Alexandra Waring

by Laura Van Wormer

  And then Jessica walked out to the edge of the stage and, walking back and forth across it, started explaining various things about the show. (It took a while before Langley caught on that she was not so much warming them up for the show as she was gradually calming them down, trying to draw them into a mood far different from the jubilation of moments before.)

  She reminded them that the topic of discussion today was wonderful moments in sexual intimacy (some guy said, “Yeah!” and Jessica smiled, lowered her voice to its sexiest and breathed, “Exactly,” making everyone laugh and prompting two catcalls to be made—one by someone in the audience and one by a member of the crew), explained the format of the show and then briefly ran through some of the technical stuff that would be going on in the studio. They were told they should ignore Lilly, the floor manager, who would be running around giving Jessica signals pertaining to cameras and time; and they should ignore Mel, the man with cue cards, who would no doubt be jumping up and down because she was going to do her best to ignore him. (“I mean really, look at this,” Jessica said, snatching a card out of his hand and holding it up:

  HI, EVERYBODY, I’M JESSICA WRIGHT

  AND THIS IS THE JESSICA WRIGHT SHOW

  “As you can see,” Jessica said, “everybody around here’s real relaxed about me going national. Notice the generous allotment of ad lib.” While everybody laughed, she looked at Mel, putting one hand on her hip. “So what do you think I’m going to say? ‘Hi ya, I’m a Miss-a Pookie Pie-ya’?”)

  She told them to try and ignore the cameras, particularly the one zooming around on the crane (“Hi ya, Zeph,” she called, waving. Zeph, perched on high, waved back); and they could, if they wanted, look at any of the monitors to see what was going out over the air. (“But please, remember that only one of us around here is allowed to be narcissistically self-involved with how she looks over the air and if you don’t know who that is, ask my producer, Denny—Denny, say hello to everybody—” “Hello,” Denny said, waving from near the studio door.) Jessica asked, however, that they not ignore the assistant producers, who would come out into the audience during commercial breaks to hear what audience members would like to say on the air. (“They’ll want to know the general thrust of your question or comments,” she explained, “just to make sure you’re in step with the show, that’s all.”)

  And then, finally, she reminded them that there were no cues for laughter or applause or anything, so they should simply be themselves. “Which means,” she added, stepping down off the stage and walking up one of the aisles into the audience, “that you should give our guests the same consideration that you would give your best friend. The kind of stuff we’re talking about today is the kind of stuff your best friend might tell you at two in the morning, after a whole lot of partying. It’s special, it’s personal, and it’s being shared with us today because well, just for once, we thought we should dwell on one of the positive aspects of life, of the gifts connected with sex. Yeah… The gifts of sex. Remember? Like that one wonderful time you had that has kept you going back for more ever since—even though you’ve never been able to quite reproduce that wonderful one time? Find that magic combination again?”

  Then Jessica took her seat on the set and introduced her four guests to the audience, explaining that when those cameras rolled she wanted the audience and guests to feel as though they were on the same side—that a kind of intimacy was occurring here, in the studio, between them, as they shared their life experiences with one another. She wanted them to forget about the cameras and to trust her to take care of establishing a relationship between all of them and the viewers who were locked outside, who were sitting at home and could only look in at them, through the window, so to speak.

  The guests then talked a little about themselves to the audience: Karen, a sixty-three-year-old wife, mother and grandmother; Ted, a forty-two-year-old husband and father; Cindy, a twenty-four-year-old wife of four years; and Hart, a thirty-year-old newlywed. Jessica started asking some questions of her guests, and of her audience, about sex. At first everything was pretty stilted, but after a while, aware that the cameras were not on yet, everybody loosened up a little and people started laughing a little, fooling around, and Jessica then, suddenly, it seemed, was having problems trying to keep her guests from telling their “best moment of sexual intimacy” before the show started.

  By the time the actual taping began (right on time, to the second, Langley noticed, as if indeed it were live), Jessica had succeeded—they all did feel like they were on the same side, audience and guests and Jessica, and like whoever might be watching through the camera was definitely an outsider. Langley thought it was like playing poker all night and then having someone come in to watch for a while, someone you had to trust wouldn’t disturb things so you could get on with the game.

  “Hello, everybody,” Jessica said into the camera after her real cue, standing with a wireless microphone, “I’m Jessica Wright and”—she paused, smiling, clearly delighted by it all—”and hello, America,” she said, very friendly. “This is so neat, because, as most of you know, this is the first time our show has been seen nationally. So one day we’re in Tucson—hi, everybody!” she said, waving into the camera. “So one day we’re in Tucson, and the next we’re in New York City, appearing over the DBS television network. And do I love it,” she said, laughing, stepping back.

  “Can we get a camera down here?” Jessica then said, suddenly sweeping down off the stage and into the audience. This was a total surprise to everyone. “Some of my old friends, fans from out West, flew all the way here to be with us today,” Jessica said. She asked them to stand up and quickly (without anything about it on the cue cards), pointed out who was who: “Mr. Roger Hacksdergen, from Portland, Oregon; Mrs. Judy Filanderbin, from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, Ms. Ellen Sinclair from San Francisco, California; Mr. Rudy McQuire from Dallas, Texas; Mr. Bill Mecujah from San Diego, California; and Mrs. Helen Potter of Lawton, Oklahoma. And the shy woman sitting here is Mrs. Belinda Peterson, part of the time from Aspen, Colorado. And while we’re at it I’d like everybody to meet Mr. Langley Peterson, the president of the DBS television network. He’s my boss, guys, so everybody please say hello to him. Won’t you take a bow, Langley?”

  Langley, stunned, stood up slightly and nodded, as everybody in the audience, laughing, said hello.

  (“Smile,” Belinda whispered.)

  Langley smiled and quickly sat down. couples to make love to each other

  “Okay, everybody,” Jessica said, whirling around (her dress flying up after her) and going back up on the stage, “for those of you watching at home, we’ve been talking about the most exquisite moments of sexual intimacy that we’ve ever had.” (Jessica just talked away, seemingly oblivious to staging, though after a while Langley realized she was indeed very aware of the camera placement since, with all her waltzing around, she always stopped directly in position for one of them.) “Lucky people,” she murmured most provocatively, standing onstage, smiling into a camera, “you get to drop in just when we’re getting to the good part.” And then her voice returned to normal.

  “For those of you who don’t know much about television, one of the best ways to generate ratings is to promise to talk about sex. But our idea tonight was not so much to titillate you as it was to try and give you something. I don’t know quite how to say it, but I’ll try.”

  She paused for a long moment. And then, “I’d like every person in this room, and every person watching at home, to feel a little bit better and a little happier about life in general after watching this show. I’d like couples out there who haven’t made love to each other in a long time—for whatever reason—to at least look at each other a little more kindly, remembering the good days that first brought you together. I’d like couples to make love to each other—after the show, please—this is not Johnny Carson—” (Laughter.) “I’d like people who are temporarily alone to remember that they are temporarily alone—and that
perhaps this show might inspire you to take some action on behalf of yourself. To maybe make that phone call, write that letter, sign up for the dating service, go to the church mixer—whatever—or maybe to just recognize the fact that, as human beings, companionship is a basic necessity, and that sexuality is part of the package we’re given at birth. We can’t just wish it away—just as we are not meant to throw it away.

  “I don’t know,” she said then, sighing slightly, moving across the stage to stand at one corner of it, “I’d just like for all of us to pretend tonight that we all belong in the same universe, and that there are some really wonderful things about being a part of it, about being human, about falling in love, and about how we physically express it to one another.” She smiled, into the camera, blinking twice. “We’ll be back,” she whispered, and the monitor faded to black and then faded up to a soap commercial. Jessica lowered the microphone and went to sit with her guests. A hushed, congregational feeling had settled over the studio.

  “She’s wonderful, Langley,” Belinda whispered, watching as an audio assistant clipped a microphone on Jessica.

  Langley nodded, looking up at their national commercials running over the monitor: dishwashing liquid; a Japanese car built in America; disposable diapers (“Thirty seconds, Jessica,” Lilly said); and the monitor went blank for the thirty seconds where the DBS affiliates would insert the local ads they had sold themselves in their markets.

  The taping resumed, and the guests started to tell their simple, brief stories of their most exquisite sexual moments—each of which, Langley noticed, was linked with being in love with the partner. (He was relieved, thinking they would at least have some kind of leg to stand on when Cordelia saw this—though this would not help them at all if Jessica later did what she said she would do: do this exact same show except with homosexuals.)

  Belinda, sitting beside him, kept sighing, quietly. But they were not unhappy sighs. No, she looked captivated, caught up in the romance of it.

  He couldn’t believe it when Adele announced this afternoon that Belinda’s car had just been waved through the West End gate. He had invited her, of course—she was just out in Greenwich—but never dreamed she’d show up. But then, once Belinda had arrived upstairs, telling him she wanted to meet Jessica Wright, the full story came out.

  Belinda had a “friend” named Patience “Pooh” Tillington Hubin whom she hated very much. They kept roughly the same rotation schedule—Greenwich, Manhattan, Aspen, Palm Beach, Europe—and Pooh had taken to sabotaging Belinda’s dinner parties when she was not invited. (In January, in Aspen, Pooh had hijacked some mega singing star who was supposed to have come to dinner at Belinda’s. “It is beeyawn mah comprahenchun hayow enywun kin stayund that beeyutch,” Belinda had said over the phone to Langley. [Belinda’s accent tended to come out when she was upset.] She was so upset, in fact, she actually asked Langley if there wasn’t some way he and Jackson could put Pooh’s third husband out of business so as to pull the plug on all that new LBO money that Pooh was using to make her life miserable with.)

  In any event, at the club this weekend, apparently Pooh had asked Belinda if she could arrange for her to attend a taping of “The Jessica Wright Show.” Pooh said she had always watched her when in Aspen and in Taos when she visited her mother, thought Jessica was just divine, a real card, and was dying to meet her. And so Belinda had come to West End posthaste to meet Jessica and to try and figure out what the heck Pooh could be up to. (Belinda felt sure that Pooh was anticipating major celebrity and would like nothing more than to be the first to trot Jessica Wright out at a charity function when Belinda and her family owned the damn network that employed her!)

  So here they were, Langley and Belinda, unexpectedly spending the day together, sitting side by side, listening to a young woman talk about how her most wonderful sexual experience had been when she and her husband had had intercourse in the laundry room off the kitchen while they were supposed to have been serving dessert to their dinner guests. She was saying how special it had been—a conspiracy, urgent, quick—and how close it had made them feel. And then she described the afterglow, of sitting there, looking at one another across the table as their guests nattered on, having no idea of the wonderfully exciting thing that had just transpired in the other room.

  Belinda’s hand crept over to Langley’s. He held it.

  The show went on, and they broke for commercials, but the spell never broke. The newlywed talked of what had been his greatest moment, but how he later lost the girl, but then how he had known there was another one out there for him somewhere, and how he had found her, married her, and that his former greatest moment paled in comparison to the fourth night of his honeymoon with his wife. The married father of three talked about the night he had done what his wife asked him to do—simply hold her, in bed, without any sex—and how, when they practiced this, their sex life reawakened on other nights in ways he had never imagined. And then, finally, the older woman shared the most provocative story of them all (and it was so strange, because she was older and not very good-looking—at least not before she started talking). Her story was about how, after thirty-one years of marriage, she had finally gotten up the courage to ask her husband to do something to her differently, and how that night had ended up being the most sexually thrilling night for them both in all the years of their marriage.

  During all this Jessica would periodically slip down to the audience and murmur to someone, “How does hearing this story make you feel?” to which people responded in a variety of ways: special, warm, hopeful, excited. (Yes, excited. Langley had noticed that there was definitely a rising sexual tension in the air. The young man next to him had taken off his blazer and covered his lap with it; everybody looked a little warm in the face; and Belinda was getting caught up in it too, he could tell.)

  He tightened his grip on Belinda’s hand, half delighted and half terrified that she might get that vacant, half-drowsy, half-seductive look that she seemed to get just before she “went off.” Oh God he thought to himself, what has happened to us that I think Belinda can only have sex when she’s crazy?

  Because that’s the way it’s been the last couple of years, he answered himself.

  When he thought back to the first decade of their marriage, of the fun they had had, it became hard to believe that Belinda was the same woman.

  He had first met Belinda at a Darenbrook Communications Christmas party in Richmond. He had been twenty-five and a little drunk. He also had been with the company for less than two months, and so when this beautiful blond girl, who said she was going to VCU, asked him back to her apartment for a nightcap, he said sure, having no idea that Belinda Smith was actually Belinda Darenbrook, Jackson’s baby sister. They had had lots more Christmas punch; they had gone to bed; Langley had passed out; and in the morning, when he saw the apartment he was in (it was some apartment), he had a feeling that Belinda Smith might not be the struggling young scholarship student, orphaned in Arkansas, that she had said she was. Then Belinda had come bounding into the bedroom and onto the bed, made love to him again, and then she had told him who she was.

  Six weeks later, shortly after Belinda told him she thought she was pregnant, Jackson (whom he had scarcely met), came into his office, said, “Congratulations, brother,” slugged him, helped him up and then took him outside to a waiting car, in which they went downtown so Langley could apply for a marriage license. It was announced that Belinda and Langley had secretly eloped the night of the Christmas party; a wedding was then held, “for the family,” in Hilleanderville in February; and the next thing they knew Langley and Belinda, man and wife, had been sitting there looking at each other in a suite at the Royal Hawaiian in Honolulu, supposedly embarking on their lives together.

  That was when Belinda had apologized profusely for all the drama —and for trapping Langley into marriage. That was also when she told him that she wasn’t pregnant—and that she never really had been, but that it had been the only way to
make her family let her quit school and start her own life. That was also when Langley said it was okay because—if she didn’t mind him saying it—when he had told her before that he thought he was sort of in love with her anyway, so he didn’t mind marrying her and having her be the mother of his child, he had meant it. “Except,” he had added, sitting there on the bed, “I think maybe I really do love you.”

  Belinda was only nineteen then, so it was hard to know what she really felt for him, but nonetheless Langley had proceeded to fall violently in love with his wife. And there had been a lot to love! Belinda was so full of life, so mischievous, so full of laughter and energy, it was near impossible not to love her. When she came bounding into a room, he felt it—in his heart. And she adored “messing up” Langley, taking his studious and controlled demeanor as a personal challenge to her powers of seduction. (She won, easily, over most anything, even—in those days—work.)

  They lived in a house outside Richmond and Langley did very well at Darenbrook Communications, and as it became clearer to Langley that Belinda had somehow really fallen in love with him too (“It’s time for us to have children together,” she said one night, “because I love you and I think I would like to look at—at least six combinations of us”), Langley became less nervous around Jackson and actually became quite friendly with him. (Which was easy, since Jackson and Belinda had been so much alike.)

  Belinda had always loved her sister-in-law, Barbara, and so the two couples started seeing a lot of each other, particularly after Jack’s kids were born. Langley eventually became Jackson’s right hand at Darenbrook Communications as well as his best friend, but in those days, while Langley had worked hard, he had also played hard, though Belinda and Jackson and Barbara were much, much better at everything than he was: tennis, swimming, riding, trapshooting, golf, flying and soaring.