Star Time (6 page)

One night toward the end of that first week, Chris's candor overcame her wariness. She inadvertently blurted out the words "I love you" while they were cooking supper. Abashed, worried that Greg's response might not be what she wanted to
hear,
she turned away so that he need not feel he had to respond.

"I love you, too," he had answered, amazed at the revelation; inner walls he had meticulously constructed since childhood were tumbling.

Exuberant at his admission, she pressed on. "You know when I first fell in love with you?"

He shook his head.

"Last Saturday night," she confessed, "when you phoned me in the newsroom for a date."

"Even before we went out?"

She
nodded,
her smile radiant at the recollection. "I had been wanting so badly for you to ask me out, ever since that first dinner together. But you told me you wouldn't date someone at work. You were always so totally cool and reserved, always saying and doing exactly the right thing. I thought of you like those Olympic speed skaters in their skintight outfits: all strength and sleekness, no pockets bulging with unsightly imperfections or history, no needs begging to be noticed. I was intimidated."

"
You
?"
He shook his head incredulously. "When I made that phone call, I was so nervous I could barely speak."

"That's just it! I could hear all that nervousness. It was like your stretch suit suddenly split up the rear. You were human. I melted."

"I never felt about anyone what I was feeling about you"—he corrected himself, willing to be honest because
she
had been—"what I
feel
about you."

For a long while they stared at each other in delighted amazement. Then, without another word spoken or their eyes unlocking, Greg began to unbutton her blouse.

Stew
Graushner's
gloomy nature was invariably directed not at grasping for happiness, a state he considered beyond possibility, but at the more prudent task of avoiding outright sorrow.
Anything more positive than disaster was invariably a surprise.
When he canceled their vacation for a second time, he expected his wife to explode and to follow up with months of sullenness. Instead Patty decided her life would always be composed of such disappointments if it depended on waiting for him for its satisfactions, and she took action.

"Hi, honey. What's for dinner?" he asked when he arrived home and started toward the kitchen.

Patty blocked his way, arms folded, face set in disapproval. "From now on don't expect to count on me for your dinner!"

An argument between them seemed to have begun without him. Stew foresaw his night ending in a migraine and continued bewilderment as to the nature of his crime. He assumed a questioning expression, hoping that would prompt, without his risking speech again, an explanation of what he should not count on her for.

"I've found out who I am," she announced.

"I'm really happy for you," he hurried to assure her, in case she was accusing him of withholding that information.

Next day she enrolled at a local college to complete the education an early marriage had denied her. Patty
Graushner
had belatedly made her way into the era of equal opportunity for women.

From that moment on, few meals were made for him, the house was rarely clean, errands were left undone, and he saw her infrequently—she was invariably studying late into the night. Now his workday could be interrupted by rushed visits to their daughter's school for teacher conferences or by a wait for the cable repairman. Like a modern Job he accepted his new circumstances and plodded on.

Stew and Patty had married in his last year at Penn State, her first. To make ends meet, she had quit school to work as a secretary, and he had taken a part-time job writing news at a local radio station. He had hoped, after graduation, to teach on the college level while writing and selling his first novel. Finding teaching jobs scarce and low paying, however, he moved to the station’s TV affiliate and speedily advanced. He eventually grew a beard and assumed a pipe as a signal to others and a reminder to himself that someday he would write the novels he was sure were burning somewhere deep within his soul.

Now, the combination of doing two jobs at the office and Patty's forcing him to share the duties at home were wearing him down. He finally capitulated to his fatigue and recommended to
Ev
Carver, the station's general manager, that Greg be made executive producer. He set up a meeting for the three of them.

Greg entered Carver's office a step behind Stew. The curtains were drawn. A low desk lamp that provided the only illumination lit
Ev's
face demonically. Greg assumed the effect was a means of cowing underlings.

Ev
Carver was a muscular, broad-shouldered man, just over six feet tall. His eyes were hard and dark, his hair red fading to gray. Several anxious network executives had tried to slow his climb, but he seemed an inevitable force. Decisive, calculating, ruthless if that would get the job done, Carver drove his subordinates relentlessly. At thirty-three he had already turned around FBS's Chicago station before being moved to Los Angeles and given a free hand to revive that station's declining popularity. He got everyone's attention the first day by firing three executives and scrapping a local morning talk show in favor of cheaper syndicated game shows. By week's end he had lured Stew
Graushner
from Pittsburgh to overhaul a struggling news operation. Anything like his Chicago success would make
Ev
Carver a surefire bet for the network's upper ranks.

"Stew tells me you're sucking up to him to become executive producer,"
Carver began.

Greg knew the man’s reputation for provoking people so as to force them off stride. He ignored the insult.

Legs crossed, hands clasped on his lap, eyes locked on Greg's, Carver grilled him for an hour about his background and his approach to every aspect of the job. Greg answered deftly, while ambivalence grew toward his interrogator. He thought he sensed coursing beneath the quick intelligence and potent personality, like vibrations almost below audibility, the rumblings of a primordial brutality.

"What do you think of Brett Winters?"
Ev
suddenly asked.
Winters was
an anchorman on a competing station. "If you look at the eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old women's market, he's got the pussy in the audience by the short hairs."

Greg was equally candid. "He's a good-looking model who can read the words off a teleprompter. And he has trouble with the three-syllable ones. If you're thinking of hiring him, my opinion is he's going to hurt us badly when news breaks live or he has to chat unscripted. He won't last."

"But you’re not convinced it’s a bad move until he does. A stud like that could hike the ad rates."

Carver's tone carried the disturbing assumption that he was familiar with Greg's private thoughts, as if he were eavesdropping on a mental phone line. Soon after, Greg made the point that a reputation for news excellence and other public service would prove important when KFBS next had to show the FCC it deserved a renewal of its broadcasting license, an ordeal that concerned most station managers.
Ev
lifted his boxer's hands from his lap and leaned forward.

"To hell with the FCC!
You think they're going to make good if News loses money? News is a pain in the ass! Only worth the trouble it causes me if it turns a decent profit and delivers the largest possible audience to my evening lineup. You'll have a lot of leeway to run your own shop,
Lyall
, but fuck up on either of those, and you're out on your ass. Deliver and you're golden. In the end the only thing that matters in television are the ratings. That's the way this business works." He smiled with an alarming intimacy. "And that's why it's made for hustlers like you and me."

Greg understood that he had passed muster. Stew was ordered to keep a close watch. Greg's failure would be considered Stew's, and both would pay the penalty.

"One more thing," Carver
added,
his expression like a farmer's eyeing gypsies near his chicken coop. "I hired a consulting firm to analyze our news broadcasts, to tell us how to raise ratings. Their report should be coming in soon. I'm eager to see what they propose."

With that the newsmen were dismissed. Stew looked as if a close relative had died.

"The plague is about to strike one and all," he moaned when he and Greg were back in his office, "regardless of race, creed, or personal hygiene. These consultants all recommend the same superficial, plastic presentation.
Matching jackets.
A funny weatherman.
Very brief news reports with lots of visuals. Keep it simple, very local.
Fires.
Violent crime.
Accidents.
Sex.
Cuddly human interest and consumer stuff. Lots of smiling
banter
on the set. You know the routine."

"We all try to attract viewers with some of that. You were doing it in Pittsburgh."

"Some, sure, but the consultants don't want you to do anything more than that. Nothing deep, nothing that runs more than a minute fifteen—actually, forty-five seconds would be ideal. Structure every story as a confrontation, a drama. Go for the emotions. It's all a kind of entertainment. No ideas. No explanation. No exploring how the system might be failing people. As if anything the least bit complicated or abstract will send the idiot viewer scurrying to another channel."

"Maybe they’ll have some useful ideas."

Stew scoffed. "You don't understand how they work.  A consultant surveys viewers to learn what news they want and then advocates it. Not the news they
need
to know. How can you ask people what news they want if they don't know what the news is until it happens?"

Stew slumped down into his chair. "We're a nuisance to Carver. He's a salesman. The station's sales and profits are what he's judged on—the bottom line. The News Division can sometimes cut into that. You know, he once warned me not to run stories that might throw a bad light on an advertiser." Stew reflected a moment. "There's another reason he hired a consultant: He wants us to run scared."

Greg was informed when Chris's option was exercised, but Stew had early made up his mind as to her value. She rented a furnished studio apartment near Greg's. Most nights, they stayed at his place because he was phoned at odd hours by the assignment desk and, at six-thirty in the morning, to consult with him on the preliminary rundown of the day's stories and which reporters to assign to them.

The couple's lives together began to assume a pattern. Chris would return to her own apartment each morning to change for work and would drive to the station in her own car.

He spent the day supervising producers and reporters who were covering the day's stories, revising the broadcast's lineup, and preparing the way it would be presented on air. She went out to cover stories and then returned to edit them and write and record narration for them. After
the nightly broadcast, if she was not scheduled for the occasional late shift, they would rendezvous back at Greg's. Whoever arrived first would begin to prepare supper.

Greg had grown up doing a lot of the cooking for his father and himself. The ordered succession of acts cooking required and the small talk exchanged began the process of filtering out the day's concerns.

Over dinner the talk would continue about their work or the news in general or the ordinary matters couples discuss. Then they read or watched television and usually made love before falling asleep. For the first time each had a best friend to
whom
dreams and fears could be disclosed. Chris was far quicker to reveal secrets than Greg. Although he was surprised to realize that he enjoyed exploring the uncharted territory of life with another person—getting to know her, to care about her—and she whisked away the loneliness that had habitually propelled him to spend evenings and weekends out with friends, he was also far less used to the isolation that secrecy imposed on them.

Apart from appearing to run into each other on Saturday mornings at the local supermarket with their separate grocery lists, as any two acquaintances living in the same neighborhood might, they dared risk few joint activities away from their sanctuary, which made it also a kind of prison. Yet, however carefully correct they had to appear to colleagues, the joy that grew out of living together was inextricable from their joy at working closely with each other, each relationship heightening the intensity of the other. Knowing they might have to answer at night for their professional decisions kept them slightly higher on their toes during the day.

Once, during lunch in the commissary, another woman reporter advised Chris that she was hurting herself at the station by acting so coldly toward Greg. The woman insisted on inviting him over to their table. Afterward she expressed delight at having been the catalyst for the friendlier behavior the two had exhibited.