“Fioritura. Viewers like technical details, they feel they’re learning something.” She was distracted by a fresh menace: her standup displayed a jawline in want of whittling. She remembered Sam’s warning about her field producer, Juno, who appeared to subsist on daikon.
Bern lifted a paper off his desk, gave it a light slap with the back of his hand. “Gotta problem with this memo you wrote my pree-decessor.”
The others bailed.
“This whuddyacallit Ray—is he hot?”
“Arundhati Roy. She. An Indian novelist, very telegenic, tipped to win the Booker Prize in ’97.”
Bern’s pale skin pinked around the scalp. “And this”—he brought Maddy’s memo toward his face—“Martha Arg—?”
“Marta Argerich is arguably the world’s greatest living pianist. A force of nature, cancels more concerts than she plays, but audiences are fanatically devoted—”
“Yeah, really. But couldn’t you do something less exotic? Juno’s working up a story on girl rappers.”
So Sam had gotten that right, too. “How about a story on cabaret artists?”
Bern bobbed his head. “Good, good. Liza Minnelli?”
“Actually, I was thinking of the cabaret genre. Wonderful artists like Blossom Dearie, or Bobby Short; he’s been at the Carlyle for ages. Or Michael Feinstein.”
Bern colored deeper. “Listen, this is too exquisite, people in America don’t know from cabaret. They go to the Holiday Inn, they go to the mall, they listen to rock. Why not do—”
“Hootie and the Blowfish!”
“There you go!” A moment. “Actually, that’s already in the pipeline.” He looked at her uncertainly. “And not your kind of story.”
Okay, deep breaths. “Bern, this show has always been a class act, one of a kind. They brought me in to cover the arts without talking down. We have a loyal base—”
“And you’ve brought up the ratings and . . . you’re an essential piece of this.” He walked to the bank of windows and eyeballed her. “But we’re losing audience to Sunday Today. We gotta play to younger demographics and go easy on the highbrow.”
“Of course.” A long moment. “Well, too bad about the Times.”
“What’s that?”
“Yeah, ‘Arts and Leisure’ was planning a companion piece on Scotti, which would have publicized ours. But the way our story’s angled now . . .” She produced a regretful frown. Bern’s scalp went rosier. She could hear his thoughts clacking like teletype: Madeleine Shaye a T-rex, but she could get the “get.”
With masterly timing: “Perhaps we could find some middle ground with the Scotti,” she offered silkily.
ARMSTEAD’S, THE LOCAL recovery room. At least in Chekhov, she mused over a Virgin Mary, the barbarians whacking the cherry trees had charm. Her half-truth about the Times might salvage the Scotti. But in a fit of housecleaning, Conant could toss her like a yellowing antimacassar. The thought gave her dry mouth, as before a concert. She’d labored and schemed to assemble this dual package, an entrepreneur of herself. . . . Followed a husband to Fort Bragg, North Carolina; aborted her career as an Outstanding Young American Pianist. Abort careers is what women did in 1966, Maddy had told herself, relieved, almost, to fold into the pack.
After the marriage imploded, she returned to New York; accompanied ballet classes, pounding out Chopin waltzes and mazurkas—stop/start/stop/start—on brittle uprights; survived on Campbell’s pepper pot soup and cheddar cubes from art gallery openings. And woke mornings with the acrid knowledge that she’d missed her moment as a soloist, could no longer compete in the international competitions that shot a young performer into orbit. At thirty-two she’d outlived herself.
Then came Laila. She needed money now, for her Lou, who slept in a closet bunk in their basement studio next to the boiler, with its mystery leaks and view of feet passing like a TV “crawl.” It was the moment of The Women’s Room; the new feminist voices were shaking gold from the trees. Why not join the chorus? Over four years Maddy rose at five to work on a biography of her idol Clara Schumann. The rejections fattened a folder till one clairvoyant editor saw they could pitch Clara as an early feminist prototype, in a juicy ménage à trois with husband Robert and Brahms to boot. After the TV movie, Maddy bought the three-story brick redstone on Jane Street, the skinniest house on the block and a steal.
She was profiled on Chronicle with a group of the new feminist biographers. Afterward, Maddy convinced Charlie Unger she could do a better interview. He liked her performer’s poise and insider’s empathy—they’d just need to bland her down, lose the raccoon eyeliner and sound of Queens. He weaned her from the old print habits and taught her to craft a TV story, quoting Kuralt at her: “ ‘Listen to the pictures. Then write to them as you would write to music.’ ” He handed her the culture beat; she marveled that they paid her (and how!) for such fun. The visibility from Chronicle jump-started a modest concert career, which in turn swelled her prestige on the show—she invented synergy before it became the rage.
She signaled the waiter for another, gnawed by a fresh worry: Could she afford to leave Chronicle? Nick dipped deeply into principal, and theirs was a luxury born of expense accounts, fancy footwork—and her paycheck. Yet perhaps Conant’s arrival had opened a door. If she went ahead full-bore with the piano, hell, maybe she could rise to, say, the top rank of tier two. Nick felt buffeted by the same downmarket pressures as Chronicle—no more books, he fumed, just “publishing ops.”
She thought of Conscience Point, its crumbling facade and silent, closed-off rooms, its grounds choked with bittersweet, its becalmed air. Waiting to be tapped for some grand enterprise, to explode magically into life. Would Nick leap with her?
CHAPTER 3 Shadblow
La vraie vie n’est pas absente, mais ailleurs.
Real life isn’t absent, just elsewhere. . . .
—ARTHUR RIMBAUD
She’d balked when Nick wanted to buy the status car of the moment. But the Lexus, she would now happily concede, handled with a pliancy almost sexual. At the usual jam-up around LaGuardia, she launched on her inner clavier into the Spring Sonata, set for an August recital with Viktor Vadim; driving, walking, flossing, she always had a piece working itself out in her head. She ascended a scale crescendo, then dropped to piano subito. It was that wisp of a second just before the downbeat that gave Beethoven such verve.
As the cars inched along, she cut a look at the old neighborhood climbing the scraggly heights to the right. The Queens of semiattached stucco houses with Flowering Cherry, rose of Sharon, and plaster Virgins in front yards. And the rancid patch of discontent that was her parents’ lives. Butler Street, where she’d walked clutching her red tin lunch box with its cargo of bologna sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, its smell of turned milk. The evenings spiked with her teacher-father’s volcanic rages over “sloppy” playing. After losing a competition, she’d slept on the floor to punish herself; done exercises to strengthen her fourth and fifth fingers, all but wrecking the ligaments. She’d stood on the doorstep in her pajamas, bawling to the point of retching, the night Imre Horvath left for Regal deli to buy she couldn’t remember what and forgot to come home. Bawling till the lights winked