What's a Girl Gotta Do (4 page)

“Of course, I wouldn’t have come if I’d known
you were going to be here. I would have thought, given all the
embarrassment you’ve suffered this last year, you’d want to keep a
lower profile,” he said.

“Hey, discretion is a two-way street. Do you
call that rock on her left hand low-profile? It’s like a
floodlight.”

Burke took a deep breath. I think he was
counting to ten. Around seven, he recaptured his temper and said,
”It’s just as well you came over, I guess. I need to talk to you
anyway. I want to get this over with.”

Amy returned and interrupted him.

“Burke, I’m feeling sick. I think I have
that, you know . . .” Their eyes met. They were speaking in their
own code. “That flu. I’m going to get a cab uptown.”

“But I haven’t met Jack Jackson yet and it
isn’t even ten. Can’t you wait until I can take you?”

“Well, I can’t wait, Burke,” she said. There
was a perceptible pause.

It was impossible to get Burke away from a
party until he had met every single important person present who
could help his career. As Jackson rarely showed up at company
parties, this could be his only shot. I watched with interest to
see who would win this battle, as I’d been there, and I’d never
won.

“You’re right. You stay and meet jack,” she
said after a moment, a girl who put her man’s concerns ahead of her
own. “Madri is leaving early. Maybe I can share her cab.”

This could only make me look bad by
comparison.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?” he said,
sounding sincere, full of empathy for his wench. This was not the
same guy I was married to.

“I’m sure. No reason for both of us to miss
this.”

They made like they were going to kiss and I
said, “Please. I’m standing right here.”

After she left us, for good this time, Burke
turned to me and said, “Robin, I just want to put this behind us
and get on with our lives. I have a lot of respect for you. I’d
like us to be friends. If not, well, I don’t care what you say to
me—or what you do,” he added with less conviction. “But leave Amy
out of it. She’s an innocent bystander.”

“Innocent, my ass! She dated a married man
while he was still married, while he was still sleeping with his
wife and telling his wife he loved her. She did it knowingly. I’m
sorry, but that’s against the rules.”

“She can’t help it. She loves me.”

“Gag me with an oar.”

He took another exaggerated deep breath.
“Look, Robin, shit happens. People decide they want different
things. People fall out of love…”

“Then you should have told me. You shouldn’t
have claimed to love me. You lied, you cheated and she encouraged
you, and for that,” I paused, “you have to die.”

I raised the butter knife slightly for
emphasis and was gratified to see that, for a split second, Burke
took me seriously enough to put an arm in front of his face
defensively.

“I’m joking,” I said with contempt. “You’re
such a weenie. I mean, what a cliché, leaving me for a younger
woman. Did you really think I was going to stab you? Do you think
you’re worth a crime of passion? Get real.”

“You’ve been known to go nuts every now and
then,” he said.

“Oh please, we’re divorcing. I’m allowed to
lose my goddamned temper. It’s one of the perks.”

He was pissed off now. “It’s your sanity I’m
worried about, Robin, not your temper. Your sanity.”

What a difference a few years of marriage
make. “I’ll never sign the papers,” he told me once, shortly after
we were married, when I mentioned that insanity ran in my family
(it came straight down the maternal line) and confided my deeply
held fear of ending up in asylum somewhere, muttering to myself
about the state of the world with spittle building up at the
corners of my mouth. Or wandering the streets telling strangers I’m
a member of the Royal Family, as my mother often does.

I’d pushed him too far. Now he was using that
fear as a weapon against me, just as I use his fears against him.
On the day we split up, he told me I was a hysteric, a doomed
woman, certifiable.

And what had I done to incite this heartless
assault? Merely tried to feed him a pie—in which I’d baked his
lucky shirt, a beloved silk Perry Ellis, cut into strips and
enclosed in a light, flaky pastry. That was the same day I learned
of his affair with Miss Congeniality, Miss “My future plans are to
find a cure for cystic fibrosis or else become a television
anchorwoman.”

He continued to probe this sore spot. “Do you
still keep that morbid scrapbook of dead people you don’t even
know?”

“Murdered people.”

“Oh, murdered strangers. So much more
rational than just dead people. Do you still grow poison ivy in the
window boxes?’

“It’s too cold for window boxes. I have it in
hanging planters inside the windows now and in vases on top of all
the major appliances and valuables. In case of burglars. If they
rob me and the police don’t catch them . . .”

“You want them to suffer a painful rash at
least, I know,” he said. “You’ve explained this to me a dozen times
and it still strikes me as nutty. You don’t think this behavior is
a little strange?”

“This from a man who rubs sheep-placenta
cream into his face every night. A man who refers to his genitalia
as ‘Uncle Wiggily.” A man who won’t read a magazine until he wipes
down the cover with disinfectant.”

“You know how many people’s hands a magazine
goes through before it gets to your door? Do you know where their
hands have been?”

“I’m surprised you were willing to kiss me
without wiping me down first.”

“It’s no use trying to talk to you civilly,”
he said. “You’ll excuse me.”

“Sure, Heinrich,” I said loudly.

He looked around nervously.

I know lots of his secrets: that his given
name is Heinrich Adolph Stedlbauer IV, changed to Burke Avery for
television; that at home he belches without excusing himself and
secretly reads Judith Krantz. I know his guilty pleasures and his
annoying habits. I know his blood type, his allergies, even which
foods give him gas. I wish I didn’t know so much about him, and I
wish he didn’t know so much about me. That’s why I said his name,
to remind him to keep his mouth shut about me.

“You promised not to tell anyone that my
name—“

“You promised to love, honor and cherish,” I
said. But he looked so hurt by my threat that I gave in. “I won’t
say anything. Jeez.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Let’s get together and
talk one of these days. I really do want to be friends if we can.”
He kissed my cheek and as soon as he did I wiped the kiss away with
my hand.

I looked for Eric—unsuccessfully—while
worrying about my imminent meeting with the ginger-haired guy. At
10:55, I headed to the elevators. As I got on, Solange, changed
into a fresh blue suit, got off.

“Oh, are you staying here tonight, Robin,”
she asked.

“Uh, no. I’m going to meet a friend.”

“Oh, I see,” she said suggestively.,

I smiled weakly and let the elevator doors
close her out. Great. A rumor of some kind would be circulating
around the ballroom in about a minute and a half. I wondered who my
name would be linked with. I wondered who I could get to tell
me.

I walked down the corridor and when I reached
the door marked 13D I opened my purse slightly to have access to my
Epilady and my cayenne cologne if I needed them, and I get a good
grip on my knife.

I knocked. No answer. I knocked again, harder
and waited. Still no answer.

Maybe he was late. I leaned against the wall
and waited. While I stood there, Joanne Armoire came out of a room
down the hall. She gave me a quizzical smile. “Who are you waiting
for, Robin,” she asked. Journalists are shameless.

“A friend.”

“Oh. Well, happy New Year, almost.”

“Yeah, you too.”

I watched her walk away and disappear into
the wall where the elevators were.

I knocked one more time, longer and louder,
in case the asshole had fallen asleep or something. But there was
still no answer.

What kind of weird joke is this, I
wondered.

Yeah, that’s what it was, I realized. A
joke.

I’m known as a kind of . . . prankster at
ANN, which was crawling with them. Somebody was getting even with
me, and in a way that would naturally appeal to my troublesome
curiosity. Let’s face it, a few phone calls around my hometown
could have yielded the information he’d fed me on the phone.

Hell, if he’d caught my own mother on a bad
day, she would have quite innocently told him anything he wanted to
know, and forgotten about it as soon as she hung up the phone.

It was a pretty good setup, I had to admit.
Page 1 of 3. Very clever. I wondered who had masterminded it and
when and how they’d reveal themselves. I started gleefully plotting
my revenge as I returned to the party.

I hoped it wasn’t too late to catch up with
Eric Slansky.

Chapter Three

I HAD MORE THAN A SLIGHT HANGOVER as I rode
the subway down to Jackson Broadcasting the next day, New Year’s
Day, a working day in the news business. An electrical storm
cracked and thundered at regular intervals inside my skull.

It was one of those days when everything on
the subway seemed slightly unreal, when I thought of the city as
New York: the Movie. Everything and everyone seemed self-conscious
and surreal. Across the aisle, this kid was staring at me and in
spite of my imploding brain I smiled at her. Suddenly, she burst
into tears. I turned to the guy next to me and said, “Kids just
love me.” The man looked surprised that I had spoken to him, like
he too might start bawling at any moment.

I’d dressed, fed Louise Bryant, and boarding
the subway on autopilot, and only now was the night before
returning to me, in flashes. Burke . . . Amy . . . Eric Slansky. Oh
God.

Had he really told me he was HIV negative and
liked “slightly” older women? Had I really mentioned that at
thirty-five I was at my sexual peak? Had we really discussed all
the different places we’d had sex?

And that practical joke. The ginger-haired
man who’d never showed. After waiting around outside room 13D I’d
gone back down to the party and had another lemon Stoly, so the
rest of the night was still kind of blurry around the edges. I
vaguely remembered Jack Jackson on stage toasting the new year and
leading us in a countdown to it. Some asshole who thought he was
being funny randomly shouted nonsensical numbers to confuse us,
which, thanks to our inebriation, he was able to do briefly, until
Jackson restored order.

When midnight struck, with corks popping and
confetti swirling I the air above, I kissed Eric Slansky.

Yeah. I remembered that kiss pretty clearly.
Eric and I danced and kissed until about 1:30 A.M. Shortly after
that, with everything around me wobbling, the air wavy like hot air
over a fire, I vanished from the screen.

The subway stopped directly beneath Jackson
Broadcasting headquarters, a massive black-and-pink granite
building in the east fifties, and I got off with a horde of waxy
white people who worked nearby, including a few JBS types whose
names I didn’t know.

JBS is really three networks: DIC, the
Drive-In Channel; JNC, Jackson Network Corporation; and

ANN. DIC is a movie channel aimed at the
beer-and-gun-rack crowd, while JNC is a bit of everything,
including tractor pulls, a highly rated if critically ignored
wrestling show, and plenty of Mr. Ed reruns.

ANN, however, is the prestige of JBS, the all
news network nobody thought would fly but did, bringing honors and
black ink to our esteemed founder and chairman, Georgia Jack
Jackson.

We’d come a long way, baby. In the early days
of ANN, there were only two kinds of people there, old-timers with
checkered careers rescued from the fringes—and drunk tanks—of
journalism, and newcomers, right out of college and willing to work
for peanuts. The freshly scrubbed and the nearly washed-up. Back
then, it took a peculiar mix of genius and low self-esteem to work
for ANN. The low self-esteem allowed them to work us long hours for
low pay without dissent. The genius kept us on the air and built
the quality of the network.

I read somewhere about this Afghan tribe that
could build a Kalashnikov from a Chinese bicycle. That’s sort of
what we did in those early years. Back then our equipment was cheap
and broke all the time. We broadcast an entire interview with Henry
Kissinger in various hues of green, klieg lights fell in the middle
of newscasts, and one day someone came and repossessed the set
while we were on the air.

We were hapless but we had this sense of
mission: to scoop the other networks and to present the news as
unbiased and unfiltered as possible to the people, the unpolished
news, warts and all. Every once in a while we’d scoop the Nets on
something important. We’d rush out of the bushes, muss the
networks’ hair, and rush back in again, laughing.

Ten years later, we are all glossy and well
manicured and every prime minister, president, and dictator in the
world watches us. It’s scary. Especially if you’re not all glossy
and manicured, like me.

I was a little late for work, but not so late
that I couldn’t stop to scan Democracy Wall, a ten-foot

bulletin board that covered the left wall in
the hallway leading to the newsroom. Under the heading FAN CLUB was
a letter from one of Madri Michaels’s crazy fans, asking her to
please send a pair of her freshly worn panties, autographed. There
were contests to provide captions for wire-service photos, goofy
stories, and a little bit of legitimate news, although the primary
purpose of Democracy Wall was to provide labor with a forum to
spoof management, world leaders, and anchors. I’d been the butt of
a few Democracy Wall jokes myself.