyed. When Lizette and Maxine made eye contact, Lizette saw a darkness descend over Maxine’s face. Something told Lizette that she might be the one responsible for Maxine’s pissed-off expression. Well, whatever it was, Lizette knew she would get a quick parole when she presented Maxine with her tidbit, the title of Missy’s book.
Lizette waited outside the lounge for the meeting to end. She waved at Callie, the NBN executive, who slipped out of the meeting early. Lizette watched Callie disappear down the hallway. Lizette had never felt totally comfortable around Callie. Lizette considered herself a romantic, one who respected the sanctity of marriage. When she heard that Callie was having an affair with the very married Josh Howe, the show’s executive producer, she lost a great deal of respect for Callie. Lizette had always thought Callie was beautiful and classy, but she had felt the need to re-evaluate that second adjective. Of course Josh was a big boy and shouldered much of the responsibility for cheating on his wife, but Lizette didn’t understand how Callie could look at herself in the mirror every morning. Lizette and her friends had a word for women like Callie: skeezer. It was a combination of s
kank, sleaze, and whore.
“And where have you been?”
It was Maxine, emerging from the meeting in front of the bunch, and it was directed at Lizette.
“Had an interesting meeting uptown,” Lizette said. She stepped closer to Maxine, drawing looks from Shelly, Molly, and Whitney as they walked by. “I have a bit of news about Missy’s book.”
She saw Maxine’s eyebrows rise. “Okay, let’s duck in here for a minute,” Maxine said, heading for an unoccupied office that belonged to one of the producers. They went inside and Maxine shut the door behind them—oblivious to the fact that the producer was just about to follow them into her own office. The producer was going to say something, to object to the door being slammed in her face. But instead she turned around and decided to go get another cup of coffee.
“Well, what is it, Lizette?” Maxine said. Maxine was trying to be cool about it. She didn’t want to look so eager in front of a subordinate because she thought eagerness in this situation translated into fear.
“I had a meeting with a lawyer from Patterson and White. He’s one of the lawyers actually working on Missy’s book.”
Maxine pursed her lips together. She looked impressed, but she didn’t say anything.
“He said he would work on getting me a copy of the manuscript. But he did have one piece of information for us. He told me the title of the book. It’s called Satan’s Sisters.”
Maxine’s eyes widened so much that Lizette could see white all around her pupils. Lizette thought she could even see redness rushing to Maxine’s heavily rouged cheeks, which were still wearing the TV pancake makeup.
“My God, is that really the title?” Maxine said. She couldn’t even veil her shock and nerves. She looked down and sat in the nearest chair she could find. Lizette had expected Maxine’s head to spin around and pea soup to spout from her mouth, but for a split second she was worried that Maxine might actually pass out.
“That damn Chris Rock!” Maxine said, her face now a scowl.
The “Satan’s sisters” line had actually come from the great comedian’s only appearance on The Lunch Club, quite a few years back. He had sat on the couch between them and explained why he had always thought it would be the scariest, most unpleasant thing in the world to be sitting on the couch between them. He said, “I know Maxine says this show is like sitting down and having a conversation with your sisters—well, I don’t have sisters . . . but trust me . . . this is not like sitting with your sisters. It’s more like sitting with Satan’s sisters.” The audience howled with laughter, and the media loved the analogy, but Maxine did not appreciate the joke any more than she appreciated all those years of parodies of her slightly sleepy eye. Lord knows she had spent enough money over the years tightening it to the point where it was barely noticeable now . . . but when she first started out in the business it was very pronounced and the bane of her existence. This fresh new hell Rock unleashed with his comment was as if her eye had gone back to sleep.
“Okay, so we know just by the title that Missy is trying to get all the attention that she can,” Maxine said. “Is this lawyer a reliable source? What’s his name? Perhaps I should talk to him.”
The idea of putting Martin Peters and Maxine in the same room kind of scared Lizette to death. She wasn’t a journalist, but her instincts told her she needed to protect her source on this one.
“Yes, he’s very reliable,” Lizette said, now a little worried that she just attached the adjective “reliable” to Martin Peters—an attorney who was about to break all kinds of ethics laws for the possibility of a piece of ass. Lizette purposely didn’t answer Maxine’s second question, hoping Maxine would just keep it moving.
“Well, the second you get your hand on that manuscript, you let me know,” Maxine said.
Lizette nodded.
Maxine got up and headed for the door, indicating that the meeting was over. But before she walked out, she turned around and said to Lizette, “Oh, and great work, by the way.” Then she smiled. Lizette was stunned. It didn’t happen very often, Maxine smiling at her. She wished she could have taken out her cell phone and snapped a picture, something to show her grandkids one day.
WHITNEY HAD GOTTEN A text from Riley on Sunday night, just before she went to bed, telling her that they could meet at the Inn right after Monday’s show. Because Eric was either in Nantucket or already on his way to Europe for some big exposé on plastic surgery, Whitney had all night and morning to think about her rendezvous. She had gone out over the weekend to Kiki de Montparnasse, the French lingerie shop in SoHo, and picked up a couple of extremely risqué items—things that Whitney wouldn’t have dared purchase a few years ago. As a matter of fact, before she started her affair with Riley, Whitney would never have even gone into such a place. She would have thought it was a store for high-priced escorts or something.
As Whitney made her way back to her office after the post-show debriefing, she couldn’t believe how different decadent underwear made her feel. It had been a long time since she had purchased sexy panties and bras for herself. Actually, thinking about it a little more, she realized this had been a first—all the other occasions had been gifts from men, or tacky bridal shower presents. Skimpy lingerie from the famous Greene Street store wasn’t exactly at the top of the must-buy list for a mother of four who had been married for sixteen years. But Whitney, who discovered Kiki in Paris when she covered France’s fashion week several years ago, was thrilled by how sexy and confident the lingerie made her feel. She even felt sharper and wittier on the show that morning, like crotchless drawers had some kind of superpowers. When she slipped them on, she turned into Super Slut! The thought made her laugh to herself.
When she reached her office, she got a call on her cell phone. She saw from the caller ID that it was from Dalton, the fancy Manhattan private school that the twins, Ashley and Bailey, had attended since they were in kindergarten. It could only mean something was wrong. Whitney snatched up the phone and answered while her stomach suddenly went into a spin cycle.
“Mrs. Harlington?” the voice on the other end said. “Sorry to bother you, but your daughter Ashley is here in the office and seems to be sick. We were wondering if perhaps you could come pick her up?”
Whitney flashed on an image of Ashley, the drama queen, conning the school nurse so that she could get out of school early. Whitney was incredibly annoyed. She was just about to catch a cab to the Inn. She really didn’t want to call Riley and cancel. She had been dreaming all weekend about his head between her legs and the things he would soon do to her. No, she had to see him.
“Um, okay,” Whitney said, trying to think. Where the hell was Eric when she needed him? The man was always working on some damn “big” story. As if Whitney spent her days watching soap operas. He was utterly useless to her and to the family. Whenever something came up, it always landed on her, hard. Well, this time she was going to push back. The fact that she was a mother didn’t mean she wasn’t entitled to a life. If she wanted to meet her lover for some spicy afternoon delight, her daughter was going to have to come second for once. And besides, it was Ashley. Whitney could never totally believe Ashley when the end result would be Ashley getting something that she wanted. Now, if Ashley had been begging Whitney to let her go to school, then she’d be believable.
“Mrs. Harlington?” the school nurse said, probably wondering why this was taking Whitney so long.
“Can you put Ashley on the phone, please?”
Well, the girl certainly tried to sound sick when she got on the phone. Her voice sounded like somebody had just slammed the child in the head with a baseball bat. But Whitney wasn’t going to be swayed. Ashley had Meryl Streep–like skills when it came to acting and manipulation. Fighting every maternal instinct in her being, Whitney told Ashley to catch a cab home.
“Catch a cab?!” Ashley said, stunned. Her voice suddenly sounded a lot stronger. “Mom, you can’t be serious?!”
Whitney felt bad, but dammit,
the girl was fourteen. There were kids two years younger than Ashley taking the subway to school every day. Even kids at Dalton. One cab ride wouldn’t hurt her.
“Oh, come on, Ash, it’s really not that big a deal,” Whitney said. “If you don’t have any cash, you can pay the cabbie with your debit card.”
“But Mom, I’m sick!” Ashley said.
“Yes, I’m aware of the fact that you said you don’t feel well. But unless I’m mistaken, I didn’t hear that something was wrong with your legs?”
A long pause on the other end. “Wow, okay, Mom. I hope I make it home.”
Whitney almost wanted to laugh. Any other time, this girl would lie, cheat, and steal for some independence. Now she was acting as if a cab ride by herself would lead her into a life of white slavery.
“I’m sure you’ll make it, dear,” Whitney said. “I have a meeting I can’t miss. I’ll see you very soon.”
Whitney was already daydreaming about lying in Riley’s arms. As far as she was concerned, Ashley was over, resolved. The thought of Riley naked and waiting at the Inn was inspiring enough to overcome any remnant of Whitney’s maternal guilt.
MOLLY WALKED BACK INTO her apartment and collapsed on the couch. She was having a hard time purging the image of Roger Mason fleeing her room at Caesars. That stunned look on his face was going to haunt her. She saw his shock and she saw a little fear, but she also thought she saw something else in Roger’s face: disappointment. The man actually liked her and he was looking forward to being intimate with her. This was a man who fucked women who looked like Dara Cruz every weekend. The fact that he might have been disappointed that she went psycho on him spoke volumes. Molly could feel the loneliness in her belly, like a stomachache. That was her big shot at finding some companionship and she had screwed it up. Roger wasn’t the best-looking guy in the world, but she did like the way she felt in his massive arms. And who was she kidding—she was so lonely she’d do Freddy Krueger if he threw a glance in her direction. The fact of the matter was that Molly was still gun-shy when it came to men. She still hadn’t fully recovered from her marriage that had ended so dramatically several years back.
