What's a Girl Gotta Do (3 page)

I needed another drink.

Chapter Two

I DRAGGED MYSELF AWAY from the writers and
went back to the bar, where I ran into Eric Slansky, the
supervising producer for the Greg Browner show. Tonight he was
dressed as New Coke.

He saw my tire iron and said, “Do you ever go
anywhere unarmed, Robin?”

“I try not to, Eric.”

“I hear you’re almost single,” he said, and
grinned.

“Almost.”

“Why don’t you lose the tire iron and dance
with me?” he said.

Before getting on with Browner—a cushy
gig—the year before, Eric had been the super prod for Ambush, a
half-hour issues show in which newsmakers and pundits were grilled
by liberal and conservative journalists. He was very funny, very
smart and he seemed very laid-back.

Oh yeah. And he was very cute.

No, cute was for puppies. What this guy was,
was anachronistically gorgeous. Like a character in a
Merchant-Ivory film, that pre-war Ivy League letterman-in-track
look: tall, lean, with shortish dark hair, a strong jaw and
piercing blue eyes. If that wasn’t just what the doctor ordered, he
was 31, four years younger than I.

Perfect. If Burke could have a younger woman,
the laws of fairness dictated I could have a younger man, at least
for the duration of the party.

Eric played along nicely, being very witty
and suggestive. I got into it and, modesty aside, parried back with
aplomb. I didn’t take it seriously, though. Come on, the guy was
gorgeous and younger and he had hit on me before. I always got the
feeling he was just casting a role for his memoirs, the Older
Married Woman, who comes somewhere between the Danish College
Student and the Lesbian Duo.

“I’d love to see you outside of work,” he
said when the Stones Medley ended.

Before I could answer, the music started up
again and a strange man cut in on us. Eric stepped aside
graciously.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” I said
apprehensively to the guy, who was about my height with ginger hair
and a florid complexion.

“No, we haven’t met. I’m a big fan of yours,”
he said. “And I know a lot about you, Red Knobby.”

He smiled and thrust an envelope into my hand
before turning and walking away.

Momentarily caught off-guard, I stood for a
moment and watched his back as he disappeared into the crowd.

People were still dancing around me and I was
buffeted on all sides by clumsy, dancing drunks. I looked down at
the Marfeles Palace envelope and opened it. On Palace notepaper he
had written: Room 13D, 11:00pm SHARP.

Attached to that was a photocopied sheet
entitled, “Investigative Report” and below that, in block letters,
was my name, ROBIN JEAN HUDSON.

Huge sections of it had been blacked out,
leaving only my vital statistics—height (5’8”), hair (red), eye
color (blue), date of birth, Social Security number—and two little
tidbits wedged between the black blocks, which reported that I had
smoked pot (big deal) and that my mother has once been arrested in
London for trying to walk into Buckingham Palace as though she
owned the place.

Everything else was blacked out, which made
me more curious, especially since the footer on the bottom said 1
of 3 and there was only one page in the envelope.

I shoved it into my purse and went to the
ladies’ room to splash cold water on my face, catch my breath, and
think about this.

The guy was no high school boyfriend. He may
have been a private investigator, but how could I be sure? What if
he was one of my sicko fans who had paid a P.I. to get the goods on
me?

Then again, judging by their bizarre mash
notes, my sickest fans were hard-core masochists. Not very
flattering, but relatively benign. The only way I could get hurt by
them was if I gave in to their demands. Then I might pull a muscle
whipping them or something.

Still, it would be pretty stupid to go up to
a strange man’s hotel room late at night, right? On the other hand,
the guy might know all my dirty secrets, and how else would I find
out what he knew?

I considered my options. I could tell someone
where I was going and to call the cops if I wasn’t back in twenty
minutes, but everyone at this party was a journalist. They’d want
to know what was going on.

The only two people I could trust with
this—my mentor Bob McGravy and my producer, Claire
Thibodeaux—weren’t there. Bob hadn’t attended an ANN party since he
gave up drinking in 1986 and Claire was a no-show.

I’d have to go it alone and be prepared for
the worst, I decided. I went out to the ballroom to retrieve my
tire iron, a real confidence-builder, which I’d left leaning
against the bar.

But when I got there it was gone.

“Did you see my tire iron?” I asked the
bartender.

“Your what?” she asked. “Your tire iron? No,
I haven’t seen it.”

She shook two chrome cocktail shakers between
her hands and said, “They took the garbage away a while ago. Maybe
they took it out with the trash.”

Shit. I really felt safer with that tire
iron.

I still had two backup systems in my purse, a
bottle of cheap spray cologne spiked with cayenne pepper to
approximate mace and a battery-operated Epilady hair-removal
system, which I realized after one use was a better offensive
weapon than feminine aid.

To be on the safe side, I swiped a knife from
the buffet table.

“Oh, can I use that.” Sawyer Lash took the
knife from my grasp and dipped it in butter, which he applied to
his roll before handing the butter-smeared utensil back to me.

Sawyer was dressed as the televangelist Paul
Mangecet. Sawyer, whose nickname was Ted (as in Ted Baxter), was
the only guy in the network whose professional reputation was close
to mine. He was a third-string anchorman with a gift for
malapropism.

He had such bad luck. Take his costume. Paul
Mangecet, the head of Millennial Broadcasting and the take-over
king of Christian business, was indeed a big news story and his
messianic-chipmunk look lent itself well to costume satire.

Unfortunately, he was also a vocal critic of
ANN’s global reach and our news policy and everyone figured he’d
make a stock play for our parent company at some point. It was a
sign of Jack Jackson’s sensitivity about the subject that the word
went out that no one was to come to this party dressed, even in an
unflattering way, as Paul Mangecet.

Someone forgot to tell Sawyer.

On my way back from the bar, one of the two
hundred people I was avoiding came over to rub salt in the
wound.

Solange Stevenson put her hand on my shoulder
and said, “You must be feeling terrible, dear. Your husband showing
up at your company party with his younger mistress! I want you to
know it’s natural for you to feel bad, Robin, to feel inadequate
and inferior. My God, if anyone has the right to feel inadequate
and inferior tonight, it’s you, Robin.”

She had come up on me from behind. Solange
moved like an Apache; you didn’t hear her coming until the hatchet
was in your head.

“How sweet of you to point that out,” I said.
“Thank you for telling me how I’m allowed to feel.”

It was Solange’s TV-psychologist way of being
bitchy, of telling me I was inadequate and inferior. Solange
couldn’t stand anyone to be happier than she was. You know the
philosophy: I cried because I had no shoes, and then I met a woman
with three thousand pairs and I really cried.

It was funny about Solange. Outside of ANN
she was one of the network’s best-loved television personalities,
with a large following, but within ANN she was only feared.
According to the newsroom, ice water ran through her veins and came
out colder. She’d never actually practiced psychology. She’d gone
straight from the doctoral program at Columbia into broadcasting.
Those who can, do; those who can’t do, teach; and those who can’t
teach work in television.

Her eyes could shrink-wrap and label you in
under a minute—manic depressive, sex addict, co-dependent—and she
had the wider world broken down into two basic categories,
perpetrators and victims. If you ask me, everyone is a little bit
of both, but hey, I don’t have a Ph.D. in the subject.

“You have to give yourself permission to feel
bad,” Solange said, patting her honey-colored hair, which was
upswept tonight and tres soigné.

“Gee, thanks, Doc. By the way, where’s your
ex-husband?”

I pointedly looked around and saw Solange’s
ex, Greg Browner, talking to Joanne Armoire.

Joanne saw me and smiled her Grace Kelly
smile. Only Grace Kelly was Grace Kelly, of course, but Joanne was
first runner-up. Tonight—her beautiful, white blonde hair hidden
under a red wig, her petite body cloaked in a polka dot dress with
Peter pan collar, Late Lucille Ball collection circa 1950s, when
Lucy and Desi were America’s marital ideal—she looked
unsophisticated, yet intelligent.

Lucy and Desi. And look what happened to
them. There’s a sitcom allegory for modern marital expectations for
you.

“Greg and I parted amicably,” Solange said,
and my mind snapped back from the black-and-white years.

Before I could challenge this distortion of
fact, Susan Brave came up, looking for Eric Slansky.

Susan, a too-tall, big-boned, tweedy woman,
was Solange’s producer. Before that, she had worked for Eric on the
Browner show. Her dull brown hair was cut into a blunt cut page boy
that screamed Holyoke ’81, where she had played field hockey and
majored in weepy women poets. Normally she wore a uniform of
cardigan sweaters, pearls and plaid skirts but tonight she was
dressed as Tipper Gore. She was obviously pasted; her tortoiseshell
glasses had derailed from the bridge of her nose and were slightly
askew, as was her Tipper wig and her goofy grin.

“Robin!” Susan said, throwing a loose arm
around me. A little Jonestown Punch sloshed over the side of her
glass. “How are ya? I saw you with Eric earlier. Do you know where
I can find him?” She had a crush on Eric.

“How are you, dear?” Solange said to her.
“You’ve had a bit too much to drink, I think.”

“Gee,” Susan said, chastened. “I never know
how mmmuch is enough.” She threw her arms open in a broad gesture
of prostration to her boss. The paper cup of punch went flying and
splashed all over Solange’s very expensive lilac silk suit.

Susan had just redeemed herself in my eyes,
but Solange was not amused.

“Susan, sometimes I think you are beyond
hope!” she said. “Now I have to go upstairs and change.”

Susan was distraught. After Solange excused
herself, Susan said, “I didn’t mean to spill my drink on her. I
feel terrible.”

She looked terrible. A shade of avocado was
creeping into her complexion. She pulled herself erect and with
something resembling dignity said, “I think I must go now to the
ladies; room. It’s time to throw up.”

She wheeled around and staggered purposefully
towards the john.

It was 9:45. I still had over an hour to kill
before my appointment and I felt tense. I needed to work off some
stress somehow, so I went looked for Burke and Amy, figuring it was
time to make them feel uncomfortable and knowing it would do me a
world of good.

At the moment, they were dancing to a Beatles
medley. After taking a deep breath, I summoned up every ounce of
chutzpah I had and shimmied on over to the dance floor, where I
inserted myself between them. I was holding the knife I’d taken
from the buffet.

“Hi, Robin,” Burke said, as if he had just
stepped in something that smelled. He stopped dancing and stepped
around me to be beside his girlfriend.

“And Miss Amy Penny,” I said, extending my
free hand. She took it without enthusiasm and we shook. When she
withdrew her hand, I noticed she was wearing a ring with a large
diamond in it.

“It’s very nice to see you… again,” she said
feebly in her honeyed drawl. With her smooth, peachy makeup, she
looked remarkably like a Barbie Doll. Malibu Barbie. Adultery
Barbie. Co-respondent Barbie.

“You’re so young-looking,” I said to her,
taking a leaf on the civil insult from Solange Stevenson’s book.
‘What are you Amy? Twenty-one?”

“Twenty-three,” she said defensively.

“Barely out of college,” I said, because I
knew for a fact she hadn’t gone to college and was self-conscious
about it.

“If you’ll please excuse me. I’m feeling
woozy,” she said, with pained politeness.

She looked a little pale. I loved that I had
this effect on her. Whenever I saw her in the hallways at ANN, she
turned tail and ran from me.

Burke looked at her with caring. Poor Amy,
put in this awkward situation by the Wicked First Wife. He gave me
that progressive parent look again.

I said, “You have a lot of nerve coming to
this party.”

Whenever I speak with Burke, I intend to be
amiable and mature, to take the moral high ground and behave with
decorum. But all he had to say was the word Amy and I became
vengeful. To actually see them together looking so happy was too
much.

Burke claimed they’d met when she was doing a
field report at the Toy Expo and he was covering it for Channel 3.
But in fact, they’d met at this very same ANN party last year, when
he had accompanied me. I remembered a look they gave each other, a
kind of recognition between strangers. At the time, it registered
subconsciously. Only later, with the addition of certain facts, did
that hidden memory of mine merge and become significant. This was a
kind of anniversary for them, I realized.

Burke was about to say something, but just
then Boris Yeltsin walked by with Mia Farrow and Ross Perot. When
they had passed out of earshot, he said, “These are Amy’s friends
and colleagues too. You don’t own ANN.”

He paused while a Spotted Owl went by,
holding a martini in each hand.