What's a Girl Gotta Do (14 page)

Why should not old men be mad? Some have
known a likely lad That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist Turn to a
drunken journalist; --W.B. Yeats

When the commercials ended, Joanne answered a
question about how she knew Griff. I couldn’t stay to listen,
though; Jerry was standing outside my office rapping on the mottled
glass, saying, “Makeup, Robin, makeup. We need time to rehearse,
you know?”

Jerry and I were going undercover as Mr. and
Mrs. Eugene Fullmark at Empire Semen that day, and we needed to get
ready. I would much rather have watched Joanne talk about Griff,
but sometimes one’s real life intrudes on, even overtakes, one’s
problems and crises. I was going in disguise, with a black wig and
thick glasses. It took a long time to get all my hair up under that
wig, and the wig was made bigger to compensate, until I looked like
Lady Bird Johnson. My eyebrows were darkened too, and in a bit of
inspired work, the makeup woman lightly dusted temporary dye across
my upper lip, giving me the faint illusion of a moustache. In less
than an hour, I was transformed into Ivy (it was Jerry’s mother’s
name) Fullmark, homemaker and helpmate to Eugene Fullmark, tax
attorney.

Jerry took one look at me after I got out of
makeup and said, “Can’t you make her look pretty? I want a pretty
wife.” Sometimes he’s so outrageously sexist, I can’t believe he
isn’t pulling my leg. Then I remember he has no sense of humor.

“Well, I’m the wife you got,” I said, talking
tough.

“You aren’t going to use that crusty sailor
voice today, are you?” he said. There was something sick about the
way Jerry relished this role-playing, us posing as man and wife.
There was a powerful element of control in it, in his being able to
make me play his wife because he was my boss. Or so I thought, but
hey—I’m paranoid.

In any case, the control wasn’t overtly
sexual. Jerry often made crude, sexist remarks—then again, so did
I—but I have to say this for Jerry, he never hit on me, not once.
In fact, I always thought he was a little afraid of my body, the
way he rarely touched me. It was like there was a one-inch offshore
zone radiating from me, a force field he could not bring himself to
breach.

Before we left, we rehearsed our answers and
our behavior towards each other in the office while Claire watched.
We weren’t in sync.

“You should defer to me a little, show me
some respect at least,” Jerry complained. “We have to convince the
people at Empire Semen we are married.”

“I hate this. This isn’t reporting, this is
acting.”

“You know,” Jerry said, his voice rising
slightly. “I’m starting to lose patience with you. You’re not being
a team player, Robin. Just remember this”—he jabbed his finger in
my face, careful not to cross the one-inch DMZ—“if you can’t stand
the heat, get out of the kitchen!”

“It’s not the heat I can’t stand,” I said,
grand and self-righteous. “It’s the stink!”

Claire came between us, laughing. “Well,
you’ve convinced me you’re married,” she said.

On the way over, we acted even more married,
sitting in the back of the surveillance van, fuming, not speaking
to each other. Jerry and I didn’t see eye to eye on much, that’s
for damn sure. All the male-female stuff aside, we had different
visions about how to present the news. Jerry liked a lot of easily
identifiable clichés for our viewers, who apparently don’t
understand the meaning of tears in an old woman’s eyes in close-up
as she smiles a little, ruefully, and says, “It’s been good and
it’s been bad.” To help the viewer out with this emotional
complexity, we cut the bite and instead explain that “Mary has
known some sadness in her life, much sadness, sadness and joy.” No
shit, Sherlock.

Jim and Ellis parked around the corner from
Empire Semen and did a quick equipment test. Jerry and I were both
wired for sound and we both had small surveillance cameras with
built-in mikes. The newsroom had been joking about Jerry’s
“penis-cam,” but, actually, his was concealed in a briefcase (his
camera, not his penis) and the mechanics of his donation would not
be shown, thank God. My camera was in my purse, or rather, Ivy’s
purse, a large black vinyl handbag especially made to hold the
small camera, with its tiny fish-eye lens and ni-cad battery pack.
The network had put big money, for them, into this undercover
capability and Jerry was determined to give the network its money’s
worth. We went undercover a lot. We once went undercover at a
church bingo hall for a story on suburban vice.

When everything was checked and working,
Jerry and I went into Empire Semen, a large, squat building in the
North Bronx. Inside, a receptionist ushered us into an office to
wait. Jerry and I still weren’t talking. A densely packed nurse
came into the badly paneled room and gave us clipboards. As we
filled out the medial questionnaire and a legal form, she sat
across from us and watched. Jerry and I seethed at each other and
mumbled under our breath.

When we handed in our assignments, the nurse
spoke at some length about the donation procedure, the storage
procedure, and the insemination procedure, which could be performed
by a licensed physician affiliated with Empire, by my own personal
physician, or by myself in the privacy of my own home. They even
delivered. In New York, you can get anything delivered.

When she was through, she handed Jerry a
paper cup and a printed sheet of “Ejaculate Handling
Instructions.”

“Better give me a bucket!” he said, winking
at me. “Right, honey?” He was really enjoying this.

“Har har har,” I said slowly.

When Jerry went to jerk off, the nurse smiled
at me. “How long you been married?” she asked. “No, lemme guess.
Judging by the way you argue, I’d say ten years.”

“It seems like a century,” I said, as my
camera recorded every word. “I don’t believe in divorce, but
sometimes . . .”

“Sometimes . . .,” she prompted, expectant of
secrets.

“Sometimes, I just want to start over without
him. The things he asks me to do . . .”

“What things?”

“You know, in bed. He has disgusting
fetishes.”

If I had to play this wife role, I was going
to play it to the hilt—my own way. “Disgusting fetishes,” I went
on. “When he bought that artificial leg, I said enough was enough,
you know, because he has two legs already. So we don’t have sex
anymore. I want to have a baby, but I don’t want to have to
actually touch him, so this is the next best thing. When I’m ready
for a baby, I’ll just come make a withdrawal, right?”

“Absolutely!” the nurse said. She couldn’t
believe I was telling her all this.

I leaned in towards her, confidentially.
“Actually,” I said. “There’s no rule that I have to use his sperm,
is there? When the time comes, maybe I could make a switch. You . .
. you have any of that Nobel-prize winner sperm here?”

She shook her head. “A lot of medical
students from Columbia University, though.”

I asked her to take me on a tour of the
storage facility. At first, she resisted, but I convinced her
Eugene would be furious if I couldn’t at least assure him that his
seed would be well cared for.

“Personally, I don’t care what you do with
it,” I said, which was not a lie. This is where going undercover
became valuable, because I was able to see the refrigerated back
room, with all its signs of shoddy organization. The sperm was kept
in big liquid nitrogen containers, some with faded labels, one of
them leaking something. Outside, a lackadaisical attendant watched
television.

I asked all the questions I had to for the
piece, and continued trashing Eugene Fullmark and telling
embarrassing stories about him, sex stories involving prosthetic
limbs and self-abuse. When Jerry and I left, she gave him a strange
smile.

“I think that nurse had the hots for me,” he
said.

“She was fascinated by you,” I told him, in
all seriousness. It was not a lie.

We gave Claire the tapes to log when we all
got back to ANN. Jerry had to run to an affiliate seminar.

“Don’t make any dubs of mine,” I said to
Claire, tipping her off that it was highly dubbable stuff. Tapes
that show on-air talent or executives being embarrassed are passed
around by the workers to be dubbed for private blooper reels in a
kind of samizdat system. I had appeared on several, and had one of
my own at home.

“Sure,” Claire said, smiling slyly.

What had I accomplished with my performance
at Empire? Well, I had assured that my part as Ivy Fullmark would
end up largely on the cutting-room floor, so to speak, and only my
relevant questions and the video from the back room would make it
into the series, thus limiting my exposure to further humiliation.
What else could I do? I have a bad attitude and an ironclad
contract. And, I admit, it was fun.

I started transferring stuff from my pockets
back into my real purse (the purse-cam hadn’t been designed to hold
anything but the camera and battery-pack) and I realized I didn’t
have my keys. Goddamn it.

I looked around my office, knowing that even
if they were there I might not find them. My office, you see, is
pretty cluttered, like my apartment, although at work a cleaning
lady came in nightly. Newspapers and raw tapes from previous
stories were stacked in precarious piles all over the room.
Interoffice memos overflowed from the fish bowl into which they
were jammed. Papers, yellow Post-It notes, and pens of various
colors covered the desk, while along the back wall was a bookshelf
holding all the books I thought I might need in writing, all
haphazardly shelved.

(There was a Pelican Complete Works of
Shakespeare, the collected works of Mark Twain, a dictionary, the
Columbia History of the World, collected poems of W. H. Auden and
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and
Influence People, a few biographies of movie stars, the definitive
bio of Edward R. Murrow, and a Bartlett’s Quotations in a glass
case with a tiny steel mallet and a sign that said, “In case of
emergency break glass.” That was a gift from McGravy.)

I couldn’t find my keys. Believe it or not, I
misplace them a lot, although never for very long. I called out to
Claire, “Did maintenance empty the trash baskets this afternoon,
while we were out?”

“I don’t know,” she answered back, her voice
muted by the wall between our offices. “I was in the library most
of the morning, boning up on sperm. So to speak. Go ahead, ask me
anything. I’ll take seminal fluid for four hundred, Alex.”

“I can’t find my keys,” I said. “Shit.”

I closed my eyes and tried to retrace my
steps that day, where I last saw my keys and what I then did, like
that. Did I drop them somewhere when I was taking stuff out of my
purse and putting it into my pockets? But it was no good. I
couldn’t remember.

As luck would have it, there was only one set
of spare keys to my place and Burke had them, which meant I’d have
to call him and I’d have to talk about the Griff case. I dunno.
Maybe a part of me wanted to see him, and the keys were a good
excuse. I hadn’t asked for my keys back because I still had this
romantic idea he would just quietly come back one night, slipping
back into my bed as though he had never gone, and my real life
could resume. He hadn’t given them back to me for reasons I
couldn’t presume to know. It was probably time to close the book on
that fantasy, I thought.

I called Burke and asked him to meet me and
bring my keys. I wasn’t keen on seeing him, but I had no choice,
right? All the same, before I left I checked my desk one more time,
pushing around the loose papers, still hoping to uncover my keys. I
didn’t, but I found a Xeroxed sheet with a yellow Post-It note
attached: “Squirreled this away from Gil Jerome for you. Eric.”

I peeled off the Post-It and read. It was the
preliminary medical report on Griff, which Jerome wouldn’t give me,
me being a witness and all. Based on the last time Griff was seen,
a partially digested meal in the stomach, liver temperature reading
at the crime scene, and lividity (the way the blood settles in a
corpse), time and death was guesstimated at sometime between
nine-thirty and eleven, New Year’s Eve. He had been attacked from
the front with the murder weapon, and he was in the bathroom when
it happened, judging by blood splatters and fingerprints—his—on the
bathroom door. The report speculated that he fell to his knees,
holding his bleeding head with one hand. He was hit again, on the
top of his head. When he collapsed, facedown on the floor, he was
struck sixteen more times.

Chapter Nine

TWO WORDS BUZZED AROUND Keggers that night:
conspiracy and confession.

Because it had good prices and because it was
in the basement of our building, right across from the subway,
Keggers was the ANN hangout. Open a bar near a network or newspaper
and you can make a fortune. Journalists like to unwind, they like
to drink, and they leave big tips. Keggers catered to us by
papering the walls with facsimiles of historic newspaper editions
(the ladies’ room was done completely in Women Get the Vote!
Editions of the New York Telegraph). Behind the bar were
caricatures of ANN personalities and executives, including my
caricature, with my overlarge mouth.

If we didn’t already feel at home, the
bartender always knew our drinks, and the lighting was kept low and
flattering. Keggers was where Burke wanted to meet me, presumably
because he could stop by the Gotham Salon offices and see Amy on
his way to or from meeting me, or maybe so he could cultivate a few
sources.

However, Burke was not there when I arrived,
which was unusual. He was an early person. I, on the other hand, am
a late person.

A Willie Dixon blues song was playing on the
jukebox when I walked in. The regulars were all there. By the door,
a table of senior assignment desk guys were loudly discussing the
possible conspiracy against ANN, which preempted their usual war
stories: Khe Sanh, Dhahran, Kabul. Bullets, booze, broads. Dallas
’63, I drank with Ruby. I’d heard these stories a hundred times,
and so had they, but they didn’t seem to mind the repetition,
lubricated as it was by steady glasses of sour mash sippin’.