“Why do I want to watch Gotham?”
Jerry just smirked, but he didn’t have to tell me. I knew.
“Excuse me,” I said, going to my office.
Claire followed me. “You really want to be alone for this, or just away from Jerry?”
“Just away from Jerry,” I said. “Come on in.”
I flicked on the monitor and sat back to watch as Amy, visibly distraught, told her viewers she wanted to come clean about some things and called on them for understanding. And then she got my respect, because she came right out and said, “I have committed a sin and broken a commandment I was raised to believe was sacred. I have committed adultery.”
Whew! Claire and I looked at each other. Amy really was coming clean, but as admirable as that was, I wasn’t keen on watching my dirty laundry exposed to even more complete strangers in TV land.
“I fell in love with a married man and he fell in love with me. We tried to avoid each other, but we couldn’t. I want you to know, though, that he and I did not become intimate until he and his wife had already taken steps to dissolve their marriage.”
I didn’t believe this for a minute. This smacked of rationalization, backdating. But she seemed to be genuinely suffering for her sin and she didn’t name names. And while I was deeply embarrassed that my friends and colleagues watching this knew she was talking about me, even I couldn’t find fault with her performance.
Only Amy Penny could confess to adultery and come off looking like the piteous victim of cupid. She quoted Pascal – “The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know,” a favorite of Burke’s – and, with tears in her shimmering eyes, she asked her viewers once again to understand and to believe in the redemptive power of love. Then she got carried away, confessing to all this diddly stuff too, like she couldn’t stop herself, she just had to unburden to two million or so of her closest friends; a bird she killed with a slingshot at age eight, a girl she teased to tears when she was ten, a scarf she stole from a friend in junior high school, and so on and so on, until she was radiant, approaching rapture, the burden of her guilt lifted. Redeemed.
I came to Carthage, and all around me in my ears were the sizzling and frying of unholy loves. No, I wasn’t quite ready to let bygones be bygones.
“It isn’t fair,” I told Claire after the whole ridiculous episode was over and Amy had moved to the kitchen set for a segment on cooking for wheat-allergic children. She teased the segment and then tossed to commercial. “She thinks she can just confess and then have it be over. Confess, go to commercial, and then – time for cooking! No, she hasn’t suffered enough.”
“Life isn’t fair,” Claire said dreamily. “Let it go.”
Claire had fallen in love with a new guy over the weekend, a news producer for MTV, and she was “happier than a bee in a Burmese poppy field,” as she put it, which made her a bit unbearable. She put her hand on my arm. “It’s time to heal, Robin. Forget about Burke and Amy. You need to fall in love.”
“Yeah, like I need a tax audit,” I said, but it was false bravado.
The fact is, I still haven’t heard from Eric and I was concerned. It had been so long since I’d been single and dating that I’d forgotten how to handle the guy who forgets to call you after a date. The correct way, of course, is to forget about him completely. He’s either gutless or inconsiderate. The wrong way is to make excuses for him. He was probably just busy. Couldn’t get to a phone. Was involved in a disabling accident.
“That’s my vice – love, I mean,” Claire said. “Seriously. My therapist says I’m addicted to love, like in the Robert Palmer song. I just go from man to man constantly seeking the first flush of love.”
“So what? You’re young, you rarely drink, you don’t do drugs, and you don’t eat meat. Love is a legit vice because it’s worse for you than all those other things.”
“Love is better than all those things,” she said.
“Not any love I’ve known. Look at my example, Claire. Or look at Joanne Armoire, for that matter. I don’t think she’d give a ringing endorsement of love these days. I mean, look where it led her. To blackmail and disgrace,” I said. “Were you being investigated and/or blackmailed, Claire?”
“No,” she said.
“How can you be sure?”
“Who’d investigate me? I’m a producer in special reports, an embarrassing network cash cow.”
“I’m a reporter here and I was investigated.”
“That’s different. You’re on the air and, besides, the guy had a thing for redheads, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. Still, how can you be sure? You’ve got secrets, right?”
“Not one,” she said sunnily.
“Sure you do.”
“What are my secrets?” she challenged.
“Um, I bet on weekends you dress in camouflage and liberate lab animals, right? Or you load up a Supersoaker with red paint and mow down fur-bearing widows on Fifth Avenue from a moving vehicle.”
“Not even close,” she said, very Mona Lisa, impossible, as always, to provoke. She gathered up a pile of medical tapes that showed swimming sperm and went to isolate some good wallpaper – background – shots.
As soon as she left, I logged into the computer, thinking perhaps Eric would contact me this way. A message blinked in the corner of my screen. I retrieved it. As I read it, icy fear cracked up my back like lightning. It came from the generic login “Intern.”
“I know what you did,” it said. I know what you did. That spooked me. Someone knew what I did. Who was it? What did he know about me? Was he the killer?
At lunch, I skulked around the cafeteria, looking at everyone sideways. Was it you? Or you? Whoever you are, will you expose me? Or will I expose you? I noticed a few other on-air people looking suspiciously around, but it wasn’t until the afternoon that I found out all the on-air people had received this same message and it was believed to be a prank, something one of those boho writers would pull.
In response, Dunbar ordered two security guards to stand guard at Democracy Wall. This caused an outcry amount the writers, who said it was a freedom of speech issue, that the anonymity of the board ensured a free forum without fear of management reprisals.
“Now,” they said, “such speech will be inhibited by the presence of ‘The Man.’”
If Dunbar’s purpose was to stifle dissent, it didn’t work. The writers, led by their producer/peasant-king Louis Levin, quickly opened a secret file in the computer, hidden in an obscure corner, and locked with passwords that changed every couple of hours. Louis messaged me to look under “Research.Writers” for a file called “Radio Free Babylon,” Password: “dirt,” where I found a neatly organized, concise catalogue of ANN personalities who had confessed and what they had confessed to, along with little satirical comments contributed by the newsroom.
There was a fair bit of résumé padding among the correspondents, widespread pot smoking in college, minor conflicts of interest, one old drug conviction, the employment of illegal aliens to help around the house, like that. Madri Michaels’s “real” age was revealed, as was Dillon Flinder’s. Among the on-air people conspicuous by their absence were Greg Browner and his ex-wife Solange Stevenson. I was surprised Solange hadn’t confessed to something new and then made a show of it. It wasn’t like her to pass up an opportunity like that.
Odd too, that both Greg and Solange had nothing to confess –- at least about each other. I concluded that after fifteen years of marriage, they probably had equal amounts of dirt on each other and a no first-strike agreement.
I put my feet up on my desk as I scrolled down through the list. I was supposed to be thinking about sperm, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the Griff murder. While I was stuck in the office, others were searching for answers and, I was sure, finding them. I searched the computer list for Susan Brave, but there was nothing. Everyone else thought it was just “talent” who had been targeted, and until Susan came forward, they would go on believing so.
Shit. I
shouldn’t have promised not to repeat what Susan told me. I wondered if Joanne’s conscience was bothering her on this. What goes around comes around, right? History was repeating itself, with a twist. This time, because of information I was withholding, the police might very well be off on a wild goose chase, and a killer might go unpunished. First I kept that worthless sheet of paper and now I was keeping Susan’s secret.
Susan. Poor Susan, who spent the first half of the party downing Jonestown Punch and the second half ridding her system of it in the ladies’ room, “puking purple,” as it was commonly known. I sent her a message to see how she was doing – and maybe get a little more information from her – but she wasn’t logged in.
I was hyperaware, sitting in front of the computer, that just a hundred or so feet of fiber- optic cable was all that stood between me and Eric. I could almost feel it humming beneath my feet. But I wasn’t going to message him first. Maybe he’d thought I would be an easy conquest, vulnerable as I was, and when I proved difficult, he’d given up the fight. Well, I had bigger fish to fry, I thought, rolling a piece of six-ply script paper into my typewriter.
Jerry poked his head in. “I have an executive committee meeting.” He said. “Do you have a script coming? I want to see it when I get back.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I said.
Before I could write, I needed four cups of coffee, each with three sugars and three creams. After performing all the necessary rituals, I sat down to confront the judgmental paper in my typewriter. My stomach gurgled and cold sweat sprang from my neck and ran down my back. I typed a lead, then tore it out of the typewriter in disgust and put in another piece of copy paper. I typed another lead and this time ripped it out midsentence. Once I get the right first line down on paper the rest of the story pours itself out on the page. But the first line, the hardest line to write, just wouldn’t come to me.
I reminded myself what Hemingway prescribed for writer’s block: Just write one true sentence. Then I swore. “God bloody son of a bitch damn it all,” I shouted, and the glass walls of my office shook. Swearing often helps, I’ve found, but not this time. I felt the frustration build inside me. Clear your head, Robin, I told myself, and just write it. Just get the first word down. But I couldn’t even summon a first word. I got up and kicked over my trash can and that did the trick. As I was cradling my bashed foot, I saw clearly and very suddenly just how to begin and immediately hoped back to my typewriter.
After I hammered out the lead the rest of the story wrote itself. Jerry wasn’t in his office when I finished, so I dropped the script on his desk. Then I couldn’t resist sitting in his nice, padded chair and spinning around, putting my feet up on his desk and doodling on his blotter/calendar, where I noticed a very interesting thing. All the birth dates of key ANN and JBS executives were dutifully noted, along with a suggested gift. On February 11th, for instance, he’d written “Rupert Regelbrugge, Napoleon brandy.” Regelbrugge was vice-chairman for all of JBS, Jack Jackson’s right-hand man. I don’t know why that surprised me. Among ass kissers, Jerry was always the first to pucker.
Unfortunately for him, Jerry had written these dates down in pencil and it took me less than five minutes to erase the old information and replace it with new. I swapped Regelbrugge’s birthday with Dunbar’s and made the gifts more imaginative. “Rupert Regelbrugge,” it now read, “large black dildo.”
I got as far as the month of May when Jerry came in. As I looked on, seething, Jerry read over my script, moving his lips as he did, an annoying trait many people in television, particularly anchors, have. After fifteen minutes of red penciling, he handed me back a red-crossed mess.
“The stuff of life itself, his precious seed, a small vial that could have launched a hundred generations of Tarsus men, lost, perhaps forever,” I read. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I want to make it more dramatic.”
“You know, Jerry, we’re not in the drama business,” I said. “We’re in the news business.”
“I know that, Robin. But what you don’t realize is that our job is to help our viewers find the natural drama or pathos or whatever in a situation. We locate it for them …”
“And then hit them over the head with it?”
“Track it and cut it tomorrow,” Jerry said, grabbing his coat. “I’ve got to go. I’m having dinner with a friend of mine from 60 Minutes.”
Not all the news was bad for ANN that day. As the dirty laundry was being displayed – resulting, incidentally, in higher ratings all over the schedule – PR was flacking positive stories to friendly media columnists, stories on nice anchors with strong families and a commitment to their communities. For example, Sawyer Lash was happily married to his childhood sweetheart and had three kids. As a family, they sponsored a pile of overseas orphans, fasted and marched and bike-a-thonned for charity, and built houses with that group Jimmy Carter was associated with. Public Relations even called me, late in the day – I was obviously way down on their list – to find out if I had any redeeming qualities.
“Did you ever do anything really good for someone?” the PR intern asked me. “Something we can throw to the tabloids?”
I used to read erotic books on tape for blind people, in a very torchy voice, before books on tape became commonplace, but that was a while ago. I made a note to get more involved in my community in the future.
“I hope to one day become an organ donor,” I said. “And once a month, I beat myself with a spiked stick.”
“Weird,” said the intern on the other end of the phone. But he wrote this down and thanked me.
Mark O’Malley was at Keggers with some of the business-news people when I arrived. He told me he didn’t know if Griff had been investigating him – Griff had never contacted him. He just decided it was better to come out than to live in fear. I bought him a drink.
“What do you think about the Mangecet threat?” I asked him.
“He’s a threat, all right,” Mark said. “He already controls a bunch of JBS stock through a Christian no-load mutual fund in the financial-services arm of his empire. The fund holds ten percent of the stock, accumulated over a six-year period.”
“But ten percent isn’t enough to pose a real threat, is it?” I asked.
“Some of the stockholders have died in the last few years and their kids have sold already, not caring who they sold to. Maybe Mangecet is planning to ruin ANN to get as Jackson, affect the stock price, and make a play at the next stockholders’ meeting.”
“But the next stockholder meeting is six months away,” I said.
Others at the bar jumped into the discussion. Mangecet had been building liquidity since he bought out Pilgrim Publishing (with its profitable Christian sci-fi line) and that theme park in Arkansas with the world’s tallest freestanding Jesus at the entrance. Did he have the liquidity to pay the “disloyalty” price? Or just to be a spoiler, get enough stock to harass Jack Jackson and influence his programming and news-gathering decisions? The Mangecet theory was picking up steam when Mark, ever the reporter, began to argue against it.
“Jackson, Regelbrugge, and Browner control fifty-nine percent of the stock,” he said. “I can’t believe Mangecet would make a move on us now, with only ten percent. But he might have wanted to exert influence over our news policy.”
“Maybe it wasn’t planned the way it went,” Mickey, the barman, said.
I hadn’t been aware he was listening as he shot back and forth with beers. “It coulda backfired on them when Griff turned double agent.”
I had an additional problem with the Mangecet theory, which I couldn’t divulge. Why would Mangecet have someone like Susan Brave investigated? Or me? Maybe he didn’t want me investigated. Maybe Griff just added me because of that redheaded thing?
I saw McGravy over in the restaurant, so I said good-bye to Mark, and went to sit with Bob, who was alone at a table for two eating a bowl of soup with his left hand while squeezing modeling clay with his smoking hand.
�
�Bad day?” I said.
He gave me a look as he squeezed his clay. Stupid question.
“At least you’re not being demonized by the tabloid press,” I said.
“Not personally. Have a seat,” he said. “I’ve had reporters from other news organizations up the wazoo today.”
“Was anyone else at ANN being blackmailed by Griff?”
“No one else has admitted it.” An important distinction. “You know, while this media circus is going on, there’s flooding in the South, blizzards in the Rockies, fighting in the Balkans. There’s some kind of flu going around so we have sick-outs. Now five of our anchors and reporters are on suspension for ethics violations and three others are at home with the flu. Goddamn it, I wish I could smoke a cigarette! Did you see the six?”
“No.”
“A disaster, complete disaster. You know that young woman from Gallaudet, the deaf university?”
“Chrissie something.”
“Yeah. I brought her on as an intern to run tapes and write a little. The girl – lady – is a fine writer. So what does Kevin Peet do with her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Puts her into the newsroom assistant rotation right away and forgets about her. Then the prompter girl – lady – gets sick, and he grabs the nearest intern, who happens to be Chrissie, and puts her on TelePrompTer for the six. Puts her on headsets. Says something to her she can’t understand because she can’t lip-read that fast, and he takes off. It’s six, the show’s on, and she’s running the script through the prompter, just trying to figure it out as she goes along and make the best of it.”
When you’re running prompter, controlling how slow or fast the script feeds through, you follow the anchor’s reading for pace, which means you have to listen to him carefully on the headsets while following the text.
“And?”
“Sawyer Lash is the anchor,” he said.
“Uh oh.”
“He’s reading, and she can’t hear him or see his face. She starts to speed up the prompter a bit, so he reads a little faster, and Chrissie’s so engrossed in what she’s reading, and she reads so quickly that she speeds up the text even more without being aware of it. Sawyer is reading, faster and faster – straight from his eyes to his mouth without passing through his brain. He’s starting to sound like a Looney Tune.
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