Star Time (60 page)

"We had enough to go on."

"So, you knew about it!" Barnett thundered. "Did you at least check with Grant?"

This is it, thought
Greg,
this is the moment when my life starts to crumble. "He already knew we had the story. He denied it. Chris mentioned that."

"He denied it, and you still went ahead."

"He wanted to kill the story so badly that he resorted to blackmail." Greg looked at Diane now. "He has photographs of me he said he'd release to the press if the story was broadcast."

"What kinds of photographs?" Diane asked, her back stiffening, preparing herself.

"Of me in bed with another woman."

Profound pain seized Diane's face. Barnett started to speak, but Diane raised her hand to silence him.

"Who is the woman?"

"Christine
Paskins
."

Diane's gaze swung to the television screen and Chris's likeness that filled it.

"Does Ken know?" she asked after a moment.

"They're going to separate after the election."

"Does he know?"
she cried out.

"Yes. The secretary showed him the pictures."

"Well, at least I'm not the only fool."

"They'll probably be published tomorrow."

A sob caught in Diane's throat. "You really turned out to be so common.
So predictably common."

Barnett rose from his chair to loom over Greg like a column of lava smoke topped by fumes of gray hair and blazing eyes and brows.

"What you have done is dishonorable and unconscionable. It is inexcusable. You broke your marriage vows to Diane and your word to me. You're the lowest sort of creature: a social climber with no moral character. You have forfeited all rights to my favor, all rights whatsoever. You should be crawling on your knees right now begging for forgiveness from my daughter and me."

Greg's attention all along had been on Diane. "You know our marriage has been over for a long time."

Barnett's outrage commanded the moment. "You understand that if you leave her, you'll leave with nothing. In any event you are to submit your resignation from FBS immediately."

"I've thought about that," Greg said reflectively. "I took the job to try to turn the company around and accomplish something worthwhile. We have a chance of doing that. My contract guarantees I stay until year's end, with an option for another four years if the company projects it's in profits. I don't intend to resign."

Barnett's face was now crimson with fury. "You got that job only because I gave it to you. And I can take it away just as easily. A scandal involving the company's CEO and its most important newscaster will provide ample cause for the board to overturn your contract and fire you. I'll see to that."

"So you can take over again."

"Yes, damn it. Take over and bring some morality back to the company."

"Last November, when I took over, you were interested only in better ratings and stopping the losses. The company's doing better now. So are you. That's fortunate because you'll need all your strength. I intend to fight you to keep the job."

"I'll see you in Hell first!"

Standing to leave, Greg placed himself in front of Diane, speaking only to her. "Perhaps the marriage might have worked if Chris and I hadn't fallen in love again, but I doubt it. I think it was bound to end. There were times we'd act as if nothing was wrong, but then something would cause the old hostility to return. We gave it a lot of years, and very little changed. So much I'd hoped for and looked for in you—that we'd looked for in each other—never materialized. We never had a family."

"You never understood how frightened I get."

"Probably.
We gradually became two
dissatisfied
people separated by all the ways we disappoint each other."

That's what marriage really is, he thought sadly, the slow destruction of the fantasies about the other person for which we originally got married. And in our case nothing ever grew in their place. He did not move, thinking that this was probably the last time he would have a chance to speak to her directly and not through lawyers. After all these years there must be something else he wanted to say.

But all he could think of was, "I'm sorry, Diane. I'm sorry I disappointed you. I'm sorry the marriage ended the way it has, with so much embarrassment."

He waited for her to summon her own last words, but she simply glared up at him, her mouth tight. He started to walk from the room.

"Don't go!" she cried out.

For an instant, Greg's years of acquired self-sufficiency fell away. Irrationally, the specter of loneliness loomed up before him as fearfully as when he was an abandoned child in an emptying house. But Diane
was already swiftly receding into an irretrievable past. I have Chris, he told himself, and I have my talent for this business.

For several days, like a man praying before a fearsome representation of the Almighty, Stew
Graushner
would halt at his desk in the office he and Susan shared and
stare
at the unopened envelope that contained the divorce papers his wife had served on him. He knew what they said—she had told him: that she wanted half of everything he possessed and would ever possess from now until the end of time. He pictured her standing in hip boots in the center of his income stream holding a large net to catch his fattest assets swimming by while he, downstream, starved to death.

Finally, like a wild animal sniffing around a baited trap, he carefully summoned the courage to reach for it. He set the official-looking document in the middle of the desk and watched it. Several minutes passed before Susan, who had been reading a newspaper, intervened.

"You need a lawyer."

She picked up the telephone and as she pushed the touch-tone buttons, continued, "Actually, you need
my
lawyer. He's a real bomber—you know, the kind who bombs the other side with motions and papers till they're dizzy and on their knees. He practically bludgeoned my second husband and left him penniless and whimpering, drove him into a sanitarium in fact. Yes, you definitely need Hal Diamond."

Stew brightened. "Hal Diamond. I like the name.
A sharp, hard sound."

"I gave him a nickname. Hello," Susan said into the receiver as someone answered. "Hal Diamond, please."

"You mentioned a nickname," Stew reminded her as she waited.

"Oh, right. I call him the Wrath of God."

"The Wrath of God," Stew repeated, a huge smile bursting onto his face as he savored the characterization. That was just the sort of defender he needed: a bomber racing into the heart of enemy territory.
A starship bristling with ray guns.
The Federation.
The Wrath of God.

God's Wrath, it turned out, required a twenty-five-thousand-dollar retainer. Stew wrote the check at end of the meeting and then drove to the bank and withdrew his last twenty thousand dollars in cash. He would hide it someplace that Patty could never get at.

Early the next day, a wire service sent out photos of Chris and Greg's lovemaking to every major newspaper, newsmagazine, television station, and Internet news source. Emails with photos attached zipped at light speed into computer in-boxes, moving within seconds to lists of friends. So many people clicked on YouTube that the heavily reinforced
servers slowed to a crawl in delivering the visuals. The invasion of the couple's privacy was justified on the theory that viewers had a right to scrutinize the personal behavior of journalists on whose trustworthiness they relied. If reporters could snoop into the sexual truancies of presidential aspirant Gary Hart or the alcoholism of Kitty Dukakis (who was not the Dukakis running for the President) or the men's room hypocrisy of TV evangelists, their own private morality was fair game.

The true motive for trumpeting the scandal was, of course, that sex and celebrities fascinated the public. Gossip combining both was irresistible: a beautiful, prominent anchorwoman, who cheated on her senator husband with the powerful head of a TV network, married to a socialite heiress. This was better than
Desperate Housewives
because the story was about real people and came complete with photographs a respectable news organization could rationalize displaying because of the participants' prominence.

Chris, who until that moment was America's darling, was instantly notorious.  A hurricane of denunciation descended. Every news program or newspaper she turned to splashed her face and often her scarcely cropped torso onto screen or paper. What had been her private life was now the subject of prurient dissection. She remorsefully recalled how thoughtlessly she herself had presented such material when it concerned celebrities she did not know.

Chris tried to read a book, but could not concentrate. Like an arsonist returning to watch firefighters battle her blaze, a perverse compulsion drove her back to watch and read the stories that were ruining her life.

Through a broker Greg rented a furnished apartment and moved himself and his
belongings in before Diane was
due to return from the country. Chris thought about joining him, but a call downstairs on the house phone confirmed that photographers were staked outside the building's entrance, their cars and even a motorcycle at the ready. She and Greg had to make do with several long phone conversations.

Seeking to limit the damage to his reputation, on Sunday night Ken issued a statement to the press—early enough to make the Monday-morning newspapers—that expressed his shock at learning of his wife's misbehavior, but that he still loved her and hoped they could repair their lives together. Not the truth, but the
statement made him sound
compassionate.

Next morning, Chris called a press conference in the FBS newsroom.
Always honest before, she was no less so now.
She stated that her husband had long known that she wanted to leave him, but at his request, so that he and the voters would not be diverted from the significant issues of his campaign, she had agreed not to announce their separation until after the November election. She loved Greg
Lyall
, not Ken. She
was sorry for all the grief that had caused. She assured them that he she intended to remain on
The FBS News Tonight.

Pointedly, she wondered aloud how the wire service had obtained surreptitiously shot photos that so clearly invaded her and Greg's privacy. A reporter for a wire service read the printed statement he had been handed in case the question came up. It consisted basically of a single line: "In accordance with our Constitutional press freedoms, we never reveal our sources."

The FBS news staff squirmed in embarrassment through the press conference. Chris tried to put them at their ease by joking that at least she would be more attractively lighted here than in the now infamous photos.

She was sure company directors would want her suspended. Greg had vowed to fight against it. At least that would give her some time. But she had no idea yet how she would address the issue tonight on the air. Millions of additional viewers would tune in to see her tonight, she knew.
A very rugged way to raise ratings.

Greg was not used to spending his free time alone and did not like it. He and Diane were usually out several times a week. On other nights he watched TV to catch the rival networks' offerings, Diane often there beside him. On weekends, even in the country, they had parties or dinners to attend.

After determining on Sunday that the stakeout would prevent Chris joining him, Greg grew antsy. He realized he had no "guy" friends, no good old buddies with whom he took in a basketball game or played poker. He was so good on the tennis court that his weekly partner was the club pro. Marrying Susan had fenced him totally into
her
life. Finally, he ordered a dinner delivery from a popular neighborhood restaurant and hunkered down to channel surf among the competition.

He was in his office early Monday morning, grateful to be able to throw himself into work. At nine, he began contacting FBS directors by phone. Barnett had spent the weekend calling them, and Greg, the only FBS employee on the board, found himself in a battle for their allegiance. Nearly all were prominent businesspeople and all but one of them men. Some to whom Greg spoke were outraged or mortified by the scandal, especially the older ones who were close to Barnett. Others were willing to extend some sympathy. Most wanted Chris suspended, but found it difficult to vent their feelings fully because Greg was the other person in the photographs. He did not know how long he could hold back the pressure.

He also tried to prepare the directors for continuing repercussions from the Pentagon story. The worst thing in their eyes, he knew, was adverse surprises. What he stressed to each were the company's positive
improvements over the year and the need to present a united front to the outside world. Yet he did manage to obtain one concurrence from them that lifted his mood after a weekend of turmoil and distress.

He found himself uncharacteristically whistling as he traversed the long corridor from his office suite to
Ev
Carver's. He did not wait to be announced, but sauntered past his assistant's desk. As usual, the curtains were drawn and the lighting gloomy.
Ev
was just ending a phone call.