Star Time (13 page)

"Is that your opinion or your father's?"

"Mine. My father doesn't discuss business with me. He wants to shield me from that sort of thing. But that might change when I come into my trust fund. A lot of it is in FBS stock."

Neither spoke for a while.

"I'm enjoying myself with you," she finally said by way of conciliation. "I really don't want the evening to end yet."

Greg yielded. "There's a little club that's very in right now."

He debated how to tell Chris and decided there was no need unless word actually got back to her that he had been seen out with a woman. He could claim he was acting as a sightseeing guide.

The club was crowded. A few people wandered in and out of the poolroom and the bar, but most had squeezed into the main room, where the band was trying to thump out enough decibels to deafen listeners to its mediocrity. He recognized a few people and waved hello, but none of them so far as he was aware knew Chris. Diane was acquainted with a few of the others. She swept through the overcrowded room with a flair that was very like the impression she made speaking: sophisticated, self-assured, provocative, and forceful.

A couple of times they managed to push onto the dance floor. In between they shouted conversation at each other. Later, they went out to shoot pool and converse. She was better at the game than he expected. The caretaker at their country place had taught her as a child, she explained. As the poolroom emptied, they began to relax a bit with each other.

They left the club after about two hours and drove back to her hotel. Both admitted they had had a good time. Out of courtesy, he walked her to the bungalow. She unlocked and opened the door. Barnett was seated in the living room reading some documents. Glancing up, he noticed Greg standing outside behind his daughter.

"You kept her out late," he said.

"We had a good time."

Barnett studied Greg's face for a moment and then lifted the papers he held. "I like what's been happening with the news."

He did not say whom he thought was responsible for what he liked, but Greg decided that was as close to praise as the man was likely to offer, and he'd better claim it.

"Thank you," Greg replied.

"Good-night, young man."

"Good-night, sir."

Barnett closed the door.

Nearly a month later, in late early March of 2001, when the evening with Barnett Roderick had slipped into a bottom drawer of his memory, Greg received a phone call from Chuck Mason, the network's head of Human
Resources, that
summoned him to New York. He told Chris about the call, although Mason had told him not to tell anyone.

She felt a sudden churning in her stomach.

"Is it a sure thing the job would be at the network?
In New York?"

Greg shrugged. His guess was that he was being considered as one of the producers on network news.

"Maybe they're looking for a new executive producer."

"Not directly from local. There are a lot more experienced guys already standing in line there to run network news."

"You must really have impressed Roderick that night. What did you two talk about?"

Greg repeated their brief exchanges.

"I'm proud of you," she said. "We've always known that either of us could get a great offer that might separate us for a while. It won't change anything."

Greg flew cross-country that night and met with Mason first thing in the morning. The man was vague about the job Greg was being considered for. Greg wondered whether Mason himself knew. The interview did not so much end as trail off, with Mason stating that others would want to see Greg as well.

Greg read magazines in an empty office most of the day and wondered what he was doing there. At four-twelve in the afternoon, Mason's secretary rushed in to tell him that Mr. Roderick would see him at four-fifteen.

The FBS Building sprouted among the row of towers on the Avenue of the Americas that included other network headquarters.  Individuality had been banished from the other offices Greg had seen that day; all were brightly lit and contained identical window blinds, beige carpeting, and steel and
plastic-laminate desks and
cabinets
colored beige and brown. The chairs, too, were identical. Barnett Roderick's office, which occupied a top-floor corner of the building, was different. Sheer curtains admitted a dusky light. The cabinets and tables were fine wood antiques. Ornately patterned fabrics covered the sofa and chairs. Several abstract paintings were lit from recesses in the ceiling.

The phone rang as Greg entered. Barnett leaned forward to pick up the receiver. Only when he concluded the phone conversation did the corporate chief look up at Greg, who was standing just inside the doorway.

"Are you married to the news?" Barnett finally asked.

"I'm married to television."

Greg hoped that was the right answer; the discovery that it was also the truth struck him simultaneously. He walked to the desk, but did not take a seat.

Barnett spoke again. "I take it that means you've learned by now that news can be a dead end for getting ahead in everything but news."

Greg nodded.

"Good." Barnett opened a manila folder before him and examined a sheet of paper. "People you've worked with say you're capable and ambitious. Your record shows the ability, but one can only guess at the ambition."

Barnett leaned back. A small smile played on his mouth.

"Are you ambitious, Greg? I mean truly ambitious? Ambitious for responsibilities and rewards
that other men
cannot imagine?" Barnett did not want the question taken lightly. His gaze seemed to probe Greg, seeking the essence locked from others’ eyes that formed the core of his character. "Ambition like that is far rarer than one might think."

"Yes, I am."

Barnett nodded. Greg understood that that point at least, whatever it had meant, had been settled favorably.

When Barnett spoke again, everything had been decided. "I'm starting you in Sales. You have news experience. Good. That means you know about product and production. But to rise in television, you need experience where the revenue comes in, where we make our money—any fool can spend it. Working in
Sales will give you that. It will also introduce you to important players in this business: advertisers and their agencies."

Barnett referred again to the paper in the open folder. "You'll get a twenty-thousand-dollar raise. That should allow a single man to live well in New York. Mason will help you find an apartment. The company pays all moving expenses from the Coast. Three weeks should be sufficient time to arrange for someone to replace you in local news."

Greg sensed that Barnett did not expect an answer, that the confidence placed in him would have been shattered by the slightest hesitation, even by a question, and that the slightest display of reluctance would have foreclosed this extraordinary opportunity forever.

"Thank you," Greg said with a firmness he hoped demonstrated his determination, his hunger, to succeed, and he left.

"Sales?
You gave up news to be a salesman?" Chris was aghast. She had tried to sound selfless when the possibility of a promotion first arose, and had been proud of him for being considered for advancement, but he was putting a continent's separation between them for what she considered the most mundane of occupations. Now she refused to conceal her disdain. "It seems to me you've gotten a real jump on your new job by selling out."

"Starting there is a means to an end."

"And justifies it, no doubt."

"To you news is the end. You love it for its own sake . . . for all the right, idealistic reasons. News is important, sure, but it isn't what turns me on about television. When Roderick asked me whether I was married to the news, it was suddenly crystal clear to me that I wasn't."

"I suppose what excites you is selling thirty-second spots for products to cure constipation."

Greg was intent on making her understand. "What hooked me as a kid was television
itself,
and I'm still hooked on it. I didn't know the difference between Sales and Programming or Finance and Operations. I just knew I wanted someday to be the guy who pulls all the levers and makes piles of money doing it, who
decides that reality television has had it but to take a chance on the pilot for
Seinfeld
or that sophisticated crime shows will be next year's key to high ratings after ten—or even on another news magazine."

An antic smile broke across his face. "What I really want is to be the magician in the center of the largest control room in the whole damned network."

"You're not a child, Greg, and television isn't magic. We’re in it because we want to communicate what people need to know."

Greg laughed. "You’ll never convince me that little figures moving and talking behind a glass window aren't magic. Ever since I was a boy, just like some sorcerer, I've longed for them to leap to my commands and bring me money and honor and power. Just snap my fingers and have all my wishes obeyed and everything become beautiful and safe. I've got a chance now to make that happen."

Bitterness and hatred were Greg's initial responses to the fracture with his mother. Yet, very quickly, others rose up inside him to dispute for supremacy: Despite having remained with his father in their little house, he felt homeless, abandoned, dislocated,
powerless
against the battering of forces he could not evade.
And lonely, always lonely.
Television was his sanctuary, companion, comfort, and hope. Like picture postcards in an earlier age, the TV set was the enchanted looking glass through which he glimpsed a life in which he was no longer alone or full of care, a life lambent with opportunity. His thoughts escaped into dreams of happy endings and loving, cohesive families that never were poor or broken apart or threatened by death or debt
—
the twin monsters with one face that lurked in the dark around his bed when he turned in each night. He was determined that his
body someday escape
as well.

Tennis, he hoped, would gain him a college education. By twelve he was winning local junior tournaments and by fifteen he was nationally ranked. Whenever he had saved enough, he traveled to a tournament out of the state. Other players might have more talent and ultimately go further in the sport, but few wanted as much to win, still fewer tried as hard. When he was losing and needed every ounce of grit to come back, he would
exhort himself with the warning, "Lose this match,
Lyall
, and it's the steel mill."

Because his schoolmates possessed money and status, the lack of which had torn his family apart, rightly or wrongly Greg perceived, that they also possessed the inner security he craved. He examined their clothing and belongings, and when he was invited, the furnishings in their homes, emulating as well as he could the conduct and speech he observed there. He was always scrupulously well-behaved, always careful not to afford their parents an excuse to deny him future entrance. He suspected that his friends emphasized his high grades and sports accomplishments to them, hoping that would elevate him above his family's lowliness.

When Greg was fourteen, Debby Stimson's parents grounded her for two months because of her wild behavior and poor marks. Greg arranged to tutor her in Math and English after school in an empty office in the rear of the library. The second hour was invariably devoted to Copulation, a lab course new to him that Debby was highly qualified and eager to teach.

Television, however, was Greg
Lyall's
most reliable mentor and temptress. The colorful shadows lured his youthful longings as seductively as prostitutes in a red-lit window. He lusted after the beautiful women and envied the assured men with fine clothes and sleek cars who dazzled them. Although he was young, he understood that buried somewhere between the education he strove for in school and the men's poise was the secret tunnel from his own world into theirs. Television heightened his boyish yearnings into a craving to climb someday behind the glass and seek there the wealth that would keep him safe and the status that would prove his right to be there. All the while, it was also teaching him how to hide in plain sight, how to be anyone.

At the Supermarket checkout line, he swiftly scanned magazine articles about the shows planned for the fall and the executives whose careers were riding on their success, about performers from Nebraska or Iowa or anywhere whose sharp wit or attractive style or the miracle of a producer's notice had lifted them from obscurity and adversity to stardom. Those people became acquaintances he had not yet met and confirmed the faith he placed in television. Out there behind the kaleidoscope on the
screen, out there in the blackness where the bright images were mysteriously born, were scarcely imaginable opportunities; infinite success awaited those who dared to seize them.

The dissension between Chris and Greg dragged on through most of that day and the next and ended only after Greg promised to return to Los Angeles every other weekend. His job would bring him there at least once a month, his boss had told him, and he assured Chris he would come out on his own at least once more.