Rise and Shine (5 page)

“Surprise, surprise,” said Meghan, who had become prickly about marriage during the winter months, perhaps because Evan was spending so much time in Tokyo on a major consumer electronics deal. “They were both eating the same thing. Each other.”

“Oh, yuck.”

“I can’t even take credit for that line. It’s from one of the gay guys in my office. What’s the deal? They get the fashion gene, the design gene, and the wit gene. What’s left for us straight people?”

“Professional sports.”

“They have all the figure skaters, too.”

In one afternoon Ben Greenstreet left Dixie Cohen and she sued for divorce and custody of the twins, due to be born in six weeks. Ben countersued for desertion, saying that he and Dixie had not had sex for two years, and announced that he intended to marry as soon as possible “the mother of his children.”

And on Monday morning it was the third lead story on all three morning shows, after the spike in the jobless rate and the death of the French president.
Morning in America
had the doctor who set up the surrogate arrangement.
The A.M. Show
had the surrogate mom’s husband, a construction supervisor who was suing for custody of their own two kids, whom he brought on the air with him. And Meghan had Ben and the surrogate, whose name was Cindy, because for as long as most TV viewers could remember, Meghan always got the big guest. Before the Super Bowl she got the quarterbacks; if there was a war she got the president.

Dixie Cohen was the only one who had the intelligence or the dignity to stay off the air.

It was hard to tell from the clips I saw that night whether Meghan had been in a foul mood all morning or whether Ben Greenstreet set her off. A few days later, when I had more of an idea of what had really been going on, I asked Irving whether he’d seen the beginning of the show and whether she’d been sour from the top of the hour, when that unmistakable four-note opening played. “I’ll give it to you like this, kid,” he said. “You got the distinct impression that it was the French president’s own fault he had the stroke.” But it was when she had Ben and Cindy huddled together on the cornsilk-colored sofa on the living room set that Meghan really worked up a head of steam.

“Mr. Greenstreet, it’s hard to even know where to begin,” she said. “A man leaves his wife of eighteen years for the surrogate pregnant with their child—”

“My children,” Greenstreet said. “There’s two of them. And there’s no DNA in there except for mine and hers. This is not a surrogate. This is the mother of my children.” And he reached over and patted Cindy’s belly.

“Let’s leave the DNA for just a moment and backtrack. You and your wife, who is, according to
Pennywise
magazine, one of the fifty top female executives in America, contracted with Mrs. Benn to use her, in essence, to provide the baby you both badly wanted. Isn’t that correct?” Meghan’s consonants were as hard as pebbles in her mouth, and she had the flinty look in her brown eyes that I’d seen before. When I took a leave from college so I could work at Rock Hill stables. When I moved to Maine to throw pots full-time at a shop called Mud in Your Eye. You do not want Meghan ever to look at you that way.

She was wearing one of her signature black turtlenecks, and above it her pale freckled face seemed to float forward like a tribal mask. Even Ben Greenstreet, who was moving his hand in a circular motion over Cindy’s enormous stomach, must have seen the hard glint in her eyes, because he began to babble.

“Look, love happens. It’s just a plain and simple deal. Love happens. And I gotta say, the reason we’re here is because both of us think maybe we’ve been playing God, paying for people to have babies. Maybe it’s the natural order of the universe, that I would look at this woman whose body is sheltering my seed and that I would realize that we were meant to be together.”

“So you see this as a commentary on the evils of surrogacy, and not as a case of a man leaving his wife for a woman fourteen years his junior who, by the way, was not in the least offended by being paid to have a baby when she deposited a check for twenty thousand dollars that your wife”—Meghan stopped and looked at the ever-present index cards in her lap, as though unable to be certain that what she had said was accurate, then nodded and did something unpleasant with her lips that suggested disapprobation—“wrote from her personal account?”

“She needed to write the check because she was the one who needed the help,” said Cindy, who had an unfortunate singsong voice. You couldn’t help but suspect that Ben would be suing her for custody of the kids in a year or two.

“Excuse me?” said Meghan. You don’t ever want to hear Meghan say “excuse me?” either. She’d used it once on the vice president when he was insisting that eliminating the estate tax would enable the administration to increase Medicaid for poor seniors, and the president’s poll numbers had gone down almost 10 percent in a week.

“Ben didn’t need to pay anybody. He can have children. He has children. I’m living proof. She was the one with a problem. She had a problem where her tubes were scarred up.”

“Endometriosis,” Ben Greenstreet said helpfully, looking down at the belly he continued to massage and not up at Meghan. Who, I was in a unique position to know, had had two surgeries for endometriosis, one before she had Leo and one afterward, an unsuccessful attempt to provide Leo with a sibling.

“Mr. Greenstreet,” she said softly, “would you characterize yourself as a moral man?”

“I have a strong sense of personal morality,” Ben Greenstreet said. “It comes from the voice within. That’s why I’m here. To say we’ve been on the wrong path where baby making is concerned.” His hand stopped moving. His eyes narrowed.

“And what about a sense of personal privacy? In other words, is there anything you can say that would make the American people understand why you’re sitting here telling them all this about your personal life?”

“Whoa, hey, you’re the one who asked us to be here.”

“She sent baby clothes,” said Cindy. “Didn’t she send baby clothes? Or was it the other one?”

“That’s what we do in television nowadays, but there are times when it seems unseemly. This is one of those times. We’ll be right back.”

My sister has become famous in television because she has what is called “the common touch.” It isn’t, really. A common touch would be fulsome, approving, pitched to the lowest common denominator of America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Meghan’s uncommon touch is that she asks the questions and makes the comments that ordinary people would like to ask if the guest were sitting on their sofa, except that they wouldn’t have the wherewithal to think of them, or at least not until hours later. The riposte you wish you had gotten off at the faithless friend? The disdainful comeback at the belittling boss? The throwaway line when you find your husband in bed with his trainer? Meghan is the person who has the broadcast equivalent at her fingertips always. Once the network did a focus group study of the morning show and found that the comment made most often about Meghan Fitzmaurice was “You gotta hand it to her.” She has always been daring, ever since she jumped into the quarry in Montrose from the highest cliff on a dare from a group of high school boys. She was nine years old, and she went in cleanly feetfirst. They cheered; she climbed onto a rock by the water’s edge and bowed. Next day my aunt Maureen discovered that she had broken a bone in her foot, the force of the water slamming her narrow instep. She wears orthotics when we run.

When we got older, I remember thinking that if she’d jumped from one of the lower spars, the crowd would have been just as impressed and her foot would have been saved. And that morning on the show she could have cut cleanly as well with that last comment. People would have said she was too harsh, but plenty of women (particularly the ones with endometriosis) would have put their heads together at dinner parties and said smugly that it was just what they would have done in her shoes.

She would have been fine if she’d left it at that. But somehow there was a beat of open air before the commercial, perhaps because Meghan had cut the interview short. And in television a beat is a lifetime, long enough to sink a politician or to kill a sound engineer who leaves it empty. There would be a lot of speculation about the technical reasons for what happened, whether someone with whom Meghan had been brusque had intentionally left the station on the air when she thought they had gone to commercial. I doubted that; the guys on the lower rungs loved her, the sound guys, the equipment guys, the gofers. She remembered their birthdays, sent home little keepsakes for their kids. Certainly it was hard to understand how someone with Meghan’s experience had not noticed that she was still on the air, that her mike was still live. What is indisputable is that Meghan said, “We’ll be right back.” And then a moment later she snarled under her breath, “Fucking asshole.” And then the network went directly to a commercial for Happy Heinies, the disposable diaper with aloe vera in the seat.

I
TOOK A
cab home from the Borowses’ building and spent a frustrating half hour trying to reach my sister. The cell phone number I had was out of service, the phone itself probably left in a restaurant and later canceled by one of the assistants, as so many had been before. The home number was useless. I never called my sister after 9:00
P.M.,
when she took an Ambien, turned on a white noise machine, switched off the phone, and went to sleep. There was nothing left to do but eat fudge ripple out of the pint container in a bathrobe that used to belong to Evan, plaid flannel with a faded Brooks Brothers label. The television was on, and the cat lay on the crest of the couch slightly above my left shoulder. Meghan says disapprovingly that I look like a caricature of a single New York woman when I do this. The ice cream carton, the cat, the tiny couch. This is one of my favorite ways to spend the evening, especially if my nephew, Leo, is with me, too, and I can put my feet up in his lap. A nineteen-year-old boy who doesn’t mind giving a foot massage to his aunt is a thing of beauty, especially if he has wild red hair and a deadpan sense of humor.

I thanked God that Leo was somewhere in Spain, somewhere where I assumed all the television sets were tuned to soap operas and bullfights. The cat snagged the back of the bathrobe with her claws, and I backhanded her and went to the refrigerator for a wine chaser. It was nighttime, and I was watching my sister on TV, which was the network equivalent of sunset at noon.

We live in a time when the past can be present, and the moment eternal, on a continuous loop of film. The events of Monday morning had slipped by me, only to be resurrected and replayed over and over. Every channel was covering the story with that telltale combination of broadly acted disbelief and muted glee that marks discussions of fallen celebrities at the beginning of this century. I had missed the actual show, but like millions of others I hadn’t needed to miss the critical moment, since it was played over and over on several cable channels: the right-wing channel (to illustrate the degradation of the mainstream media), the BBC (to illustrate the curious customs of Americans), and the comedy channel (because the truth was that it was funny). Some viewers must have been mystified, since when the clip was replayed, Meghan’s words were blanked out to conform to the FCC regulations about obscenity that she had shattered in an instant that morning. Over and over the report was that she had said something unspeakable, and then all the viewers saw was a woman in a turtleneck fingering a stack of index cards as her lips moved.

Of course I can read Meghan’s lips. Sometimes when I am at her dinner table and she is pretending to listen to the man on her left she is really listening to me, and if she feels I am about to go wrong, her lips will move. Republican. Divorced. Bankrupt. All the quicksands into which I might so easily step.

I reached for the phone, then replaced it in the cradle. It would be cruel to wake Meghan now, even if I could. She has to be up and in the shower at 4:45, in the car to the studio at 5:00, on the air two hours later, her skin glowing, her hair arranged so that it looks soft and pretty but never falls into her face. She is the only redhead on TV news, and is inevitably described by reporters as the best-known television redhead since Lucille Ball. In her early years in the business, when she was flying around the country as a general assignment reporter, she did her own makeup, and she laid the Pan-Cake on pretty thick, so that there was contrast between her dark eyes, her red hair, and her white skin. Then six months into her time doing the news on the morning show, one of her male cohosts made an offhand comment about Meghan’s freckles being covered by the makeup people during a second-hour segment on the world freckle competition in Des Moines. (“You can’t make this shit up,” Meghan had said. “There’s a kid at the table, Meg,” my brother-in-law had replied, pointing his fork at Leo. “What?” said Leo, who frequently let his mind wander into a country different from the one his parents inhabited.)

Overnight an organization of proud redheads had formed, demanding that Meghan’s makeup be lightened. I believe there was even a logo with the legend “Free the Fitzmaurice Freckles!” A celebrity news program—“an oxymoron,” Meghan always says—interviewed a famous dermatologist, who had never met her or seen her in person but who said my sister didn’t wear enough sunscreen and better take care of herself as she grew older because she had thin skin.

My sister had always hated her freckles; she found them infantilizing and had been thrilled when she realized that on-air she could trowel on the powder with no one the wiser. Now she wore a sheer foundation from which a sprinkling across her nose shone dimly, and at forty-seven she was happier to look like a distaff Tom Sawyer than she had been at twenty-four, when the phrase “taken seriously” came up in our conversations more than any other except, perhaps, “anchoring the evening news.” I was Meghan’s mind dump; she left everything with me, no matter how small, large, or forbidden.