Jack O'Connell - Wireless

Now she settles herself into the chaise lounge, scans the sky for traces of any sunlight, sees none, and is thankful she hasn’t completely blown the ceremony. She looks back over her shoulder into the dark of her apartment and instantly wonders what Flynn would make of her place. Would he be turned off by the lack of any feminine homeyness? Something about him feels a little old-fashioned, just a hint of anachronism about the guy.

Ronnie’s apartment is a spacious two-bedroom, two-bath “luxury” unit with a galley kitchen and a huge living/dining area that opens onto the balcony. It costs most of her salary, but she’s never been very concerned with savings plans or exotic vacations. Her idea of traveling is to make a job change every year or two and relocate to another part of the country, then dig in for a while, shock and build a virgin audience, and when she hits her peak and the national syndication people come sniffing around, pack the bags again and pull out the trade journals and the road atlas.

Vinnie, the QSG station manager, was shocked by her résumé and ratings sheets. “I don’t get it,” he’d said to her in their first interview. “These numbers, you’re a station saver, you’re a radio messiah. You could head to New York or Atlanta, name your price, let the big sales guys rent your voice coast-to-coast.”

Ronnie gave him her most libidinous smile and said, “I’d rather keep a low profile.”

And Vinnie gave his chronic, world-weary sigh and said, “You’ve come to the right station.”

A week later Ronnie signed the lease for 3-G, called a local rental franchise, and furnished the place in a day. Her only aesthetic requirement was neutral colors, neither too masculine nor too feminine. When the moving men left after delivery she had an earth-toned hotel room, all muted angles and practicality. This was exactly what she’d been after, a setting where she could go to sleep each night and dream that she was in an airport Ramada and due to board a flight at the terminal next door.

Her one oddball, nonrented modification was a huge antique bookcase she bought a week after moving in. Her first Sunday in town, she overpaid a Russian émigré down at the refugee flea market in the train lot on Ironhouse Ave. It was an ornate monster, old and battered and painted a flat black, but hand-tooled with a curving, scrolled headpiece and little pointed spires rising at the top. She had to pay again to have it hauled to the apartment, but it was her one concession to personalization — she loaded it with the contents of her steamer trunk.

Ronnie is a tape-head. She considers her condition a benign affliction. She purchases blank cassettes, through the mail and in bulk quantities. Then she scans the band wave and records hundreds of diverse noises, music, talk shows, news reports, station jingles, EBS tests. Before she moves out of a city, she spends a week sorting through her latest collection. She keeps what she judges to be the top ten percent, though she doesn’t have a system for qualitative judgment. It’s more of an instinctual, instantaneous choice. Then she simply throws the rest of the tapes in trash bags and leaves them in a closet of the vacated apartment. Disposable sound-crap , she calls it. She puts the keepers in the steamer trunk and brings them with her to the next job. She thinks of the cassettes as her version of a photo album, a coded record of all her journeys, an audio cipher of all the highway crisscrossing she’s done for a decade now.

Ronnie never tapes her own show and it amuses her a little that she’s already forgotten a couple of her titles. There was Sensual Sessions in Cleveland and The Carnal Response in Santa Fe, but for some reason Toronto is a blur. She can remember how boxy the broadcast booth was and she still has an occasional fantasy about Yves, her engineer that season. But the name of the show itself has escaped her.

Ronnie has already stayed in Quinsigamond longer than any of her other stops. That fact both bothers and consoles her. Back in June, she’d thought that by Christmas she’d give Vinnie her notice and start sorting her tapes. On Labor Day — a muggy, bad-air holiday that found the city looking as if it had evacuated for the nuclear strike of her childhood daydreams — Ronnie shocked herself by deciding, out on the balcony, about 4 A.M., to work on until spring.

She knows she should have been getting the itch by now, the signals that begin warning of an oncoming move. But it hasn’t happened. She’s migratorily “late,” and this should be causing worry and frustration. This time around, something’s different. It could be her age or a change in body chemistry, but this time she’s got an odd, instinctual hunch that what’s delaying her departure is the city itself. It’s almost as if she clicked with this dying mill town in a way that’s never happened before. And of course it’s pathetically ironic that the one place where she’s starting to feel she could actually remain is on its way out, decaying into a harsh powder of warring people and evaporating industries. If she can see these signs, then why isn’t she making the normal moves, setting the process in motion again? Why isn’t she checking the trades and sorting her cassettes? Why isn’t she phoning the modeling agencies?

In the past, before she’d leave each city, Ronnie would drop some money on an expensive quirk. She’d begin by visiting a local modeling agency, paging through their layout books until she spotted a woman of approximately her own age who gave off a subtle leer. It was always something in the face, something about the positioning of the eyes and the lips. And it would have to be mildly hidden, visible only peripherally beneath a layer of disinterest, a lingerie catalogue model as opposed to a Playboy centerfold.

When she’d find the right look, Ronnie would pay for some photographs, black-and-white portraits, soft-focus head shots, the hair and lipstick perfect, the skin smooth and often translucent. Finally, before packing up the Jeep and moving on, she’d have the photographer print up a hundred eight-bytens. Then, once she was established in her new city, plugging into the repressed community psyche and starting to make some waves, invariably the letters would start to roll in, a new batch of fans requesting a photo of Ronnie Wilcox. She’d dig out her stack of head shots, sign her name across the bottom with a red felt marker, and send back a glossy of some anonymous model from a thousand miles away. And as long as Ronnie stayed in that particular city, this coolly seductive visage, this countenance radiating airbrushed carnality, would always be her image.

Ronnie pulls a plastic spoon from the pocket of her robe and starts in on the ice cream. She knows she’ll be freezing in about three minutes, but it’s a price she’s willing to pay. While she eats she starts to wonder about what Flynn would think of her fake publicity stills and this leads her to wonder: if she put a photo of herself next to a photo of the faux Ronnie, which one would Flynn choose? The subliminal nymph or the real road-woman? To be scientific, she should insert a control in the experiment, maybe some perfect suburban homemaker drawn from cooking or station wagon ads. Maybe that’s what would really hammer his button. He’s what, thirty-five, thirty-six, ripe for that settling-down mode, primed to marry the hardworking dream woman, ten years his junior, bored with her career now and ready to start pumping out a couple offspring for the breadwinner.

Suddenly, she can picture Flynn in some too-green field, pitching a whiffle ball, underhand, to a six-year-old version of himself.

She puts the pint of Haagen-Dazs down and uncaps the mescal. Get a grip, girl , she thinks, you just met this bastard .