Star Time (19 page)

“This is no hour to be coming home.”

“We had a lot to talk about, Daddy,” Diane interjected. “Greg has something to ask you.”

“Mr. Roderick,” Greg began uncertainly, “I know this may sound sudden, and I guess it is, but Diane and I love each other. I would like your permission to marry her.”

“My boxing coach has the flu,” Barnett remarked, apparently oblivious of what had just been said. “I need a sparring partner.”

Diane understood and was alarmed. “Daddy, Greg’s not a boxer.”

“Have you ever had the gloves on?” Barnett asked him.

“Once or twice in a
Phys
Ed class as a kid,” Greg replied with a chuckle.

“You’re certainly man enough to defend yourself—I hope.”

Greg thought he detected malice in the tone. “Well, yes, but—”

“And love my daughter enough to fight for her.”

“Of course, I do.”

“Then take off your shirt and put on the gloves.”

Greg thought the joke had gone too far and tried to beg off. “I’m a lot younger than you—”

The older man’s eyes narrowed; the difference in age was a goad, not an obstacle. The challenge could not be refused. The extent of Greg’s desire for Diane Roderick—and for all that went with her—was about to be tested.

Greg smiled tightly at Diane, trying to display fearlessness. As he started to remove his jacket, the sleeve caught on one of his cuff links. Unfastening it took an embarrassingly long time. He was grateful for every second. Proving his commitment and worth by fighting his father-in-law-to-be seemed insane to him, a throwback to some sort of primeval tribal ritual. He would lose no matter which way the fight went—and he had no doubt, despite his youth, what that would be. He glumly stripped off his shirt and
tie
and slipped his hands into the boxing gloves lying on the ring apron. Diane anxiously tied the laces.

“How long have you been boxing?” Greg asked Barnett.

“All my life.”

“What about a
headguard
for him?” Diane asked.

“He’s too much of a man to need it at his age.”

Oh, God, Greg thought.

Diane fastened the other
headguard
on Greg, who then followed the older man up the wooden steps and between the red-velvet-covered ropes.

In the center of the ring, Greg lifted his fists into what he remembered to be the standard fighter’s posture and waited for the massacre. Jabs swifter than he had anticipated snapped back his head. He tried to respond in kind and found himself pawing to keep Barnett away. The older man was dancing and circling, throwing an occasional jab, but obviously seeking an opening for a hard right hand. Greg, too, then began circling, to get away from it. A left hook staggered him from the other side. And then he caught a right that cleared his head.

He decided that he might as well try to do something and shot his own right out. It did no damage—Barnett was too shifty to hit solidly—but the fact that it actually brushed against something buoyed his spirits a little.
Until the next right caught him while he was watching out for another left hook.

He noticed blood on one of his gloves. The momentary satisfaction disappeared after he realized it had to be dripping from a cut on his face.

“Want to stop?” Barnett called out.

Greg swung angrily at him and was rewarded when the punch grazed a cheek. He began swinging wildly, hoping something would land. A hard uppercut rocked his mouth shut and lifted him off his feet. The ropes saved him from going down.
And the bell from having to continue.

“That’s more than enough,” Diane called out, climbing into the ring.

“Do you want to stop?” Barnett asked him.

“I want to knock your sadistic head off!” Greg rejoined hotly. Actually, at that moment, all Greg wanted was a thick mattress under him in a darkened room.

Barnett smiled. “We’ll shower and talk in the library.”

Fifteen minutes later, with Diane sitting beside him and his face aching and continuing to puff up beneath a large Band-Aid, Greg asked her father for her hand in marriage.

Barnett replied circumspectly. “Normally, I would ask about your prospects in life.”

Greg wanted no misunderstanding. This was the crux of the pact to which his ambition was about to bind him. “You know my prospects better than I. What do you think?”

The older man stared into the younger’s eyes for a very long time, trying to plumb their sincerity. Then his gaze shifted to his daughter, eagerness evident in hers and apprehension about his answer and love for her young man.

Finally, he gave his answer, which was as much a pledge. “You have my solemn assurance that there’s no limit to how far you can go at FBS.”

Diane’s arm thrust through Greg’s, hugging it.

“But Greg,” he went on, “I want
your
assurance that you’ll love and care for my daughter as well and faithfully

as truly

as I do.”

Greg did not hesitate. His decision had been a lifetime forming. He was resolved. “I want to—and will.”

A smile snaked onto Barnett’s face bright enough to illuminate them all. He leaned forward and shook Greg’s hand.

“You have my blessing. You’re a very lucky young man. She’s a wonderful girl. I hope you realize that.”

“Yes, sir, I do,” Greg replied politely, and smiled at Diane.

“I think I’m pretty lucky, too,” she said to her father, but with her eyes on Greg.

On the Sunday night Diane agreed to marry him, Greg had considered flying out to California to tell Chris in person, but had remembered what she had once told him. “If one of us ever decides to end it, we’ll just say good-bye, we won’t drag it out.
Quick and clean.
I’d hate a lingering death.”

Finally, late on the next night, after putting off the call all day and rehearsing what he would say, he phoned her.

“This isn’t easy to tell you,” he began, “but I’ve decided to end our relationship.”

He thought she might have disconnected because she took so long to reply, but then her voice, quiet, halting, asked, “What made you decide now, so suddenly . . . especially after last weekend?”

“I needed time away from you to think. I’ve been doing that.”

Chris’s voice turned as sharp as her hurt. “You must have gotten a better offer. Who is she?”

Greg told her.

“You bastard!
You scheming bastard!”

Greg did not reply.

“I guess last weekend was your bachelor party,” she snapped.
“One last, grand fuck.
Living with me was kind of a detour for you on the way up, wasn’t it? I should feel honored I was worth that much of your time.”

“I loved you, Chris.”

Sarcasm flowed over her words. “And now you don’t?”

The abrupt click saved him from having to answer. After a week the click still resounded within the hollow center of his thoughts.

No loss in her life had ever struck so hard at Chris as losing Greg. She had warily opened her heart only to have it ransacked. She had trusted Greg and had loved him totally, and he had betrayed her totally. He loved
me,
she silently keened over and over. I can’t believe he didn’t love me.

At times she despised Greg because he had left her despite having loved
her,
and at other times because she was convinced he had lied about loving her and had used her from the very first. Sometimes, though, she told herself he had fled because he had found nothing in her worth loving, and then she despised herself.

She reached out to a few women friends for companionship, but became so submerged in her despondency that she forgot a Saturday lunch she had scheduled with one and a date to go shopping with another. Abjectly apologetic each time, she begged their forgiveness on the phone and ran out to purchase lavish gifts to be delivered immediately.

Only to Marian Marcus, though, did Chris open up to confide her grief and the reason for it. She had assumed, she told Marian, that she and Greg would spend their lives together—she had
wanted
to spend her life with him. Living together, she had always believed, was a prelude to marriage. They had argued, but always because their work put pressures on the relationship, never because of what they felt for each other. The one thing she had always been sure about was that Greg loved her.

She had feared his going to New York because it would separate them, not because she ever thought he might desert her. Never once had he mentioned the other woman, only her father. Recalling all the
canceled trips, Chris suspected he had been seeing this Diane for months and had lied about his reasons for postponing trips back to L.A. Although knowing that she valued honesty above all other values, he had lied to her. Had he been lying when he said that he loved her?

During those harrowing days, Marian ceased to be Chris’s assistant and truly became a friend who cared about her, listening for hours and offering solace as Chris talked out her feelings of sorrow, often sleeping over on the sofa at her apartment just so Chris would not be alone. The friendship that had begun with Marian’s outlandish confidences became cemented for life during that bleak time.

That first weekend, Marian insisted Chris
accompany
her to dinner and a movie. Chris was too preoccupied with her loss to concentrate on the film, and instead they drove for hours and talked. She rode
horseback
alone in the hills the next day. Her sorrow lurked in ambush behind every tree and in every gully.

Soon, however, Chris began to fight the despondency by losing herself in her work, the only lover she still trusted not to betray her. A workaholic and ambitious before, she became possessed; reporting became her only faith and ascension in her profession her hope for salvation from despair. Much of what used to be her free time was spent perusing stacks of photocopied public records and tracking down potential informers who might be more willing away from their offices to give her leads.

Chris even welcomed the outrage that abandonment by Greg aroused in her because it allowed her to close off her mind and heart to everything but work. She yearned to hurt him as painfully as she had been hurt and felt purified by the primeval rawness of her hatred. But her feelings flowed deeper and wider than retaliation against one man. Not only would her determination to succeed bring her personal fulfillment, but also vindication against everyone throughout her life who had ever tried to block her progress. Her influence would increase with her popularity, she knew, and would safeguard her independence.

She was as zealous to safeguard her emotions. Never again would she expose them to the ravages that dependence on another’s love could cause.

The day of Diane and Chris’s engagement party, the announcement appeared prominently in the
New York Times.
Already reports had appeared in newspaper columns and chatter about it had been flashing around the company: lots of calls to colleagues in Sales and at KFBS to find out more about this Gregory
Lyall
who was marrying the Chairman’s daughter. Greg perceived caution and deference in the congratulations and, from many, envy.

He was leaving the FBS Building at lunchtime when he encountered
Ev
Carver in the lobby.
Ev
halted, his red head cocked to one side, his mouth widening into a knowing smile.

“Opportunism or cowardice,
Lyall
?”

He offered no congratulations.

By the end of the month, Greg was given a new title and responsibility for a small area of Sales. He was by then working closely with Bill Jorgenson. A sizable increase appeared unannounced in his paycheck. He was prepared to use it for a down payment on an engagement ring, but Barnett offered the couple the ring he had given Diane’s mother.

Gus Krieger slumped dejectedly as he left FBS’s office tower at the FBS in Los Angeles. He had just met with a group of executives in Network Programming, the department that chose, developed, and scheduled the shows that went on the air.

Back on the day the new series were announced for the fall, they had told him they loved the pilot show he had written and produced, and they ordered thirteen episodes for the new fall season. Loved it? They were delirious. Although the order had not been for a full season, they praised him for having come through again, and their hands fought to get through the tangle to shake his.

Now, just when he was about to start production, the network refused to approve his scripts and insisted he shoot some new scenes for the pilot. The woman character is too tough, they had claimed. Audiences are turned off.

“But she’s a cop. If she were soft, she’d get her head shot off three times before lunch.”

A programmer named Raoul
Clampton
came as close to articulating the group’s consensus as it seemed capable of doing. “There’s tough . . . and then there’s
tough.
The problem is that she’s
tough.
You see?”