To Die For (12 page)

“I knew you’d say yes in the end,” she says. Come to think of it, this was one of the only times I ever saw her smile, that she wasn’t on the air.

“I pity the poor guy that ever tries to say no to you,” I say.

“Nobody ever does,” she says.

T
HERE ARE SOME
individuals I could mention that will probably tell you I’m some kind of cutthroat, ambitious bitch. I’m not naming names, but I know people talk. And right now what they’re probably saying about me is what a pushy ball-busting woman I was down at the studio. They’re saying I was full of myself, thought I was so great.

Well, what if I did? Since when did it start to be a crime to have a little confidence and self-esteem? If I didn’t blow my own horn, who else was going to do it for me?

I may not be some bra burner, but I’ll tell you this. Nobody gets on a guy’s case just because he knows he’s good and says it. If a guy tells his boss he deserves a raise, or a more responsible position, it earns him points. But you take someone like me, and just because I’m petite and blonde, I’m supposed to be some shy, retiring little decoration in the corner, never making any waves, never going after any more than what people give me. So when I didn’t behave that way, they call me a ball buster.

It’s true, I went into our station manager’s office and told him I wanted to be made the news anchor within six months. Yes, I pushed him hard, to send me to the cable TV conference. I told him I wanted to produce a segment about the lives of a bunch of high school kids from the wrong side of the tracks. You think if I hadn’t done that, Ed was going to stop by my desk some morning and say, “Hey, Suzanne, suppose I let you use a minicam for a few days, to make us a report on teen life”? Not likely.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. You have a goal, you’re a fool not to go out there and pursue it. Because I’ll tell you something: If I don’t go after what I want, there’s always going to be someone else who will. And if there’s a prize out there for the taking, it might as well be mine.

S
HE BOUGHT NEW LUGGAGE
for the trip to Mansfield. Had her hair highlighted, got herself a new briefcase. I’d be willing to lay odds she even started going to a tanning parlor a week or so before the big event. I mean, this was the dead of winter, and all of a sudden Suzanne’s looking like she’s just got back from Hawaii.

One morning when she was bringing in the coffee—which was still the most important part of her job, if you asked me—I commented that her husband must be looking forward to this little getaway. Two nights in a nice hotel with his bride, indoor swimming pool, Jacuzzi, king-sized bed. “Oh,” she said, “Larry’s not coming on this trip. I thought it would be best not to have any distractions, knowing I’m going there for business reasons.”

She was doing her homework all right. Looked up the keynote speaker, Casey Anderson, in our
Who’s Who in Media
guide, so she’d have some idea of her interests. Even sent a couple of introductory letters to five or six station managers who were signed up to attend, letting them know she’d be there and she was looking forward to meeting them and perhaps sharing her tapes with them.

One thing I got to say for Suzanne. She never concealed from me the fact that she had bigger fish to fry, never pretended she was going to grow old at WGSL. “Someday you’ll be able to point to me up on the screen and tell people you gave me my start in broadcasting, Ed,” she’d say. “I’ll never forget you for that.”

And she knew it was fine by me, too, that she was looking for a better job. Having Suzanne around was kind of tiring, if you want to know the truth. She was so wound up, you had to keep thinking up jobs for her to do. So all of us at the station looked forward to her big break almost as much as she did.

Day she left for Mansfield, George, our sound man, tied a bunch of tin cans to her bumper: “Mansfield or bust.” It was a joke, you know. We watched her go out into the parking lot, to her car, to see her expression. Nothing. She gets in her car, turns on the ignition, like there’s nothing out of the ordinary, backs up, and turns around. Still no reaction. I mean, those cans must’ve been making one hell of a racket, but she just drove off down the road, never stopping. Way I figured it, she was just so focused on the damn conference she never even noticed. Probably drove the whole three hours to Mansfield like that. I like to think of her pulling into the parking lot at the Mansfield Marriott like that. Mrs. Big Shot Weather Girl. With her tin cans clattering.

I
USED TO COME
over to her condo three, four times a week. Not just when we were working on the video. Just to hang out. Try on clothes, do each other’s hair, listen to tapes. God, we could talk all day and never run out of things. I’d tell her anything. She knew about Chester, my stepfather. She was the only one I ever told about that. “You got to just block that out of your memory,” she told me. “Pretend like it never happened and before you know it, the whole thing will be like a bad dream.” She said that’s what she did. Just focus on the good stuff. Things make problems in her life, it’s like her brain’s a TV screen. She changes the channel.

That was the day she told me things weren’t going so great with her and Larry. “I don’t know, Liddy,” she told me. “I think I might’ve made a mistake, getting married when I did. Cutting off my options like that. I was thinking twenty-four was so old. But you know Diane Sawyer was close to forty when she let herself get tied down to that movie director guy. And look at her career. Plus, she chose someone that could really support her career, help her along.” You know what Diane Sawyer’s husband, the movie director, did this one time, Suzanne told me? He didn’t think they were hanging the lights around her the right way. So he went over to the TV station himself, and fixed them just the way they should be, to make her look better. “That’s what I call love,” she said. “Imagine a guy that would know to do that for you. Larry, he thinks all they have to do is turn on a spotlight and start the cameras rolling. I mean, he’s a nice guy and all, but he doesn’t know a thing about television.

“And another thing,” she said. “He’s just so boring. All he wants to do is sit around watching TV and talking about what we’re going to name our kids.”

She told me she met this guy, at the TV conference she went to in Mansfield. He was a station manager or something like that, somewhere in New York State. This guy could’ve been a model in
GQ
, she said. He had this hair, not all gray, but at the temples, so he didn’t look that old, just distinguished. He was married, but his wife wasn’t there. He told Suzanne they weren’t getting along. They’d be getting a divorce soon, they were just waiting till their kid got into prep school.

“We had so much in common, Liddy,” she told me. “It was like I finally found someone that spoke the same language as me, someone that cared about the same things I did. It was like I’d known him all my life.”

She said she didn’t mean to hurt Larry, but after she got back from the conference, all of a sudden everything he did just started grating on her nerves, like fingernails scraping across a blackboard. The way his pants were always too short. The hair in his ears. The way he’d leave his socks on the sectional sofa. He just hung around all the time, she said, never doing anything but watch TV. He’d been putting on weight too. “Love handles,” he called it. But Suzanne called it fat.

“It’s horrible,” she said, “when someone’s crazy about you, and you wish they wouldn’t even touch you. Night after night I tell him I’m not in the mood. But the truth is, I don’t think I’ll ever feel like doing it with him again. And the worst part is, he doesn’t even get mad. He’s just like this dog that follows me around drooling.”

Not that her puppy Walter ever drooled, she said. But Walter was one dog in a million.

T
O BE HONEST,
I wouldn’t have remembered her at all if you hadn’t come up here asking these questions. In my job, I go to so many conferences. I’ve met so many young women like her, they all start to blend together: Reasonably pretty, reasonably bright girls who want to grow up to be Barbara Walters. Look at, what’s-her-name, Fawn Hall. One minute Barbara’s interviewing her about her involvement with Oliver North. Then Barbara’s asking her what she’s going to do next with her life? And what does old Fawn say? “I want a job like yours, Barbara.” I mean, at this point the woman’s more rich and famous than most of the people she interviews. Used to be kids growing up had dreams like cowboy and movie star, fireman, ballerina. Now it’s “television journalist.”

This one—you say her name is Suzanne?—may have been a little more driven than the average, a little more hungry. Hard to say, there were several of her kind swarming over the Marriott that weekend. Girls in man-tailored suits with their video cassettes in their briefcases that you know would give you their room key in a minute for the chance at a job—any job—at any station. But what would be the point in taking them up on it?

I’ll be honest with you: I haven’t always conducted myself like a complete Eagle Scout at these conferences. My wife and I—we’ve been going our separate ways for years now, and both of us look the other way now and then. It’s not some high-flung notion about the sanctity of marriage that would keep me from having a quick fling with a girl like your little Suzanne Maretto there. It’s total apathy. More than apathy, actually. Boredom.

They look attractive enough, understand. They even know the moves—they may put their tongue inside your ear and run their hand down the front of your pants in a way that makes your body hungry enough. They know the way to look at you—a certain blank, open-mouthed, wet-lipped look—as though they’ve been so carried away by your extraordinary magnetism and power over them that they’ve become total sexual animals. They breathe heavily, they make little noises as though they’re beyond words—beyond thoughts even. They appear to have more orgasms in a half-hour period than my news hour has commercials. They’re skillful too: they’ve read books on the subject, or magazine articles anyway. The last girl who took me up to her room at one of these conferences kept a bottle of creme de menthe next to the bed and took a big sip from it right before performing oral sex. It was a unique sensation, I have to admit.

But what they’re doing, these girls, is performing, and nothing more. They’re auditioning, same as they would in a sound studio, with two cameras pointed on them and someone holding up the cue cards. I can’t pretend I haven’t enjoyed the performance now and then, but frankly it gets old fast. There aren’t that many new tricks left, and the ones I haven’t seen by now, I don’t really need to. As for Suzanne Maretto in her cheap suit and her push-up bra—not that I remember, understand, but I can guess—she was strictly a beginner. There are girls in this business that could tell Suzanne Maretto to go audition for “Romper Room.” And I don’t hire
them
either.

I
DON’T KNOW WHAT
happened at that TV conference Suzanne went to, back in the winter, but I’ll tell you one thing, she was a different person when she came back. All of a sudden, everything was wrong with her life. Nobody was good enough. Nothing we did was right.

I remember having the two of them over for dinner, my son and his wife, a day or two after she got home. She starts in raving about the wine they served at the banquet. Not the kind Angela and I serve at the restaurant. This was some fancy stuff. Who knew? Main thing was, it was expensive, and it was better.

And the meat they served. You never tasted better. It came on a little bed of, not lettuce, but had we ever heard of endive? She’s talking to a guy that’s run a restaurant twenty years and she wants to know have I ever heard of endive, like they maybe invented the stuff in Mansfield.

And the workshops she took. Now she knows how backward the station she works for really is. Their lighting, cameras, everything. Might as well be from the dark ages.

She met this anchorwoman, Stacy Something-or-other. Stacy, Casey, who remembers? Point is, to hear Suzanne talk this woman hung the moon and several of the minor planets. All evening it’s “Stacy says this” and “Stacy says that.” Angela and me, we’re in the kitchen, fixing the coffee, and she says to me (my wife doesn’t usually talk off color, but she has a real mouth on her now and then), she says, “Next thing we’ll be hearing Stacy pees champagne and shits gold.”

But that wasn’t the part that got to us. The part about these television people, one step removed from the saints, we could just laugh that off. It’s the way she was treating our son that hurt. Picking at him, nonstop. Pointing out the calorie count in every piece of food he puts in his mouth, giving him this look.

“Your pants are too short, Larry,” she tells him. “We’ve got to get rid of this polyester shirt. It makes you look so cheap. And it’s getting a little tight on you too, I might add.”

“Don’t you think Larry would look good in a beard?” she says to Angela.

“I think he looks pretty good just the way he is,” Angela tells her.

“Oh, well, sure,” says our daughter-in-law. “Only he’s got this receding chin situation, and a beard would conceal it better.”

I can see Angela’s eyes go real dark when Suzanne says this, but I give her a look like, keep out of it. This is Larry’s business, not ours.

Only Larry just takes it. Never fights back. Never says a word. “I guess I could give it a try,” he said. “Just so long as you wouldn’t mind scratchy kisses.” Then he nuzzles up to her, like a big teddy bear.

“Not now, Larry,” she says. I tell you, that dog of hers got more affection.

W
E WERE OVER AT
Suzanne’s condo this one time. I mean, it had got to where I was over there more than I was at my own house. Larry was always off at work, and Suzanne and me were best friends.

We were doing our nails. She was doing my nails, is more like it. And all of a sudden she puts down the emery board and looks at me and says, “Do you think Jimmy Emmet’s cute?”