Heart and Soul

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “Oh, sure, we all get threats. I mean the reporters, the anchors, the network in general. I doubt it was anything more than the usual looney tunes. She probably heard Barbara Walters had got a bodyguard clause in her last contract deal.”

  As they ran the reedited tape again and made notes together about the subtitling and score, Cassie tried to imagine what it would have been like to work for her sister. Like so much else in television, news had become big business, each Nielsen rating point worth millions in potential advertising revenue. Consequentially, news anchors and the hosts of news magazines like 60 Minutes and Breaking News had become far more than just reporters. They had become part of the very news they were hired to report. Like movie stars, they had high-powered agents and multimillion-dollar contracts. They existed in that rarefied celebrity world that made their names household currency, their lives the property of tabloid newspapers.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me about you and Miranda,” Cassie said at the end of the afternoon as Sheila and she cleared up their papers and threw away the foam coffee cups in the editing room. Cassie had felt the unfinished conversation hovering in the air all afternoon, the intensity of Sheila’s feelings an unwanted yet palpable presence between them.

  “Yeah,” Sheila muttered, smashing out a filtered cigarette. Trying desperately and largely unsuccessfully to stop smoking, Sheila had taken the tack of smoking only half of each cigarette. The ashtray was a graveyard of broken smoldering stubs. “But it’s, like, not something I want to talk about.”

  “Okay,” Cassie replied, surprised by the hurt she felt at Sheila’s terse reply. Within a few short days of working with the generally talkative and clearly talented producer, Cassie had felt an easy, mutually admiring friendship take root. Sheila had been the only one on the Breaking News team to speak honestly about Miranda. At least up to a point. What could she be holding back?

  The answer came, unexpectedly, that Friday, the morning after their reedited piece aired. From McPherson to Manuel Cortenzo right down to a temporary file clerk, Cassie and Sheila had heard only compliments on the segment. Having decided to go out to lunch together and celebrate, they were waiting for the elevator when the eighteenth-floor receptionist came running down the hall, crying: “Cassie! I’ve a message for you!” She was so excited that she had to stop and gulp in air before she could add in an awed, lowered voice: “Mr. Magnus called. Himself. Personally.”

  “Yes?” Cassie replied, and then when the girl just stared at her speechlessly, she prodded, “I assume he said something?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes! He called to congratulate you on a job well done. Those were his very words.”

  “What’s wrong, Sheila?” Cassie demanded as they slid into a booth at Hoover’s, a glorified diner on Seventh Avenue that attracted a combination of media and fashion clientele. Sheila, who’d been chattering nonstop all morning as they discussed the logistics of doing another parking violations piece—this one on city employees who took advantage of their perks—hadn’t said a word since they stepped into the elevator.

  “Nothing,” Sheila replied, hiding behind the enormous menu that Cassie suspected she already knew by heart.

  “Let me rephrase that,” Cassie replied. “Sheila, what the hell is wrong?”

  “I’m just hungry,” Sheila mumbled behind the plastic-covered menu.

  “You’re always hungry,” Cassie pointed out, which was true. Sheila’s capacity for food was legendary. A normal eating day for her would include two cream cheese-encrusted bagels for breakfast, half a pizza for lunch, buckets of take-out Chinese for dinner, a pint of Häagen-Dazs before bedtime, with any number of little noshes—from a Snickers bar to a half-dozen David’s chocolate-chip-and-pecan cookies—in between.

  “I think I’ll have a chef salad,” Sheila announced, folding the menu and staring out blankly at the jam-packed room.

  “Now I know something’s really upsetting you. Since when do you voluntarily ask for greens? Are you feeling sick?”

  “I’m fine, damn it. About the new piece…”

  “It’s something to do with Magnus,” Cassie interrupted. “You started acting weird when you heard he’d called me.”

  “It’s nothing to do with anything,” Sheila retorted, meeting Cassie’s look dead-on. “Damn it to hell, Cassie, you have no right prying into my life like this. Absolutely none. Who the hell do you think you are to come snooping around my personal affairs, implying this, inferring that—”

  “I merely asked what was wrong. But now I think I know.”

  “—no fucking right whatsoever. I do not, I never have, let my hair down, so to speak, to other women about deeply private things. I can’t abide this heart-to-heart bullshit routine where everybody talks constantly about how they feel about every little thing. All that ‘getting-in-touch’ with your emotions garbage. I hate that. I really do. What goes on between a man and a woman, in my humble opinion, is strictly between them. What happens behind closed doors is no one’s fucking—”

  “You had an affair with Magnus,” Cassie interrupted quietly, “that ended when Miranda came along.”

  “—business.”

  “That’s why you hated Miranda so much. Of course.”

  “No,” Sheila replied, tapping out a cigarette.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “No, I hated Miranda because she just used Magnus. The way she used all the rest of us.” Sheila sucked deeply on her cigarette and squinted at Cassie through the smoke. “Listen, I never kidded myself about Vance. When I started with Magnus ten years ago, his affairs were already the stuff of myth. If you were halfway pretty and more or less willing, you were going to end up one morning in that king-size bed of his on Fifty-seventh Street. He didn’t love me any more than any of the others. But I do believe he liked me. A lot. We had … fun together. I made him laugh.”

  “How long did it go on?”

  “Seven and a half years.” Sheila sighed. “Oh, I wasn’t the only one during that time. You see, I didn’t kid myself. But I was the only one he kept coming back to. It was a stable, yeah. But, well, I guess you could say I at least had a permanent stall. Pretty pathetic, huh?”

  Cassie shrugged and tried to smile; she was thinking of Jason and the little crumbs of affection he had scattered her way. Not only was she content to feed off them, all she wanted was more. That was pretty pathetic.

  “At first I didn’t know what was wrong,” Sheila continued, her mind’s eye fixed firmly on the past. “He just became so fucking moody. Unresponsive. I was worried he was sick. Well, I guess in a way he was. I began to realize that he was totally obsessed with her. He talked about her all the time.”

  “To you?”

  “Yeah.” Sheila laughed. “Can you believe I actually sunk that low? Listening to a man babble on about another woman. I turned into his comforter … it was the only role left. And then I guess she woke up and saw that he could help her get what she couldn’t on her own.”

  “Breaking News? But wasn’t she hired on as host?”

  “Oh, no, Miranda could make her own way in the network. She didn’t need him for that; she already had Magnus exactly where she wanted him. No, it was all that la-di-da society stuff she was so involved with: opera fund-raisers, ballet benefits, or whatever. She couldn’t break in. In the eyes of those people, Miranda was a total nobody. She needed Magnus—who knew everybody in that world from his first marriage—to get her entree.”

  “So he opened the right doors for her,” Cassie said, thinking of the old woman in blue sequins whom Jason had pointed out to her that first night as “the keeper of the gate.”

  “Exactly,” Sheila said. “The ultra-sophisticated, hugely successful, universally admired Vance Magnus became Miranda Darin’s glorified butler. And the truly terrible thing? He loved every minute of it.”

  Thirteen

  He was tired. It was more than just jet lag, though Lord knew flying across se
ven time zones in four days would wear anybody down. It was more than the nonstop meetings, or business dinners that were really just more meetings, or informal breakfasts that were even further meetings. He was dead-tired. Bone-tired. Weary down to his very marrow. He had extended the trip by one week. Then two. But he finally realized that it was hopeless. For well over a month now he had tried as hard as he knew to run away from what had happened and for not one single second of the time had he escaped it. Miranda was dead, but she was not gone.

  “Air France Flight 077 boarding for Kennedy.” A Swiss-accented voice interrupted his dreams. He must have dozed off in the bright sunlight that flooded the departures terminal at Zurich International Airport. “First class passengers, please have your boarding passes ready.”

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” the flight attendant said, smiling with sudden pleased recognition as he handed her the boarding card. Jason Darin’s face was familiar to any Air France in-flight veteran. He was one of those rare, wonderful male passengers who always flew first class, rarely asked for anything besides his privacy and the International Herald Tribune, and never made a pass at even the prettiest flight attendants. Although, mused the attendant as she handed Jason back his stub, a show of interest from someone as attractive and—there was no other way of phrasing it—sexy as this clearly exhausted man would not be unwelcome.

  Later, as she worked the spacious and comfortably appointed first-class cabin, the attendant tried to figure just what it was about Jason Darin that made him so appealing. Being French and therefore more than a bit experienced in these matters, the attendant liked to think that she held rather high standards when it came to les hommes.

  Firstly, a man must not be too obviously sensual: no exposed chest hairs or gold chains, no overly long or overly groomed head or facial hair, nothing too flashy when it came to clothes. Monsieur Darin had avoided each of these faux pas. If anything, as was often the case with the American male, he was dressed haphazardly. Not that he looked poorly groomed, he was just clearly a man who had other things on his mind besides what he put on his back. Today he was wearing a handsome tweedy sports jacket that unfortunately should have been retired several seasons back: an inner lapel was frayed, and a cuff button was missing. His olive corduroy pants, too, were impeccable in taste, but worn in appearance. The eggshell-blue Oxford cotton button-down shirt was perfect—especially when offset by the dark, unruly hair—but it really should have been accompanied by a tie. A green-and-gold silk patterned one by Hermes perhaps, the attendant decided, quickly and expertly redressing him.

  And then with equal pleasure, as she skillfully served cocktails through a patchy stretch of air turbulence, she mentally undressed him. She could tell by his eyes—the liquid gold of a first-class cognac—that he would be a generous, knowing lover. His well-muscled frame was larger than most European men, and yet he had none of that clumsy bearishness that afflicted so many athletes. He was comfortable with himself, at ease with a masculinity that was as potent as any cologne. But what made this man so ridiculously appealing, the flight attendant finally concluded, was the sadness that had transformed his all-American handsomeness into something altogether darker, perhaps even a bit dangerous. Someone, something, had closed down this man’s heart. There was a remoteness about him that made him seem unattainable … and therefore just that much more attractive. She stole little glances at him as she served lunch, but he seemed thoroughly unaware of her presence, or of the excellent cut of fillet that he barely touched.

  As she cleared away his tray, she asked in her most discreetly seductive tone, “Would you like anything else, monsieur? Believe me, you would be most welcome to whatever your heart desires now … or later.”

  “Excuse me?” He glanced up at the cabin attendant and saw the frank invitation in her smile. “No,” he replied, sorry to see her bright expression fade, “but thank you. You’ve been very kind.” After she’d hurried down the aisle with a disappointed shrug, he sat back and closed his eyes but he soon felt the familiar tightening of anxiety in his chest. He hadn’t had more than an hour or two of restless sleep each night of the trip; why should he suddenly expect to drift off now?

  One of the bankers who had accompanied him to Thailand and with whom he’d become friendly had advised him that he was pushing himself too hard.

  “You should delegate more, Jason,” Eric Loniman, a vice president at the German investment bank that was backing Jason’s new development efforts in Bangkok, had told him. “You Americans drive yourselves so hard. And for what? Another million or two?”

  “I like to work, Eric,” he’d responded automatically. And as recently as a month ago, that would have been true. For years, Jason had thrived on challenges, on the marathon working days, the equally demanding social nights. He had relished the trigger-quick negotiations that could make or break the crucial bridge loan. He had prided himself on being the calm, cool center of the vortex of bankers, lawyers, architects, engineers, and investors who played key parts in each of his development deals. But this time, though the negotiations had gone well for developing an industrial park outside of Bangkok, he had hardly enjoyed himself. A virus of guilt—as feverish and nauseating as any flu—had weighed down his limbs. Each morning he had to steel himself to face his image in the mirror. Every night he had to climb into bed knowing his conscience was waiting for him: eager, voracious, ever wakeful.

  He’d traveled from London to Tokyo to Manila to Bangkok to Prague to Berlin, and now at last he was en route to New York, and yet he knew he had gotten nowhere when it came to facing the truth about Miranda. His mind had circled the subject, ceaselessly, with nightmarish intensity, and yet everything was still unresolved. He was coming home from a thoroughly successful business trip feeling utterly defeated. There were only two things that sustained him—two faces and two voices he carried with him in his heart everywhere he went. One he knew as well as his own. Heather: his pretty, demanding, spoiled daughter. She was his pride and his despair, because though he loved her as much as life itself he knew he was failing her.

  “Daddy, when are you coming home?” she had demanded on the phone two nights before, her voice a reproachful whine. “I miss you. I want you here. I hate it when you go away.”

  “I’ll be home soon, pumpkin,” he’d tried to soothe her. “I’ll be back for your birthday, I promise.”

  And the other face, the other voice … he knew he had no right to treasure. He should not think of her. Because of Miranda, it should never be allowed to happen. He knew this, he kept warning himself. But the only times he had been able to edge himself into unconsciousness was when he tried to conjure up Cassie’s face: the exact tilt of her chin, the shape of her lips, the muted color of her eyes. And then, for a brief moment, he would be able to escape from the memory of what he had destroyed … by dreaming about what he would never be allowed to touch.

  “Now, you’re sure you don’t want to invite some of your friends back to the house?” Cassie asked Heather the afternoon of her niece’s eighth birthday when she picked her up at the Dalton School. Despite her busy schedule, Cassie always dropped Heather off at Dalton in the morning and took a forty-five-minute break around three-thirty each schoolday to collect her niece from that posh bastion of wealth and privilege on East Eighty-ninth Street. She usually raced uptown from Magnus Media in a taxi to wait for the uniformed horde that—despite its impeccable social credentials—was as loud, messy, and boisterous as any group of children anywhere. Except for Heather. Frequently among the last to leave the school, she was always quiet, perfectly turned out, and unfailingly alone. It had long since occurred to Cassie that a girl as self-centered as Heather probably didn’t have any friends.

  “No, for the last time, no!” Heather snapped as Charles, who came from the town house to meet them, held open the door of the BMW for her. Cassie usually had Charles drop her back at the office after she’d made sure Heather was safely inside the town house. “I hate everyone in tha
t stupid school. And I hate you doing this, Aunt Cassie. Why don’t you just stay at work where you belong?”

  “I belong here with you,” Cassie replied, picking up her end of an argument that had started the first day she’d shown up at Dalton. It just didn’t seem right to Cassie, who had been raised in a quiet friendly suburb, to leave a little girl basically on her own in the middle of a dangerous city.

  “Mommy never picked me up,” Heather would usually respond sullenly. “I’m not a baby. And Charles knows the way home by now.”

  “No one said you were a baby, Heather.” It would be Cassie’s turn to reply. “I just like to see you, okay? Hear how your day went and so forth.” A sulky silence would greet all her attempts at warmth and companionship. “So, Heather, how’d your day go?”

  “You know, I think I hate you, I really think I do.”

  “Then we’re making progress. Last week you said you were sure you hated me.” It had not been smooth sailing with Heather, to say the least. Not having any experience with children, it would have been difficult enough for Cassie to cope even if Heather had been a generous, sweet-tempered eight-year-old. It was almost impossible for her to manage this selfish, mean, and thoroughly unhappy little girl. The brief détente that had existed after Miss Boyeson was dismissed ended the minute Jason left on his business trip. Nothing was good enough for Heather. “Hate” was her favorite word, whether used in reference to a pineapple upside-down cake the cook had made or a cable-knit cotton sweater that Cassie bought as a surprise for her niece at GapKids.

  “I hate green,” she’d told Cassie, unceremoniously dumping the sweater on the solarium floor. “It’s pukey.”