Alexandra Waring (22 page)

He brought his eyes back down, smiled, and sank his mouth into her, feeling her thighs seize up around him. He started moving his mouth, slowly, listening to her sounds as he did, and with every movement of his mouth and with her every accompanying sound he felt himself grinding into the bed.

He was not going to last long.

Apparently she was not either, because she groaned and then suddenly sat up, reaching down to him and pulling him up, murmuring in a rush, “No, Gordon—I don’t want to come like that—I want to be with you, I want to come under you.” And as he crawled up to her, she reached down, murmuring, “Let me touch you, please,” and he felt her hand slide around him, touching him, holding him, and she whispered, “Oh, Gordon, you are so
…
”and he lowered himself down on her, trapping her hand between them as an effective hint. She quickly brought him to her, into the slick warmth.

“I love you,” he said, pushing himself into her all the way, just the way he loved it, and she loved it, thinking how it had never changed, how splendid that plunge was when she was as ready as he.

She groaned, softly.

He pulled back, slowly, and then plunged back in all the way.

She groaned, louder, drawing a breath. “Yes,” she whispered as he pulled back, slowly. He did it again, pushing hard into her, but he pulled back quickly too, this time, and then plunged in all the way again, pulled again, plunged again, pulled again, plunged again, letting himself fall into it, knowing it was not going to be long for him, but not for her either, because after briefly urging him on, her hands were now still and the fluid movement that had been with him was already starting to falter, her body jerking slightly, tightening against him as he kept at it, pulling back, plunging in, pulling back, plunging in, harder maybe, maybe harder, at her, in her, feeling her body starting to climb.

“Oh, Gordon—Gordon,” she said, taking a quick breath and holding it, her body rising higher. She arched, her arms locked around him, her body straining as he kept at it, pulling back, plunging in, pulling back, plunging in, and then he heard her start to whimper and then he could feel her coming, feel her spasms around him, and he felt himself starting to go, but not yet, but then, as her body started easing back down to the bed, she whispered, “Come, darling, come inside me,” and he did, right then, as he had for years, every time she said it, and he heard himself grunting with it and he came, at last, he was coming, feeling everything flooding out of him, every—last—thing—out, yes, everything out of him now, everything, warmly, yes, inside of her.

Yes. Delivered.

Shew. He relaxed, letting his face fall next to hers.

“You are the absolute best,” she whispered, turning to kiss the side of his head

“I want to make love to you forever,” he whispered back. They lay there, the air cooling around them. He felt the perspiration on the small of his back starting to evaporate. And then he felt everything that had been his, together with hers, seeping warmly down between them. He shifted, slowly pulling out of her, and then resettled, holding her tightly, nestling himself in against her thigh, wet.

They lay there.

“I’m cold,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

“I can’t move,” he said, watching her profile in the candlelight.

“Well,” she said to the ceiling, her mouth stretching into a smile, “somebody’s going to have to go down and get the covers.”

He smiled too. “Yes, one of us will.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” she said, turning her head to look at him.

They looked at each other, smiling, blinking.

“So what will you give me if I get them?” he finally asked her.

“Dangerous question,” she said, laughing softly.

“Why?”

“Ask me again,” she said, touching his mouth with her forefinger.

“Okay. What will you give me if I get the covers?”

“Me,” she said, kissing him gently on the mouth. “If you get the covers, Gordon, I’ll marry you.”

14
Langley’s in for a Number of Surprises

On Friday morning, two days after Jessica Wright had arrived at West End, Alexandra started acting with the one person Langley had trusted could control her—Cassy. It wasn’t an out-right fight that Alexandra picked with Cassy, but it was some sort of public declaration of independence, and it certainly came as a surprise to all.

Langley and the department supervisors of DBS News had all gathered in the large conference room on the third floor of Darenbrook III for one of Cassy’s production meetings. The conference room was very light and airy—with skylights above and fresh flowers, always, on the table—and, with fruit and yogurt and danish and coffee up from the cafeteria on carts, they had all come to enjoy these morning meetings as sort of a big family breakfast, over which they discussed their production progress.

Cassy usually opened the meeting by briefly running down the agenda, listing the segments or aspects of “DBS News America Tonight” they would be discussing. But this morning she barely got through her opening remarks before Alexandra started in on a number of objections she had about the format of the newscast—a format which everyone knew she had formerly agreed to.

At first, sitting there, Langley thought maybe Alexandra just woke up on the wrong side of the bed (finally—human, at last), because there was an emotional note in her voice that he had not heard before. (Usually, if Alexandra was upset, she had to tell people she was upset because she never sounded upset—she always sounded like an anchor who thought her microphone might still be on.) Then he thought maybe she was coming down with the flu or something, because she didn’t look so hot. And then he began to wonder if Alexandra wasn’t jealous of Jessica Wright in some way, if this wasn’t some kind of tantrum Alexandra was throwing to refocus DBS’ attention on her, because, yes, however quietly and politely she was conducting it, Alexandra
was
throwing some kind of tantrum.

Could she be jealous of all the attention that Cassy was giving Jessica’s special? There had to be a connection, Langley thought, because the day before yesterday Alexandra and Cassy had been as thick as thieves and now Alexandra was fighting her and the only thing that had happened in the meantime was Jessica’s arrival.

But then, listening more carefully to Alexandra, after a while Langley began to wonder if maybe Alexandra was right about some of her objections to the format. Maybe her style should be more formal on the air, maybe they should cut the business editor’s segment by a minute, cut the Friday entertainment segment altogether, throw out the weather, expand the science and technology and do the zillion other things she was talking about.

But then he had to remember all that Cassy had told him. So, was Cassy right? Did Alexandra need to loosen up a little, show more of her personality on air, interact with the correspondents in the same spirit of camaraderie that she shared with them off camera? Should they increase the on-air time of the backup anchor, did they need one soft feature each half hour and was Gary Plains, the weatherman, really so vital when it came to attracting an audience?

Alexandra, with her new argumentative nature (which had dropped half the mouths in the meeting thus far), summarized her complaints with “It’s too informal, too chit-chatty, we’ve got too many distractions from the news. We’ve got too many personalities doing too many things and the philosophy behind it is all wrong. Everything’s getting way off track and I want it back on track.”

Cassy, eyes down on her notes, waited a moment to make sure Alexandra was finished. And then, taking a deep breath, she looked at Alexandra—over the top of her reading glasses—for a very long moment. And then she took her glasses off, gently laid them down on the table, and said, addressing the room, “I want everyone back here Monday morning at nine. We’ll have a new agenda worked up for discussion.”

Meeting dismissed, Alexandra was the first to get up and leave the room. The others, looking at one another in stunned silence, began to file out. Cassy remained seated at the conference table, as did Langley and Kyle.

“Do you need me?” Chi Chi asked Cassy. She had been taking notes at the meeting.

“No—no, thanks, Chi Chi, you run along—I’ll be down shortly.” Cassy waited for her to leave and then she turned to Kyle. “So what do you think?”

“What do I think?” Kyle said, eyes widening slightly. “I think, if looks could kill, you just got murdered, Cass.”

“I know.” Cassy looked around to make sure the door was closed. When she turned back to them she was laughing. “Phew,” she said, collapsing back into her chair and fanning air across her face with her hand. “My husband used to tell me she could get a little intense in meetings.” She dropped her hand and looked at Kyle. “Wow, the temperature went up around twenty-five degrees in here, didn’t it?”

“No,” Kyle said, laughing, “it was more like all the oxygen got sucked out of the room.”

“That’s it—you got it,” Cassy said.

They didn’t seem very upset, but Langley felt pretty unsettled by Alexandra’s performance. “Why is she so mad at you?” he asked Cassy.

“She’s not mad at me in particular, I don’t think,” Cassy said, sitting forward and resting her arms on the table. “It’s just that I’m the safest person to take a swing at.” She smiled, gently, and not for the first time Langley thought about how funny it was that the same Cassy who expected people to drive themselves until they dropped in their harnesses also had a side to her—a side less frequently seen, but being seen now
—
that made one only long to lay one’s head in her lap and be comforted. “And I’m not sure Alexandra is mad,” she said. “I think she’s just getting a little scared. I think we’re
all
getting a little scared,” she added. “It’s perfectly natural at this point—are we taking our best shot, will the newscast work, do we have the right format?”

“And do we?” Langley said quickly.

Cassy and Kyle both looked at him, looked at each other and burst out laughing.

“I can see people around here have a lot of trust in our judgment,” Cassy said, brushing a strand of hair off her forehead. She dropped her hand and looked at Langley, trying to keep a straight face. “That is what you hired Kyle and me for, isn’t it, Langley? To combine our thirty-five years of television experience to destroy Alexandra’s career and bankrupt the network?”

Late that Friday afternoon Cassy came up to his office for a closed-door, one-on-one about Alexandra’s complaints regarding the format of the newscast. Cassy said that, while she had no intention of making “NAT” into Happy Talk News, or a new entry in the burgeoning field of Scratch ‘n’ Sniff (“the frantic and manic format for which the industry had cocaine to thank,” Cassy said, “Or someone spending too many hours getting atomized on the main floor of Bloomingdale’s”), she had no intention of letting Alexandra turn to the old Sermon on the Mount routine either.

The format was their biggest challenge, Langley knew, because their problem was not so much how to get anyone to tune in to “DBS News America Tonight” once, but how to get viewers to tune
back
in, night after night. According to market research, they could count on an audience the week of May 30 because, their surveys showed, people wanted to see how Alexandra was doing since the last time they saw her—when she was shot on TV and rerun hundreds of times.

(Research said 46% of all Americans had heard of Alexandra Waring and of that group, 87% said they knew she had been shot on TV, 58% said they knew she had been a reporter, 16% said they knew she was a celebrity of some kind, 3% said they knew she had been an anchorwoman, less than 1/2% said she was Jackson Darenbrook’s girlfriend, and 12% said they were “Undecided.”

(“Undecided about what?” Langley had asked the research guy. “Who she is,” he had answered. “We thought ‘Undecided’ sounded better than ‘Specifically Identified Incorrectly.’”Well,” Cassy had said, “who do they think she is?” “Um,” the guy had said, looking through his sheets, “let’s see—fashion designer, won a gold medal in an equestrian event in the last Olympics, used to be on ‘All My Children,’ Richard Burton’s third wife, Rosalynn Carter’s press secretary, played the sister-in-law on ‘My Three Sons,’ wrote a nasty book about her mother, husband is running for President—” “Enough!” Cassy had said.)

The trick, Cassy said, was to find a format that made the most of Alexandra and their affiliate correspondents. Cassy said if Alexandra started playing formal networkese, the accents and regional style of their affiliate reporters would appear strange and amateurish. Alexandra had to display more of her personality, more of that camaraderie with the local reporters to make a bridge for viewers, to get them over that cultural abyss created by traditional network news—that abyss from where viewers expected reporters to come with no accent, no apparent home or regional ties.

The success of “DBS News America Tonight,” Cassy had sworn from the beginning, would ride on how well they developed a news hour about America that was
honest
, that—even in its reporters illustrated some fundamental truths about the diversity that made up America and that generated in viewers some long-term fascination with exploring it with Alexandra, as well as keeping abreast of its current events.

Cassy said she knew Alexandra believed that too but was reacting to the enormous pressure for her to prove herself and was falling into the trap of thinking that the Sermon on the Mount routine had something to do with serious journalism besides making everything appear serious—which, in their case, might end up making everybody else on the newscast look ridiculous.

And past that point, Cassy said, an hour was too long for the Sermon on the Mount format and they needed complimentary energy in the studio with Alexandra, contrasts. And even though Alexandra probably could pull off an hour of heavy-duty anchoring by herself, God help them if Alexandra ever got sick because the whole newscast would fall apart without her. So no, Cassy had no intention of letting Alexandra go through with this format.

However, Cassy also had no intention of fighting with her at this point, not when Cassy could see that Alexandra was struggling to feel more in control of her fate-a sign that her confidence was wavering. What Alexandra needed now was unequivocal support, Cassy told Langley, not opposition, not to be told she was wrong; she needed to feel that everyone was with her, do or die; and so Cassy was going to let her have her way for a few days, with the certainty that Alexandra herself would change her mind about the format when she started thinking more and reacting less.

“Which brings me to what 1 think set her off in the first place and for which I should commend you on your powers of observation,” Cassy said, sighing a little, looking more than a little tired. “You were right—Alexandra
is
mad and at me. And she’s mad at you too.”

“Me? Why?”

Cassy leaned forward to plunk her elbow down on Langley’s desk and rub her forehead with her hand. Then she laughed to herself, brushed her hair back off her forehead and settled her chin in her hand, looking at him. “Langley,” she said, squinting a little, “did you tell Gordon that Cordelia Paine would shut down DBS News if Alexandra lived with him without marrying him?”

“What? I never said any such thing,” Langley sputtered, trying to remember exactly what he had said.

“That Alexandra’s career would suffer if she didn’t get married?”

“Me?” Langley said. “Gordon told me
you
told him that.”

“I did tell him it would be better for Alexandra’s career if she were married,” Cassy admitted, pushing off of the desk and sitting upright, hands in her lap. “Well, anyway
…
” She looked at him, lofting one eyebrow, starting to smile. “Whatever we did say, it apparently worked since she’s going to marry him—sometime within the year.”

“Thank God,” Langley said. “At least we won’t have to worry about that.”

“Yes, well,” Cassy said, “we still have your frisky friend Mr. Darenbrook to contend with. I don’t think he’s going to take the news very well.”

“Then we don’t tell him yet,” Langley said.

“Well, when do we?” Cassy said.

Langley shrugged. “When we publicly announce it—when we have to, I guess. The important thing is, we know where Alexandra stands.”

On Monday morning the production meeting reassembled back in the third-floor conference room, people looking a little apprehensive. At 8:59:45 (or thereabouts), Alexandra swept in, saying cheerful good mornings as was her former habit, but eyes still blazing the message that she was not to be messed with. Cassy did not mess with her. Cassy—if Langley’s eyes did not deceive him about the flicker in Alexandra’s expression—surprised Alexandra by handing out a three-page memorandum that summarized the format changes Alexandra had proposed on Friday.

“This Friday, at four o’clock,” Cassy announced, “we are having a full-run dress rehearsal of ‘DBS News America Tonight.’ Graphics, film, music, the set, the works—whatever we’ve got thus far, let’s put it together and see what it looks like. We’re going with the format that incorporates all of these changes.” She smiled, looking over at Alexandra. “From here on in, we need to see, hear and feel everything through the studio and on tape—to react, to discuss, to modify, to accept or reject. Agreed?”