"I'll see you when your book comes out," he promised. "Remember, the whole show's yours—I'm a man of my word."
"I won't be here either," David told him. "I'm going back to L.A. in a couple of hours."
The two men looked at each other. Monty nodded, held out a hand, and they shook.
"I'm staying on for a few days, so no good-byes yet," Georgiana said, smiling, when he turned to her.
Monty nodded. He looked at Elizabeth. "I'll talk to you later?"
"Yes, I'll look forward to it."
He headed for the front door after giving Dorothy a kiss.
In a few minutes David, Elizabeth, and Patty went down together to the lobby. The doorman flagged a cab for Patty, and she went off to Penn Station to catch her train to New Jersey. David retrieved his luggage from the doorman's storage area and he and Elizabeth stood in the vestibule, underneath the Tiffany glass dome, while the doorman looked for another cab.
"Are we sure we don't have a—that we can't—?" David asked her.
She nodded, swallowing, holding her arms tightly across her chest. "Not you and me. It couldn't work."
"Elizabeth," he said.
She saw the sadness in his eyes. She reached up, took his face in her hands, and kissed his lips softly. And then she smiled and walked back into the building, waving good-bye over her shoulder.
56
Their little luncheon—Dorothy and Henry and Elizabeth and Georgiana—was quiet and subdued. Everyone was distracted by his or her own thoughts.
Elizabeth did not even know what she thought about anything connected with her life anymore. She was coming and going and meeting herself in every doorway. A few weeks ago she had been living in England and now she wished she never had to go back. A few weeks ago her emotional life had consisted of her students and Elizabeth Farren, a countess who had been dead for almost two hundred years, and now her life was intimately involved with what seemed like two hundred people simultaneously.
"Excuse me, Miss Elizabeth?" Sasha said to her in the middle of their meal. "Mr. Smith's producer wishes to speak to you immediately."
Elizabeth excused herself and went to the telephone. Mike said to turn on Monty's show immediately, there was news breaking that Monty said Elizabeth needed to be aware of. Fast.
Monty had dashed to the studio straight from the Hillingses'. The show was well under way when a caller said, "I don't know what's the world coming to, Big Mont, if a beautiful girl like Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres turns out to be a lesbian."
"What?" Monty said, instinctively reaching for the off button he swore he would never use on a caller. "What are you talking about?"
"Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres is a lesbian," the caller repeated.
"I'm sorry, but you've got it wrong, my friend," Monty said. "So wrong, you cannot imagine."
"I didn't get it wrong, Big Mont," the caller said, "I got it straight from the news rack at the 7-Eleven on my way to work this morning. Everybody at the coffee area was talking about it."
That's when Monty's producer had come into the studio waving the new edition of the Inquiring Eye. "Let me see that," Monty's audience heard him say, crumpling the tabloid as he grabbed it.
"Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres's Lesbian Lover! Actress Loved Her and Left Her!"
"Ladies and gentlemen," Montgomery said, ignoring the pit in his stomach. "I, Montgomery Grant Smith, your fearless leader in all things correct, must, once again, rely on my own extraordinary life to set the record straight. There is no way—let me repeat, no way—Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres is gay. I know because I am dating her."
People started shouting in the control room.
"They don't believe me," he told his audience. "You should see them in the control room here, they're all making faces at me, shouting at me that I can't say that I'm dating the beautiful actress, Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres. Well, I am. Ask her. And now, dear fans, you know why I am in New York."
That's when he scribbled a note to Mike, telling him to call Elizabeth.
"She may get out of it, but it's gonna be close," the head of the public relations team told Jessica Wright over the phone at DBS. "I don't know how the hell you managed it, Jess, but Montgomery Grant Smith is just about the only person who could pull this off."
"Pull what off?" the TV talk-show hostess asked him.
"His defense of Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres," he said.
"What are you talking about?" Jessica said.
"On the radio—on his show. He's on the air right now saying there's no way in hell Georgiana can be gay because he's dating her. I thought you'd arranged it."
"What!" Jessica pushed her intercom. "Find Alexandra and tell her to turn on Montgomery Grant Smith's show, pronto. It's urgent."
"Why the disbelief?" Monty demanded of his audience. "Why doesn't anyone believe that Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres would go out with me?"
"Maybe because she's a classic Hollywood liberal, Monty," a sympathetic caller suggested.
"She's hardly a classic Hollywood liberal, my friend," Monty said in a high-handed voice. "She's a genuine British peer, that's what she is—her father is a viscount."
"Her mother's from Brooklyn!" the next caller cried. "How could she be a genuine peer if her mother's from Brooklyn?"
"Ah! And therein lies the beauty of her story, my friends," Monty said without missing a beat. "Her father is British nobility, but she prefers not to make use of her title: the Honorable—and I underscore. The honorable—the Honorable Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres. And she prefers to work and live and pay taxes in America. If we had more immigrants like Georgiana, I'd say let them all come!"
Monty laughed. Now it was getting fun.
The network was flooded with calls from all over the country. The pit in his stomach had eased. It was going to be okay, he thought. Regardless of what Georgiana had done or had not done, by the end of the day she would at least have fifteen million conservatives out there who would swear she was the target of a smear campaign simply because she was going out with Montgomery Grant Smith.
"Monty wants you to come to the studio," Elizabeth said breathlessly, holding the portable phone in her hand. "Can you handle going on the air with him?"
"Oh God!" Georgiana said, holding her face in her hands.
"Tell Monty she will be right over," Dorothy said.
Georgiana sat bolt upright. "But—"
"Elizabeth will go with you and you will go on the air and you will face this like the wonderful, talented, and courageous young woman you are!" Dorothy told her. "Besides, dear, Monty will help you. I know he will."
"All right," Georgiana said, jumping up.
The calls did not stop. AT&T said a circuit had blown with the overload on the 800 number. Evidently many of Big Mont's listeners had something to say about his dating a beautiful movie star who was being so brutally victimized by a smear campaign in that rag the Inquiring Eye.
"It's those feminist storm troopers, Big Mont, I tell ya!" a caller was saying.
The studio door opened and Georgiana was led inside.
"They can't stand the idea of her going out with you, so they say she's a queer like them!" the caller continued.
"Oh, God," Georgiana said, turning right around to go back out.
Elizabeth blocked her way.
"As emotionally dysfunctional as I tend to think most feminists are," Monty said into the microphone, "I don't think their sexuality is the problem, my friend. The problem is that they—and all these special-interest groups—want my job and my money without having to work for them the way I have to! And the Democrats buy it every time!" He shoved an ad cartridge into the console. "Okay, folks, we'll be back after this message with Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres. That's right, that's what I said—Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres will be here in the studio when we come back."
The on-air light went off and Monty slid off his headphones and stood up. "You okay?" he asked Georgiana.
"I think so," she said weakly.
"Sit there," he instructed. "Mike, get her a headset. Elizabeth, sit on the other side of her." Everybody started moving. "Erica," Monty said to Mike's assistant, "get Georgiana a cup of very strong tea loaded with milk and sugar."
"But—" Georgiana said.
"Do as Big Mont says," Monty told her. "And when it comes, I want you to drink it straight down. It'll help."
"Okay, can you hear all right?" Mike asked her. Georgiana nodded, adjusting the headset. "This is the volume control," Mike said, showing her the knob. "And make sure to speak into the microphone."
"She's only done a million interviews, Mike," Monty said. "Georgiana," he continued, sitting down, "you just follow my lead and we'll get through this."
She nodded.
Monty looked at Elizabeth and winked. "Piece of cake. It'll be fun. Relax, everybody." And then he leaned forward to switch on the intercom to the engineering room. "Cram any more people in there, guys, and you're going to knock the wall down." To Georgiana, "You've got a lot of fans rooting for you." He looked up at the clock.
"In ten, Monty," the engineer said.
He watched the clock, lips pursed. The light came on.
"And, as promised, folks, she's divine and gorgeous, the Honorable Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres is here in the studio," Monty said. "You should see the guys swooning in the control room. Hello, Georgiana." His audience heard the sound of a kiss. "Sit down over there, love."
Georgiana smiled nervously. She glanced behind her and saw that studio employees were packed into the engineering room, pressing against the glass.
"Well now, you've had quite a day," Monty said to her. "I warned you when we first met that anything was likely to happen if you hung out with me, that certain people wouldn't be able to stand it."
"Yes, well, Monty," Georgiana said nervously, "you were right."
Lowering his voice to a very serious tone, he said, "Quite frankly, Georgiana, no one believes that you'd go out with me."
"Well, they're wrong." Pause. Then a very deep, sexy laugh. "Aren't they, Monty?"
He made a groan of utter surrender and then whispered into the microphone, "Does this sound like a lesbian to you folks?"
"And I think there are several things that need to be laid out on the table," she added. "No pun intended, Big Mont."
People were screaming in the control room.
"Pandemonium, folks," Monty said calmly, "has just broken out in the control room."
"Monty," Georgiana said, "the first thing I think your audience should be made aware of is that you're one of the sexiest men alive. When Montgomery Grant Smith lets himself go," she murmured in an aside to the microphone, "believe me, there is no greater turn-on."
The crowd in the control howled and hooted and banged on the glass.
"The pandemonium has turned into riot," Monty said into the microphone. "And I am but merely sitting here, modestly blushing.”
"Monty?" Georgiana said in her bedroom voice.
"Yes, Georgiana?" he murmured.
"I also want your listeners to know that, yes, it's true, I have been to bed with a woman. I don't want to lie to them about that."
Monty made a face as if to say: Watch it! Watch it! Don't do yourself in!
"And so I want to ask you, Montgomery Grant Smith," she continued, still in that bedroom voice, "if, in your opinion, that has made me a better or worse lover?"
The control room exploded again. After a few moments, the noise settled down and there was a moment of radio silence.
"It has made you the most exciting woman I have ever met, I swear to God."
This time the door to the studio opened, and all across America they could hear the hoots and whistles and screams and banging of the crowd in the control room.
Elizabeth was quietly laughing in her corner.
The interview went on for the next forty-five minutes. They fielded calls, went over their mutual sexual attraction, and Monty explained that their relationship was being forced into hiatus since they lived and worked in separate cities. Monty also made sure his listeners understood that Georgiana's bisexuality was something that made her even more attractive to him.
The screener wisely followed the producer's instructions and did not put through any of the outraged thousands of Monty's regular listeners who were flabbergasted by this entire thing.
When the show was over, Georgiana threw herself at Monty, kissed him deeply, and then went out to sign autographs for network employees. An hour later she was taken downstairs to Monty's limo and whisked off to parts unknown.
Exhausted, Monty and Elizabeth went upstairs to his temporary New York office. She sat back in a chair and closed her eyes, listening as Monty fielded a few outside calls from the press. Then he told his assistant to hold all calls, closed the door, and threw himself down on the couch. After a long sigh, he looked up to the ceiling and said, "You could have told me."
"It was not for me to tell," Elizabeth said, turning her chair around to look at him.
They sat there in silence. Monty with his eyes closed, arm over his face, Elizabeth watching him. The long striped sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, his tie was loose, he had a large ring of perspiration under his arm.
"It was wonderful, what you did," Elizabeth finally said. "Although the part about the feminists was rather dumb—" She stopped and smiled. "Oh, what the hell. You were great. I only regret we can't rewire your brain."
He chuckled. And then, from under his arm, "You know, Georgiana and I really did—I mean, we really—well..."
"Went to bed?" Elizabeth said casually.
"Yes," he said, bringing his arm down off his face to look at her. "Does that shock you?"
"No," she said. "Georgiana's right, you are a very attractive man—when you let yourself be vulnerable."
He blinked. "What?"
"I said you're a very attractive man."
"I need to lose weight," he said.
She shrugged. "If you want to, you'll lose it."
He winced a little and held the expression, looking at her through one eye. "You're not a lesbian too, are you?"
She smiled. "No, but it's not as if I haven't wished I were on occasion."
"You're in academe," he said, "you'd make a great lesbo."
"You are either the most obnoxious idiot, or the biggest genius, in the history of radio."
He laughed.
"Georgiana told me about you two—what happened," Elizabeth said. "That's when I knew I liked you, when I realized that it had been nothing to her but much more to you."
He was immediately embarrassed. "Nothing to her," he repeated, groaning and putting his hand over his face again. After a moment, he said, "So what did Aussenhoff ever do that was so special? Why are you so hung up on him?"
"But I'm not," she said. "I haven't been for a long time. I just needed to be reminded."
Monty lowered his arm and turned his head to look at her again.
Now Elizabeth was looking down at her lap, head hanging. It was not a pose familiar to her.
He sat up suddenly and placed his feet on the floor. "I want to say something to you, Elizabeth, but I have to warn you, it makes no sense."
"Then maybe you'd better not say it," she murmured.
"I don't know how we can manage it," he said, "but I want to keep seeing you." She didn't say anything. "Elizabeth?" he said quietly.
She had one elbow propped up on the chair arm now, and was holding her face in her hand. "Do you remember what you talked about on your show the day you brought me the radio in Queens?" she asked him.
He tried to think. "No."
"You talked about people who try to commit suicide and about people in 'nut houses,' as you called them." Elizabeth raised her head. "Monty," she said, "I'm one of those people you talked about, who you said should be allowed to do everyone a favor and get rid of themselves so they won't be a burden on society anymore."
Monty sat there, not understanding.
Elizabe
th stood up. "You have any Kleenex in this place?"
"Paper towels in the desk, middle drawer," Monty said. "I don't have a handkerchief, sorry."
Elizabeth went around the desk, found a paper towel, wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and walked over to the window. Hand resting on the pane, she said, "So what do you think about that, Monty?"
"I think," he said, standing up and walking over to her, "that Aussenhoff should be killed for what he did to you."
"But he didn't do it, that's just the point," she said, looking out the window. "I was heading toward a breakdown for years, only I had no idea." She turned to look at him. "There was never any reason for me to think I might be mentally ill. There's no mental illness in my family; there's no alcoholism, no drug addiction, no abuse, nothing. For absolutely no reason I was near the deep end—and it started when I was a child." She paused. "I was ill, Monty. I was one of those people you were talking about on the radio. Only I had money to pay for some very expensive care and other people don't. What I'm saying is, I heard you say that you should be spared crazy people like me. And I think you believe that."
"But you're not crazy, Elizabeth."
"Not anymore, no." She sniffed, looking down for a moment. "But I think you must be crazy to have some of these views you have. They're so defensive, so self-occupied; when I hear your show I feel like I'm hearing the whole country sliding into mental illness." She looked up. "I believe in kindness, Monty. I believe in helping people learn how to better themselves, to learn, to grow. And so I don't understand how someone like me can ever be acceptable to someone like you, and I certainly cannot pretend to understand my feelings about you—except to confess that I have been mentally ill and maybe my feelings for you demonstrate that I might still be."
The last was said with a tearful little smile.
He came over and wrapped his arms around her. "Tell me," he whispered.
And so, standing there, in his arms, Elizabeth did. About her increasing insomnia over the years, the panic attacks that started after she moved in with David, the tranquilizers, which seemed to do the trick. At first. About running to England after David left her and how she was taking too many of those triangular little pills so that nothing was fully registering, nothing was getting resolved. And about the night she had been interviewing at Oxford, and she had gone to dinner by herself and had drunk wine by herself, which she knew she shouldn't do on those pills but did anyway. On the way home she wanted to buy some vodka and kill herself with the booze and pills, but she didn't because she could hear her mother saying, "Who would possibly do such a thing?"
Any Given Moment (The Alexandra Chronicles Book 3) Page 33
