Читать книгу Gloss - Jennifer Oko - Страница 13

WE MET AT MECCA, A MIDDLE EASTERN–themed bar on the roof of the new Scheherazade Hotel, the latest hot spot in town. Normally, as a regular gal, I wouldn’t have been able to get past the red velvet rope (unless I wanted to risk waiting in the line that snaked through the lobby, leading up to a metal detector and an armed guard blocking the elevator bank). I suppose I could have shown my network news ID and claimed press privileges, which usually worked, but I was pretty sure my date’s credentials were enough to merit VIP status.

“I’m meeting Mark Thurber,” I said to the Armani-clad, steel-shouldered bouncer behind the rope. I could hear a few girls in the line behind me rustle when I said the name.

The bouncer looked at his list, asked to see my driver’s license and unhooked the latch. “Twenty-ninth floor, take a right.”

And there I went. Clop, clop, clop down the marbled hall and into the elevator.

And there he was, sitting at a small corner table, surrounded by candles and dark velvet cushions, wearing a little stubble and a dark gray shirt. I tried to take a good look at him, to take him in, in the flesh, without the studio makeup or the unreal glare of television lighting.

Sitting there, back straight, chin up, eyes searching around, Mark reminded me of the guys in high school that I had been too terrified to talk to, the thin, chiseled waspy ones that had landed at my progressive private school only after being expelled from a string of blue blood boarding schools or Upper East Side preps. He had floppy, straight brown hair, an aristocratic profile and a slightly smug countenance reminiscent of a British movie star. Totally out of my league. But then again, sometimes guys like that actually liked girls like me—thinking girls like me (with small bones, light olive skin, oversize eyes and the surgically altered residue of a prominent nose) to be somewhat exotic. Mark was trying to push down his cowlick when he looked up and saw me. He smiled (those dimples!).

“Hi,” I said as I walked over to him, grateful that the Persian carpet snuffed out the graceless clop-clop of my high-heeled shoes. “I hope you haven’t been waiting too long.” I was only a few minutes late, but I hate when people aren’t punctual. It’s the producer in me—time sensitive and tightly scheduled.

“Just got here,” he said, but he was probably lying. He was already halfway through whatever it was he was drinking. “Coffee?” he said, holding up what appeared to be a tube leading to a hookah pipe.

“That’s coffee?”

“It actually is. Some strange coffee martini they make here. These are actually straws. Try it. It’s good.”

“Odd.” I sat down and took a sip. “And clever.”

Basically, the bowl was made to look like one of those Egyptian water pipes, but the proprietors had created a way to drink from them instead.

We bantered. We sipped our alcoholic coffee through straws.

It was like a lot of first dates, the kind where you talk and talk to avoid any awkward silences. Until the inevitable.

“So.”

“So.”

Silence.

“How about we order another one?” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

I was surprised to find that I wasn’t self-conscious and squirming next to a guy like him, but there I was, comfortably slouching into the pillows, gently touching Mark’s arm after he accidentally spilled a little of the drink on the table and tried to mop it up with his sleeve without my noticing. I had noticed and I thought it sweet.

He told me about working in the White House, about how every day he had to pinch himself because he couldn’t believe he was actually there, in the most powerful place on earth.

“What’s he like?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The president, silly.”

Mark laughed and said that, because I was a member of the press, he couldn’t really give me a straightforward answer. And anyway, he said, he worked more directly with the vice president. So I asked about him.

“Off the record?” He gave an exaggerated snarl and then held up our now empty hookah. “Waiter! Can we have another one?”

Hookah or no hookah, Mark did not need much lubrication to tell me that the VP was an ass. It was common knowledge that he was a screamer, a phone thrower, a man in dire need of mood stabilizers but too macho to take any. At one of his first press conferences (not that there were many), the VP took off his shoe and banged it on the podium in a manner reminiscent of a certain Soviet leader circa 1960. In fact, that was the perception—that the VP fancied the savior of America would come in the form of an iron-fisted, quasi-totalitarian, Soviet-like regime, just with a nice capitalist overtone. Since Mark was about as far as you could get from a gray, bland, perfunctory Soviet apparatchik, they didn’t really get along on a personal level. That said, the vice president was preparing to run in the next presidential election, and Mark did have issues of professional longevity to consider.

“I figure I don’t have to like him. And he doesn’t have to like me,” he said. The waiter returned and Mark leaned forward to take a sip from our refreshed bowl of caffeinated elixir. “As long as he likes what I write.”

“But do you believe in what you write? I mean, do you believe in his policies?”

“His policies are based on the polls. So there isn’t much to believe in. It’s like that with any politician.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I didn’t say I respect it.”

I sat back and crossed my arms, like a disappointed schoolteacher. “How can you live with yourself, working for something you don’t respect?”

“Oh come on, people have lived with a lot worse. Especially in Washington. You just have to learn not to personalize the political.”

“But that’s not why you got into the business, is it? Just to rub elbows with power? I mean, you could have done a lot of things, I imagine. Why work in politics if you don’t really think you’re doing some good?”

“I didn’t say we weren’t doing any good. We are doing some good.”

“Like what?” I said, and then immediately hated myself for being so argumentative.

Mark laughed. “You just can’t suppress that hard-hitting reporter inside you, huh?”

“Yeah, right,” I said, hiding the fact that I was blushing by sucking up some more of our drink. “But seriously, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, I’m just curious about what it is about your work that moves you, you know, gets you out of bed in the morning?”

He fumbled with his straw. “I know it sounds clichéd, but I guess a lot of what we do is just simply better than the alternative. It’s not that anything is so great, but we could be doing a lot worse. It probably sounds like moral gymnastics or defensive reasoning, but I do believe that.” He took another sip. “At least I like to believe that I believe that,” he said, looking up from the hookah with a full dimpled grin.

“What a mental menace,” I said, citing the words Mark had infamously coined referring to the Fardish president before he was, also Mark’s words, effectively eviscerated.

He smiled again.

“You like those alliterations, don’t you?” I said.

“This is a luxurious libation, don’t you think?” he said, changing the subject with a wink.

An ambrosial aphrodisiac, I thought to myself as I lifted the straw to my mouth once again. And that, basically, is how, a couple of hours later, I wound up in the hotel suite of a People magazine certified eligible bachelor.

And that’s where he leaned forward across the plush velvet couch and gave me a soft, gentle kiss on my mouth. He had soft, full lips, warm and, oh…this is hard for me to write, even now. One doesn’t get many kisses like that behind bars.

“I should go,” I said, not really wanting to, but proud of myself for saying so.

“It’s okay,” he said, “we can just talk if you want.”

I wanted to kiss him. “It’s just, well, I don’t want to do anything stupid, and you are one of the most coveted guys in the country and I really don’t want to be another conquest and…” I went on like this for a bit too long, embarrassing myself more and more with each word. I grabbed a water bottle from the coffee table and finished it off, because if I was drinking I couldn’t talk.

Mark laughed. His eyes closed when he laughed. It was incredibly sweet.

“You know the stupid thing?” he said, sitting back into the cushions, away from me. “Because of that People article, sure I can get laid, but no woman will trust me enough to take me seriously.”

I shot him an impish grin. “Poor you.”

“No. Seriously. I really like you, Annie. And I know it sounds like a line, but I would really like to get to know you. See what happens.” He crossed his arms, giving himself an uneasy little hug. “Is that okay?”

“Okay,” I said, wanting to believe him. I told him that if we really wanted to get to know each other, he had to trust that I understood that everything he said was off the record, and that made him smile, as if there was a lot he wanted to tell me, which, of course (I later found out) there was.

We didn’t kiss again that night. We just talked and talked until the sun started to rise, and then we both fell asleep on the bed, fully dressed.

When I woke up, there were two pink peonies on my pillow. Mark was in his hotel-issued, white terry-cloth bathrobe, watching me.

“I stole them from the breakfast spread,” he said, pointing his chin at the flowers.

There was a cart with coffee and pastries at the foot of the bed. He poured me a cup and sat down next to me. I sat up to take it.

“Peonies are my favorite,” I said. “And lilacs.”

He smiled.

I smiled.

It was a little awkward again. And there was no alcohol in this brew.

“You have beautiful hair.” He gently touched my brown tangled nest.

I worried about my morning breath.

“What time is it?” I said, looking for the television remote. Found it. I turned on my show. “I have a piece on at 7:44.”

“Cool.” Mark looked at his watch. “We have thirty seconds.” He put his arm around my shoulder, giving me a quick squeeze, causing me to spill a bit of the coffee on the sheet.

It is an odd thing to watch someone watching your work, especially when it’s someone you have a crush on. And, if I could have chosen it, this certainly wasn’t the first piece I wanted Mark to see.

“Wow,” he said when the story was over and Natasha was showing Faith and Ken some of our purchases. “That was totally disgusting.”

“You don’t like snakes?”

“Remember, I work in Washington.”

I laughed. “It was pretty gross. The place smelled like a subway toilet.”

“I think I might have fainted if I got anywhere near one of those pits.”

“I did faint,” I said, quickly regretting admitting that.

“You did? From the smell?”

“No, I…I don’t really know why.”

“You don’t know?”

“Well, I had gotten a disturbing call, and it kind of made me unbalanced. And maybe that, with the smell, I don’t know…”

Mark looked at me as if I was nuts. But in a sweet way. And I don’t know why, but I guess I needed to talk about it with someone, so I told him the story. About the piece, about the calls.

“Wow,” he said again. “I saw that story. I was there the day it aired, remember? It was a really nice piece, but what’s the big deal?”

“I know. But Natasha said that the second caller specifically mentioned it when calling me all sorts of horrible things.”

“Like what?”

It was too embarrassing for me to spell out how he had phrased in hideously derogatory terms that I was a weak journalist, a lazy hack, that reporting like mine was part of the problem, and that I might as well be producing Nazi propaganda and working for Leni Riefenstahl at the rate I was going. It had really hit a nerve.

“He just said stuff about the story being totally wrong and misleading, and basically blamed me for the downfall of society,” I said. “There were some threats about needing to get it right, or else.” It sounded funny when I summed it up like that. Now I wasn’t even so sure why I had gotten so upset.

“Or else?”

“Or else. I’m not really sure what.”

“Well, who do you think it could be?”

“Honestly? My best guess is that it was some whack-job viewer. We do have a few, and they do make strange phone calls from time to time. But the weird thing is that I don’t know how they would have my cell number. Unless some idiot intern forwarded the call. I suppose that could happen. But it was still upsetting.”

“And they haven’t called again?”

“No.”

“Will you let me know if they do?”

“Okay,” I said, relieved that I could talk about this with someone, that he didn’t seem to think I had overreacted.

And then we got up because I had to rush home to shower and change, and Mark, well, he had a country to help run.

Dear Faith and Ken,

I have been watching your show for over five years, but after your interview with the family of the runaway, I am turning the dial. It was completely distasteful to harass the parents in such a way. At least on Sunrise America they just spoke to the siblings.

Disdainfully,

A Disappointed Viewer