The Vibrant Years(7)
She stepped between him and CJ. “Actually, CJ, I have some things I’d like to discuss with you privately first.” If she sounded like a child, so be it. She might as well play to the audience.
CJ looked from Cullie to Steve and weighed their value in this situation against each other. Then she turned to Steve. “Why don’t you wait in your office, and I’ll let you know when Cullie and I are done.”
CHAPTER THREE
ALY
She had no idea I knew that the bikini she was wearing was stolen. But not too many women wore red bikinis in Goa in 1974. And no woman I ever met wore it quite like that. As though the scraps of cloth were a lover and she knew exactly how lucky the bastard was.
From the journal of Oscar Seth
Aly adjusted her gray silk jacket over her trousers. She’d remembered to leave the jacket on a hanger, but she could hardly take her pants off at the office.
Aly hated—loathed—wrinkles. They were a simple thing to control about your appearance. Aly had no patience for the kind of person who shuffled through life with crumpled clothing as though they couldn’t even bring themselves to care about their own appearance.
Joyce Komar, Aly’s boss and the head producer at Southwest Florida News, never had a wrinkle on her clothing. Aly’s own mother, the always perfectly put-together Karen Menezes, most certainly never did either. And here Aly was wearing wrinkled pants on a day as important as today.
Thanks to Meryl Streep, Aly’s career dreams were about to come true. No more spot reporting on diversity stories. Finally, Aly was going to anchor her own segment, do a full interview.
Ms. Streep was scheduled to spend the winter on Marco Island as part of her research for her next film, which according to Aly’s top secret insider intel was set in a retirement community there. Aly’s best friend’s son’s boyfriend worked for Ms. Streep’s talent agency, and he’d been able to get Aly in touch with her people. And Aly had snagged an exclusive interview for SFLN.
What on earth had possessed her to experiment with a new brand of trousers? There was a reason why Aly stuck with tried and tested things. The trousers were covered in those ugly horizontal wrinkles that ran across your crotch when you dared to sit down. It was the twenty-first century. Why did companies still make clothing that punished you for the act of sitting?
Aly checked her wristwatch. She had twenty-seven minutes before the editorial meeting that was going to change the trajectory of her career. She could feel it in her bones. Grabbing her purse, she ran out of her office. Wrinkled pants were not going to keep this from her.
It took her three minutes to drive to the Ann Taylor store, then another five minutes to run in and grab a pair of slim-fit black pants in a size six, twenty-nine-inch inseam. It had taken her years to zero in on the perfect combination of an interval workout routine and a diet so she could wear these pants and look like someone who fit the role of a news anchor. It took another five minutes to pay, then another five to drive back—because this was Naples, and she got stuck behind a driver who had nowhere to be.
Switching the pants out took two minutes. After that she touched up her lipstick, sprayed the flyaways from her chignon with her travel-size antifrizz mist, and gathered her iPad for notes. She was still the first person in the conference room.
Joyce followed half a minute later and smiled when she saw Aly. Her “There you are, on time as always” smile. As always, Aly wasn’t sure if it was admiration or annoyance—another trait her boss shared with her mother.
“Our ratings are down two and a half points,” Joyce said five minutes later to the seven people sitting soldier straight around the conference table she commanded like the captain of industry she was. Her perfectly styled blonde hair, polished blush nails, the humongous cluster of diamonds on her ring finger: it all announced, rather loudly, exactly how much she “had it all.”
“Honestly”—she threw a loathing look around the table—“our content has been so boring these days, even I don’t want to watch us.”
They were a news channel; entertaining content should not be their job. But not one person at the table pointed that out. Aly sure as hell didn’t.
“If we keep going this way, we’re going to lose more sponsors, and you all know what that means.” Joyce’s I-smoked-in-my-youth voice was thick with insinuation.
Of course they all knew what that meant. Over the past five years, the size of their team had shrunk down to half. But Aly was still here, and that wasn’t an accident. She was going to get that segment. She knew it.
Every time her ex-husband had laughed at her “pathetic optimism,” the fact that she’d dodged the layoffs had kept her from internalizing the many, many ways in which he had tried to get her to drop her dream. She still couldn’t understand why a man so kind and loyal, even smitten, had had such disregard for this particular ambition. Enough to let it tear them apart.
Not that it mattered anymore. What mattered was this meeting today and what she did with it.
“Ideas for the Thanksgiving special?” Joyce said, a gauntlet tossed across the glass-topped mahogany of the conference table.
Aly would wait. She’d let Jessica or Bob go first—she could tell from their faces that they had nothing. If she went first, they’d just move to the next person, and then someone would repeat her idea, and somehow magically it would become theirs.