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To the few who watched her a minute longer, it was conceivable that the woman in the black pants and white blouse could be the popular talk-show host whose show was taped inside the building. Conceivable, but unlikely. Was Blue Reynolds’ hair that long? That dark? Why would Blue be standing there motionless on the fire escape, looking up into the sky? Such a sensible, practical dynamo of a person—she certainly wasn’t the type to catch snowflakes on her tongue, as this woman now appeared to be doing. And especially not when The Blue Reynolds Show was going to start in twenty minutes. Tourists who’d hoped for last-minute tickets were right this second being turned away, the studio was full; please check the website for how to get tickets in advance.
This snow, coming two days after spring had officially begun, had the effect of bringing people throughout the city to windows and doorways—and to fire escapes, apparently. Though six to eight inches was forecasted, it was hard to begrudge snow like this, flakes so big that if you caught one on your sleeve you could see the crystalline shape of it, perfect as a newborn baby’s hand. And with tomorrow’s temperatures rising into the fifties, what snow was piling up on railings and rooftops and ledges would melt away. It would be as if this remarkable snowfall had never happened at all. Much like the sighting of Blue—if in fact it was Blue—there outside her studio building’s ninth floor.
The black steel fire escape stood out against the buff-colored limestone, an add-on when the building got transformed from bank to apartments in 1953. Now that it housed offices again, its fire escape made balconies for those lucky enough to have access along with their downtown skyline views. Like a switchback trail, the escape descended from the twelfth-story rooftop to the second floor, with landings at each floor.
The landing on which the woman stood was piled with a good three inches of snow, deep enough to close in on her ankles and soak the hem of black crepe pants. Her boots, Hugo Boss, lambskin, three-inch heels, were styled for fashion, not utility, and as she stood with her face upturned, she was vaguely aware that her feet were growing cold. Still, the pleasure of being pelted by snowflakes held her there. She could not recall the last time she’d been in, truly in, weather like this. And never alone, it seemed, and never focused, anymore, on the weather. Standing here, she had the exquisite feeling of being just one more anonymous Chicago dweller. Just a fortyish woman on a fire escape in the snow, and not Blue Reynolds at all.
This snow made her want to be a child again so that, instead of going home to a bowl of Froot Loops eaten while she reviewed reports, she would be preparing to pull on snow pants and boots and head for the lighted hillside at the park, plastic saucer sled in tow. She would return home later soaking wet, with chapped red cheeks and frozen toes and a smile that would still be on her face when she woke the next morning.
Was such a day a memory, she wondered, or a wish?
She knew the snowflakes must be wetting her just-styled hair, spotting her white silk blouse—Escada, she’d put it on not fifteen minutes earlier. These thoughts, they existed outside her somehow, far enough away that they didn’t motivate her to climb back inside her office window—even as today’s guests waited downstairs in the green room, nervous about meeting her. Even as the camera and lighting and sound and recording crews were gearing up for this last show of the week. Even as three hundred eager audience members were now taking their seats and would soon meet Marcy, Blue’s right hand; Marcy, who managed her life, who would tell them what to expect on today’s show. They wouldn’t expect a snow-wet, distracted Blue Reynolds.
Still, even when she heard someone tapping the window to get her attention, she stood there squinting up into the whitened sky. One more minute. One more.
The tapping, again.
“I know, I’m coming,” she said.
Inside, the stylists and her producer and her assistants fluttered around her, clucking like outraged hens. What areyou doing, it’s practically show time! Look at that blouse! Areyou sure you’re okay? No. She wasn’t okay, hadn’t been truly okay ever, that she could recall.
What expectation she saw on the faces of her studio audience when she took the stage! It wasn’t her they’d come to watch; she never lost sight of that. Because she was a regular person who argued with her mother, who cleaned hair from her shower drain so that the cleaning lady didn’t have to. She was a woman who failed to floss, who needed to clean out her purse, who paged through People at the dentist’s office, just like most of them. They were here to see the woman who, upon seeing that magazine, could then book whoever interested her and interview them on this very stage. They were here to see the woman who sometimes made the cover herself.
On today’s show were a sociologist, a high-school superintendent, a Christian minister, and three teens—one boy and two girls. One of the girls was eight months pregnant. The topic was abstinence education.
In talking with Peter, TBRS’s producer, about this show, Blue had protested his suggestion that she open with an audience poll. Getting the audience involved in hot-button issues had in the past led to a Jerry Springer-like atmosphere that she had to work hard to redirect. Peter said, yes, but think of the drama. “We want people to engage,” he said. “And not only because it’s good for ratings.” She agreed in part; engagement was the point of it all, or was supposed to be the point.
He continued, “You saw the latest numbers. We’re slipping—just a little, and obviously we’ll bring it back up, but if we lose our edge right now, we lose our contract renewal leverage.” Lower ratings also led to lower ad revenues, lower production budgets, more difficulty in booking guests who had the power to draw viewers—all of which then trickled down to lower salaries for everyone on her payroll. Lower salaries meant good people jumped onto newer, flashier, competing ships. Ultimately, she’d agreed to do the poll.
Standing at the front of the stage, she welcomed the audience. Three hundred faces of all skin tones and both genders watched her eagerly, fans from any and every place on Earth. Beyond, too, she sometimes suspected. While Marcy claimed there was an angel in every audience, Blue rather thought there was an alien, who would inevitably write in to rant about how off-base she’d been on a particular topic, even if that topic was the fifty best uses of filo.
“Let me introduce you to some typical teens,” Blue said, and the two teenage girls appeared from the wings to take their seats behind her. Indeed, both girls were typical looking, with long brown hair and eye makeup and TV-modest clothing bearing popular-brand logos. Both girls were white.
Facing the audience, she said: “Kendra and Stacey—who is eight months pregnant—are seventeen-year-olds from intact middle-class families. Their parents are professionals. Both girls are B-students, involved in extracurricular activities—” this drew a chuckle from some of the audience—“and both have made preliminary plans to attend college. The main difference in these young women’s lives is that one of them attends a high school that follows an abstinence-only curriculum, and one attends a school where teenage sexuality is considered ‘normal’ and the students are educated accordingly. Abstinence is taught as one of several possible choices.”
She stepped down from the dais and walked to the lip of the stage. “With a show of hands: which of you thinks Stacey, our pregnant teen, got the sex-is-normal message?”
About half of the audience raised hands.
“Now who thinks Kendra did?”
Most of the other hands went up, as did the volume of voices, arguments already begun.
Blue waited a beat, resisting the urge to rub her face. Looking into Camera 4, she said, “The answer, when we come back.”
She allowed the rumbling to continue during the break, hoping the audience would get it out of the way now; things were not going to get better.
Taking a seat between the girls, she looked at each of their nervous faces. “Are you hanging in there?”
Kendra shrugged. Stacey shifted in her chair and smoothed her pink maternity top. “I’m okay, I guess,” she whispered.
In a moment, they were on air again. Blue said, “With me today are Kendra and Stacey, Chicago-area teenagers who, like most of their peers, are dealing as best they can with the pressures of growing up in our increasingly sexualized culture.
“Before the break I polled the audience on which of these girls received the teen-sex-is-normal message from her school, and which was taught to abstain until marriage.” She looked at Camera 2: “Brad, give us that tight view—audience, watch the screen.”
She waited, knowing that on the screen behind her would be a close-up image of a girl’s left hand, on which there was a silver ring. Brad nodded, and Blue continued, “This is known as a purity ring, representing adherence to the abstinence ideal: a vow of chastity, a promise to wait for the right man—or woman, because some young men are wearing them too—and marriage.
“Girls, raise your hands.”
Of the four hands now displayed, three were bare of jewelry, as they’d arranged ahead of time.
The silver glinted, of course, from Stacey’s left hand.
Amidst the reactions of surprise from many in the audience, and satisfaction from others, a skinny, dark-haired woman in the middle of the room stood up and yelled, “Sinner! Hypocrite! Take off that ring!”
Stacey’s face crumpled. “It’s not wrong! I love him,” she said, then burst into tears.
And before Blue could stop herself, she did, too.
* * *
After refereeing fifteen rounds between the sociologist and the minister—had Peter chosen such a closed-minded, sanctimonious old man on purpose?—Blue escaped the set the minute they were clear. Reverend Mark Masterson, a tall, self-serious man with heavy jowls and bottle-black hair, followed her backstage.
“Just what do you think you’re going to accomplish by telling teenage girls to go ahead and have sex?”
“Was that what I said?”
“You made that child out to be a hero.”
He’d made no secret of his disdain for the facts and the statistics, which were the substance of her supposed endorsement. Blue looked at him coolly. “And you made her out to be a whore—I’m sorry, ‘whoremonger’ was your word, wasn’t it? I thought you were a minister, but apparently you’re a judge.”
He frowned down at her, his height giving him an illusion of superiority she was sure he made the most of. He said, “When I agreed to do this show, I was under the impression that you had a conscience.”
“And I was under the impression that someone who has committed to serving his community would at least attempt to do so.”
He straightened the lapels of his brown suit jacket and picked off a spot of lint. “These are children we’re talking about. They require firmness and absolutes to shut down ungodly urges. Romans chapter eight verse thirteen for example: ‘For if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.’”
“So Stacey must die? That’s a reasonable punishment.”
“Now let’s not be ridiculous. The Bible permits a certain amount of interpretation.”
Blue nodded. “So true. Excuse me.” Giving him no chance to reply, she walked away quickly, shoulders pulled back, chin up, and shut herself in her dressing room. She’d known there would be no easy consensus on such a complex issue, but just once she would have liked to have the kind of powers needed to instantly transform a person like Masterson into a hormonal, love-struck teenage girl.
Blue was pulling off her boots when Marcy joined her, looking as fresh and enthused now, at four-fifteen, as she had at eight this morning. It was more than Marcy’s white-blonde hair (“Of course it’s dyed,” she’d told a woman in the audience during a commercial break. “Nature doesn’t make this color …”), more than her flared-leg jeans and gray cashmere t-shirt. Marcy had what Blue’s mother Nancy Kucharski called “a dynamic aura,” grown even more dynamic since meeting Stephen Boyd, an industrial designer who was teaching Marcy ballroom dance. Passion created that aura, Nancy said. “It’s good for the complexion, and not bad for the rest of the body, either!” Blue had to take her word for it—and an experienced word it was.
“Good show,” Marcy said, as though things had gone just as well as the day before, when they’d hosted four champion dog breeders and four captivating puppies.
“Compared to what?” Blue stepped out of her pants and stripped off the substitute Escada blouse—there were two of everything, just in case—then put on gym gear and brown velour sweats. Or rather, a brown velour tracksuit, as they were being called again. The seventies were back, complete with Barry Manilow and Cat Stevens and Neil Diamond on the radio, which Blue didn’t mind so much. The songs were reminders of a time when she was young enough to believe she knew where she stood.
“I’m serious. Except for that little … outburst, you really kept things under control.”
Blue shook her head, still embarrassed. “I don’t know what that was about.”
“Empathy, maybe.”
“Is Peter having a fit?”
“He’s too busy working on a spin strategy. Stacey’s still a mess though, poor thing.”
“I suspect she’s going to need therapy.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. I just didn’t get any.”
Marcy reached behind Blue to straighten her hood. “Speaking of misguided youths, your mother called. She’s not coming to the Keys with us after all; she says she met someone and he wants her all to himself this weekend.”
“Someone named Calvin,” Blue said, more curious than surprised. “She apprised me the other day. He owns a bookstore—not the ‘adult’ type, a real one, but that’s all I know. Did she tell you anything about him?”
“Only that they’ll be by your place for drinks at eight tonight. She said to tell you don’t worry, they won’t stay long.”
Calvin was Nancy Kucharski’s third “boyfriend” since New Year’s. He’d been there at her mother’s place when Blue called last Monday night. The call had been brief, with Calvin waiting and Joni Mitchell crooning loudly in the background. Blue had a strong suspicion that Joni wasn’t her mother’s only throwback indulgence; the last time she’d visited her mother’s apartment, the place had smelled vaguely of marijuana.
Her mother hadn’t waited for the seventies retro movement to catch up with her; she’d continued to march as its poster child these three decades since. Her hair, left alone to evolve to a natural silver-gray, was past her shoulders and often braided. Her favorite earrings were small silver peace signs. She wore vegetable-dyed t-shirts to work in her organic rooftop garden, and she had recently pierced her nose. Probably she’d been smoking pot all along—maybe even grew it, organic and therefore wholesome—and where Blue was concerned was simply following their mutual and long-established policy of Don’t ask, Don’t tell.
Marcy dropped a manila folder onto the countertop in front of Blue. “This has your itinerary and Peter’s final notes for next week. With spring break in progress, we’re sure to have some great crowds. Oh, the first scuba class is set for Sunday at nine. I know you said you’re not planning to dive, but I think you should. Key West has some of the best reefs in the northern hemisphere and you can’t see them if you don’t do the course.”
Blue removed her makeup with pre-soaked pads—the sort of single-use product her mother hated—while skimming the itinerary. They’d leave Chicago early tomorrow, arriving in Key West at about ten. The whole crew would stay at the Ocean Key Resort, where, for her, a spacious oceanfront suite would make a nice home-away-from-home for the week.
She said, “I’m afraid I’ll get the bends,” a cover for the truth, that she was a lousy swimmer.
“Do you even know what the bends is?”
“Hey,” Blue said, still reading, “now that my mom has bailed, why don’t you bunk with me in my suite? It’s two bedrooms. We can stay up late watching Owen Wilson DVDs. I was so embarrassed when we had him on last time and I had to admit I hadn’t seen Shanghai Noon.”
“I would … but I invited Stephen along, and …”
“Say no more,” Blue said, closing the folder.
“Besides, you should really get out some, while we’re there. I hear the nightlife is crazy good.”
“Sure. I’ll just hang out in bars and, I don’t know, take home whoever’s willing.”
“If you did a little more of that, then—”
“Then what?” Her own answers: Then she might have had multiple fatherless children, as her mother did. A career of cleaning motel rooms and checking groceries and selling fruit baskets by phone every holiday season.
Then she wouldn’t be cloistered in this building, in this life.
Marcy said, “Nothing, forget it. You should just have more fun, that’s all. Life is short, and you’ve paid your dues.”
Blue leaned over and took longer than she needed to tie her sneakers. “So, I’m off to the gym. Guess I’ll see you—and Stephen—at Midway, six forty-five a.m. sharp.”
“Blue?”
She sat up. “Yeah?”
“What were you doing out there, on the fire escape?”
“The fire escape?” She looked out the window. The snow was still falling with vigor.
“Yeah,” Marcy said, “you know, that steel thing, used for egress in the event of an emergency. Was there some emergency I should know about?”
“Branford called.” The private detective she’d had on retainer for almost four years now.
“And?”
“And he has a lead. I don’t have any details yet.” She looked at Marcy and saw her at nineteen, saw her as Bat, heard her saying even back then, days and weeks afterward, that it wasn’t too late to find the child. She could change her mind, she could track him down.
Now Marcy said, “Ah.” That was all there was to say, so many fruitless years into the search.
“So, see you at sunrise.”
Chapter Two (#u16723e4b-046e-5242-b128-b579a8e9c660)
Inside Blue’s apartment was the life she’d been living for ten years, or seasons, as she’d learned to call them. Ten seasons of ratings pressures and growing competition, the challenge of keeping a laser-sharp focus on what daytimeaudiences want, but trying to do it on her terms. “Style and Substance,” was the headline of her recent Elle interview. That was the goal. Sometimes they achieved it.
Ten seasons of expanding success. The apartment’s structural remodel had come after season two, and the color scheme back then … what had it been? Pale blue and lavender with light woods? Or was that the following incarnation? She could no longer recall. Only that the décor had been updated four times—every two years, the way some people traded up vehicles. The apartment needed to be current, Marcy said, because Blue sometimes entertained there. Marcy handled it all just the way she handled most of the other details of Blue’s life. Saint Marcy, Blue often called her, and Marcy would say, “Ha! Not after the life I’ve led.”
It was all talk, though, had always been all talk with her. The worst Marcy had done was what they were all doing that year they’d shared the dilapidated house. Taking on new names—Blue had tried out Skye, after the heroine of a book she’d read, but became Bubble when her belly began to round—inventing themselves, dabbling with drugs, with sex (though she’d quit both when her periods quit) … and while some people might consider them Hell-bound for their behaviors, Blue wasn’t convinced. She and Marcy and their various housemates had been young, rudderless, sure of their invincibility and the idea that they had so much time ahead of them that they could waste it freely, using homemade bongs and listening to Prince. So much time that even the biggest of mistakes would sooner or later melt away and be forgotten, like tonight’s snow after tomorrow’s sun.
The apartment was newly decorated in what Blue thought of as Twenty-first Century Lodge style. Though the work was completed weeks ago, the scent of fresh paint and new wool rugs persisted, in a pleasant, low-key way. The place looked marvelous, all warm woods and natural stone and leafy plants throughout the wide-open space. Marvelous and unused. Marvelous and bereft. An ArchitecturalDigest spread, after the magazine’s crew had gone.
In her bathroom she pulled off the elastic that bound her hair. Highlighted chestnut, her stylist called the color, withhints of honey and cinnamon, as if her head were a pastry. Wholesome was the word the media often used to describe her, suggesting that somehow her nut-honey-cinnamon hair and her long-legged tomboyish build explained her success. They’d changed their tune a bit when she made it onto the Forbes Top 50 list. Now she was wholesome and driven, wholesome and savvy, wholesome and well connected and well dressed.
Style and substance, how surprising, how unusual!
A woman who made her living on TV did not, strictly speaking, have to be attractive to succeed, but if she wasn’t, the media loved to say so. Hence the hour she’d just spent at the gym, an hour for which she paid a ridiculous amount of money in order to get exclusive time with Jeremy. An effective hour, though, repeated five times each week (up from the three that used to do the trick); she was in top physical form. If while doing stretches, crunches, leg lifts, she sometimes thought of Jeremy’s sculpted body making better use of hers, where was the harm in that?
Her bathroom’s new wallpaper, an amber grass-textured weave, kept bringing to mind a Hemingway story—not one of the novels they would be promoting on the show next week, but another, about Mount Kilimanjaro and a couple waiting for rescue at a nearby camp. The short story, a tale of regret, had been a favorite of Mitch Forrester’s … and Mitch had been a favorite of hers.
As she washed her face she recalled Mitch reading her the story one evening early in their short-lived relationship. He’d been pensive—something to do with his ex-wife and the difficulty he was having in getting to see his son. “There are only so many chances to get things right,” he’d said, but she hadn’t understood very well at the time. She’d been barely nineteen, sure that life was a broad and endless series of chances. After all, didn’t they live in the land of opportunity, where success in business, in life, in love, was no accident of birth but could be made? Wasn’t Mitch in charge of his own destiny? What was there to regret at his age, twenty-seven? He could have a new wife. (Her.) He could have new children. (Hers.) For two promising months she had done a very effective job of ignoring anything that contradicted her vision, and then he’d set her straight. And then … then, he’d set her free.
Less easy to ignore, these days, were the lines in her forehead and the tiny sunbursts spreading, now, from the corners of her eyes. Her softening jawline. Thinner lips. Less easy to ignore was her makeup artist’s insistence that the miracle of Botox was her salvation. Easier, though, if she quit looking in the mirror. She pressed the light switch and left the room.
She now had the whole sixth floor of this historic art deco building. An entire floor was more space than she needed, by far—as if that mattered; what did need have to do with her life anymore? Here it was just her and Peep, her tabby Maine Coon cat. He slept most of the time, and she was gone most of the time, so their pairing worked out well. With the apartment’s lights still off, the falling snow looked like a shimmering veil outside the east-facing windows. In daytime, that view included Lake Michigan as seen between downtown’s towers. Out the north side was a view of slightly lesser buildings, one of which housed the studio. The apartment was swept and dusted and vacuumed weekly, the floors polished monthly—and before and after every cocktail party. The refrigerator was stocked, the wine bottles circulated, all by a Marcy-directed staff that Blue never saw.
She went barefoot down the hallway to the kitchen on marble floors the color of bitter chocolate. Why colors seemed so often to be named for food she wasn’t sure. Her kitchen cabinets were crème brûlée, and her granite countertop was confetti orzo. The wall color throughout all the main rooms was something to do with squash: pale summer squash? Light butternut purée? Whatever. She wasn’t Martha Stewart.
