Star Time (18 page)

Chris was waiting at the gate to pick him up. She was overjoyed to see him after so long and had arranged to take the entire weekend off. They were to drive up to San
Ysidro
Ranch outside of Santa Barbara.

She was just edging the car onto an access ramp of the freeway when her police radio reported a shooting at a nearby car dealership. The briefest of glances passed between them. She swung the car wide to get back on the boulevard and, a moment later, radioed the assignment desk that she was racing to the scene. A KFBS News crew would be immediately diverted. Greg had long suspected that for a few lucky reporters, such as Chris, stories seemed to materialize in front of them, as if their presence were a catalyst.

Police were still cordoning off the street and ambulances were still arriving as Chris jumped out of the car and rushed forward, Greg only a step behind. She flashed her press credentials, but two policemen refused to admit them.

“Our crew will be here in three minutes,” Greg threatened. “The first
pictures
they’ll shoot is of you two telling us you don’t want the people of California to know what happened here.”

The policemen glanced sheepishly at each other and reluctantly, stepped back to admit the broadcasters.

Seven people had been shot to death. Three others were badly wounded. Among the dead was the small dealership’s manager, a nationalized Mexican. The killer was also a Mexican émigré. That morning U.S. Immigration and Naturalization authorities had denied his application for permanent residency and ordered his deportation back to Mexico within thirty days. Frantic, he blamed the manager for sabotaging his application and several co-workers as well. Starting in the showroom, he walked through the premises firing two pistols he had bought, calmly shooting down those he believed to be his enemies, as well as several customers he had never seen before. He counted aloud
the bullets remaining after each shot. In the Service Center, with one bullet left, he committed suicide.

Greg withdrew to Chris’s car when he saw the KFBS remote news van pull up, before the crew could glimpse him. He observed her through the showroom’s shattered glass facade, deftly taking advantage of this lucky break Stew
Graushner
could not deny her. Totally intent on her report, she interviewed witnesses and then had the cameraman retrace the killer’s steps as she recreated his murderous progress. Finally, she did a stand-up close. Not a word had been wasted, Greg realized, not a motion was extraneous. A regular late-shift reporter had been dispatched to the hospital to do follow-ups for the late-evening news program.

About an hour up the California coast, Greg pulled off the highway to find a tavern with a television set. KFBS’s news broadcast was about to begin. He and Chris ordered supper while sitting at the bar. The station led with the story and was the only one to get meaningful video before the police locked down the crime scene.

The couple ate leisurely while watching the rest of the broadcast. They were preparing to leave when they heard the grave voice of FBS’s network anchorman, Ray
Strock
, announce “a tragic scene in Los Angeles. Reporter Christine
Paskins
has the full story.”

Chris’s eyes glittered in the low light as she watched her report being rebroadcast across the entire country. As soon as it ended, she took Greg’s face between her hands and kissed him passionately.

“How fast can we get to Santa Barbara?” she whispered.

Greg realized once more that Chris was a single, unified whole. Her exhilaration over her success had sexually excited her as fully as it had intellectually. Love for her rose up within him like a flock of songbirds.

“We’ll be inside a cottage in twenty minutes,” he whispered back. “I’ll be inside you five seconds after that. Count on it.”

Her body trembled at the thought. He knew he could never love another woman the way he loved Chris.

They started to pull off clothing before they closed the cottage door, consumed by the great secret of sex they shared. He lifted her onto his hardness without waiting to reach the bed. Wet and open, she wrapped her legs around him, feeling him as surely within her love as he was within her body. Sighs escaped them both as sensation and sanctuary conjoined.

The next morning, as soon as they began to stir awake, they made love again.

The rest of the day was spent horseback riding, Greg precariously; playing tennis, with Chris trying to make up in tenacity what she lacked
in experience; walking in the woods; and reading by the pool. They ate too much at lunch and again at dinner.

They made love for hours that night. Only later, when she was asleep and curled naked and deeply content against him, did he finally force himself to wrestle with the anguish of choosing between two women. He had never been so torn in his life—between love and all his dearest objectives.

He loved Chris and she made him happy, but Diane would provide access to everything he coveted, endowing him with the power and freedom he craved, propelling his ambition as far as he could reach, to where his dreams awaited. All the gaping wants of his childhood would be satisfied. Banished forever would be worries about poverty and exclusion and loss. The deprived, bereft steelworker’s son would vanish and only the confident Yale man Diane had chosen to marry, Barnett Roderick’s heir apparent, would remain. Effortlessly, he would enter America’s moneyed aristocracy. Security, indeed wealth, would sit as confidently in his pocket as his jackknife had as a boy. If he wished to, he could walk upon the stars.

Greg weighed the issue objectively: He genuinely enjoyed Diane’s company and believed the union would bring him contentment. She was attractive and gracious, a sophisticated and amiable companion. She was as social as he. Although she was a hard worker at her job and for charities, people comprised her major interest in life—her father, friends, the children at the hospital. Indeed, she loved children, as he did. She knew he wanted a large family, and she wanted one, too, she had assured him. She was capable of affection and humor and, even after displaying irritation, quick to hug and make up.

On the minus side of the ledger, he remembered how emphatic she could be to get her own way and how testy when she did not. When she had rushed to pay at the nightclub and, earlier that same night, had criticized him, she seemed overeager to be in control and uncomfortable when she was not. Or was he exaggerating her attitude in retrospect? Were their brief, minor disagreements an indication of greater disputes to come or merely a normal means of adjusting to each other?

He decided he was being too negative in characterizing Diane’s
behavior, that
those irksome attitudes could well have been caused by her nervousness under the pressure of running a large event and not yet knowing him well enough to relax. He justified her failure to evoke the infinite tenderness that Chris did by recalling his own conscious avoidance of tenderness toward
her
, wanting not to be disloyal to Chris. Focusing on tenderness forced him to consider the largest of her deficits compared to Chris, one he could not ignore: that he felt little passion for her. The desire Chris ignited could consume him.

Passion, he admitted, was only part of what he felt for Chris. He could talk to her more openly than anyone he had ever known. She was the only one he had ever let see the sometimes-apprehensive inner man he had concealed since childhood, who operated the limbs and voice of the Greg he had constructed around himself. He loved her prodigiously, deeply. And because of that, he was tortured.

Greg looked down along Chris’s naked body, remembering the first time he had lain beside her, in the little apartment near the sea. A great sadness overcame him. If he chose Diane, he would be losing the love that flowed abundantly, joyously, from Chris, and would plunge torment deep into her heart.

Yet, she, too, had faults, he reminded himself. She was as career-driven as he and could become self-absorbed and reclusive. Their fights could be ferocious. So often their lives seemed separate, their aspirations parallel or contrary rather than shared; at times they were united only in that amazing passion. And passion, like any fever, he told himself, inevitably passed. It had for Arnold Mandel and his wife. It had for his parents. Yet, always, he had to admit, towering over every other consideration that arose in his mind, was that his passion for success—for winning at the game of life—far exceeded his passion for anything else, even for Chris.

He could not lie to himself that he loved Diane the way he did Chris

or maybe even that he loved her at all. But he gradually and logically convinced himself that love for her would grow over time. A hazy image of their lives in ten years illuminated the darkness above the bed. He could see an older Barnett offering Greg a place atop FBS.
And as if in a painting, a smiling Diane amid their children in a palatial home, gazing worshipfully at the viewer, at him.
He could feel intimations of the power he would wield, of the freedom to do and have everything he had ever desired, lifting him upward into that reverie. The grief he would feel upon parting from Chris would be replaced by satisfactions he could not yet begin to imagine, but seemed so much more than he would be losing.

Determining finally that he must seize this opportunity to realize his destiny or
risk having it pass
him by forever, Greg decided that he would ask Diane to marry him. If she said yes, he would break off with Chris.

She would be devastated, but it never occurred to him
during all of that dark night
that his greatest loss might be that the love he
felt for her embodied his essence and worth as a human being
.

As he said good-bye to Chris, he steeled himself against suffering doubts, and his face revealed none of the misery he was feeling. The hours on the airplane flying back to New York were spent planning his proposal of marriage to Diane. His future was at stake. For all his calculation when making the choice, he took marriage and his commitment to Diane seriously. He wanted the moment to be romantic, and she would expect that. He tried to think where a man suitable to a woman like Diane would propose.

He decided he would take her to dinner at Eleven Madison, if he could get a reservation.
Superb food.
Restrained surroundings.
Long-established.
He did not have time to buy a ring and was reluctant to incur the debt until after she said yes. Besides, any ring he could afford would probably just embarrass her.

With dessert the waiter set down a bottle of champagne before them.

“I’m hoping we’ll have a reason to celebrate,” Greg explained. He paused. He wanted her to hear how sincerely he wanted her. “Will you marry me?”

“Do you love me, Greg? You’ve never told me.”

“I love you,” he said, eyes shining. “What kept me from saying it before, what almost frightened me away
tonight,
was that you might think I was a fortune hunter.”

He leaned forward and kissed her, seeking both to convince her to marry him and from her silent lips, to provoke her answer.

“Yes. Yes,” she finally said aloud when they pulled apart.

Greg felt himself zooming through the magic window and into the glamorous future he had always yearned for.

He took her back to his apartment and made love to her, sealing her acceptance. The experience was again enjoyable for them both, and he was sure that it would doubtless grow more so as they grew better acquainted with each other’s likes. Greg had no illusions that it would ever approach what he had just chosen to discard.

At five-thirty that morning, Diane awoke, remembering that her father, who would soon be up and exercising, would become concerned upon discovering that she was not yet home.

Greg accompanied her in a cab, intending to continue on to his office to get a head start on the day. She prevailed on him, instead, to come
upstairs with her and then and there ask for her father’s permission to marry her.

“Daddy won’t object if it’s what I want.”

Greg had hoped to delay the confrontation. He wanted time to think through the right approach and for Barnett to convey back through Diane what his response would be to the new turn of events. But because he suspected she might doubt his ardor if he delayed, he accompanied her upstairs.

Just as Greg was no longer under the illusion that Barnett, unaided, had singled him out for advancement, he could not lie to himself that he had seduced a guileless Diane into becoming his mate. He fully understood now that Diane had done the singling out and that Barnett had enabled the seduction. Although Greg was sure the father would have preferred her choosing someone from her own class, someone with substantial family credentials, he desired her happiness and had acted to fulfill her wishes. He had offered up to Greg a foretaste of all the earthly delights that might be his if he were chosen, and if, in turn, he chose. And Greg had hungered for them all.

They found the Chairman in a large room Greg had not yet seen in the back of the apartment: a gymnasium with weights and exercise equipment around the periphery and, in the center, a full-scale boxing ring. Barnett wore only shiny black trunks and high leather shoes. His hands were encased in boxing gloves, his head in a padded
headguard
. He was attacking the heavy bag. Despite his sixty-one years, he looked fit and
trim
. He finally glanced over at the young couple, who stood to one side watching.