What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [17]
Then, one day, Jenny came up to L.A. to go to a party I had been invited to as well. At last, like two fated lovers in a fable, the telephone voices came face-to-face for the first time, and Jenny left with a distinct, fresh impression of Mr. Licht.
“He’s an overgrown frat boy.”
She couldn’t believe this creature had seemed intimidating. He was a kid. “I still hated him.” In time, she left Southern California for San Francisco and then a job with MSNBC in New York, not saying good-bye because there was no reason to, because she possessed nothing but antipathy for me. She might have possessed even more antipathy if she had known I had told my station’s executives not to hire her if she ever applied for a job. To be honest, I feared the competition; I could tell she was smart and good.
Years later, years without contact between us, I went to 30 Rock to see network executives, and while strolling through the newsroom of NBC’s local station I came across Jenny, by now producer of the 11 P.M. news in the nation’s biggest market. Wow, I thought, she looks great. We chatted. She immediately wondered if I was being sweet simply because she had attained market acceptability.
She was correct.
Sir Romance.
But professional success is, indeed, an attractive quality, and one of the things most attractive about Jenny to this day is that she’s successful and driven.
Now began the longest pursuit of my dating days, longest in time and longest in distance. I was living in the Bay Area because NBC had bought a station in San Jose and asked me to move from Los Angeles to help oversee its integration into the NBC way of doing things. This meant many trips to New York to talk with management.
With another coming, I e-mailed Jenny to tell her about a job that was open at our station. Perhaps you’d be interested, I noted. Perhaps we should talk. Perhaps we should have a drink. She read this for what it was, a backdoor request for a date, a “total scam,” but she did consent to meet at an Irish pub in Manhattan one night after her 11 P.M. show had ended. She arrived with a “let’s get this over with” air and no makeup. More than three hours later, she says, she left with a “he’s not so bad” feeling. The years had sandpapered a bit of my cockiness.
Though separated by the entire United States of America, we managed to go out a few times, and while I thought Jenny liked me, she regarded each get-together as nothing more than collegial. “We can hang out,” she said, “but it’s not going to go any further than that.” Her argument was we worked for the same company and had similar jobs and those were ingredients that should never be combined with a personal relationship, period.
I tried to talk her out of this. Why, I said, do women always think ahead to the worst case? We are not about to get married. It’s dating, not betrothal. Why not see what happens? If something does, we’ll figure out what to do.
One night, on a rooftop deck of a friend’s apartment in New York, I expounded like this for forty-five minutes, trying to break her resistance and winding up nowhere. Ever since I was a teen, I have known what my wife would be like, someone smart, beautiful, warm, independent, and successful. And dark-haired, which Jenny is. Nobody before had met every item on my list. She did. I wasn’t ready to declare her The One, but neither was I ready to give up merely because of a hurdle like being in the NBC family together.
In the end, oddly, it was precisely because we worked for the same company that the walls came down. Both of us were dispatched to Athens in the summer of 2004 as part of NBC’s coverage