What's a Girl Gotta Do?

by Sparkle Hayter

  When you’re running prompter, controlling how slow or fast the script feeds through, you follow the anchor’s reading for pace, which means you have to listen to him carefully on the headsets while following the text.

  “And?”

  “Sawyer Lash is the anchor,” he said.

  “Uh oh.”

  “He’s reading, and she can’t hear him or see his face. She starts to speed up the prompter a bit, so he reads a little faster, and Chrissie’s so engrossed in what she’s reading, and she reads so quickly that she speeds up the text even more without being aware of it. Sawyer is reading, faster and faster—straight from his eyes to his mouth without passing through his brain. He’s starting to sound like a Looney Tune.

  “Finally, the producer gets through to him on the IFB and tells him to read off the hard copy in his hands. So Sawyer stops reading—all of a sudden—still live to the nation and the world, and looks down at the pages in his hands, surprised, like he thought they were props.”

  Bob squeezed the clay hard and a dollop broke loose and landed in his soup with a dull splash.

  “He knows they’re not props,” I said.

  “Yeah, but he looked like he didn’t know, you know what I mean? So he read the rest of the story, head down, word for word off the page.”

  “But he’s such a nice guy.”

  “Yeah, and we needed someone to jump into the spot and fill it on short notice, someone with”—he paused and made a face, like he was quoting someone else—“credibility.”

  “Sawyer? Credibility? The guy who referred to Yeltsin in a phone interview as Doris Yeltsin?”

  “I know. We’re going to become a laughingstock. Entertainment Tonight is doing a story on Sawyer’s screw-ups and the cult following Sawyer now has among college fraternities. They use his show as part of a drinking game.”

  Every time Sawyer fucked up, stuttered, or mispronounced the name of a foreign capital, you had to drink. If he mispronounced the name of an American city (he liked to pronounce La Jolla, California, phonetically, for instance), you had to drink twice. Ratings were up.

  “Such a nice guy, and not a speck of dirt on him,” McGravy said, digging back into his soup. I guess he’d forgotten about that lump of clay. I was about to remind him, when Burke appeared.

  “I have to be running,” McGravy said quickly, wiping his mouth with his napkin and then pushing himself back from the table. “Left my flak jacket in the office. I’ll talk to you later, Robin. Nice to see you, Burke.”

  In the last week, I’d seen Burke more than during any other week since the first days of our marriage. I was starting to realize how little I actually enjoyed being in his company. I was starting to feel kind of happy that he’d left me.

  “I thought you’d want to know,” Burke said. “The police have picked up a suspect in the Griff murder.”

  “Who?”

  “Buster Corbus, a union goon, a troublemaker hired to harass Eloise Marfeles,” Burke said.

  “Really?”

  “Apparently, Marfeles interrogated every member of the staff on duty that night as well as a union informer or two, and got a tip that this goon was hired to sabotage the lights and plumbing in the rooms on the thirteenth floor, while everyone was at the party. Marfeles had your ANN folks up there for publicity, and these renegade union guys were going to take advantage of it.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Eloise, not only a hotel queen, but a crime fighter as well.”

  “Well, the publicity is bad. She’s been putting a lot of pressure on the cops to solve this case, bossing them around, nagging them, berating them. I guess she decided to get the goods on her own. I bet the woman’s got a wicked touch with an electric cattle prod,” he said, and laughed. “My scoop on this should be airing, oh, about now. I told you it wasn’t really a conflict of interest.”

  “Please! It’s still an enormous conflict. Perhaps not at Channel 3 but …”

  “Can I sit down?”

  “Sit at a table that hasn’t been bussed yet?” I asked.

  “You aren’t being fair,” he said deliberately and uncomfortably, ignoring the postmeal slop on the table, just to show me. Still, when the busboy came and cleared the mess away, Burke’s jaw unclenched and his shoulders relaxed. With his thumb and forefinger, he nonchalantly flicked a cracker crumb off the heavy laminate table.

  “You know, it’s a good thing we’re getting divorced,” I said, watching him. “If we’d stayed married, I swear they would have found you one day face—down in your poisoned spaghetti.”

  “Aw, be nice, Robin,” he said in his sweetest voice, the kind of voice you use to reassure wild animals.

  “So, tell me, why did this union goon kill Griff?”

  “It’s speculation but they believe the guy went into the room, maybe through a heat duct, thinking Griff was at the party with everyone else, and surprised him. What do you think?”

  “I think you can make a case against anyone if you try hard enough. I have firsthand experience with this now, unfortunately. So the cops get a suspect and Eloise Marfeles gets to screw the unions. Happy ending.”

  “You prefer the feminist conspiracy theory? Or the religious right?”

  The waitress came and we ordered drinks.

  “No, I hope they’ve got the guy, really,” I said. “But it still doesn’t answer a big question I have on my mind. Who hired Griff?”

  “Joanne told Amy she thinks Griff was trying to build a harem of submissive professional women,” Burke said, laughing. “Submissive. Imagine including you.”

  “Yeah, it seems like a lech of his caliber would go after babes—young, dewy models—instead of dames—troublesome women journalists in their thirties. No, it makes more sense to me that Griff was working for someone else, and just using this as a sideline, to make a few bucks and get his pole greased, but who was he working for?”

  “Mangecet?”

  “I just can’t put Mangecet and Griff together in my mind.”

  “Yeah, Mangecet strikes me as the kind of guy who’d have his own in-house investigators, clean-cut guys with a mission,” he said, and stopped. He didn’t want to give anything away to me, so he changed the subject.

  “Did you see Amy today?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well? What did you think?”

  “My teeth ached afterwards.” But even I was getting tired of this adversarial stance. It was wearing me out. The problem wasn’t Amy Penny, I told myself grudgingly. The problem was Burke Avery. And Robin Hudson.

  “We were doomed. We always knew it,” I said.

  I saw Eric come in and walk to the bar. He looked at me but didn’t wave. Burke followed my glance to Eric and back and said, “You and Eric have something going?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I saw the way he looked at you,” he said. “Did you sleep with him?”

  “I’m allowed to now. I think I’m going to like this single stuff.”

  The last sentence was barely out of my mouth when Burke grabbed me by both shoulders, looked at me with an expression of terror, and kissed me hard. I was so surprised by this move that it took me a moment to recover but when I did, I was decisive. I pushed him back across the table and slapped his face.

  The slap was unnecessary, but I didn’t know if I’d ever have another justifiable opportunity, so I seized the day.

  “You’re an engaged man,” I said. “You can’t kiss me anymore. You waived that privilege.”

  “I know,” he said, contrite. “I know. I’m sorry. I lost my head. I still have feelings for you and, and … I guess I got lost in the moment.”

  “Are you trying to completely confuse me?”

  “No! It’s hard getting divorced. I mean it when I say I still have feelings for you. I feel kind of mixed up too,” he said. “All week I’ve been debating whether I really wanted to end it. I mean, divorce is so … final.”

  I was at a loss for words momentarily. I looked around whil
e I got my thoughts together. Now Eric had his back to me, but he was looking into the mirror behind the bar and his reflection was staring at me.

  “When you were with me,” I said very slowly, spelling it out, “all you wanted was other women. Now that you’re a hair’s-breadth away from being single again, you think you might want me?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, yeah, I want you, but I don’t want to be married to you. I wish we could date every Friday night or something like that.”

  I arched my left eyebrow and opened my mouth to comment on this childish, utopian vision of his, a world where all women loved him and were willing to share him freely.

  Before I could say anything, Burke said, “I know that’s stupid. You don’t have to tell me. It’s just, everything has happened so fast this year. You know, you and me, then Amy and me. Before you know it, I’ll have a family and a big house. I’ll never again be the person who lived in the East Village with a buxom redheaded wife. It makes me feel kind of … sad.”

  He smiled at me, certain that I would find this somehow charming.

  “You always wanted a family and a house, with lots of trees and streets where your kids could bicycle in safety.”

  “I did,” he said. “I still do. I’m just having a weak moment.”

  Have it somewhere else, I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud, a sign I was getting soft.

  “Look, I appreciate your telling me the stuff about Griff.”

  “I knew you’d want to know.”

  “That was thoughtful,” I said.

  “Let me see you home, make sure you get home safely.”

  “No, thanks, I’m sober and besides, I’m not going straight home.”

  I slapped a five on the table for my drink and got up. Burke got up too. He leaned over and kissed me again, this time on the cheek.

  We said good-bye and, to vex him, I walked over to Eric.

  “Did you hear about Griff?” I asked. “They’ve got a suspect.”

  “Just heard,” Eric said. His tone was clipped.

  “So I guess Browner isn’t going to confess to anything?”

  “Doubt it,” he said. He raised a long-necked bottle to his lips and drank. His Adam’s apple bobbed. It turned me on.

  He looked away.

  Well, it’s been a long time, but this man-woman stuff was starting to come back to me. If he doesn’t call and he gives you the cold shoulder when you run into him, do not chase, because it will make you look really foolish. Looking foolish was something I wanted to avoid at all costs.

  “I figured you’d want to know,” I said, my chill, clipped tone matching his. “See you.”

  I turned to go. He turned away too.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE SUBWAY PLATFORM WAS JAMMED. On a bench in the center of it slept a reeking homeless man whose clothes had all turned to the color of sludge, while an old woman in a cheap coat and orthopedic shoes stood nearby, probably going home after a long day at work.

  That put me into a foul mood. In another time, the old woman could have prodded the vagrant with her cane and shamed him into giving up the bench: On your way, young man. In the nineties, you couldn’t be sure the vagrant on the bench wouldn’t jump up and blow you away, or shove a screwdriver into your skull. Where oh where is Batman when you really need him?

  Kissing Burke made me feel sort of sick inside, a feeling intensified by the presence of several young couples in love on the subway ride home. Antiromantic epithets formed in my head as I watched them, and I had a sudden urge to warn them: Stop! Go back! Abandon yourselves to meaningless sex! But just then the Susan Brave light flashed on in the back of my brain, the light that warns me I am crossing a line from cynical single to bitter spinster. I checked my thoughts.

  Susan Brave. Why was Griff investigating her? Susan, Joanne—both people who had paid special attention to me the night of the party. Now I knew why. They thought Griff had given me something on them.

  Susan, Joanne, and me—the only people I knew for sure he was investigating. What did we have in common, aside from the fact that we were all women, roughly the same age, single, in television, and had all, at one time or another, worked for Greg Browner?

  We had all worked for Greg Browner and it was fair to assume Greg had hit on all of us.

  Perhaps Paul Mangecet did hire Griff to investigate us, I thought, as the train lurched and staggered through the semi-dark tunnel. Maybe he wanted control of Greg and Greg’s stock and was trying to get the goods on him. Not only would Mangecet get Greg’s stock, but he could get Greg’s “credibility” and win more of the stockholders to his side. So maybe he wasn’t investigating us so much as he was investigating Greg, and we were just part of the web.

  Who else was in the web? Madri Michaels sprang instantly to mind. She and Greg were co-anchors for a while. In fact, he had “found” her at an affiliates’ convention and brought her to ANN to anchor weekends, before he elevated her to sit on the evening news throne next to his a couple of years later. I took it as a given he had not only put the moves on her, but that he had succeeded.

  When Greg hit on me and, in a fairly obvious way, indicated it could help my career, I didn’t file a complaint against him and I didn’t really talk about it.

  I know, I know. I seem like the type to file a complaint, but I didn’t, and precisely because I am that type. I have a reputation as a … bit of a troublemaker and I didn’t think anyone would believe me, a lowly writer with a known bad attitude—and a history of insanity in her family—over him, a millionaire and a media force.

  I have wondered since if I should have complained, if it was, you know, my duty as a woman. But I’d been lobbying for a reporter slot and after the stuff with Greg happened and I was fired from his show, they plugged me into the weekend reporting slot. I didn’t want to make waves.

  This was starting to make sense to me. Griff knew we wouldn’t complain. We were women who had been sexually harassed in some fashion by Greg Browner and, out of our own self-interest, kept quiet.

  When I came up from the subway that night, I had this eerie feeling I was being followed.

  At first it didn’t frighten me, because it was relatively early, about eleven-thirty. I expected to see a lot of people when I turned onto Avenue B. But instead of the usual people hanging out on street corners, congregating around burning trash barrels to keep warm, the streets were deserted. The weather had turned colder and driven most people inside.

  I turned around slowly and saw a tall man walking in the shadows by an abandoned building. I couldn’t make out his features, although when he walked beneath the streetlight I thought I caught a glimpse of a tweed overcoat. Damn. I’d been in such a hurry that morning I’d forgotten to put my cologne in my bag, and I couldn’t find my Epilady.

  Up ahead I saw the red-and-yellow awning of a bodega, a little mom-and-pop Hispanic grocery, and I ran up to it and ducked inside. Behind the counter, a fat man in a yellow T-shirt sat leafing through a Spanish magazine. A portable black-and-white TV was turned to a Spanish game show and all the contestants were laughing at something the host had said.

  The man looked up at me suspiciously. I acted like a customer, walking down the shelves of Café Bustelo, dried yucca, guava paste, and blue-and-yellow Goya cans towards the steel and glass cooler in the back.

  Behind me the front door squeaked open and a little bell rang. I froze midstep and looked up at the round, fish-eye mirror wedged in the corner above the cooler to see who it was. It was a kid, a teenager, maybe five feet tall.

  I relaxed and let out a deep breath, then took a can of coffee and went back to the counter. Above me, a heating vent blew a gust of warm, dusty air.

  “Is that all?” the man asked. A tinny cheer rose from the TV set.

  “Yeah,” I said. I glanced out the window but couldn’t see the tall man. Maybe I wasn’t being followed, I reasoned. But in the event I was, a can of coffee in a plastic bag could be a weapon.

  Burke,
after surveying my umbrella, my poison ivy, and my spray cologne spiked with cayenne pepper, once asked me if there was anything that couldn’t be a weapon if it fell into my hands. The only thing I could think of was Jell-O.

  “To you, the world is just full of weapons, isn’t it?” he said.

  Yep, and the world is full of reasons to use them, I thought now, as I left the store, prepared in my heart to bludgeon a man to death with a coffee can if necessary.

  But the man had vanished.

  As I approached my apartment building, I heard footsteps and took off running and when I did the footsteps stopped. But as I fumbled with my keys at my front door, I felt a hand on my shoulder and a woman’s voice behind me said, “Robin? May I talk to you?”

  I wheeled around.

  There was Amy Penny, bundled up against the cold in a preppy camel-hair coat, standing behind me blowing warm air into her gloved hands.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “May I come in? It’s really important.”

  “Oh, why the hell not,” I said. I was really aggravated now, but I wasn’t about to leave her alone on my street. With her Upper East Side dress and affected ways, in my neighborhood, she was a property crime just waiting to happen.

  “No point freezing your ass off out here.” I opened the door for her.

  “That perfume you’re wearing,” she said as we waited for the elevator. “Is that … L’Heure Bleue?”

  “Yes,” I said. The elevator came.

  “I thought so,” she said, and started crying.

  Mr. Grooper from the third floor got off as I shepherded her into the elevator. “Don’t cry for Christ’s sake. Please? Tell me what’s bothering you, and then tell me why I should give a shit.”

  But Amy Penny was crying so hard she couldn’t talk through her convulsive sobs.

  “This is my floor. Come on,” I said, leading her through the dim hallway. I opened the apartment door and waved her in.