What's a Girl Gotta Do (21 page)

“I fell in love with a married man and he
fell in love with me. We tried to avoid each other, but we
couldn’t. I want you to know, though, that he and I did not become
intimate until he and his wife had already taken steps to dissolve
their marriage.”

I didn’t believe this for a minute. This
smacked of rationalization, backdating. But she seemed to be
genuinely suffering for her sin and she didn’t name names. And
while I was deeply embarrassed that my friends and colleagues
watching this knew she was talking about me, even I couldn’t find
fault with her performance.

Only Amy Penny could confess to adultery and
come off looking like the piteous victim of cupid. She quoted
Pascal – “The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know,” a
favorite of Burke’s – and, with tears in her shimmering eyes, she
asked her viewers once again to understand and to believe in the
redemptive power of love. Then she got carried away, confessing to
all this diddly stuff too, like she couldn’t stop herself, she just
had to unburden to two million or so of her closest friends; a bird
she killed with a slingshot at age eight, a girl she teased to
tears when she was ten, a scarf she stole from a friend in junior
high school, and so on and so on, until she was radiant,
approaching rapture, the burden of her guilt lifted. Redeemed.

I came to Carthage, and all around me in my
ears were the sizzling and frying of unholy loves. No, I wasn’t
quite ready to let bygones be bygones.

“It isn’t fair,” I told Claire after the
whole ridiculous episode was over and Amy had moved to the kitchen
set for a segment on cooking for wheat-allergic children. She
teased the segment and then tossed to commercial. “She thinks she
can just confess and then have it be over. Confess, go to
commercial, and then – time for cooking! No, she hasn’t suffered
enough.”

“Life isn’t fair,” Claire said dreamily. “Let
it go.”

Claire had fallen in love with a new guy over
the weekend, a news producer for MTV, and she was “happier than a
bee in a Burmese poppy field,” as she put it, which made her a bit
unbearable. She put her hand on my arm. “It’s time to heal, Robin.
Forget about Burke and Amy. You need to fall in love.”

“Yeah, like I need a tax audit,” I said, but
it was false bravado.

The fact is, I still haven’t heard from Eric
and I was concerned. It had been so long since I’d been single and
dating that I’d forgotten how to handle the guy who forgets to call
you after a date. The correct way, of course, is to forget about
him completely. He’s either gutless or inconsiderate. The wrong way
is to make excuses for him. He was probably just busy. Couldn’t get
to a phone. Was involved in a disabling accident.

“That’s my vice – love, I mean,” Claire said.
“Seriously. My therapist says I’m addicted to love, like in the
Robert Palmer song. I just go from man to man constantly seeking
the first flush of love.”

“So what? You’re young, you rarely drink, you
don’t do drugs, and you don’t eat meat. Love is a legit vice
because it’s worse for you than all those other things.”

“Love is better than all those things,” she
said.

“Not any love I’ve known. Look at my example,
Claire. Or look at Joanne Armoire, for that matter. I don’t think
she’d give a ringing endorsement of love these days. I mean, look
where it led her. To blackmail and disgrace,” I said. “Were you
being investigated and/or blackmailed, Claire?”

“No,” she said.

“How can you be sure?”

“Who’d investigate me? I’m a producer in
special reports, an embarrassing network cash cow.”

“I’m a reporter here and I was
investigated.”

“That’s different. You’re on the air and,
besides, the guy had a thing for redheads, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. Still, how can you be sure? You’ve got
secrets, right?”

“Not one,” she said sunnily.

“Sure you do.”

“What are my secrets?” she challenged.

“Um, I bet on weekends you dress in
camouflage and liberate lab animals, right? Or you load up a
Supersoaker with red paint and mow down fur-bearing widows on Fifth
Avenue from a moving vehicle.”

“Not even close,” she said, very Mona Lisa,
impossible, as always, to provoke. She gathered up a pile of
medical tapes that showed swimming sperm and went to isolate some
good wallpaper – background – shots.

As soon as she left, I logged into the
computer, thinking perhaps Eric would contact me this way. A
message blinked in the corner of my screen. I retrieved it. As I
read it, icy fear cracked up my back like lightning. It came from
the generic login “Intern.”

“I know what you did,” it said. I know what
you did. That spooked me. Someone knew what I did. Who was it? What
did he know about me? Was he the killer?

At lunch, I skulked around the cafeteria,
looking at everyone sideways. Was it you? Or you? Whoever you are,
will you expose me? Or will I expose you? I noticed a few other
on-air people looking suspiciously around, but it wasn’t until the
afternoon that I found out all the on-air people had received this
same message and it was believed to be a prank, something one of
those boho writers would pull.

In response, Dunbar ordered two security
guards to stand guard at Democracy Wall. This caused an outcry
amount the writers, who said it was a freedom of speech issue, that
the anonymity of the board ensured a free forum without fear of
management reprisals.

“Now,” they said, “such speech will be
inhibited by the presence of ‘The Man.’”

If Dunbar’s purpose was to stifle dissent, it
didn’t work. The writers, led by their producer/peasant-king Louis
Levin, quickly opened a secret file in the computer, hidden in an
obscure corner, and locked with passwords that changed every couple
of hours. Louis messaged me to look under “Research.Writers” for a
file called “Radio Free Babylon,” Password: “dirt,” where I found a
neatly organized, concise catalogue of ANN personalities who had
confessed and what they had confessed to, along with little
satirical comments contributed by the newsroom.

There was a fair bit of résumé padding among
the correspondents, widespread pot smoking in college, minor
conflicts of interest, one old drug conviction, the employment of
illegal aliens to help around the house, like that. Madri
Michaels’s “real” age was revealed, as was Dillon Flinder’s. Among
the on-air people conspicuous by their absence were Greg Browner
and his ex-wife Solange Stevenson. I was surprised Solange hadn’t
confessed to something new and then made a show of it. It wasn’t
like her to pass up an opportunity like that.

Odd too, that both Greg and Solange had
nothing to confess –- at least about each other. I concluded that
after fifteen years of marriage, they probably had equal amounts of
dirt on each other and a no first-strike agreement.

I put my feet up on my desk as I scrolled
down through the list. I was supposed to be thinking about sperm,
but I couldn’t stop thinking about the Griff murder. While I was
stuck in the office, others were searching for answers and, I was
sure, finding them. I searched the computer list for Susan Brave,
but there was nothing. Everyone else thought it was just “talent”
who had been targeted, and until Susan came forward, they would go
on believing so.

Shit. I shouldn’t have promised not to repeat
what Susan told me. I wondered if Joanne’s conscience was bothering
her on this. What goes around comes around, right? History was
repeating itself, with a twist. This time, because of information I
was withholding, the police might very well be off on a wild goose
chase, and a killer might go unpunished. First I kept that
worthless sheet of paper and now I was keeping Susan’s secret.

Susan. Poor Susan, who spent the first half
of the party downing Jonestown Punch and the second half ridding
her system of it in the ladies’ room, “puking purple,” as it was
commonly known. I sent her a message to see how she was doing – and
maybe get a little more information from her – but she wasn’t
logged in.

I was hyperaware, sitting in front of the
computer, that just a hundred or so feet of fiber- optic cable was
all that stood between me and Eric. I could almost feel it humming
beneath my feet. But I wasn’t going to message him first. Maybe
he’d thought I would be an easy conquest, vulnerable as I was, and
when I proved difficult, he’d given up the fight. Well, I had
bigger fish to fry, I thought, rolling a piece of six-ply script
paper into my typewriter.

Jerry poked his head in. “I have an executive
committee meeting.” He said. “Do you have a script coming? I want
to see it when I get back.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I said.

Before I could write, I needed four cups of
coffee, each with three sugars and three creams. After performing
all the necessary rituals, I sat down to confront the judgmental
paper in my typewriter. My stomach gurgled and cold sweat sprang
from my neck and ran down my back. I typed a lead, then tore it out
of the typewriter in disgust and put in another piece of copy
paper. I typed another lead and this time ripped it out
midsentence. Once I get the right first line down on paper the rest
of the story pours itself out on the page. But the first line, the
hardest line to write, just wouldn’t come to me.

I reminded myself what Hemingway prescribed
for writer’s block: Just write one true sentence. Then I swore.
“God bloody son of a bitch damn it all,” I shouted, and the glass
walls of my office shook. Swearing often helps, I’ve found, but not
this time. I felt the frustration build inside me. Clear your head,
Robin, I told myself, and just write it. Just get the first word
down. But I couldn’t even summon a first word. I got up and kicked
over my trash can and that did the trick. As I was cradling my
bashed foot, I saw clearly and very suddenly just how to begin and
immediately hoped back to my typewriter.

After I hammered out the lead the rest of the
story wrote itself. Jerry wasn’t in his office when I finished, so
I dropped the script on his desk. Then I couldn’t resist sitting in
his nice, padded chair and spinning around, putting my feet up on
his desk and doodling on his blotter/calendar, where I noticed a
very interesting thing. All the birth dates of key ANN and JBS
executives were dutifully noted, along with a suggested gift. On
February 11th, for instance, he’d written “Rupert Regelbrugge,
Napoleon brandy.” Regelbrugge was vice-chairman for all of JBS,
Jack Jackson’s right-hand man. I don’t know why that surprised me.
Among ass kissers, Jerry was always the first to pucker.

Unfortunately for him, Jerry had written
these dates down in pencil and it took me less than five minutes to
erase the old information and replace it with new. I swapped
Regelbrugge’s birthday with Dunbar’s and made the gifts more
imaginative. “Rupert Regelbrugge,” it now read, “large black
dildo.”

I got as far as the month of May when Jerry
came in. As I looked on, seething, Jerry read over my script,
moving his lips as he did, an annoying trait many people in
television, particularly anchors, have. After fifteen minutes of
red penciling, he handed me back a red-crossed mess.

“The stuff of life itself, his precious seed,
a small vial that could have launched a hundred generations of
Tarsus men, lost, perhaps forever,” I read. “You’re kidding,
right?”

“I want to make it more dramatic.”

“You know, Jerry, we’re not in the drama
business,” I said. “We’re in the news business.”

“I know that, Robin. But what you don’t
realize is that our job is to help our viewers find the natural
drama or pathos or whatever in a situation. We locate it for them
…”

“And then hit them over the head with
it?”

“Track it and cut it tomorrow,” Jerry said,
grabbing his coat. “I’ve got to go. I’m having dinner with a friend
of mine from 60 Minutes.”

Not all the news was bad for ANN that day. As
the dirty laundry was being displayed – resulting, incidentally, in
higher ratings all over the schedule – PR was flacking positive
stories to friendly media columnists, stories on nice anchors with
strong families and a commitment to their communities. For example,
Sawyer Lash was happily married to his childhood sweetheart and had
three kids. As a family, they sponsored a pile of overseas orphans,
fasted and marched and bike-a-thonned for charity, and built houses
with that group Jimmy Carter was associated with. Public Relations
even called me, late in the day – I was obviously way down on their
list – to find out if I had any redeeming qualities.

“Did you ever do anything really good for
someone?” the PR intern asked me. “Something we can throw to the
tabloids?”

I used to read erotic books on tape for blind
people, in a very torchy voice, before books on tape became
commonplace, but that was a while ago. I made a note to get more
involved in my community in the future.

“I hope to one day become an organ donor,” I
said. “And once a month, I beat myself with a spiked stick.”

“Weird,” said the intern on the other end of
the phone. But he wrote this down and thanked me.

Mark O’Malley was at Keggers with some of the
business-news people when I arrived. He told me he didn’t know if
Griff had been investigating him – Griff had never contacted him.
He just decided it was better to come out than to live in fear. I
bought him a drink.

“What do you think about the Mangecet
threat?” I asked him.

“He’s a threat, all right,” Mark said. “He
already controls a bunch of JBS stock through a Christian no-load
mutual fund in the financial-services arm of his empire. The fund
holds ten percent of the stock, accumulated over a six-year
period.”

“But ten percent isn’t enough to pose a real
threat, is it?” I asked.

“Some of the stockholders have died in the
last few years and their kids have sold already, not caring who
they sold to. Maybe Mangecet is planning to ruin ANN to get as
Jackson, affect the stock price, and make a play at the next
stockholders’ meeting.”