To Die For (11 page)

“Come on, Lydia,” Suzanne says to me. “Let’s get you a pair of panties. You choose anything in the store. My treat.”

I tell her I don’t need anything. I mean, these panties cost nine, ten dollars. Each. “I got enough underwear,” I tell her.

“But nothing like this,” she says. “You feel different when you’re wearing lingerie like this. You feel beautiful.”

“It’s not like anybody’d even see it,” I say. “Except my mom, and she’d just figure me having underwear like that must mean I was going all the way with someone and then she’d give me a hard time about it.”

“So hide them,” Suzanne says. “Let it be your secret. Everybody needs a few secrets in their drawer.” That’s when she shows me the garter belt. “This is what I’m getting,” she says.

I didn’t even know what it was exactly, except you see them in pictures sometimes. Only I don’t look at those kind of magazines.

She tells me it’s how they held up their stockings in the olden days. Before panty hose.

It makes me feel kind of weird, knowing she’s getting the garter belt. It wasn’t the way I pictured her.

“You’ll understand someday, Liddy,” she says to me. “When you meet someone.”

It was pretty. It had these little pink roses stitched on the place where you hitched the stockings on, and little silk ribbon bows. They wrapped it up in pink tissue paper for her and put it in this little box with flowers on it, like it was a present for someone. Only it was for her.

There was this man and woman there at the store, same time as us. About the same age as Suzanne and Larry. She wasn’t as pretty as Suzanne, but you could tell he was crazy about her. He kept picking out bras and stuff for her to try on. I mean, he’d run his fingers over the fabric like he was testing it or something. You almost felt embarrassed watching him, it seemed so personal. But you also had to envy her. Knowing there was someone that felt that way about her. Even though she was a little chunky.

They were in front of us at the counter where you pay. I guess the stuff she bought must’ve come to a couple hundred dollars, the amount of panties and stuff she was getting. After they added it all up, he just handed the girl his charge card. She kissed him—french kissed—right there in the middle of the store.

“He really knows how to treat a woman,” Suzanne said to me. “But I bet you they aren’t married.”

T
HURSDAY AFTERNOONS,
L
ARRY
and I used to go down to the Y, play a little pickup basketball, take a shower, go out for a couple of beers. It wasn’t a team. Just a bunch of guys blowing off a little steam.

I remember this one time in particular. We’re sitting in the sauna after the game. Us and these other two guys we used to play with sometimes. Single guys, like me.

“Man, did I hit the jackpot last night,” one of them says. You know the way guys talk. “Chick could’ve kept going all night, like she hadn’t been laid in a year.”

So then I say something about the girl I’d been out with, you know? I mean, half of the stuff you say is made up, and everybody knows it. You just like to talk big. It’s part of the game, same as dribbling the ball or making foul shots. Just a bunch of guys screwing around, no big deal.

So this other guy, the first one, he starts telling us how this particular chick liked to do it at her parents’ house when they were downstairs watching TV. And this other guy starts talking about this chick he knows that likes to be tied up. I say my girlfriend likes it the normal way, “just often is all.” “How often?” says the guy with the tied-up girlfriend. “Three, four times a night,” I say. “Man, it’s a sacrifice, but what can you do?”

All this time, Larry’s just sitting there, not saying much. Then this one guy, he turns to Larry and says, “So, how’s it feel to be an old married man? Your old lady keeping you happy?”

And then he does a funny thing. He gets up off the bench and wraps his towel around him. “Why don’t you guys just grow up?” he says. “You think that’s all there is to life? Let me tell you, there’s more to it. There’s such a thing as love and commitment.” I don’t remember the exact words, but that was the gist of it, anyway. Real heavy and serious. Like the guy couldn’t take a joke. Which generally he could.

After he left, Buzz, this buddy of ours that did it at his girlfriend’s parents’ house, he turns to me and says, “Jeez, what’s with him?”

Richie, this other guy, says to blow it off. “Sounds to me like he just hasn’t been laid in a while,” he says. “Just because the package looks good doesn’t guarantee it’ll be so great on the inside.”

T
HERE WAS THIS
time the kids came over for dinner. No special occasion. It was just something we did every now and then. Joe made rigatoni and I baked an almond cake that was always one of Larry’s favorites. She didn’t bake, herself. Not that I’m blaming her for that. There are worse crimes. As we all know.

Anyway, they came over the house five o’clock, maybe five-thirty. Larry and Joey got a beer and went in the den to watch the end of the basketball game. She and I were in the kitchen. I mean with Janice off on the road with the Ice Capades it was like Suzanne was my own daughter. We’d talk about everything. If she was wondering should she cut her hair or something, she’d call me up. Did I think blue curtains would be nice in the bathroom? She’d sooner call me than her own mother.

We were having a glass of wine. There wasn’t much fixing to do for this dinner—just pour the dressing on the salad, that was it. So we were just sitting there at my cooking island, sipping our wine and talking. And I said to her, “Have you two given any thought to starting a family?” Their anniversary was coming up and all. They had this beautiful condominium, and he was doing so well down at the restaurant. They were really on their way.

“Oh,” she said, “I don’t know about that. It’s so complicated, you know.”

Well no, actually, I didn’t know it was so complicated. It always seemed pretty simple to me. You love someone. You get married. You have a family. “What do you mean ‘complicated’?” I said.

“With my job and all,” she told me. “In my field a woman with young kids has two strikes against her. Especially when she’s just starting out.”

I asked her what she meant. “Say you’re covering a big story like, maybe, Princess Stephanie’s getting married over in Monaco,” she says. I’m trying to act like I know who this Princess Stephanie is—which I don’t. “Right,” I say. “I’m with you so far.”

“So they have to send—in addition to the on-camera talent—a hairdresser and a wardrobe person, and a camera and sound crew. A satellite. You wouldn’t believe how many people it takes to put together a major network news remote broadcast.

“And what if the reporter has a baby? Does she leave it home? Maybe, but can you imagine how expensive it gets hiring that kind of round-the-clock help? Not to mention, who do you find that you can trust?

“Or say you bring the baby along. But then he gets chicken pox or something, and he’s throwing up all over the place. Maybe he even gives his mother chicken pox, and she’s got to go on camera in front of millions of people, with these chicken pox all over her face.

“Or maybe you haven’t had the baby yet. You’re just pregnant. And there’s all these people at the wedding, the jet set, in their designer dresses and everything, and you’re big as a house. Do you remember how Jane Pauley looked when she was covering the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana? It was gross.”

“Gross,” she said. I still remember that part.

“Well I don’t know,” I said. “I always loved how it was when I was expecting. I never felt so fulfilled.”

“But that’s not even the worst,” she says to me. “The worst is after the baby’s born, when you haven’t lost the weight yet. And you’ve got all this blubber and these boobs out to there, without even the excuse of being pregnant anymore.” Then she mentioned this other woman I never heard of, Christina Ferrari. I remember her name because it was the same as the car. Christina Ferrari used to be a cover girl, she said. In addition to hostessing some TV show. Don’t ask me what.

After that I didn’t know what to say.

“Larry and I really value our freedom to pursue our other interests,” she told me. “Couples that are tied down to kids can’t just up and take off for the weekend to go skiing or something.” But I knew she couldn’t be talking for my son when she said that part. Because you just knew Larry was dying to be a father.

“Well,” I said, “there’s a time and a place for everything.” And around then was when Joey came in saying whatever happened to dinner? We didn’t talk about it anymore, and I guess I just figured, she’s young, you know. She’ll come round.

After supper, I remember, we were looking through some of our old home movies. Joe had just brought all our old Super 8s in to have them transferred to video. Janice’s ice shows, and Larry in his first jv basketball game and so forth. There was this one of me giving Larry his bottle when he couldn’t have been more than six, eight months old. And Larry puts his arm around Suzanne and says, “Someday that’s going to be us, honey.” And she looks at him and says, “Listen. If you wanted a baby-sitter you should’ve married Mary Poppins.”

T
HEY SAY
C
ONNIE
Chung left her job with CBS voluntarily, but I have my own theory concerning what happened there. This whole story that it was her biological clock ticking, and she wanted to devote herself full time to getting pregnant and having a baby. It just doesn’t add up. In my opinion, the network wanted to get rid of her, and this was just their way of giving her a graceful exit.

Who would give up a career like that to have a baby, when they could adopt? That’s what Barbara Walters did, and look how fabulously everything worked out for her. As she herself puts it in her autobiography—which is one of the most inspiring books I ever read, incidentally—whenever she has any regrets about the time she missed, staying home with her little girl, seeing the first steps, whatever, she remembers: If she’d been home watching those first steps, she would have missed out on her historic interviews with Henry Kissinger and Barbra Streisand and that Egyptian president, what was his name. The one that got shot. You can’t have everything. Life is full of tradeoffs. But when all is said and done, who would really trade a bunch of dirty diapers and drool-soaked clothes for a career like that?

Not that I was closed off to the idea of having kids with Larry. Listen, nobody gets more gooey over kids than me. Little booties, little smocked dresses, all the cute stuff they make now. It’s enough to make you want to adopt a whole orphanage.

Which was always an idea of mine, to tell you the truth. As I told Larry, why do we need to have our own baby when the world is so full of kids who need good homes? Just a while back, I saw this special about Romania, and I want to tell you, you wouldn’t believe what’s going on there. I mean, it was almost too disgusting to watch. Some of the children were older or handicapped, and naturally you have to be very careful with a country like that, that you aren’t getting one with AIDS. But some of the little girls were real little dolls, too. There was this one, big eyes, skinny little arms and legs. You just wanted to reach right through the TV screen and pick her up.

The way I figured, so long as we were adopting, there was no rush either. I wouldn’t have to take time off for pregnancy, or worry about getting out of shape and then having to work so hard to get the weight off like Joan Lunden did. Plus, if we adopted in a place like Romania, we could maybe pitch our experience for a half-hour special. Bring along a camera crew, let the viewers at home live through the whole process, start to finish. I bet if we did something like that, the phone would be ringing off the hook, at the station, with people wanting to know how they could do it too. It would make you feel good, knowing you had an influence in so many people’s lives like that. And I mean, when you’re in broadcasting, you do. Whether you know it or not. Dan Rather changes the part in his hair on Monday, and by Wednesday half the men in America are changing the part in theirs. When you think about it, it’s awe-inspiring.

S
UZANNE HAD BEEN WORKING
for us and doing the weather show ten, twelve months, when we got the notice about the Northeast Regional Cable Television Operator’s Conference, over in Mansfield. Stuff like this usually went straight in my circular file. I mean, who needs to pay a couple hundred bucks to eat rubber chicken and sit through a day and a half of workshops on how to increase advertising revenues or liven up your test pattern?

But Suzanne got all excited when she saw the brochure. “So,” she says. “We’re going to have to pretape ‘Senior Chat’ and the Sunday morning show, if we plan on being gone over a Saturday night. I’d better get onto that.”

“Whoa there,” I tell her. “Who says we’re going anyplace? I never go to this conference myself, and I sure as hell don’t send my employees.”

“Well you never had me working for you before either,” she tells me.

“Look, Suzanne,” I say. “I know you’re young and you’re full of ambition and energy. That’s great. You may even have some talent in the field. But you’re not going to turn this dog of a station into anything more than what we’re running here. The potential’s just not there.”

It was like she didn’t hear me. “So,” she says. “We’ll need to book a couple of hotel rooms. Lucky I just bought a new suit.”

“You think an event like this is free?” I ask her. “Think again.”

“I’ll pay half of my registration fee,” she says. “It’ll be tax deductible. Career development.” Then she starts reading off the names of the different optional workshops you could attend. The keynote speaker is a news anchor from Troy, New York. Suzanne says she wants to be sure she gets to meet this woman. That would be a perfect type of market for her.

I could’ve said no, of course. But past a point I didn’t have the heart. “OK,” I tell her. “I don’t have the stomach for these conferences, but you go for it if you’re so goddam eager. God forbid I’d try and get in the way of the next Connie Chung.”