Star Time (26 page)

All the lights were on and the front door open in Sally’s house when Annette arrived. Loud music boomed from within. She entered to find a mess: empty bottles and food on the carpet. A young man in jockey shorts lay on the living room sofa with his eyes closed, listening to heavy-metal on the stereo.

“Where’s Sally?” Annette shouted over the music.

The young man opened his eyes. “Oh, wow,
man! It’s
Luba
! ‘Oh, oh,
Luba
!’”
he crooned in imitation of the husband’s greeting on her show.

Annette flipped off the music. “Where’s Sally?”

He shrugged. “Want some coke? It would be a privilege.” He pointed to an end table.

Annette went searching through the house and found Sally passed out naked on the floor of the bathroom. Her nose was white. Annette tried to wake her, but Sally appeared comatose.

Frightened, Annette yelled for the young man to give her a hand and threw a blanket over Sally.

He appeared in the bathroom doorway.

“Help me lift her,” asked Annette.

“She probably needs the rest.”

“Damn you!” Annette yelled. “Help me lift her!”

Wrapping her in a bathrobe, Annette strapped Sally into the car’s safety harness and drove straight to a hospital. She feared her friend might be about to die from an overdose.

Several hours later, when Sally had come to and been dismissed by the hospital, Annette drove her south to a well-known rehab clinic and signed her in.

In addition to arranging for the cherry trees to be in luxuriant blossom, Ken Chandler had brought a violin case to the picnic.

“
We going
after Capone’s boys?” Chris asked.

A machine gun would not have surprised her more than the violin he took out and the feeling and skill with which he played several pieces for her.

He admitted, “I’m trying to impress you and change your image of me.”

“You’re succeeding.”

He filled more of what she already knew about his background. His mother was a music teacher in Manhattan, his father a shopkeeper with a small lamp store. Playing the violin had gotten him a good education at New York City’s High School of Music and Art. But he had always envisioned himself in public office, not one of twenty violinists in an orchestra pit. As soon as he could realistically do so, he ran for the State Assembly and began his political career.

As she listened to him, Chris began to believe that Ken Chandler might actually be that rare creature in public life, a decent man.

When a rainsquall hit, they ran back to his car, each holding a handle of the picnic basket with one hand and a corner of the tablecloth overhead with the other. Once inside the car, he asked, “Where to?”

“This is fine,” she told him.

They watched the rain spatter on the windshield and distort the dappling river and the pink fringe of cherry blossoms beyond. Gradually, it came to Chris that she enjoyed being with this good man who felt as comfortable with silences as her Wyoming childhood had made her, who did not mistake them for voids or endings but treated them as the ebb of life’s natural rhythm. A man like that was one you might eventually learn you could depend on. When the two finally began to converse again, they seemed to have known each other a long time.

Within weeks Chris acknowledged that she loved Ken, but she admitted to being hesitant about getting married. The step seemed so final. She came from a home where divorce was unthinkable. Only after
Ken promised her that if she ever fell out of love with him, she could leave him but he would never leave her did she say yes.

They were married early the next year in her hometown in Wyoming. Her parents liked him, which surprised her because her father distrusted politicians.

The print and broadcast media had a field day profiling the celebrity couple, recounting how he had fallen in love with her before they had ever met, had instinctively known when he saw her broadcasting from London that they would someday marry. The public prominence of each heightened the other’s stature. Chris’s wide recognition and popularity cast a luster over Ken that no amount of political accomplishment could.

The year 2008 was both Bill Clinton’s final year in office and the year the United States elected an African American to replace him. The election year allowed for the married couple far less time together than both would have liked. She did not hold back on-air revelations and sharp commentary that might embarrass his party, but such annoyances were small blemishes on
the their
happiness.

With the change in administrations, the executives supervising Chris’s news operation decided a reshuffling of on-air news personalities would be in order. Again, Carl Green struck pay dirt.

At a doubling of her salary, Chris agreed to co-host the network’s morning news-and-talk broadcast. That simplified her life. She could move to New York City, where Ken lived when he was not in Washington, and work regular hours, albeit starting very early each day; for the first time in many years she would have a home life.

She and Ken took a large apartment on Central Park West. Her neighbors, used to and considerate of celebrities, bothered them relatively little as they shopped for food and strolled through the Upper West Side. Within a year her morning program’s ratings, in the doldrums for over a decade, climbed into sight of competition with the
Today
show and
Good Morning, America
. As its energizing new element, she received much of the credit.

Chris settled easily into married life. She had been so deadened by the end of her relationship with Greg that she had forgotten how much she liked the predictability, the close companionship, and the mutual reliance of living with someone she loved. She felt comfortable with Ken and admired his character. Intelligent and steadfast, he was not dynamic, but was always dependable. She was almost relieved not to feel with him the great, destructive storm surge of passion she had with Greg.

If his career had been flourishing, Greg might have endured the growing acrimony in his at home. But he could foresee no greater ascension at the network, only continued incarceration in a
plushly
padded limbo where sharp tools were taken from him, so he could not hurt himself or anyone else. At home he and Diane never yelled or threw things or called each other names—both were too well-mannered—but the atmosphere was glacial and promised to remain so: just the two of them, alone while together, gradually growing more self-centered. His increasing lack of contentment with the two halves of his life, divided neatly into day and night, but tainted by the same original sin, became too much for him to endure.

He and Diane barely spoke to each other anymore and rarely made love. When they did speak, every sentence contained the potential for a reproachful accusation aimed at the other’s flaws. Arguments, when they did erupt, were instant and vicious. The rest of the time, the two silently endured each other’s presence, but were worn out by the ordeal; they had no refuge.

Greg began to consider a prospect that had tortured him as a child: divorce. And it plagued him with guilt and worry. He had lied to Diane about loving her when they married, but had been determined to make the lie up to her by making love grow and by keeping her happy as long as they both should live. Divorce would evidence his failure. It would bring him isolation and self-recrimination. He did not doubt that it would also strip him of his job—and every other now-tainted treasure he had married for.

“I want a divorce,” he finally said when they were in the study after dinner. Those were the first words they had spoken to each other all day because of an angry exchange the night before.

Diane burst into tears. “I don’t,” she cried, and ran into her dressing room and locked the door.

Losing Greg was too disheartening for her to consider. She still loved him, although differently from the uncritical way she had before. And she still had hopes that the happiness she once knew with him would someday return. They were a couple; people invited
them
places together. She could not bear to think of herself alone. Losing him would rob her of much of the security that sustained her. However, so would the wrenching alteration of roles she knew he considered essential to improving their relationship, but that she believed was an excuse to conceal buried feelings of inferiority. She would also have to agree to have children, which she feared might be a death sentence.

No matter how Diane tried to avoid the issue, however, Greg knew that he was reaching the point where divorce might be the only way to save what was left of his life.

The network’s share of those watching television at night had shrunk from two-thirds in the mid-1980s to some 35% toward the last years of the new millennium’s initial decade. Where had the network audience gone?
To cable mainly, where they could see movies, twenty-four-hour news, sports events, and edgier first-run series.
Moreover, they could get television entertainment in other ways: Nearly all homes had VCRs and many had DVRs that recorded shows for later viewing. They could watch movies and other offerings on videocassettes, which had nearly phased out, and DVDs, which were stampeding in. In short, network television was in crisis.

FBS had fared far worse than the other established networks and, in fact, had spiraled downward to trail them in the ratings. The network’s vaunted skill at picking hot new shows seemed to falter. Some blamed the Chairman’s getting on in years and others on the entire programming team’s failure to come up with shows that connected with the new audience. Because advertisers paid for the number of viewers they reached, smaller audiences meant less revenue to FBS. All the while, network costs and staffing were reduced only slightly, as if this downturn were merely an aberration that would quickly be reversed.

Barnett Roderick had created FBS and dominated the company. He had run it with an iron hand for over forty years and still approved all major decisions. He and Diane together owned the largest block of stock. But now the long-docile outside directors on its board were suggesting that some changes might be in order, including a succession plan to prepare for his eventual retirement. Barnett had resisted talk of an heir apparent for years. And he saw no reason for the panic that wholesale changes implied. Just a few hit shows, and things would turn around. They always had. They would again. The very idea of picking a successor aggravated him; it was like arranging his own funeral.

By the spring of 2009, however, the company’s woeful earnings and talk that the company might be ripe for a takeover were forcing him to consider a shake-up in top management and, at least, the pretense of a succession plan. Since the retirement of his second-in-command who had long watched over FBS’s day-to-day operations, he had more or less ignored its growing problems, sure that the coming season’s new shows would turn the company around. He would have to address those problems now.

They weighed heavily on his mind when he arrived at the
Lyalls
’ apartment for the dinner to which Diane invited him once or twice a month. Tonight she arrived home incensed after a board meeting at the hospital, and she devoted most of the initial dinner conversation to it.

A child she had grown to love had died. Diane had held the parents’ hands and told them nothing could have been done, but she privately believed that the child’s chance to survive was drastically reduced because the hospital’s resources were over-weighted to adult services and it had no specialists in pediatric cancer.

“If we had a children’s hospital, just for children and their diseases, we could attract the best experts in pediatric oncology, cardiology,
all
the specialties. This was a real tragedy. It has to end. But the board says the hospital has other priorities as well. And it does. So,
I’m
going to do it.”

“How?”
Greg asked.

“I’m going to raise the money to build and staff a separate building as part of the hospital. Kids from anywhere could come and be treated, regardless of whether they can pay. The hospital could certainly use the space we’d give up once we moved into our own building.”

“That’s an awfully big job to take on.”

“I’m quitting my job and taking it on full-time. I won’t let anything stand in my way.”

“You never do,” Greg
said.
He
had hoped the comment would sound supportive and encouraging, but Barnett detected an undertone of reproach. He began to listen more closely to the couple’s conversation. Although it was amicable on the surface, Barnett sensed discord smoldering beneath like an ember under ashes. Not wanting to trouble Diane with what might be a false
impression,
Barnett confronted Greg when they were alone in the library.

Greg poured port for the two of them. Then, taking the armchair across from Barnett’s, he confided the truth.

“Our marriage is near the breaking point. Diane wants us to stay together—she wants it very much—but I’m tired of being her lap dog. I want children and so much more from her than she’s willing to give.
To
me.
Not to some hospital.”