Star Time (14 page)

He took her in his arms. "I'll miss you every moment we're apart. It's just that this might be the one great chance to get what I want in life. I couldn't say no

and didn’t want to."

She nodded, holding back tears. "I guess if someone promoted me to White House correspondent or something incredible like that, I'd be the one trying to justify the move."

"If we can find a job in the East for you, this whole thing might just work out better for both of us."

She looked up at him. "I really want to believe it."

"Of course it will." He kissed her tenderly. "We love each other. That's all that matters."

The three weeks left to Greg and Chris rushed by like refugees trying to escape the onslaught of the inevitable separation. The couple continued to tell each other that the separation would change nothing because they loved each other. The apartment would continue to be their home together. Greg signed the lease over to Chris and shipped some of his furniture to New York. She would vacate her little studio at the end of the month and move her own things over.

This did not seem to either of them an appropriate time to examine concerns that had slowly risen to the surface like rocks in a cultivated field: whether his hunger for material success might clash with her idealism, his need for greater socializing become bored by hers for greater solitude, his penchant for diplomatically fitting in and sliding through to gain his ends conflict with hers for head-on confrontation. Neither wanted to risk crippling the stronger attachments they both believed would allow their love to stretch a country's width without breaking.

They focused instead on how much they loved each other and on the qualities in the other that brought them happiness, all the while concurring in little vows: "We'll telephone at least once a day." "We'll pick romantic places to spend our weekends together." "We'll take care never to argue when we're together."

No matter how tired they were, they made love each night and struggled to stay awake afterward to snuggle and talk a bit.

"Why is God doing this to me?"

Stew
Graushner's
immediate reaction to Greg's transfer was soul-searching despair.

"He's not, I am," Greg pointed out.

"You're just a front man."

Stew asked Greg to spend his remaining days defining long-term directions for the broadcasts and training his replacement as executive producer. Greg thought he would have to fight hard for Hugo Ramirez as his choice, but Stew immediately agreed.

"He's ready," was all Stew said.

Greg immediately gave Chris the go-ahead on a political investigation he might normally have considered too costly or far-reaching. He recognized that he might either be compensating for guilt pent up by a failure to advance her more effectively or be satisfying an impulse for worthiness he would not be here to take the blame for if the investigation proved to be an expensive dead end.

It was an open secret in California broadcasting that
Ev
Carver was exploring other possibilities in the event FBS failed to reward him with a significant job at the network. Greg suspected that might be the reason
Ev
did not review the Ramirez appointment with the thoroughness he usually applied. Greg pondered how to inform
Ev
diplomatically that their dinner at the Ivy had resulted in he himself being the one called to New York, the one Barnett Roderick had singled out. But
Ev
phoned Greg first.

"Human Resources just sent me your transfer papers. Chuck Mason there assumed I knew all about it. But we know I didn't."

"He told me not to say anything until he could arrange all the paperwork."

"Exactly how did this miracle occur?"

"Roderick mentioned me to him."

Anger and admiration were audible in
Ev's
voice. "I was right about you,
Lyall
. You are a really tricky bastard."

"Nothing tricky about it.
I was a lot more surprised than you when Mason called me."

"Maybe I ought to ask you to put in a good word for me. For all I know you've got the old man believing you're my ventriloquist."

"I'm going there at a very low level,
Ev
."

"But damn it, you're going."

A week later
Ev
Carver was made vice president in charge of FBS's owned-and-operated television and radio stations.

Sex and the City
and
The West Wing
would win Emmys that year and so would James
Gandolfini
and Edie Falco on the cable-network phenomenon
The Sopranos,
as would actors in
Will & Grace
and
Everyone Loves Raymond
. November 11
th
turned the nation's mood to gloom after terrorists flew airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the ground.

During his first days on the new job in New York, Greg realized that he had to learn to look at broadcasting differently. Like Chris,
newspeople
usually considered television a medium of communicating information. Those in programming were likely to call it an entertainment medium, with the Sports Department pointing out the popularity of competition as entertainment. But to the top executives at networks and stations television was basically an advertising medium, a way of peddling viewers to advertisers for the largest possible revenue, which is what those executives were judged on. Many might have wished they could broadcast only commercials, but knew that to lure
viewers,
they had to pay for programming to fill the airtime between them.

The national network was simply an organization that distributed the programs and some of the commercials at regularly specified times to affiliated stations, several of which in the largest cites, the major markets, were owned by the network. The stations earned the bulk of their income from ads they sold during their own local programming and between the network shows.

Toward the end of his first week at the network, when Greg was dizzy with trying to master the intricacies of selling airtime to
advertisers, he received a telephone call from Barnett Roderick's secretary.

"Mr. Roderick," she said, "would like to know if you're free to have dinner at his home tonight at seven-thirty."

Astonished, Greg mumbled an acceptance.

"You might come five or ten minutes early," she advised. "Mr. Roderick always dines on time."

Legend had it that few, if any, top FBS executives had ever been invited to Barnett Roderick's apartment, much less to a private dinner. It was clear to Greg that Barnett Roderick had truly chosen him.

A conversation with a spiffily dressed associate led to lunchtime visits to a 42
nd
Street
shoeshine stand and a prominent haberdashery for a new necktie. Nothing was wrong with the one he had on, but wearing a new one would make help to forestall nervousness.

He left work an hour early, so he’d have time to go home to shower and shave and put on fresh clothes. The one-bedroom apartment overlooking the East River was costing him four thousand dollars a month, but was the sort of place he had hoped to find in New York in what he had learned was the right neighborhood.

At exactly six fifty-five, as he pushed the doorbell in the hallway outside the Roderick apartment in the San Remo, Greg was revisited by the same anxiety that had wrenched his insides as a boy when he had arrived at Billy Franklin's house for a Saturday-afternoon date. Billy's father was the omnipotent figure who managed the steel mill where his own father worked.

The door swung back. Greg relaxed. Diane Roderick stood before him, a broad smile on her face. A maid hovered in the background to take his coat.

"Welcome to New York," she said cheerily. "I've drawn the thankless job of being
your
escort at dinner."

Greg was pleased to see her. He had enjoyed her company that night in Los Angeles. She was as striking as he remembered: large gray eyes circled by long lashes and reddish-brown hair pulled back. She wore a green silk dress with a bodice gathered to one side.

They chatted about his impressions of New York as she led him down the long picture-gallery foyer, which was as wide as many rooms the real-estate brokers had shown him. The floor was marble and the walls covered in deep blue brocade that set off the paintings.

"Would I recognize any of the artists from my Art History course?" he asked.

She motioned toward one.

"A Picasso?"

"And there's a Degas. The one over there's a Vuillard Dad doesn't like very much and might sell. He's got his eye on a Matisse he wants to put in the living room. The paintings in the dining room are all nineteenth-century American with a water theme. You might recognize some."

The foyer gave onto an immense living room. Through the windows at the far end, he could see buildings in a line at the far edge of Central Park. The living room lights were low, and the dark wood furniture appeared to glow from within.

Diane turned aside just before the entrance and led him off the foyer into a much cozier room, paneled in mahogany. Bookshelves above cabinets covered one wall. Barnett was seated in the largest of the armchairs watching FBS's network news program on a television screen recessed into one of the cabinets. Below it, with the sound off, other networks' news broadcasts could be seen on four smaller screens.

"Greg," he acknowledged perfunctorily, and his eyes swept back to the largest screen.
Anchorman Ray
Strock
was signing off with his customary: "Good-night and hoping for good news tomorrow."

"What's your opinion of our news program?" Barnett asked him.

Greg did not have to deliberate on the question. The broadcast followed his at KFBS, and he had watched it dozens of times. "It tends to be a headline service. It doesn't give viewers any more than the others and often less. Last night they allotted thirty seconds to China’s detention of the U.S. spy plane's crew and then a minute fifteen to the race riots in Cincinnati. They might have been announcing the football scores. No context. No exposure of
deeper issues that might become problems for the country and the viewer later on."

Without any sign as to whether he agreed, Barnett stood up and guided him to the dining room. Greg took care to compliment his host on his home.

Dinner was an elegant affair with several courses. The maid who had taken his coat fluttered silently behind them with serving trays and a wine bottle. To his host and hostess, however, Greg gathered, this was an ordinary meal.

Initially, the conversation focused on Greg. Barnett inquired about his first week in Sales and his impressions of various aspects of broadcasting and the company. But then father and daughter fell into a personal dialogue, and a remarkable transformation came over Barnett. Up until then, even toward his daughter in public, he had appeared gracious, but autocratic. Now, in private, their enormous fondness for each other revealed itself in warmth and openness.

Barnett wanted to know how her job was going and a fund-raising event she was organizing. He teased her affectionately about the clothing bills she had run up that month, and she laughingly maintained that they had to be a mistake—she was a working girl and shopped only at K-Mart.

When the meal concluded, Diane invited Greg to accompany her to a party.

"You ought to start meeting people here,” Barnett advised. “Diane knows everyone. I'll be dropping by later."

The party was being given by the parents of Diane's friend Libby Dexter, whose most prominent features seemed to be long blond hair and a grandfather who started out with a small-town drugstore and left the family a worldwide pharmaceutical company. Libby took a long look at Greg and then pronounced her approval to Diane.

While strolling with him into the next room, Diane explained, "I told her I might be bringing someone."

"She seemed to know something about me."

Diane smiled coyly. "That you're tall, dark, and mysteriously handsome."

Greg recognized some of the names and a few of the faces to whom she introduced him. Many were well-known business people. Several had accents and European titles. A ballet dancer, two painters, and several actors seemed to have been added to spice up the conversation. All mingled sociably. At twenty-three Diane was among the youngest. The purpose of the party was to honor a member of their crowd who had just finished a stint as secretary of the Treasury with the outgoing Clinton administration and was assuming the chairmanship of a major bank.

To his relief Greg knew two of the male guests. One was a highly ranked professional tennis player he had competed against in the juniors. The other was an acquaintance from Yale named Tim Jeffers, who had gone into his family's century-old investment bank upon graduation. Greg and Jeffers had been members of the same senior society and had always gotten along, but Greg had considered the disparity in their backgrounds too great for friendship. Despite his belief that he had been tolerated solely because of his tennis prowess, Tim seemed genuinely pleased to see him. Perhaps, Greg speculated, his wide-eyed, awkward college
self had
been as personable as he had tried to project. Diane and Tim were old friends.