What's a Girl Gotta Do?

by Sparkle Hayter

  “Robin, I had cashed my chips, begged and borrowed, even hocked all my jewelry to get twenty-five thousand. I didn’t know where to go to get another twenty-five grand. It was a nightmare. Honest to God, Robin, I have never felt more scared in my life. Not crossing mine fields in Afghanistan, not dodging snipers in Sarajevo.”

  “You didn’t get the rest of the money,” I guessed.

  She smiled ruefully and nodded around the room. “I raised another seventeen thousand by selling my furniture at a tremendous sacrifice. Really. For a fraction of what it is worth.”

  “Then you saw him at the Marfeles?”

  “I was supposed to meet him at ten-thirty in Room 13D, but when I got to his door, I heard voices inside. Griff said, ‘It’s too late. It’s already on its way.’ Or something like that. There was someone in there, speaking softly, and I couldn’t make out if it was a man or a woman. Then Griff said, ‘She won’t know what to look for until I tell her. So you still have time.’”

  “‘She’ being …?”

  “Me, I thought,” Joanne said. “Anyway, I went back to my room. Around eleven, I made another try. That’s when I saw you.”

  “Did you go back to his room later?”

  “Shortly after midnight. And there was no answer.”

  “You think he intended to give the information to me?” I asked.

  “Judging from the suggestions he made to me, he probably would have wanted you to give him a blow job first.”

  “Why us? Or is it every on-air person at ANN? Was Solange being blackmailed?” I asked.

  “It’s hard to imagine anyone being able to blackmail Solange,” Joanne said.

  Yeah, what could they get on her, after all? She’d already admitted to being a victim of incest, the child of an alcoholic, a victim of bulimia, anorexia, lookism, sexism, all for the edification and emotional benefit of her television viewers.

  “Some people can’t be blackmailed. Exhibitionists like Solange and unrepentant rascals like Georgia Jack. And perfectly honest people, of which there are exactly none,” she said, and smiled.

  “Where are the pictures?” I asked.

  Joanne shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is I saw them, I know they exist, but I don’t know what happened to them. They’re out there somewhere.” She looked out her panoramic window at the dark city. “It’s scary, some stranger out there, holding my intimate secrets.”

  I nodded. “I used to think it was scary that some anonymous, lonely fan could be jerking off to my publicity photo. But this is worse.”

  “Yeah, it violates the self, as Solange put it. It’s like psychological rape. The thing is, I’ve been on the other side of this. I’ve learned other people’s secrets, dug up dirt without them knowing it. I’ve confronted them with it. It’s my job. I’m an investigative reporter. But I feel like I’ve been stung by my own tail, you know what I mean?”

  I did.

  “Did you kill him?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said. “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “In a way,” she said, “I’m glad this is out. All this time, I’ve known those pictures existed, and I’ve worried about their disclosure. It’s a relief in a way not to have to worry about it anymore.

  “So—I told you about Alejandro, Robin. Why don’t you tell me what Griff had on you?”

  So I told her about Red Knobby, an unpleasant memory but a relatively innocuous one.

  This is the deal. I was ten, and had suddenly become interested in boys, but did not know how to get their attention. In my reading and my perusal of art books, I got the idea that what boys liked best was the female form, so I invited a half dozen of the neighborhood boys into my garage one day.

  There, I reclined, Odalisque-like, under a dusty blanket, facing a semicircle of skeptical boys. I hesitated only a moment, and flung back the blanket.

  And there I was, completely naked, expecting adoration and admiration for my daring exposure, when one of them, a boy unfortunately nicknamed Stinky Starko, started laughing and said, “Knobby knees! She’s got red hair and knobby knees!”

  Mortification spread up my alabaster skin like a fire as the boys began jeering “Knobby! Knobby knees,” and then ran away from me, like I was poison.

  It was a damning commentary on my early sexual presence, and did a real number on my body image. For several years, I was known as Red Knobby, and every time I heard that name I felt exposed, frightened, and pissed off, in that order.

  It set my self-esteem back a decade, my Red Knobby Years, although I got even with those boys. When we were little, they wouldn’t even talk to me, they’d just make loud jokes at my expense. But by the time I got to high school, I had turned into a swan, on the outside at least, and I wouldn’t talk to them.

  Even as an adult, whenever I heard the word knobby, I would smell creosote and timber and feel a flash of humiliation. But now that it was out, it seemed like no big deal. Now I look back on that incident and think, those little boys had a chance to gaze upon this body, and they focused on my knees. It’s not a bad body and those boys missed a great opportunity, one I hope haunts them in their dotage. I think of them when I’m working out my hostility in the employee gym and am starting to feel the burn.

  But as far as dirty little secrets go, Knobby and the Starko Affair couldn’t hold a candle to Alejandro and the APC. With pictures.

  Chapter Eight

  THE NEWS-JOURNAL was not convinced of Joanne’s innocence, but while she dominated their story in the morning edition, they weren’t letting me off the hook yet either. Using innuendos, they even put forward a conspiracy theory, involving me, Joanne, and possibly other women, getting together to rid the planet of a “sleazebag” like Griff, a service-to-our-gender sort of thing.

  “CIRCLE WIDENS—SECOND TV REPORTER IMPLICATED IN GRIFF MURDER,” read the headline on page three. In the main story, a “retired homicide expert” said, “The guy was a sleazebag. I’m surprised some lady, or group of ladies, didn’t blow him away long before now.”

  Inset, they had a photo of me leaving Joanne’s the night before, with the caption, “Hudson leaves after confab with Armoire.” One plus one equals a conspiracy.

  The story was flanked by Kerwin Shutz’s column, in which he cited Thelma and Louise, Basic Instinct, and Hillary Clinton for inciting a “wave of violent, vigilante feminism.” Kerwin moonlighted as the ultra-right-wing questioner on ANN’s show Ambush and his perennial fear was strong women trying to take his gun away. Gee, what would Freud say? It kind of made me wonder what his parents’ marriage was like.

  I had to laugh, though, imagining Kerwin Shutz huddling in his survivalist basement on Long Island, his constitutionally protected semiautomatic penis-substitute at the ready to fend off a gang of raving feminists.

  I was tempted to log into the computer and send Shutz a message, something facetious like “You are next on our Sworn Enemies of Feminism List,” but he’d probably take it seriously and it would end up in the News-Journal the next day as a “threat.”

  Claire gave me the day’s memos and my phone messages when I got in. I went into my cluttered office and read through them. Two calls from Elroy and three calls from Burke. He was trying to cultivate me as a source, I guess, the shameless cad. In the message space on one of the pink slips was written, in quotation marks, “Hey, Holden, gimme a call, willya?” Holden was his pet name for me, as in Holden Caulfield and William Holden, who starred in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network.

  I crumpled it up rather gleefully, shot it into my wastepaper basket, and turned on the TV to catch Joanne’s live presser (I’d been forbidden to attend in person). It was about five minutes before the ten hour—Joanne was coming up in the first block of the next show—so I watched Sawyer Lash, the network’s worst anchorman, misread a story on B-films. He kept saying “marital” for the word “martial.”

  “A new marital-arts action film,” he said, as the screen filled with shots of two ninjas kicking the shi
t out of each other. At the end of it, Sawyer stopped reading and cocked his head slightly, like a hound. I could almost hear the producer screaming at him through the IFB in his ear.

  “I’m sorry, that was a martial-arts film, not a marital-arts film,” Sawyer said, and then teased Joanne’s live presser at the top of the hour before the show went into terminal break, network ID, and commercial.

  I love live television.

  At a table in Studio C, Joanne sat before a bouquet of black microphones, flanked by Jack Jackson and George Dunbar, the court eunuchs cringing behind her. The look on her face was perfect—neither chastened nor arrogant, but serene. I knew this serene look of hers and you couldn’t argue with it for long. It gave her a kind of mysterious authority.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said, and went into her prepared statement.

  Basically, she said the same things she told me, more or less. She denied any connection to Griff’s murder, admitted to Alejandro and the APC, but left out the lawn boy and the married man and all the colorful others, taking care of them with the blanket statement that she was a single red-blooded female in her thirties with a sex drive and a sex life that were nobody’s business.

  “But,” she said, “my brief relationship with Alejandro was a huge mistake in judgment, creating the appearance of a conflict of interest. I take my profession seriously, and I realize I have violated an ethic we hold dear. I deeply regret my mistake, and I have learned from it.”

  Before taking questions, Georgia Jack came to the mike. “I want y’all to know, Joanne here is a better reporter today for having erred and repented.”

  Georgia Jack had done a brief turn as a preacher before being defrocked for moral turpitude in 1961.

  “Today, she gave me her resignation, but I wouldn’t accept it. She’s taking two weeks off, without pay, in contrition. I stand behind her one hundred percent. All this sniffing around ladies’ petticoats for secrets and love letters is gutter behavior. And I have something else to say. Someone is trying to discredit ANN’s integrity and I am going to find out who.”

  Then he opened up the floor to questions.

  In one fell swoop, Jack Jackson had spun the focus away from Joanne and on to some outside force threatening ANN. If you want to debunk one conspiracy theory, give ’em another. From there on, all the questions had to do with which shadowy force was trying to ruin ANN—the religious right, the radical left, rival broadcasters, the Democrats, the Republicans, the print media, sinister foreign powers?

  Jackson hinted of vague, suspicious things, and promised that when he knew something, they’d know something.

  A reporter then asked Jackson if he had anything he wanted to confess. Jackson said that with all his sins, he’d have to do it in installments, the reporters didn’t have that much time, and in any case, most of his sins weren’t PG and couldn’t go out on the airwaves.

  When they broke for commercial, I scanned the day’s memos. The first, from Jack Jackson, iterated that he believed in freedom of speech and association, he believed in Joanne Armoire’s integrity, and he believed in the integrity of his employees.

  The second, from Dunbar, urged anyone who might have some secret that could compromise his or her objectivity to come talk to him about it, so that ANN could share the burden. I’m paraphrasing, but basically it was a call to confession. Voluntary, of course.

  And Bob McGravy, now head of ANN’s in-house Ethics Committee, had written a memo restating ANN’s policies and ethics quite righteously, but also gently reminding us that we are all flawed and should not pass judgment too quickly. Typically, he ended it with a bit of poetry.

  Why should not old men be mad?

  Some have known a likely lad

  That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist

  Turn to a drunken journalist;

  —W.B.Yeats

  When the commercials ended, Joanne answered a question about how she knew Griff. I couldn’t stay to listen, though; Jerry was standing outside my office rapping on the mottled glass, saying, “Makeup, Robin, makeup. We need time to rehearse, you know?”

  Jerry and I were going undercover as Mrs. and Mrs. Eugene Fullmark at Empire Semen that day, and we needed to get ready. I would much rather have watched Joanne talk about Griff, but sometimes one’s real life intrudes on, even overtakes, one’s problems and crises.

  I was going in disguise, with a black wig and thick glasses. It took a long time to get all my hair up under that wig, and the wig was made bigger to compensate, until I looked like Lady Bird Johnson. My eyebrows were darkened too, and in a bit of inspired work, the makeup woman lightly dusted temporary dye across my upper lip, giving me the faint illusion of a moustache. In less than an hour, I was transformed into Ivy (it was Jerry’s mother’s name) Fullmark, homemaker and helpmate to Eugene Fullmark, tax attorney.

  Jerry took one look at me after I got out of makeup and said, “Can’t you make her look pretty? I want a pretty wife.”

  Sometimes he’s so outrageously sexist, I can’t believe he isn’t pulling my leg. Then I remember he has no sense of humor.

  “Well, I’m the wife you got,” I said, talking tough.

  “You aren’t going to use that crusty sailor voice today, are you?” he said.

  There was something sick about the way Jerry relished this role-playing, us posing as man and wife. There was a powerful element of control in it, in his being able to make me play his wife because he was my boss. Or so I thought, but hey—I’m paranoid.

  In any case, the control wasn’t overtly sexual. Jerry often made crude, sexist remarks—then again, so did I—but I have to say this for Jerry, he never hit on me, not once. In fact, I always thought he was a little afraid of my body, the way he rarely touched me. It was like there was a one-inch offshore zone radiating from me, a force field he could not bring himself to breach.

  Before we left, we rehearsed our answers and our behavior towards each other in the office while Claire watched. We weren’t in sync.

  “You should defer to me a little, show me some respect at least,” Jerry complained. “We have to convince the people at Empire Semen we are married.”

  “I hate this. This isn’t reporting, this is acting.”

  “You know,” Jerry said, his voice rising slightly. “I’m starting to lose patience with you. You’re not being a team player, Robin. Just remember this”—he jabbed his finger in my face, careful not to cross the one-inch DMZ—“if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!”

  “It’s not the heat I can’t stand,” I said, grand and self-righteous. “It’s the stink!”

  Claire came between us, laughing. “Well, you’ve convinced me you’re married,” she said.

  On the way over, we acted even more married, sitting in the back of the surveillance van, fuming, not speaking to each other. Jerry and I didn’t see eye to eye on much, that’s for damn sure. All the male-female stuff aside, we had different visions about how to present the news. Jerry liked a lot of easily identifiable clichés for our viewers, who apparently don’t understand the meaning of tears in an old woman’s eyes in closeup as she smiles a little, ruefully, and says, “It’s been good and it’s been bad.” To help the viewer out with this emotional complexity, we cut the bite and instead explain that “Mary has known some sadness in her life, much sadness, sadness and joy.” No shit, Sherlock.

  Jim and Ellis parked around the corner from Empire Semen and did a quick equipment test. Jerry and I were both wired for sound and we both had small surveillance cameras with built-in mikes. The newsroom had been joking about Jerry’s “peniscam,” but, actually, his was concealed in a briefcase (his camera, not his penis) and the mechanics of his donation would not be shown, thank God.

  My camera was in my purse, or rather, Ivy’s purse, a large black vinyl handbag especially made to hold the small camera, with its tiny fish-eye lens and ni-cad battery pack. The network had put big money, for them, into this undercover capability and Jerry was determine
d to give the network its money’s worth. We went undercover a lot. We once went undercover at a church bingo hall for a story on suburban vice.

  When everything was checked and working, Jerry and I went into Empire Semen, a large, squat building in the North Bronx. Inside, a receptionist ushered us into an office to wait. Jerry and I still weren’t talking.

  A densely packed nurse came into the badly paneled room and gave us clipboards. As we filled out the medical questionnaire and a legal form, she sat across from us and watched. Jerry and I seethed at each other and mumbled under our breath. When we handed in our assignments, the nurse spoke at some length about the donation procedure, the storage procedure, and the insemination procedure, which could be performed by a licensed physician affiliated with Empire, by my own personal physician, or by myself in the privacy of my own home. They even delivered. In New York, you can get anything delivered.

  When she was through, she handed Jerry a paper cup and a printed sheet of “Ejaculate Handling Instructions.”

  “Better give me a bucket!” he said, winking at me. “Right, honey?” He was really enjoying this.

  “Har har har,” I said slowly.

  When Jerry went to jerk off, the nurse smiled at me. “How long you been married?” she asked. “No, lemme guess. Judging by the way you argue, I’d say ten years.”

  “It seems like a century,” I said, as my camera recorded every word. “I don’t believe in divorce, but sometimes …”

  “Sometimes …,” she prompted, expectant of secrets.

  “Sometimes, I just want to start over without him. The things he asks me to do …”

  “What things?”

  “You know, in bed. He has disgusting fetishes.”

  If I had to play this wife role, I was going to play it to the hilt—my own way.

  “Disgusting fetishes,” I went on. “When he bought that artificial leg, I said enough was enough, you know, because he has two legs already. So we don’t have sex anymore. I want to have a baby, but I don’t want to have to actually touch him, so this is the next best thing. When I’m ready for a baby, I’ll just come make a withdrawal, right?”