Without a scholarship, I managed to last out my junior year at Texas by working nights at the Austin newspaper. In the late spring, when I was a junior and Marcie was a sophomore, we thought she was pregnant. We ran off to Lampasas and got married in a country church. To support our new family I applied for a job at the Dallas Times Herald. They hired me. We moved to Dallas in the summer. Then it turned out she wasn’t pregnant after all. But Marcie and I were happy to be married, anyhow. She studied voice at SMU, and I learned news reporting at the Times Herald. We lived in an old asbestos-siding apartment building with an attic fan on Yale Boulevard near the campus. I made forty-five dollars a week. Marcie’s daddy in Houston sent us two hundred a month so she could stay in school. We had a new Mercury and a Muntz TV which were wedding presents. We could drink beer and eat pizza at Gordo’s, and every few months blow twenty-five dollars on wine and a good dinner. It seemed like a great life at the time, but being in our twenties, we thought we were stuck with it forever.

  So how did it happen that a red-bearded psychiatrist would be hallooooing in front of a big house that I didn’t live in but was paying for in Pelham Manor, New York?

  “You want to meet him?” Cindy said, looking at me.

  “Yeah, I’d like to ask him a question,” I said.

  “Oh boy, I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” Cindy said.

  She hugged me again.

  Dr. Fornet watched me coming toward him. He seemed wary. No doubt from having listened to Marcie for five nights in the past week. Some of the stories Marcie told about me were not lies, exactly, but they did not present me in the best possible light, either.

  “You must be Mallory,” Fornet said.

  I said, “What is analysis going to do for Frankie?”

  Fornet stepped sideways toward the rose bushes with an expression on his face that said there could be a world trophy American Beauty hidden in there some place, if only he could find it.

  “Dr. Fornet is going to teach me how to cope,” Frankie said.

  “All you’ll learn from him is how to hustle,” I said.

  “That was a very good rap we had yesterday, Frankie. I probably got as much out of it as you did,” Dr. Fornet said.

  “Yeah. Maybe more,” Frankie said.

  Cooper watched from the front seat of the Rolls through the mirror glasses.

  “I think you are trying to sell my kid a package of bullshit,” I said to Fornet.

  “Your infantile aggression never ceases to amaze me,” Marcie said.

  “One can hardly dismiss existential psychiatry as bullshit,” Dr. Fornet said with a twisted little smile. “Even if one does view the world from the mind of a television person.”

  “I just did it,” I said. “It was an existential act.”

  “I’m gonna go play my guitar,” Frankie said.

  Frankie walked slowly toward the house.

  “The boy hates you, I’m afraid,” Dr. Fornet said.

  “He thinks I’m a hell of a guy,” I said.

  Frankie paused to listen.

  “He’s repressing his hatred,” Fornet said. “Beneath the impassivity you have forced him to cultivate, there lies a vast pool of rage, fear, pain . . . and a sickening disappointment in his father.”

  “Frankie, you sure you want to be analyzed by a man who confuses jack-off fatigue with repressed hatred?” I said.

  Frankie shrugged and said, “He’s about the same as everybody else.”

  “I’ll tell you what you might try,” I said to Frankie. “Instead of existential psychiatry, you might try working hard to be good at something. It’s worth the trouble, and it can be a pleasure.”

  “Your ambition has broken out of its cage again,” Marcie said. “Tell Frankie how they call you Captain Success, and then do a quick exit with a couple of gags to cover it up.”

  “Dad, that’s what I'm doing with my guitar,” Frankie said. “I mean, getting good at it.”

  I felt pretty stupid for not having understood that a lot earlier. I know this does not excuse it, but at least I understood it now that Frankie had explained it to me, and that was more than could be said for Fornet.

  “We are dealing with moment-to-moment reality,” Fornet said. “Do you feel threatened by having your son learn to deal with his life as he lives it, rather than with the distorted picture of a life that is forced upon him in your quest for power?”

  I said, “Listen, Fornet, I grew up poor in Dallas, and that is why I am going to knock you on your ass, in case you later on are digging for a reason.”

  “My god, Frank, what kind of example is that for a father to be?” Marcie said.

  I motioned for the kids to come closer. I said this was going to be an example of how to cope with moment-to-moment reality.

  Cooper got out of the limo.

  “I should point out that I get off on karate,” Fornet said.

  Fornet arranged his body in a karate stance. He looked like a grasshopper. Cooper sidled in between us.

  “Why don’t we take it on home before the museums close?” Cooper said.

  “That’s a good idea, D. Wayne, but first I have to rearrange this bowl of fruit,” I said.

  “You wish I were a homosexual, but your jealous anger indicates you’re afraid I'm not,” Fornet said, moving his hands like a spastic.

  I jumped at Fornet and clutched him by the throat. I intended to choke him and kick him and punch him and generally enjoy myself at his expense.

  Instead, we fell over into the rose bushes.

  Fornet landed on bottom. I fell on him and felt the stuffing shift like when you fall on a soccer ball.

  Fornet screamed, “The thorns! The thorns!”

  I got up. Fornet clawed at himself.

  “My shirt is torn. My back is ripped. My god, I’m bleeding. Do you see the blood?” he said.

  Marcie helped Fornet up. She was very tender with him. She led him toward the house.

  “From now on, Frank, let’s use the lawyers, huh?” Marcie said, looking back at me.

  Cooper grinned two deep dimples. Cindy rubbed my hands where they were scratched. The braces shone as Frankie’s mouth hung open. He was probably thinking about Segovia.

  “Mama’s going to get really tired of Dr. Fornet,” Cindy said.

  “I’m bound to run him off before long,” Frankie said.

  “Real good move you put on that sucker,” Cooper said.

  It was a joy to be with my family.

  5.

  I SPENT THE REST of the weekend in the apartment watching television and staring into space. I was thinking about a show titled “Just Up the Street” and one of the things that came to my mind was that you could shoot the whole three hours at the Mallory home in Pelham Manor easily enough. Plenty of wonderful Americans there, doing happy things.

  On Monday morning I was getting ready to go to the office and start quizzing production people for ideas for “Just Up the Street” when another crisis erupted, and I had to get Cooper to drive me to the Jersey shore, to a town called Bay Head. You can get there in a little over an hour, but who would go unless you favored swimming in a red tide? Or unless some deranged person had selected it as a location for scenes in “Satan Takes a Bride”? Norris, the director, had phoned. He said he had a problem with the star, Pete Stern.

  Pete was infuriated at the crew and he had locked himself in the ladies’ room of a service station. He refused to come out.

  “He’s supposed to be leaping from one houseboat to another, chasing the mysterious force, but he’s locked in the john instead,” Norris said. “He’s mad because one of the guys in the crew said he jumps like a fag.”

  The Silver Goblet pulled up to the location before I realized it. I had been staring at one of those full-page ads in Variety an executive producer usually pays for himself. Somebody named Aaron Furness was being congratulated for another hit TV series on ABC about a lovable heart surgeon.

  Norris opened the rear door of the limo before Cooper could get out. “He’s been in there for over two goddam hours,” Norris said. We walked toward the ladies’ room. The crew sat around. Some played cards. Others enjoyed naps.

  I didn’t want this to take long.

  “Pete,” I said, rapping on the door of the toilet. “This is Frank Mallory. Have you got amoebic dysentery or something? There are thirty people out here about to go on overtime.”

  A bitter laugh came from behind the door.

  I looked at Norris.

  “It wasn’t too bad when he chased the head witch down the alley,” Norris said. “He runs okay. It was the jumping. You know how little kids look when they crouch down and put their feet together and swing their arms back and forth?”

  “What’s left of the shooting?”

  “Two days if he gets out of the can in the next five minutes,” Norris said.

  I said, “Pete, we need you out here.”

  “You damn well need me out there,” Pete Stern said.

  “Who said he jumps like a fag?” I asked Norris.

  Norris said, “Joe said it. Pete wants him fired. You know what a hassle that would be with the union?”

  Joe was a light gaffer. I walked over to interrupt his card game.

  “Want to give me a break, Joe?” I asked. “Take a couple of days in the Poconos on full pay and expenses?”

  “I ain’t leaving,” Joe said. “He jumps like a fag.”

  I said Joe could take the wife and kids with him.

  “To a hotel?”

  Get a suite, I said. Do a lot of room service.

  I went back to the ladies’ room.

  “Pete, I got rid of the guy who insulted you,” I said. “Open the door.”

  A latch unbolted and Pete Stern stepped out. He was tall and blond and he could look rugged if he stood still and wasn’t asked to deliver more than one line of dialogue at a time. He had been discovered by an aging actress when he went to her home in Beverly Hills to measure her dining room for new carpet. She got him in a number of beach party pictures. He became a star when he landed in a TV western series in which all he had to do was not drop his gun and say, now and then, “I don’t rightly know, ma’am.”

  “Hello, Frank,” said Pete Stern. “I knew you’d take care of this.”

  “Let’s go to work,” I said.

  “Not with this crew,” Pete said. “I want a different crew. They all laughed.”

  He shouted at the crew.

  “I want all of you off the set!”

  “In other words,” I said, “you want to be here on the Jersey shore, all by yourself, making your own movie.”

  “Frank, I want that crew deported!” Pete said. He stepped back into the ladies’ room, slammed the door, and bolted it again.

  “Did you ever see him in that remake of The Maverick Queen?” Norris asked. “He slid off his horse like Fred Astaire coming down a staircase.”

  I said, “Shoot around him today. Double him. Long shots. Over the shoulder stuff. We’ll come up with a new ending so you don’t need him at all, and you can wrap it on time.”

  I headed toward the limo.

  “Oh, and don’t tell Pete,” I said. “Let him spend the whole day in there looking at himself in the mirror.”

  Going past the card game, I said, “You’re right, Joe. He jumps like a fag.”

  Joe said, “I could be wrong. I could think about it in the Poconos.”

  6.

  IT WAS AFTER LUNCH when I got back from the Jersey shore, but Cooper had stocked the limo with a pizza featuring many of the architectural wonders of Florence, so I hadn’t missed a meal.

  My office was in a corner of the twentieth floor of the Chambers building, a floor where people worked for a living in behalf of CBC. Stanley Coffman’s office was on the same floor, in another glassed-in corner with a similar wide-angled view of Gotham.

  To find the Big Guy or Herb Grant or the executive dining room, you had to take a special elevator up to the thirty-fourth floor and show your ID card to an armed guard.

  Stanley had a theory about the security.

  “Grant doesn’t want anyone to catch him by surprise when he’s playing with his Frisbee,” Stanley said.

  The Chambers building was on Sixth Avenue in the fifties, near CBS, ABC, Time-Life, McGraw-Hill, all of those relatively new skyscrapers that crept away from NBC and the skating rink but kept Rockefeller Center for an address. You could say the Chambers building was part of Rockefeller Center’s encroachment on cut-rate jewelers, porno shops, and clothing stores for the man who fancied orange tuxedos.

  When I stepped off the elevator on twenty, Stanley was in the hall chatting with a tall, long-haired production girl.

  As I walked by, Stanley took the girl’s arm and held it out to me.

  “Could that throw a knuckler?” he said.

  I smiled at the girl.

  “This is Melissa,” Stanley said. “Melissa struck out twelve yesterday against Channel Seven in the park. Our guys kicked their ass.”

  More importantly, I said, had anybody seen any numbers on the earthquake?

  “God, our footage was incredible. Half of Peru was under water,” the girl said. “The rest was on fire.”

  Stanley said, “Fucking thing did a thirteen share. Right in the old flusher. The female private eye got it up against the ropes and hammered it. The bounty hunter put it down for the count. And the campus dean with the two retarded kids pulled down his pants and shit on the whole hour.”

  I said we did what we could in an effort to serve the public.

  “Grant’s marbles bounced all over the floor this morning,” Stanley said. “Know what I want where I work next, Frank? A window that’ll open. Then when the certifiable dunce comes around, I can do a bird thing for him.”

  Stanley was as capable as any network president could be, but he knew as well as anyone how quickly they come and go. The Big Guy had selected Stanley as network president because he did a good job of running the station in Los Angeles. Stanley was a West Coast guy. He went to USC and he was one of the few people I liked who ever came up through sales.

  Stanley did not have the best of marriages. His wife missed her swimming pool, and his kids missed wrecking their cars. On my way down the hall I could still hear Stanley talking to Melissa.

  “Might blow a few trains tonight,” he said. “What’s the story on the clap? Cleared up and everything?”

  When I got to my own corner of the floor Arleene was at her desk in the outer office reading a copy of Rolling Stone. She was a handsome, gray-haired, tailored woman in her early fifties. She had the kind of alertness, efficient style, wit, and curiosity that I had found only among New Yorkers.

  Arleene had raised two daughters by herself and had never ceased to be astounded by the fact that both of them had chosen to marry Ivy League types with connections in brokerage firms. She attributed this flaw in their character to the genes of their father.

  Even if he had survived the crash of his wounded torpedo plane on the flight deck of a carrier during World War II, he would have returned home and tried to start a mail-order business, she said.

  “All I really knew about him was that his uniform fit and his wings looked swell,” she had told me.

  When I said to Arleene once that there was more than one kind of patriot in that war, she said, “I love my daughters, but I could have collected tinfoil or coat hangers, right?”

  Arleene had been my secretary through all of my overachieving at CBS, and I insisted that she be another part of the package when I changed networks. “Your writers on ‘Satan Sucks’ have been in your office for thirty minutes,” Arleene said.

  “How stoned are they?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but a while ago in there it sounded like six ducks playing basketball.”

  My office had two sides of floor-to-ceiling glass, one side filled by a programming chart that showed what every network put on the air in every minute of prime time throughout the season, and one wall of four TV monitors built in above a long shelf designed to hold the framed photographs, objects of humor, awards, and other trivia that a man can’t resist keeping on display until he either dies or retires and his children store them in a damp basement.

  It was a reasonably large office, with plenty of room to pace across the carpet, with a small bar in a corner, and the desk, chairs, sofa, and tables had all succumbed to Arleene’s recent infatuation with leather and stainless steel.

  The writers were Thurlow Watts and Larry Travers. Watts was a partially bald and bearded man in his forties. Before he turned to TV and movie writing, he had done fourteen novels nobody remembered, and the libretto of a Broadway musical about sugar cane growers that closed the second night. He tended to dress in the tank tops and denims of a younger man. He looked especially silly when he carried his shoulder bag and wore a cap like Lenin’s.

  His partner, Travers, was only twenty-two, wore dark glasses, had permed hair, a goatee, a mustache, baggy trousers that covered his sneakers, and a knee-length fatigue jacket over a faded football jersey. Travers considered the craft of writing only a brief stopover on his way to becoming a Hollywood mogul or perhaps Pope.

  They had met and agreed to become collaborators, I believe, after sharing a mutual experience. In a studio screening room they had simultaneously laughed out loud and convulsively at the part of a highly praised dramatic film where the heroine got both her legs amputated.

  Watts was sitting on my desk top with his legs folded under him. Travers was doing pushups on the carpet.

  “Okay,” I said, entering. “What we need is a new ending with the same setups as the old one. But not a word from Pete in the last few pages. You have to know he’s around without getting a real look at him.”