What's a Girl Gotta Do (19 page)

“What are you afraid of?” he said.

“Oh God. Nothing personal, but you have a
reputation as a terrible playboy, and I’ve been warned away from
terrible playboys by my culture and my womenfolk and, come to think
of it, my own experience.”

Yeah. I looked around me with some surprise,
asking myself, Where am I? How did I get here? In what hormonally
induced stupor did I wander into this trap?

“Robin,” he said, in a tender voice I’d never
heard him use before. It touched me so deeply—a sudden, rapier
thrust of tenderness—that my immediate reaction was pleasure,
followed by an icy gust of fear. “I am not a playboy. Do you want
references? Call up some of my ex-girlfriends. Investigate me,” he
said. “Or trust me. What will it be?”

I opened my mouth but said nothing.

“Wait—don’t answer now. You’re upset. You’ve
had a bad week,” he whispered. “Think about it. Sleep on it tonight
and call me tomorrow.”

Why was I afraid of him? Later, alone in my
bed, windows and doors locked and heavy bits of furniture
barricading them, I read over my file of stories on sperm,
fertility, and artificial insemination and thought I found the
answer in a paragraph Claire had highlighted form the Encyclopedia
Britannica entry on reproduction:

“Although fertilization in the higher
terrestrial forms involves contact during copulation, it has been
suggested that all of the higher animals may have a strong aversion
to bodily contact. This aversion is no doubt an antipredator
mechanism: Close bodily contact signifies being caught.”

Chapter Eleven

THAT NIGHT, I HAD THIS DREAM AGAIN. I was
writing a script for the eight o’clock news show and I had writer’s
block. For some reason, I thought I had plenty of time, but when I
looked up at the clock I saw it was three minutes to eight. A
sudden panic gripped me. Sweat sprang like leaks from my pores,
rolled down my face, grew legs, and turned into insects. A mob of
large, angry show producers and anchorpeople bore down on me. I was
ruined.

Now, this deadline dream shouldn’t disturb
me, because far scarier, far more humiliating things have happened
to me in real life. And yet, this dream of inadequacy represents
the greatest terror in the world to me. And then it gets worse.

The anchorpeople and show producers are
bearing down on me, my sweat is turning into Mesozoic bugs, and the
clock is ticking towards deadline loudly, like a bomb, when
suddenly former White House Chief of Staff John Sununu rushes in
from behind a blue curtain and whisks me away to safety, where he
takes me in his beefy arms and kisses me. I wake up screaming.

Instead of the sound of my own scream,
however, I hear the ringing of a phone come out of my mouth.
Another ring, and I am almost conscious and reaching for the phone,
buried beneath some dirty clothes.

“Robin?” a woman’s voice said.

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

“Susan. Susan Brave. I hope I didn’t wake
you.”

“Actually, you woke me just in the nick of
time,” I said. God, I hate when I have those Sununu dreams.

“I wondered if you’d meet me for lunch. It’s,
well, an emergency and I can’t talk about it on the phone.”

“What kind of an emergency?” I asked, groping
for my clock radio. It was almost noon and, I remembered,
Sunday.

“It’s about Griff,” she said. “Will you meet
me? I’ve beeped Joanne too.”

“Of course,” I said, still fuzzy with sleep.
I rummaged for a pen and took down the information on the
restaurant I was to meet her at, A Real Dive. Only after she’d hung
up did I think to ask: Why would Susan want to talk about Griff?
Louise Bryant looked at me with scorn.

A Real Dive was housed in a renovated bar on
West Street, overlooking the Hudson. Every table had a view of the
big Maxwell house sign across the river in jersey. A trendy,
self-consciously seedy place, it was popular with Boomers because
it specialized in the cuisine of their youth, or imagined youth.
The white Formica tables were veined with gold and the menus and
place mats had faux coffee rings and faux grease stains printed
right into the paper.

I guess I’d describe the décor as Mel’s Diner
meets 1950s Waterfront, complete with such appetizing accoutrements
as faux bait buckets. It was very faux. In fact, the only thing
that wasn’t faux about A Real Dive was its prices – a very real
$15.95 for the meat loaf platter with mashed potatoes and green
peas. For a dollar less you could get the tuna and potato chip
casserole platter or the macaroni and cheese with franks
platter.

Susan was already there, sitting in a booth
by herself looking uncomfortable, when I arrive. A sweet dame,
bless her soul, Susan is a perennially awkward adolescent, the
timid girl (despite her valiant last name) who joined every club
she could to make friends and didn’t fit into any of them. In a
way, she was perfect for Solange, her boss, because she was a born
martyr who could absorb Solange’s psychological abuse and come back
for more.

“Takes a licking, keeps on ticking,” they
said of Susan in the newsroom.

When I approached, she started to rise but
the paper place mat stuck to her hand and came with her, sending
silverware and condiments spinning all over the floor. Everyone in
the restaurant looked up, and then looked away, nonchalant, as
busboys came over to wipe up the broken glass and ketchup. Susan
makes me feel graceful.

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” she said to the
kneeling Guatemalan bus guy.

“’Sokay, ‘sokay,” he said.

She looked at me. “Hi, Robin. I’m so
embarrassed.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m the
queen of public humiliation. Not that you should be humiliated,” I
hastened to add.

We sat down and another busboy brought Susan
a new stained place mat and fresh silverware.

“I’m just not myself these days,” she
said.

After ordering drinks from an indifferent
waitress in a starchy pink uniform and cat’s-eye glasses, Susan
said, “I was hoping Joanne would get here….”

“What’s going on, Susan?”

“Weelll,” she said, twisting her fingers
nervously. She looked around, everywhere but at me. “Griff?”

“Yeah.”

“He was … blackmailing me too.”

“He investigated you?”

“Yes,” she said.

Every word she spoke came squeezed through
some dense filter of fear or embarrassment, or both. The waitress
brought our drinks. Susan had a double scotch, I was having mineral
water. It was way too early in the day to drink, even for me, but
Susan downed hers.

“Why was he investigating you? I thought only
on-air people … it doesn’t make sense.”

Susan was Solange’s producer. As the public
had no idea who she was, how could her credibility be ruined with
the public? What would be the point of investigating midlevel
producers, when there were so many riper targets around?

“I don’t know why, but he did. I don’t want
to tell you any more until Joanne gets here,” she said.

“Well, okay.” But I couldn’t stop asking
questions. “Did you stay at the Marfeles that night?”

“No,” she said.

“But Solange did. She let me use her room to
change into my costume.”

“So Solange stayed at the Marfeles, and
Joanne did. Do you know who else stayed there?”

“No. Why?”

“I dunno. It might matter,” I said.

There was a familiar voice behind me and when
I turned around I saw the waitress guiding Joanne to our booth.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, looking very
early Grace Kelly in dark glasses and scarf.

“Where were you?” Susan asked.

“Don’t laugh, but I went to Eileen Lane
Antiques in Soho to visit my furniture. You know that vanity I had,
the one I bought in Paris with the teardrop-shap0ed mirror and the
mother-of-pearl accents?”

I didn’t know it, but I nodded.

“Sold,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. But I’m going to be able to buy most
of my furniture back, I think. Oh, there was a photographer on my
tail too. He took my picture coming out of Eileen Lane. Wonder what
spin they’ll put on that in tomorrow’s paper? Don’t worry, though,
I lost him.”

“You’re sure?” Susan said.

“Positive,” said Joanne. “He’s somewhere on
the New Jersey Turnpike in a New York City taxi looking for me
right now. Meter running at double fare.”

Joanne had a round-the-clock tabloid
photographer following her. I did not. I felt strangely miffed
about it.

We ordered lunch and then Susan reprised what
she’d told me. Then she paused, reached out and grabbed our
hands.

“Before we go on, we should agree that
nothing we say among ourselves goes beyond this circle.”

“But if it …,” Joanne began.

“I don’t want to go to the police. I’m afraid
I’m going to end up on the front page of the Post or the
News-Journal, and my mother – she still goes to church almost every
day. She thinks I’m still a virgin.”

We had no choice. Joanne and I both promised
secrecy. This, my friends, is a conspiracy – of sorts. Above us,
the minute hand on a clock featuring the Cream of Wheat man clicked
loudly forward. Susan went on.

“He called me up about three weeks ago, told
me some stuff about myself, and said he knew a lot more, stuff I’m
not going to tell even you two. I met him the first time in that
restaurant in Macy’s Cellar and he showed me a sheet of paper with
most of the information blacked out.”

Joanne and I nodded. The very pink waitress
brought us our meat loaf platters.

“He said he had two more sheets, and if I
wanted them, I could have them for ten thousand dollars.”

“Only ten?” Joanne interrupted.

“Well, I’m not as well-known as you,” Susan
said. “You’re more famous, so you had to pay more. Anyway, I told
him I didn’t have ten thousand. I have about five in my 401(k) but
I can’t get at it, and I have a little more in CDs I can’t get at
and …”

“What did he say?” Joanne asked, between
bites of the mealy meat loaf.

“He swore and said he hated the nineties,
because nobody was liquid.”

“Hard times for blackmailers,” I said.

“And he said I’d better find the money, or he
was going to turn over all the information on me to someone at ANN.
I wanted to know who, because I was afraid he’d turn it over to
Solange. I … I don’t want anyone to know my private business, but
especially not her.”

“She’d probably do a whole show around you
and your private problems,” Joanne said.

“Yeah,” Susan said, picking at her meat loaf,
which was growing cold in a congealing pool of amber gravy flecked
with green peas.

“What happened next?” I asked.

“He called me up a couple of weeks after
that, and insisted on coming to my place.”

“Uh-oh,” Joanne said.

“I didn’t have any choice. So he came over,
and when I told him how much I’d been able to raise, selling my
grandmother’s jewelry, he got upset.”

“And-”

Another drink came, and she halved it in one
gulp and emptied it in the next.

“So, he offered me an alternative.”

“A blow job?” Joanne said. “That’s the deal
he wanted to make with me.”

“Well, I …” Susan stopped.

“Don’t go on if …,” I began.

“I performed … um … manual masturbation on
him. A – a – what would you call that? A hand job?”

Joanne and I nodded.

“Once, only once. And you know, that worm
still didn’t give me the information.”

“I’m sorry, Susan,” Joanne said, giving
Susan’s hand a squeeze across the table. “Robin’s right, don’t go
on if you feel uncomfortable.”

“No, it feels good to talk about it, to tell
you the God’s honest truth,” Susan said. “It’s been awful carrying
it around these last few weeks.”

She stopped for a drink of water. “So,
anyway, on New Year’s Eve he called and told me to meet him at the
post office with the money.”

“Which post office?” I asked.

“The main one on Eighth Avenue, across from
Madison Square Garden. He came, I gave him the money I had, and
then he told me he didn’t have the information with him. He’d
already sent it to a certain reporter at ANN, but he said she
wouldn’t actually be able to get it without first talking to him.
But if I didn’t show up at the party that night with another five
thousand, he would hand over his information about me to this
reporter.”

“Who?” I asked.

“I asked him again who it was and he said it
was someone down on her luck who would be real grateful to get a
scoop.”

She and Joanne looked at me. I said, “Why
would I be interested in his information? He was taking a chance if
he thought I’d rat out my colleagues. How did he know I wouldn’t
take the information and burn it? Or … or turn it over to Standards
and Practices for an endless, discreet, internal investigation.
Besides, he investigated me too.”

Joanne snorted. “Maybe he thought he could
use it to get a blow job from you. I hear he had a thing for
redheads.”

“The way he described it, it did sound like
he meant you,” Susan said.

“And you do have kind of a whistle-blower
pathology,” Joanne added. “Not to sound like Solange …”

“I’ve been worried sick the last week,” Susan
continued. “It hasn’t shown up in your mail, has it, Robin?”

“No, of course not!” I said at once.

Did they believe me? Despite our benign
relations in the past, we were suspicious of each other now. I was
beginning to experience that universal feeling of guilt. Once I
stole a package of Life Savers from a five-and-dime and to this day
whenever I walk into a Woolworth’s I feel a little shabby and a
little guilty and I always keep my hands where the clerks can see
‘em.

“He said I had to know something in order to
get it, right? Well, except for the initial phone call and brief
encounter on the dance floor, I didn’t see or talk to the guy,
okay? When I went up to meet him, there was no answer. You
remember, Joanne? You were coming out of your room when I was
knocking …”