Festival of Deaths (2 page)

When the call came from DeAnna Kroll, Lotte was already awake, sitting up in bed, reading her way through a novel by Dorothy Cannell. Dorothy Cannell wrote murder mysteries of the humorous, rational sort, which was the sort Lotte liked. There had been very little reason and very little humor in her life. There had also been very little sleep. In the early days after the escape, Lotte had been unable to sleep because of nightmares. Then the world war had ended and the Israeli War of Independence had begun, and she had been awakened every night by gunfire and tears. Then there had been coming to America, and college and graduate school, and—it was thoroughly incredible how many things there were in life that could keep a person awake. Of course, by now, all those things had been eliminated. Lotte didn’t have to worry about money any more. The show seemed to generate the stuff out of thin air, so that now in her old age Lotte was not just financially secure, but positively rich. She owned this enormous Park Avenue apartment and a house in the Catskills. She had a closet full of idiotically expensive clothes and a financial consultant who took her to lunch at the Four Seasons to discuss aggressive strategies for capital maximization. Lotte didn’t have to worry about David any more, either. He was a rabbi with a big congregation on the Philadelphia Main Line. He had a wife and three children and a black Persian cat. His wife kept a kosher home and invited Lotte to it at regular intervals. In fact, David’s wife did better than that. Once a year, Lotte took the show on the road for a ten-city series of location programs. One of those programs was always filmed in Philadelphia during Hanukkah. When then happened, Rebekkah invited the entire cast and crew and really threw a party.

No, Lotte thought, there was really no worry in her life to keep her awake. She was just used to being awake. She went to bed late. She rose early. There was nothing she could do about it. She only wished she could convince DeAnna Kroll of that, because DeAnna Kroll always apologized too much when she called in the middle of the night.

The truth was, Lotte Goldman liked DeAnna Kroll very much. She had liked DeAnna Kroll from the moment the two of them met, in the back of a classroom at Columbia University, where Lotte was teaching a class on abnormal psychology. It had been an auspicious meeting if there ever was one. DeAnna had needed her score, as she put it, to make it necessary for Bart Gradon to promote her. She had been very direct about that aspect of the proposition. In return, Lotte had found herself being very direct about her side of it all. Her own honesty had astonished her. She had told DeAnna Kroll just how sick she was of psychiatry, and how much stupidity she thought it was. She had told DeAnna Kroll just how sick she was of Columbia University. There was something pinched and ungiving about the academic life that Lotte had never liked. On the day DeAnna Kroll had walked into her classroom, Lotte had just received her promotion to full professor, and it had left her in despair. The whole situation was crazy. It was very wrong to despise the good things life gave you when so many people had nothing at all. Lotte hadn’t been able to help herself. It was not logical to be depressed about good fortune. Lotte didn’t think she cared.

“Listen,” DeAnna Kroll had told her, with a sharp wind coming through an open window at their backs and making them both shiver, “it probably won’t work. But if it does work, there’s no place it can’t go.”

Well, it had worked.

It had worked in spades.

And so had Lotte and DeAnna.

There was no accounting for it, but DeAnna Kroll was the closest friend Lotte Goldman had ever had, and she had a feeling that the compliment was returned. For some reason or the other, they fit.

When the phone rang, Lotte put down her book and picked up without a second’s worry that what might be coming on the other end of the line was bad news about David or Rebekkah or the children. It was going to be DeAnna Kroll, and Lotte knew it.

“Don’t tell me,” she said, without bothering to say hello, “a saboteur got onto the set and blew it up. Bart Gradon saw yesterday’s show and died of embarrassment. We have been invaded by representatives of the Moral Majority.”

“The Moral Majority is out of business,” DeAnna said, “and Bart can’t be embarrassed. I don’t know about the set. I haven’t been down to the studio.”

“You’re not at the office?”

“Of course I’m at the office. It’s four o’clock in the morning. Where am I supposed to be except at the office?”

“I could say in bed with a man, DeAnna, but that would serve no purpose. What is the problem?”

“The Siamese twins never made it. They’re stuck in the fog at Heathrow.”

“Heathrow.” Lotte frowned. “Does the Concorde fly from Heathrow? Into New York?”

“It does, but it’s no use. I was going to call you first thing I got up here, but I decided to do some checking first. Short of somebody on staff inventing the transatlantic equivalent of ‘Beam me up, Scottie,’ there’s no way to get those two over here in time to tape.”

“Ah,” Lotte said. “What about Maria? What does Maria say?”

“I can’t find Maria.”

“It wasn’t Maria who told you the Siamese twins would not be able to tape?”

“It was Prescott Holloway. He went to the airport and waited for hours then
he
tried to call Maria and he couldn’t get her either. It’s not a great night for getting people, Lotte, let me tell you. I’ve been calling the whole staff. I’ve gotten hold of maybe half of them.”

“The other half probably have better things to do. You ought to get a better thing to do. You’re going to leave it until too late.”

“I had it too early. That’s why I’ve got a twenty-three year old daughter and I’m only thirty-eight. Never mind the other one. The other one is giving me migraines.”

“Your daughters will be fine,” Lotte said. She meant it. She had known both of DeAnna’s daughters since they were small children, and they seemed like very normal and psychologically healthy girls to her. They seemed especially psychologically healthy since she’d given up Freud in favor of feminism. “I suppose we’ll have to think of something to tape a show on. We couldn’t just let it ride for one day.”

“No. We don’t have enough of a lag.”

“We ought to have enough of a lag. Most of the other shows tape at least a week in advance.”

“Most of the other shows don’t have our reputation for breaking news. You got anything you want to do?”

“I don’t have anything that would constitute breaking news,” Lotte said drily. “I have a few things that are fairly provocative.”

“Such as what?”

“Such as those women I told you about. I went to their support group. The women whose husbands won’t perform cunnilingus.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line, and Lotte smiled to herself. In one of the odder divisions of labor on
The Lotte Goldman Show,
it was Lotte herself who checked out support and self-help groups and twelve-step programs for possible guests. DeAnna had tried it and found herself to be too conspicuous, and neither Lotte nor DeAnna trusted anyone else on the staff to do the initial work. Once Lotte had found a group she thought had possibilities, she put Maria Gonzalez on the case, or whoever had Maria’s job at the moment. Talent coordinators never seemed to last long on
The Lotte Goldman Show.

“Ah,” DeAnna said on the other end of the line. “Cunnilingus.”

“You have to admit it’s provocative,” Lotte pointed out.

“I know it’s provocative,” DeAnna said, “but I thought we had reservations. I thought we’d decided that these women were Looney Tunes.”

“Of course they’re Looney Tunes. If you want my private opinion, I think the leader of that particular group is a full-blow delusional schizophrenic with better-than-average coping mechanisms. But that’s not the point. This is an emergency. We have to do something very quickly. Isn’t that right?”

“You’ve been dying to have these people on, haven’t you? You’ve just been dying to.”

“Something like that,” Lotte admitted. “I think I can see myself, leading the discussion. How many calls do you think we can get about the explicitness of the language?”

“How explicit do you want to be?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“No,” DeAnna said. “Let me think. We’ve got to have the husbands. That’s the key.”

“You’re right. The husbands. It would be very good if one of them got on and said that he wanted to perform cunnilingus on his wife, but she would not let him.”

“It would be better if one of the wives had never had an orgasm. It’s really too bad we just can’t hire actors for these things.”

“Someday we should go on the program ourselves,” Lotte suggested, “and talk about how easy it is to do without sex and what a relief. Then we should cancel the program and take off for the south of France.”

“I can’t take off for the south of France,” DeAnna said. “Sherleen would never forgive me. They don’t have street people there.”

“Yes, they do, DeAnna, I have seen them. But the street people are not black.”

“Maybe Sherleen could get interested in being French. Never mind. I’ve got to make some phone calls. Cunnilingus.”

“Cunnilingus,” Lotte said solemnly.

“Would you mind coming in about an hour early? You probably won’t get to do anything but sit around, but at least I’ll be able to stop worrying about having everything in place, and if I can get hold of these people we can do a quick extra format run-through. Though why we do any format run-throughs at all is beyond me. Australian Aborigines know our format well enough to duplicate it.”

“I’ll be in an hour early,” Lotte promised. “Go do what you have to do and stop worrying. Everything will be all right. Everything always is.”

“Everything is always all right because I worry myself to death,” DeAnna said. “Never mind that, either. I’m going to get off the phone. I’ve got to make one more stab at finding Shelley Feldstein. Cunnilingus.”

“Cunnilingus,” Lotte repeated, for what must have been the third time. The phone went to dial tone in her ear, and she put the receiver back into the cradle.

The Dorothy Cannell novel was lying open on her knees. Lotte picked it up, stuck a stray piece of paper from the night table into it, and put it aside. Her cigarettes were on the night table, too, a habit she had started early and been unable to break. She took one out of her silver cigarette case and lit up.

DeAnna would go out and set up a program on cunnilingus, and they would run it, and it would rate well. Lotte knew all that to be true. She also knew that the older she got, the less interested she seemed to be in any of the things they did programs about. Sex was like eating and sleeping and shopping and all the rest of it, something people did over and over and over again, something that didn’t seem to get anyone anywhere. Just where Lotte wanted sex to get people, she didn’t know. She didn’t know where she wanted to get herself. But there it was.

She swung her legs out of bed and stretched.

Today she would go into the office early and that would break up the time. This afternoon she would have lunch with DeAnna at Viva Tel Aviv, and that would be a positive pleasure. This evening she would take a call from her brother, David, who would tell her it made no sense to keep kosher when she could never remember to observe Yom Kippur. Tonight she would be up too late, too restless to sleep.

Really, life would make a great deal more sense if she could spend a great deal more of it unconscious.

S
ARAH MEYER WAS ASLEEP
when Prescott Holloway called, but she wasn’t surprised to be wakened in the middle of the night, and she was even less surprised to be wakened by the company driver instead of her own boss. Sarah Meyer was only twenty-six years old, but she already had the world figured out, and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like much of anything. Sitting up front with Prescott on the way into the office, feeling cinched and strangled by her seat belt, it occurred to her that she had a right to complain. She’d had a right to complain months ago, when the job she’d wanted—the one she’d slaved for, in fact, the one she
deserved
—had gone instead to the outsider Maria Gonzalez. Sarah had known what all that was about, and she still did, and nobody was going to talk her out of it. The least Lotte could have done was to give Sarah the job as Maria’s assistant—but that hadn’t happened either. Nothing ever happened the way Sarah wanted it to. Nothing ever had, not even when Sarah was in high school in Scarsdale, not even when she went away to college at Barnard, never. Written down on paper, Sarah’s life looked perfect. Witnessed in living color, it was a mess. Sarah didn’t even have a roommate any more. Her last one, a snippy little bitch from Baton Rouge, had packed up and moved out back in August. Sarah was not in the least bit interested in finding someone else. Whoever she did find was sure to be a first-class pain in the ass. Whoever she did find was sure to be pretty.

Sarah rode all the way into the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building without saying more than “hello” to Prescott. She marched through the lobby to the elevators without saying more than “hello” to Jack. Since Prescott and Jack both knew her well, neither one of them tried to start a conversation. Sarah was in a bad mood, and when she was in a bad mood she was nasty. When she was in a bad mood she was
ugly,
even uglier than usual, and she knew it. That was Sarah’s stock in trade. She was ugly.

When the elevator doors closed, Sarah looked up at the car ceiling and sighed. She was tired and she was cranky and she felt even fatter than she really was. Her face felt like pudding. For years, she had told herself she would win out in the end, that the process was simple, that if she followed all the rules it would work out just like all those Beverly Cleary young adult novels she borrowed from the library. There would be her sister, Linda, pretty and brainless, knocked up at nineteen and sentenced to a life of diapers and drudgery. There would be Sarah, with an Ivy League diploma under her arm, marching off to the glamorous world of television. Or art. Or something. The problem was, Linda had indeed gotten married at nineteen, but she hadn’t been sentenced to drudgery, because she’d married a student at the Harvard Medical School. Now the student was the most successful plastic surgeon in Westchester County, and Linda had maids. Sarah had one room on the Upper West Side and a closet full of mark-downs from Lerner’s. She had also stopped going out to Westchester to visit Linda, because Linda always did the same thing. She played matchmaker. And it didn’t work.