The Ghost of Greenwich Village: A Novel (3 page)

“One of the writers. I thought he was doing this soup mess.”

“I don’t know. I just got here and Tanya sent me down.”

“Oh, well. Hey. Welcome, then. What’s your name?”

“Eve Weldon.”

“I’m Lark Carmichael. Director. I’d shake your hand but I have a wicked cold,” she said, dabbing at her nose with a tissue. “All the stuff is laid out for you. It shouldn’t be too bad. As long as it looks good, that’s all that matters. When Zorin’s done pretending to cook it tomorrow, Bliss and Hap will pretend to taste it and pretend to love it. I’d help you, but I probably shouldn’t handle food right now.” She sneezed twice and turned to go.

“No problem. Nice to meet you,” said Eve, sorry to lose her fellow space traveler so soon. She ran her eyes across the staggering array of ingredients on the counter: a dozen lobster tails, slabs of red snapper, halibut, and sea bass, and piles of shrimp, crab legs, mussels, oysters, and clams. The recipe said the entire lot was to be cleaned, cracked, de-boned, de-shelled, and de-veined.
De-lightful
.

She leaned in close, poked a finger at a set of glistening silver scales, and wrinkled her nose at the smell of raw seafood. She tried breathing through her mouth, but there were other hindrances. The cold slime of the flesh turned her fingers to ice, and the tiny bones hidden deep within put up fierce resistance to separation, driving her nearly mad with frustration. Gradually, she got used to the odor, though the halibut seemed particularly malevolent. Well, raw fish wasn’t exactly known for its pleasant aroma. She briefly considered finding Lark to ask her opinion, then decided against it. If Eve had learned anything during her two forays into the New York City job market, it was that nobody wanted to hear your questions or your problems. They expected you to get on with things. Figure it out.

When she was finished, she washed her hands and bent over the directions. “Heat oil in large pot.” The pot came up to her
neck, but after finding a crate to stand on, this was doable. “Add garlic, onion, leeks, and bay leaf and cook until onion is tender but not browned.” Check. Now, this actually smelled quite lovely, she thought, inhaling the woody steam. She was really cooking now, cooking on the moon. “Add tomatoes, fish stock, wine, fennel, saffron, salt, pepper, and parsley.” Check. Check. “Bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer five minutes. Add lobster, snapper, sea bass, and halibut and cook ten minutes. Add shellfish to pot and cook five more minutes or until shells open.” Not difficult, but a little disconcerting to watch the mussels spring apart, as if expressing their horror at this ghastly turn of events with a unified silent scream.

All right now. It looked fine. Good, even. The deep red-brown broth, glistening with flecks of oil, offered up its treasures in a most inviting way. Even the halibut’s nasty smell had subsided. Now she only had to “write up the segment.” With no alliteration, puns, or “clever” turns of phrase, of course.

   • • •

Tanya led Eve through the vast open-plan room and down a hall on the far side. They made a right turn, then a left, and then another right. They walked a good minute before going around two more bends, where they were confronted by a locked door. This Tanya opened by punching a code onto a small panel. On the other side lay another long, extremely narrow hallway. At the very end, they came to a windowless office that seemed cut off from the rest of the world. A space capsule for one. The room was a study in corporate cheerlessness: gray walls, gray carpeting, gunmetal shelving. Eve sat down while Tanya silently logged her onto the computer with a few keystrokes. As she turned to leave, Eve looked at the screen’s blank page, which was divided in half vertically by a long black line and looked quite unlike anything she’d ever seen before.

“Excuse me …?” Tanya turned around. Eve didn’t want to admit she had no idea what to do, but this represented more
daunting a challenge than some odorous fish. “Could you maybe just get me started?”

“What do you mean?”

“What exactly am I supposed to do?”

“Didn’t you just make the bouillabaisse?” asked Tanya. Eve nodded. “So now, hello, just write the segment.”

“Sure,” said Eve, improvising. “But you know, each TV station has its own style. I just wanted to know how you do things here.”

Tanya plunked her hands on her hips. “Um, not really, no. Television scripts look pretty much the same everywhere. And this isn’t a ‘TV station,’ you realize that, right? It’s a network. Jeez.” She headed off down the hall. Eve stared at the strange screen, willing it to make sense. It glared back, brazen. “Okay, look.” Tanya reappeared in the doorway. “The head writer’s next door. His name’s Mark. Maybe he can help you.” As quickly as she’d materialized, she was gone again.

Eve ventured into the hall. She could hear the man in the next office talking sternly on the phone.

“Look, Steve, you sound like crap but we really need you in today. Orla Knock had some kind of meeting, so I’m editing. And guess what? Before she left, she canned Kevin.” There was a pause. “No, I’m not joking. Apparently I’m now responsible for helping some new freelancer through the drill and then I’m supposed to report to Orla on how she does. So that’s an extra hour out of my day. We’re spread way too thin and all we need is more grief from Giles about this department. So really, buddy, get your ass in here. Thanks.” He hung up.

Eve knocked and pushed the door open. “Uh—hello, are you Mark?” she said. “Sorry to bother you, but I’m about to write a—um, segment—and I’m ready to go and everything, but …” Mark shuffled through some newspapers on his desk and seemed intent on ignoring her. “I was wondering if you could just give me a push?”

Finally, he looked up. He was close to forty, she guessed, with
a long, lean frame, pronounced bones in his face, and long dark lashes. He stared a moment before speaking, seemingly thrown, as if her appearance did not match what he’d been expecting.

“So you’re Kevin’s replacement,” he said. “I couldn’t believe they found someone so fast.” He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. “That’s the thing about the networks, man. They can abuse you any way they want because people are literally lined up to take your place.”

“I wouldn’t say I was ‘lined up.’ And anyway, Tanya was quick to let me know this is just a tryout.”

“Well, that’s the way it works around here. Unless you come over from the
Today
show or
GMA
. You didn’t, did you?”

“No.”

“So.” He pulled a piece of paper off a stack. “By my calculations, you must be bouillabaisse. I knew when I saw Kevin’s name down for that one he was going to have a fit. I didn’t have a clue he’d actually make a stink with Orla, though. Let’s go back to your computer and see what’s what.” He brushed past her and they went back to her office. “So, where have you worked?” he asked, sitting down at her desk. She said nothing. “Damn, this thing’s slow.” He hit the side of the monitor with the flat of his hand. “Which news software are you familiar with?”

Eve couldn’t look him in the eye, so she settled for his nose. “I can’t remember what it was called.”

“But you’ve written news scripts before, right?”

Eve wrapped her arms around her waist.

He pushed back from the desk. “You’ve got to be kidding. What, you just walked in off the street and said, ‘Hi, I’d like a job in TV’?”

“Hardly—”

“May I assume you’re a print journalist, then?”

“I was published in my college paper.”

“This just gets better and better. You had a byline? A column?”

Did he really need to be this disagreeable? “It was an excerpt of a paper I wrote.”

“
Fabulous
. About what?”

“An examination of Toulouse-Lautrec’s influence on Modigliani. It won second place in a southern Ohio college essay contest.” Eve tried to infuse this line with a sense of relevance.

He kicked the desk. “Christ, are you for real?”

Eve looked for the little boy inside her interrogator, but once again, it was only a tetchy adult who glared back at her. A clock on the wall ticked the seconds. She saw it all slipping away—the job, the apartment, everything. “Look, a friend set up this meeting with Orla Knock. That’s how I got in. But I’m here now and you need help,” she said quietly but firmly. “Can we just see how it goes? I really can write.”

He sighed. “This is nuts,” he said. He looked at his watch and mumbled something. “Fine, whatever. Can’t
wait
to see what you can do. I’m setting up the page. Here, on the right, is where you’ll write what Hap says to introduce the segment. That’s called the ‘intro.’ ”

“So let me get this straight,” she said after watching him work for a few moments. “I write what this man is going to say?”

“Um, yeah. Everything you hear a network anchor say was written by a union writer, except when they ad-lib, which is usually an unmitigated disaster. Sometimes they rewrite what we write, but they almost never start from scratch.”

“So we’re … their voices?”

“I suppose, but for God’s sake never say that again.” He pointed to the screen. “Now, see here? At the bottom? The computer will tell you how long your copy runs when spoken. If the rundown—that’s this sheet that has the whole show on it—says your intro should be twenty seconds, write twenty seconds. Exactly. No more, no less.”

“Does it have to be exact-exact?” she asked. “Isn’t the show two hours long or something?” She didn’t want to trigger any
more animosity with her questions, but curiosity got the better of her.

“You’re a walking faux pas machine.” He closed his eyes and shook his head again. “Timing a live show is unbelievably complicated. First of all, there are, like, a thousand elements: the segments, the commercials, the bumpers, the teases, the ‘hello’ pages.” Eve wished she had a pen to take notes. “Plus, twice an hour, the computer takes the network off the air and goes to the local news and weather cut-in. If the anchor’s still blabbing away because you wrote too much, or put in too many questions for him to ask, it looks really ugly having him disappear from the screen mid-sentence. On the other hand, if you write too little, and leave the host with nothing to say and time to fill, let’s just say don’t bother coming into work ever again.”

“I see,” said Eve.
Who would want this job?
“And how am I supposed to come up with precisely twenty seconds about bouillabaisse?” she asked. “Could I ask Hap McCutcheon what he’d like to say?”

“You’re elevating my blood pressure,” said Mark distractedly as he tapped on the keyboard. “No, you cannot ask Hap or Bliss what they want to say. You’ll probably never even meet them. They work mornings; we work nights. I’ve been here four years and I’m sure neither of them could pick me out of a police lineup.”

This was starting to sound like a very strange arrangement, writing for people you didn’t know. Rather like choosing an outfit for someone you’d never seen. But Eve had to admit this Mark was slightly more obliging than her two previous New York bosses, and she decided she ought to be grateful. “Got it,” she said.

“It’s
your
job to figure out how to interest the American people in some foreign soup with a hard-to-pronounce name. At eight-thirty in the morning. No one else’s.”

“Okay.”

“So—go to it.” He stood up and motioned for her to take the chair behind the desk.

Eve took her seat, thinking hard about bouillabaisse.
Bouillabaisse. Bouillabaisse
. “Well,” she began. “I guess the name itself is appealing.”

“Because?” he said, looking at his watch again.

“It sounds glamorous. It makes me think of sophisticated French people sitting around in striped T-shirts and neck scarves on the shores of the Mediterranean.” She’d been there as a child during a family trip to France. Her mind strayed further as the reverie took hold. “They’re under the stars, drinking red wine. They’re laughing—at a political joke. Or a Jerry Lewis reference maybe. And they’re eating this wonderful bouillabaisse, big steaming bowls of fish and fragrance.” She opened her eyes.

He nodded a little impatiently. “Okay. But now imagine you’re a mother of four in Indianapolis.”

“Why?”

“She’s our target audience. You have to make her obsessed with making this soup. And to her, that fantasy sounds intimidating. These French political joke makers are so urbane and this bouillabaisse sounds pretty complicated.”

Eve jumped in. “Oh, but it’s not. I just made it, down in the studio. All by myself. I mean, it took a while because I was making a large amount. But for a normal dinner party, I think it’d be pretty easy.”

“All right,” he said. “Take those two ideas and put them together. Most intros are a combination of two contrasting ideas. See what you come up with. Make it conversational and of course mention Zorin at the end. Show me when you’re done.”

Just then, Tanya popped her head in, looking irritated. “Hey, it’s time for your pre-interview with Senator Farnsworth. You’re not at your desk and his aide is giving me all kinds of grief.”

“ShitShitShit. Okay.” For an instant, his commanding demeanor seemed to slip. He threw a glance at Eve and left.

A senator on the phone? Great Scott. Eve was relieved to have only soup on her plate, or in her bowl, as it were. She perched her fingers on the keyboard but all the ideas she’d had evaporated. Striped shirts? Beaches? What had she been thinking? Either her attention span had shrunk to nil or Donald had messed with her brain’s wiring somehow. Or maybe this job—writing a handful of very specifically tailored sentences—was just too difficult.

She thought of her job back home. The paralegal work she did for her father, Gin—taking notes during depositions, summarizing documents, and preparing reports—came easily. It always had. Only lately had that effortlessness begun to feel constraining. But it had been weeks and weeks since she’d done even that, and she was feeling rusty.

Her fingers hovered above the keys. Donald rarely seemed to have a problem getting started. What was it he said about writer’s block? Ignore it. Write your way round it.

She began to type, slowly at first, before picking up steam as her dormant skills roused themselves. She looked down at the computer timer: Her first attempt had yielded four minutes of copy. She began to play with the words—adding, subtracting, and changing their order as if stringing them on the add-a-pearl necklace she had when she was twelve. But no matter how much she reworked it, she kept winding up with twenty-two seconds. She had to lose three words, but which ones? “Rich and delectable”? Or “hearty yet elegant”? It was a linguistic
Sophie’s Choice
. Half an hour later, she printed her best effort.