Sellevision (13 page)

“It’s nice to speak with you, too. Is this your first piece of Diamonelle jewelry?”

“Oh no, I own many pieces. I just love Diamonelle, I get more compliments than you could even imagine.”

Peggy Jean continued to smile broadly. “That’s great to hear, Zoe. Now let me ask you: What was it about this
particular
Diamonelle ring that caught your eye?”

“Well, I think it was the fact that, like you said, it’s got a lot of glamour to it, but it’s also really believable because it’s not so big that people would think it’s a fake.”

“Exactly,” Peggy Jean confirmed. “This is a very beautiful, very believable ring.”
So far, so good
, Peggy Jean thought.
Maybe it’s a different Zoe
.

“Oh yes, I’m looking forward to wearing it. I think I’m really gonna love it. Especially because I, unlike you, am not a bitch with hairy knuckles, so the ring will look much bet—”

“Shit, Peggy Jean, we’re going to disconnect the caller, stand by.”

The caller was cut off midsentence with a squelch and then a click.

Peggy Jean began to tremble, visibly. She stared blankly into the camera, mouth open.

“Peggy Jean, are you okay? Peggy Jean?” When her producer got no response, he called out to an engineer, “Get her off, cut to a promo,
now!
”

eight

“M
y God, she humiliated me on live television, in front of
millions and millions
of viewers,” Peggy Jean said, holding back the tears. She and Trish were sitting in Peggy Jean’s Acura in the employee parking lot of Sellevision. Peggy Jean had run to her car immediately after the show when she realized she’d left her purse, which contained her pills, on the front seat.

Struggling to not ruin her eye makeup, Peggy Jean confided to Trish, “I’m really scared.
I’m being stalked
.”

Trish placed her hand on Peggy Jean’s shoulder pad. “Look, she’s just some crazy person who sent you a couple of letters and then got on the air, that’s all there is to it. She won’t get on the air again and I promise you, it’s all going to go away.”

“But it’s not just a
couple
of letters, it’s
many
letters, sometimes less than an hour apart. And now phone calls!” Peggy Jean wailed. The Valium hadn’t kicked in yet.

“I know, it’s scary, real people
are
scary, but that’s the price we pay for being in the public eye. We’ve all received our share of letters from nutcases—a month from now, you won’t even remember this Zoo person.”

“Zoe, it’s Zoe,” Peggy Jean corrected.

“Well, maybe ‘Zoo’ is more appropriate.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re right, Trish. I mean, maybe this is just the price we pay for our celebrity.”

“It is, I’m telling you. Of course there is one thing you should be worried about,” Trish said.

“
What
?” Peggy Jean said with alarm.

“Look over there,” Trish said, pointing across the street at a Krispy Kreme sign being lowered by crane into place on the new store front.

Peggy Jean smiled, relieved. “Actually, that comforts me. It means there will be police officers around.”

“Honestly, Peggy Jean, you have no need for police officers. Now come on, let’s go back inside.”

She had one new E-mail.

To: [email protected]

Fr: [email protected]

Subject: Cut, Cut

You cut me off mid-sentance on live television?

That’s how you treat your FRIENDS???

Oh, nice try with the new frosting job, but sweetheart, let me tell you something: it DOESN’T work. Neither do your hairy knuckles. You are nothing but a RAT.

But I do know what would work for you:

Cut, Cut.

Peggy Jean gasped as she read the last two words:
Cut, Cut
. Was it a threat? A threat of physical harm? Had this Zoe person finally gone over some edge? “And I
don’t
have hairy knuckles, you madwoman!” Peggy Jean said through gritted teeth as she tapped the “send” key on her computer. As she did this, she looked down at the knuckles of her right hand, turning them in the light to catch the profiles of hairs.

Yes, hairs.

She took another Valium, washing it down with one of the little bottles of peppermint schnapps from her flight.

A

fter that week’s third Joyce’s Choice program ended and Adele Oswald Crawley’s Indian Pride Fry Bread Extravaganza special came on, Bebe walked back to her office and, upon opening the door, came very close to fainting.

B—

I was trying to remember how many times you blushed over dinner. I lost track after twelve, but figured a “baker’s dozen” might get the idea across. You know, “an eye for an eye.”

Looking forward to seeing you again
,

Hoping to see you soon
,

Do you believe at love at first sight?

Yours truly
,

Unable to stop thinking about you and praying you feel the same
,

Eliot

The handwritten card was the most romantic thing Bebe had ever held in her hands. It completely overpowered the thirteen long white boxes, each filled with a dozen red roses, that were stacked on a pile atop her desk. One hundred and fifty-six roses altogether. It was completely overboard. The first thing Bebe did was phone her mother, Rose, in California.

“Mom, I really think I might have met somebody,” she said.

“Oh, dear, that’s wonderful! Did you meet him out shopping?” her mother asked.

Bebe hadn’t thought of exactly what to tell her mother in terms of how they met. She improvised. “We’ve only had one date, but it’s like I made a list of everything I wanted in somebody and he arrived, mail-order.”

“Is he a doctor?” her mother asked. “An executive?”

“He owns a business, a chain of stores.”

Her mother gave a small, delighted gasp. “A
chain
of stores? Imagine that, a whole chain, how wonderful. Do we have any of his stores down here?”

“It’s a dry-cleaning business, actually. But that’s not the point. The point is that he’s handsome and smart and funny and, I don’t know, I just have a really good feeling about him.”

“Well, everybody needs clean clothes,” her mother said, trying to sound upbeat. “Of course, there’s no reason he couldn’t branch out in the future.”

After Bebe hung up with her mother, she looked over at the mound of boxes, the top box opened. It reminded her of a story her mother told her.

When Bebe was five, she lived with her mother and father in Brooklyn. Her father was a police officer with the NYPD. He worked a lot of nights, and one of those nights was Bebe’s mother’s thirtieth birthday. Because Dad frequently missed holidays, the family often celebrated them later or earlier. But on this particular birthday, a box arrived. Inside the box were three dozen roses. Why, out of all their nine years of marriage, had he chosen this birthday to have a special delivery of roses sent?

It was almost as if he somehow knew that he would be killed that night, in the line of duty.

Bebe didn’t remember her father. But she did remember her mother’s grief, because it lasted for years. And it was only when Bebe was ten that her mother told her of Bebe’s brother, a brother she’d never known because he’d been given up for adoption at birth. Bebe’s parents were newly married and hadn’t expected a baby so soon, when they had so little money. It had been a difficult decision, but one they felt was best for the baby.

To this day, Bebe’s mother still talked about the roses. And she still said the one regret in her life was letting that baby go and losing that piece of her husband. Of course, her other large regret in life was that her daughter was forty-two and not married.

Roses had never been just roses to Bebe. Roses had always been some sort of
message
from a father that she couldn’t even remember.

A

t the Barnes & Noble superstore five miles from his condo, Max walked the aisles, glancing at books, but truly hunting for a prospective boyfriend.
What better place to shop for a smart man than a bookstore?
he reasoned.

He saw a handsome young guy in the Fiction and Literature section. Khaki slacks, blue oxford shirt, gold wire-frame glasses. Max paused, leaned forward, and took a book from the shelf, pretending to read as he peered over the top. The young man was engrossed in his own reading. Max studied the man’s face, trying to determine if he could visualize the stranger at some future point in time throwing a Frisbee in the park for the not-yet-born golden retriever puppy the two would have obtained from a reputable breeder in upstate New York. The stranger, perhaps sensing that he was being scrutinized, glanced up from his book and caught Max’s eye. The man smiled at Max, then looked back down at his book. Max managed to glimpse the title:
The Bell Jar
.

Immediately, Max replaced his prop-book on the shelf and continued down the aisle, walking past the man and making a sharp right.

Pausing in the neutral zone of Books for Young Readers, Max realized he was likely to encounter another
Bell Jar
reader unless he devised a strategy. Science Fiction? No, Max did not want a Trekkie boyfriend with a calculator wristwatch. Movies and Television? Just the thought of sitting home on Friday night watching a scratchy old copy of
A Streetcar Named Desire
with some guy who knew all of Blanche Dubois’s lines made Max feel depressed. Sports? No towel-snapping ex–frat boys, thank you. Photography? Too pretentious. History? Science? Computers? No, no, no.

After eliminating Travel by reason of his own abandonment issues, Max decided that the only two sections of Barnes & Noble that were appropriate for boyfriend shopping were Self-Improvement and Pets.

While pretending to read
Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
, Max spotted a beefy, jockish-looking fellow. The guy had very large biceps, which could come in quite handy when it came time to haul firewood inside. The man scanned the titles of the books and then plucked a copy of
Codependent No More
from the shelf.

A codependent bodybuilder did not sound unappealing. Except then Max saw that the man was wearing a wedding band. This meant he probably had a wife who suffered from low self-esteem, who was needy and clingy and assumed that every time her husband went to the gym he was really visiting a secret girlfriend. He imagined the wife at home that very moment, wondering where her husband was, doing frantic situps on the living room carpet in an effort to become more attractive to her ripped husband, thus staving off the divorce she feared was almost inevitable.

Or maybe he was gay. Gay men often wore wedding bands, trying to pass. But then the guy walked away, without so much as a glance.

Max read
The Right Dog for You
in the Pets section. He was surprised to learn that Chow Chows had black tongues and Basenjis didn’t bark. Max had always assumed
all
dogs had pink tongues and barked. What other of his assumptions, he wondered, were untrue? Most? All? Until only recently, he had assumed he would continue with Sellevision, eventually rising to the ranks of Peggy Jean or Bebe. Perhaps even one day having his very own show, Max’s Choice, which could have featured a collection of Max’s personal favorites from the vast Sellevision inventory.

How quickly one’s life could change, fall apart. If Max hadn’t insisted on a preshow latte, it never would have spilled into his lap in the first place, thus setting into motion the chain of events that led to his subsequent misery, whereby he was left with no options except boyfriend shopping in the late afternoon at a suburban Philadelphia book retailer, where instead of a boyfriend he gained only knowledge of Chow Chow tongues.

Replacing
The Right Dog for You
on the shelf, Max made his way to the Philosophy & Spirituality section.