Morning Glory Page 13

  “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 sl
eep 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?”

  I doubted he cared. After all, his contract would remain intact long after Daybreak was hoisted into its coffin.

  Dimly, I realized everyone in the studio was staring, but I was long past paltry concerns like dignity.

  “Um, we’re back in thirty,” said Pete.

  Everyone on set had stopped in their tracks.

  “Uh, Becky?” I heard Lenny’s voice shine out from the control room. “You okay?”

  “This was going to be my dream job,” I ranted to Mike. “My dream life! Working on a network show in New York City.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Merv. “I think Pomeroy broke her.”

  “Becky,” Lenny said again. “In fifteen—”

  “And there’s a guy—a great guy, who is actually kind of smokin’—and he can stand me long enough to have sex with me.”

  Mike’s eyes widened just the tiniest bit at that one. All around the studio, I could hear the gasps. Colleen’s smile was real for once. She was loving the show.

  “Becky,” Lenny pleaded. “In five—”

  “And instead,” I said, or rather, screamed, “it’s all a mess. Because of you.” I jabbed a finger at him. “No one here does their job well because you can’t be bothered to do yours at all!”

  I glared at Mike. His face was frozen. No one in the room dared to breathe—but me. I sucked in oxygen like it was going out of style.

  “And, we’re back,” said Pete the stage manager.

  15

  I slinked off the set, still hyperventilating, as Colleen snapped into host mode.

  “Welcome back to Daybreak,” she said cheerily. “And now, with a check of the weather, here’s Ernie on the plaza.”

  The feed switched to a shot of our ebullient weatherman standing in front of a thick crowd of people. “Thanks, Colleen. Well, we’re all enjoying the sunshine out here today.”

  The folks behind Ernie jostled one another and toasted plastic cups filled with lemonade. “Daybreak!” one screamed. “Woo-hoo!”

  I knew for a fact that there were only six people in that crowd. Six people artfully arranged inside the camera’s frame to look like a pack of hundreds. Each of the six had been given free lemonade, hot dogs, and IBS T-shirts in exchange for their efforts.

  Ernie smiled at the camera. “Makes me wish I was wearing my thong.” He laughed merrily. The fabricated crowd laughed too.

  I felt hollow. Hollow and helpless. I trailed down the hallways, ignoring the stunned expressions of the people I passed along the way. The executive producer of Daybreak had just had a nervous breakdown in front of her entire staff. Had my rant gone on another microsecond, I would have been doing it in front of our audience as well.

  All four of them.

  I climbed into the elevator and pressed the button for the lobby. I needed to feel some of that sun Ernie promised on my face.

  At one of the sub floors, the elevator stopped, and an intern climbed on. He took one look at me, and hugged the edge of the elevator. Ditto for the archivist we met on the next floor.

  I gave them a little wave. “Uh, hi?”

  They exchanged glances, and sidled even farther away.

  I had a very bad feeling about this. Either I was wearing the crazy on my face or … oh God. How many people had been watching the in-house feed monitors when I went on my little tirade?

  The door opened at the lobby and my two companions watched me the way one might a rabid dog. “Are you … getting off?” one asked me.

  “Um …” My voice came out high and brittle. “Not yet.” I jammed my finger against the button leading to Adam’s floor. The other two raced out of the elevator.

  I got the same response as I walked through the news department. Some people stared. A few of them scattered. I kept my chin up and my eyes straight ahead. Just get to Adam’s office, and don’t think about how whatever reputation I had at IBS ten minutes ago—hard-ass? failure? fangirl?—had now mutated into something far more humiliating.

  I opened the door to 7 Days. The people there were clustered in groups that got quiet as soon as they caught sight of me. Oh, no. Oh no no no no no.

  With great trepidation, I approached Adam’s door and knocked. He answered, a triumphant smile practically splitting his face in two. “Hey, cutie,” he said. “You’re nuts, you know that?”

  I nodded miserably.

  “Let’s go to lunch.”

  I stared at him. “It’s not even ten A.M.”

  He shrugged. “Brunch, then. Come on. You need to get out of here for a bit.” He grabbed my hand and drew me back down the hall. We were only getting stared at more.

  “Adam …,” I said in warning.

  He looked back and me and winked. “Nothing’s a secret around here, Becky
. It’s a newsroom. And you’re always on Candid Camera.”

  We made it out of the building in one piece, though my cheeks felt heated by the time we exited the lobby onto the plaza.

  “I thought it was a nice gesture, for what it’s worth,” Adam said. “Some people send flowers, you yell at giant cameras.”

  I was too shell-shocked to respond.

  “That was me you were talking about, right?”

  I pulled my hand from his so I could rub my temples. “I’m never going to be able to show my face in there again.”

  “Nonsense,” said Adam, steering me down a side street toward a diner. “Everyone was on your side. Mike doesn’t deserve you. You know that. We all know it. He’s ungrateful and nasty.”

  “Can’t argue with you on that anymore.”

  He smiled. “Glad to see you upgraded him from my personal threat level.”

  I forced a chuckle.

  “It’s making you crazy,” he said. We stopped walking for a moment and he turned to face me. “He’s making you crazy. It’s not worth it.”

  I gaped at him in disbelief. Not worth it? The news? My dream job? Well, what was left of it anyway.

  “Becky, I know you think it’s a great job, but it is just a job. There are other shows you could work for.…”

  Easy for him to say, with his connections and his education and his track record of never killing a television show almost half a century old. Adam Bennett, of the Newsweek Bennetts, would find another show to work for. But Becky Fuller of the Weehawken Fullers? Not so much.

  “I get it,” I said stiffly. “You think my life is ridiculous. My show is ridiculous. I’m ridiculous.…”

  “I never said that—”

  “You’re upstairs doing investigative pieces on Zimbabwe and Zaire and—” Crap, what else started with a Z?

  “Zambia?” Adam suggested.

  “Zambia!” I cried. “God, you hard news guys look down on us! You, and Mike—”

  “Whoa,” Adam said, holding up his hands in protest. “Do not lump me in the same category as—”

  “What is it, huh?” I asked. “Is it because our audience is women?”