Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Don’s immediate pretense of familiarity suggested a man who had spent a lot of time in locker rooms. His suit, plus the tan face and the shirt with its open collar, contained all the trace elements of his past: all-state safety in high school, college in California, a brief career as an on-air personality, even hosting an unsold game-show pilot, followed inexorably by divorce, cocaine, rehabilitation both personal and professional, which led to a fine executive job running the news division of a small-market station buried deep in anthracite coal country. Internal exile.

Richard got the game now; what Don wanted to hear was a profane version of the banter that passed between the anchorman and the sports guy.

“Never arrested, never convicted,” Richard said to Don’s hearty and laughing approval. He turned to Toni. “I say that all the time, but I’m not really sure what it means.”

Toni tapped her foot twice. “I hate to break this up, but we’re going to be about a half hour. The game’s running long, because that’s what always happens. But we’re all set to go. And, Richard, all you need to do is give me a little Sturm this afternoon. I’ve got work to do, but we’ll fetch you about five minutes before.” She fluttered in for an air-kiss.

“What about the Drang? There’s always got to be some Drang, ” Don said, shaking Richard’s hand again.

“People these days demand fair and balanced. We provide the Drang, ” Toni said. “In this case, a congressman from Orange County with the attention span of a tick. Last summer on Crossfire they’re doing this special on mental illness, and Carville asked if he was advocating voluntary sterilization of the mentally disabled, and the guy said, ‘There shouldn’t be anything voluntary about it.’ Despite three million dollars’ worth of outside spending, he got re-elected by his largest margin yet.”

Richard laughed. He explained to Don, “The only contact sport Toni knows is politics. She’d be completely happy to fill prime time with Burmese deputy ministers beating each other senseless with bamboo canes.”

Toni turned to Richard. “Today’s opponent may be a nutjob, but he shakes things up. It’s good television. And, face it, unless we’re saying something interesting, they’re just going to flip right past us. Give them the conventional wisdom, and they’ll tune out in favor of the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl.”

Richard said, “You should be grateful there isn’t a Smith and Wesson Bowl.”

“That would be one hell of a halftime show,” Don said with a grin, before he and Toni headed up the short hallway to the control booth.

Toni looked over her shoulder. “Someone will come get you to tape a cutaway. Max is anchoring. He’ll give an overview, introduce both of you, then we’ll do a sixty-second break and jump right in.” Next came her traditional exit line, the only pep talk she ever managed: “Don’t fuck it up.”

Left alone in the green room, Richard fiddled with the morning’s Washington Post, reading the annual New Year’s list of what was in and out, all with a slight hope that it might say something along the lines of James Carville out, Richard MacMurray in. He thumbed through the spurious claims of a women’s magazine, wondering who actually followed the advice—“Secret Sexual Tricks,” “The One Thing He Can’t Resist,” “Twelve Ways to Spice Things Up” in a presumably mundane love life. Cadence. He picked up a pair of newsmagazines that would be in his mailbox the next day, nearly identical covers about diet and exercise studies. Cadence. Cadence, who ran four miles four times a week, who bought and ate all things organic, who subscribed to eleven different health and wellness newsletters, whose most prominent compulsion was opening a new toothbrush every other Monday.

Sometimes what Richard did not know about her bothered him as much as what he did. Like the etymology of her last name, Willeford, and its almost anti-ethnic sound—English, he supposed—but the subject had never come up. She was constantly working; the city did that to people, turned them into worker bees who went back to the office after happy hour. And he had no idea just how her family got by, a younger brother who’d managed the difficult trick of washing out of a junior college, a father who hadn’t worked in seventeen years; he cashed a black-lung check plus Social Security and a pension from the mine workers, but that didn’t seem like enough to keep the furnace bin filled with coal in winter, keep him in Jack Daniels and pony bottles of Rolling Rock, all that the old man asked for in the name of recreation.

And suddenly Richard understood the motivations of Cadence’s career, that she was an old-fashioned girl who sent money home to her father each month without ever bothering to ask for the credit. How had he missed such obvious things? So many of his friends did these minor things for their aging parents, then acted as if they deserved a victory lap for bringing Mom flowers and candy on her birthday. Cadence didn’t want or need the credit. She did what was required. Now, even seven weeks from the last time he had touched her, Richard kept thinking of new reasons to love her. Cadence, of the twenty-nine workout videos and almost as many pairs of athletic shoes. Cadence, who once pummeled a Somali cabdriver after he called her a bitch. It was Richard who had posted her bail, and Richard’s mildly pushy phone calls to a deputy prosecutor that made the charges against her evaporate, another bit of the insider bartering he now performed most every day of his adult life.

A healthy-looking brunette swaddled in a tight, fuzzy black cashmere sweater appeared with a cup of coffee and without comment produced a stiff whisk broom to remove flakes of Krispy Kreme icing from Richard’s navy suit. “I see they’ve given you the crucial job of the day,” he said, eliciting a smile but no reply. It took a moment to register that she’d probably take that as an insult, and all he’d intended was to tell a gentle joke, to express that he was fully capable of doing it himself. But he could think of no other thing to say to extricate himself, so he sat quietly and waited. Part of her job description, he surmised, included never talking to the talent. He wondered how long it would take before he stopped assessing a woman’s attractiveness by scrutinizing the ways in which her body differed from Cadence’s.

A second production assistant lugged in a tackle box full of makeup and motioned Richard to a barber-style chair just off the set. While she patted concealer over the bluish half-moons beneath his eyes and dusted his face with powder, Richard took his IFB device out of its case, and another technician clipped a battery pack to Richard’s belt. The IFB was a luxury, its plastic innards custom molded to fit the contours of Richard’s left ear. Cadence had arranged the fitting for his last birthday. He couldn’t stand to watch guests on these shows shuffle, trying to catch earpieces that popped out at awkward moments. This was a badge of office for his profession.

Toni materialized out of the control room, her arm draped proprietarily over a fat man in a plaid flannel shirt. “Wally here is going to tape a teaser—sit in the chair and look like an authority. And the game is running long. Which means the whole segment will be short—if you’ve got ammo, use it up front. We’ll get about a four-minute warning, a College Football Scoreboard, and then we’re live.”

The production assistant pointed Richard to a second, slightly higher director’s chair that sat in front of a blue chroma key screen. Wally toyed with his intricate Rollie Fingers mustache while moving in close with the camera dolly. “This won’t hurt a bit.”