The Best Job in Television

I wish I could tell you about her, her beauty and her bitchiness. The way she could make you feel like a god, and then laugh to herself at your clay feet. Like that first night she and her husband, Joey, asked me out for drinks. Joey was mixing them in the kitchen, and Sharman, in her low-necked gown, asked me for a cigarette.

"Oh, don't get up... please," she said, and bent over me, her hands on the arms of my chair. She waited for me to light a cigarette for her and place it between her lips. Then she laughed softly and blew a short breath of smoke in my face.

"That's for looking," she whispered, and ran her finger down the front of my shirt to the fourth button.

Being conventional about other men's wives had never been any problem for me, but anyone with male in him could have only one idea about Sharman. You couldn't help it. It was all over her, from her blonde hair all the way down. Her legs were nylon ads. And the way she crossed them made you twist. I was hoping she was going to send Joey out to mail a letter or something, but she didn't. And when Joey came in with the drinks, she turned wifely. She even crossed her legs differently.

Joey handed us each a glass and offered a toast to me and my future with TV station WWXY. Joey was WWXY's chief announcer. The title may not sound like much, but every other announcer was after the job because it meant first crack at the commercials. They were the money, and Joey got them, and the rest of us got what he was too busy to handle. It didn't bother me. I was willing to wait it out and see.

"Old man Holiday really likes our boy, Martin," Joey was telling Sharman and nodding at me. "Says he sees great things for him..."

Joey's voice was warm and chuckling. He always talked as if he were selling soap, and, at the moment, he was talking about me as if I came in the big economy size.

"... yes, Marty, boy, that's the pitch. In Holiday's book, you're better than Tomkinson, the lad whose job you got. And Sharman will tell you the old man had some plums lined up for ol' Tomkinson. I wouldn't be surprised if you latched onto them."

I knew Mr. Holiday liked me. After my audition for the job, he took me out to lunch and told me I would make out all right. The luncheon with Mr. Holiday impressed the other boys, so I knew it meant something.

"Odd thing about ol' Tomkinson, though," Joey was chortling. "No one knows the pitch on why he left. Just didn't show one day. Scrammed out. Got lost." Joey shook his head. "He's the second lad who's pulled that in a year." Joey cackled and slapped his knee. "Announcers are a screwy bunch. A buddy of mine, only 23, 24, and he's been shacked up with a dozen stations already."

"Darling," Sharman said, "don't moralize. Especially about business." She patted his wrist. "I'm sure that you and Martin have something in common besides television. Joey lives his job, Martin..." She was smiling at him.

Joey cowered behind his hands. "OK. OK."

Sharman suggested a game of darts in the playroom, and Joey was a bull's-eye man with darts. We wound up the evening listening to Joey's collection of early jazz records, with Joey blackboarding the finer passages for us. She showed him off like that all night.

Sharman called me the next weekend. Joey did a lot of sports work, the commercials and color, baseball, football, whatever was in season. It was fall, and Joey was following the Ivy League around. Sharman phoned that Joey was in Boston setting up the Harvard-Dartmouth game, and would I like to take her to dinner. I let myself ask her where to meet her.

She picked me up in her car on the corner she had suggested, and in 15 minutes, we were out of town. We rode along the shore drive, and the radio was playing one of Jackie Gleason's albums, and there was the pull of her perfume, and it wasn't hard at all to imagine that there wasn't any Joey, just the two of us, Sharman and me, in a brand-new little go-to-hell world. We stopped off at one of those summer places that stay open late in the season. It was built on a rock, overlooking the ocean, and we had it all to ourselves. A man and his wife ran it, and they seemed pleased that we had dropped by. The way Sharman was looking at me, I think they thought we were honeymooners. We ordered steaks, and the man brought us our cocktails and told us about the veranda. He said we might like to watch the ocean from it. Wonderful view of the ocean, he said. He said he'd call us when the steaks were ready. He opened the door for us, and we stepped out. They had taken in the tables for the winter, and there was just the weather-beaten floor and railing and a sharp wind. It gave you the feeling of standing on the bridge of a ship, the way the whole ocean lay before you. If you looked straight out, you couldn't see land at all. If you looked down, you saw the spray hitting against the rock, and the gulls gliding and dipping, hovering, and sandpipers skimming across the sand, skirting the black batches of washed-ashore seaweed. Sharman's cheeks were reddening in the wind, and her eyes were beginning to water. There's something tender to me about a girl's eyes watering, and I wondered what she was thinking about. Maybe Joey. Maybe me. Maybe trying to find the quirk that had led her here, now, with me. That's what I was thinking about, but nothing figured.

"What are the odds," I said, "that Joey is someplace like this with a doll who works for some account executive?"

"They're high, I think."

"Care?"

"Of course. No wife wants to think there's another female more attractive to her husband than she."

"Other than that, what's Joey to you?"

"A good life."

"Because he buys you what you want?"

"Because he gives me what I want." She paused. "There's a difference, you know."

"The certificate with the doves on it that says so?"

The way she smiled made me feel she suddenly thought of me as 10 years younger. "Do I really puzzle you that much?" she said.

"Ever since that first night," I said.

"I wanted you to call me," she said simply.

"It's hard to believe that I'm so irresistible."

"It's just that you were so proper that first night. So... polite. Not a look from you. Not even when I crossed my legs so prettily for you. I wanted to see if you'd still be proper if you thought I'd rather have you... different?" She let her eyes run up and down me, and strolled a couple of steps away and looked out over the water.

We went inside. I dropped two quarters into the jukebox, and we romped through a couple of rhumbas with ad libs in them that Joey wouldn't have liked. We had the steaks, and afterward, a cordial. Then we left.

On the ride back, she sat as close as if there were three of us in the front seat. The headlights of the car brought out the white lines around the curves in the road and I followed them, and I passed cars, and I slowed down at intersections, but I wasn't conscious of any of it. I wasn't thinking of anything but Sharman, and the way the length of her leg was touching mine, and how when we swerved, it would go away for a moment, and how I would wait for her to move it back. And I thought about what she had told me, and it didn't make much sense. Her risking the good life, as she called it, that Joey gave her for a haystack tussle with me. But then we came to a break in the curbing where we could pull in on the beach, and I cut in and stopped. I pushed the button on the dash and we watched the top fold back, and she lay her head back against the seat, and I kissed her. It was a first kiss, and fresh, and I felt her fingers working on the back of my neck and the movement of her mouth against mine.

"It's cold, darling," she said softly, "but you can come back for a nightcap if you want to."

She gave me her key, and I turned it in the lock. The hallway was dark, but she stepped surely inside, and she was waiting for me when I closed the door. I held her by the arms, not close yet, and tried to find her eyes. Her fingers were working at the buttons of her coat. She opened it, and I felt her arms pulling me into her, and she lifted her head, and I put my mouth against hers. It was good to stand like that, no leash, knowing it was going to be whenever we wanted it to be.

"Drink?" She nodded to a decanter of Scotch on the coffee table.

"I'd like one. You?"

"Yes."

I poured an inch into each glass. "Ice? Soda?"

"It's all right this way."

She took her glass, and we sat there, and she smiled and sipped her Scotch. I drank mine and splashed another inch into my glass. She reached for my hand. Then she kissed me, and I unbuttoned her sweater slowly and touched her.

"Have a cigarette with your drink, darling, Martin darling," she said softly, "then come and find me." And she ran up the stairs.

I began to live for the weekends with Sharman. Our second we spent in Atlantic City, the third in New York, and the fourth in the Pocono Mountains. We had only four. It was after the fourth, the Monday night after, that she came to my apartment. It was raining, and when I let her in, she was soaked. She had thrown a raincoat over something nylon and hadn't bothered to button it. She was wearing a pair of pink mules with the fur wet and matted. She was crying and trying to brush her wet hair from her face.

"Holiday knows about us. He knows!"

She was holding tightly to the lapels of my pajamas.

"He says he was in the Poconos last Saturday night too. He saw us together. He checked with the desk clerk and he knows we were registered together. He said if his wife hadn't been with him, he'd have reported us then and there." She was shivering. "Joey doesn't know yet. Holiday says it depends on us whether he tells him."

"Christ! Where's Joey now?"

"With Holiday. At his home. Holiday (concluded on page 68) Best Job (continued from page 26) set it up. Joey thinks he's there to talk over a new show. But Holiday said if you were still around tomorrow, he'd... he'd... tell Joey... and see that..."

I knew what she wanted me to say, and I didn't want her to have to say it. "Don't worry about it," I told her. "I can pack in half an hour."

She started to cry again, and there was her wet hair brushing against the side of my face and I could feel her sobs heaving. "Martin, I'm sorry... I'm so..."

"Sure. Me, too. The Ivy League will never be the same."

She laughed back a sob, and I held her. She kissed me, squeezed my hand, and was gone. I stood there looking at the door, with part of her wet silhouette all over my pajamas.

• • •

It wasn't until two years later that I finally understood about Sharman. I was covering a presidential speech for one of the networks, and after it was over, a group of us, TV and radio, were having drinks in a hotel bar. One of the men was introduced as Tomkinson. I remembered Joey's talking about a man named Tomkinson, and I asked him if he had ever worked at WWXY. "...about two years ago?"

"Yes!" he boomed. "Did you?"

I nodded.

He laughed. "She's quite a girl, isn't she?"

"Who?"

"Sharman, of course. Who else? ...bless her."

He saw the look on my face, and he was grinning. "I imagine Joey told you about me. How I took off so suddenly. Joey would say, 'got lost.' "

"Matter of fact, yes."

He nodded. He was enjoying himself. "Did she come to you in the middle of the night with a coat draped over her nightgown and give you a song and dance about old man Holiday?"

"Yes... it was raining like hell. She was soaked."

"Raining! Say, that was effective. She's improved. Dear, dear Sharman."

I couldn't talk. I think I looked at him as if he were a fortune teller who had just told me the name of the first girl I had ever slept with.

"Well, don't look so crushed!" he laughed. "Not that I blame you. I imagine I looked about the same when I got it from the chap who preceded me. Met him a bit later. Only he was more cautious about it. He wasn't quite sure. You see, he was the first." He bowed his head toward me. "Though by no means the last."

"Are you telling me that Sharman... with you... with him..."

"I'm afraid so," he smiled. "We've been duped. The lot of us. It's her way, poor thing, of saving Joey. Only way she knows, I suppose, but damned effective. The other chap and I figured it out, and I rather think you'll agree. You see, she adores her life at WWXY. I guess she had a rather rotten time of it before. But at WWXY, Joey is the big dog. Gets all the top commercials, and they have it rather nice. Only she knows Joey isn't the best announcer in the world. And she's made up her mind that no one is going to get their little gold mine away from them. The instant she sees a new announcer is better than Joey and stands a good chance of getting Joey's job, she goes into her little act."

He finished off his drink and rotated the empty glass between the palms of his hands.

"You know," he said, "I rather envy the next good man who gets a job at WWXY. In a way, it's the best job in television."

"Do I really puzzle you that much?" she said.