Star Time (24 page)

In odd moments of leisure, she realized she was lonely. A feeling occasionally struck her that resided somewhere between regret and what might have been considered self-pity if she were ever to allow herself to admit to that weakness: How narrow her existence had become and how alone she was. Her life consisted of attempting a new solo high-wire reporting endeavor act every day or two. Cameras recorded her feat for replay before millions of people. But there was no one to catch her if she
fell or even to care if she did. And no one waited to embrace her each night when she finally reached safety.

Greg often compared his own career with
Ev
Carver’s, who had climbed quickly and high by succeeding at the tough tasks he was handed. He had collected greater power and more departments, while flattening obstacles and people in his path. The force of his personality and the rumors of his success with women inside the company and out added to his mystique as an irresistible force.

At a brainstorming meeting to develop a selling strategy to the ad agencies for the new season,
Ev
proposed a scheme that might have left the network open to antitrust charges. Greg was the only one willing to attack
Ev’s
idea.

Ev
laughed at him. “There are no rules,
Lyall
. You know that: You married the boss’s daughter. All you have to do is keep your nose clean and your ass wiped.”

Ev
and the others went on as if Greg’s comment had never been made. Each time Greg raised a point, something similar happened: courtesy, but no heed. To them he was as transparent as a man made of glass. They were careful around him because the Chairman had personally placed him on display, occasionally changing the title on his pedestal. But to everyone he was familiarly known and dismissed as “The Son-in-law.”

In 2006, after America’s off-year elections, a reshuffling of assignments brought Chris to Washington in the prestigious post of head White House correspondent and a contractual commitment to make frequent appearances on the network’s Sunday morning news shows. She had not had to fight or lobby for the job. The decision makers had beseeched her to take it.

Again, Carl Green, her agent, would only agree to a two-year contract. Her stock was rising too fast to let her be locked in. She was now earning close to a million dollars a year.

The career advancement Greg had expected to procure by marrying Diane became more elusive and illusory as he appeared to climb higher at FBS, but never into formidable jobs. One particularly mortifying day someone forgot to inform him about a change in the time for a meeting about the new fall schedule he and other senior executives were having with Barnett and Raoul
Clampton
, the new head of Programming. The meeting had already ended when Greg arrived.

That night he joined Diane at a dinner party where he hoped pleasant company would lift his depression. That possibility ended when the
hostess raised her glass to toast her husband. He had just been elevated to managing director of a large investment bank where he had gone after business school instead of entering his father-in-law’s firm. Greg felt that everyone silently condemned him as a failure and a parasite.

During the three-block walk home to their apartment, Greg told Diane about that day’s slight at the office and how badly he felt when their host’s promotion was announced. She advised him to have her father fire the person who had forgotten to inform him of the time change.

Greg was aghast. “What would that solve?”

“It will get you respect.”

“The wrong kind.
I’d like to earn it and respect myself instead.”

In Diane’s astronomy, people like her father who had the talent made it, as she herself was doing in her more limited sphere, the others didn’t. She grew short-tempered. “Perhaps you weren’t cut out for that sort of thing. Some people aren’t.”

Greg did not know whether Diane was purposely trying to insult him or, rather, to ease his adjustment to failure. In either case no adequate rejoinder was possible.

He brooded over her remark for days, worrying that it might have originated with her father, during one of their daily phone conversations. All his life he had thought of himself as a winner: self-assured, capable, and certain of his objectives. Yet, even he wondered whether speculation might not be true.

Diane’s love for Greg had not diminished over time, but she had become edgier with him, less accommodating. She had chosen a man who, regardless of his physical attractiveness, his strong-mindedness, his magnetism, came from a sketchy personal background, and who needed her and her father to maintain his job and his status in her world.

At a time when she might have reduced the growing tension between them by exhibiting sensitivity to his predicament and bending somewhat, she grew less respectful of his worth and consequently less willing to make allowances for his concerns, all the while fearing that unless she maintained her control over him, she would lose him. Greg refused to bend on his side because his steadfastness was all he really possessed that was his own.

The worldly woman who strode into the White House’s press room appeared greatly changed by her years abroad. Chris
Paskins
dressed with style and could converse urbanely over a
confit
of duck or salmon en
croûte
while commenting comfortably on the St.-
É
milion
. She had a broad, sure knowledge of international crosscurrents and a far greater skepticism about people and their motives than the ingénue who had
arrived in California from Wichita and quickly fallen in love. She was also less volatile and more self-possessed. That was because little had changed on the inside. Confident then, she was more so now, but with her combative instinct kept under better control; she had learned that so long as she trusted no one, she need only do her work to the best of her ability to make her way just fine.

Covering the Clinton White House was different from any previous assignment. With stories cascading down from the heights of government, she was assured of getting on the air most nights, usually doing her stand-up in front of the White House portico. She was flooded with press releases, was briefed by press aides, but found she had almost no access to the President. Refusing to take on faith what the White House press office was trying to sell
her,
she worked hard to track down the facts behind the stories and gradually developed contacts throughout the government: the Defense Department, Agriculture, State, the Treasury, Capitol Hill.

At first she resisted joining the herd making the rounds of cocktail parties, receptions, and dinner parties, as she had resisted most of the social whirl in Los Angeles and for which she had been too busy in London. But she soon realized that so much could be discovered after hours in Washington and so many useful relationships developed with the powerful in government that she began to accept the invitations.

Hosts and hostesses considered Chris a prime catch: an attractive, single TV celebrity to whom their other guests sought access.

For the first time in a long while, Chris began to settle into something akin to a normal life.

Diane and Greg always spent a week in the winter at their house in Aspen. She was an excellent skier, having learned when she was young. Greg started skiing after they married but, being a good athlete, had quickly improved. No sport he had ever tried provided the sense of personal freedom that downhill skiing did—you swooped and glided and dipped wherever you pointed your skis. Aspen was a congenial area, with its four skiing mountains, good restaurants, and shops full of the newest equipment and clothing; its slopes, streets, and houses attracted friends, many from the West Coast, whom he got
to
see no other time of the year; and for vacationers, it had the air of a perpetual party. Greg and Diane had spent some of their happiest times together in Aspen.

The second day of their vacation that February, they skied with a group of friends on Aspen Mountain, which rose from one side of the town. Longtime visitors still occasionally insisted on calling the mountain Ajax, so as to demonstrate that they were not among the glitz-ridden newcomers easily taken in by the marketing label. Among
the group was a friend’s exuberant eight-year-old son, whose developing skill displayed enormous delight in unshackling the restraints of gravity.
Being with the boy so much of the day caused Greg to feel keenly the absence of children in his life.
He was already in his mid-thirties. It was long past the time that he and Diane began their own family.

The couple had fallen into the habit of bathing in the hot tub when they returned to their house on Red Mountain after a day on the slopes, and then, because they were already naked and their muscles felt warm and stretched and nicely tired, they would often have sex and then sleep until eight at night, when they dressed and joined friends for dinner. Aspen was an interlude of unaccustomed eroticism between them.

“Don’t put in your diaphragm this time,” he said as they walked to the bedroom in thick cotton bathrobes.

She looked uncomprehendingly at him for an instant and then realized what he wanted. “Please, Greg, don’t start that again. You know I’m not ready to have children yet.”

“You’ll be thirty soon.”

“I’ll think about it then.”

She slipped into the bathroom and was out quickly. She found him sitting up against the headboard, arms crossed,
his
expression angry. She
lay
down beside him and put her head on his shoulder, trying to melt his coolness.

“It’s a very big step, Greg, and it worries me.”

“You assured me before we were married that you want children, but you keep putting me off when I bring it up.”

“I guess I want them,” she hedged, “but not just yet.”

“By now you should know. That’s supposed to be the point of being a family.”

“It scares me,” she confessed.

“You’re wonderful with kids. You’ll be a fine mother.”

“The responsibility is just part of it. There’s the pain.” She seemed to be feeling it.

“They can give you an anesthetic.”

“Greg, it can kill me,” she said, her fear fully infusing her words, “The doctors tell me the same problem that killed my mother can kill me. It can happen.”

This was the first time she had admitted the truth: that she had investigated the prospect of giving birth and feared to be struck down by the same illness that afflicted her mother. She lifted her face to look at his. “So, where does that leave us?”

“Would you adopt?”

“Would you?”

“Someday maybe,” he said, “if we had tried and failed to have our own. All my life I’ve felt as if I’m owed my own family back.
You?”

“You know I love the kids in the hospital.”

“That’s easy to do. They’re not your own.”

“Adopting children scares me for a different reason. I’ve seen so many adopted kids with diseases no one expected. And no biological histories, so you can be prepared.” Talking about the object of her fears was alarming her. “It’s enough for now that we have each other.”

She moved up to kiss Greg. He did not respond. She kissed him again, trying to arouse him, hoping to bury these thoughts under ecstatic sensation.

“Is that all there is for us?” he asked.
“For the rest of our lives?”

“What do you mean?”

“Two people not really satisfied with each other . . . a little more selfish and a little less satisfied each day.”

“I’m satisfied,” she objected.

“No, you’re just willing to accept the status quo. How could you be satisfied with me when I’m not satisfied with myself?”

She sat up. “I’ve never heard you talk this way. We have a wonderful life. Look around you.”

“None of it is
mine
,” he said with sharp bitterness.

She put her head back down on his shoulder. “And you resent that it’s mine.”

Chris’s initial thought upon finding herself seated at dinner next to Sen. Kenneth V. Chandler was disappointment. Although she had never met him, the bachelor senator from New York was known as much for his gossip-column dating life as for his legislative skill. She expected to find him drunkenly leaning against her by dessert and his hand groping for her knee long before that. Worse, he looked exactly as a senator was supposed to: a full head of wavy hair turning prematurely gray at the temples, full eyebrows over thoughtfully self-assured eyes, straight features, and the jaw of a gladiator. He might have won the job on the basis of an eight-by-ten glossy. The advent of television campaigning had produced a bumper crop of the type. He was forty-two years old, a dozen years older than she, had been in the Senate eight years, divorced ten, and in politics twenty.

“I asked our hostess to seat me next to you,” he said upon meeting her.

“That’s flattering,” she replied, seized by an impulse to flee the dinner party.