Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [4]
NBS needed a new anchor. Mo Minetti was leaving the “U.S./A.M.” breakfast show to have a baby. She had been offered a mind-bubbling amount of money to have it on the show, but she had declined, unexpectedly, on grounds of personal privacy and taste. Teams of NBS lawyers had sieved through her contract to see if these constituted legitimate grounds, but in the end, reluctantly, they had to let her go. This was, for them, particularly galling because normally, “reluctantly letting someone go” was an expression which had its boot on quite another foot.
The word was out that maybe, just maybe, a British accent would fit. The hair, the skin tone and the bridgework would have to be up to American network standards, but there had been a lot of British accents up there thanking their mothers for their Oscars, a lot of British accents singing on Broadway, some unusually big audiences tuning in to British accents in wigs on “Masterpiece Theatre.” British accents were telling jokes on David Letterman and Jay Leno. Nobody understood the jokes but they were really responding to the accents, so maybe it was time, just maybe. A British accent on “U.S./ A.M.” Well, hell.
That was why Tricia was here. This was why loving New York was a great career move.
It wasn’t, of course, the stated reason. Her TV company back in the U.K. would hardly have stumped up the airfare and hotel bill for her to go job hunting in Manhattan. Since she was chasing something like ten times her present salary, they might have felt that she could have forked out her own expenses, but she’d found a story, found a pretext, kept very quiet about anything ulterior, and they’d stumped up for the trip. A business-class ticket, of course, but her face was known and she’d smiled herself an upgrade. The right moves had got her a nice room at the Brentwood and here she was, wondering what to do next.
The word on the street was one thing, making contact was another. She had a couple of names, a couple of numbers, but all it took was being put on indeterminate hold a couple of times and she was back at square one. She’d put out feelers, left messages, but so far, none had been returned. The actual job she had come to do she had done in a morning, the imagined job she was after was only shimmering tantalizingly on an unreachable horizon.
Shit.
She caught a cab from the movie theater back to the Brentwood. The cab couldn’t get close to the curb because a big stretch limo was hogging all the available space and she had to squeeze her way past it. She walked out of the fetid, goat-frying air and into the blessed cool of the lobby. The fine cotton of her blouse was sticking like grime to her skin. Her hair felt as if she’d bought it at a fairground, on a stick. At the front desk she asked if there were any messages, grimly expecting none. There was one.
Oh…
Good.
It had worked. She had gone out to the movie specifically in order to make the phone ring. She couldn’t bear sitting in a hotel room waiting.
She wondered. Should she open the message down here? Her clothes were itching and she longed to take them all off and just lie on the bed. She had turned the air-conditioning way down to its bottom temperature setting, way up to its top fan setting. What she wanted more than anything else in the world at the moment was goose pimples. Then a hot shower, then a cool one, then lying on a towel, on the bed again, drying in the air-conditioning. Then reading the message. Maybe more goose pimples. Maybe all sorts of things.
No. What she wanted more than anything else in the world was a job in American television at ten times her current salary. More than anything else in the world. In the world. What she wanted more than anything else at all was no longer a live issue.
She sat on a chair in the lobby, under a kentia palm, and opened the little cellophane-windowed envelope.
“Please call/’ it said. “Not happy,” and gave a number. The name was Gail Andrews.
Gail Andrews.
It wasn’t a name she was expecting. It caught her unawares. She recognized it,