Star Time (65 page)

Greg was touched. Chris parted with compliments sparingly, having been raised in a part of the country where compliments were rarely given for fear of breeding conceit.

"How did it feel watching shows you picked?" she asked. "Was it anything like finally getting a chance to steer the world?"

"The truth?"

"Of course, the truth.
This is me here."

A smile slowly widened across his face as he recalled the feeling. "It was incredible! I felt as if a little push from my pinky could level a mountain. And somehow floating just above everyone else, elevated. No wonder people get addicted to power. It's like a drug. I imagine you must feel like that sometimes on the air."

All of Chris's concentration was on Greg and what he meant to her. "You're my dearest addiction, Greg. You're the sweet poison I can never resist."

She leaned forward and kissed him. "You know that no one reaches me the way you do. Are you ever sorry we became involved again?"

He shook his head. "I was dead for a decade—opulently embalmed—but dead. You brought me back to life. We're like two halves of a single engine. Put us together and we race at ten thousand RPMs."

She smiled seductively, putting her arms around his neck. "You're the piston. I'm the cylinder."

"Oh, yes."

Arms encircling her, he drew her toward him and began to unbutton her blouse, gazing down at her.

"Oh, yes."

The phone rang just as Greg arrived at his office the next morning to peruse the overnights.

"I couldn't sleep," Marian said the instant Greg answered. "How'd we do?"

Greg started with the figure for the 8 o’clock half hour. Both thought them pretty good.

"We slipped a little at eight-thirty, but not much. After the number of times we moved
A Funny Marriage
last spring, it's probably a victory." He gave her the figures.

"Hooray! The producer will have a heart attack."

"That's about it," Greg joked.

Marian was too tense to notice the comic tone.
"Uh-oh!
You're trying to hide the rest of the night from me.
World
and
Scum
must have done terribly. How bad was it?"

Greg was chuckling at her mistaken despair. "We swamped everything on the air. By the time
Scum
ended, it was half a point ahead of everything else."

Marian was screaming and babbling nonstop. She finally stopped to ask if ten o'clock was as bad as they had guessed last night it would be.

"Worse." Greg was no longer joking. "By eleven it had lost two-thirds of
Scum
's
lead-in. Think about it: Over sixty-seven percent of the audience wouldn't stick around long enough to find out who done it."

"We
did it, Greg. We won a lot more than we lost. We got off to the running start we were hoping for."

"By next week, we could be crying in our beer."

"By tomorrow night," she reminded him pessimistically. "We'll be up against NBC's Thursday-night lineup. No chance. Even respectability would be a stretch."

"That's what I love about this business. Being a genius lasts all of about a day."

As soon as she hung up, Marian raced back into the bedroom, flipping on the overhead light in passing, diving on top of Derek, and planting kisses all over his face. He struggled to wake up.

"A quake?" he mumbled. "Is it a quake?"

"My sweet baby, the whole world is shaking.
So far, so good."

He sat up and looked at the clock. He would have to be up in a couple of minutes anyway.

"Do you want me to have Rosa make us something for dinner tonight?" she asked.

"I won't be eating home tonight. I'll be out late."

"You've got plans?"

"Last-minute thing.
The girls on the show decided to throw Ginny Lansing a surprise birthday party tonight."

"No escorts?"

He shook his head as he started toward the bathroom.
"All girls.
Except for me."

Marian stiffened.
"Why only you?"

"You're not going to believe this. They asked me to jump out of the cake."

"I believe it all right."

When Derek joined her in the kitchen a few minutes later, she casually remarked, "I'm glad you're getting along so well with everyone on the show. I get the feeling Ginny is a lot of fun."

"Jesus, she's wild.
Just like she is on-screen."

Marian knew Derek hated when she was possessive, but she could not help herself. "I just remembered. I may have a business dinner tonight. I can drop you off at the party and pick you up afterward."

"I'll take my car."

Annette Valletta had never been more miserable in her life. Her illness, she had begun to admit, was terminal. Barely able to lift her hand to ring for the full-time nurse, she felt death taking more of her body away each day. Sally had replaced her as if she had never existed: on
Luba
and, she was sure, in Johnny's bed. On top of all her other calamities, she had caught a dreadful cold. Her nose dripped, and her head ached and was so stuffed up she felt the pillow was inside it, not behind it.

"I need an antihistamine!" she called out to the nurse.

"I think we ought to phone the doctor first," the nervous woman replied.

"So he can charge me another two hundred for a consultation? If I'm going to die, I intend to do it with a dry nose."

Annette sneezed. The effort so racked her body that the nurse rushed to her patient's medicine cabinet to find the bottle of antihistamine pills.

The nurse suggested washing Annette and putting a little makeup on her. Annette shook her head and let it fall back onto the pillow. She was too far gone, she decided, to hang on to meaningless vanities. She waved the nurse from the room.

When life turns on you, it really turns, she observed.
Stardom
and
her husband.
She lay there for a long while grieving over her obliterated fortunes and the betrayals visited on her. She did that every day, but today the nose cold had taken away her last ounce of combativeness. She no longer had the strength to fight back. She was done for, defeated,
replaced in every way, a dry hulk of a woman waiting for death to claim the shell.

As time passed, she began to grow angry at the thought of how badly her kindheartedness had been abused. Finally, she grew so angry that she jumped out of bed and began stalking the room. She was halfway to the curtain-drawn windows before she realized that she was feeling better and stronger than she had in months. She stopped in midstride. She extended one foot. No problem at all. She extended the other. Okay.
Then her arms.
A little bit sore, but no more than she would feel after a long workout.

A miracle! God had sent her a miracle! She dropped to her knees in the center of the room, as she had done as a child with her devout Italian grandmother, who had rarely let an hour slip by with her chest uncrossed. Annette had prayed to St. Jude each night for intercession from God—both son and father, just to be sure—and from the Virgin Mother, which her grandmother had drilled into her was obligatory. Her prayers had been answered.

"Thank you, God," she whispered in utter gratitude.
"Both of you.
Thank you, Holy Mother. Thank you all for returning my health and letting me live."

Contributions! She must make them, she decided. St. Jude's Hospital would get a big one, of course.
And the Church.
Which church in particular? She had not been inside a church since leaving home—if you didn't count that church in a film she had made a couple of years back. She would just have her accountant send the check directly to the Pope and let him figure it out. Annette peered up at the ceiling and wondered if that was enough to show her gratitude.

At that moment her rationality took over. What had been different this morning?
she
tried to deduce. Well, the nose cold. But the antihistamine had whisked away the symptoms, so it couldn't—

The antihistamines! She had taken an antihistamine. That was it! The pills would have suppressed any allergy she might have had. Highly allergic, she was susceptible to asthma from air-blown pollutants, was made miserable by trees and grasses in the spring, and had suffered from hives until she spotted lemon as the culprit and eliminated it from her diet. She knew all too well how dangerous and yet how relievable by medication were allergy symptoms.

But what could this possibly have been an allergy to? She tried to list all the substances to which she might have been exposed that could have caused an allergic reaction. Perhaps it was something she had skipped this morning, so there was less of it in her system than usual.

This particular morning she had eaten her usual breakfast. Unlike most days, she had not bathed or put on makeup and perfume.

The perfume!

She had started to wear a new perfume a couple of months ago. She thought back to the day she had bought it and then to when she had first opened its box and removed the stopper to put it on. She remembered perfectly. That had been the day she had first felt a little shaky.

The door opened. Seeing her patient on her knees in the middle of the room, the nurse cried out for the maid's assistance and rushed forward.

"You shouldn't have tried to go to the bathroom on your own," the nurse admonished Annette worriedly, dropping down beside her.

A moment later the maid was also on her knees, on Annette's other side. Each grasped an elbow to lift the patient, who stared at the women in turn.

"The only one missing now is Billy Graham," Annette observed.

That's when they realized she was all right.

By nightfall she was back in
Luba
, Natasha had been dispatched back to Moscow, and Sally was unemployed. Johnny convinced her he had kept such a close eye on Sally only to be sure she could not entrench herself and prevent Annette’s return.  How wrong she had been about him, Annette decided. That bitch, Sally Foster!

By October no doubt remained that
Scum
was a runaway hit. But Stew
Graushner
could derive little pleasure from his success. He was so depressed that on his day off he could barely drag himself to Rodeo Drive to pursue his new hobby of shopping.

He became sick to his stomach when his lawyer informed him that Patty had just pulled off "the slickest maneuver" the lawyer had ever seen to advance the divorce case on the calendar. It would be coming up for trial in a matter of weeks.

"Some Wrath of God!"
Stew groused sorrowfully to Susan. "He's more like a dishrag. Patty wipes the floor with him."

Stew grabbed for the computer keyboard and began to write an episode for
Scum
in which the naive professor is hunted by his ex-wife, a lawyer, whom he imagines to be a vampire trying to suck out his last drop of blood.

"It's the best script you've ever done," Susan later commented with delight.

Chris had become so obsessed with the investigation, so desperate to prove her
innocence, that
she sometimes seemed close to madness. Preclusion from reporting on the news while the American public flocked to other networks' newscasts heightened her agitation. She knew how near her mental edge she was skirting, but the fear of a loss in the upcoming court case or even of the stain of settling presented the greater
danger of a life much like death: shunned by the profession that gave her life purpose and permanently dishonored because certified dishonorable by a court of law. That way portended greater madness. She ceaselessly drove herself and the people working under her in the search for the means to break through the now vastly popular Defense secretary's seemingly unassailable falsehood. Days had stretched into weeks.
Weeks into a month and then two.
She had not been on television since July.

Chris slept very little now and was often in Washington or Maine, pursuing leads that invariably wound nowhere. Yet, much of her time was diverted from the investigation by opposing lawyers, who spent days on end deposing her and recording the ordeals on video. The days before the depositions would be spent in preparation.

She and Greg spoke on the phone every day, but except for periodic conferences to assess the status of the investigation and the lawsuit, she avoided seeing him in person for long stretches because she knew that her obsession with the investigation made her dreadful company and that he was consumed by his own obsession: the upcoming directors’ meeting.

Greg worked from earliest morning to late at night now: with Marian to fine-tune the schedule, with his vice presidents to complete the corporate restructuring and locate one last paring of expenses, with the sales staff to monitor daily sales and to pep-talk them into trekking yet again among their buyers to pluck out the last possible penny of advertising income, with the Finance
v.p.
on his quarterly projections, with lawyers and investment bankers to fend off potential takeover interest, and in conversation with the company's directors to gain their support before the showdown.