eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Jane Cody keeps lists. After all, how else would she keep track of her life—her job producing a Boston TV show; her amiable but frankly dull second husband; and her precocious six-year-old son who “doesn't do small talk” but loves to bake. And as if that weren't enough she has an acid-tongued mother-in-law living in her barn, an arthritic malamute lodger to walk, and a dangerously seductive ex-husband on the scene.
In New York, Desmond Sullivan is fretting that his five-year relationship with smart, sweet Russell is too monogamous and settled. Perhaps a spell as writer-in-residence at Deerforth College will cure that, and also allow him to finish his biography of one of the 'sixties greatest forgotten mediocrities, torch singer Pauline Anderton? When Jane and Desmond meet in Boston, they embark on a TV documentary about the elusive Anderton, which is to take them on a journey of self-discovery in which they learn as much about their own secrets and lies than they ever wanted to know.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780743218351 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 07/31/2012 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 466,646 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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
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?) Ithad 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 get