Morning Glory (13 page)

He turned and kept walking.

“Okay,” I said. “Forget that. How about an interview with Tim McGraw and Faith Hill?”

“If either one becomes president or cures cancer, let me know.”

“Mike,” I begged.

He stopped for a moment and folded his arms. “I hear you’re dating Señor Dipshit. How’d you make that happen?”

I frowned and quickly scanned the area for IBS employees. “Who told you that?” News certainly traveled fast in the office.

“You and him—really?” Mike looked disconcertingly baffled by the notion.

“Um, well, we’re not exactly—”

“Because he usually goes out with the girls who are …” He stretched his hands apart vertically. “And have …” His hands undulated around his torso.

Wow, he was as bad at miming as me.

I cocked my head to the side and tried to decipher. “Taffy pullers with meatballs?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” I replied. “But guess what, Mike. I’m not taking the bait.”

“Hmph.” He kept walking.

“And we’re going to talk later about how it’s not nice to call people names.”

Mike snorted again.

“Because I can think of a few choice ones for you.”

“Back atcha, fangirl.”

I sighed. One more block. “How about Sean Combs?” I tried. My goal for the day was to nail Mike down with one fluff piece. Just one. If I had to ply him with scotch to get it done, so be it.

“I might,” said Mike, “if I knew who that was. But hey, I do have one promising lead. There’s an interesting story out of Albany. The governor’s tax returns are being audited and—”

“Oh for God’s sake!” I cried. This was worse than Ernie and the weather vanes. “You’re killing me, Mike. No. No.”

“That’s a perfectly good story,” Mike insisted. For a second, I thought he might stamp his foot. “Could be a great story, in fact. You just don’t like it because it doesn’t have Britney Spears in it.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “You get Britney and the governor together, we’ve got a deal.”

He huffed off.

“What wrong with a little human interest? I want the viewers to get to know you.”

“And they are supposed to get to know me by seeing me act utterly indifferent to their favorite celebrities?”

“Mike—”

“What you want,” he said coldly, “is for me to pander to an audience so you can sell them erectile dysfunction medication. And I won’t do that.”

I slumped. We’d just turned to walk into the restaurant, with me having my doubts that there was anything I could offer him that would sweeten the pot, when suddenly a woman pounced on us.

“Oh my God!” she shrieked. “It’s you! You’re that guy!”

Mike took a step or two back from his raving fan. The woman was in her fifties—right in our viewership range—and was dressed in a pair of slacks and a sweater set.

“I just saw you this morning!” she went on, her voice getting well into squeal territory. “I was watching the
Today
show—”

Mike grimaced. “I’m not on—”

“And there was a commercial. So I clicked around, and there you were! Everyone was eating stuffed zucchini and you were all cranky about it and I was like—oh my God, there’s that
guy
. You used to do news, right? Like a while ago?”

Used to?
Uh-oh. Thanks a bunch, lady. Now I’d never get him on board.

She put her arms around him and held her phone at arm’s length, smiling broadly. Mike stood stock still.

“Please remove your hands from my person,” he stated.

I heard the phone click, then the fan checked out the results and squealed again. “Oh, this is so great. Thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” I said, since it was clear Mike would not.

“Dan Rather!” she exclaimed. “I can’t believe it.”

I clapped my hands to my mouth. Oops.

Mike’s face was a thundercloud. He yanked open the door of the restaurant and dashed in.

Okay. Okay, but this really just proved my point. I trailed after him, readying my arguments.

“Mike, you see that—people want to like you.”

“No, they want to like Dan Rather.”

“They’d know it was you if you put
yourself
out there a little more. You don’t need to be so dry on morning television. They want to like you. They want to
know
you. You’re in their house every morning, while they’re eating breakfast. You’re chatting with them. About current events, about the world they live in … It’s an honor, don’t you see that?”

He didn’t see. Not at all.

“Mike,” I said, defeated. “Can’t you just do a few more stories that people will
enjoy
? We’re in trouble. I’m in trouble. Help me,
please
.”

The hostess eyed us both, her expression alarmed. “Um, table for two?”

 14 

S
o, no big surprise, I didn’t get through to Mike at all during our lunch. He shot down every one of my story ideas and complained about the public’s lowest-common-denominator tastes. At this point, I figured, the only story we might agree on would be getting an interview with the actual arsonist. Doubtless I’d have lots of luck with that one.

As the week wore on, it became clear that my problems were not a product of first-day jitters, but of a genuine miscalculation about the show’s capabilities. Perhaps it was time to face facts. I might be a great news producer, but I didn’t have the training or experience necessary for a job like this. Sure, I’d had a Rolodex full of useful contacts in Jersey, but that was local news. It took people years to drum up those contacts on the national level. Adam had been in national news his entire career—with a college degree—and he hadn’t yet attained executive producer level. Granted, he was at a far more successful show, but still. There was a process to these things.

I could bluff about “Dempsey’s people” and “arsonists’ girlfriends” as much as I wanted, but in reality, all I had was a very convincing “fake it till you make it” act. I didn’t have any real pull.

And neither did anyone else at
Daybreak
—except Mike, and he would back only the stories he wanted. Stories that usually weren’t morning show material.

That afternoon, as I watched them tape Lisa’s entertainment segment for the following day, I was feeling especially relieved that Mike had taken off. I’d never hear the end of it if he was privy to what was happening on set right now.

I wondered if there was a way to distract him while we played the tape tomorrow.

“Many actors,” Lisa was saying, “have changed their names in order to be taken more seriously.”

It was a wonder that anyone could take Lisa seriously. Her tan was practically orange, her mouth looked like she was wearing a pair of wax candy lips, and her halter top strained over the overinflated water balloons that passed for her breasts.

Was it possible they’d gotten even bigger recently?

“For instance,” she said, “Ricky Schroder became Rick Schroder. The Rock became Dwayne Johnson.”

One of the cameramen covered his mouth to hold in his snicker.

Oh, God. Hadn’t anyone vetted her copy?

“And Portia de Rossi’s name used to be Amanda, but she changed it so as to sound more like the car, which she felt sounded more impressorial.”

I turned to Lenny. “
Impressorial?
Are you
sure
I can’t fire her?”

He shook his head no.

“What?” I asked. “Is she sleeping with someone?”

Lenny pointed up.

“Jerry?” I said. “Ouch.”

A moment later, an intern entered with a message for me from Jerry. Speak of the devil. I took a deep breath. Time to face the music.

“Be right back,” I said to Lenny.

Or maybe not.

I was ushered into Jerry’s office right away. He kept me standing this time, waiting, while he studied a sheet of ratings.

“Have you seen these?” he said without looking up.

Uh-oh. And here I thought I was just going to be forced to answer for Jimmy Carter. I had to think fast. “Okay, yes, but—”

“You’re here to make the ratings worse?” He slammed the paper to his desk. “That’s why you came here?”

No, I’d come to make the show better. But I doubted that argument would fly at the moment.

“Thing is,” I said, “Mike’s still getting up to speed on our format. We’re still working on some elements of the show.…”

“Getting up to speed?” Jerry scoffed. “You’re circling the drain. You rarely book anybody decent because of the ratings, you’re not getting any of the big interviews—”

What was the point of denying that? “We just need a little more time …,” I said weakly. “I really feel that once Mike has settled into his role we’re going to see some big jumps, both in quality and in viewership. The two go hand in hand, I think. With just a touch more patience …”

A look of pity crossed Jerry’s features. “God, you’re even more naïve than I thought.”

My brow furrowed. What the hell was he talking about?

He sighed and pushed his chair back. “You have no idea why you have this job, do you?”

“Excuse me?” I asked as he came around and leaned against the front of his desk. The look on his face was the same one my dad had given me when he’d told me the truth about Santa Claus. I began to get the distinct impression that Jimmy Carter’s people were the least of my worries.

“It never crossed your mind? Why the network wouldn’t give me money to hire a real executive producer?”

Uh, well, things were tight all over. And people didn’t want to back … oh, shit. A losing horse.

“The network wants to cancel the show,” Jerry said.

My heart dropped—not into my stomach. Into something far more painful. Maybe my spleen? My kidneys?

“They want to run game shows and syndicated talk instead. That’s why they gave me no budget for an EP. They wanted me to hire someone inept, someone who would run the show into the ground.”

“I was someone …” I felt faint.

“That way,” he explained, “they would feel justified canceling such a long-running show.”

“I don’t get it,” I cried, my tone just shy of frantic. “You’re saying you
hired
me …” I plopped down on his guest chair. “…  That you hired
me
to … run the show into the ground?”

“No,” Jerry said, though his tone was flat. “At first, I figured they’d have it their way, that I’d never find anyone decent enough to save the show. But then you stumbled in here, and for a second, I thought you might have a shot. Especially when you got Pomeroy.”

For a moment, my hopes lifted, ever so slightly. So he did think I could do it. And that’s why he let me get Mike. Because I was right: It would work. It would be great. Or would have been.

“But the joke’s on me, because it turns out you’ve failed even more completely than the network could have hoped.”

Never mind.

“In six weeks,” he announced, “they’re canceling the show.”

“No!”

But Jerry didn’t even register my dissent. “So not only will you have significantly weakened our news division, you’ll have presided over the demise of a show that’s been on the air for forty-seven years.”

My heart decided that my spleen hadn’t had enough trauma for the day and started sucker-punching it.

“Nice work,” Jerry said. “Why don’t you go over to PBS and see if you can kill
Sesame Street
.”

Oh, God, no. This was far worse than I’d feared. I figured it would be me who was getting fired. That I could handle. That I was used to. After all, I’d already done it once this year. But to be responsible for everyone else losing their jobs? Colleen? Lenny? Sasha, Tracy, Dave … oh God:
Ernie?

Mike would still have his contract. And Lisa would no doubt land on her feet. Merv, our director, could probably get squeezed into another department, but …

I’d ruined us all. Because I couldn’t hold my show together. Because I couldn’t get my anchorman in line. Because I thought it would be a great idea to fire the old host in a fit of “Who’s the Boss?” and then hire an unrepentant, curmudgeonly diva in his place.

“Go.” Jerry pointed at the door. “You’ve wasted enough of my time.”

I hung my head. Go? Go down and tell them what I’d done? Go down and explain to Lenny that his kids’ college funds might be in serious danger? Tell Colleen that she’d been right about me all the time, and that she should probably phone up her friends back in Phoenix? Look directly at Mike as I informed the staff that the show’s days were numbered, all because I was as incompetent as the network executives hoped I would be?

I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

Finally, I managed to lift my face and look Jerry in the eye. “Can you … will you do one thing for me?”

“What?”

“We have six weeks, right?” I asked quickly. “Just don’t tell anyone yet. Morale’s not exactly at peak to begin with, so …”

“Fine.” Jerry returned to his desk. “Tell them whenever you want to. It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

I left his office. I left his floor. My path through the twisted corridors of the
Daybreak
basement was trod as if I was a member of the walking dead. What was I going to do? What was I going to do?

I turned a corner and ran smack into Lisa.

“There you are!” She bounced. Certain parts of her body bounced a half beat off. “I have a great idea for a segment. Get ready for this!” She paused dramatically and flung out her arms. “Past. Lives.”

I blinked.

She nodded at me, her pillow lips parted in excitement. “Like, if we could find out
who
celebrities had been in their previous lives, I think that would be terrific, don’t you? Like, what if Justin Timberlake had been Abraham Lincoln?”

I could think of a million responses to this idea. But none of them were worth saying. She could decide that Fergie had been Joan of Arc and report that on
Daybreak
if she wanted. Wouldn’t make a difference now.

“Could be very evocatative!” Lisa called after me as I trudged on.

Adam called that night, but I told him I wasn’t feeling well. Which was true. I changed into pajama pants and my now-faded
I ACCEPT!
T-shirt and turned out all the lights. I lay curled up in my bed in my horrible, too-small apartment, and watched the brick wall outside my window. This was the apartment I’d gotten when I thought I had a network career ahead of me. I didn’t care how bad it was—job or apartment—because both were just the start of something bigger.

The tough part about wrapping your whole life around something—anything—is that when that thing disappears, you’ve got nothing left to hold you up. My mother had discovered that when my dad died. Our home was never the same. She’d never intended to support me on her own. She didn’t know how to move forward without him.

I didn’t know how to move forward now.

What was there out there for me? Getting fired from
Good Morning, New Jersey
had taught me that it was harder to find a new job than I thought. And that’s when my record had been spotless. Now? Now I’d killed an entire show.

Who would have me now?

I curled into an even tighter ball and looked at my alarm clock. It was seven o’clock. I had six and a half hours to figure out what to say to them. I had six and a half hours to figure out what to do.

Six.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

When I got to work, I still hadn’t figured it out. Plus, I had the handy-dandy addition of giant raccoon eyes, frayed nerves, and a profound inability to be logical.

After our morning meeting, I told Lenny I was in the middle of something, and let him take over in the control room while I attempted to map out a strategy. But the lack of sleep wasn’t helping me do what I hadn’t been able to the previous evening. How do you strategize utter failure?

I paced in my office. I paced in the restroom. I paced in the control room when no one was looking. In fact, I was in the middle of a particularly frantic bout of pacing when I caught sight of Merv in deep conference with the stage manager, Pete.

“What’s going on now?” I asked.

“Mike’s offended by a word in the next story,” he explained.

“Offended?” I narrowed my eyes. “It’s about Easter chicks.”

“It’s okay,” Merv said. “They’re on commercial break, and we’ve sent someone for a thesaurus.”

A thesaurus? Oh,
hell
no.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, to judge from Colleen’s shrill response when Pete approached the news desk,
Roget’s
in hand.

“He needs synonyms now?” She threw up her hands in disgust.

“Okay,” said the stage manager. “We’ve got ‘feathery,’ ‘fleecy,’ ‘flocculent’.…”

“ ‘Flocculent’ sounds like something we’d hear out of Lisa’s mouth,” Lenny grumbled.

But Mike didn’t hear any others he liked, either. “I’m not going to say ‘fluffy,’ ” he insisted. “It’s bad enough that I have to do these ridiculous stories. There are certain words I will not utter on air.”

“Hey, buddy,” drawled Colleen. “Last week I had to use ‘rectal’ and ‘moisture’ in the same sentence.”

“Well, first dates are always awkward.”

She glared at him. “I didn’t see anyone coming at
me
with reference material,” Colleen went on, undaunted.

“Interesting point,” said Mike. “Blow me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s happening.”

“Blooooooooow meeeeee.” His microphone made the words echo across the studio.

“Kill his mike!” Merv shouted. We didn’t want a repeat of Jimmy Carter.

All right. Enough was enough. I pressed the button that connected us to their earpieces. “Mike.”

He ignored me.

I tried again, louder. “Mike!”

He popped out his earpiece and pointedly scratched his temple with his middle finger.

That was
it
. I sprang out of my chair.

“Becky?” Lenny said in warning. “What are you doing?”

Fueled by fury, I stomped into the studio and up to the news desk. “I need to talk to you,” I spat at Mike.

“Um, Becky?” As if from a great distance, I heard Pete. “We’re back in sixty seconds.…”

“I’ve looked up to you all my life,” I said to Mike. “Idolized you. My dad and I used to watch you on TV.” If he dared make some snotty comment about how I’d told him that in the elevator, I’d … “You epitomized the best of what I wanted to do.” What I’d failed to do. “So imagine my surprise—” You know what? Adam was wrong. “—When it turned out that you’re the
worst person in the world
.” Not number three, not number two. The absolute worst.

He looked at me, stunned momentarily into silence.

“Do you have any
idea
how lucky you are to be here?” My voice went up an octave. “How lucky we
all are
to have these jobs? How quickly it could all be
taken away
?”