Toni White appeared in the open doorway, arms crossed to hold a pile of videotapes. An overly tanned man in a black suit and gray shirt with an open collar leaned in behind her, and Toni dropped the pile on the makeup table, rested her hips against its edge, and began the introductions.
“Richard MacMurray, meet Don Keene, news director of the lowest-rated newscast in all of Pennsylvania.”
Don laughed, showing teeth dingy yet perfectly straight. “Not all of Pennsylvania. Just the northeast.”
Richard got up out of his chair for a handshake. “Lowest rated? I thought you had the dean of Pennsylvania anchormen up there.”
“We do,” Don said, holding Richard’s hand a beat too long, a mannerism Richard associated with both politicians and television personalities. “It’s not that we don’t have a solid product, I just think people are tired of watching. They like to take some time and look around, watch a few weeks’ worth of Family Feud and Bowling for Dollars. I’m down here casting around for what’s going to bring them back.”
“Come home to Channel Eleven’s Eyewitness News,” Richard said, a heavy emphasis on the Eye- in Eyewitness.
“Which brings us to you and your tape.” Toni gestured to a pile of videos.
Richard said to Don, “Until this morning, I didn’t know I had a tape.”
“You don’t, in the usual sense,” Toni said. “I sent him a compilation of your greatest hits.”
“I hope,” Richard said, turning back to Don Keene and his black suit, “she didn’t send you the thing with the candy bar. Not exactly my proudest moment.”
“It might not have been on your reel”—Don laughed—“but goddamn, it was great television. I thought the anchorman might lose it. Anyway, nothing wrong with shaking things up a bit. Let’s just hope you never get charged with a federal crime in Alabama, or else that prosecutor will fuck you but good.”
Don’s immediate pretense of familiarity suggested a man who had spent a lot of time in locker rooms. His suit, plus the tan face and the shirt with its open collar, contained all the trace elements of his past: all-state safety in high school, college in California, a brief career as an on-air personality, even hosting an unsold game-show pilot, followed inexorably by divorce, cocaine, rehabilitation both personal and professional, which led to a fine executive job running the news division of a small-market station buried deep in anthracite coal country. Internal exile.
Richard got the game now; what Don wanted to hear was a profane version of the banter that passed between the anchorman and the sports guy.
“Never arrested, never convicted,” Richard said to Don’s hearty and laughing approval. He turned to Toni. “I say that all the time, but I’m not really sure what it means.”
Toni tapped her foot twice. “I hate to break this up, but we’re going to be about a half hour. The game’s running long, because that’s what always happens. But we’re all set to go. And, Richard, all you need to do is give me a little Sturm this afternoon. I’ve got work to do, but we’ll fetch you about five minutes before.” She fluttered in for an air-kiss.
“What about the Drang? There’s always got to be some Drang,” Don said, shaking Richard’s hand again.
“People these days demand fair and balanced. We provide the Drang,” Toni said. “In this case, a congressman from Orange County with the attention span of a tick. Last summer on Crossfire they’re doing this special on mental illness, and Carville asked if he was advocating voluntary sterilization of the mentally disabled, and the guy said, ‘There shouldn’t be anything voluntary about it.’ Despite three million dollars’ worth of outside spending, he got re-elected by his largest margin yet.”
Richard laughed. He explained to Don, “The only contact sport Toni knows is politics. She’d be completely happy to fill prime time with Burmese deputy ministers beating each other senseless with bamboo canes.”
Toni turned to Richard. “Today’s opponent may be a nutjob, but he shakes things up. It’s good television. And, face it, unless we’re saying something interesting, they’re just going to flip right past us. Give them the conventional wisdom, and they’ll tune out in favor of the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl.”
Richard said, “You should be grateful there isn’t a Smith and Wesson Bowl.”
“That would be one hell of a halftime show,” Don said with a grin, before he and Toni headed up the short hallway to the control booth.
Toni looked over her shoulder. “Someone will come get you to tape a cutaway. Max is anchoring. He’ll give an overview, introduce both of you, then we’ll do a sixty-second break and jump right in.” Next came her traditional exit line, the only pep talk she ever managed: “Don’t fuck it up.”
Left alone in the green room, Richard fiddled with the morning’s Washington Post, reading the annual New Year’s list of what was in and out, all with a slight hope that it might say something along the lines of James Carville out, Richard MacMurray in. He thumbed through the spurious claims of a women’s magazine, wondering who actually followed the advice—“Secret Sexual Tricks,” “The One Thing He Can’t Resist,” “Twelve Ways to Spice Things Up” in a presumably mundane love life. Cadence. He picked up a pair of newsmagazines that would be in his mailbox the next day, nearly identical covers about diet and exercise studies. Cadence. Cadence, who ran four miles four times a week, who bought and ate all things organic, who subscribed to eleven different health and wellness newsletters, whose most prominent compulsion was opening a new toothbrush every other Monday.
Sometimes what Richard did not know about her bothered him as much as what he did. Like the etymology of her last name, Willeford, and its almost anti-ethnic sound—English, he supposed—but the subject had never come up. She was constantly working; the city did that to people, turned them into worker bees who went back to the office after happy hour. And he had no idea just how her family got by, a younger brother who’d managed the difficult trick of washing out of a junior college, a father who hadn’t worked in seventeen years; he cashed a black-lung check plus Social Security and a pension from the mine workers, but that didn’t seem like enough to keep the furnace bin filled with coal in winter, keep him in Jack Daniels and pony bottles of Rolling Rock, all that the old man asked for in the name of recreation.
And suddenly Richard understood the motivations of Cadence’s career, that she was an old-fashioned girl who sent money home to her father each month without ever bothering to ask for the credit. How had he missed such obvious things? So many of his friends did these minor things for their aging parents, then acted as if they deserved a victory lap for bringing Mom flowers and candy on her birthday. Cadence didn’t want or need the credit. She did what was required. Now, even seven weeks from the last time he had touched her, Richard kept thinking of new reasons to love her. Cadence, of the twenty-nine workout videos and almost as many pairs of athletic shoes. Cadence, who once pummeled a Somali cabdriver after he called her a bitch. It was Richard who had posted her bail, and Richard’s mildly pushy phone calls to a deputy prosecutor that made the charges against her evaporate, another bit of the insider bartering he now performed most every day of his adult life.
A healthy-looking brunette swaddled in a tight, fuzzy black cashmere sweater appeared with a cup of coffee and without comment produced a stiff whisk broom to remove flakes of Krispy Kreme icing from Richard’s navy suit. “I see they’ve given you the crucial job of the day,” he said, eliciting a smile but no reply. It took a moment to register that she’d probably take that as an insult, and all he’d intended was to tell a gentle joke, to express that he was fully capable of doing it himself. But he could think of no other thing to say to extricate himself, so he sat quietly and waited. Part of her job description, he surmised, included never talking to the talent. He wondered how long it would take before he stopped assessing a woman’s attractiveness by scrutinizing the ways in which her body differed from Cadence’s.
A second production assistant lugged in a tackle box full o
f makeup and motioned Richard to a barber-style chair just off the set. While she patted concealer over the bluish half-moons beneath his eyes and dusted his face with powder, Richard took his IFB device out of its case, and another technician clipped a battery pack to Richard’s belt. The IFB was a luxury, its plastic innards custom molded to fit the contours of Richard’s left ear. Cadence had arranged the fitting for his last birthday. He couldn’t stand to watch guests on these shows shuffle, trying to catch earpieces that popped out at awkward moments. This was a badge of office for his profession.
Toni materialized out of the control room, her arm draped proprietarily over a fat man in a plaid flannel shirt. “Wally here is going to tape a teaser—sit in the chair and look like an authority. And the game is running long. Which means the whole segment will be short—if you’ve got ammo, use it up front. We’ll get about a four-minute warning, a College Football Scoreboard, and then we’re live.”
The production assistant pointed Richard to a second, slightly higher director’s chair that sat in front of a blue chroma key screen. Wally toyed with his intricate Rollie Fingers mustache while moving in close with the camera dolly. “This won’t hurt a bit.”
Richard pulled his jacket taut and sat on its tail, then adjusted his bright-yellow tie. He checked himself in the monitor on the floor stage left.
“Try to look like a serious fucking guy with some serious shit to say. Look just over the lens to the left. There. Give me five seconds of that. You don’t want to look like Congressman Mouthbreather over there.” Wally nodded at a guy in a cheap gray suit perusing the buffet.
“Ready?” Wally said, and before Richard could reply, the red light came on. Richard cocked his head just slightly, a mannerism he had learned from videotape of his previous appearances; his media coach—the same person who had trained the would-be senator from Alabama on how to appear folksy yet serious—said it made Richard look studious, as if he were considering the evolution of his position at every moment.
When the red operating light on the camera disappeared, the light from its secondary spotlight dissolved into a blue-black glow, and Richard blinked his eyes clear. Cameraman Wally departed the darkened set, sipping a tall, ice-filled glass of orange juice that Richard figured was spiked with a good dose of vodka.
“What do we do now?” Richard asked of Wally’s departing back.
Wally stopped. “The only thing we ever do. We wait.”
20
SHERRI ASHBURTON began calculating just how much her mother-in-law’s latest misadventure—Geneva’s fall, her hospitalization, a last-minute plane ticket for Ash, his cab in from the Dallas airport—would cost. Ash hadn’t even left yet, and already they were out $900 for a plane ticket and a few nights’ worth of $60 motel rooms and restaurant food. She’d keep a running total in her head for the entirety of his trip, and she resented it. Being an adult, Sherri had once believed, would free her from having to worry about things like whether or not her bank card would go through. She felt guilty too.
Whether Ash flew in tonight or tomorrow or next Tuesday, Geneva’s hip was still going to be broken, and she’d still need surgery, rehab. The hospital wasn’t going to make her wait until Ash showed up to sign whatever paper they needed him to sign; the only reason Sherri had relented, the only reason she had chosen not to put her foot down about the money—despite the fact that she would have to cover his shift at the Canyon Room this afternoon and despite the fact that he was scheduled to sit for the bar exam in just three weeks—was that the doctor described Ash using one of the saddest phrases she’d ever heard: only known living relative.
She settled for helping him pack. She stopped him at the edge of the bed and made him remove his T-shirt, stuffed it under the pillow so that she could sleep with his scent. All Sherri Ashburton would do in his absence was watch television and eat cans of organic vegetable soup and wear his shirt while relishing the extra room in their full-size bed.
Ash hadn’t spoken to her about his mother, not since the discussion about the plane ticket, about whether or not his presence would make any difference. “It’s therapeutic,” he argued, and Sherri suspected that he meant his absence would be therapeutic for both of them too.
Because Sherri was thinking about money as they drove in silence to the airport—whether or not she could survive for three or four days on the forty-seven dollars in tips that she’d squirreled away—she knew that she would not park the car (three dollars for the first thirty minutes) and walk Ash into the terminal. He’d be frugal once he got to Dallas; he’d even sleep in his mother’s empty house if he could; the dust and the stale smell and the general creepiness never seemed to faze him. Geneva had been in the nursing facility for a while; how long, Sherri couldn’t precisely remember. Seven months? This trip could work in their favor, even. She could encourage Ash to be assertive for once, to take control of his mother’s finances on a day-to-day basis instead of letting things crop up the way her property tax bill had snuck up on them last spring.
Sherri made an almost involuntary noise she knew he would take as harrumph. “You need to talk to your mother. Between the taxes and utilities, she’s paying maybe seven hundred dollars a month for nothing. For an empty house. Just pissing that money away.”
“Please, not this. Not now. I grew up in that house.”
“That house is empty now,” she said, and immediately wished she hadn’t. His face registered a pained look that told her to back off. “Think of what a difference seven hundred dollars would make in our lives every month. Can we at least make a point of actually talking about it sometime, before it costs us more?”
Sherri popped the hatchback, and Ash extracted his duffel bag, a separate backpack with books on constitutional law and a mangled copy of Black’s Law Dictionary. “When I get back. Right now, I figure I’ll have three hours on the plane each way. Three hours, uninterrupted, just to study,” he said, thumping at his books through the heavy canvas of his bag; he dropped the duffel at the curb and leaned in the driver’s-side window for a final kiss. She pictured him rummaging in his mother’s house for a pen to make notes, huddled over his books, sitting under the baked-enamel light on what had once been his father’s desk. He would always be the smart boy from trigonometry class that she’d fallen in love with, the one who used to camp beneath her window, a subdivision Romeo throwing rocks and pennies. She nearly swooned as he ran his thumb along her jawline with the lightest pressure he could manage, his touch moving along with her memory. She loved that boy. Always had. He kissed her again, and said, “Thursday. I’ll see you Thursday.”
21
AT THE newsstand, Mary Beth stopped for a bottle of water and a new tin of peppermints. Farther down the C concourse, a woman sold coffee to a man in a turtleneck sweater and watermelon-colored nylon running shorts. Mary Beth made a quick stop at the restroom, and when she returned, saw the same man leaning against the wall, taking a call on the white courtesy phone. There wasn’t even an agent at her gate, just a dozen other travelers, all wearing the mask of boredom they hoped might keep friendly conversation to a minimum.
Mary Beth took a seat and watched the television news, a reporter in a tweed cap and trench coat making his way through midtown Manhattan. He stopped in front of the retail display windows that lined Fifty-Seventh Street to confront passersby about their resolutions.
The top-of-the-hour broadcast recapped the lead stories from the past year—an assassination in the Middle East, a mining collapse in western Pennsylvania, the bombing of an Orthodox cathedral in Moscow by Chechen separatists, August’s transoceanic flight of a billionaire in a shiny silver balloon, the summertime disappearances of a handful of young blond girls. Next, set to the background music of Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year,” came the usual year-end homage to dead celebrities, a slideshow of the last luminaries of a departed age, the tributes rendered in black and white—the stop-motion of an athlete dying young, the overdosed guitarist haloed and backlit in perform
ance, a soundless clip of a pratfalling sitcom star, people both familiar and anonymous, even in death. A hockey player from a team Mary Beth had never heard of, the Green Hornets or Yellow Jackets or something, lay in a profound coma after being struck in the temple by an errant slapshot. In Washington, the president’s daughter was recovering from mononucleosis, and the president himself waddled on crutches after tearing his Achilles tendon during some undescribed Camp David recreation. Goodland, Kansas, dug out after seventeen consecutive days of snow; the local McDonald’s claimed to be sold out of everything but Filet-o-Fish sandwiches and orange soda.
Ten hours into the New Year, the airport began to fill with a smattering of travelers all plagued by the rescission of their pledges from the night before, already defaulting on the renouncement of tobacco, the promise of temperance. The bar even offered a midday special, a double for a dollar more. Most travelers would soon abandon the grandiose ambitions of midnight in favor of a more cautious optimism. New Year’s Day meant negotiations, internal debates. One drink wouldn’t hurt.
Shifting in her molded plastic seat, Mary Beth realized she was the loneliest kind of traveler. The worst part of being in an airport was being there alone, with no one to watch your luggage while you darted into an overcrowded and malodorous restroom, no one to laughingly point out the tabloid headlines about your favorite celebrities, no one to share the once-every-two-years pleasure of a box of Good & Plenty. She was flipping through a well-thumbed copy of the USA Today Life section when her eyes caught the image of her brother on the TV, seated in front of a computer-generated backdrop of the Capitol—a short promotional announcement for a scheduled television appearance.
A check of her watch told her she’d be on the way to Dallas by the time he made the air. She wondered when they’d taped the teaser (he’d taught her the whole vocabulary of his strange career) and whether he was going to wear that garish yellow tie before she remembered it was one Gabriel had picked out among the downtrodden orphans that littered the clearance table at Dillard’s; she’d forwarded it along last Christmas, a tentative step toward reconciliation.
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