True Enough

by Stephen McCauley

  Jane pushed herself off the bed and stood beside him, studying the rows of bottles. “Midlife crisis?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Long-term. Care to join me?”

  “Why not? Do you have anything for Everything In General?”

  2.

  She longed for one of those glittering New England autumn days, with blue skies and bright sun and brisk wind, but when they stepped outside, the humidity was so heavy, it could well have been midsummer rather than early October. A few of the trees in front of the stately brick houses along Marlborough Street had started to change color, but given the weather, they looked unsettlingly incongruous. She and Brian had grown up in Chevy Chase and so, technically speaking, were Southerners, although that particular identity was one she’d never been eager to claim; it didn’t fit her image of herself. As soon as she got to Smith, she began telling people she was from Washington, D.C., a geographically more neutral territory. The ruse worked so well, she started moving her childhood north in increments. By the time she entered graduate school, she’d almost convinced herself she’d been born in Connecticut. These days, it seemed as if the weather from her childhood had decided to throw her a curve by migrating north with her.

  Desmond squinted up at the sun and put on a pair of bottle-green dark glasses that struck her as unnecessarily stylish. She put her arm through his as they walked along Marlborough Street. “You’re not nervous about this meeting, are you?”

  “Not nervous,” he said. “Anxious maybe.”

  “Don’t be either. It’s going to be casual.”

  “What are we asking for?”

  “Tons,” she said. “Major sponsorship of the entire series, the full backing of the station. Two or three million, minimum.”

  “That much!”

  “If we’re lucky, we’ll get ten grand, which doesn’t sound like much, but as seed money, it’s crucial. Once the station shows its support, I should have no trouble scraping together another fifteen grand for the pilot.”

  “Where does that come from?”

  “You start at the top, combing through the roster of big corporations with public relations problems: ugly law suits, cans of tainted food, a diet pill that made eight people lose their hearing. Oil spills are obviously the best—all those birds—but I don’t think there’s been anything too grim in that department in the last couple of years. Then you start working your way down through thousands of little foundations with a couple of dollars they want to get rid of. It all adds up, that’s the important thing to remember.”

  “You’ve done your homework.”

  She had done her homework, at least in a manner of speaking. She’d given Chloe a memo requesting some information; thirty-six hours later Chloe had come into her office and dumped a bulging file of grant applications on her desk, explaining that she’d have given them to her sooner but she’d had to fix some major computer glitch, which she tried in vain to describe to Jane. If delegating responsibility was Jane’s forte, well, there were worse things than that. This whole project had made her feel professionally renewed in ways she hadn’t anticipated. Working on it was so much more gratifying than moping around cocktail lounges and coffee bars with Dale Barsamian, and besides, it gave her something to talk about with Dale Barsamian when she did mope around with him.

  Once they were speeding along Storrow Drive, the river basin on one side, the glinting windows of Back Bay town houses on the other, Desmond pulled the tape out of his pocket and slid it into her tape player. “This could take a little getting used to,” he said. “Don’t expect perfection. It’s from one of her live recordings late in her career. The second half of the recording doesn’t have much to recommend it, but the first half is quite strong. It has a few signature numbers and some great raw emotion. Judging from the tape, she didn’t really start hitting the bottle until intermission.”

  There was a smattering of applause and then a gruff, sandpapery voice thanked the crowd. “This next number is one I learned from Dorothy herself, Miss Judy Garland. I love ya, Judy. Give the kids a kiss g’night from me.”

  It began promisingly: a string section played the melodic line from “Over the Rainbow” in rich, torchy tones. A flute came in with a few decorous trills, obviously meant to suggest a happy bluebird flapping its way across a pastoral scene. Not that she was prey to obvious sentimentality, but something about this particular song always got to Jane, and she felt a little catch in her throat. The orchestra pulled back and in a soft voice cracking with emotion, Anderton sang her first word, a gentle, sibilant “some.” This was followed by an odd second of silence during which you could hear Anderton gathering her breath. And then came a shattering “WHERE,” like a clap of thunder directly overhead. Another moment of disorienting silence was followed by a rushed, breathless “ovah the rainbow” as if she were speaking the line.

  It wasn’t simply that the voice was aggressively loud—like Jane’s old gym teacher screaming at her for doing clumsy jumping jacks—but it also had a gravelly quality that made you want to clear your own throat as you listened. And this was before she started belting down cocktails! Then there was the bizarre lack of consistency in her pronunciation, from the crass, Bostony “ovah” in the first line to the absurdly pretentious “eau-verre” a few verses later.

  Jane tapped the tape player. “Do you mind if I lower it a bit?”

  “No, not at all.”

  That helped. This was one singer who’d never be accused of subtlety, but once Jane let herself relax into the song a bit more, she found that there were some audible gradations of the overpowering belt. She sang in character, if not always on key. Anderton ended with a remarkably understated and touching “why oh why can’t I?” as if she genuinely wanted to know. The music faded out and Desmond ejected the tape.

  After a moment of reverential silence, he said: “Well?”

  When Jane was alone in her car, she tended to listen to pop music of the blandest sort. If she was in the right mood, she could tear up listening to one of those fashion models with a microphone singing a cornball rendition of the latest mush from an animated Disney film. Dale, who claimed to know something about jazz, had taken her to hear singers he considered great; mostly she’d found them to be show-offs who put perfectly beautiful melodies through a meat grinder. In general, she hesitated to venture much of an opinion about music since some expert was always coming along and telling you why your taste was contemptible. If it was a choice between listening to more of this tape and tuning in to a religious fanatic call-in show, she’d probably opt for the latter. And yet, against all odds, she found herself shaken by it, and perhaps a little haunted.

  “I don’t know if it’s good,” she told Desmond, “but it’s . . . real.”

  “That’s it exactly,” Desmond said. “It’s the one thing pop singers never are anymore. They can be strong or accomplished or loud, but they’re almost always packaged and overrehearsed, carefully modulated for a particular audience. You listen to them and you have no idea who they are or where their voice is coming from. No honesty.”

  Jane had lost the thread of her initial idea, but it was gratifying to know she’d at last said something right. “How close were she and Judy Garland?” she asked.

  Desmond tipped his hand from side to side. “Hard to say. She often mentioned her in concerts, the kind of thing you just heard, or: ‘I’m sending out a special hello to my pal Judy,’ but I haven’t been able to find any evidence the two actually met.”

  “No letters, anything of that sort?”

  “I found one memo Garland sent to her lawyers asking them if they could get ‘that broad in the housedress’ to stop mentioning her in concert. That’s really about it. Anderton was famous for performing in simple outfits.”

  When she asked Desmond when he’d be finished with his book, he looked out the window at the river flashing past and the low collegiate buildings of Cambridge on the other side of the water. Something was holding him back, he explained,
some missing piece of information. He had all the facts, the dates, the times, the places. “But,” he said, “I still don’t have the essential truth of her life, the core of who she was. Until I find that, I don’t have a coherent narrative of a life so much as a collection of incidents. ‘The clothes and buttons’ of a person, to use Mark Twain’s phrase, but not the person herself.”

  The subject seemed to fill him with a degree of melancholy that struck her as just a touch overdone. “I hate to interrupt,” she said, “and I don’t mean to be indelicate here, but can’t you just make something up, some essential truth, then fit the other pieces around it?”

  Judging from the grim, disbelieving look he gave her, it was a bad idea, maybe even an appalling one. Probably an indication that he thought she had subnormal intelligence or, worse still, no integrity. She was confident of her intellectual abilities, but she sometimes worried about the integrity issue. It had taken her a good two years of working on Dinner Conversation to get over the impulse to call in friends at the last minute and hand them a character and a script. What had finally decided her against it was not “honesty” and the even more amorphous “principles,” but the realization that people being themselves always made for a better show than people acting a role. Right choice, wrong reason. But rather than try to back out of this blunder, if that’s what it was, she stumbled on, digging the hole deeper: “I know you wouldn’t end up with the essential truth in the way you mean it, but you’d probably end up with something that’s true enough.”

  You could say the same thing for the narrative she was writing in Dr. Berman’s office. It wasn’t the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it was true enough to get the important points across. After all, most people, shrinks included, were more comfortable with an edited version of reality and only the most profoundly masochistic individuals look at themselves without a shade over the bulb. Look at that libelous “memoir” of Rosemary’s.

  Desmond was either so horrified he couldn’t speak or, she’d rather think, genuinely stumped at how to respond. “It doesn’t work like that for me,” he finally said. “It’s a matter of sifting through the pieces and listening to everything, over and over if need be, until the truth emerges. If I were to leap at some convenient assumption or . . . well, lie, which is what you seem to be suggesting, I’d never know who the person really was. Which would end up being an enormous disservice to the subject, even if he tried to stay locked up in a closet, like Westerly.”

  “I’ll leave you to your standards,” Jane said. “Which end up being a lot harder to live up to when you’re working with television deadlines. Just do me a favor, when we go in to talk with David, don’t contradict me. It’s best to present a united front. We can work out all the rest afterward.”

  3.

  She led him through the reception area of the studio as if she owned the place and greeted everyone with the studied geniality of a company president who’d made a point of being on a first-name basis with the underlings. “I’ll show you around the soundstages,” she said. “Most of them are down here on the first floor. We’ve still got half an hour to kill.” But as they neared the elevators, she started chatting with a tall man with a gaunt, Abraham Lincoln face; when he made a move toward the elevator door, she discreetly indicated to Desmond that he should get on. “We’re going up to five,” she told the man. Once the doors had closed, she started slathering on praise for a proposal of his she’d read two weeks ago and then introduced him to Desmond as Keith Sommerstone, esteemed creator of, among other films, Insects, one of public television’s most successful documentary series. He got out at the third floor and Jane immediately pushed the button for the lobby. “He’s got a vacuum cleaner on the funds around here,” she said as they descended. “He could propose an eight-part series on whittling and get a green light.”

  Desmond was convinced he had something to learn from Jane’s self-confidence, even though he didn’t entirely believe the self-confidence itself—any more, it was obvious, than she did. He suspected she was the kind of person who left everything undone until the last second, and then faked and fibbed her way out of the corner into which she’d painted herself. But the important point was, she did get out. And with her help, he’d get out of his corner as well. She had ambition and wasn’t afraid of it; that was the difference between them. He’d always thought of ambition as a first cousin of greed and envy and, although not closely related, at least on the same family tree as murder. Getting where you wanted necessarily seemed to involve machinations whose sole purpose was to get your rivals to drop their guards so you could charge ahead of them and then slam the gate shut. And if the rivals didn’t get out of the way, you just resorted to plan B and mowed them down. But Jane’s ambition was tempered by a benign lack of clarity: it was apparent she wanted this series to go over, even if she herself wasn’t certain of her motives. The idea of making up an essential “truth” as the center of someone’s life was appalling, but she’d delivered the suggestion with such sweet sincerity, he felt grateful to her for trying to help him out. Since arriving at the station, he’d noticed a definite increase in his pulse rate, an indication of just how desperately he wanted this series to fly.

  In addition to the show Jane produced, several news, cooking, and gardening programs were filmed at the studios of WGTB. Desmond knew you always had to expect that movie and media personalities would be smaller and less impressive (although generally better looking) in person than they were on screen, but it hadn’t occurred to him that the studios themselves might be so morbidly ordinary. As Jane gave him a tour of the building, he found himself marveling at the ticky-tacky, taped-together, temporary appearance of things: everything out of sight of the camera could have been part of a high school production of Our Town—metal folding chairs behind a news anchor’s desk, backdrops on which the painted scenery ended in mid brush stroke, a wastebasket filled with oily paper behind a chef’s kitchen counter.

  “If you look at anything too closely,” Jane said, catching his glance, “it starts to look seedy. I’m talking about the studio, not life.”

  Maybe so, but he’d often thought that it was true of life as well. The young couple who lived above him in New York were so loving on the street, but so volatile and vicious in private. Then there was Peter, who appeared to have been living a double life for a good portion of the time Desmond had known him. Or, to take a more frightening example, his own carefully hidden ambivalence about Russell, which perhaps, given recent events, hadn’t been hidden carefully enough.

  Jane slipped her arm through his as she had on the street. He was flattered by her attention, but he couldn’t tell if she genuinely liked him or was trying to convince herself she did. Maybe—according to her theories—they were essentially the same thing. “I won’t even show you the set of my show. Imagine a windowless conference room in a real estate office and you’ve got the general idea. We stick a vase of fresh flowers in the middle of the table and it looks like the Four Seasons. That’s the genius of it. Anyone can make a lovely set look lovelier, but to transform a wreck into something beautiful is a talent.”

  They were passing through a room set up with rows of long tables equipped with telephones and pitchers of water. “Fund-raising,” Jane said. “Every time a right-winger gets up and makes a speech against us, we have to take on more volunteers to handle the pledges. I’ve even flirted with the idea of voting Republican myself as some contorted way of keeping the station alive.”

  The offices of Dinner Conversation were on the second floor of the building. In the outer room, two men and a woman—all looked young enough to be Deerforth students—were clustered around a computer. The young woman was a dark beauty with a Lady Godiva mane of curly hair, dressed up in a bell-bottomed pants suit. She looked up at Jane and bit her lip anxiously, as if she’d spotted blood rushing from Jane’s forehead.

  “Chloe, Carl, Otto—Desmond. Any disasters I should know about?”

  “Everything’
s on track,” Chloe said “Dershowitz called earlier to cancel for next week, but I talked him into coming on.”

  “You should have asked me,” Jane snapped. “What makes you think I wouldn’t have welcomed his cancellation?”

  “You’re the one who invited him.”

  “That isn’t the point, Chloe, and you know it.”

  The point, it was obvious, was some kind of rivalry, but rather than pout over what was clearly an unfair accusation, Chloe apologized. One of the boys moved away from the computer screen, and Desmond could see a garish color photo of a naked woman. “We were just trying to figure out if this is really Courteney Cox’s body,” he said to Jane. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s not her body even if it is. If anyone comes in, tell them I’m still out. Desmond and I have a meeting with David in fifteen minutes, so I don’t want any interruptions.”

  Chloe tilted her head to one side and all that lush hair—or whatever it was—slithered over her shoulder. “Good luck, you guys,” she said in a voice so drenched with sympathy they might as well have been headed straight to the ER for heart surgery.

  4.

  David was a short man who was letting himself go physically. When he stood up to shake hands, Desmond couldn’t help but notice that his stomach was pressing against the bottom buttons of his pink shirt and his thighs straining against his chino pants. He had a round, meaty face and a small goatee that was being used to compensate for an absence of chin. Something in his look of exhaustion suggested a man who’d lost his appetite but was resigned to eating everything on his plate. There was a certain weary dignity to men like this, the ones who were determined to pay their dues and make good on their promises, especially if they didn’t lose it completely and end up with blood on their hands and a body or two stashed in the basement somewhere.