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  These were the reporters and anchors who always dominated the A block—the first ten minutes or so of a news show—and brought prestige and respect to ANN. The Pantheon. They took risks, they knew how to use their sources, and they knew how to tell an exciting story. Because of this, they had considerable influence with lawmakers all over the world. Everything they did, everything they said, every movement of their heads, every earnest furrow on their brows said “Emmy.”

  God, I wanted to be one of them.

  The pathetic thing is, I had been well on my way. I’d had the crime and justice beat, covering big Manhattan murder trials and other cases for the network. It was a second-string beat, but I didn’t mind. It fascinated me and I knew it could lead to bigger and better things.

  Then I got my big break. I was sent to D.C. on a temporary assignment to fill in as weekend White House correspondent. All right. It was only weekends and it was only fill-in, but it was that all-important foot in the door to the Washington power establishment—and the big stories. I could have parlayed that into a regular spot in the A block, guest appearances as a panelist on Brinkley, a column in the Washington Journalism Review, a Maxwell House commercial.

  But I had this little problem, you see. I couldn’t seem to keep myself from fucking things up.

  After half an hour of mingling, nobody had approached me and I was beginning to think the guy who called me was just an old high school boyfriend playing a practical joke. Old high school boyfriends. There’s a depressing subject. I needed a drink.

  Traditionally, the New Year’s drink at ANN parties was Jonestown Punch, which was not only in bad taste but was bad tasting, a sickening, strong concoction of grape juice and vodka. That was free. Anything else you wanted you had to pay for at the cash bar.

  Which is where I found Jerry, one arm over the bar, his Richard Nixon mask pulled down around his neck, trying to offend a young bartender/actress.

  I stood behind him and heard him say, “I’ll have a slow screw up against the wall. Know what that is?”

  The bartender gave him a shriveling look.

  “Sloe gin, OJ, and Galliano,” she said.

  That’s Jerry for you. He drinks slow screws, a drink whose only purpose is to shock cocktail waitresses and lady bartenders. So out of touch, that Jerry. Doesn’t know that the new generation of drinks—Sex on the Beach, Safe Sex, Oral Sex, Orgasms—makes the old slow screw quaint and old-fashioned.

  He didn’t see me standing behind him, so he proceeded unwisely.

  “I’m well hung,” he said to the skeptical brunet. “Oh, I apologize. I suffer from a mild case of Tourette’s syndrome. Do you know that disease? It makes me tell the truth all the time.”

  He thought he was so funny. The woman just stared at him.

  “Just a mild case. I’m a producer. I could get you a job in TV. Nine inches. Oh, there I go again.”

  Yes, all Jerry’s best lines sounded like they’d been picked up from liars in locker rooms. I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and say something smartass—I was spoiling for a fight—but Burke was going to be here later and I was saving myself for him.

  Anyway, the lady could take care of herself.

  “Get away from me, or I’ll call security,” she hissed.

  Jerry turned and saw me there.

  He hated that I’d just witnessed his humiliation at the hands of a female.

  “Look, it’s another member of the PMS Sewing Circle,” he said, as he pulled his Richard Nixon mask up over his face and pushed past me.

  I could tell he was really drunk, otherwise he’d never have had the nerve to talk to a pretty young woman like the bartender. Jerry has this little problem relating to women, you see. It’s a very common problem. When he’s sober and he comes face to face with a woman in a social setting, he tends to become focused on her breasts and can’t look her in the eye. If she moves from side to side, his head moves from side to side too, like a dog watching a tennis ball.

  I ordered a shot of lemon Stoly and downed it with a grimace and then grabbed a plate of hors d’oeuvres and went up to the balcony area overlooking the dance floor. Louis waved me over to a table by the railing.

  There were about a dozen writers crammed around the rectangular table, one in Woody Allen wig and glasses clutching a doll, another as a giant condom made of papier-mâché, complete with ribbing and reservoir tip, the whole thing articulated into segments so the wearer could bend and sit. The rest were a mixed bag of Scud missiles, presidential pets, the usual buffoonish congressmen.

  They looked up and said hi, and then resumed an argument I’d apparently interrupted on the moral imperatives of Bewitched.

  “Look at it as an allegory about marriage,” Helen Lalo said. “This young woman comes into her marriage with exceptional abilities, which her husband tries to stifle. He tries to make her conform, to sacrifice her natural gifts, her specialness. Endora, on the other hand, encourages her daughter to express her special talents.”

  I couldn’t get into this conversation, so I sat down and watched people waltzing on the dance floor below, waiting for my anonymous source to make himself known. Just then, my husband danced into view with Miss Amy Penny.

  What a cute couple—Burke as Oliver North and Amy as Fawn Hall. I thought maybe Donald Trump and Marla Maples or Jimmy Swaggart and a generic truck-stop prostitute might be more appropriate costume couplings. But even as I was sneering, I felt a painful twinge. Burke looked really good, like a younger, shorter, blonder Peter Jennings, and that snappy marine uniform didn’t hurt a bit.

  Burke was a lucky guy. With his sunny looks, he could only age well. As a woman, I fought crow’s-feet, but no crow’s-feet for him. Unh-unh. What he had, the television columnists called “an endearing correspondent’s squint.” My worry lines robbed me of a little bit of youth and diminished my on-air worthiness, but his gave Burke a look of authority. Personally, I think the best revenge is aging well, and in that respect, Burke had me beat, hands down.

  I was quite sure young women would always find him attractive, young women like Miss Amy Penny, who sparkled tonight as Fawn Hall. Unaware that I was watching, she looked up at him as they danced and he looked back and their eyes glistened, full of each other. They looked like they were in love, but I couldn’t tell—was it with each other, or with their own reflections in each other’s eyes?

  I blinked back tears and watched through the blur as Greg Browner brought George Dunbar over and introduced him to Burke. Dunbar was president of ANN. Burke shook his hand energetically and said something. I don’t lip-read too well, but I knew Burke’s spiel for media bigshots. Look them in the eye, smile warmly, say, “I really respect your work,” and then quote them back to themselves (“I liked what you said to the National Association of Whatever about blah blah blah”). But he never gushed and the technique worked for him, talented sociopath that he is. He was a rising star at Channel 3 and being groomed for network, or so the buzz went.

  These golden people were standing almost directly below me but Burke still hadn’t seen me. For a moment I had a childish urge to do something cartoonish—drop a flower pot, anvil, safe, or grand piano on him. Not having any of those items at hand, I threw a cocktail peanut at him instead, which bounced off his head and landed at his feet. He looked up.

  “Sorry!” I hollered down. He gave me that condescending look of hurt I know so well. It’s the look a progressive parent gives a demon child when child psychology has failed. I am very disappointed with you, that look says. You’ve let me down. But you’re hurting yourself more than me.

  Burke didn’t say anything, he just moved out of peanut range. I could see Amy still, talking to Greg in this hyper way. She was a nervous little thing, but nervous in a way other people (other than me) find attractive. It’s a mildly gushing, eager-to-please nervousness.

  The men exchanged business cards and all shook hands, the ritual networking farewell. When the band started up again with Glenn Miller, Burke and Amy wen
t back to the dance floor, the better to display their unbridled love for each other to the whole world.

  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.