A Ruling Passion

by Judith Michael

  The executives smiled. They were expected to smile at Enderby's alliterative phrases, and they always did, even when the phrases were turned on them. But they did not smile a few months later when he hired Sybille Fielding and named her executive producer of "World Watch," WEBN's weekly news roundup that had never had good ratings. And there were no smiles when Enderby led her through the offices and studios on the fifteenth floor of the Enderby Building, making introductions.

  "They'll adjust," he told her as he led her to a glassed-in cubicle after the last cold handshake. "It's impressive how much people can adjust to when they're getting paid well."

  "It would make things easier if they do," Sybille said.

  He raised an eyebrow. "But if they don't you'll manage? You're not chasing after popularity."

  She shook her head, then looked up at him. "I want them to know I'm here. And I want you to approve of me."

  He was fascinated by the intensity of her ice-blue eyes, set off by her smooth olive skin and heavy black hair. He had already noted her prettiness, and her compact figure, small but curving in the right places, neat and orderly in a severe, tailored gray suit. Now he saw again, as he had seen in their interviews before he hired her, that her eyes were as searching as beacons, and he wondered whether her controlled body and the tightness of her mouth hid ruthlessness or passion. / want them to know Pm here. It would be amusing to watch her make sure they did. Enderby was interested to discover in himself a flicker of sexual curiosity. It took a lot, lately, to arouse him.

  "It's too early to talk about approval," he said. "But you do interest me.

  Sybille's eyes became alert; she met his eyes in a long look, then turned away with a visible effort, as if forcing herself. "This is a wonderful office."

  He gave a cursory glance at the cubicle. "Ifs functional, which is all anyone gets around here. The linocut behind the desk is a Picasso; that'll impress about two people out of a thousand."

  "It impresses me." She stood beside the desk chair, wanting to sit in it, but holding back until Enderby was gone. "I didn't expect an office right away; I thought first you'd want me to prove what I could do."

  "While working out of a closet.> Don't be asinine. I don't have any truck with people who short-change themselves or get cute with false modesty. Either you're good and you know it or you're not and you won't be around very long. You have a reputation for being tough and good; if you really are, you make damn sure people know it the minute they meet you. Don't ever give anybody a chance to reach any conclusion about you but the one you want. Remember that."

  Sybille was frowning. She contemplated him through hooded eyes, trying to figure him out. He was tall and broad, with stooped shoulders and a deeply lined face, and his hair stood out from his head in a frizzed yellow-white aureole like raveling steel wool that quivered when he spoke. He had a loud voice, and his fingers were gnarled. He walked with a goldheaded cane and dressed in tweeds and bow ties, like a British country squire.

  Sybille had looked him up before she came to New York to be

  interviewed by him, and she knew he was seventy-seven, from a wealthy Canadian family, all of them dead. He had been divorced four times and widowed once, and had no children. He had started the Enderby Broadcasting Network to cash in on television when it was new, but had never built a network: he owned only WEBN, an independent station once powerful but lately so low in the ratings no one took it seriously. And he was reluctant to spend a lot of money rebuilding it.

  Which is why he hired a twenty-three-year-old producer from a small station in California, Sybille thought. And a woman. That saved him twenty-five percent right away.

  But she hadn't argued about salary; she had no choice She told herself it was temporary; there was no way she would be satisfied for long with less than a man would make.

  Don^t ever give people a chance to reach any conclusion about you hut the one you want. This was the first conclusion: no one would ever look at her again and think she came cheap.

  "FU remember," she said to Enderby. "That's good advice. Thank you."

  Surprise showed in his eyes. "Fll be damned. A generous response." There was a pause. Reluctantly, he turned to the door. "Get familiar with the place. If you have questions, call anyone you like; they'll think more of you the more demanding you are. Be definitively decisive and demanding." He watched her, waiting for her smile, but none came. Instead she looked puzzled. "'World Watch' editorial meeting tomorrow at eight," he growled. "I'll expect to hear your ideas for whipping it into shape." Halfway through the door, he turned back. "Have you found a place to live?"

  Sybille nodded shortly, her body tense with the desire to sit at her desk.

  "Where is it?"

  "On Thirty-fourth Street."

  "Where on Thirty-fourth Street?"

  "The Webster Apartments."

  "Never heard of it."

  "It was recommended to me."

  "Any problems with it?"

  "No. It's fine."

  He nodded and took another step.

  "Thank you again," Sybille said, her voice warmer now that he was really leaving. "I won't disappoint you."

  "It will be easier if you don't," he said, echoing her own words of a few minutes earlier, and he closed the door behind him.

  She let out her breath with a little explosion. Son of a bitch. Old, mean, nasty. The worst kind to work for: the kind she couldn't predict.

  But at least he was gone. Now, at last, she could setde into her own chair and survey her own office. Even she couldn't pretend it was big or handsome, but it was her first, and the desk, though the wood was scratched and had cigarette burns in it, had a dark, masculine look that pleased her. Two office chairs were squeezed on the other size of the desk, facing her.

  Behind the desk, next to the Picasso linocut, a small window looked across Broadway at the spire of Trinity Church. Sybille swiveled to look at it. The cross at its tip and its arched stained-glass windows at treetop level, in the midst of looming office buildings, made it look to her like a picture postcard. The church made her uncomfortable. It seemed wrong for New York: small and graceful, almost delicate. She wanted everything to be the tallest, the largest, the boldest, the fastest, the noisiest. The most important city in the world. The most rewarding. The place where success meant more than anywhere else.

  The place where Valerie lived.

  The day before, she had taken a bus all the way up Madison Avenue and then walked over to Fifth Avenue, to the building where her mother had told her Valerie and Kent Shoreham had bought an apartment. She stood on the opposite side of the avenue, gazing at it in the crisp November sun. Behind her was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its broad steps stretching across the front of the building, the grandeur of its pillars making even the trees of Central Park seem small and friendly. And in front of her was the grandeur of Valerie's building, made of sedate gray stone with tall paned windows. An awning stretched from the carved wooden doors to the street, and two uniformed doormen with glossy hats and white gloves blew imperious whistles that made taxis come to heel.

  Sybille stared at the building, envying Valerie for living there, hating the sleek people who came and went while she watched, their heels clacking arrogandy on the sidewalk, their furs gleaming, even the two dogs one of them was walking looking fat and smug. She had read about such buildings, and seen them in movies and on television, but she had never stood before one; she had never known anyone who lived in one. She watched the people come and go, knowing they hadn't the faintest idea she was there and wouldn't have cared if they did know Envy and anger burned in her; she thought it must be

  radiating out, across the street, and scorching everyone there. But they never looked up; she was invisible.

  Not for lon0. Pretty soon thef II know Fm here. Fll live in that building, or one just like it. Fll be that bitches nei£fhbor.

  She walked up and down in front of the museum, inspecting Valerie's building from different angles, jos
ded by the Sunday crowds and the activity around her. On the expanse of sidewalk, someone was displaying strands of glass jewelry on a white cloth; nearby, two rickety tables were stacked with books for fifty cents apiece; at the corner of the museum steps a gangly man in a dark jacket, dark pants and a stocking cap had set up a small table and was playing a shell game with two tourists while his friend kept a lookout for police. On the steps, a tall figure swayed to the rhythm of his saxophone and the beat of two tomtoms and a steel drum being played by three teenage boys.

  Sybille stood among the swirling crowds, watching all the performances. It would make good television, she thought; audiences would like it. Her eye saw everything framed within the borders of a television screen.

  She stopped beside an aproned man with a drooping mustache and bought a hot pretzel with mustard, biting into its doughy saltiness as she walked. But then she threw it onto an overflowing trashcan. You wouldn't catch Valerie Shoreham chewing on a pretzel while she walked on the street.

  Suddenly Valerie and her apartment building seemed impossibly remote. Sybille's fiiry grew: why was everything so difficult? She turned and walked rapidly away, ignoring the bus stop where a crowd waited. She didn't want to wait: she wanted to move.

  But as she strode down the avenue, her anger lessened. The sidewalks were crowded, traffic was heavy, and the city's energy flowed around her, flowed through her, until she began to feel she could do anything she wanted. New York was everything she had expected it to be, fast and furious, the place for her, the place to be unencumbered and unattached.

  She was young and ambitious and divorced. It had been very easy —much smoother and faster than she had thought a divorce could go, because there was nothing to quarrel over. Nick had no property and no expectations of any that she could see; it was obvious to her that he would always be a failure, like his father. There was no trouble over Chad either. Nick had custody and she had visitation rights whenever she wanted. And maybe more, she told herself. I can get a judge to give me my son whenever I want him. No judge would refuse me if I

  tell him my husband talked me into giving up my baby and now I want him back. I can do that anytime. But for now I'm free.

  The first few days in New York, she repeated it to herself wherever she was: in her apartment, in her office, walking in the streets. No one nagged at her for attention or listening or carinff. She'd been so afraid of being divorced and alone, but now she woke up every morning with a sense of being cut loose from everything that had ever made demands on her. She didn't miss Nick. She thought she had missed him in the first weeks after he moved out, but in truth what she really missed was thinking of herself as part of a couple. And she thought she had missed Chad, but in fact what she had missed was thinking of herself as a mother. The truth was, she didn't miss anything.

  She felt most free when she walked home from work. Her first days in the Enderby Building she stayed late each evening to avoid running the cold gaundet that had greeted her when Enderby made his introductions, and so each evening she reached the street alone, and walked alone, the bite of the chill air against her face making her feel combative and excited. Striding through Greenwich Village and then into Chelsea, she quickened her pace so the bustling people about her would know she was one of them, not a tourist. She glanced at dilapidated buildings and renovated ones as if she had seen them all her life; she casually skirted the heaps of clothing and overflowing bags that turned out to be people asleep in doorways or across heating vents in the sidewalk; she thought briefly of Nick and Chad, telling herself of course she would see them often; and then she let them slip from her thoughts. She had worked for Quentin Enderby for three days and she had an editorial meeting in the morning: that was what she had to think about.

  She had stayed up much of the night, preparing for it, sure it would be high-powered and demanding compared to the meetings in Palo Alto and San Jose, and when she took her seat at a little before eight o'clock in the morning she was tense and alert. She told herself no one expected her to know everything on the first day, but still her hands shook. She had to prove herself, and Enderby would be there. As president, he never attended editorial meetings, but this morning, to see what she could do, he would sit at the head of the table. And he had told her how he felt about first impressions.

  Six men and two women sat at a long table strewn with newspapers and wire reports, discussing the lead stories, deciding what they would feature that week on "World Watch." In a few minutes, Sybille began to relax. After half an hour she knew she had nothing to worry about.

  They dealt more heavily with international events and less with local ones than she was used to, but otherwise everything was the same. She was smarter than everyone else, just as she had been in California. She would stand out here just as she had stood out there. Everything was going to be fine.

  Enderby picked up a glass of ice water and drained it. "Sybille is going to give us the benefit of her worldly wit and wisdom to make World Watch' more watched." Everyone but Sybille chuckled. She watched them with contempt. 'We're waiting," Enderby snapped.

  Her notes were in her briefcase; she left them there. It was more impressive to speak without them. "I've seen six weeks of World Watch' tapes. Every program has been the same: too slow, too solemn, too tame. I kept waiting for something I could love or hate or talk back to, and there wasn't anything. It all went past me like a fog, words and words, and pictures that every other newscast uses, and a set design I can't even remember." She met the hostile eyes that were focused on her, then she looked at Enderby. He was leaning back in his chair, eyes closed, hands folded on his chest, their age spots dark and splotchy against his white shirt. Like a corpse, Sybille thought. Except that he was smiling. Coolly she returned every look around the table. This was what Quentin Enderby wanted.

  "I have a few ideas. Of course we'll need dozens to get this show where it should be, but this is a start. Make the backdrop a huge world map like the ones they have in kindergartens, bright colors, big lettering, dark lines for countries' borders, and so on. Every time a news item is introduced we'll light up the place where it happened. Most people haven't the faintest idea where Sri Lanka or Khatmandu or the Transvaal are—they probably don't care, either, but they'll feel good about being shown; it's like getting something for nothing."

  "Transvaal?" asked a young man at the other end of the table.

  "South Africa," Sybille said crisply. "Then there's the anchorman. Somebody should teach him not to drop his voice on the last word of every sentence; he needs bigger shoulder pads; his hair ought to be combed from the left instead of the right; and get rid of those glasses —hasn't anybody heard of contact lenses? Better yet, get rid of the anchorman."

  Eyes swiveled to the head of the table, and it struck Sybille that the anchorman had been hired by Enderby. "He may have been good at one time," she said, "and he's nice-looking, sort of like everybody's neighbor, but that's one of the problems." Stubbornness crept into her voice. "He's stodgy and flat, like the husband every woman wants to

  leave, instead of a young, handsome guy every woman would like to take to bed, even though she and her dull husband know she never will."

  "Nast}'," said a tall red-haired woman admiringly. She sat at En-derby's left: and gazed thoughtfully at Sybille through large hornrimmed glasses. "Neat and nasty."

  Sybille ignored her. "There are some other—"

  "The script," Enderby snapped. His eyes were still closed; he had not stirred. "Sets and shoulder pads are fluff. Get to the script."

  "It doesn't have any life," Sybille said. "There's nobody to hate. Every story in the world has a villain and we have to tell the audience who it is each time so they can hate him or her without feeling guilty or worrying about being right or wrong. Everybody believes the world is divided into good guys and bad guys; it's our job to help them sort out which is which."

  ^"Our job?" echoed a pudg)^ man with thinning hair.

  "Of course. Our ancho
rs, our reporters; that's why they watch us. They want us to help them side with tlie good guys. Issues are confusing; we're here to make them simple."

  "Not true." The woman at Enderb/s left peered at Sybille through her glasses. "Our job is to report to people on what happened that week. They maybe don't have time to read a newspaper or watch a newscast every day, and they want to know what's been going on. That's all they want; it's not up to us to tell them what to think."

  'Tou're wrong," Sybille said flady. "And that's why nobody watches your newscast. You don't have a good anchor, you don't have jazzy graphics, you don't have heroes and villains. All you have is the news, and if that's all you've got to offer, you're dead. You have to tell people what to think because most of them are too lazy or too stupid to think for themselves. We've got to make them believe that when we tell them who to trust and who not to, only then can they deal with the mixed signals they're getting from politicians and newspapers. They're busy people out there, how can they know enough to make up their own minds? We can do it subdy—we don't have to hit them over the head with it—but the message has to be that unless they watch us they'll be helpless and frustrated in a very confusing world."

  "God damn!" Enderby was laughing, huge guffaws making the table shake. "If that isn't pure gold! Tell the audience what they need, then tell 'em we're the only ones who can give it to 'em!"

  "She has a pretty low opinion of people," said the pudgy man with thinning hair.

  Enderby smiled beatifically. "Of course she does. That's why I hired her."

  A silence fell over the table as the WEBN executives altered their thinking about Sybille Fielding and their attitude toward her. And then, with smiles and gentler voices, they got down to the business of the transformation of "World Watch."