The Last Manly Man (33 page)

“Oh, I don't care how many artists live here. I was expecting it to be like the Marriott, with room service and little bottles of shampoo. And these elevators are so ancient and slow,” said the miserable, dark-haired tourist. “Can't we move into a bland, modern place with no character?”

“I checked. There are no hotel rooms available anywhere in the city right now. There are five big conventions in New York,” said another woman, who then changed the subject. “Are you going to the financing seminar this morning?”

I beat them to the street and grabbed a cab just ahead of them to take me to Macy's, where I have my own personal shopper, Blair. I share Blair with other harried professional women, but all the same, it's a nice luxury. She had all my sizes and designer tastes in her well-organized database, so all I had to do was pick out a few things to change into for work, and she'd get the rest and send them to the office later that day.

When I got to the WNN offices, on the twenty-second floor of the Jackson Broadcasting Building in east Midtown, our six executive producers were waiting around the oval glass table in the pastel conference room. Our president, Solange Stevenson, and our veep, Jerry Spurdle, were not there yet. All of our executive producers were women, with the exception of Dillon Flinder, who was in charge of our health and science programming, and Louis Levin, in charge of repackaging foreign entertainment programming. Jerry and Solange had hired the other four, and I'd brought Louis and Dillon onboard, albeit after a bitter fight with Solange over Dillon. Back in the late 1980s, Solange and Dillon had repeatedly made the “beast with two backs” (and on one occasion the beast with three backs, according to Dillon, though he refused to tell me who the third party was). Dillon's presence was a constant reminder of their sexual intercourse, but that wasn't why I'd brought him aboard. I didn't know about him and Solange at the time. Dillon had made quite a few strange beasts in his sexual prime, one involving a drilled watermelon, and it was hard to keep track of it all. The man had tried almost everything possible involving consenting adults and/or inanimate objects, though I knew for a fact he hadn't yet made it with a bearded lady or a native Texan, because he'd told me so one night at Keggers, our regular watering hole.

While I was filling everyone in on the fire the night before, Jerry walked in and interrupted.

“I hear you had a fire,” he said to me, smirking his oily little smirk. He was stirring his coffee, which he drinks in a mug that says “Chief Melon Inspector, WTNA TV.”

“Yes, there was a fire,” I said.

“What happened? Some drunken sailor fall asleep in your bed with a lit cigarette?” Jerry asked.

“I don't know the cause of the fire yet,” I said, ignoring the bait.

“Sounds like something you'd do, burn down your building,” he said. “I mean, it fits the pattern.…”

“Well, I didn't.”

“Methinks she doth protest too much,” he said. “So how'd you do it?”

Jerry's ability to provoke didn't come from his cleverness, obviously. The secret lay in his persistence, the way he buzzed around you like a hungry mosquito. Jerry was always trying to get a rise out of me, get my goat, “make my monkey crazy,” in the terminology of my friend, producer, and peasant-king Louis Levin. This was a constant quest of Jerry's. I don't know why. There are some vexing people you can't ever quite escape in life—they keep popping back up—and Jerry was one of those people in my life.

“Whatever you like, Jerry. Boozy sailor with a lit cigarette? Works for me,” I said with a laugh.

He wasn't finished. “By the way, I just got some more reports about your last trip, sent by foreign affiliates,” he said. “You really angered some people. Did you really defile the heads of the five children of the Thai TV president?”

Touché. It was true. I had completely alienated the very proper Thai TV president by patting his kids' heads—not just patting their heads, but mussing their hair. And when informed of my crime, it's true I laughed and said, “You're kidding me.” But who knew that it was an offense to pat a child's head in Thailand? Okay, our protocol department knew, but somehow, I had missed the head-patting thing. You do twelve countries on four continents, each with its own intricate customs and etiquette, and try to keep it straight. I'll tell you, in the beginning I was diligent and alert about all this etiquette, but after the first five countries it becomes a blur, and you forget where you are, and which way you should or should not point your feet or bow, when you should and should not smile, or pour your tea, or whatever, in order not to give offense to the local potentate or six-armed god.

Somehow, I'd managed to offend people and minor deities in several countries without even trying. Far be it from me to ask where the “offense” is in hoisting my glass with the wrong hand to toast the vainglorious wife of the current dictator while outside the palace walls the ethnic majority is parading the heads of murdered minorities on pikes, or women are stoned to death for real or presumed adultery. An idiot like me just doesn't get this good-manners business, I guess.

But if being on the road taught me anything, it was to keep one's mouth shut as much as possible, lest someone take offense, or your words be misconstrued or misquoted, which could have a harmful effect on your company's business. So I kept all this to myself.

“What did you do in Singapore?” Jerry went on. “The liaison there says you insulted some people but he's too much of a gentleman to go into specifics.”

“Singapore?” I didn't remember offending anyone in Singapore.

“You really offended people,” Jerry said, pushing forward, a hint of desperation in his voice because he had been unable to provoke me all week. “I hear you were really on the rag in Beijing too.”

The producers took a collective breath, and all eyes turned to me. It would have been so easy to say something wiseass to Jerry, Mr. Cultural Sensitivity. But I didn't.

“Enough squabbling, children,” said Solange Stevenson, behind me. She had come in like an Apache without any of us hearing her. “I have lunch with Barbara Walters at one, so let's get down to work. Jerry, you've sent feelers out to some new sponsors?”

“It's preliminary with most of them, although Lose It Fast Diet Products is very close to making a worldwide deal,” he said.

“Let's ask ourselves, do we want them as sponsors?” Solange said.

Before I could pipe in, Louis said, “I agree. Do we want to perpetrate western beauty ideals on the rest of the world? They have enough problems.”

“Five million bucks,” Jerry replied.

“On the other hand, being overweight is also a health issue,” Solange said.

“Isn't there some question about whether those particular weight-loss products cause gallbladder disease?” asked Dillon.

“Is there?” Solange said, looking as if she was giving these pros and cons meaningful thought. She turned to Jerry. “Make sure the products are safe and fair to women. If they are, take the advertising.”

This was akin to letting a tobacco lobbyist determine if cigarettes were safe for preschoolers. Jerry's pairing with Madame Solange would seem a fractious one. Solange, after all, is a card-carrying feminist on the board of a number of women's groups. Jerry is not what you'd call a real pro-woman guy, except when it comes to his sexual preference. At first Jerry was embarrassed as hell about working at the “chick network,” and this made him even more of a macho braying ass than he already was. But Jerry knew how to get money out of sponsors, and Solange is a canny businesswoman first and foremost. She talked the good woman game, but would sacrifice her ideals in a New York minute for the sake of business. Perpetrating western beauty ideals? Bad. Five million bucks? Good. What was just as galling was that every one of the women they had hired had fallen in line with this philosophy. And the biggest feminists in the place were Louis and Dillon.

Me? I was the one upon whom both Jerry and Solange focused all their irritation and spite. Go figure. Was it just a coincidence I was sent on the road a lot to scout new programs, make deals, do public relations stuff? I'd come back from the road, work at the office for a week or two, and suddenly, another business trip would materialize. Jerry and Solange had run out of places to send me after the last trip, but then discovered I hadn't taken a vacation in a long time. My unused vacation at the All News Network had been transferred to WWN, but under company bylaws, I'd have to take my vacation before my anniversary date or lose it.

I decided to take it. I just had to get through this last day.…

The producers summarized their current productions. Our top-rated original-ish program was
World of Soap
, an hour that gave zippy synopses of our close-captioned soap operas from India, Iran, France, Bulgaria, and the USA. The soaps themselves were showing slow but consistent ratings' growth, as was
Jet Set Gourmet
, the international cooking show, and our reruns of sitcoms featuring women. Women's sports numbers were okay; the news and informational programming was lagging, in large part due to crappy time slots, usually wedged between paid programming for telephone psychics and personal-improvement messiahs. Reruns of Solange's old pop-psych talk show were doing well (no matter where you go, it seems, people can't get enough of reunited relatives and girls who date their mother's toothless boyfriends).

Overall, we were, in our first year, a modest ratings success, but were still bleeding money and making only incremental audience progress.

After we went over some budget stuff, Solange dismissed us so she could run to Le Cirque for lunch with Barbara. Before Jerry could snag me, I fled to my office, my perky assistant, Tim, right behind me.

“Here are the morning's memos, and your mail,” he said. “I took the liberty of removing all the anthrax hoaxes and sending them to the police.”

“Thanks. You busy?” I asked him. “I have a bunch of errands for you. Personal errands.”

“I live to run errands.”

“I'm staying at the Chelsea Hotel because of the fire, in my friend Tamayo's apartment.” I gave him the room number and said, “Don't tell Jerry and Solange where I am. If there's an emergency and you need me, YOU call me.”

I then gave him my account numbers for Con Ed, cable, insurance, and phone, so he could look after getting things cut off and forwarded and whatever. This was one of the great perks of an otherwise grueling executive gig, an assistant who sweats all the small stuff for you.

“I guess I'd better call the maid and tell her not to clean your apartment until further notice,” Tim added.

“You're the best, Tim. How did I luck out and get you?”

“You made a deal with the devil but you were drunk at the time and don't remember it. Anything else I can do to make your life a more candy-colored place to be?”

“No, thanks.”

When he left, Louis Levin rolled in. Louis is a paraplegic and motors around in an electric wheelchair. He's been known to use this for nefarious purposes, i.e., speeding toward a group of network censors in the narrow hallway, yelling, “She's outta control!”

“What is up with you, Robin? Why didn't you say more to Jerry?” he asked. “He gave you so many openings to zing him. You've let him get away with it all week. Dillon and I have had to promote your feminist point of view in meetings or it doesn't get said. Nothing against the sisterhood, Robin, but I feel funny having to be the biggest feminist in the place.”

“I'm trying this new thing, being circumspect and turning the other cheek,” I said.

“Right, sure you are,” he said. “What's the deal, really? It's like Chinese water torture, isn't it? You're making him guess when the next drop will fall …”

“I swear, it's not a plot against Jerry. I'm trying to be, you know, mature about stuff.”

“Oh, woman, you've gone soft!” Louis said. “Ever since you've come back … It's that man isn't it? He tamed you.”

“What man?”

“The one in Paris you don't want anyone to know about,” Louis said. “He called this morning and I happened to pick up. Evidently he had tried to call your apartment first and he got no answer. I think. It was very hard to understand him. He doesn't speak English very well.”

“Oh. He called?” I said, very cool.

“God, you're blushing! And what's this?” He started pawing through a bunch of books and videotapes on my desk.

“
Virgin Queens and Lusty Consorts: Feminism and Romantic Love
,” he said, reading the title off a book. He turned to the back flap and read, “‘Can the modern woman reconcile the conflict between being a feminist and being a heterosexual?'”

“Someone sent that to me. I haven't even read it. Jesus. Don't jump to conclusions,” I said. “Don't make connections where there aren't any. The man in Paris was a—”

“Fling,” he said.

“A friend.” As casually as possible, I added, “Did he leave a message?”

“Yeah, either he's going to his lib to work on an ex-parent, or he's off to the lab for his experiment. I'm not really sure. He's gone for a month. He'd try to E-mail when he had time.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Lab? What's this guy do?”

“He's a physicist.”

“You're blushing again.”

“I'm tired and flushed,” I said. “Jesus.”

“Don't get me wrong. Nothing wrong with it. But why the secrecy? Is he married? Please tell me he isn't married …”

“No, of course not. We're just friends. No big deal. He's a friend of Tamayo's, actually. She told me to look him up while I was there and I did.”

“What's wrong with him?”

“Nothing's wrong with him.”