Praise for Jennifer Oko’s Gloss

“Jennifer Oko’s Gloss is a very funny novel set in the parallel universe of morning television. Filled with details and gossip about what really goes on behind the cozy, coffee-tabled sets of the national morning shows and the people who host them, this story of a young producer caught in a web of journalistic ethics and political intrigue is both about and written by an insider who has lived to tell the tale.”

—Laura Zigman, author of Animal Husbandry and Piece of Work

“After finishing Gloss by Jennifer Oko, I felt as if I had finished a dish made up of fresh, seasonal ingredients that filled me up without slowing me down.”

—Christian Science Monitor, Reader’s Pick

“Comical, fast paced and full of insider gossip, Gloss is an entertaining read written by a TV news veteran who’s now a producer for CBS’s The Early Show. For anyone who has ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of news reporting, this book will fill you in and keep you entertained.”

—Kristin Harmel, author of The Blonde Theory

“Jennifer Oko’s novel Gloss [is] a peek behind the scenes of morning television…. Even though it is a serious story, the novel is a light and easy read, with humor present on every page.”

—The Oklahoman

“Jennifer Oko is flying off the hook with energy, wit, and style!”

—Moderngirlstyle.com

“This is one book you have to keep checking to make sure you are reading fiction. The story is engrossing…fast paced, riveting and one you just can’t put down, with an insight to morning news programs that gives you a whole new way to look at them while having your morning coffee and muffin.”

—Affaire de Coeur [five stars]

“A damn good book.”

—Modern Women’s Fiction

“Oko’s biting humor, à la Murphy Brown, makes this book very difficult to put down.”

—The Book and Cranny

“Often laugh-out-loud funny, but sometimes downright scary, this bigger-than-life romp will probably give more than one early morning news show staffer pause. Some of the characterizations—and complications—may be a little over the top, but readers will probably be too amused to take much notice.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

“You won’t be able to put [it] down. Filled with tons of fun details gathered, no doubt, by the author’s own experiences in morning television. You’ll have a blast reading Gloss, and not just for the guessing game of ‘who’s really who’ in the large cast of characters that inhabit Annabelle’s world. A deliciously dishy and irresistible tale!”

—Brenda Janowitz, author of Scot on the Rocks

“A humorous send-up of the TV industry and today’s pop culture where fame is an end in itself. Ms. Oko’s eye is sharp and her pen as sharp, as she bares the quirks and flaws in an industry she knows from the inside. Gloss is an entertaining, delightfully irreverent, and enlightening work.”

—Romance Reviews Today

Gloss
Jennifer Oko

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Michael, who makes everything possible.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PART TWO

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

PART THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Gloss would not exist if it weren’t for the support and encouragement of some very special people. So, to my agent, first reader and my personal Queen of Swords Stephanie Kip Rostan, thank you again and again. Selina McLemore’s enthusiasm for the printed page is contagious and I am lucky that not only did she fall in love with Gloss but she was able to help me whip it into a more readable shape than I could have done alone. I am grateful that Selina was able to usher the book into Linda McFall’s able hands and that Linda has been able to guide me through the rest of this adventure. Thank you to everyone at MIRA and Harlequin Books.

Every writer should have a support group like I had with Roomful of Writers: Elaine Heinzman, Kevin Ricche, Martha Heil, Peter Reppert, James Riordon, Contessa Riggs and (briefly) Eric Roston. A special shout-out to Jennifer Ouellette and Erica Perl. On the face of it, it would seem that the authors of books such as The Physics of the Buffyverse and Ninety-Three in My Family might not necessarily be the best readers for a book like Gloss, but in fact a little Einstein mixed with some excellent children’s literature was precisely the medicine the book needed. John Elderkin, wherever you are, thank you for the title. Thank you to Elizabeth Shreve for your endless publishing wisdom, and, along with her, to Emily Lenzner for the jubilations.

Thank you to my friends and colleagues at CBS News.

Writers usually work in solitude, but this writer wouldn’t be able to get anything done if it weren’t for friends like Tula Karras, Jenny Trewartha, Jan Trasen, Julie Ziegler, Jennifer Howze, Sasha Gottlieb and Liza Vasilkova.

This book was sold shortly after the birth of my son, Jasper, and published shortly before the birth of my daughter, Laila, and it took an amazing amount of help from my family to assure that I had the time, space and energy to be a producer, a writer and a good mother all at the same time. Annette Oko, Ben Oko and Helen Dimos—thank you for the love you have showered on Jasper, Laila and their mom. Thank you to my brother Daniel Cohen and his wife, Stephanie Cohen, who have been tremendous cheerleaders throughout my writing career (and my life!). And to my parents, Sue and Arnold Cohen, it sounds trite but I really have no words to thank you enough. My husband, Michael Oko, continues to amaze me with his patience, his kindness, his enthusiasm and his belief in me. And it is Jasper and Laila who have helped me see all the blessings and joy.

Thank you.

gloss (glôs) n.

1 A surface sheen, often referring to cosmetics used to enhance the lips.

2 A superficially or deceptively attractive appearance.

3 A smooth-coated, slick media format.

The obscure we eventually see.

The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

—Edward R. Murrow

PART ONE

gloss (glôs)

n.

1 A surface sheen, often referring to cosmetics used to enhance the lips.

2 A superficially or deceptively attractive appearance.

3 A smooth-coated, slick media format.

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

—Edward R. Murrow

PROLOGUE

I DIGRESS.

When I was little, the adults laughed and said I had a vivid imagination. It was a good thing. But by the end of my elementary years it was a source of heated conversations in parent-teacher meetings, and then, by high school, it became a source of parent-psychologist conversations, leading to parent-neurologist conversations, leading to a career as a television news producer, and ultimately, to where I am now. Which is to say, my tendency to take off on flights of fancy, and my general inability to focus ironically brought me to a place of fancy-less focus: the Federal Detention Center in Alexandria, Virginia. My lawyer grins Cheshirelike and insists we will win. No fear, he says, this will end soon, you will write a book, a movie deal will be in place and, years from now, you will look out over the veranda of your Hollywood Hills home, sipping chardonnay and laughing at this little adventure. Wake me up after the second coming, I tell him, when I’m in a good mood. Most days I tell him to shut up and give me whatever paper it is that I need to sign.

I wasn’t always this surly. In fact, I’m not always this surly. I like to think of myself as personable. My fellow inmates seem to like me. They say things like “you ain’t so bad (dramatic pause) for a white girl.” And, when we are dancing around the cell block to entertain ourselves (my friend Galina in the neighboring cell can scat like she is channeling a Slavic version of Betty Carter), they tell me I move like a sista’ and that I could easily have a starring role in a hip-hop video. I’m not sure if I’m flattered or not, but I think many of my outside peers would savor that as a compliment. The whiter you are, the more privileged your background, the more being “ghetto” is supposed to be a coveted commodity. I never understood this trend, the rich boarding school boys with droopy pants, walking with the lilt of a drug lord thug. Wispy wheat-haired lasses showing their palm and saying in a staccato cadence, “Talk to the hand.” I appreciate the grit and flavor such mannerisms represent, but wouldn’t it make more sense for people to want to mimic the rich and powerful? Of course, I’m not sure which would be more absurd, a prep-schooled, Ivy-educated, wavy-haired, nose-sculpted young woman like myself trying to talk jive (if jive is still spoken) or a middle-class, third generation mixed Eastern European young woman, also like myself, trying to act like a Vanderbilt.

Like I said, I digress. But that is actually not so off point. Because really, what got me here, into cell block six, had a lot to do with people (yours truly included) trying to appear like something they are not: morning television.

Dear New Day USA—

I watch your show everyday and have for years. But yesterday, I noticed that Faith had changed her hair style. I don’t like it. She looks much better with a side part.

Sandy Franklin

Winona, WI

CHAPTER ONE

“THIRTY SECONDS TO AIR!” THE STAGE MANAGER skipped over the wires strewn about the floor and jumped behind the row of semirobotic cameras.

“Shit!” The frail makeup artist rushed forward, armed with a powder puff, and dived for Ken Klark’s shiny, pert nose. The white dust settled and she was gone, out of the shot.

“Ten seconds!”

Klark stroked his chiseled chin, smoothed back what there was to smooth of his ever so trendy, close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair, and ran his tongue over his neon-white teeth. Four thousand dollars in caps right there. He had expensed them to the network, which did not contest.

“Five seconds!”

He tugged his dark blue blazer behind him once more and sat up cocksure.

“Three! Two!” On the unspoken count of “One” the stage manager mimed a gunshot at Klark, who smiled, leaned a bit forward, waiting a beat for the zooming camera lens to settle on him.

“Good morning, everyone! It’s a New Day, USA!” he said. “Today is April 4th, and this is ZBC News. I’m Ken Klark.”

“And I’m Faith Heide.” A small, bobbed blonde in a fitted red sweater popped up on the screen, emitting a girl-next-door smile into eight point five million homes.

And I’m fucked, I thought as I ran into the control room behind the set, twenty minutes late. You are supposed to check your graphics and chyrons before the show, not when it’s already live on the air.

The eyes of the executive producer were illuminated by the wall of monitors at the front of the darkened room, making it particularly intimidating as he turned them toward me for a brief moment, adding pressure to my dangerously undercaffeinated brain.

It was never a good thing to enter the control room without having had at least a sip of morning coffee, because even with the dimmed lights and hushed tones, the place was electrically charged. Figuratively, I mean. Of course it was literally, too. I often thought they turned down the lights not because it was easier for the director to focus on the monitors, since the darkness cuts down on the glare, but because sometimes it seemed the energy emitted by live television was too powerful to face front on. Think about it. For something to have enough energy to hold the attention of someone as far away as, say, Huntsville, Alabama, imagine the energy it has when up close and personal.

I tiptoed over to the row of graphics terminals.

“Maria,” I whispered to the unionized (and therefore to be treated very nicely) woman whose job it was to hit the button to call up each title as the director asked for it. “Can I check my chyron list at the break?”

She didn’t respond, but I knew she heard me. So I hovered, counting down the seconds to the commercial interruption, at which point I knew, because we had been through this before, she would wordlessly, if slightly aggressively, punch up the titles on the computer so I could make sure that none of the characters in my piece would have a misspelled name show up underneath them on the screen. I did this because such an error is one of journalism’s cardinal sins. No matter how moving, how well-crafted, well-researched, well-written, well-produced your piece, be it an article or a lower-third graphic for a segment of fluff, spelling someone’s name wrong was as good for your career as if you got caught sleeping with the big boss’s husband. Actually, that’s a bad analogy. In network television, most of the big bosses have wives.

“It’s P-u-r-n-e-l-l,” I said. “Not P-e-r-n-e-l-l.”

“That’s what you sent us.” She didn’t turn to look at me when she said this.

“I know. That’s why I’m here. We have to fix it.” I was talking through my teeth, but trying to sound sweet and sympathetic all the same.

“Whatever,” she said, typing in the correction one rigid finger at a time.

I exhaled. It was 7:12. That meant about eighteen more minutes for airing “important” stories, and twenty-three minutes until mine.

I went to the green room to steal some coffee. Technically, that pot was for the guests. But the mud they made for the staff was just plain offensive, and I’m sorry, I worked very hard and was entitled to something that was, at the very least, drinkable.

The green room was not actually green. Green rooms hardly ever are. When I worked at Sunrise America, the walls were blue. Here, our walls were a soothing, creamy yellow. If Franklin, the middle-aged man who considered himself the patron of the room, a man steeped in petty authority and indulgently expensive colognes, wasn’t around, it was one of my favorite places to watch the show. The couch and chairs were upholstered in a soft, welcoming tweed, the monitors were tuned to every network, for comparison’s sake, and there was an abundant spread of fresh fruit, cheese and pastries.

That day, a B-list movie star was holding court next to the latest reality game show reject, and I knew that Franklin wouldn’t dare say anything to me in front of them. And by the time the show was over, he would have forgotten my trespass.

Or he would have if it weren’t for the fact that as I turned to exit, carrying my hot, filled-to-the-brim cup of much needed coffee, I walked right into—Oh!

“Oh, my God, I am so sorry,” I said as I put down my foam cup and grabbed for some paper napkins.

“Don’t worry. It’s just my shoe.”

“No, but…” I bent down to mop up the brown liquid that was pooling at the front crease of this guy’s tan suede Wallabies.

“It’s really okay.” And then he bent down just as I was looking up and…

“Ow.” Shit. My head hit his chin.

“S’okay.” And his tongue was bleeding.

This was worse than misspelling a name. I had now ruined the tongue of a man who, I assumed, was supposed to be a guest on our show. A speaking guest.

Franklin was already at the guest’s side, ice water in hand, ushering him to the couch, fawning over him as if he were a damaged little bird.

I pulled myself up and started to apologize again.

“Wheelly,” the guest said, tongue in cup, green eyes on me, “I wasn’t wooking either.”

Luckily, the B-list star and the reality guest had been too wrapped up in the accolades of their publicity entourages to notice what was going on. And before Franklin could chew me out, a barely postpubescent production intern appeared to say the guest named Mark was needed in makeup.

The tongueless guy stood up. “’At’s me.”

“Let me show you where to go,” I said. “I promise it’s safe now.”

He laughed and followed me down the hall.

I was never a morning person. I liked to think the fact that the bulk of my career was spent in the trenches of morning television was inexplicable. I’d started out my career assuming that by this point (the moment I spilled the coffee on the show, I mean, not right now, sitting here scribbling behind bars), almost ten years into it, I would be producing world-changing investigative reports and documentary-length profiles of the interesting and important. But aside from the fact that there wasn’t much of an audience for such things, it turned out that getting a staff job at one of the few programs (most of them on public television) that did that sort of work required a kind of wake-up-and-smell-the-blood ambition I just didn’t have. As already alluded to, when I woke up, I couldn’t really do much until I smelled the coffee. And if you didn’t wake up smelling blood, the rumor was that the only other way of getting one of those jobs was by waking up and smelling some suit’s morning breath, if you know what I mean. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately) that opportunity hadn’t come my way. Instead, I had developed a talent for turning out perfectly toned feel-good feature stories for the top-ranked national morning show. Wake-up-and-start-your-day-inspired stories. Have-a-good-chuckle-in-the morning stories. Learn-how-to-improve-your-life-with-the-latest-soon-to-be-forgotten-exercise-trend stories. But sometimes, especially since the war, if I was lucky, I was able to sneak in an occasional learn-something-valuable-about-the-world-at-large story, and it was that sort of thing that kept me going. Like this day’s story, for example.

“So, what do you do here?”

“Huh?”

“You work here, right?” said the man named Mark, tongue clearly improving, honey-brown hair being combed and teased. I was standing on the threshold of the fluorescent lit makeup room, waiting to escort him back to the green room once the face powder set, watching the artists work him up like a diva, slathering cover-up around his eyes as if looking like he was approaching his mid-thirties, which he did, was not entirely acceptable.

“Oh. Yeah.” I twisted my ponytail around in my hand. My hair was long then, and I accidentally caught a strand in my mouth. I hated it when I did that.

I pulled it out, hoping he hadn’t noticed. “Sorry. No coffee yet, you know? My brain isn’t fully functional.”

He laughed and playfully suggested I drink some off his shoe. Ha. Ha.

“I usually don’t come to the studio,” I said, explaining that I only did tape pieces, suggesting by my tone that I was somehow above the 6:00 a.m. call, like I was showing off. Which I suppose I was.

“So, why are you here today?”

“I heard one of our guests needed some coffee.” He was looking at me via my reflection in the mirror, and I was deeply regretting hitting the snooze button earlier, not allowing myself enough time to put on any makeup. But, looking at my reddening cheeks, I knew I didn’t need any blush.

He smiled. Cute dimples, I thought, which made me a little nervous. I glanced at my watch.

“We should get going.”

The stylist sprayed Mark’s (thick) hair one last time, trying unsuccessfully to tame a small cowlick on the right side of his head. He laughed (look at those dimples) and told her to leave it, that without it no one would know it was really him on TV.

I brought him to the sound check, where a lavaliere microphone was clipped to his tie, and then I left him with another nubile production assistant so I could get to the control room in time to watch my piece.

“Sorry again,” I said over my shoulder.

“Don’t apologize,” he said. “I feel like I should buy you a coffee or something. I was the one who got in your way.”

I emitted a shrill giggle (ugh!) and rushed down the hall. By the time I reached the control room, my cheeks were so flushed they hurt.

“What’s wrong with you?” my friend Caitlin whispered as I sidled up next to her. Caitlin was another producer on the show, although she only did live bookings—politicians, pundits and their ilk. We’d worked together for years now, sharing late nights at work and many drinks at the corner bar afterward, and our friendship had long extended beyond the office. She was a friend I could call after a bad date or a bad haircut. I was a friend she would call for the same. Truth be told, for her the bad haircuts were pretty common. She had recently acquired an unflattering bob, streaked in brassy shades of red and yellow that seemed to change with each flicker of the monitor lights. She tried to tone it down by clipping it back with little baby barrettes, and the general visage was far from professional. Certainly, she looked odd as we stood in the control room, hovering in the back row where the segment producers waited to watch their pieces hit the airwaves. Apparently, I looked a little odd myself.

“Annie?” She tried again. “Your cheeks are like a clown’s. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I said, my voice still sort of shrill.

“Whatever.” She let out a quiet, knowing chuckle. “Thanks for babysitting my guest. I got here late.”

“Mark?”

“Yeah. He goes on after your segment. Isn’t he cute?”

“I didn’t really notice.”

She gave me a don’t bullshit me kind of look. I glanced at the clock: 7:34.

“Excuse me, my piece is up.” I went to stand next to the executive producer, the EP, which is what we producers did so we could gauge his reaction when our pieces were on. It was the only time to get feedback. The rest of the day, he was too busy planning for tomorrow. There is no such thing as retrospect in morning television. It’s all present tense and tease the future.

“Take camera five! Cue music! Dissolve four.” The director brought us safely out of commercial. “Take three!”

Faith Heide looked up.

“Welcome back to New Day USA,” she said with an engaging smile, which quickly morphed into a furrowed, concerned-citizen look. “Later this hour, is the popular eggshell diet safe? And we’ll talk to the stars of the hot new reality show Who’s Your Mama. But first (pregnant pause), for this week’s edition of our American Ideals series, I met a man whose free-market ingenuity is helping to improve the lives of some women who, until recently, didn’t know what it meant to be free.”

She turned her head to watch the video on the enormous plasma monitor to her left, and then the image went full screen.

I breathed in deeply. I always got a bit of a knot in my stomach when I heard the words I had written come out of an anchor’s mouth. I never knew what they were going to do with them. And Faith, of late, had apparently decided she needed to be taken more seriously. Meaning she was constantly lowering her voice a few octaves and interjecting poignancy with perceptible sighs, trying, I suppose, to sound smarter. You could try to tell her to speak normally, but she wasn’t one for taking direction. Her agent had recently negotiated to get her the largest salary in television history (with a decade-long job guarantee), so she probably felt that she didn’t really need to learn anything new.

“Douglas Purnell might not look like someone who would care much about mascara,” Faith’s narration began. I watched my work in the staccato reflections of light the monitor cast upon my boss’s face. A flicker of emotion from him would be victorious. Call it compassion fatigue, but most television news professionals are intensely jaded. Once, I had produced a piece about a reunion of people who had grown up in a brutal orphanage. But the show was tight on time and something needed to go. “What do you think?” the director had asked the executive producer. The EP had turned to him and said, as if it was the most obvious thing, “Kill the orphans.”

Anyway, the piece I had on that day had nothing to do with orphanages. It was a profile about this guy Doug Purnell who had set up a number of beauty parlors and cosmetics laboratories in Fardish refugee camps at the southern edge of the former Soviet Union, all run by women. We didn’t shoot there, of course. There was no budget for international travel anymore, especially if it meant going to upsetting places where we’d once funded wars. All of the interviews were done stateside, in Purnell’s D.C. office (an organization called Cosmetic Relief) except for a short pickup bit shot by one of the freelance crews the network retained in the region, and there was some amateur DV footage provided by Purnell himself. But it was clear, from the translated sound bites, that these women were immensely grateful to him. He was helping them become self-sufficient while building self-esteem in the process. And the story was as all-American as a network could ask for because a major American cosmetics company had loaned funds and supplies. It was the best story I had done in a while. The most interesting to me, anyway.

People always told me I had the coolest job. I traveled all over the country; I met loads of interesting, colorful people. Celebrities mostly bored me, they were so ubiquitous in my work. So, yes, I would say I had a cool job. But I also had a growing sadness about what I did. It was a feeling of constant loss. I would put in weeks and weeks researching, shooting, writing and editing hours of footage, building relationships with strangers and soothing their fears that they might be portrayed badly, and out of it came about three minutes, four if I was lucky, of a story that most people only half watched because they were chomping on their Cheerios as it played. And then it was gone. There might be an e-mail or two of follow-up, colleagues might say something like “nice piece” when I got back to the office, but that was basically that. The end of it, and on to the next one.

Besides, even if they did put down their Cheerios and watch, they would have no idea that you, the producer, had any hand in it, because someone like Faith would appear in a few shots and have her voice laid in. Some of the correspondents I worked with were more involved than others, and some were really great, but the truth was, in order to show up on the air every day, someone else had to be doing some of the lifting for you. With Faith, “some” really meant “all.”

Sometimes I believed that she believed she had actually done the reporting. And why not? From beauty queen to weather girl to network wonder, Faith Heide always had a presence that caused people to take notice, and a voice that kept their attention. And that, in the end, is probably what matters: the personality of the person asking the questions and telling the tale, not who wrote the actual story. Or, rather, what matters is the viewer’s perception of the personality of the person asking the questions and telling the tale.

I used to question the astronomic salary scales of our on-air talent, but after years in the business, traveling around, talking to our viewers, watching the mercurial dances of the ratings’ shifts, I’m starting to think they deserve those big bucks. Their roles remind me of psychotherapy, with its theories of projection and all of that. It’s morning, the audience is just waking up, and these faces on the screen, these players, are extensions of their dreams—people they know but not really, events they are familiar with but not entirely. It isn’t actually news they are looking for when they turn on the TV; it is more of the same. And because of that, no story, no presentation of a story, can deviate too far from their expectations; it would be too disruptive, too jarring to their psyches. They would change the channel. But instead they had Faith. After all these years of appearing in people’s bedrooms every morning, Faith seemed so familiar and so credible, that, well, she just had to be there. They stayed tuned.

“And for more information about my report, check out our Web site,” she said, smiling. “Ken?”

His turn.

“Nice story, Faith,” he said, as if he actually liked her, and then turned to a new camera angle. “Coming up—long-lasting lipsticks. Are they safe? And later, did she do it? Hollywood vixen Asia Sheraton is here to tell her side of the story. But first, he has been called the vice president’s Prozac, the most trusted man on Pennsylvania Avenue, the brain of the millennium. And he’s only thirty-five. People are saying that senior White House aide and speechwriter Mark Thurber is going to be a central player in Vice President Hacker’s upcoming presidential bid. He’s here with us this morning to give us an insider’s perspective of what some say is the most secretive administration in history, and to discuss his new book, The Scribe Inside: Memoirs of a White House Advisor. Good morning, Mark. So nice to have you here.”

“Good morning to you, Ken. It’s nice to be here.”

Oh my God. “That’s Mark Thurber?” I asked Caitlin, who had come to stand between me and the EP (it was her turn to gauge his take on things). She didn’t answer, though. She didn’t have to.

“Are you enjoying your visit to New York?” said Ken. “It seems we hardly ever see members of the administration outside of D.C. these days.” Cue large, fluorescent white smile.

Thurber laughed and said something about the terror threat being too high to allow high-ranking officials into the pubic eye. “But I’m glad I risked it today. I’ve quite enjoyed meeting some members of your staff,” said the man People magazine had recently named Washington’s Most Eligible Bachelor.

He looked different in person than he did in those airbrushed photos. A little more weathered and more, well, like a lot of guys I know: healthy, a bit on the thin side (I read somewhere that he was a marathon runner), dressed according to the preppy-chic suggestions of the latest J. Crew catalog. Job aside, I wouldn’t say he was all that exceptional. Except look at that smile. Look at those dimples.

My cheeks started to burn. And at that moment, though of course I didn’t know it at the time, the trajectory of my life was rerouted onto a different track.

Dear New Day USA,

I just want to thank Ken and Faith for being there for me each mourning (sic), bringing the important events of the world into my home. They are both so smart and well informt (sic) and Faith is so lovely and Ken is like the brother I never had. Would it be possible to have them send me autographt (sic) pictures? It would mean the world to me.

George Albridge

Allentown, PA

CHAPTER TWO

IT SOUNDED LIKE A BROKEN RADIATOR, THE ALMOST deafening hiss that blasted through the Sweetwater, Texas Convention Center. And it was palpable, how the moist summer heat helped the noxious odor cling to my hair and my clothes. The smell was urinelike, and was particularly intense near the large pits in the center of the floor. Like at the pit I was standing next to as my correspondent, armed with freshly applied lipstick, protective gear and a poker, was learning how to extract the venom from a rattler who, unbeknownst to him (or maybe her), was on his way to the slaughter two pits down the way. I was in the depths of what a logical person might have thought to be the worst cliché of a Freudian nightmare imaginable. There were, in the space surrounding me, about five thousand live and very angry rattlesnakes. We were shooting a few interviews and some footage for a feature piece before we went out to participate in what was and probably still is the world’s largest rattlesnake roundup. This wasn’t exactly the place I would have liked to be when my phone rang—and the person calling was the guy who had become the subject of a more preferable variety of dreams. I probably wouldn’t have even answered except I didn’t know it was him because the caller ID was blocked.

“Hello? This is Annabelle,” I said, sounding very serious. When I answered the phone on work time, my voice tended to drop a few octaves (sort of like Faith’s, I suppose), something my friends ribbed me about to no end. My normal voice, my casual voice, was (and is) a bit on the high side; telemarketers often asked if my mother was home.

“Hello? Hello?” He didn’t introduce himself, but having watched the tape of his appearance on our show too many times to count, I knew his voice. Mark Thurber’s soft but masculine lyrics “I’ve enjoyed meeting your staff” had become the sonnet that lulled me to sleep at night. And, because Caitlin told me she had given him my number, I had been anxiously anticipating his call for the past few days.

“Hi!” My response got caught in the back of my throat and came out like a chirp.

“Hello?” he said again. “I’m sorry. I think we have a bad connection.” Now he was almost yelling. “There is a loud hissing sound. I’ll call back.”

“It’s just snakes!” I said, basically shrieking. He hung up anyway.

“What’s next?” said my correspondent, who was gripping the neck of a fanged rattler with her manicured fingers, gripping it so he couldn’t bite her and, understandably, at arm’s length.

“Did you get a tight shot of the fangs?” I asked the cameraman. He glared at me as if it was a dumb question, because it was. I looked back at my correspondent. She was looking a little ashen under all the foundation and blush. She was, after all, standing in the middle of the pit, as opposed to standing comfortably on the other side of the wall with me. There were snakes trying to strike at her steel plated boots, and more snakes slithering between her feet.

“Drop it and get out,” I said. And if that isn’t power, I don’t know what is.

The dynamic between producer and correspondent is a delicate one. On the one side you have an outwardly needy and demanding ego, and on the other, an inwardly needy and demanding ego. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. It can get incredibly tense, but without each other, we would both be unemployed; I look like a Muppet in front of the camera, and some of the correspondents I worked with couldn’t write themselves out of, well, a rattlesnake pit. To be fair, not this correspondent. This one I liked. We might have covered a lot of really silly stories, but given the opportunity, she was a good journalist—and she could write. More importantly, she was a friend.

“Oh my, he called, didn’t he?” Natasha said as she climbed out of the pit and landed safely on the snake-free cement floor.

“Huh? How did you know?”

“You are holding your phone the way I was holding that snake.” It was true. I had the phone at arm’s length, as if it might bite. “You look like you are channeling a signal from outer space,” she said.

“Maybe that’s what I need to do.”

“Let me know if you get any reception.”

So I held the phone higher, playing at the extraterrestrial idea, and as the antenna hit its apex, the phone rang again.

We both gave a start. I looked at the display. No caller ID.

“Do you think it’s him?” I let it ring again.

“Answer it!”

I didn’t. And it rang once more. Natasha grabbed the phone from me.

“Annabelle Kapner’s phone…May I ask who is calling?” She looked at me, eyebrows up. “It’s a Mr. Sage calling from Media-Aid.”

Immediately deflated, I reached over to take the call.

“This is Annabelle.”

I had no idea who Mr. Sage was, much less Media-Aid, and was quite prepared to send this call to the snakes, as it were.

“Ms. Kapner, we need to talk.”

“I am sorry, I’m in the middle of a shoot. Would you mind calling back and leaving a message on my voice—”

“It’s very important that we speak…” He had a slightly affected accent that I couldn’t place.

“Sir, I’m sure it is important, but this is a really bad time for me to talk.” Didn’t he hear the hissing?

“Self-important bitch,” he said, and hung up.

Stunned, I stared at the keypad, as if it could tell me something.

It wasn’t the first time I had gotten an irate viewer call, assuming that was what this was. But no one had ever been quite so harsh. It felt as if one of the snakes had bitten me. Maybe it was the smell of the place, maybe it was the call, but my skin suddenly became cold and prickly, and I thought I might lose my balance, which is not something you want to do when standing near a rattlesnake pit. So I took a few deep breaths to still my nerves, put the phone into the back pocket of my jeans and walked away.

Natasha and the crew were already heading over to the concession area, where you could buy rattlesnake key chains, wallets and gall bladders (considered by the Japanese to be an aphrodisiac) among other things. I went to join them and distracted myself by stocking up on souvenirs, planning to expense them as props.

When I first started working in this business, a veteran field producer named John Mitchell had called me into his office and sat me down in a fatherly sort of way. Mitchell was a little creepy (rumor had it there were a number of harassment complaints filed against him), but he had promised to give me tips about how to succeed at the networks, so there I sat. He smiled, baring horribly crooked teeth, and told me that if I wanted to be a producer, which I did, I needed to learn to pad my expense reports. I started to ask about the ethics of doing such a thing, but he interrupted before I could finish the question. It’s an unspoken honor system, he said. If every producer padded then it wouldn’t be suspicious if something odd showed up. And odd things always showed up. Usually they were legitimate. Mitchell (multiple Emmy-winning, I should point out) told me he was once doing a live remote in an open field when a large cow got in the way of the shot. He asked the farmer to please move his cow, to which the farmer replied, “You wanna move her, you gotta buy her.” So there it was, under “misc. expenses”—One Cow: $1,000.00.

“What do you think of this?” said Natasha, holding out a stuffed, coiled adult rattlesnake.

“I think you should have that on set when you introduce the piece,” I declared, suddenly excited by this idea, happy to move on from the strange call. I imagined Faith having to confront a pile of dead, stuffed snakes on live TV, and I picked up another coiled one off the table, admiring the wide-open mouth, the pointy fangs up close and personal. A tiny bit of plastic dripped down from the tips, approximating venom.

Then my phone rang.

It rang again.

I was going to let it ring through to voice mail, but Natasha grabbed the antenna, and pulled the phone out of my pocket.

“Annabelle Kapner’s office,” she said, winking at me, mouthing, “Maybe it’s him?”

And then she turned paler than she had been in the pit.

“They hung up,” she said, and handed me the phone. “Annabelle, what was that story you had on last week?”

“About the Fardish beauty parlors?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“Why?”

“I think it might have pissed someone off.”

I looked at her blankly.

“Whoever that was just called you a few unspeakable terms, said something in some foreign language and then slammed down the phone.”

I tend to be a fairly nonconfrontational person, or at least I was before I landed in jail, and one of the things I liked about morning television was that we hardly ever did the sort of stories that pissed people off. We stayed positive and hopeful because negativity is hard to stomach in the morning. Of course, it did happen upon occasion that people felt misrepresented (as I mentioned, we did get irate calls periodically), but usually that was because they felt they did not get enough airtime to promote whatever it was they were promoting, not because they felt personally slighted. And if a story was somehow critical, we did our darnedest to balance it to within an inch of its life, even if it was an unbalanced story to begin with. Often after my segments aired the subjects involved sent me flattering e-mails and even flowers. Once I got a cashmere scarf, but I had to return it because the network’s news standards don’t allow us to accept gifts worth more than seventy-five dollars. Of course, you could argue that the wholesale value of the scarf was less than that, which is why I did keep the matching hat.

“Annie?”

I had fainted. I must have been out for a while because when I opened my eyes, we were in a makeshift infirmary. The rattling sounded distant, but I knew we were in the convention center because the table across from me was lined with rows and rows of bottles of antivenom.

“Annabelle? Are you okay?” Natasha was sitting on a metal folding chair next to the stretcher I was lying on, patting a cool, damp cloth across my forehead.

“Where’s the crew?”

“I sent them to shoot the snake hunt. Don’t worry about it. Are you okay?”

“I think I fainted.”

“You did.”

A medic came over to check me out. He had greasy hair and was missing a front tooth, and I really didn’t want him to touch me. I sat up.

“I’m okay. I must have overheated,” I said, which was a stupid thing to say, because if anything the place was overly air-conditioned.

Natasha and the medic shared a knowing glance.

“I’m okay,” I said again, and tried to stand. They both pushed me back down and told me to sit still for a while. The medic handed me a small paper cup filled with lukewarm water. I drank it down and handed it back to him. “It was probably the smell that knocked me out. Really, I’m okay.”

“Why don’t you relax for a few more minutes?”

“We need to keep shooting,” I said. Never come back from a shoot without a story, that’s the rule. Once, Natasha and I were doing a story about lobster fishing. Actually, it was about a lobsterman calendar. Anyway, it turned out that the Dramamine my cameraman had taken had expired two years earlier, and he spent the bulk of our boat ride tossing up over the side. But every few minutes he would wipe his mouth and take a few shots of Natasha helping the beefcake lobsterman bring in the traps, before he had to return to face the sea. The video wasn’t his usual standard, but at least we had something to put on the air.

My phone rang again. I was resigned, and also by now a bit curious, so this time I answered on the first ring.

“This is Annabelle,” I said tentatively.

“Hey. It’s Mark Thurber.”

I thought I might faint again, I was so relieved. And so nervous.

“Remember, we met on your show the other day?” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “How are you doing?” As if his calling was the most normal thing in the world, as if we spoke every day, as if I hadn’t just fainted from the combined shock of receiving two really odd phone calls and the hideous smell of thousands of rattlesnakes.

“Um, I was wondering. Well, I am going to be in New York next week…” (He said “um”! He was nervous, too!) “…and I was wondering if you might be around. Maybe I could treat you to that coffee we talked about.”

What is that phrase, emotional whiplash? One second I am being harassed, the next I am being courted. I felt dizzy. Adrenaline was furiously racing through my body. I looked to Natasha for focus. She was making quizzical expressions, eyebrows up, forehead creased, desperate to know who I was talking to. “It’s Thurber,” I mouthed, and she did a little dance, which made me smile.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I’m around. Let me just check my Palm.” I counted to ten and then we made plans to meet after work on Tuesday.

The nice thing about being in jail, if one has to say something positive, is that it gives you plenty of space and time to appreciate honesty. More than appreciate it—recognize it. Or rather, recognize the bullshit. I am realizing that this is a very important skill to have, bullshit recognizing, and that it’s one I sorely lacked before I got here.

Take my history with men. My last relationship, if I can call it that, had ended about six months before the phone calls in the rattlesnake pit. It had started online, and it pretty much ended there. The guy was nice enough, and apparently a number of other virtually sophisticated women agreed with me. We had been dating for a few months when we decided to take the next step; we took down our profiles from nicedate. com. But he was a lawyer, and a slippery one at that, so when a friend of mine discovered that he still had his profile up on ivyleaguedates.com, he defended himself by saying he had never agreed to take his profile off of that site. The ethical legacy of the Clinton era, I suppose. We lasted two more months. He was quite charming, and I was entering the age of the “why aren’t you married yet” question, so I desperately tried to make it work. But when another friend discovered my beloved’s profile on swing-date.com, well, let’s just say I logged off of men for a while.

And now here I was, surrounded by thousands and thousands of very phallic creatures, being pursued by Mr. Too Good To Be True.

“Are you okay?” Natasha asked again, after we had completed our mandatory round of “Oh my God! That was him! Oh my God!”

“I feel fine.”

“I mean about that other phone call. Before you fainted. What do you think that was?”

“I think,” I said, suddenly bolstered by Mark’s call and insanely energized, “I think I have no idea, but I’m ready to go find the crew now.” She said okay, because she also knew the rules, and we hitched a ride on the back of a farmer’s pickup truck, off to hunt some snakes.

To whom it may concern at New Day USA:

You had a story on this morning about a new facial yoga that helps to reduce wrinkles. Can you please tell me where I can find these classes?

Thank you,

Bonnie Eager

Fargo, ND

CHAPTER THREE

Tuesday.

WE WERE SUPPOSED TO MEET AT 7:00 P.M., but I was, as usual, running late. My senior supervising producer still hadn’t signed off on the edit, promos was demanding more snake footage and my video editor was all bitchy because he only worked until six, per union rules, and he refused to do any overtime. And the piece aired tomorrow. It was 5:55 when the word came down that Carl was finally in his office, ready to screen. Carl Van Dunt—he was my supervisor. So up I went, tape in hand.

Many correspondents didn’t have the time to sit through screenings, but Natasha took a pride of ownership in her work and tried to make a point of it, so I stopped by her office to grab her to come with me.

“Shh!” she said, vigorously waving for me to enter.

“What’s up? We have to go to Carl’s—”

“Shh! Listen.”

Natasha’s office was directly across from Tom Tatcher’s, the EP’s. He had a corner window and she had no windows, but from a power perspective, it was a great place to be. The building was erected in the seventies, apparently a time when not a lot of attention was paid to soundproofing.

“He’s in there with a team from legal.”

This was weird. Legal hardly ever came up to our floor. Why would they? People don’t regularly sue over diet fads and celebrity interviews.

We leaned forward intently. I couldn’t hear much, but I was pretty sure I heard my name. Then they said their goodbyes.

The door opened and four men walked out. All in suits, Tom included. Down to the elevator bank and gone for the day.

“You heard my name, right?” I said, whispering.

“Don’t be stupid. That wasn’t you they were talking about.”

“Do you know any other Annabelles here?”

“Maybe they said Isabel? You know, Isabel, the new girl?”

“She’s an intern.”

“So?”

“Well, what were they talking about?”

“I don’t know. I just caught the tail end of it.”

“Maybe I should talk to Tom, tell him about the calls?”

“What could he do? It’s been almost a week and they haven’t called back, and you have no idea what the story is, anyway. I’m sure he has other things to deal with.”

Which was true. It was incredibly hard to get the attention of the boss, and you had to be judicious about it. Tom was a nice guy and tried to be welcoming, but his job was just too nuts. I used to think I wanted to climb the network ladder, perhaps run a show myself one day, but when I watched my supervisors, and especially the executive producers, I really started to question my career track. The stories, the guests, the competition, the overly ambitious young staffers, the hotheaded anchors, the egocentric correspondents, the late nights, the early mornings, the ratings, the marketing, the press, the promotion, the spin—it all fell on their heads, 24/7 (you can forget about a personal life), and the job security was as good as the weekly Nielsen Report. The American public could, essentially, vote you off the island on any given day, contracts be damned. We were the number one morning show, but only by a few ratings points. Should one of the other two network programs start creeping up (which they seemed to be doing), it was an invitation to a beheading.

“Let’s go see Carl,” I said. “My editor is about to bolt.”

Neither of us liked Carl, and he didn’t really like us, either. Carl was in the twilight of his career, recently fired from a big job at a different network, only to be hired by ours (word was he was golf buddies with the suits at the top). Carl had a big title for years and years over there, running one soon-to-be-canceled show after another, but the rumor was that for the past decade or so no one over there ever knew what he actually did. They said he spent so much time standing in the lobby, seeing and being seen, that everyone joked he should accept the dry cleaning deliveries so at least he would be of value.

Things didn’t change much when he came to New Day USA. He had a big, beautiful office with big beautiful paintings, but most of the time he wasn’t there; he was out in front of the building, modeling his stylish suits, which were decades too young for him, laughing loudly so everyone could see he was having a good time. He just seemed to be one of those people who kept fluffing his feathers and somehow charming the right people enough that he failed up and up.

The sad thing was, once upon a time, Carl was actually worth what they paid him. Word was that in the early days of his career, he was breaking stories right and left. He spent years covering war zones, telling stories that no one else would tell. But somewhere along the line, things changed. He started doing more and more pieces filled with style and less and less filled with substance. He was one of the first producers to mandate that every edit should be a dissolve, that more time should be spent worrying about the lighting and the correspondents’ haircuts than about the questions they were asking.

Purists didn’t like what Carl was doing, but the audience did. And as the ratings went up, so did Carl’s stature in some parts (the money parts) of the industry. In fact, a lot of people credit Carl with the softening of the network news, but I think that might be a little too generous (or malicious, depending on your view of the world).

Anyway, you might think that someone who had been around so long would want to nurture younger staffers like us, maybe try to relive his proud and productive early years, but the truth was it often felt like he resented us. Understandably. We took up his time with our petty needs when he could otherwise be schmoozing with the people who actually could impact his career and his wallet. Never married, never really appearing all that happy, he had only his job and his authority, and in the end, there was no security in that.

Word was, after years of him doing pretty much nothing, the suits in our front office had seen the light and were now trying to push him out, make room for some younger, less wrinkled, less expensive blood, and Carl was holding on for dear life, making dealings with him more uncomfortable than ever. Up front he was as charming as all get-out, but he routinely took credit for other people’s work, gossiped incessantly (well, we all did that) and, worse, liked to change our pieces just to put his fingerprints on them. In fact, he was sort of a tyrant; he enjoyed tearing producers (and especially associate producers) to shreds. He would never raise his voice, but would say things like “this makes absolutely no sense” and “who wrote this shit?” and “how did you ever get a job at a network, anyway?” Usually he was comparably easy on me, but not always; he was the first and only person ever to make me cry at work.

But he was a sucker for celebrity.

“Annie has a date with Mark Thurber tonight,” Natasha said before we even sat down.

I should have been pissed, but I knew Carl would be impressed (I was a bit impressed with myself, after all), and, more importantly, I knew that he would be nice to me in the hopes that I would return with good gossip tomorrow. And, hope of all hopes, he probably figured if a relationship took root and Mark and I became an “it” couple, he could claim us as friends, one of whom was in a very powerful place.

Carl spoke to us while simultaneously consulting his BlackBerry, periodically typing a few things, putting it down, picking it back up again, as if to remind us of his importance, acting disinterested while inquiring about how Mark and I met, where we were going, what I thought might happen.

I stifled a sneeze. Carl’s office was saturated with a musky male cologne (I could have sworn he shared it with Franklin); the scent trailed Carl wherever he went. It was so strong that some people would take the stairs if they saw him waiting for the elevator. It was weird, and made me wonder if smelling sensitivity toughens with age.

“Excuse me,” I said, and grabbed a tissue off his desk before offering up a little more information, just enough that we got the desired response.

“Did you make the changes we discussed earlier?” Carl asked, referring to his meddling with our snake piece.

“Of course.” I blew my nose.

“Then I don’t need to see it again. It’s fine. Have fun tonight.” He grabbed his remote and turned toward the monitor opposite his desk to watch the feeds of the evening news packages.

And that was that.

For now.

Dear New Day USA,

I am what some might call a news-junky. I am always very impressed with Ken’s hard-hitting interview style and just wanted to say that I wish there were more newsmen like him. His recent interview with the White House spokesman Mark Thurber was very insightful, really pounding out the truth of our administration. Do you know if Mr. Thurber is single? Can you please give him my address and phone number? I have included it below.

Robin Fayer

Orlando, Florida

CHAPTER FOUR

WE MET AT MECCA, A MIDDLE EASTERN–themed bar on the roof of the new Scheherazade Hotel, the latest hot spot in town. Normally, as a regular gal, I wouldn’t have been able to get past the red velvet rope (unless I wanted to risk waiting in the line that snaked through the lobby, leading up to a metal detector and an armed guard blocking the elevator bank). I suppose I could have shown my network news ID and claimed press privileges, which usually worked, but I was pretty sure my date’s credentials were enough to merit VIP status.

“I’m meeting Mark Thurber,” I said to the Armani-clad, steel-shouldered bouncer behind the rope. I could hear a few girls in the line behind me rustle when I said the name.

The bouncer looked at his list, asked to see my driver’s license and unhooked the latch. “Twenty-ninth floor, take a right.”

And there I went. Clop, clop, clop down the marbled hall and into the elevator.

And there he was, sitting at a small corner table, surrounded by candles and dark velvet cushions, wearing a little stubble and a dark gray shirt. I tried to take a good look at him, to take him in, in the flesh, without the studio makeup or the unreal glare of television lighting.

Sitting there, back straight, chin up, eyes searching around, Mark reminded me of the guys in high school that I had been too terrified to talk to, the thin, chiseled waspy ones that had landed at my progressive private school only after being expelled from a string of blue blood boarding schools or Upper East Side preps. He had floppy, straight brown hair, an aristocratic profile and a slightly smug countenance reminiscent of a British movie star. Totally out of my league. But then again, sometimes guys like that actually liked girls like me—thinking girls like me (with small bones, light olive skin, oversize eyes and the surgically altered residue of a prominent nose) to be somewhat exotic. Mark was trying to push down his cowlick when he looked up and saw me. He smiled (those dimples!).

“Hi,” I said as I walked over to him, grateful that the Persian carpet snuffed out the graceless clop-clop of my high-heeled shoes. “I hope you haven’t been waiting too long.” I was only a few minutes late, but I hate when people aren’t punctual. It’s the producer in me—time sensitive and tightly scheduled.

“Just got here,” he said, but he was probably lying. He was already halfway through whatever it was he was drinking. “Coffee?” he said, holding up what appeared to be a tube leading to a hookah pipe.

“That’s coffee?”

“It actually is. Some strange coffee martini they make here. These are actually straws. Try it. It’s good.”

“Odd.” I sat down and took a sip. “And clever.”

Basically, the bowl was made to look like one of those Egyptian water pipes, but the proprietors had created a way to drink from them instead.

We bantered. We sipped our alcoholic coffee through straws.

It was like a lot of first dates, the kind where you talk and talk to avoid any awkward silences. Until the inevitable.

“So.”

“So.”

Silence.

“How about we order another one?” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

I was surprised to find that I wasn’t self-conscious and squirming next to a guy like him, but there I was, comfortably slouching into the pillows, gently touching Mark’s arm after he accidentally spilled a little of the drink on the table and tried to mop it up with his sleeve without my noticing. I had noticed and I thought it sweet.

He told me about working in the White House, about how every day he had to pinch himself because he couldn’t believe he was actually there, in the most powerful place on earth.

“What’s he like?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The president, silly.”

Mark laughed and said that, because I was a member of the press, he couldn’t really give me a straightforward answer. And anyway, he said, he worked more directly with the vice president. So I asked about him.

“Off the record?” He gave an exaggerated snarl and then held up our now empty hookah. “Waiter! Can we have another one?”

Hookah or no hookah, Mark did not need much lubrication to tell me that the VP was an ass. It was common knowledge that he was a screamer, a phone thrower, a man in dire need of mood stabilizers but too macho to take any. At one of his first press conferences (not that there were many), the VP took off his shoe and banged it on the podium in a manner reminiscent of a certain Soviet leader circa 1960. In fact, that was the perception—that the VP fancied the savior of America would come in the form of an iron-fisted, quasi-totalitarian, Soviet-like regime, just with a nice capitalist overtone. Since Mark was about as far as you could get from a gray, bland, perfunctory Soviet apparatchik, they didn’t really get along on a personal level. That said, the vice president was preparing to run in the next presidential election, and Mark did have issues of professional longevity to consider.

“I figure I don’t have to like him. And he doesn’t have to like me,” he said. The waiter returned and Mark leaned forward to take a sip from our refreshed bowl of caffeinated elixir. “As long as he likes what I write.”

“But do you believe in what you write? I mean, do you believe in his policies?”

“His policies are based on the polls. So there isn’t much to believe in. It’s like that with any politician.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I didn’t say I respect it.”

I sat back and crossed my arms, like a disappointed schoolteacher. “How can you live with yourself, working for something you don’t respect?”

“Oh come on, people have lived with a lot worse. Especially in Washington. You just have to learn not to personalize the political.”

“But that’s not why you got into the business, is it? Just to rub elbows with power? I mean, you could have done a lot of things, I imagine. Why work in politics if you don’t really think you’re doing some good?”

“I didn’t say we weren’t doing any good. We are doing some good.”

“Like what?” I said, and then immediately hated myself for being so argumentative.

Mark laughed. “You just can’t suppress that hard-hitting reporter inside you, huh?”

“Yeah, right,” I said, hiding the fact that I was blushing by sucking up some more of our drink. “But seriously, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, I’m just curious about what it is about your work that moves you, you know, gets you out of bed in the morning?”

He fumbled with his straw. “I know it sounds clichéd, but I guess a lot of what we do is just simply better than the alternative. It’s not that anything is so great, but we could be doing a lot worse. It probably sounds like moral gymnastics or defensive reasoning, but I do believe that.” He took another sip. “At least I like to believe that I believe that,” he said, looking up from the hookah with a full dimpled grin.

“What a mental menace,” I said, citing the words Mark had infamously coined referring to the Fardish president before he was, also Mark’s words, effectively eviscerated.

He smiled again.

“You like those alliterations, don’t you?” I said.

“This is a luxurious libation, don’t you think?” he said, changing the subject with a wink.

An ambrosial aphrodisiac, I thought to myself as I lifted the straw to my mouth once again. And that, basically, is how, a couple of hours later, I wound up in the hotel suite of a People magazine certified eligible bachelor.

And that’s where he leaned forward across the plush velvet couch and gave me a soft, gentle kiss on my mouth. He had soft, full lips, warm and, oh…this is hard for me to write, even now. One doesn’t get many kisses like that behind bars.

“I should go,” I said, not really wanting to, but proud of myself for saying so.

“It’s okay,” he said, “we can just talk if you want.”

I wanted to kiss him. “It’s just, well, I don’t want to do anything stupid, and you are one of the most coveted guys in the country and I really don’t want to be another conquest and…” I went on like this for a bit too long, embarrassing myself more and more with each word. I grabbed a water bottle from the coffee table and finished it off, because if I was drinking I couldn’t talk.

Mark laughed. His eyes closed when he laughed. It was incredibly sweet.

“You know the stupid thing?” he said, sitting back into the cushions, away from me. “Because of that People article, sure I can get laid, but no woman will trust me enough to take me seriously.”

I shot him an impish grin. “Poor you.”

“No. Seriously. I really like you, Annie. And I know it sounds like a line, but I would really like to get to know you. See what happens.” He crossed his arms, giving himself an uneasy little hug. “Is that okay?”

“Okay,” I said, wanting to believe him. I told him that if we really wanted to get to know each other, he had to trust that I understood that everything he said was off the record, and that made him smile, as if there was a lot he wanted to tell me, which, of course (I later found out) there was.

We didn’t kiss again that night. We just talked and talked until the sun started to rise, and then we both fell asleep on the bed, fully dressed.

When I woke up, there were two pink peonies on my pillow. Mark was in his hotel-issued, white terry-cloth bathrobe, watching me.

“I stole them from the breakfast spread,” he said, pointing his chin at the flowers.

There was a cart with coffee and pastries at the foot of the bed. He poured me a cup and sat down next to me. I sat up to take it.

“Peonies are my favorite,” I said. “And lilacs.”

He smiled.

I smiled.

It was a little awkward again. And there was no alcohol in this brew.

“You have beautiful hair.” He gently touched my brown tangled nest.

I worried about my morning breath.

“What time is it?” I said, looking for the television remote. Found it. I turned on my show. “I have a piece on at 7:44.”

“Cool.” Mark looked at his watch. “We have thirty seconds.” He put his arm around my shoulder, giving me a quick squeeze, causing me to spill a bit of the coffee on the sheet.

It is an odd thing to watch someone watching your work, especially when it’s someone you have a crush on. And, if I could have chosen it, this certainly wasn’t the first piece I wanted Mark to see.

“Wow,” he said when the story was over and Natasha was showing Faith and Ken some of our purchases. “That was totally disgusting.”

“You don’t like snakes?”

“Remember, I work in Washington.”

I laughed. “It was pretty gross. The place smelled like a subway toilet.”

“I think I might have fainted if I got anywhere near one of those pits.”

“I did faint,” I said, quickly regretting admitting that.

“You did? From the smell?”

“No, I…I don’t really know why.”

“You don’t know?”

“Well, I had gotten a disturbing call, and it kind of made me unbalanced. And maybe that, with the smell, I don’t know…”

Mark looked at me as if I was nuts. But in a sweet way. And I don’t know why, but I guess I needed to talk about it with someone, so I told him the story. About the piece, about the calls.

“Wow,” he said again. “I saw that story. I was there the day it aired, remember? It was a really nice piece, but what’s the big deal?”

“I know. But Natasha said that the second caller specifically mentioned it when calling me all sorts of horrible things.”

“Like what?”

It was too embarrassing for me to spell out how he had phrased in hideously derogatory terms that I was a weak journalist, a lazy hack, that reporting like mine was part of the problem, and that I might as well be producing Nazi propaganda and working for Leni Riefenstahl at the rate I was going. It had really hit a nerve.

“He just said stuff about the story being totally wrong and misleading, and basically blamed me for the downfall of society,” I said. “There were some threats about needing to get it right, or else.” It sounded funny when I summed it up like that. Now I wasn’t even so sure why I had gotten so upset.

“Or else?”

“Or else. I’m not really sure what.”

“Well, who do you think it could be?”

“Honestly? My best guess is that it was some whack-job viewer. We do have a few, and they do make strange phone calls from time to time. But the weird thing is that I don’t know how they would have my cell number. Unless some idiot intern forwarded the call. I suppose that could happen. But it was still upsetting.”

“And they haven’t called again?”

“No.”

“Will you let me know if they do?”

“Okay,” I said, relieved that I could talk about this with someone, that he didn’t seem to think I had overreacted.

And then we got up because I had to rush home to shower and change, and Mark, well, he had a country to help run.

Dear Faith and Ken,

I have been watching your show for over five years, but after your interview with the family of the runaway, I am turning the dial. It was completely distasteful to harass the parents in such a way. At least on Sunrise America they just spoke to the siblings.

Disdainfully,

A Disappointed Viewer

CHAPTER FIVE

EVERY WEDNESDAY AT 10:00 A.M. WE HAD our weekly staff meeting. It was usually a fairly staid affair in which we would pile into the conference room (walls decorated with the ever-present mosaic of monitors and posters from our network’s sitcoms and reality shows). We crowded around the ferry boat–sized conference table, coffee in hand, sometimes a bagel, stragglers standing in the back. Tom would read off the previous week’s ratings, usually getting overly enthusiastic if he had anything positive to say about ours, which was becoming rare. The staff would give tentative feedback (the grumbling happened out of Tom’s earshot), and then we went on to tear apart the competition:

“June and Jack looked like they were about to hit each other yesterday, did anyone notice that?”

“I know! It’s so obvious they hate each other!”

or

“How stupid was that segment on Sunrise about the toe therapy? They are really getting desperate, aren’t they?”

Of course, what no one ever said is that, as we all knew, our own Ken and Faith were so jealous of each other they wouldn’t even speak to one another unless the camera was rolling. Or that we had done a similar toe therapy segment the week before.

But the best part of the meetings was when the bookers regaled us with their latest war stories from the field. Not travel bookers, guest bookers—the people who line up all of the live talking heads you see on the shows—the Elizabeth Smarts, the families of infants who fell down wells, the best friends of the latest soldier to die (especially if the soldier had an interesting story to tell, that is, like if he were previously a famous baseball star). People loved this stuff, and that was why morning shows made more money for their respective networks than any other news program that aired. No one under the age of sixty was watching the evening newscasts anymore, and morning was the only growth market on the dial, so the pressure was on. But because morning shows fell under the news divisions, there were rules. Of gravest importance: no one was allowed to pay for interviews. But no one ever said anything about offering overnights at five-star hotels and tickets to Broadway shows. Or mind games. Most bookings were made over the phone, with our (mostly female) bookers sweet talking the intended guests into believing that by coming on our show, their lives would improve dramatically. But if the story was big enough, armies of bookers would descend upon the home of, say, some teenage girl from Arkansas who had miraculously escaped a traumatic weeklong kidnapping. Scores of New York City bookers would camp out at the Holiday Inn closest to her small, rural town, each one striving to become the family’s new best friend, convincing them that by going on her show (as opposed to the other shows), it would be therapeutic, inspiring to others, good for the girl. And fun, so much fun. Bookers had been known to take such girls shopping in the mall, out for ice cream, and give her all sorts of candy (never money!) so that she would pick, say, Sunrise America and not New Day USA for her first interview. Of course, while said girl might give one show the first interview, she would more often than not appear on all the other shows a few minutes later. Often, the cameras would be lined up outside her house, with a slightly different angle for each program. As soon as she finished talking to, say, Faith (via remote), she would be escorted a few feet to talk to, say, Sally.

Sometimes bookers were known to lie outright, claiming to be from a show they were not, telling the guest the interview was canceled or moved. Tom forbade our staff doing that and generally asked us to toe an ethical line, to make sure we could all face the mirror in the morning. And that might be why our ratings were slipping a bit. Joe Public was getting savvy, and potential guests would ask things of our bookers that we wouldn’t, but other shows sometimes would, provide.

I was lucky. I sometimes considered listing it on my résumé, under relevant skills: “digital editing, digital photography, French proficiency and luck.” I had somehow convinced the powers that be that I was a horrible booker, and so happily avoided the so-called booking wars that were the backbone of morning television. Well, I shouldn’t say somehow. The truth was that I was a terrible booker. On the one occasion that I was asked to do what we called a “door knock,” I basically fled the crime scene faster than the criminals. It was a few years back, up near Niagara Falls, in the dead of winter. But it wasn’t dead at all. The world seemed very alive that day, with forty-mile-an-hour gusts of piercing wind and the kind of temperatures that cause your nose hairs to freeze.

It was around this point in my career that the romance of all the travel had started to wear thin. In the earlier days, I was so thrilled to be hopping on planes and in and out of cars that it didn’t matter if I was going to stay at the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, or at some no-name motel in a polygamous hill town in Montana (though, that’s actually one story I never did that I always wanted to do—an exploration into polygamy in the Mountain West. Unfortunately, unless one of the polygamous patriarchs had murdered three of his eight wives, we weren’t interested).

Anyway, up in Niagara Falls, the story was that three young children, all from the same family, had jumped into the rapids together, in the dead of winter, involving what was either a suicide pact or an insidious push by a psychotic mother, who had witnessed the whole thing. The mother hadn’t been charged yet, but was currently at the hospital under a suicide watch herself. My job? Knock on the door and ask the poor father how he felt—and if he would like to share his story with millions of viewers, because it would be cathartic and possibly help another family from suffering the same loss. And I had to do so before the other two network fists beat me to the door.

I had been up in that neck of the woods anyway, working on a story about family-friendly casinos, when my pager went off. My pager almost never went off, so if it did, I knew I was in for something unpleasant. For a self-proclaimed newsperson, I was rather skittish of breaking stories. I didn’t look at my pager. Then my cameraman’s cell phone started to vibrate, and he was a much better newsman than I was. So we left the overlit casino where we had been shooting some footage, piled into the crew car (a fortified SUV with a gated rear door, darkened one-way windows, and more locks and bolts than a drug trafficker’s Humvee), crossed back over the bridge to the American side of the falls, and drove up to a bland one-story redbrick house, with children’s toys and bikes scattered about the yard, covered with a few inches of snow, clearly untouched for some time.

My cameraman practically had to push me out of the passenger seat, I was so reluctant to do what I had to do. But I did it. I zipped up my puffy black parka, pulled my thick wool ZBC News ski hat down over my ears (briefly catching one of my chandelier earrings in the knitting), took a deep breath and cut a path to the front door.

I could tell we were there first. No other press in sight. No trodden down, muddied up snow on the walkway. Just a few footprints of varying sizes going to and fro. The freshest ones looked like they were going fro, and I took that to be a good sign. Such a good sign, in fact, that I knocked just once on the door, and when no one answered, I slipped my crisp white business card under the door (with a short note scribbled on the back telling the sad dad to call if he wanted to share his story), turned around, announced to the crew that no one was home, and we returned to the casino to continue the other shoot.

That didn’t go over so well when, the next morning, the father of the dead kids, husband to the suicidal suspect, appeared as an exclusive on Sunrise America in tears and sobs and oh, so compelling. He was even holding his one remaining child, an infant son (postpartum psychosis was the lay diagnosis of the mother’s state), in his arms. Sunrise beat us in the ratings that morning and I almost lost my job, which was saved only because the date coincided with the announcements for the Emmy nominations, and a piece I had produced a year prior was listed as a candidate (it didn’t win, but still).

My luck got even better when, a few days later, it was revealed that the Sunrise booker had basically bought the father off by giving him the use of a new car for a two-year period in exchange for appearing on their air, which he had been understandably reluctant to do. That producer did get fired (though the father kept the car), and suddenly my work was being held up in press releases as the ethical standard to match (though my name was never mentioned—it just said something along the lines of “a producer from New Day USA was first on the scene, but understanding the sensitivity of the story and the pain of the family, she made the journalistically appropriate call to give the father some space and time.”).

Since then, I avoided guest booking at all costs and was very happy that Tom liked the American Ideals series, because they were my favorite pieces to produce. The stories were heartwarming, caught your attention, and we didn’t have to worry about competing for guests. These weren’t front page tabloid sensation stories, they were just good stories, pure and simple. And they rated well.

“Nice piece, Annabelle,” he said, when we had moved on to the housekeeping portion of the meeting. This was a bit odd because he rarely singled out praise.

I was a little taken aback. “Oh! The snakes? Thanks.”

“No, the Fardish thing. Last week’s Ideal. Nice job. We’ve been getting a good response on it.”

“Oh. OK. Thanks.” I uselessly tried to will my cheeks not to flush.

“We want to do a follow-up. Come talk to me about it after the meeting.”

“Oh, that’s great,” said Carl, who was sitting, as always, to Tom’s right. “We really worked hard on that piece.” Like he had anything to do with it.

Tom’s office was not a subtle place. The shelves on the sidewall overflowed with Emmy statues, and the wall behind his desk was covered with pictures of him in just about every place on earth, shaking hands with every luminary imaginable. A number of awards and honor plaques and paperweights lined the windowsill. A whole slew of things still needing to be hung were stacked in a corner.

Tom was fairly young (pushing forty) to have achieved so much, but clearly he had impressed the right people—impressed them so much that less than six months earlier they had poached him from a different network’s evening news program and named him head of our breakfast fare. As Tom liked to say, morning television was a whole new universe, Edward R. Murrow be damned.

“Hi.” I meekly knocked on the door, which was already open. Tom was on the phone, so he motioned me to take a seat in front of the bloated mahogany desk. The chairs were large and leather and I felt very small. I counted three pictures of him shaking hands with the president. Two with the vice president. Tom towered over both of them. He was ridiculously tall, a fact that I am sure did not hurt his career.

After a few minutes, he hung up and we awkwardly exchanged a few niceties.

“So,” he said, “I hear you are dating Mark Thurber.” Even in this gossipy business, this was weird. I mean, it hadn’t been three hours since the date ended. I immediately turned red and was, needless to say, a bit upset.

“Um,” I said. Brilliant response.

“Carl told me.” Of course. “And it was on Page Six.”

He opened up Page Six, the gossip page of the New York Post. There was a small paragraph at the bottom right:

Which Hollywood starlet was seen at Rocco’s last night, sitting this close with her latest—married—director? And which action star is reported to have cried when turned away from Mecca? And speaking of Mecca, which hot young D.C. insider was seen canoodling with an unidentified petite brunette at that hot spot late into the evening?

My cheeks felt swollen, they were so hot. “Uh, well, we just went out for a drink. Is that a problem?” I wanted to protest the canoodling bit, but decided it best not to go there. Anyway, there was hope for canoodling in the future.

Tom said that if people figured out who I was and where I worked, it could be a perceived conflict of interest, and that if things progressed, it was important to disclose these matters and so forth.

“It was just one date,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t cover politics.” And, wait a minute, wasn’t it a conflict of interest that our network (with its stock-holding news division employees) was owned by Corpcom, a corporation whose interests included just about everything we covered: movies, books, oil companies, chemical companies, fast-food chains, amusement parks, an airline…the list of conflicts went on and on. I didn’t say that, of course.

“Right, right,” he said, shaking his head a bit as if, oops, he had forgotten what it was that I reported on—which was mostly innocuous and soft. And then he apologized for meddling in my personal life, but he just wanted to protect me, and…whatever.

“Didn’t you want to discuss the Ideals piece?” I was anxious to change the subject.

“Of course.”

His barely postcollegiate assistant stuck her blond head in the door. “Max is on line one,” she said.

“Hold on,” Tom said to me. He picked up the phone. “Yup, uh-huh, yup, yup. Okay, I’ll let you know.” He hung up.

“A really strong piece,” he said, as if it were a continuation of a sentence. “Rated well. Max wants a follow-up.”

“Max?” The rumor was he hardly ever watched the show. Too early.

“Yes. Max Meyer. He liked your work. You should feel proud.”

I did. But I was confused.

“There’s not much else to say, though,” I said.

“Figure something out.” Tom turned to his computer and started answering e-mails, which I took as my cue to leave.

When I was little, I loved watching the monkeys at the zoo, the way they climbed all over the place and each other, periodically stopping to pick at each other’s scalp. That’s what our newsroom was like. Everybody was into everybody else’s business. But the funny thing was, so many publicists sent us so many flowers so often, that when an enormous bouquet of lilacs and peonies landed on my desk, no one took any notice.

I felt faint again, but in a very good way, and sat down in my ergonomically correct chair to open the little note that was attached to the basket.

There’s some good coffee in D.C. Perhaps you could come do a story about it.

Mark.

And so, after thorough consideration (and a fair amount of squealing to Natasha), I decided it was only logical to start the Ideals follow-up with Doug Purnell’s Washington office.

Dear New Day USA,

I am writing to register a complaint. Last week, we came all the way from Florida to stand outside your studio window with Weather Mike. Mike was very kind to us during the commercial breaks, but our friends and family said that the only glimpse they caught of us was a quick shot of my husband’s arm. If people are going to travel this far to stand outside your window, you should make the effort to show all of them.

Sincerely,

Donna Clemente

Tempe, AZ

P.S. Could you please send us some New Day USA coffee mugs to the address below. It is the least you can do.

CHAPTER SIX

PERHAPS I SHOULD STEP BACK A BIT, EXPLAIN how the whole refugee cosmetics story fell in my lap in the first place. It was a little different from our typical fare, because, typically, unless a piece had already been covered by, say, the New York Herald, we would not consider doing it. Seriously. A huge number of the stories we produced were stolen from a newspaper story, wire copy or magazine article. Or, sometimes, from a noncompetitive television program, like something that aired on CNN or MSNBC, or, on rare occasions, from public radio. Our senior staff, especially Carl, were very reluctant to approve an unproved entity. But the best way to have an idea okayed? Tell the seniors that the other morning shows were hot on it already. Which is why, when Carl handed me a press release from Cosmetic Relief, I was fairly surprised that there were no supporting articles or transcripts to go with it, much less outside interest.

“We want you to produce this,” he said, coming up from behind me, putting a single sheet of paper on top of my keyboard. “It will be a Faith piece. Don’t fuck it up. It came from Max’s office.” Max Meyer. He was above Tom. He was above us all. He was the CEO of Corpcom.

“Max’s office?” This was a first. This would be like Bill Gates telling a junior software programmer that he had a suggestion for some code.

“Yes. Max’s office.”

I took a quick glance at the pitch. “Why was this sent to him?”

“Annabelle, I have no idea, but it’s here now, on your desk. I e-mailed it to you as well.” He was clearly exasperated by me (this was already more work than he usually did) and started to walk away.

“So, can I go over there, to this refugee camp?” This was a very exciting prospect; I had never been sent abroad for work.

“What do you think?” he said, turning back toward me, glaring as if that was the stupidest question in the world. “Of course not. Just coordinate with the foreign desk for the pickups. And apparently Cosmetic Relief has some footage we can use.”

Years ago, almost a decade, when I was in journalism school, all green and idealistic and out to save the world, we had a class on ethics. The class was supposed to be pragmatic, sort of a guide for us innocents for when we went out into the big scary world of modern media. But what the aging, Ivy-shielded professor failed to mention—and what we would all find out way too soon—was that there were two sides to the ethics camp, especially for those of us who wound up working in television. On one side, you could make a living, perhaps a decent one, so what if you had to compromise a little? And on the other? Well, most of us had student loans to pay. So, if my boss told me to put together a story using footage provided by the very people I was doing a story about, who was I to argue? And of course we would credit it on the screen so the cereal-eating, coffee-sipping, lunch-box-packing viewer would have full disclosure.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll get right on it.” And I did. And, apparently, I did a good job.

But now, to follow it up, I really wasn’t sure what, beyond perhaps another interview with Purnell, I could throw together. So I called him in the hope that there were some new developments—particularly some that would bring me to Washington.

“Annabelle!” he said, once I got him on the phone, “I’ve been meaning to call. We absolutely loved the story!” Purnell had a very feminine voice for a man, and it took a minute to register that it was him speaking and not, say, his secretary.

I thanked him for the compliment and told him about my plight, and he said he was of course thrilled to get more publicity for his cause and was happy to help. In fact, he told me, it just so happened that a rather big story was about to break. Vanity, the cosmetics company that was funding his venture, had decided to start using some of the Fards as models for their new line of lipsticks and lip gloss. A delegation of select refugees was coming to Washington to kick off the campaign.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I said, because Lord knows that would have been a great way for Faith to wrap up the story the first time around.

“The deal just got finalized last week, after the piece aired.”

To me, that new information really only meant one thing: it was a good excuse to travel to D.C. sooner rather than later. It meant I might find time for that cup of coffee right away.

“Why don’t I come down,” I said. “We could discuss this more in person.”

“On camera?”

“Well, yes, but not immediately. I mean, we will need to do another interview on camera, but first maybe I should just come down to talk.”

Purnell hesitated. Then he cleared his throat, sounding like a jungle bird doing a mating call. I moved my phone’s headset off my ear for a moment.

“Are you there?” he said.

“I’m here. So, how about it? I could come down one day later this week.”

He exhaled loudly. “Well, at this point, Annie, I would love to see you, but I wouldn’t want you to make a wasted trip. There’s not much more I can say in person that I couldn’t tell you over the phone.”

“Well, is there anyone else I can meet? What about those refugee models? Are any in D.C. yet? Maybe it would be good for me to meet them once before we put them on camera?”

“I would need to check on it.”

“I won’t take a lot of your time,” I said, meaning it. He wasn’t the person I really wanted to see, anyway. “And it would be easier to discuss how to proceed with the follow-up segment if I could meet some of the other people involved. It’s really important that I do the best job possible on this story. Even our CEO, Max Meyer, is interested in this, so you should feel pretty good about it, Mr. Purnell.”

“Call me Doug.”

“Doug.”

Usually, people responded to a request from a network news producer as if it were a request from the president—rolling out the red carpets, bending over left, front and backward to accommodate. I’ve had people cancel school, surgical appointments, work, you name it, just for the chance to be on TV. Apparently, Douglas Purnell just wasn’t that impressionable.

“Well,” he continued, “I am not sure they are available yet. Hold on, though. Let me look at my schedule. For my old pal Max Meyer, maybe I can squeeze you in.”

“You know Max?”

“Figure of speech. Just met him at a conference once. A long time ago. Anyway, I’m leaving town later in the week.” I could hear him tapping at his keyboard. “Schedule’s pretty packed,” he said. “How about lunch today?”

“Today?”

“Sure, why not?”

Because I’d only had about three hours of sleep, that’s why. “How about tomorrow?”

“I have meetings all day tomorrow. I’m free this evening, though. How about dinner?”

Well, I figured, that would mean I would have to overnight in D.C., which would mean more time for coffee. I could always nap on the plane. If I left the office now, I’d have time to go home to grab some clothing, some perfume, and drop off a key for my doorman so he could stop in to feed Margarita, my cat.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll meet you at your office around five.”

I called travel to book the ticket and hotel, confident that Carl would approve the expense.

From: akapner@riseandshine.com

To: Mark.Thurber@whitehouse.gov

Re: Coffee

Not sure about you, but I didn’t sleep much last night. I could really use a cup of joe. And, guess what? They want a follow-up on that Ideals story. I am going to be in D.C. in a few hours.—Annabelle

P.S. The flowers are stunning.

Dear New Day USA,

I am not the sort of person who writes letters to television programs, but I just wanted to write and say that I love your American Ideals series. In times like these, it is so important for us to highlight what is good about America. Bless you all.

Jim Merit

Sterling, VA

CHAPTER SEVEN

I ALWAYS FELT THERE WAS SOMETHING MOMENTOUS about flying into Washington, D.C. Partly because they made you stay in your seat for the full half hour prior to landing, which was often the point when you needed to use the facilities. But mostly it seemed momentous because from high above, the nation’s capital looked like a very promising place. With its elegant memorials lining the banks of the Potomac and the Washington Monument proudly reaching to the sky, from just below cloud level Washington was one of the prettiest cities on earth. It was a pity that the drive downtown quickly shattered that illusion.

Purnell’s office was in Logan Circle. It was an area that just a few years prior had practically been a no-man’s land. Now it held some of the most prestigious and coveted properties in town. Like Tribeca in the nineties. Except, of course, this was not New York, so pretty much the only people wearing black were the ones heading to funerals. Anyway, while prestigious, the neighborhood was still transitional, and not three blocks from Purnell’s office it was fairly easy to find a crack house, should you want to. But that is neither here nor there. Crack has no part in this story. Like a lot of stories that take place in Washington, we will simply avoid discussing or acknowledging the fact that the capital of the richest country on earth is practically third world, what with the intense division between rich and poor, the horrendous state of local corruption, the pathetic public works and insanely high crime rate. Violent crime, I mean. Other types of crime, white-collar crimes, the sinister sort of crimes where you never see your victims so you don’t have to feel guilty, well, they do play a part in this story.

The Cosmetic Relief office was very much in the style of a New York City loft, all airy pretense and boasting with space, making it the envy of nonprofits and NGOs everywhere. I couldn’t help but think that the money spent on rent might have put a number of inner city kids through college, or, more to the point, feed a few hundred Fardish families for a year. But then there were the mural-size photos that lined the entrance walls, pictures of refugees happily putting on lip gloss, of little Fardish girls learning to apply eyeliner. If these were the models, they were worth a lot. Their lacquered smiles said it all.

“Annabelle!”

Purnell met me up at reception, open-armed, squeaking. He startled me.

“Oh! Hi.” I had been sitting on a tightly stuffed orange armchair, and when I started to stand I knocked a few magazines off the circular glass table in front of me. “Sorry,” I said, leaning forward to pick them up, belatedly aware that at that angle he might be able to see down my wrap dress. I quickly stood.

“Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me,” I said.

“No worries, Annabelle. No worries,” he replied. He was a bit creepy. His body did not fit his voice. While he spoke like an adolescent girl, or, to be fair, a young boy whose voice still hadn’t exited the developmental stage, his body was a bit more well formed—like a big, goofy uncle figure, a Santa Claus or a Buddha. A mass of white-gray hair connected to a well-trimmed but full beard, completing a circle around his head, causing his face to look like the pit in the middle of a halved fleshy fruit. He had a lot of extra insulation; when we had done the first round of interviews it took my crew a full hour to light him because sweat kept breaking through, creating too much shine on his forehead and nose no matter how much powder we applied.

“So…” I so eloquently murmured, trying to move our conversation forward.

“So,” he said, “are you hungry? Ready to eat? We have a reservation at Casablanca.”

This surprised me, as well. Casablanca was a new restaurant, so busy it was almost impossible to get a reservation there. And it was cavernous and loud, not the typical place for an intimate business meal. I would have much preferred the Oval Room or the Palm.

How did I know so much about D.C.? Full disclosure: Karen, my best friend from college, was a scientist at the National Institutes of Health and I spent a lot of time visiting her. Soon, I was going to want her to be spending a lot of time visiting me.

Anyway, I liked D.C. Many people don’t, but for me, a native New Yorker, I found it calming and almost provincial. And actually quite interesting. Karen once told me that she thought D.C. was a bit like L.A.; if you picked up the industry types and held them in the air, underneath you would find some fascinating signs of life.

“Sounds good,” I said to Purnell. “I’ve heard they have great calamari.”

We piled into the Town Car that was waiting out front, and I text messaged Mark that he should meet me at Casablanca at seven to celebrate the one-day anniversary of our first date.

“So, tell me,” I said, once I had swallowed a few calamari. They were quite delicious. “You’ve dragged me down to D.C. This had better be good.” I said it with a flirtatious air, admittedly a little full of myself (and a martini), knowing full well that no one had dragged me down but me.

Purnell laughed. Or, I should say, he giggled. “He he he.” Like that. He told me basically what he had already told me on the phone—that Vanity was going to be using Fardish makeup and models for their new line, and that the presentation would be happening very soon. He wasn’t sure he could introduce me to any of the Fards just yet, but he did expand on the story a little. He said the products would be marketed at the “tweenager” market—girls between the ages of eight and twelve. And the really exciting thing, he said, was that the products had special ingredients that would help the young girls grow into adolescence with less acne and fuller lips.

It wasn’t really information I needed to come all the way down to D.C. for, to be sure. Most of our shoots were set up from the office. Unlike the prime-time, big budget magazine programs, we rarely scouted locations or pre-interviewed in person. But this time, well, my phone started to vibrate. It was a text message from Mark. He was on his way.

“So,” I said to Purnell, trying to sound like I deeply cared about the story, which, now that I was about to see my Adonis, I really didn’t. “Those models…You never told me if I could meet any while I am in town?” But before Purnell could answer, my phone started to vibrate again. Now it was a call, but with no caller ID.

“Excuse me,” I said, and answered it. “This is Annabelle.”

“Ask him about the tests,” said a male voice, weirdly accented but now a little bit familiar.

“Who is this?”

“Just ask him.” The man hung up.

Purnell was looking at me quizzically, and I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Wrong number, I think.” I took a large sip from my second martini and ate the olive. I was trying hard to buy my own it’s-probably-just-a-crazy-viewer story, the martinis hazing my line of inquiry, allowing me to completely ignore the fact that whoever called seemed to know where I was and who I was with. But journalistic integrity demanded I ask something. “Um. Do you know anything about some sort of test?”

“What kind of test?” A small ball of sweat ran down his cheek and into his beard.

I didn’t really know what kind of test, so I took a stab. “The makeup. Is it tested?”

He giggled again. “Of course it is. Totally safe. This is a topnotch product, Annabelle. Vanity wouldn’t have considered selling it otherwise.” The bead of sweat was jiggling at the base of his beard now, ready to hit the table any second.

I glanced at my watch. It was almost seven. I couldn’t think of another test to ask about.

“Okay,” I said, trying just to look at his eyes, not his beard or the table below it. “So when does this all start? Who can I interview? Do the refugee models speak any English? When can I meet them?”

“Annie,” he squeaked. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” I sat back, quizzical.

“You are just doing a follow-up, right? A simple little story?”

“Right.”

“Like, three to four minutes?”

“Uh-huh.” I had no idea what he was getting at.

“So, you don’t really need to shoot a lot, right?”

“Not much. An interview or two, the models…it depends.”

“Okay, I just needed to make sure we were both on the same page here.”

“We are.”

“To Max Meyer,” he said, and, I think, attempted to wink, although both eyes twitched closed for a second, so maybe he was just squinting. He raised his near-empty martini glass. And although I wasn’t really sure what he was talking about, I met his glass with mine.

We discussed the logistics of when and where and what I could shoot, and though a little disturbed about the strange man on the phone, I was satisfied that I would be able to put a nice story together, one that would be good for Faith and make the big boss proud, easily justifying a few trips down to D.C., which truly was all I cared about.

We ordered dessert.

We talked about having some of the models live on the set for a makeup demonstration.

We discussed which shades might work best for Faith’s complexion.

We had some port.

My head was spinning and it was 7:50, and Purnell was calling for the check.

There were no text messages on my phone and Mark was most certainly not in the room. He was almost an hour late. Being stood up, even just the suspicion that you are being stood up, can deflate pretty much anyone, even a stylishly dressed New Yorker.

“Can I give you a ride to your hotel?” Purnell said.

It felt as if a calamari was lodged in my throat.

I looked at my watch again. I thought about waiting longer, but did I want to look like some desperate wench, waiting around for him with nothing better to do? I slowly nodded at Purnell and, as if to change the subject, brushed a few crumbs off my dress. Marc Jacobs. Simple, black and tremendously flattering to the figure. I had recently bought it at a sample sale and had been very excited to take it out on the town. Now it occurred to me that maybe the dress was a bad luck omen, payback because I had grabbed the last one off the rack, out from under the grasp of another eager shopper. Karma, if you believe in it. I did. The black suede boots weren’t helping the matter. I had taken them from an old roommate’s closet without asking, and hadn’t ever returned them.

“Are you okay?” Purnell asked, his voice sounding more and more like my mother’s. I had to look at him to make sure she wasn’t actually there.

“Boy trouble.” I was never very good at keeping my personal life out of my professional, and, as stated, I was a little drunk.

“That’s ridiculous. How could a young lady as lovely as you have boy trouble? Ridiculous.” He reminded me at this moment of Tweedledee. Or perhaps Tweedledum.

“Yeah, right,” I said. I just about started to tear up.

“You know what? Let’s get out of here. I can show you some things that will take your mind off this jerk.”

“It’s okay,” I said, trying to inconspicuously wipe away the tear I felt forming. “I should just go to the hotel. I could use a good night’s sleep anyway.”

“Oh, this is pathetic,” Purnell said. “Come on. We’re in this together.” He had, at this point, placed his hand on top of mine, on top of the table. It felt soft and a bit sweaty. I gently removed my hand from under his. “You want to meet some of those models. Sure, why not. I can introduce you to a couple of them right now. Plus a few of my Fardish friends,” he said.

“I thought you said they weren’t available.”

“Most of them aren’t. But a couple might be.”

It sounded interesting, but I must have looked hesitant (or just plan pitiable) because now Purnell was acting as if he was trying to prop me up.

“I might even be able to scare up a few lip gloss samples for you to take back to New York,” he said.

For a moment, in my inebriated state, that seemed to me like as good a reason to go as any. I did have better things to do than wait around for a disrespectful guy. I could meet the models tonight. I could find out more about the Fardish makeup. I could sample it. Usually, there was no need for us to investigate very deeply into our stories. They were simple and formulaic, and most of the reporting had already been done in the newspapers. But there I was, and my subject was willing to give me more time and more access. Maybe I would even think of another test to ask about. At the very least, I would get some free makeup. I could give it to Carl to pass on to whatever up-and-coming local correspondent he was dating, and he wouldn’t give me any grief about the expense of my coming down here. People in television loved freebies, no matter how big their salaries.

But I really didn’t feel like going. I felt like crawling underneath the king-size bed in my nonsmoking hotel room and never coming out again.

“Annie,” Purnell squawked, grabbing my shoulder with his inflated hand, pulling me back so I stopped slumping. “I don’t know much about dating, but I do know something about power, and it seems to me that you are giving too much of it over to this boy toy of yours.” I looked at him. I was about to take dating advice from a damp, bulbous, thoroughly unattractive, much older man. Because you know what? He might be right.

And so, check paid, we made for the door and had the valet call our car around.

“Where are we going?” I said, once I hazily realized that we had crossed the 14th Street Bridge and were headed into Virginia.

“Don’t worry so much, Annie.” Purnell patted my bare knee with his chubby hand, making me start to regret this trip. I moved closer to the window and checked my phone again, just in case I had somehow missed Mark’s call. Nothing.

We turned off at the Crystal City exit, passing Costco and the Fashion City Mall before turning into one of those bland, cookie cutter town house complexes built in the mid-1970s, probably around the same time as my office.

We got out at the last unit, number 15. The front light wasn’t on and I tripped on the first step leading up to the door, giving Purnell the opportunity to grab my arm with his puffy hand to help steady me. He had a key and opened the door, and that’s how we went inside—arm in arm.

It looked like Mecca. The bar, I mean, the one I had been at with Mark the night before. Lots of velvet cushions and hookah pipes. Except these ones didn’t have alcohol inside, these ones were real. Five men (each of a sun-weathered, indiscernible age) were sitting around, spilled out over the carpet, lounging on the pillows, puffing the pipes, filling the air with a thick smog and a strange cinnamonlike scent. There were no women in the room.

Upon seeing us, the men cried out in unison, “Cow!”

That’s what they said: Cow. There being no cows among us, I figured that was how they said hello. When Purnell said something like cow in response, they went back to smoking their pipes.

“These are my Fardish friends,” he said, motioning for me to take a seat on a large, uninhabited purple cushion pushed up against a carpet-covered wall. “They are helping us with the project.”

I sat down and out from nowhere a little girl rushed up, offering each of us a cup of tea. Purnell held his up as if to make another toast. “Here’s to New Day USA and Vanity Cosmetics!” he said, knocking his against the cup now in my hand.

The girl curtsied and quietly scampered off, but I couldn’t fail to notice her absolutely radiant skin and full, movie star-like mouth.

“She looks nice, doesn’t she?” Purnell said, having caught me staring at the child. “Fida’s a big fan of the products.”

“Fida?”

“The girl. She’s going to be one of the presenters next week. Others are coming in a few days.” Purnell, now seated next to me, took a puff from one of the pipes. “Fida and her sister are the prettiest, I think.” He looked to the door Fida had run behind. “Fida! Lida!” He said something in Fardish. At least I think it was Fardish. He was clearly fluent in whatever language it was.

Fida came back into the room, accompanied by a smaller and fuller-lipped girl who couldn’t have been older than eight. Maybe ten for Fida. Maybe.

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