Star Time (33 page)

"Hi, I'm Chris
Paskins
," she said, introducing herself to those closest to the door: a desk assistant and two cameramen.

As if the
staff,
paralyzed with dread under the dangling sword of unemployment, did not know who she was. Staffing in newsrooms had been steadily cut for years, so all knew that finding employment elsewhere would be a grim, maybe impossible, process.

Greg, Alan Howe, and Hugo Ramirez were waiting for Chris when she arrived. Greg was carrying a bouquet of white roses.
A calculated
risk.
Would she be touched or angered by his remembering she liked white roses?

"On behalf of all of us, welcome to FBS," he said, handing her the bouquet and hoping the salutation from "all of us" would tip her reaction to the favorable. She smiled.

He continued, "I thought I'd give you an hour to settle into your office before we get together to go over ideas for the new broadcast."

Chris noticed Hugo had joined the group gathering around her. She gave him a hug. "It's going to be fun."

"Just like it used to be," Hugo replied. He glanced at Greg to include him in his meaning. Chris did not. And then he remembered stumbling upon them at an L.A. restaurant, and once-questioned jigsaw pieces began to slip into place.

Even people standing on the fringe who were confident of being kept on felt awkward and disloyal. Only two days earlier another executive producer had relied on their loyalty.

"It's great to have you here," one of the young women said and extended her hand, introducing herself.

“Of course.
Hedy
Anderson,” Chris replied, receiving a smile for having been recognized. "I've seen your work. It's good,"

The handsome, big-boned young woman who had risen swiftly as a reporter after being hired from a local Chicago station broke into a grin. “Nice to know you were watching.”

Others stepped up to make her welcome.

Chris recognized a face at the back of the group staring stonily at her. Ray
Strock
. The lines plowed by time across his forehead and from nose to chin like parentheses about an angry mouth expressed the antagonism of a man shamed by displacement after a lifetime of esteem and achievement. Chris went up to him.

"It's an honor to be on the same broadcast with you," she said.

"We'll see," he answered.

He stared at Chris for a moment, then abruptly turned and walked out of the room.

Stew
Graushner
finally managed to land
a job
writing at scale wages for a lurid syndicated tabloid TV-news program called
The Guts of the Story
. The program had fenced off for itself the lowest level of what passed for news. It titillated an audience eager for cheap thrills with the frightening, the lascivious, and the grotesque. Favored subject matter included celebrity love affairs, murder, rape, child molestation, and UFOs. Stew was astounded at how suited the people on staff were for their jobs; they seemed as strange as the subject matter.

A sign one of the producers placed on his desk summed it up well: "No Story Too Weird, No Gossip Too Raw,
No
Smut Too Lewd." Stew suspected the man was not joking. His own brain kept hearing a far-earlier phrase, the words Dante had placed above the Gates of Hell: "Abandon All Hope You Who Enter
Here.
"

Stew approached the weekend like a man gulping air after freeing his leg from a shark. He had written a dozen segments his first week—he no longer called them programs or broadcasts or kept his prose unemotional. One of the tamest had been about a whorehouse madam murdered by her dwarf maid, who was believed to have escaped under the skirt of one of the prostitutes, the maid's lesbian lover. Next week he was slated to work on "bizarre sexual practices of an IRS coven."

Until the moment he was handed his paycheck, Stew was sure God would figure out a crafty way to stiff him. One of his coworkers gave him a lift to the university Bursar's Office, where he exchanged the check for an extra
two-weeks
' grace period to come up with the rest of the semester’s tuition. By the time he paid off the bill, second semester would be upon him. The dream of owning a car receded into the mist of the distant future.

Later, while shopping for a new shirt in the Westwood section of the city, he was stopped by a woman he had known casually when both were on the university faculty. Instead of the polite sympathy he expected when he told her about his separation from his wife, she expressed delight. She was giving a singles party tomorrow night and badgered him to come. Apparently, eligible men were at a premium. She gave him her address, an apartment in Marina
del
Rey.

Ordinarily, parties and unattached women, especially in large numbers, dismayed Stew. He had dated sparingly before meeting Patty and married young. It was a "brave new world" out there from all
accounts,
one he doubted he was prepared for.

By the next afternoon, though, not having spoken to a single person since receiving the invitation, he felt an urgent need for human contact. He had to start his single life sometime. Deciding that one more night spent extracting faces from the water stains on his walls would make him a prime candidate for
insanity,
he got dressed and hitchhiked out to Marina del Rey. He would worry about a ride back when the time came.

The apartment was large and crammed, mostly with women. The door was open. People sipping white wine spilled out into the hallway. Several near a dining table were dipping raw vegetables into a runny dip. Haute cuisine did not seem the attraction here.

Many of the guests knew each other, Stew observed, doubtless veterans of such get-togethers. He tossed back two white wines.

"Professor
Graushner
," a woman's voice called out above the din. For a moment, that he was once that person did not register. Then he turned around to confront his social life.

"Professor
Graushner
," the woman repeated, slipping around a knot of people to stand before him.

She was short, in her mid-thirties, with an appealing face punctuated by a small nose and eyebrows darker than her long hair, which was streaked through with several designer shades of blond. He liked her smile because the corners of her eyes crinkled and made the smile seem wholehearted. He remembered having liked it sometime in the past, but could not recall the name attached to it.

"I'm Susan
Glendon
," the woman announced. "I took your creative writing course, oh, years ago."

"Of course," he said, recalling a woman who dressed then in sandals, hand-woven skirts, and peasant blouses, a sort of refugee from the previous decade. She now wore cream-colored slacks and a purple silk blouse that appeared too casually chic and well pressed to be inexpensive.

"You made a big difference in my life," she confessed.

"Didn't someone used to pick you up after class on his motorcycle?"

She laughed, the eyes again crinkling attractively. He recalled slim, tan legs revealing themselves as she hiked the hand-woven skirt high on her thighs and took her place on the back of the motorcycle.

"My first husband," she told him. "I worked as a secretary to put him through welding school—God, can you believe it,
welding school
—then I found out he was cheating on me. My second husband was better educated and a lot richer, but just as rotten. You said some nice things about my writing. That gave me confidence to try writing for a living."

Stew searched his brain for a recollection of her writing, but the memory of her legs blocked everything else. She seemed genuinely grateful for what he had taught her. He, in turn, felt grateful for the first therapeutic words applied to his battered ego in months.

"But I'm blocked right now," she said glumly. "I've been trying for months to come up with a good idea and can't."

Oh, no! Stew thought. Another blocked writer! After the summer he had spent immobilized before blank typewriter paper, it would be like looking into a mirror. But she was attractive, seemed eager to be with him, and did not consider him the irredeemable failure he now believed himself to be. With a shock it occurred to him that perhaps, if the evening went right, he might get to see those legs
again,
and all the way up this time.

"Are you working on anything?" she asked.

"What?"

"I heard you weren't teaching at the university anymore, so I figured you're probably working on a story or a novel."

To give himself time to think he handed her a white wine and poured another for himself.

"Actually," he said, at a loss for a more original answer to hold her interest and esteem, "I'm working on this idea for a novel about a college professor who takes a job at a sleazy tabloid TV-news show."

Stew began to describe the eccentric people he worked with and the sorts of subject matter the show dealt with. Susan seemed entranced.

"I don't think it's a novel," she finally told him.

"It's not?" His mind's eye could see the skirt dropping abruptly over those legs like a stage curtain, someone else spiriting her away into the night on the back of a motorcycle, and
himself
vainly trying to hitch a ride to follow her.

"No, I think what it would make is a wonderful sitcom." She was bursting with excitement. "It's terrifically funny, especially the way you tell it. The setting is great. It has endearing characters."

"Endearing.
That's what I thought," he remarked in amazement.

"All the craziness of life could be inherent in those newsroom crazies and the people they would meet doing stories.
All the deceit and self-delusion.
The stories would raise intriguing issues that the comedy could play off of. You'd never run out of situations and characters."

Stew noticed that in her enthusiasm the tip of her tongue occasionally flicked lightly across her dry upper lip. He stopped breathing as he waited for the next appearance of that pink intimacy.

"And I love the idea of the college professor," she added. "It was really a stroke of genius putting an innocent with integrity right at the center of all those amoral people who don't care in the slightest about the difference between truth and fiction."

"Well, thanks."

"Look, I don't want to impose on you. It's your idea. But this is the most exciting idea for a sitcom I could imagine. I'd love to work with you on it."

Stew roused himself from meditation on the cunning attraction hidden in the cavern behind her lips. She seemed to be asking him to collaborate on something with her. He pieced it together out of bits of phrases still floating about his memory. She wanted him to develop this silly idea he had tried to impress her with—for lack of anything better—into something she could try to sell as a TV series. They would start by writing some sort of proposal, she seemed to be saying.

Weeks earlier, staring down the gun barrel of poverty, he had resolved to renounce pie-in-the-sky fantasies and not waste his time trying to write fiction no one would ever buy. He was a talentless
wannabe, not a real fiction writer. He must think now only of making a living. He had a daughter to put through college.
Shoe leather to save.
Bunions to shrink.
It was time he grew up.

Hoping to sell a sitcom was even more absurd than hoping to sell a book; thousands of books were published each year; only a handful of new series got on the air. But he was enjoying the unfamiliar sensation of a woman's adulation, and more important, was pretty sure that if he turned her down outright, the chances of extending the night into her bed would drop to zilch. That last point was the clincher.

"Sure. I'd be glad to work on it with you. You know, maybe
sometime
when we both have a few spare hours." He would wait until the morning to tell her he had changed his mind.

She threw her arms about his neck and kissed him. "This is just the kind of idea I've been looking for. Running into you here was a miracle. I have a feeling you've changed my life again." She smiled her unreserved, crinkle-eyed smile at him. "I had a crush on you in class, you know. To be able to work with you . . . Oh, Lord, I'm excited!"

She grabbed his hand and began pulling him toward the front door.

"I haven't even said hello to the hostess," he called out, lifting a last white wine from the serving table.

"Send her a note," Susan called back over her shoulder.

Stew
Graushner
woke up in an unfamiliar bed in a darkened room. He carefully felt around and established that the other side of the bed was empty. He remembered a very long night, moaning, not much conversation, a lot of body parts, and not embarrassing himself despite having experienced sex only with Patty and none of that for six months.

His clothing was nowhere in sight. He wrapped himself in the top sheet and followed the smell of coffee into a large kitchen that might have come out of
Architectural Digest,
all maroon-and-black lacquer and stainless steel. Susan was preparing breakfast on a black granite counter. She beamed at him and bounded over to kiss him.