Rise and Shine (18 page)

Joseph Murphy is the president of Meghan’s network. Before that he was the president of a company that makes and sells cars, and before that the president of a company that makes and sells major appliances. At his first meeting with the staff, he had made the mistake of describing his strategy for the network as similar to his strategies for the other two. “Don’t think of it as programming,” he’d said. “Think of it as product.”

Meghan had named him Joe-Joe the Dog-Faced Boy. The name stuck. Sometimes when he was leaving the newsroom, which he liked to visit to show that he knew, as he said, “where the heart of the network lies,” people would bark. He thought it was a newsroom tradition, like insisting on going to the actual site of a big story when it would make just as much sense to him to take the feed from a local affiliate.

“Miss Fitzmaurice,” he said. “I don’t believe we’ve met. How are you?”

“Fine thanks, Mr. Murphy. Actually we did meet at the fifth anniversary party for
Rise and Shine.
I had a long talk with your wife.” Apparently Joe and Rita were having a hard time cracking the code of New York City after the halcyon days of Detroit and Indianapolis. Media types thought they were too corporate, and corporate types were always enraged at the pieces the news side had done about their business practices. Rita was spectacularly indiscreet. She drank white wine like it was water and we were chatting in Death Valley at noon. I had liked her immediately. And she loved Meghan, could quote from her greatest hits on
Rise and Shine
the way I liked to think our parents would have done had our parents been in any way those kinds of parents. But that was before Meghan said “Fucking asshole” so that America could hear. I doubted that Rita was among those women who believed Meghan had done the right thing by calling Ben Greenstreet by his proper name. When Joe was named network chief, the first thing she’d asked him to do was arrange an audience with the pope.

There was silence on Joseph Murphy’s end of the phone. I had breached the firewall of New York propriety: if someone believes you have never met, you must go with that belief if you are the less powerful of the two. How had I forgotten, given the number of anchormen, diplomats, writers, and hedge fund managers to whom I had been introduced three, four, five times?

“Mr. Murphy?”

“Call me Joe. And you are Bridget, is that right? I have a sister by that name.” Along with Colleen, Maureen, and Mary Pat, I’d be betting. I heard adenoidal breathing on the line but thought it would be unwise to shout “Tequila!” Few Murphy clans think of Tequila as a name.

“The thing is, Bridget, I’m trying to reach your sister, and I’m having a dickens of a time. I’ve left a number of messages with her assistant and at her home, and I’ve even called her agent and her husband at his office. And I just can’t seem to track her down.”

“She’s on vacation, Joe. She doesn’t go often, but when she does she really likes to relax. Drop out of sight. Go off the reservation.” I’d run out of clichés.

“Of course she does. So do I, although Mrs. Murphy complains that I’m still on the phone to the office too much. But I get out there and golf, play a little tennis. Your sister plays tennis, if I recall.”

He recalled. She’d beaten the crap out of him at a mixed doubles match for charity. The poor guy had gotten so red in the sun at the tennis center that the EMTs in one corner of the court had been in a half crouch during most of the match. He recalled, and now he was going to rush the net, old Joe Bow-Wow Murphy.

“I’m sure she will be in touch as soon as she gets back, Joe.”

“Well, there’s the problem, Bridget. I need to be in touch with her now. Things are a little hot around here, and there are some issues that need to be ironed out with Meghan right now. And I know that she was at Grosvenor’s Cove for the week. In fact, our old old friends the Braithwaites—do you know them, he’s on the museum board?—they saw her there. Susan Braithwaite told Rita that Meghan was looking marvelous.”

“Joe, I would bet you the concierge at Grosvenor’s Cove would put you right through.”

“Oh, he was happy to. He’s a good man. Cecil, his name is, but the British way, you know. Ce-cil. Beautiful voice, too. The trouble is, she’s checked out.”

“Ah,” I said. The breathing had stopped. Tequila was either thinking hard or calling Cecil on the other line.

“She stayed the week and then she left. And now it’s been almost a month since we’ve heard from her. And someone said to me, Well, if there’s anyone who knows how to track her down, it’s her sister, they’re as thick as thieves.” It seemed an apt metaphor: the Fitzmaurice sisters, who had snatched quite a life out of not much of one. Or at least the elder had, and the younger had come along for the ride. “So here I am, calling you before I call the ambassador. Can you imagine being ambassador to Jamaica? Heck of a cushy job.”

I was doing the mental scramble. “Gee, I assumed she’d left the number with the people at the Cove,” I said. “I don’t have it right here. Let me call you with it from home, Joe.”

“I would appreciate that, Bridget. And when you talk to Meghan, tell her that she’s in all our thoughts.” And those of the FCC.

“Jesus Lord!” cried Tequila from the next room.

She and Alison both came into my office and closed the door. With three people in my office, it feels like the subway at rush hour. Tequila sat down and knocked a pile of files off my desk.

“She’s gone,” Tequila said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “It’s just that this Murphy guy can’t find her. If you were his secretary, he’d be on the phone to her right now.”

“Saying what?” said Alison.

“I went missing once,” said Tequila.

“When?”

“Whenever. Sometimes you just don’t want to mess with people. You don’t want no questions, no ooooh-oooooh worrying-about-you nonsense, no looking at you like, Oh, no, Tequila, times are bad. You just want to keep yourself to yourself.”

“One of the papers today said that Meghan is exploring other opportunities,” Alison said.

For someone who has been indicted, it’s a bad fact pattern. For a patient, it’s a poor prognosis. But in TV, it’s exploring other opportunities. That’s the kiss of death. “It would be better if they said she was in rehab,” I said, picking up the old, misshapen pot in which I kept my pencils. It was the first pot I’d ever fired. That’s the kiss of death for a childless forty-three-year-old woman. The lumpy clay thing on her desk she’d made herself.

“One of the papers today said she was in rehab.”

My phone rang. Tequila answered it with the haughty voice again, then put the call on hold. “You are a popular girl with the men today,” she said. “It’s Mr. Altercation.”

“I don’t know anyone named Altercation. In fact, I don’t even believe there exists anyone named Altercation.”

“That’s not a real name, Tequila,” said Alison.

Tequila presented her enormous rack for inspection, which is what she does when she is annoyed. Tequila has the breasts of a grandmother and the spindly legs of a grandfather. She heightens the effect by insisting on wearing leggings and the sorts of oversize shirts that were popular when she was a teenager, usually with some kind of spangles on the shirt. Today a sequined tiger lurched toward Alison and me as Tequila bristled, perhaps because in this case she was remembering how often it’s been suggested that her name is not a real name, either.

“Altercation, Altercation. That man you know. That one who gave you all that money and you say no funny business but we think you lying. Him!”

“Prevaricator?”

“What I said!” said Tequila as the tiger lunged toward us.

“Miss Fitzmaurice,” he said softly on the phone.

“Bridget, please, Mr. Prevaricator. How’s your granddaughter?”

“My granddaughter?”

“The one who memorized
The Cat in the Hat.
”

He chuckled softly. “How good of you to remember,” he said. “She’s moved on to
Amelia Bedelia.
”

“I bet you enjoyed those,” I said.

“As a matter of fact, I was discussing them with your sister not long ago. That’s why I’m calling.” As he spoke, I reached for a pad and pencil, knocking my Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association paperweight and a jar of paper clips off my desk. I took notes, and Tequila and Alison stayed put. When I said, “How does she really seem to you?” both of them leaned forward a bit in the molded plastic chairs.

“Thank you,” I said, and then, “I can’t thank you enough,” and then, “Thank you very much again.”

“You were right,” I said softly. “She just wants to disappear for a while. No cell reception. No phone. No address. But I do have a fax number.” I pulled a sheet of paper off the pad and wrote in capital letters “WHEN ARE YOU COMING HOME?” Tequila took it from my hands, and a moment later I heard a birdlike beeping as the old fax machine handed down to us by a law firm began to send. Everything we had was hand-me-down, every chair, every computer, every desk. The beeping stopped. Somewhere in the kitchen of a small seaside house in a remote part of Jamaica lent to Meghan by Edward Prevaricator, who had run into her at Grosvenor’s Cove and realized she needed a place to stay, there apparently was a fax machine and my words would spill out the other end.

“I’m tired,” I said. “I’m going home.”

“Your nephew called, too. He say nothing important, just to talk. And Commissioner Lefkowitz say he’s out tonight at a meeting in Staten Island. He say that girl DeBra is at Rikers, got capped for drugs. She’s crying, carrying on, say it’s because her baby died.”

“Jesus, I’m so tired.” I could hear the rain hitting the metal hatch to the basement out in back of the house. The roof in the transitional building needed replacing, and I hadn’t found a donor yet to underwrite it. I hoped it wasn’t leaking. The rain started to come down hard. “You got an extra umbrella?” I asked Alison.

Next morning on my desk was a newspaper turned to a story on DeBra’s arrest, a warrant for one of the moms in the shelter on an old drug charge, and a sheet of paper that said in capital letters “I’M NOT. DON’T WORRY.” Somehow my pencil pot had gotten knocked down and broken into two big, ungainly pieces, so I stuffed the pencils in the drawer and threw the pot in the trash.

M
EGHAN ONCE TOOK
me to lunch at a place in midtown that is famous because it is the place where people like Meghan have lunch. Actually, Meghan herself rarely has lunch out, preferring a salad at her desk or at home after she swims. But when she does eat, she eats at this restaurant, which has mediocre food and a media clientele. Part of its charm is that the staff now know anyone who is anyone in television or movies or print journalism. Many of those people have spent so much time with their noses pressed against the window of the true American aristocracy or the new American big-name money that to have a maître d’ say, “Good afternoon, Miss Fitzmaurice,” gives them a feeling of well-being no amount of overdone salmon can quench.

I don’t quite get the point of the place, because it is impossible to talk about anything substantive there. The one time we went we couldn’t trash the woman from another network who is always angling for Meghan’s job because she was just a few tables over. We couldn’t trash Meghan’s producer, Josh, whom Meghan calls Josh 3.0—she likes to say that when the 4.0 upgrade comes out, it will have news judgment and a sense of humor already installed—because Josh’s wife, an agent, was at the table on one side of us. And we couldn’t even trash people who weren’t there because sitting back-to-back with Meghan was one of the gossip columnists for one of the tabs, and he was listening to everything we said so carefully that next morning there was an item saying Meghan had criticized her Cobb salad. I had it, too, and I can tell you it was lame, not enough cheese or bacon and too much lettuce.

We had been reduced to talking the entire lunch about Leo’s high school graduation, whether I should find a bigger apartment, and whether our aunt Maureen needed to be moved from her apartment to an assisted living complex. It was a real wow of a lunch, made worse by the sight of so many people who loathed one another kissing on both cheeks as though they had been born in France instead of the Chicago and Philadelphia suburbs. Most of these are not nice people, people who have risen triumphantly to the middle through the use of sharp elbows.

But there was one interesting moment, and that was when an entire table of guys—two television executives, one movie producer, and an agent—was disrupted by the sounds of their cell phones ringing simultaneously. They all took the calls, of course, rising from the table to move to more secluded corners of the dining room in case they were screwing any of their lunch companions in a business deal and were going to be told so by an assistant. General hilarity reigned when each returned, and before long the entire restaurant was in on the joke: three assistants had been calling to say that the fourth lunch companion would be late, while his assistant was calling to tell him she had told the others that he would be late.

“And he’s not even late!” they all roared.

Then the restaurant manager came over to personally deliver the message they’d just received that Mr. Blah Blah was running a little late. And the place went wild. The fact that everyone thought this was the hilarious high point of the day goes a long way toward explaining how lame most movies and TV shows are, particularly the ones that are supposed to be funny.

And he’s not even late! Cue the laugh track.

But the incident did illustrate how impossible it has become to tumble off the radar in our day and age. Yet that is what Meghan had managed to do, convincingly and utterly. Later she would show me a dusty stack of faxes from the network, pleading that she call and set up a lunch date with the president, asking that she meet and discuss her future, demanding that she respond immediately on when she would return, informing her that she was in breach of contract. But in a world in which everyone is instantaneously available, Meghan was almost completely out of reach. In a world that had become like that restaurant, friends and enemies and rivals and allies all with an ear cocked heavenward for the messages from cell phones and e-mails and lunch conversation, the only possible way to be silent was to disappear.