True Enough

Book by McCauley Stephen

Chapter One: Things to Do

In the course of one week, Anderton went from unknown lounge singer to Decca recording artist. "One morning me and the kids are having coffee," she told Look magazine in 1961, "and a record producer calls and says he wants to cut a demo. That phone call gave me a whole new life, even though nothing changed."

From Cry Me a River:

The Lives of Pauline Anderton by Desmond Sullivan

1.

Jane Cody kept lists -- Things To Do, Things To Buy, Bills To Pay, Appointments To Keep -- but because she knew they provided the kind of irrefutable paper trail that almost always got people into trouble at tawdry junctures in their lives, her lists weren't the literal truth. Some inaccuracies were alibis in case the reminders fell into the wrong hands, while others were there to mislead the people she practically forced to read them. It was a simple system that caused her problems only when she confused the code and started missing dental appointments and showing up at restaurants for imaginary lunches, both of which had happened in the past three weeks. Obviously, she'd been working too hard, unless maybe she hadn't been working enough.

She was sitting at her desk poring over tomorrow's notes to herself to stave off the anxiety attack she could feel brewing in the back of her brain, building in strength like one of the many tropical storms currently approaching adulthood somewhere in the South Atlantic. (The topic of a recent doom-laden conversation on the show she produced: Another Storm of the Century?) It had been a bad morning -- an argument with her son and a volleyball game of passive-aggressive selflessness with her husband -- and then the chocolates one of her co-workers had brought in proved disappointing and the carefully arranged plans for this afternoon's taping of the show had started to unravel. At moments like these, she wished she hadn't tried to impress her shrink by agreeing with him that tranquilizers and antidepressants were grossly overprescribed. She was tired of going out of her way to impress Dr. Berman. She was paying him $130 an hour, which ought to be enough to buy his approval, no matter what her opinions.

It was one of those hot, irritating late-August days with the kind of filthy air you wanted to push out of the way. She actually could see -- or thought she could -- particles of dust and lead and pollen suspended in the fuzzy air, banging against her window, trying to get in. The Charles River was low and slow-moving there on the other side of Soldiers Field Road, and even the muscular rowing crews pulling their way through the murky green water looked sluggish. When she turned forty last year, Jane finally had been released from envying the physical perfection of youth, an unexpected birthday present and a useful one, too, if you had the misfortune of living in Boston, a city cluttered with colleges and private schools. Throughout her thirties, she'd been plagued by the conviction that she could be as fit and healthy and firm as all those running, rowing twenty-year-olds, if only she put her mind to it. Now she could hide comfortably behind that pathetic but irresistible slogan of defeat: "I think I look pretty good for my age."

Jane's office was on the third floor of the studios of WGTB, one of Boston's public television stations. She was a producer of a thrice-weekly show called Dinner Conversation, a newsy program considered cutting-edge because it was so low-tech retro, and successful because no one had figured out what to put on in its place. The concept couldn't have been more simple: six people were assembled at a round table in a studio made to look like a dining room and asked to discuss a topic in the news. Plates of nicely prepared food and glasses of respectable wine -- both donated -- were placed in front of them. The camera was turned on unobtrusively about ten minutes into the conversation and turned off thirty minutes later. There was no host, no moderator, no overarching point of view, and, most important of all, there were no expenses. The key was getting the right six people, something Jane had a special talent for, despite the fact that her at-home dinner parties were often disasters. It had been her inspiration to have an even mix of experts and man-on-the-street types. Half the viewers tuned in to find out what the biochemist from MIT had to say about global warming, and half tuned in to watch the biochemist from MIT get talked into a corner by an amateur weather watcher from one of the area's shabbier suburbs. As long as someone sounded brilliant and someone was made to look foolish, the show played well. Reasonably well. Lately, rumors that Dinner Conversation had reached the end of its life cycle swirled around the studio daily. If you could believe the mean-spirited gossip, some of the interns spent half their time coming up with cute headlines to announce its demise: "The Dinner Party's Over," "Conversation Grinds to a Halt," "Will That Be All?"

The office was eerily quiet this afternoon as it usually was when they were in the middle of a crisis. In two hours they were taping a conversation about a recent plane crash, and one of the guests, a flight attendant, had canceled earlier in the day. Then at noon, a pilot who had agreed to appear and would serve as the authority figure and centerpiece of the discussion called to say he was delayed in Dallas indefinitely. They were left with a couple of windbag travel agents, a friend of one of the other producers whose entire identity revolved around his refusal to fly, and a New Hampshire housewife who claimed to have "died briefly" in an airline disaster several years earlier. As far as Jane was concerned, going on to write best-selling religious tracts -- in this case, I Met God -- was ample evidence that death, no matter how short-lived, had not occurred, but as a nervous flier herself, she didn't want to tempt fate by calling the woman's bluff.

There was a faint knock on Jane's door and Chloe Barnes tentatively stuck her head into the office and gave Jane one of her trembly looks of empathic concern.

"Everything's under control, Chloe. I have several people lined up, I'm just waiting for them to call and confirm."

"You're sure there's nothing I can do?"

"Very sure."

Chloe bit down on her lower lip and raised her eyebrows, as if to say, "Poor you." Jane had fallen for this wide-eyed, lip-biting expression for the first few weeks Chloe worked at the station. Then she saw Chloe staring at her with the exact same mixture of worry and pain while Jane was combing her hair in the bathroom mirror and realized it was a young, beautiful woman's pity of a forty-year-old she considered past the point of sexual relevance. Jane would have laughed it off if she hadn't been worrying about the sexual relevance question herself.

Half an hour earlier, Jane had phoned Rosemary Boyle, an old college friend who was in Boston to teach a couple of courses at BU. Rosemary was a self-involved poet, usually a conversational black hole, but last year she'd written a memoir about being a widow, so she could provide an expert opinion on loss, or something equally pertinent and unspecific. Since the publication of Dead Husband, Rosemary was prepared to provide an expert opinion on anything, as long as it helped promote the book. The only thing she wasn't prepared to talk about was the $1.5 million poor Charlie had left her when he died or committed suicide or whatever, and how her wrenching description of intolerable privation had added another few hundred grand to her coffers. Jane still hadn't heard back from her. They could easily do the show with five guests, but four was out of the question.

"David's getting a little worried," Chloe said. "He's wondering if we should get some Harvard people lined up."

"Definitely not!" Jane snapped. "I'm handling this."

Chloe tugged at her lower lip, a sign that Jane had sounded annoyed rather than authoritative, thereby further undercutting herself.

David Trask was the show's executive producer and saw "Harvard people" as the solution to every problem, as if having an endowed chair, whatever that was, was enough to make up for being pretentious and phlegmatic. Why David was communicating through Chloe, instead of talking to her directly, was a question she'd have to ask when she had a free moment. Chloe had come to the station straight out of Wellesley College four months earlier and was, in Jane's opinion, making too much progress too quickly. She was intelligent -- you couldn't deny her that -- and so full of energy and ideas you wanted to cap her, like a well, to control the flow.

Chloe was wearing a black suit with a Mandarin collar and bell-bottomed pants, all made out of a tastefully shiny material that probably contained rubber or some other unwholesome, impractical material. No doubt her monthly wardrobe allowance exceeded Jane's mortgage. Her shoes were big lumpy things with immense soles that made her walk with a heavy-footed gait, as if she were about to slap on a pair of skis and hit the slopes, but even they didn't detract from an overall appearance of gorgeous malnourishment that had men throughout the building finding reasons to pass by her desk several times a day. Genetic engineering eventually would produce human beings very much like Chloe: satiny blends of the best physical features of every race with perfectly proportioned faces and figures, human beings with such a scrambled background that racial biases, stereotypes, and quotas were rendered irrelevant in their presence. Her father was a Korean, African-American, Italian lawyer who worked as a diversity consultant for a multinational, and her mother was a former model or dancer or something show-offy, part Colombian, part Chinese, part Native American. Despite all of the advantages wrought by her looks and her upper-middle-class upbringing, Chloe saw the world entirely in terms of villains and victims, and seemed to have equated victimhood with strength and moral superiority in a manner Jane found incoherent, infuriating, and increasingly common among the young people, male and female, who came to the station. The fact that she'd risen to assistant producer in four months didn't seem to register as evidence of her own good fortune. Jane suspected that Chloe, like most college grads of her generation, was bulimic, but there were bloated, premenstrual, post-lunch moments when she envied her even this messy but efficient affliction.

"I can't believe that airline pilot canceled," Chloe said. "We should do a show on people whose lives were ruined by flight cancellations -- missing job interviews, weddings, important deaths."

"I hate missing important deaths," Jane said. "It ruins your day."

Jane would have gone into a defensive rage if someone had responded to an idea of hers with this kind of sarcasm, but Chloe took it in and decided to make the best of it. "Bad idea?" she asked.

"It needs fine-tuning."

Jane could see Chloe adjusting the knobs already, sharpening the focus and heightening the contrast. She could deal with Chloe's beauty and youth, write them off as superficial advantages which would fade in time, but there was no way to compete with someone willing and eager to actually learn from her own mistakes. She felt like saying, here, take my desk, my office, let's just get this over with right now.

2.

When Chloe left, Jane went back to her lists. Reading through the orderly arrangement of words on paper -- true, false, and everything in between -- made her feel more in control of her destiny.

Gerald's gymnastics class -- 3PM, halfway down the To Do list, was code for taking her six-year-old son to his shrink. She had no hesitation in admitting Gerald was seeing a shrink -- if anything, telling her friends made her feel like a better, more attentive mother than she quietly feared herself to be -- but her mother-in-law, who was temporarily installed in their carriage house, would have been horrified at the idea, even though she routinely told Jane, in her oblique way, that she thought Gerald was a peculiar child. In Sarah's view of the world, having a problem was life and attempting to do something about it was self-indulgence. The stoic put up with their God-given afflictions and addictions; the moral weaklings caved in and tried to do something about them.

So to avoid Sarah's scorn, Gerald was dragged off to his gymnastics instructor, Dr. Rose Garitty, M.D., every Wednesday. Poor pudgy, peculiar Gerald. The mere thought of him trying to do somersaults was enough to rend Jane's heart.

"Let's just tell her the truth," Thomas had suggested.

"The truth" was Thomas's solution for everything, which pretty much described her husband's optimistic, kindhearted, one-dimensional view of the world.

Facial -- 12:30 on the Appointments list was code for her own shrink. Not that she felt any shame about that either, but if Thomas got wind of the fact that she'd started seeing Dr. Berman again, he'd probably ask why, in that wounded way of his, and she might have to explain that for the past year she'd felt a thin crust of boredom forming over the top of their marriage. Or, to be more accurate, she'd begun to feel the thin crust of boredom that had always been over the top of their marriage thickening while she swam in the cold waters below trying to find a hole or an air pocket so she could catch her breath. She wasn't ready to talk openly about that with Dr. Berman, let alone with Thomas. After three months of twice-weekly sessions, she'd gone as far as explaining to the doctor her fears that her career was at a standstill, something she presented as neurotic insecurity, even though she had ample evidence it was true. Discussion of marital concerns would have to wait until she felt more solidly in control of them.

Finish reading Westerly biography. This referred to a book by someone named Desmond Sullivan, a soon-to-be colleague of Thomas's. She'd agreed to read and summarize the thing for her husband weeks ago. Thomas was too busy preparing his courses to read it himself, and too earnest to simply compliment the author with nebulous praise and then drop it. She'd had most of August, but thus far she hadn't done more than scan the index to find references to people who interested her more than the subject himself. The author would be showing up at Deerforth College any day now, and she'd written this little note to herself so Thomas would find it and be reassured that it was only minutes before she completed the tome and gave him her book report.

Up at the top of the Bills To Pay list was Pay Roofer. That stumped her. If she had to guess, she'd say it referred to some petty indulgence she wasn't interested in admitting to. Unless it meant that the person who'd reflashed their chimney six months ago still hadn't been paid. On a separate list, she made a note to look into that one.

When her direct line rang, she pushed the papers to the back of her desk and, assuming it was Rosemary Boyle calling about the show, grabbed the receiver on the first ring. But it wasn't Rosemary. It was Caroline Wade. Or, as Jane had come to think of her, Just Caroline.

"Hi, Jane, it's just me."

Jane appreciated self-deprecation as much as the next person, but only when it was clearly an attention-getting display of false modesty. Caroline's humble whimpers often pointed to actual flaws. But how nice that Dale Barsamian, Jane's ex-husband, had married Caroline instead of a fifteen-year-old beauty queen or a manic overachiever, someone who would ...