A ruling passion : a novel (16 page)

"But you'll have one," he promised. "You'll have everything you want."

"I know," Sybille said. And beneath the sounds of Ted moving furniture upstairs, they went to their bedroom, and Nick turned the lock with a loud click.

Holding him later, as they lay on the rumpled bed, Sybille began to think there was an advantage in having three of them there. With his work and his partner all in one place, Nick would find it natural to work long hours; he wouldn't be making a lot of demands on his wife. He'd leave her alone, but she wouldn't be alone in the house; she wouldn't have to worry anymore about filling her hours with other people, other sounds. And I'll be working, too, she thought. Tomorrow I'll be sure to find a job in a San Jose television station. It would all be fine. They'd have no trouble sharing the house, they'd have no trouble being married. And they'd be happy.

The house was narrow, on a narrow lot, with brown grass in front and back, a tilting, emaciated palm near the driveway, and a large window in the living room looking into an identical window in an identical house across the street. The rooms were painted an odd shade of mustard which glowed with an eerie incandescence in the light from the streedamp in front of the house. Sybille and Nick bought white bed sheets and hung them as curtains, but, even though that diflPused the light, still they looked strangely unearthly to each other and it was always a little startling when one of them looked up and wondered, briefly, who that oddly hued stranger was.

The three of them arranged their few pieces of furniture, put away their mismatched dishes and utensils, and shelved the cartons of books they had hauled from Palo Alto, with their furniture, in a rented van. For a week, as they cooked their first dinners in the large kitchen, they tripped over the ripped linoleum and each other, but soon they began to find their own spaces. And each night after dinner, Nick and Ted went back to work, and much later, Sybille and Nick went to their room, and Ted went to his.

'Tou're sure you're all right here?" Nick asked as he reached for her in bed.

"I'm fine," she said. "I'm happy."

He believed her. She had not complained about the house after their first day there; and she no longer talked about not being really important in his life. Even the mustard walls had become a joke between them. But still, Nick knew there was a restlessness in Sybille always simmering below the surface, and two weeks after they had moved in, when they had turned out the light in their bedroom, she lay tense beside him, turning and turning until, finally, she slid out of bed.

"Can I help?" he asked.

"No, I'm just not sleepy. I think I'll read through my television

notebooks for awhile. I usually do, at night. You go to sleep; I'll read in the living room."

He raised himself on his elbow, watching her in the light from the street. "You're worried about finding a job."

"Yes. But it's all right; I'll get over it." She picked up one of the notebooks on the bureau. "I just have to talk myself out of worrying. I'll find something. Good night, Nick."

He lay back. Talk herself out of worrying. It was amazing, he thought, that that strength was always there, even when she was insecure in so many other ways. And she would talk herself out of it; he was sure of it. And she would get a job, and be the success she always vowed to be. He did not doubt that any more than she did.

The next morning, Nick and Ted left early to buy equipment for their workshop. But Sybille had left even earlier. And that day she found a job at the largest television station in San Jose.

Now, she thought; finally, this minute, my life really begins.

Chapter 7

[ M m hey were so busy they almost never saw each other.

^^^ Nick and Ted had formed a consulting company

^1 ^ named Omega Computing Services, and they

^ ^W spent their days helping companies install and

1 I operate new computer systems. The rest of the

time they worked in the office they had set up in the family room; evenings and weekends, through lunch, often through dinner, they put together proposals to attract new customers, wrote computer programs for the customers they had, improved the programs they'd already installed, and tossed ideas back and forth for ways to use computers that no one had yet thought of When their minicomputer at home could not handle the complex programs they were writing, they rented time on a mainframe computer in downtown San Jose, and, since it was cheaper to rent time at night, they would begin after dark, often working until morning, when they would install the new program in a customer's company and teach office workers how to use it. By the time they returned home, late in the day, they were too tired even for dinner, and they disappeared into their bedrooms for a rare ftiU nighfs sleep.

And all the while, Sybille was moving up at KTOV, always moving up. Before coming to San Jose, she had written to the president of KNEX in Palo Alto, suggesting she would expose Terence Beauregard's sexual activities unless he wrote her a letter of reference. After a week of silence he had sent her one that was tepid, but better than she had expected. Still, the day she arrived at her new job, she was defiant and fearful, and her fear was with her until she realized that no one connected her with the Ramona Jackson story. From then on, it was as if that whole scandal had never occurred. She was a part of KTOV, starting fresh.

She worked from early morning to late at night, twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch, listening, watching, soaking up information, finding ways to use everything she already knew to impress those she worked for. She wasn't trying to be liked; she wanted to be respected and admired, she wanted to be noticed, she wanted to be on camera. But that was not what they wanted from her. "You're too good to be on camera," they said. "Good producers are hard to come by and you're one of the best. And that's where we want you." They increased her salary and gave her a bigger desk in the newsroom. Putting her on the other side of the camera was out of the question.

Sybille thought about quitting. But no other station in the valley could compare with KTOV. I'll make them change their mind, she vowed, m produce whatever they want me to, and when I have enough influence, they'll give me what I want. They'll have to.

Within a year, she was writing and producing the noon news five days a week, and producing the ten-o'clock news on weekends. And she was creating a new program that would be hers to produce and direct if it was approved.

She was working at such a high pitch that for the first time in years she needed no diet to keep her weight down. Every morning before dawn, she exercised for an hour; just before she went to work she had a cup of coffee with Nick and Ted, and then she forgot about eating until dinner. That was at nine, or later, either at the station or at home, brought in by one of the three of them, or cooked by Nick. They didn't much care what it was; they were too busy to pay attention to food.

For SybiUe, thoupits of everything but work dropped away the minute she stepped tlirough the glass front door of KTOV The station sat on a small rise on the eastern edge of San Jose. A network affiliate, it reached the electronics whiz kids who were creating what was already being called Silicon Valley; and the Mexican-Americans whose

parents had come north a generation or two earlier to settle on the fertile land; and the Californians whose families had been there since the Gold Rush, and talked about the old days, when you could drive from San Francisco to Monterey without seeing a single shopping mall or fast-food drive-in. KTOV reached them all, and because it was aggressive and innovative and it successfully targeted each group, it was the fastest-growing and richest station in the valley. It was the perfect place for someone driven by ambition.

At the early hour when Sybille walked in the front door, the receptionist had not arrived, the secretaries were not due for some time, and no visitors or talk-show guests had appeared. She walked through the silent lobby and hushed corridors, almost trembling with excitement. She felt she owned everything around her, from the greenroom to the makeup rooms, from the control room to the main studio, high-ceilinged, with four semicircular sets permanendy in place for the news and weather, a cooking show, a cozy afternoon talk show, and a Sunday-afternoon entertainment hour. She had a right to be there. She belonged.

Because it was on top, there was an air of excitement everywhere in the KTOV building, not felt by outsiders, but as real and powerful to Sybille as a current running through her blood. Much of the time she barely noticed Nick's long days and weekends; she was engrossed in her work at the station or at a desk she had set up in a corner of their bedroom. She liked knowing that Nick and Ted were just a few feet away, in the family room, but they did not see each other until a break came in their work or one of them decided it was time to eat.

Sometimes Sybille emerged first, to suggest dinner or just to wander around the cluttered family room that was the office, workshop and research lab for Omega Computing Services. Huge flow charts were tacked to the walls; reams of computer printouts were strewn over a long table made from a door balanced across two file cabinets. A large computer, its glowing numbers and letters seeming to dance on its dark screen, sat on an identical table nearby. A rolling stool and a typist's chair found in the storeroom of the engineering building at Stanford rolled from one table to the other. Nearby was a Ping-Pong table with two scarred paddles and a sagging net, the scene of fierce competitions. A coffeepot stood beside two Mickey Mouse mugs; cardboard doughnut boxes were filled with notes and sketches; and in a corner a pencil lay forgotten beneath dusty cobwebs.

Sybille would watch the men absendy, still thinking about her own work; or she would peer at their printouts, trying to decipher the

program language, or gaze in bewilderment at the rows of equations on the computer screen. She knew vaguely what Nick did all day as a consultant, and she knew that their goal was to expand four- or five-or sixfold as rapidly as possible, to hire a staff and move into new quarters and then expand even more. She knew it all, but she could not understand what they wrote.

"It's a foreign language," she said. But she did not ask him to explain it. When he tried, the numbers and symbols swelled and swayed dizzyingly in front of her; she just wasn't interested enough to work at understanding them. So she glanced at Nick's work, surprised at its mysteries, and then asked about dinner. The three of them usually ate right there, shoving papers aside to make a clear space on one of the worktables, and then Sybille would go back to her desk to work on the next day's schedule, or the new program she was creating that she would soon present to the station manager and the news director, for their approval.

On the nights when he was home, Nick came to her after midnight and led her to bed. As tired as they both were then, they were buoyed up by an energy that fed on what they had done all day, and thoughts of tomorrow. Nick was instandy aroused, as soon as they lay together, and it was the closest Sybille ever came to the kind of intense peak of feeling she had once dreamed of It was as much exhaustion and the excitement of their separate lives as passion, but they did not know that. While it lasted, they thought it was love.

Valerie doesn't have anything like this.

The thought came to Sybille at odd moments, like flashes of lightning, so bright it blocked out everything else. Then it would be gone. But other thoughts of Valerie would appear at any time, her image dimmed by Sybille's unabated ftiiy, but still there, intruding. Where is she? What is she doin0?

She knew a litde bit, from talking to her mother, who still sewed for Valerie's family. She had spent a year in Europe after college, and then traveled around the world. Somewhere along the way, she had married Kent Shoreham, someone from Boston whose parents knew Valerie's parents. She and Kent divided their time between Maryland's Eastern Shore and New York, where they had bought an apartment on Fifth Avenue. That was all Sybille's mother knew.

It was enough for Sybille, for now. All she could do was keep track of Valerie until she found a way for them to meet again. And tlien... She didn't know. But she would, when she had time to think, and to plan.

She wanted to learn to ride horseback, knowing Nick had shared that with Valerie, but it was too expensive, and so, temporarily, she gave it up. But she did take up skeet shooting, another of Valerie's sports, and she was so good, her aim so steady and her eye so sharp, that her score was better than Valerie's ever had been. Valerie doesn't have the patience, she thought, to become an expert at anything.

I have Nick, Sybille thought; I have my job, I have my shooting. She repeated it at night before she fell asleep. In every way she was superior to Valerie.

When she learned she was pregnant she bought a few new clothes and managed to squeeze in a doctor's appointment once a month; otherwise nothing in her life changed. In February she hired a nanny. And in March, Chad was bom.

For a few days, Sybille let herself relax, backing off from the relentless pace she had kept for nearly two years, to sit at the window, staring at the heavy clouds above the houses across the street, thinking about how this might affect her plans.

"That's an astonishing kid," Nick said, sitting beside her a week after Chad was born. "Did you see him smile?" And even through her absorption, Sybille heard the pride and elation in his voice.

"He's very handsome," she said. "He looks like you."

Nick grinned. "I thought so, too. But he has your mouth. Lucky kid; it's a very kissable mouth."

She shook her head. "I don't see any of me in him; he's much more like you. He'll probably use a computer before he learns to talk."

She did not nurse Chad; she had no time. "I'll be at the station all day and if I don't get my sleep at night I won't be worth a thing at my job."

"Don't go back for awhile," Nick said. "They've given you two months off; why not take it?"