What's a Girl Gotta Do?

by Sparkle Hayter

  “Yes yes yes yes no yes no no yes,” he beeped back. “And the Verrazano-Narrows in a moving vehicle,” he added.

  Around five o’clock Claire came into my office and said she wanted to discuss her career strategy in a more relaxed setting. Greg Browner was thinking of adding Nightline-esque backgrounder pieces profiling the celebrities on the show, and that would mean a reporter slot. Claire was dying to report.

  “Keggers?” I suggested. Keggers, our usual hangout, was cheaper and more convenient than Kafka’s, where she wanted to meet, and much less pretentious, or at least pretentious in a different way.

  “Expand your horizons,” Claire said. “You might even like the place. Besides, I want to talk about Greg and reporting and I want to do it away from the radar ears of journalists.”

  “Kafka’s then,” I said, and went back to the computer.

  For another hour, I scanned the wires for interesting murder stories, and then went off to find McGravy. The early evening, after the day shift was gone, was the best time to catch him in his office. I found him there carefully winding one of the twenty or so windup toys on his desk: lizards, wind-up sushi, kangaroos, robots, chattering teeth, and so forth, all of which seemed to be moving. More tactile replacements for cigarettes.

  “The great thing about quitting smoking,” McGravy said without looking up at me, “is that you can get away with all kinds of childish behavior under the banner of quitting smoking. I don’t think I’ve had so many toys in my life, or enjoyed them so much.”

  Not exactly dignified behavior for the network vice president in charge of editorial content, God bless him. Although he blames this behavior on giving up the toxic weed, calling this his second childhood, the truth is it’s more of a recurring childhood, and quitting smoking is just his latest excuse.

  He looked up at me now, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and laughed this grumbling kind of laugh. “What can I do you for?” he asked.

  “Jerry Spurdle …”

  McGravy rolled his eyes. “Now what?”

  “He sickens me. He wants to go undercover on this sperm bank story. He wants to donate sperm.”

  A pair of walking sneakers were winding down on his desk and he picked them up and rewound them before answering. To his side, a marching baseball walked off the edge and fell into the wastepaper basket, where it flailed its legs helplessly against the trash. McGravy bent over and retrieved it, then rewound it and sent it towards the other edge.

  “Sperm,” I reminded McGravy.

  “Well,” he said, rewinding the chattering teeth. “It might be necessary and there’s no way it can cause the kind of problem colon cancer did. You have to learn to bend, Robin.”

  “Bend, or bend over? Bob, it’s too hard for me to work for him,” I said, weariness in my voice, trying to appeal to his respect for individual personality. “He makes me so mad I want to pound him into the ground sometimes. It takes seven major muscle groups just to hold my tongue. Can’t you get me out of there?”

  “No, Robin, I can’t. My hands are tied,” he said, gesticulating with a toy duck. “Jerry wants you in that unit, and what Jerry wants, he gets. I’m sorry, Robin.”

  “Jerry wants me there?” I echoed. “What a sadist.”

  “Some people who know your temper, Robin, might say he’s a masochist,” Bob said. “He knows you’re smart and can get the job done. The fact is, you’re not exactly a hot commodity right now, and he is. As long as he keeps his overhead low and his profit high, he’ll be Dunbar’s fair-haired boy and he’ll get what he wants. You know Jerry has turned a huge profit in Special Reports ever since he took it over.”

  George Dunbar, the president of ANN, had been handpicked by Georgia Jack Jackson for his ability to squeeze dollars from dimes, and he loved Jerry Spurdle.

  Puzzled by Jerry’s success, the J-school grads down in the newsroom came up with two theories about how he’d made it to his position: Either he had color videos of network executives performing sexual acts with members of endangered species, or he performed those sexual acts on network executives himself.

  But I knew the truth. While the journalists of the network disdained him, the accountants loved him because he was cheap and the salesmen loved him because his series were easy to sell to sponsors. He made them that way; he aimed the shows at the sponsors as much or more than the viewers. He knew a famous maker of tampons and sanitary napkins would appreciate the concentrated female audience tuning into a series on Hollywood hunks, for instance. Spurdle bragged that his unit’s reports were the only ones never sponsored by anything that flashed an on-screen 800 number. He had real sponsors, no small boast at the network built by Slim Whitman and Ginsu knives.

  “Robin, let me tell you something I learned over the years I’ve been lucky enough to make a living in this business,” McGravy said.

  Uh-oh. I smelled a “When-I-worked-with-Murrow” story coming. This usually involved a homey anecdote or parable about some character he knew in the early days of television, culminating in an odd moral.

  Sure enough, McGravy told me about a man he used to work with at CBS, back in the olden, golden days before color transmission, who had a lot of talent but a bad temper. He could never compromise and not only did it make him unpopular around the office but it ruined several of his shows. One day, just as his show was about to go to air, he had a massive coronary and died. It was like a bad smell was removed from the place, McGravy said. Nobody missed him.

  He paused and I knew the big finish was coming.

  “The thing is, if you’re talented you can get away with being a sonofabitch, but nobody misses a sonofabitch when he dies.”

  Oh, like when I’m dead I’m going to care, I almost said. But then I remembered that I respect this man, so I held my tongue.

  I knew what he was trying to tell me, and I knew he was right. I had to be nicer to other people, be cooler, panic less, cuss less, smile more. Deep down, I knew all this and yet it galled me—it absolutely galled me—to have to take orders from Jerry Spurdle, a man for whom I had no respect, for whom I had nothing but contempt, a man who believed a woman was only a vehicle for the transport of her breasts.

  “I could make Spurdle fire me,” I said. “ANN would have to pay out my contract.”

  “I have no doubt.”

  “He shouldn’t fool with a woman who knows his credit card number. Because living well is not the best revenge, Bob. The best revenge, in my opinion, is huge crates of Depend undergarments delivered to his apartment door. Or live chickens maybe …”

  “Don’t do it, Robin. Nobody will hire you in this town right now. Nobody will hire you in Washington or L.A. either. You’ll end up doing paid programming or pollen stories on the Weather Channel for the rest of your life.” He stood up and leaned over the desk for emphasis.

  “No, I won’t.”

  “You’ll be selling tooth whitener at four in the morning on Nickelodeon. If you’re lucky. Because there are guys like Jerry everywhere, and sooner or later you have to learn how to deal with them. You’d better do it sooner, Robin.”

  “I’m not going to kiss Jerry’s ass.…”

  “I’m not asking you to kiss his ass. I expect you to stand up to him, to fight to lower the sleaze factor. But quitting is backing away from a fight just because it isn’t turning out precisely the way you want at the moment. Don’t chicken out. If you stay here, do your time in Special Reports, pretty soon everyone will forget about the … belch and the cannibalism thing, and I’ll be able to safely move you back to general news—maybe. But be patient, and remember, as the old saying goes, you get more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

  “Well, if you really want flies, you ought to try bullshit,” I said. “It’s an old folk remedy.”

  “I have faith in you, Robin, for whatever it’s worth,” Bob said. He wound up a monkey with cymbals and sent it towards me.

  “It’s worth a lot, Bob.”

  The monkey clanged its cy
mbals.

  Chapter Four

  BEFORE I WENT TO KAFKA’S, I had to stop at home to change clothes and to feed my dictatorial cat. Louise Bryant greeted me at the door with a contemptuous howl.

  “Relax, you’re not starving,” I said to her.

  Knowing that tone of voice, she adopted another tactic, kissing ass, rubbing her back against my leg and looking up at me with something almost like affection. If I didn’t feed her soon, she’d move to more punitive action, taking a clawed swat at the back of my leg. Louise Bryant was very Machiavellian.

  Louise Bryant came to us, to me, late in her life. It was like this: Burke wanted a baby, I didn’t. Some people are meant to be parents, and some of us, those with long histories of insanity in the family, for instance, are not. In the end it was moot, because it turned out I was infertile. Children just weren’t a realistic expectation without tens of thousands of dollars of costly and chancy in vitro. Burke needed a more fecund field than me (which he apparently thought he’d found in Amy Penny).

  So Burke and I compromised on a cat. Actually, we’d decided on a kitten but at the SPCA we changed our minds and took home this ancient, battle-scarred alley cat with a taste for restaurant dumpster food and roses, a strange fear of harmonica music and a less strange fear of thunderstorms. After an unknown number of years as a street cat she took to being a house cat surprisingly well, as though she was born to luxury. But right away, the battle of wills began between Louise Bryant and me over her diet. She refused to eat anything from a can unless I stir-fried it with greens and oyster sauce.

  Oddly enough, I do this every night for her. I open a can of Hill’s Science Diet and stir-fry it in a little olive oil with some bok choy. I do this for a cat I’m not even sure likes me.

  As soon as I put the plate down for her, she immediately forgot about my existence and buried her face in her food.

  I searched through my closet for something sort of chic and sort of bohemian to wear, something that would qualify for Kafka’s. I hadn’t been to Kafka’s, but I’d heard of it. It was the club of the minute, the newest mecca for young, stunning New Yorkers, like Claire. She ran with a gang that always included a lot of really beautiful, pseudo-bohemian actors, models, writers, and cerebral rock musicians who seemed on the verge of huge breaks. They all had respectable success at an early age, appearing in good off-Broadway plays or in small art films by promising young directors and they were very much in love with themselves. One of their number was making a documentary about them and their lifestyle, so whenever you’d see them in clubs, you’d see this cameraman and sound tech in their orbit, recording their every pithy bon mot and existential glance into space.

  I shouldn’t be so contemptuous, because the truth is, I’m jealous of them and their easy confidence. When I’m around hot young people I feel kind of cold and old. I often wish I could turn off that deep, dark neurotic part of myself at will and be breezy and shallow when I need to be, such as when I am facing the bouncers at some trendy club, worrying that they won’t let me in.

  Fortunately, red hair is very trendy now and I have a long, stubborn mass of it. Club bouncers, who are people I should not want to impress but do, love it and usually wave me right in.

  But when I got to Kafka’s, the two borderline IQs at the door made no move to admit me, although I was the only one waiting behind the red cordon.

  Housed in what was once a meat wholesaler’s warehouse, Kafka’s was an example of seedy chic, a fashionable bar located in New York’s meat district near the Hudson River waterfront. Ten years before, the neighborhood was the heart of the gay S & M district known as the Meat Rack. Since then, many of the leather bars had gone out of business, but the transitional transsexual prostitutes, half man half woman, the chicks with dicks as they called themselves, still worked the area.

  While I stood waiting for the bouncers to let me in, a car pulled up just down the street. There was a baby seat in the back. The front door of the station wagon opened, two long stockinged legs stretched out, and a tall, beautiful transsexual stepped into the spotlight of a street lamp.

  As the car squealed away, she slithered back into the shadows of an iron awning to wait for the next trick. I couldn’t even make her out in the darkness, she blended so well into the shadow, no doubt a useful skill in her dangerous profession. But then there was a bright flash of a lighter, which quickly died out. A few minutes later the lighter flashed again, first a yellow flash and then a quick blue-white flash. The lady was a crackhead.

  At this point, satisfied that they had demonstrated their power over my social destiny, the bouncers abruptly unfastened the cordon and waved me out of reality and into surreality.

  Inside, the bar was lit by blue-white halogen lights that shone vertically in cylinders from the floor, like some kind of force field. The place was busy for a weekday, and the beautiful people were three deep around the pale, glowing blue bar. Despite Vogue’s admonition that black was boring, almost everyone wore black as a base, accessorizing with bolder colors.

  “Can I get you something?” the bartender, a tall Oriental woman, asked. She had an English accent.

  “Vodka martini, dry, made with lemon Stoly, no garnish, on the rocks, lightly stirred,” I said. I love ordering that. Name’s Bond, James Bond. However, the pretension was lost on the bartender, who dutifully and absentmindedly stirred it up and handed it to me in a Lucite glass with a cockroach cleverly embedded in its base.

  Down at the end of the bar Claire’s usual gang of friends were hanging out but Claire was nowhere to be seen. One of them, an actress named Tassy something-or-other, waved at me absently, like she knew me from somewhere but couldn’t remember if she liked me or not. I waved back and turned away to spare her having to make the judgment.

  Claire was late, which was unusual. It was a quarter after nine before she finally got to Kafka’s. Although the crowd was thick, it parted easily for her as she made her way through the blue-white force field to the bar. Right away, I knew something was wrong.

  Claire, who was always perfectly put together, had failed to accessorize.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said breathlessly. “But I just had a call from one of your old sources. The police are looking for you. They want you to turn yourself in.”

  “Turn myself in? Why? What is …”

  “I stopped back at ANN to pick up a tape I wanted to watch later and while I was there this woman called,” Claire said. “Desirée.”

  That was Nora, a police department flack who used to work at ANN and was a very reluctant source. “Desirée” was her nom de fink. I privately referred to her as Sore Throat.

  “They found this guy dead—killed—at the Marfeles Palace. You were seen with him or something. Desirée was vague on details, but it sounds like you’re a suspect, Robin.”

  “Oh sweet mother of …”

  Words were flashing at me like neon signs: ME. A SUSPECT. FOR MURDER. ME.

  For once, I was speechless. Speechless and paralyzed. Even with my rotten luck, this was going too far.

  Claire ordered herself a double Dewar’s neat, which she emptied in one large swallow. She rarely drank.

  “I’ve got a taxi waiting outside. Do you want to call a lawyer and have him meet us at the cop shop?” She slid her hand over mine and gave it a squeeze. “Or do you want to sit a while and get your bearings on this?”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  When we were in the taxi, I thought of this story I read about Vaclav Havel, then president of Czechoslovakia, shortly after the Communists fell and he and other dissidents came to power. A year earlier, Havel had been in jail, as had many of his colleagues. Now they were running the country, making decisions on everything from freeing the press to how to distribute a shipment of East German brassieres.

  During cabinet meetings, when the absurdity of the situation became too great, Havel would stop the meeting and say, “Let’s all laugh for a moment.”

  I love that
. I love the idea of a world leader taking a moment away from history for a hearty guffaw. I think it’s good, all-purpose advice. I tried to follow it as the taxi rumbled over the narrow streets towards Manhattan South.

  Within the hour, I was sitting at a table in a room at Manhattan South, which looked after everything below Fifty-ninth Street in Manhattan, with Detective Joe Tewfik, whom I knew slightly, and Detective Richard Bigger, whom I did not know at all.

  I did not call a lawyer, because I felt my best shot was just to go in and tell the damn truth, or as close to the damn truth as I could get. I hadn’t killed anybody, so why did I need a lawyer to speak for me, to conceal my crimes? For $350 an hour at that. I’d had a hard enough time with my divorce lawyer, who kept trying to goad me into going after a big piece of Burke’s earning and inheritance potential. In my settlement meeting, she and I kept saying conflicting things. Finally, we burst into heated argument with each other, while our ostensible “enemies,” Burke and his lawyer, watched, amused, from across the conference table.

  I hated the way she made me look, like some kind of pitiful victim, being economically punished for his adultery when he took his income and left our marriage. I am not a victim, I told her. I earn my own living and plenty of men want to sleep with me too. I do not need Burke Avery, got that?

  So I didn’t trust a lawyer to tell my side of the story. Besides, I brought the tape recorder I used on stories with me and when I sat down at the table at the cop shop I whipped it out and said, “You don’t mind if I record this, do you?”

  “Uh—no,” Bigger said, surprised.

  Tewfik wasn’t surprised. “Miss Hudson is a reporter. Like Brenda Starr,” he said. “She keeps a record of everything.”

  “How do you know Larry Griff?” Bigger asked me.

  “Who is Larry Griff? Is he the dead guy?”

  Bigger nodded. I thought they might do a good-cop/bad-cop routine, so I planned to be sweet to the bad cop and rude to the good cop, just to muck up their rhythm somehow. But Tewfik was just sitting back watching, letting Bigger represent the duality of man single-handedly.