What's a Girl Gotta Do (18 page)

“A bad one?”

“Well, an interesting one,” he said. “So tell
me about your family.”

“My mom lives with my aunt Minnie in my
hometown. All my mom’s sisters are there. My dad died.”

“When?”

“When I was ten.”

“Wow. How did he die?”

“Well, you know how you can’t get a traffic
light at a bad intersection until somebody dies?”

“Yeah.”

“My dad was the guy who died. My father was a
real safety nut, you know? He was always warning of the hidden
menace in things, and looking for ways to thwart it. Anyway, he was
one of the organizers of a petition drive to get a light at this
intersection in the middle of town. It was a really bad one, a
blind corner with the streets crossing at funny angles and a lot of
thick bushes on one side.”

“What happened?”

“Well, that day he was taking measurements of
the street dimensions for the committee’s report, and a truck
barreled around the corner and killed him. There’s a little plaque
there with my dad’s name on it, near the traffic light.”’

“That’s terrible. You were pretty young,” he
said. He took a cut mushroom from the board and put it up to my
mouth. I ate it. His fingers touched the tip of my tongue.

“Yeah, you know, life’s a bitch,” I said. “I
used to imagine my dad was in those traffic lights. Oh God, does
that sound crazy?”

“Not really. . . .”

“I didn’t believe my father was reincarnated
as a traffic light, or anything. It’s a metaphor for a kind of . .
.”

“Benign authority,” he said.

“Exactly!”

“Something telling you stop, go,
caution.”

“Yeah. So—how did you dad die?”

“Um, massive coronary,” he said, almost
apologetically. “In the bathtub. He smoked, ate, and drank himself
to death. Slowly. He was sixty-nine.”

“I’m so sorry.” There was an awkward moment.
We had divulged too much. Or I had, at least. Eric, actually,
seemed unbothered, but I felt like I had made a tactical error.

The bowl went into the fridge to marinate,
and Eric wiped his hands on his apron before taking it off and
hanging it on a hook. I loved the way he dressed, a navy blue
corduroy shirt over faded jeans. He had a great physique, like he
worked out, but not too much. He didn’t have that
bowling-balls-in-pantyhose look of muscle men or anything like
that.

Did he have a hairy body, I wondered? His
arms weren’t very hairy, but just above his open collar there was a
nice hint of dark hair on his chest. Too hairy didn’t turn me on,
but some strategically located body hair would be nice. Burke was
almost hairless.

“Have a seat and I’ll plug in the Fritz
tape,” he said, but then the phone rang. He took it in the bedroom.
The door was open and I could see him sitting on his bed, a
four-poster.

I sat down on an overstuffed sectional sofa,
which sank comfortably as I nestled in. It was warm in Eric’s
apartment, a nice contrast to the icy rain outside, and I was
feeling very good and very pretty.

When he came out, he said, “Sorry, that was
Greg, about some show plans for next week. The guy never stops.
Never. He wants me to watch Greg Browner Weekend.”

“He has a weekend show now?”

“It’s highlights from his live shows the
previous week. We repackage the stuff and sell it to a new
advertiser. Do you mind watching? He thinks he wants to change the
lighting. He thinks it’s making him look old.”

“Age is making him look old,” I said.

“I know, but I don’t how you work for
Browner,” I said. “Are you a saint?”

He smiled. “No. I’m just not a news moonie,
like some of you. For me, it’s a great job. Technically, I work for
Greg’s production company—I don’t actually work for ANN anymore—and
I make twice what I made when I worked on Ambush. I give him that
youthful edge he’s missing. I do what Greg tells me to do, and if I
have a better idea I tell him and he turns thumbs up or thumbs
down. I don’t sweat it, and every two weeks I get big bucks,
relatively speaking. I have money for my real life.”

“What is your real life?”

He thought about it and said, “It’s an
endless search for true love. How about yours?”

I gritted my teeth and, through sheer force
of will, sucked a blush back from my skin. “I don’t really believe
in love,” I said. “I think my life is an endless search for the
guilty party.”

He didn’t laugh. Instead, he looked like he
found this . . . interesting. The show was starting so he turned up
the volume. We watched a montage of Greg shots—chatting with
guests, laughing at Eddie Murphy, earnestly quizzing Richard Nixon,
leaning on Elton John’s piano, singing along. Over this was the
Browner theme music, friendly but newsy, like a Stephen foster song
played on typewriter keys. The announcer read off the list of
guests, three always and always in this order: celebrity,
politician (there to tell America something we don’t already know
about them), and a “regular guy” to whom something irregular had
recently happened.

At the bottom of the screen, a super told
weekend viewers the show was taped and not to call. Greg, looking
handsome for an older man with kind of a blond, Robert Mitchum
thing going, conversed with the famous guest and then opened up the
phones to his millions of viewers, many of whom had his toll-free
number programmed into their phones. They loved Greg and he had
good demographics, if not the ratings Larry King had—yet.
Ironically, Greg skewed very well with college-educated women.

On the air, he was very appealing, I’ll give
him that, but that was his TV persona. A TV persona is kind of like
a whalebone corset. When you take it off, everything goes
flying.

“First-time caller, Greg,” a male voice
drawled. “Want to say I love your show and I wish you’d run for
office.”

“Thanks a lot, Chicago, but I’ve already got
a job I love. Did you have a question for Cher?”

“Think he’ll ever run for office?” I
asked.

“Never,” Eric said, snorting. “Look, he likes
a few of those callers every show asking him to run, because he
likes to be flattered, but he loves television. He has more
influence with his talk show than he would have as president.”

“Not quite.”

“Pretty close. On his show, he’s in control
of his image. He gets to be the voice of reason between warring
extremes. Nobody can run for office anymore without checking in
with him and Larry King, and Greg is the wave of the future because
he’s younger than Larry and he’s better looking. Jackson gives him
autonomy. Women viewers write him erudite love letters. People
admire him. If he went into politics, all that would be over.”

Eric was smart. Why did I think he was a
bimbo?

“I see your point. But people think Greg
might do it—run, I mean. Doesn’t he risk a backlash if he doesn’t
run? Like Ross Perot when he pulled out of the presidential
race?”

“Nah,” Eric said. “He’s more like Will Rogers
than Ross Perot, on the air at least. If he refuses to run, it just
endears him more to his viewers. If he actually ran, all that would
be over.”

“Do you think Greg was being blackmailed
too?”

“Greg says no.”

“Do you believe him?”

“It’s not my job to believe him or not, just
to implement his managerial edicts,” he said tersely and looked
back at the television. He was a little sensitive about working for
Greg. I didn’t press him.

“Yeah, it’s time for the diffusion filter,”
Eric said, referring to Greg’s lighting complaint. “Lighting isn’t
good enough anymore. We need to blur his edges a bit too.”

“You aren’t serious? That’s so
dishonest.”

“This isn’t news, this is talk, and things
are looser in the talk format. Solange uses a diffusion filter
too,” he said. “It’s human nature to want to appear better than we
really are. You wear makeup. All you on-air people wear a ton of it
on the air just to look ‘natural’ and not washed out on video. So
why sweat it?”

“Oh, it gives me a chance to get
self-righteous,” I said.

“You’re cute when you’re self-righteous,” he
said. It was such a corny thing to say that it caught me off guard.
He caught me off guard a lot. That worried me.

We watched the rest of Greg’s weekend show
and talked some more about our families, a subject Eric kept
bringing up. I was an only child. Eric came from this big Long
Island family, and he had twelve nieces and nephews. Once a month
they all got together at his brother’s house in Long Beach to
argue, insult each other, and eat grotesque amounts of food. He
made it sound very appealing. I bet other women eat this stuff up,
I thought. A bachelor could do very well with this kind of family
values rap. I, however, was impervious.

After declining my offer to help, he went
back into the kitchen, and we continued our conversation between
the two rooms. I knew what was going on. I’d heard the old wives’
tale, that a guy who cooks dinner for a woman gets laid that
night.

“Here we go,” he said, putting place mats,
silverware, and wineglasses on the coffee table. He went back to
the kitchen and returned with condiments and wine, red, which he
poured for both of us, leaving the bottle on the table. On his
third trip, he came back with two steaming plates, filet mignon
covered in marinated mushrooms, shoestring French fries, an glazed
carrots. Thank God, he’s a meat eater, I though. I have a soft spot
for men who are meat eaters. There’s just something about a
carnivore.

“It looks wonderful,” I said. “Thanks.” He
sat back down next to me, a little closer this time. “I thought
after everything you’ve been through lately, you could use a
home-cooked meal.”

Well bless you, I thought, crossing my legs
and bouncing my foot slightly. We watched Fritz the Cat and drank
some wine and I started to think it might not be such a bad idea if
Eric seduced me. God knows he was attractive, and he had a
powerful, primal sexuality. So what if he was just casting a role
for his memoirs? So what if I would just be the Older Married Woman
who follows the Danish Exchange Student? Maybe he could be the
Younger Stud in my life story, who comes between the Philandering
First Husband and The Kids in the Hall.

Normally, I’m not quite this brazen and
desperate, but I hadn’t had sex in months, and I hadn’t had good
sex in about a year. My husband, on the other hand, was presumably
having lots of good sex with his younger paramour, and all my
friends and foes knew about it.

After Eric cleared away the plates, he made
coffee, which he served with a basket of anisette biscotti. His
grandmother’s recipe.

“The News-Journal described you as ‘kind of a
loner’ today,” he said, smiling.

“Well, in the last six months I haven’t been
out much.” I didn’t want to go into it. “Thanks again for that
police report. Sixteen to twenty whacks with a blunt metal object,
huh? What a way to go.”

“It must have been bloody,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, thinking aloud. “Yeah, it
must have been, which means . . . the killer would have been
covered with blood afterwards. He, or she, couldn’t have gone back
to the party without changing clothes. That means it was probably
someone with a room at the Marfeles that night, someone who could
kill Griff and then go change clothes.”

“Yeah, or someone who could hide his bloody
clothes under a costume,” he said, but without my enthusiasm for
the topic. “Murder’s kind of a hobby of yours, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Why are you so interested in it?”

“The usual reason, I guess. We are most
fascinated by what we most fear, right? For instance, Claire, who
is flawlessly gorgeous, is fascinated by disfiguring diseases,
especially if they are mosquito-borne and capable of being
transported to this country in tires or produce,” I said. “She can
go on for hours about biting flies that lay their eggs in your
bloodstream, eggs that hatch into these long, slender worms that
come out of your eyes. Or that disease that makes men’s testicles
so large they have to carry them around in a wheelbarrow.”

“I get the picture,” he said, pained.

By this time, I noticed that we were sitting
just an inch apart. Had I unconsciously inched closer to him, him
to me, or had we inched closer together, drawn simultaneously by
forces of mutual attraction? At this rate of geographic progress,
actual penetration was only hours away.

I was in no hurry. I had nowhere else to go
and the wine and the stories had lulled me into complacency. I felt
at that moment like I could stay where I was forever and whatever
happened happened.

I looked up and he was staring at me, into my
eyes. I smiled and stared back, just as intensely. At first it was
silliness, a staring contest. We had to hold back laughter. But
then it got serious.

Eric had these blue eyes, not just blue, but
cold, other-worldly blue eyes. Have you ever been on a glacier? I
was once, and when you look down a crevasse, you see this pale,
foggy blue ice, deeply buried, prehistoric ice, holding old
secrets. That blue.

It was almost painful to stare into his eyes
for too long, and yet I couldn’t have looked away if I tried
because there was a commensurate pleasure. So I kept staring,
watching different emotions flicker below the surface of his eyes.
Suddenly, I wanted to run for my life.

Instead, I blinked, slowly and deliberately.
He leaned over and kissed me. Or did I lean forward and kiss him?
Or both? I don’t remember now. I just remember a kiss and then a
jolt of the most tremendous fear I’ve ever experienced. I bolted
upright and sprang to my feet.

“I have a lot of work to do on this sperm
series,” I said. “And I have this murder on my mind so . . .” I
looked around. I don’t know why. Looking for an escape hatch, I
suppose.

He grabbed my hand, tried to nudge me back to
the sofa.