A ruling passion : a novel (29 page)

'Walter said—"

'Walter's a coach, a tepid toady of a teacher, not a tycoon of television." He grinned broadly, pleased with himself "It'll come, it'll come; you just calm down. I'm right about this, and you probably know it. If you don't, don't tell me." He put his arm around her and pulled her close. "Let's come home early tonight."

"Fine," she said.

"Where are we going for dinner .>"

"I told you three times: Cote Basque with the Giffords."

"Did you tell me.> I don't remember." He bent his head, and Sybille lifiied her face to his. "You look very pretty tonight," he said and kissed her with a hunger as great as the first time, more than a year earlier, when he had pulled her across his lap in his limousine. "Nuts about you," he murmured, his lips against her cheek. "Bitchy, sexy, ambitious dame. As good as a three-ring circus. I figured you'd be like that. We'll come home early tonight."

"Fine," she said again. "When can we schedule that show?"

He chuckled. "Can't let go, can you? I told you: when you're ready."

"That's not good enough, Quentin." She stayed in his arms, looking up at him. "We've been doing publicity on it; I have to know how to keep it going. I've got to have a date."

"January," he said after a pause.

"January! I don't need another four months!"

"You probably need more," he growled, suddenly peevish. "I'm tired of talking about it; aren't we supposed to be going out tonight? Where are we going, anyway?"

Sybille opened her mouth to snap at him, then closed it. He's seventy-eight, she thought. He'll die soon. I have to find some new ways to get around him, but it won't be for long. And then the station will be mine, the money will be mine; whatever show I want will be mine.

That's when Valerie and Nick and all of them will see what I can do. That's when my life will really begin.

Chapter 11

a,

I M M inancial Watch" premiered the second week in Jan-

v^^^^/^ uar)^. For all her preparation, when she sat at the

^. ^^^^^KM desk a few minutes before airtime, Sybille froze.

W ^W Her heart was racing and she was sure it was miss-

I ing beats. I'm going to have a heart attack, she

thought; I'm going to die before Quentin. But I can't; thafs not the way I planned it.

Someone came up with her microphone and she took it from him, threading the cord beneath her suit jacket and clipping the microphone to her lapel by herself; she couldn't stand it when people put their hands on her. Someone else gave her an earplug, which she fitted into her ear; he taped the wire to the back of her jacket, out of sight. "Three minutes," said her assistant producer through the speaker in her earplug, and Sybille nodded, clasping her clammy hands. Her teeth felt locked together and her mouth was dr}'.

Then the music came up and she saw on the monitor the logo she had designed for the show, with a fat, black, masculine Mont Blanc pen, held by an invisible hand, scrawling "Financial Watch" across the screen. The floor director held up five fingers so she could see them as

he counted off the last seconds; the announcer introduced the show; the red light on her camera lit and Sybille Enderby was on the air.

She kneaded her hands in her lap, hidden beneath the desk, and looked straight at the camera, reading the scrolling script on the Tele-PrompTer and smiling at the lens, trying to think of it as a friend. Valerie said you had to make love to the camera. After more than six months of coaching, Sybille still had no idea what that meant.

It was the longest half hour of her life. Later she could remember none of it. She knew she had interviewed, by satellite, an embezzling financier who had fled the country for a sumptuous mountain chalet in Yugoslavia; she knew her panel of experts had given their opinions on which stocks and bonds to buy or sell; she knew the film clips of financial news from around the world had appeared and disappeared exactly on time as she read the text that accompanied them; but the minute the half hour ended all of it vanished from her mind.

"Wonderful, Sybille!" exclaimed the floor direaor as the screen went to black and a commercial came up. Sybille felt a wave of exhilaration surge through her. She'd done it; she'd proved herself "Won-derflil!" said the floor director again. He fussed over her, removing the wire taped to her back. "I never saw so much news crammed in one program; it never slowed down, never got dull; terrific idea to have whafs-his-name in Yugoslavia; how you managed to do that..."

Sybille's exhilaration began to seep away. "Good show," said one of the cameramen as she undipped her microphone. "Really zipped along," said another cameraman as she walked past him, feeling cold now, none of her exhilaration left. "Great format," said the film editor as she walked down the corridor. "You really put it together," said her assistant producer, meeting her outside the newsroom. "Not too bad for the first time," said Enderby as she entered her office.

"What was wrong with it?" she demanded.

"You tell me."

"I don't know; it's all a blur. But everybody's been telling me what a great show it was and nobody says one word about me.^^

"That so.>" He crossed his legs. "Well, I guess they all saw something wrong."

"What? What did diey see?"

"That you got a ways to go yet."

"Damn it, what does that mean?"

"What it says. Come off" it, babe; you know what I'm talking about. You haven't got it, not yet an)^way, and you'd be the first to say so, only louder, if somebody wanting an anchor job read like you."

"Like what? Read like what}''

"Like somebody reciting to a convention of cooling corpses. Like a teacher who got saddled with misfits and morons. You explain, you don't chat. You want it straight.^ You're getting it straight. You don't connect with an audience. You act like there isn^t an audience. You smile, but it doesn't get to your eyes. You come across hard and cold, not sexy. Shit, Syb, all that coaching—"

"Don't call me Syb. I've told you not to."

He shrugged. "Sometimes you warm up an inch or two and then you're not bad. That's what you'll be working on, starting tomorrow. You might still get it. If not, we'll find somebody else."

"When?"

Again, he shrugged. "No time limits, babe. You work on it some more, we'll see what happens."

"When?"

"Six months. That's more than you'd give somebody you hired. I don't need a star in my bed, you know; I like you whether you're on camera or not. Seems a damn-fool thing anyway, a producer as good as you screwing around with an anchor job; damn-fool thing."

"Not to me." Her voice dropped. "I'll work on it. I'll fix it."

Enderby stood and enveloped her in his arms. "You make me feel all worn out—all that ambition and greed—but other times you make me feel damn good. Young and sexy, like you. Like I could live forever. Lucky for you you found me; not many men with the stuff to handle you."

"Not luck: skill." Sybille tossed it off, making it a joke. "I was looking for a strong man and I found him." She extricated herself, forcing herself to do it gently. It was Nick's fault, she thought. She'd practically begged him to come to New York for the premiere of the show, but he'd said he was too busy. If he'd been there to give her support, she might have done better; she needed friendly faces. He'd let her down. He and Valerie: they always let her down.

"Now what?" asked Enderby impatiendy. 'Tou get that faraway look on your face and I never know what you're thinking, but it's usually not good."

"I was thinking we'd better go home and change. We're meeting the Durhams at the Plaza at nine."

"Durhams? Who the hell are the Durhams?"

"I have no idea. You made the date; you said we'd sit with them. It's the Cancer Fund Ball."

"Oh, that thing. She's on the committee giving it; he owns a litde

cable network in Washington. Damned deadly dull, but she's a devilish little dish. We'll come home early."

"Fine," Sybille said, as she always did. "Just as long as we stay late enough to get the early editions of the papers and see if there are any reviews of the show."

"Too soon; they'll be in the late editions. Forget the show. Time enough to read reviews tomorrow."

Sybille did not answer. It was better to let him have the last word than to argue with him when he was being stupid and not understanding her. They still talked more than most married people, she thought; they talked about the station, about the programs she produced and others being planned, about the apartment as it was being redecorated, all except Enderby's bedroom, which he insisted be left untouched, and they talked about people.

Enderby loved to gossip. With the same viperish tongue he had used in the art gallery on their first evening together, he dissected everyone. He wove together past histories, family feuds and alliances, bankruptcies, divorces, murders, suicides, lawsuits, even good marriages. But he never spent much time talking about the good ones; they provided no fertile ground for malice.

For Sybille, it was the malice that made marriage to him tolerable; she relished his unsparing eye and skewering adjectives. Soon, as she came to know his circle, and met people he did not know, she was matching him story for story. By the time they had been married a year, their early evenings, when they were briefly at home to dress before going out, were times to exchange tales about the people they had seen that day; and a few hours later, when they returned from a dinner party or benefit ball or gallery opening, they had more fodder for more stories. Often, if Sybille was clever, she could keep Enderby talking until he was so tired he wanted only to go to sleep. Like Sche-herezade in reverse, she thought cynically: keep the husband spinning stories so he'll leave me alone.

If gossip was the seasoning that kept her marriage palatable, socializing was the food itself Sybille passionately adored the social life of Manhattan, and everything connected with it, and would have stayed with Enderby for that alone. She could not buy enough clothes, and since she had learned to ignore price tags, and she was known at most shops and designers' studios, there were thousands from which to choose. She hired a consultant to tell her which colors she should wear, which clothes, which makeup and hairstyle, which jewelry. She joined a gym to work out in the early mornings, and took up tennis.

She found a club in Flushing where she could go back to skeet shooting, loving the feel of the shotgun in her hands, an extension of her carefiilly controlled body. She began to feel taller and more slender in her new clothes; for the first time she left home each day or evening without the nagging feeling that what she wore, though it had seemed fine in her bedroom, was all wrong. And she knew, from the glances she got from other women, that she looked just fine.

Each night they came home too early for her because Enderby was tired and wanted to be in her bed before going to his own room, but still SvbiUe had her social life. They dined on exotic foods that she commanded herself to enjoy; they mingled at fashion shows and theater parties with the men and women who owned much of the world's wealth; they danced at benefit balls with couples who raised hundreds of millions of dollars for each year's popular diseases.

Enderby danced enthusiastically, his right arm pumping his partner's arm up and down, bending her backward beneath him, twirling her around without warning, or grabbing both her hands so he and she could revolve under the arch of their raised arms. His steps were long and eccentric; no one, often not even he, knew where he would go next. He navigated the dance floor with dazzling speed, and others soon learned to get out of his way when he and a startled-eyed partner came swooping in their direction.

Sybille hated the way he danced. She knew people were always watching them, and she felt exposed and ridiculous, a party to her husband's antics, a victim of his exhibitionism, and so she eagerly accepted offers from other men to dance, no matter who they were. She danced with men she hated and men she scorned, she danced with men whose paunches kept them at arm's length and with men who could only shuffle in the middle of the room, talking about business. Once in a while she got a man who could dance, and with him she moved skillftilly in the steps she had learned from a private teacher. It was all right then that people were watching.

For some reason Sybille could not fathom, Valerie seemed to enjoy dancing with Enderby. Several times a month, during the height of the season, the four of them met at some affair, and between the appetizer and the soup, or the soup and the sorbet, Enderby and Valerie would go to the dance floor, leaving Sybille and Kent Shoreham behind. Sybille wouldn't have minded, because Kent was easygoing and a good dancer, but it annoyed her that Valerie seemed to be having a better time with her husband than she ever had. She would watch them, Valerie's head tipped back in laughter, Enderby grinning at her

and bending her backward as if making love to her. When he twirled her around, his hand holding hers high in the air, Valerie was like a ballet dancer, her feet barely touching the ground, her tawny hair flying outward as she whirled, and when they danced off across the floor, Valerie never looked surprised: she always seemed to know where they were going. There was nothing foolish about Enderby when Valerie was his partner.

"He's a challenge," said Valerie, laughing, when she returned to their table at the edge of the dance floor and Sybille asked if she had had a good time. It was June, one of the last balls of the season, and Valerie was wearing a sheath of white satin that outlined her slender curves and ended in a flare of black lace below her knees. At her throat and ears she wore jet and diamonds, and, as far as Sybille could tell, she had on no makeup at all. Sybille, wearing black silk, knew she was as perfectly dressed as Valerie, but she wished she had worn white. Waiters were serving passion-fruit sorbet in tall crystal flutes, and Valerie sipped her wine as she caught her breath from the dance. "He's impredictable and exhausting, and absolutely one of a kind. I see you don't mind letting the rest of us monopolize him on the dance floor."