Seems Like Old Times (16 page)

"I seem to remember a lot more than I realized."

"Hey, that isn't why you were laughing, is it?"

She looked at the toes of her shoes as she walked along.
"Not at you, Tony.
Never at you.
At me."

He stepped in front of her, stopping her progress and
forcing her to look up at him, his expression suddenly serious. Then he slid
his hands into his back pockets. "Why?"

She saw the way the setting sun's rays shone on the blackness
of his hair, bringing out wine red highlights, the way his shoulders jutted
straight and broad under the pale gray sweatshirt he now wore over his tank
top, the way his dark eyes still mesmerized her and made her want to immerse
herself in them and never walk away.

Then she lowered her gaze, and shrugged. "No reason,
Tony. Nothing I could even begin to explain."

"Try me."

"No, but thanks."

"You're sure?"

"Sure." She smiled, secretive and sensual. He
was fascinated by these facets of Lee Reynolds, as enthralled as he'd been
seventeen years ago.

She slipped her hands in her pockets and they walked along
in silence. Now and then, their arms brushed, but neither moved far enough away
to end the contact.

One of the Circle Z Ranch’s wild oak and brush covered
hills stood higher than the others. When Tony wanted to be alone, it was the
perfect place to go.

He sat with his back against a tree trunk, one leg
stretched out straight, the other bent at the knee.
Before
him lay rolling pasture land.
A group of his horses ran free over an
open field under the watchful eye of two ranch hands. Sometimes he came up here
just to look at the scene below, as if to convince himself that the land before
him was really his own.

At other times, like now, he came to think through
problems. His father had warned him against seeing Lisa again, and he had to
admit Vic was right.

Tony side-armed a stone high into the
air,
and watched as it sailed down the hill to land far below his perch. Years ago,
after Lisa left him,
he often wondered what his life would have been if
he and Vic had never come to Miwok.
If he had never met her.
He never would have known what it felt like to be completely in tune with
another person, what it felt like to be with someone and know that only with
them were you whole, and that without them you were no more than a shell of
yourself. He would never have known the torture of losing the person he felt
that close to, and would never have known
a loneliness
so complete and so black he had wished he could die from it.

He flung another stone, harder this time.

It had been his fault that he and Vic had moved here. He'd
caused Vic to leave the best paying job he had ever held. In the end, the move
was a good one for Vic, but at the time, it had seemed catastrophic.

Although born in Texas, he’d traveled with his father all
over the west as Vic worked on different ranches. Out of the blue, an old
friend offered Vic a job at a wealthy riding academy in Malibu. Vic quit his
job in Albuquerque for California, and checked them into a motel while he tried
to find an apartment near the riding academy.
Whenever the
two of them showed up to look at a vacancy, though, they were told the
apartment had been rented only hours before.
Vic's search widened until,
eventually, he ended up in the San Fernando Valley, the agricultural fringe
just north of Los Angeles.

Tony had just turned fifteen, halfway through his freshman
year, and found himself in a new high school. It was a nightmare. The
kids
saw him as a hick, and "Tex
Mex
"
was the nicest of the names he was called. The Mexican kids thought he was
strange because he wasn't from a
barrio
, could speak almost no Spanish
and didn't do anything they considered cool. To the whites, though, he was
Mexican, one of "them," and ostracized from the white kids' world.

He fought his way through the first few weeks,
then
gradually changed his style of dress and speech. He was
tired of being an outsider, tired of being lonely. When he was younger, he’d
had baseball, the one thing he did better than any of the other kids. Baseball
was what had helped him become accepted in new schools time after time. But as
he got older, baseball wasn't enough. A part of him hated Vic for taking him
away from the horse and cattle ranches where Vic had worked, from the nomadic
life they’d both loved. Yet another part found him poking fun at the country
bumpkin image of the ranches he'd grown up in. He wanted to belong. Other kids
did.

Finally, he found a crowd willing to accept him. They were
a tough group, one that Tony saw as the neatest, most savvy and most fearsome
in the school.

Vic railed against the gang of boys Tony hung around with.
When Tony took an interest in girls, Vic found them even worse. He called them nothing
but
putas
. Tony defended his friends until he
could scarcely say a word to his father without an argument.

Four weeks into Tony's sophomore year, he came home at
three o'clock in the morning. The low riding car's
souped
up engine jerked to a stop in front of the apartment building where he lived.
He rolled out of the car, too drunk to stand. The quiet street erupted with
hoots and loud laughter by boys still in the car, and with lusty, raucous jokes
by the girls.

Tony opened the door to the apartment to find Vic standing
by the window waiting for him. He stumbled into the bathroom and threw up.

The next day, Vic quit his job, pulled Tony out of school,
and left Los Angeles, heading north. Two weeks later, Vic found a low paying
job at a small horse ranch, the Circle Z, in an unknown northern California
town called Miwok.

Miwok.
The first time Tony saw
it, he laughed at the place. It wasn't rugged like ranch land, or exciting like
L.A. It was pretty. Pretty! How embarrassing for a kid who'd just learned how
to be a big city tough guy.

Tony grinned as he remembered meeting Lisa. She had a
Social Studies class in the morning, and he had the same class in the
afternoon. In both classes the students had to do a massive report on one
state. Lisa had chosen New Mexico, which was the state Tony wanted, since he'd
lived there just before coming to California and he knew a lot about it.

All he'd heard about her was that she was brainy, serious
and nice. Compared to the girls he used to hang out with, she was plain, dowdy
and prejudiced. He remembered how, his first week at Miwok High, she'd gawked
at him as if he were from outer space. But he was desperate to get New Mexico
for his state report. Hell, if he could have New Mexico, he'd hardly have to do
any research or anything. He hated research. He’d approached her.

First she got all huffy about him talking to her, but then
she gave him a look of understanding that bowled him over. No other girl had
ever looked at him with such trust and compassion. To his amazement, he even
told her about his mom dying when he was born. Was
he
nuts, or what?

But they began to talk, and he remembered thinking that
the way her eyes sparkled, she wasn't very plain, and with hair the color of
whipped butter, she certainly wasn't dowdy. The way she slowed her step, hung
on his every word and acted as if she like being with him, made him think she
wasn't prejudiced either.

He liked her so well, he didn't even ask for New Mexico.
Instead, he did his report on Delaware. It was small, he reasoned. How hard
could it be? Unfortunately, he found out. Right from the start their
relationship had to have been pretty serious for a Mexican American,
southwestern kid like him to be willing to tackle one of the original thirteen
English colonies for a state report.

He remembered the first time Vic saw them together. Vic
had said, "She's trouble." How
could she
be,
Tony had wondered.

But as he got to know her, he realized that she was quite
different from the way she appeared on the surface. It was as if she were a
river that seemed placid, but had treacherous rapids just out of sight. She
wouldn't admit it, much less talk about it, but he could see it, and knew it
involved her mother. Lisa’s demeanor would change when she’d talk about Judith
Reynolds. She was always trying to please the woman, but no matter how hard
she’d work, no matter how many achievements or awards or successes she’d
attained, they were never enough. For Tony, who’d never been given anything but
unwavering support and love from Vic, the way her mother treated Lisa was
unimaginable.

The worst part was that Lisa wouldn’t talk about it, and
would scarcely acknowledge that anything was wrong.

On several occasions, he’d almost told her that he
knew--heck, the whole town knew--that Judith Reynolds drank a lot more than was
healthy. She made the rounds of different stores to buy her beer, but that
didn’t stop people from noticing either the volume or the regularity of her
purchases. But since Lisa never brought the problem up, he kept his mouth shut.
He wondered if that wasn’t the biggest mistake of his life.

He had thought being there for her would be enough, and
she would talk to him if she needed to. After all, she had told him how she
felt about him. And later, when they were seniors, she had told him that she
loved him. He believed her. But then she left. He still didn't know why. The
boy that he was believed she had rejected him, that she’d been shamed by their
love. The man he had since become, though, questioned that belief.

He could see, to his amazement, that she still cared about
him, and that she was still fighting those feelings. He wondered how long it
would be before she left again.

o0o

That same morning, Lee's agent called to say they had just
received an offer from Nighttime News, run by one of the competing networks,
for her to be the anchor on the weekend news broadcast. This wasn’t another
second-rung anchor position, like she had on Evening
Newscene
,
but the actual lead. No more would she have to hear the announcer bellow, "Here
is Evening
Newscene
with Rick Archer!!"--
then
wait a beat--"and Lee Reynolds." To no longer
be the "and" following a long pause after Rick Archer's name was the
kind of deal she'd long dreamed of.

Her Evening
Newscene
contract
was nearly up. Her agent had been about to enter negotiations to renew when the
Nighttime News offer came in. The agent said the offer was most generous and
recommended careful consideration
since,
after all,
she wasn't getting any younger. She knew what he meant. Television cameras were
cruel to anyone overweight or aging. She could control her weight, but...

Soon after, her business manager called to say he’d spoken
with her agent, and if the new contract materialized as suggested, he was
working up some outstanding investment strategies that he’d need to talk over
with her so she wouldn’t have to pay a penny extra in taxes. That call was
followed by her personal publicist who was already planning a campaign to
further promote her name and career based on this latest move and promotion.

Hearing from her these people, considering the terrific
opportunity presented, thinking about her career, caused her stomach to become
so tense that, for the first time in days, she had to take some of her ulcer
medicine. Oddly, the business related nervousness, the tension, even the
renewed stomach pain, reminded her of Miriam’s comments about putting on an old
shoe again. Granted, it pinched, but it was a familiar pinch. She had spent a
lifetime working to get ahead.
Push,
pull, two steps
forward, one back, but always, ultimately, her position and status improved.
She knew how to make it improve even further. Jumping networks and shows was
one of the means to her ultimate goal: to be the lead weeknight news anchor at
one of the big network stations.

She didn’t see how she could refuse the Nighttime News
offer. To do so would be unlucky. Over the years she’d learned that building a
career didn’t take half as much talent as it did hard work and luck.

Ever since the seventh grade when she began to write short
news bulletins and long gossip columns for her friends, Lee had wanted to be a
journalist. She had always thought in terms of the print media, with her goal
being the
New York Times
. Those plans were shelved when, shortly after
graduation, one of her journalism professors, Paul Hastings, lined up a job for
her with a television station in Los Angeles. The thought of going out into the
real world to look for work had been a scary proposition. Jobs in magazines
were hard to come by, the
L.A. Times
wanted experienced reporters, and
free lancing was only for the independently wealthy or hard core, starvation
loving anorexics. Hastings' offer was too good an opportunity to pass up, even
though her "production assistant" position was really no more than a
glorified secretary.

After Lisa’s first day on the job, Hastings showed up at
her apartment with a bottle of Dom
Perignon
to
celebrate. When he made it clear just how grateful she was supposed to be, she
showed him the door. He was persistent, she was lonely, and eventually his
persistency paid off. They had an affair that lasted over a year despite her
not ever feeling entirely comfortable with him. Even in bed she had the
disquieting tendency to think of him as "Mr. Hastings."

After four months of behind the scenes work, the six
o'clock news show producer, who'd recognized Lisa's photogenic features from
day one, began to send her out on news assignments with a cameraman. She was
sharp, aggressive and ambitious. She covered shopping mall openings and
community board meetings, the kind of thing that, nine times out of ten, ended
up on the cutting room floor, but even so, her reports were insightful and
evocative. Then, one day, the station sent her and a cameraman out to cover the
mayor making an address to a civic action group. The address would have
absolutely no news worthiness unless it was an exceedingly dull day everywhere
else in the greater Los Angeles area. On that particular day, however, three gunmen
broke into the meeting, took everyone hostage, and demanded that the mayor free
all political prisoners as well as give the gunmen three million dollars. Lisa
and her cameraman got the whole thing on film. The gunmen decided to let the
television people leave in order to bring their film to the studio and to air
their demands in living color on the six o'clock news. They failed to realize
that the same cameras that gave the public information would also help the
police tactical squad plan a hostage rescue. By six o'clock, the hostage threat
was over and Lisa had the whole episode on camera. She not only reported the
story, she was a participant in it and documented the crisis with clarity, in
the no nonsense, nerves of steel manner that remained her style. Because of its
drama, the national networks picked up the story.