What's a Girl Gotta Do?

by Sparkle Hayter

“What is your real life?”

  He thought about it and said, “It’s an endless search for true love. How about yours?”

  I gritted my teeth and, through sheer force of will, sucked a blush back from my skin. “I don’t really believe in love,” I said. “I think my life is an endless search for the guilty party.”

  He didn’t laugh. Instead, he looked like he found this … interesting.

  The show was starting so he turned up the volume. We watched a montage of Greg shots—chatting with guests, laughing at Eddie Murphy, earnestly quizzing Richard Nixon, leaning on Elton John’s piano, singing along. Over this was the Browner theme music, friendly but newsy, like a Stephen Foster song played on typewriter keys. The announcer read off the list of guests, three always and always in this order: celebrity, politician (there to tell America something we don’t already know about them), and a “regular guy” to whom something irregular had recently happened. At the bottom of the screen, a super told weekend viewers the show was taped and not to call.

  Greg, looking handsome for an older man with kind of a blond, Robert Mitchum thing going, conversed with the famous guest and then opened up the phones to his millions of viewers, many of whom had his toll-free number programmed into their phones. They loved Greg and he had good demographics, if not the numbers Larry King had—yet. Ironically, Greg skewed very well with college-educated women. On the air, he was very appealing, I’ll give him that, but that was his TV persona. A TV persona is kind of like a whalebone corset. When you take it off, everything goes flying.

  “First-time caller, Greg,” a male voice drawled. “Want to say I love your show and I wish you’d run for office.”

  “Thanks a lot, Chicago, but I’ve already got a job I love. Did you have a question for Cher?”

  “Think he’ll ever run for office?” I asked.

  “Never,” Eric said, snorting. “Look, he likes a few of those callers every show asking him to run, because he likes to be flattered, but he loves television. He has more influence with his talk show than he would have as president.”

  “Not quite.”

  “Pretty close. On his show, he’s in control of his image. He gets to be the voice of reason between warring extremes. Nobody can run for office anymore without checking in with him and Larry King, and Greg is the wave of the future because he’s younger than Larry and he’s better looking. Jackson gives him autonomy. Women viewers write him erudite love letters. People admire him. If he went into politics, all that would be over.”

  Eric was smart. Why did I think he was a bimbo?

  “I see your point. But people think Greg might do it—run, I mean. Doesn’t he risk a backlash if he doesn’t run? Like Ross Perot when he pulled out of the presidential race?”

  “Nah,” Eric said. “He’s more like Will Rogers than Ross Perot, on the air at least. If he refuses to run, it just endears him more to his viewers. If he actually ran, all that would be over.”

  “Do you think Greg was being blackmailed too?”

  “Greg says no.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “It’s not my job to believe him or not, just to implement his managerial edicts,” he said tersely and looked back at the television.

  He was a little sensitive about working for Greg. I didn’t press him.

  “Yeah, it’s time for the diffusion filter,” Eric said, referring to Greg’s lighting complaint. “Lighting isn’t good enough anymore. We need to blur his edges a bit too.”

  “You aren’t serious? That’s so dishonest.”

  “This isn’t news, this is talk, and things are looser in the talk format. Solange uses a diffusion filter too,” he said. “It’s human nature to want to appear better than we really are. You wear makeup. All you on-air people wear a ton of it on the air just to look ‘natural’ and not washed out on video. So why sweat it?”

  “Oh, it gives me a chance to get self-righteous,” I said.

  “You’re cute when you’re self-righteous,” he said. It was such a corny thing to say that it caught me off guard. He caught me off guard a lot. That worried me.

  We watched the rest of Greg’s weekend show and talked some more about our families, a subject Eric kept bringing up. I was an only child. Eric came from this big Long Island family, and he had twelve nieces and nephews. Once a month they all got together at his brother’s house in Long Beach to argue, insult each other, and eat grotesque amounts of food.

  He made it sound very appealing. I bet other women eat this stuff up, I thought. A bachelor could do very well with this kind of family values rap. I, however, was impervious.

  After declining my offer to help, he went back into the kitchen, and we continued our conversation between the two rooms. I knew what was going on. I’d heard the old wives’ tale, that a guy who cooks dinner for a woman gets laid that night.

  “Here we go,” he said, putting place mats, silverware, and wineglasses on the coffee table. He went back to the kitchen and returned with condiments and wine, red, which he poured for both of us, leaving the bottle on the table. On his third trip, he came back with two steaming plates, filet mignon covered in marinated mushrooms, shoestring french fries, and glazed carrots.

  Thank God, he’s a meat eater, I thought. I have a soft spot for men who are meat eaters. There’s just something about a carnivore.

  “It looks wonderful,” I said.

  “Thanks.” He sat back down next to me, a little closer this time. “I thought after everything you’ve been through lately, you could use a home-cooked meal.”

  Well bless you, I thought, crossing my legs and bouncing my foot slightly.

  We watched Fritz the Cat and drank some wine and I started to think it might not be such a bad idea if Eric seduced me. God knows he was attractive, and he had a powerful, primal sexuality. So what if he was just casting a role for his memoirs? So what if I would just be the Older Married Woman who follows the Danish Exchange Student? Maybe he could be the Younger Stud in my life story, who comes between the Philandering First Husband and The Kids in the Hall.

  Normally, I’m not quite this brazen and desperate, but I hadn’t had sex in months, and I hadn’t had good sex in about a year. My husband, on the other hand, was presumably having lots of good sex with his younger paramour, and all my friends and foes knew about it.

  After Eric cleared away the plates, he made coffee, which he served with a basket of anisette biscotti. His grandmother’s recipe.

  “The News-Journal described you as ‘kind of a loner’ today,” he said, smiling.

  “Well, in the last six months I haven’t been out much.” I didn’t want to go into it. “Thanks again for that police report. Sixteen to twenty whacks with a blunt metal object, huh? What a way to go.”

  “It must have been bloody,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking aloud. “Yeah, it must have been, which means … the killer would have been covered with blood afterwards. He, or she, couldn’t have gone back to the party without changing clothes. That means it was probably someone with a room at the Marfeles that night, someone who could kill Griff and then go change clothes.”

  “Yeah, or someone who could hide his bloody clothes under a costume,” he said, but without my enthusiasm for the topic. “Murder’s kind of a hobby of yours, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why are you so interested in it?”

  “The usual reason, I guess. We are most fascinated by what we most fear, right? For instance, Claire, who is flawlessly gorgeous, is fascinated by disfiguring diseases, especially if they are mosquito-borne and capable of being transported to this country in tires or produce,” I said. “She can go on for hours about biting flies that lay their eggs in your bloodstream, eggs that hatch into these long, slender worms that come out of your eyes. Or that disease that makes men’s testicles so large they have to carry them around in a wheelbarrow.”

  “I get the picture,” he said, pained.

  By this time, I
noticed that we were sitting just an inch apart. Had I unconsciously inched closer to him, him to me, or had we inched closer together, drawn simultaneously by forces of mutual attraction?

  At this rate of geographic progress, actual penetration was only hours away. I was in no hurry. I had nowhere else to go and the wine and the stories had lulled me into complacency. I felt at that moment like I could stay where I was forever and whatever happened happened.

  I looked up and he was staring at me, into my eyes. I smiled and stared back, just as intensely. At first it was silliness, a staring contest. We had to hold back laughter.

  But then it got serious.

  Eric has these blue eyes, not just blue, but cold, otherworldly blue eyes. Have you ever been on a glacier? I was once, and when you look down a crevasse, you see this pale, foggy blue ice, deeply buried, prehistoric ice, holding old secrets.

  That blue.

  It was almost painful to stare into his eyes for too long, and yet I couldn’t have looked away if I tried because there was a commensurate pleasure. So I kept staring, watching different emotions flicker below the surface of his eyes. Suddenly, I wanted to run for my life. Instead, I blinked, slowly and deliberately.

  He leaned over and kissed me. Or did I lean forward and kiss him? Or both? I don’t remember now.

  I just remember a kiss and then a jolt of the most tremendous fear I’ve ever experienced. I bolted upright and sprang to my feet.

  “I have a lot of work to do on this sperm series,” I said. “And I have this murder on my mind so …” I looked around. I don’t know why. Looking for an escape hatch, I suppose.

  He grabbed my hand, tried to nudge me back to the sofa. “What are you afraid of?” he said.

  “Oh God. Nothing personal, but you have a reputation as a terrible playboy, and I’ve been warned away from terrible playboys by my culture and my womenfolk and, come to think of it, my own experience.”

  Yeah. I looked around me with some surprise, asking myself, Where am I? How did I get here? In what hormonally induced stupor did I wander into this trap?

  “Robin,” he said, in a tender voice I’d never heard him use before. It touched me so deeply—a sudden, rapier thrust of tenderness—that my immediate reaction was pleasure, followed by an icy gust of fear.

  “I am not a playboy. Do you want references? Call up some of my ex-girlfriends. Investigate me,” he said. “Or trust me. What will it be?”

  I opened my mouth but said nothing.

  “Wait—don’t answer now. You’re upset. You’ve had a bad week,” he whispered. “Think about it. Sleep on it tonight and call me tomorrow.”

  Why was I afraid of him?

  Later, alone in my bed, windows and doors locked and heavy bits of furniture barricading them, I read over my file of stories on sperm, fertility, and artificial insemination and thought I found the answer in a paragraph Claire had highlighted from the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on reproduction:

  Although fertilization in the higher terrestrial forms involves contact during copulation, it has been suggested that all of the higher animals may have a strong aversion to bodily contact. This aversion is no doubt an antipredator mechanism: Close bodily contact signifies being caught.

  Chapter Eleven

  THAT NIGHT, I HAD this dream again. I was writing a script for the eight o’clock news show and I had writer’s block. For some reason, I thought I had plenty of time, but when I looked up at the clock I saw it was three minutes to eight.

  A sudden panic gripped me. Sweat sprang like leaks from my pores, rolled down my face, grew legs, and turned into insects. A mob of large, angry show producers and anchorpeople bore down on me. I was ruined.

  Now, this deadline dream shouldn’t disturb me, because far scarier, far more humiliating things have happened to me in real life. And yet, this dream of inadequacy represents the greatest terror in the world to me.

  And then it gets worse.

  The anchorpeople and show producers are bearing down on me, my sweat is turning into Mesozoic bugs, and the clock is ticking towards deadline loudly, like a bomb, when suddenly former White House Chief of Staff John Sununu rushes in from behind a blue curtain and whisks me away to safety, where he takes me in his beefy arms and kisses me.

  I awake screaming.

  Instead of the sound of my own scream, however, I hear the ringing of a phone come out of my mouth. Another ring, and I am almost conscious and reaching for the phone, buried beneath some dirty clothes.

  “Robin?” a woman’s voice said.

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “Susan. Susan Brave. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Actually, you woke me just in the nick of time,” I said.

  God, I hate it when I have those Sununu dreams.

  “I wondered if you’d meet me for lunch. It’s, well, an emergency and I can’t talk about it on the phone.”

  “What kind of an emergency?” I asked, groping for my clock radio. It was almost noon and, I remembered, Sunday.

  “It’s about Griff,” she said. “Will you meet me? I’ve beeped Joanne too.”

  “Of course,” I said, still fuzzy with sleep. I rummaged for a pen and took down the information on the restaurant I was to meet her at, A Real Dive. Only after she’d hung up did I think to ask: Why would Susan want to talk about Griff?

  Louise Bryant looked at me with scorn.

  A Real Dive was housed in a renovated bar on West Street, overlooking the Hudson. Every table had a view of the big Maxwell House sign across the river in Jersey. A trendy, self-consciously seedy place, it was popular with Boomers because it specialized in the cuisine of their youth, or imagined youth. The white formica tables were veined with gold and the menus and place mats had faux coffee rings and faux grease stains printed right into the paper.

  I guess I’d describe the decor as Mel’s Diner meets 1950s Waterfront, complete with such appetizing accoutrements as faux bait buckets. It was very faux. In fact, the only thing that wasn’t faux about A Real Dive was its prices—a very real $15.95 for the meat loaf platter with mashed potatoes and green peas. For a dollar less you could get the tuna and potato chip casserole platter or the macaroni and cheese with franks platter.

  Susan was already there, sitting in a booth by herself looking uncomfortable, when I arrived. A sweet dame, bless her soul, Susan is a perennially awkward adolescent, the timid girl (despite her valiant last name) who joined every club she could to make friends and didn’t fit into any of them. In a way, she was perfect for Solange, her boss, because she was a born martyr who could absorb Solange’s psychological abuse and come back for more.

  “Takes a licking, keeps on ticking,” they said of Susan in the newsroom.

  When I approached, she started to rise but the paper place mat stuck to her hand and came with her, sending silverware and condiments spinning all over the floor. Everyone in the restaurant looked up, and then looked away, nonchalant, as busboys came over to wipe up the broken glass and ketchup.

  Susan makes me feel graceful.

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” she said to the kneeling Guatemalan bus guy.

  “’Sokay, ’sokay,” he said.

  She looked at me. “Hi, Robin. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m the queen of public humiliation. Not that you should be humiliated,” I hastened to add.

  We sat down and another busboy brought Susan a new stained place mat and fresh silverware.

  “I’m just not myself these days,” she said. After ordering drinks from an indifferent waitress in a starchy pink uniform and cat’s-eye glasses, Susan said, “I was hoping Joanne would get here.…”

  “What’s going on, Susan?”

  “Weelll,” she said, twisting her fingers nervously. She looked around, everywhere but at me. “Griff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was … blackmailing me too.”

  “He investigated you?”

  “Yes,” she
said. Every word she spoke came squeezed through some dense filter of fear or embarrassment, or both.

  The waitress brought our drinks. Susan had a double scotch, I was having mineral water. It was way too early in the day to drink, even for me, but Susan downed hers.

  “Why was he investigating you? I thought only on-air people … it doesn’t make sense.”

  Susan was Solange’s producer. As they had no idea who she was, how could her credibility be ruined with the public? What would be the point of investigating midlevel producers, when there were so many riper targets around?

  “I don’t know why, but he did. I don’t want to tell you any more until Joanne gets here,” she said.

  “Well, okay.”

  But I couldn’t stop asking questions. “Did you stay at the Marfeles that night?”

  “No,” she said. “But Solange did. She let me use her room to change into my costume.”

  “So Solange stayed at the Marfeles, and Joanne did. Do you know who else stayed there?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I dunno. It might matter,” I said.

  There was a familiar voice behind me and when I turned around I saw the waitress guiding Joanne to our booth.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said, looking very early Grace Kelly in dark glasses and scarf.

  “Where were you?” Susan asked.

  “Don’t laugh, but I went to Eileen Lane Antiques in Soho to visit my furniture. You know that vanity I had, the one I bought in Paris with the teardrop-shaped mirror and the mother-of-pearl accents?”

  I didn’t, but I nodded.

  “Sold,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. But I’m going to be able to buy most of it back, I think. Oh, there was a photographer on my tail too. He took my picture coming out of Eileen Lane. Wonder what spin they’ll put on that in tomorrow’s paper? Don’t worry, though, I lost him.”

  “You’re sure?” Susan said.

  “Positive,” said Joanne. “He’s somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike in a New York City taxi looking for me right now. Meter running at double fare.”

  Joanne had a round-the-clock tabloid photographer following her. I did not. I felt strangely miffed about it.