Alexandra Waring (41 page)

Belinda he was coming inside of right now—

Just-right-in-there-oh-God-yeah. Jesus.

“Yeah,” he sighed, collapsing, then swallowing, catching his breath. “Oh, Belinda,” he said into the side of her neck. “Oh, baby, I love you. I love you,” he said. “I always have, I always will.”

“Shhh,” she said, stroking his hair. “Shhh.”

They lay there for a minute, and Langley became more aware of the noise on the floor. People were around. In droves they were around and getting louder by the minute. “I bet they’re all coming up into the cafeteria,” he whispered.

“We better get up,” she said.

He pulled out of her and slid, slowly, to the floor, laughing. He got up, pulled his pants up and walked over to his jacket, pulled out his handkerchief, came back to the couch and offered it to her, which she accepted. They helped each other pull their clothes together, smooth their hair, get Langley’s glasses back on, and then they sat for a moment more on the couch, holding each other. Langley kissed her once more, for a long time, thinking that he might never have loved her more.

Langley turned the lights on, while Belinda, giggling, sprayed a little cologne around. Then he called Adele on the intercom and asked her if she could go downstairs and get a copy of the story line up for “DBS News America Tonight,” waited a minute, and then peeked outside to make sure she was gone. She was. So Langley and Belinda sneaked out and across the hall, where he dropped her off at the ladies’ room and he went on to the men’s.

He washed his hands and face, retucked his shirt in, combed his hair and retied his tie. He smiled at himself in the mirror, thinking how very, very glad he was that he hadn’t cheated on Belinda. And how very, very happy it made him to think that maybe things were heading back on track now. He thought about going out to Greenwich with her tonight and how maybe they might make love by the pool. He thought maybe they should plan a trip—Europe, Paris maybe— or maybe they could go to London together when
…

He smiled at himself in the mirror again. There were so many things they could do.

He walked out of the men’s room, his step as strong and as jaunty as he felt. (God, was this the greatest feeling, making love to his wife like this, or what? Just making love to the woman he loved, having fun, like kids, just going ahead and doing it wherever they felt like because it was so good?) He knocked on the ladies’ room door.

“Just a minute,” she called.

He smiled, pushing in the door. “Hi,” he whispered. “Can I come in?” He slipped inside and walked through the little dressing area. Belinda was standing at one of the sinks, holding a paper cup in one hand and holding out the other to him in a “stop” motion. She ducked her head slightly, swallowing, and then lowered her hand.

“I didn’t want you to make me laugh,” she said. “I was just taking some aspirin.”

Headache?” he said, coming over to stand behind her, sliding his arms around her waist and nuzzling her neck.

“A little one,” she said, closing her purse. She turned around and kissed him on the mouth. “Do you love me, Langley?” she whispered.

“More than anything,” he said, kissing her again and then releasing her. “Come on.” He took her hand, leading her to the door. “I want to take you on a tour of this place.” He held the door open for her. “I want everyone to see what a beautiful wife I have. I want everyone to see how lucky I am.”

And so Langley and Belinda Peterson, in love, went for a tour.

29
The Unveiling
Part V: Cassy

“Why, I’d be delighted to give Mr. Brobbent a tour,” Cassy said to Rookie Haskell, turning then to smile at their guest.

Mr. Rupert Brobbent, founder and president of KlapTrap Insecticides, Elrama, Pennsylvania, was just standing there, staring at her, entranced.

Oh, good
, Cassy thought,
we’ll get this guy to sign for life.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” Rookie said, slapping Mr. Brobbent on the back. “I see you’ll be in excellent hands. No one knows more about ‘DBS News America Tonight’ than Cassy here, and Cassy also happens to be quite an outdoor chef herself.”

Cassy looked at Rookie.

“Cooks in the backyard all summer long,” Rookie said, smiling at her. “So nobody knows better than Cassy that what KlapTrap says is true.”

Mr. Brobbent looked into Cassy’s eyes, eyebrows rising. “Only time flies in our backyard?”

“Yes, right,” Cassy said, nodding and smiling.

Mr. Brobbent was their very recent and very lucrative sponsor for the weather segment for the summer quarter, and so Cassy was quite happy to tell him most anything he wished to hear. Certainly, she would be happy to give him a tour of DBS News—particularly since she had a few other people waiting for the same thing: the station owner of their potential Little Rock affiliate, Ketton Harper; the daughter of some friends of Norbert and Noreen Darenbrook’s, Amelia Randsworth, who thought maybe she might like to be an anchorwoman (but who Kyle said was the type best beheaded to stave off revolt by the masses); and a very distinguished gentleman, about sixty or so, with immaculate silver-gray hair, dressed in a gray pinstripe suit, who arrived in the newsroom on the arm of Jackson’s assistant, Claire, and was introduced simply as Greg, a friend of the family’s who wished to sit quietly and watch, which he had.

Meanwhile, upstairs, the studio audience for “The Jessica Wright Show” was back in the cafeteria. The buses had been ready to take them away, but only nine people wanted to leave and one hundred and ninety-one wanted to stay and talk to Jessica. So nine people were sent back to the midtown drop-off point in radio cabs and one hundred ninety-one—plus the four guests from the show—were having wine with Jessica and, if the latest rumor was correct, Jackson had offered to roll TV sets in and call out for pizza and salad if they cared to stay and watch “DBS News America Tonight.”

Nothing was going quite the way Cassy had expected today. She had thought Jessica would be fine, seeing that she had already done seven shows, but Jessica had arrived late and looking like a wreck. But then, when Cassy thought they might have to run one of the earlier tapes because Jessica was so obviously under the weather, Jessica turned around and produced not only one of her best shows but one of the most extraordinary pieces of television Cassy had seen in quite some time. (She had sat there, dumbfounded, in the control room. The topic of sex aside, Cassy decided that Jessica had missed her calling—there was an inexplicable streak of evangelical grace in this young woman.)

Instead of tired and nervous, Alexandra was the calmest and happiest Cassy had seen her in weeks. And she looked like a million healthy, radiant—and she said she had slept like a baby last night. (“My body doesn’t understand endless management and planning meetings,” she laughed, “but it does understand putting on a newscast.”)

Kyle, on the other hand, was a nervous wreck, his efficiency in hand but his usual calm nowhere to be found. And Langley, who Cassy thought would be fretting about everything, was spending the day drifting around West End with his wife. And then Jackson, who had always been so eager to feel included in the process, had come nowhere near Alexandra, the newsroom or anyone connected with DBS News today. And if Cassy hadn’t gone upstairs this afternoon to see how the luncheon was going, she wouldn’t have seen him at all.

And when she had seen Jackson, it was so strange because he barely spoke to her—he didn’t even
look
at her, really—choosing instead to focus his attention on Denny. But Cassy did not want to try and guess why this was so. Because not only did she not have the time to think about Jackson today, but it scared her to because it reminded her of how much she had been thinking about him all weekend. And about how exhausted she had been Friday night, but how she had not been able to sleep because her heart had started to pound every time she thought back over the events of the day—about how Jackson had held her in his office and the feelings it had triggered inside, and about how those feelings had increased sitting ‘outside in the square.

It was loneliness that was triggering these thoughts, these feelings, she felt sure. It was her defense against being too acutely aware of how alone she was in this apartment, sleeping in this big bed, so alone that she could be horribly ill and have no one to call out to. (Sleeping alone and dying in her sleep were somehow, irrevocably, connected in her mind of late.)

But was it loneliness that had brought on this surge of sexual desire? A kind of deep-seated ache that she had not felt in years?

For
Jackson?

Granted, he did have a wonderful body, just the kind Cassy had always been attracted to. But it was a body that also belonged to the type of man that drove her crazy—a man like her ex-husband-to-be, except this one didn’t even have to drink to cause trouble.

And the real killer—the thought that Cassy wished she could avoid acknowledging but couldn’t because it was true—was that her sexual feelings were rarely, if ever, disconnected from her emotions. And there was no denying it, standing there in Jackson’s office, looking up at him after he released her, she had looked into his eyes and thought,
My God, he’s in love with me
, and then there
had
been a decided change of emotion on her part. She had felt close to him; she had felt safe with him; she had felt inexplicably happy. He had not been a jerk; he had not been a loudmouth. He had been an earnest, deeply caring, deeply troubled, lonely person who was suddenly and inexplicably the most wildly attractive man she had ever met in her life.

Lying there, stretched across her bed Friday night, looking out at the night sky over the Hudson, Cassy had wondered if maybe she was losing her mind.

Jackson?

“What the hell is Jackson Darenbrook doing in my head?” she had cried to the bedroom then, flipping over and trying to hide underneath the pillows.

But Jackson Darenbrook had remained a guest in her head for the rest of the weekend anyway. In the rest of her body, too.

Cassy took Mr. Brobbent and the others through the newsroom to the conference room, closed the glass door against the noise and began a general overview of what went into their newscast. She pointed to the newsroom, explaining that news arrived at DBS in five basic ways: from their affiliate newsrooms, whose reporters and facilities operated as bureaus for DBS; from the wire services; from free-lance reporters and crews they hired as stringers; from foreign networks and news services they contracted with on special events, such as the coverage on President Reagan and the Moscow summit that they would be seeing tonight; and from (she laughed) monitoring CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC.

She also explained that it was there, in the newsroom, that all facts concerning incoming news stories were checked and rechecked by multiple sources, and that their news coverage was quite often enhanced by DBS News’s access to various computer databases. For example, on one database they could type in the entries “Reagan,” “Human Rights,” and “Soviet,” and within a minute they could have a list of every article in which those three words had appeared in seventy-five daily newspapers for the past ten years-anyone of which they could call up on their computer screen to read.

Here, in the room they were standing in, the editorial staff met several times over the course of the day to discuss the breaking news, the coverage they had on it, and how the story line-up for that night should be revised. It was here that it was decided which story was more important than another, the length of time they would devote to covering it, and which way-out of the options they had-they would cover it (film report, live report from the field, the anchor report, etc.).

Cassy punched a few commands into the computer terminal sitting on the conference table and showed them the current story line-up for that night, pointing out the estimated segment times.

Then they went on to the satellite room where Cassy briefly outlined how the DBS TELENET satellite enabled DBS News to enjoy two lives. First, as a functioning news network, able to receive local news coverage from all over the country, and then able to transmit out all over the country a national newscast. And, secondly, as a clearinghouse of information, story coverage and pictures for their affiliate newsrooms.

Out in the hallway (where Langley and Belinda joined the tour), Cassy explained that every newscast was made up of many different inputs-both visual and audio—that could be used in endless combinations. What they would be seeing, then, were a number of these inputs and, in the control room, how they were put together in combinations and sequences that hopefully most effectively communicated the news.

She took them into editing (explaining that they would still hear the word “film” used all the time, though everything was on videotape), sliding open one of the soundproof glass doors that sealed each editing bay, pointed out some of the equipment used in editing stories, and explained that, once a story was finished, it was put on a video cassette and sent on to engineering.

They went into the graphics lab, to see where artists were working on visual stills by hand, and to see the “magical” paintbox. The head artist, Becky Seidelman, cued up a graphic on the paintbox screen and with the metal stylus—her “paintbrush”—demonstrated how she could dab in colors or paint over with new ones, airbrush images, or do almost any kind of alteration imaginable.

They went into engineering, an enormous place with islands of machinery and six-foot-high metal casings along the walls, holding all kinds of electronic equipment, dials and meters-all of which, Cassy said, were used to monitor the electronic information flowing both into and out of the DBS television facility. “If the newsroom is our conscious brain at DBS News,” she said, “then engineering is our nerve center.”

There were a number of small chambers, alcoves really, off of engineering, and Cassy stopped at one, showing them a big machine that looked sort of like a soda bottle machine with a glass door running down the side. She opened this door and pointed out how video cassettes had been inserted into it from top to bottom. These were the commercials they were to run tonight, stacked in sequence. The identical machines to the right of the commercial machine, she explained, were for cassettes of news stories, loaded in the same sequence as the rundown sheet.

She also stopped by the character generator, into which subtitles and credits were typed, on a single “page” (superimposed over an interview, for example, to identify the speaker) or on a scroll, to be rolled, such as credits were.

They went into the audio booth (where Belinda Peterson collided with Cassy and then backed away without apology), a glassed-in area that looked onto the main control room. Each of the many sliding levers on the boards they were looking at, Cassy explained, represented a channel input of sound-everything from Alexandra’s microphone in the studio to the sound on a commercial—that could be switched in or out, faded in or faded out of the newscast. The audio person sat in here, listening for the director’s cues, responsible for every input of sound in the newscast.

They moved on to the control room, where a very long desk ran almost its entire length, in front of which were rows of television monitors stacked to the ceiling. Cassy explained that, for each visual input source they had seen on their tour, there was a monitor in the control room to represent it. For example, she pointed out that each of the SAT monitors (marked SAT 1, SAT 2
…
showed the director what satellite signals were coming in that he or she could cut to (and to preview the signal, for example, to make sure the reporter was indeed standing there, ready to do his live report from the field).

Monitors marked CAM referred to cameras in the studio; GRPH stood for graphics; VTR for video sources, and so on. The most important monitor, she said, was the one marked PRGM, which stood for program-which showed what was going out over the air. Belinda Peterson then knocked into a chair and Langley said something to her. (Belinda was making Cassy very nervous. She was acting very strangely and Cassy knew it wasn’t her imagination because everybody else on the tour had half an eye on her too.)

Cassy went on to explain that the director—who sat in the middle of the long desk—was in charge of orchestrating all inputs of the newscast, everything from when to roll the opening sequence and bring up the sound to what the camera angle looked like; to cuing the talent; to cutting from one video source to another (such as camera 2 in the studio to the commercial cued up on VTR 3).