What Remains (7 page)

We create narratives for people, because they are simpler than the complexities of real lives. Everyone wants a good story, with a prince and a princess and a villain. When narratives change, it’s unsettling, because whether or not they’re our own, they help to define us, and we don’t want to let go of them. In my own narrative my husband was brave and I was selfless, the two of us dancing a tragic dance of love. Cancer was our villain. It wasn’t so simple, of course, but this was our story.

The hardest part of moving on is cleaning up and collecting the scattered bits and pieces, the noise, the buzzing in the head. Making decisions about what to keep, what to give away. I kept a box of odd things. Anthony’s belt still bent at the notch where he wore it, his bike shorts and a wrinkled T-shirt, his good-luck cuff links, a gold locket, and our wedding bands. I kept the framed photo of John and Carolyn’s dog, Friday, that she hung up at every hospital and a book of poems with John’s doodles in the margins. I kept the amethyst ring from Carolyn, a tape recording of her phone greeting, and the gold Cartier toe ring she surprised me with one night in the city our last summer together.

And then I packed them away one by one as they worked free from the memories attached to them.

Ultimately what remains is a story. In the end, it’s the only thing any of us really owns. Some people write to explain their lives, others to escape them. I write partly out of a compulsive habit to keep things organized. Partly because our story is all that remains of our lives together, and I was afraid of losing that, too. But this is
a
story of my life, not
the
story. Who could ever begin to tell it all?

I looked for God and meaning in all the usual places: the Bible, a yoga retreat, a mountaintop in Peru. I had my numbers and my cards read and went to see Beatrice the psychic, who said I’d meet my next husband in Europe and I’d be wearing a floral dress. But the closest I came to solace was in philosophy and in fiction: logic and truth. I was a permanent step behind and at constant risk of falling further. It took me a certain time, for instance, to understand what had happened to Anthony—that he was gone and I had lost a husband, that I was a widow—because I kept backing up to the phone call that night in the Vineyard.
They’re not here yet and I was just wondering, are they there? With you?

Among the voices in my head was one that chided me for calling the coast guard, the air force, for saying it out loud. In my fantasies, if I hadn’t been so quick to think it, maybe we would have found them—John wandering the property, Carolyn asleep upstairs. She would be sheepish, I imagined, at putting me through all of that, and he would laugh it off.
Oh, Carole, you’re so dramatic!

I kept only one eye on the details when Anthony died three weeks later, making sure I got them right—the music, the guest list, the ashes delivered by sunset. The other eye trailed behind, trying to figure out, still, how this had happened. Playing it over and over to see how it could be fixed.

There are days I feel as though the interesting part of my life has happened to me. The curtain has come down, the guests have gone home, and I am here alone, waiting for a ride. This life, the one I made for myself through varying amounts of design and chance, seems to have started and stopped between twenty-five and thirty-five. I moved to the city. I found a career. I married a handsome man. I met Carolyn.

Before I was a wife or a widow, I was a journalist, and that started in Annette Kriener’s office at ABC, on Sixty-Seventh and Columbus. Really it started ten months before on an ordinary January morning, watching TV in my parents’ kitchen. The space shuttle
Challenger
exploded, and an entire life occurred to me. From a thirteen-inch black-and-white television I saw a completely different world develop, beyond Suffern. I watched the coverage and became absorbed with the network news anchors, and I made up my mind. As far-fetched as it seemed, I wanted somehow to be
there
. I wanted to tell the story, not watch it.

I began going to job fairs for college students interested in media careers. There had been months of these fairs, to no avail, and this one, I’d decided, would be the last. I was tired and on my way out but handed a résumé to an older man from ABC-TV who said he would pass it on to the right person and who also wondered whether I’d like to get a drink sometime. I didn’t have the drink, but there was a phone call anyway, and then a moment in which I picked out what I thought a woman in New York would wear to an interview at ABC News. I chose a black-wool skirt and a matching peplum jacket, and I fixed a pearl pin to the collar, because I had seen Holly Hunter wear a pin like it in the movie
Broadcast News
. I pulled my hair back neatly in a ponytail. I took the Red and Tan Lines bus from Suffern to the Port Authority on Eighth Avenue, and then the subway to Sixty-Seventh Street and an elevator to the tenth floor.

The young girl in
Broadcast News
organized her life early in the direction of journalism, writing to pen pals, cultivating an almost disturbing obsession with language and facts. I wish I could say that as a child I sat each evening captivated by Walter Cronkite. That I hoarded newspapers in my room and collected the big stories in scrapbooks. I wish there were a defining moment in my childhood I could pick out—my family huddled around the TV watching the Watergate hearings, maybe. Instead I can instantly summon any given episode of
M.A.S.H.

I am nervous in the subway in my black suit on my way to Annette Kriener. She is the budget controller for the news show
20/20
with Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs, and she has an enormous amount of power. She is rumored to have started and stopped careers with a phone call, and she is known as the
dragon lady
around the office, though I don’t find this out until I am working there. Had I been armed with this information, I might not have taken that subway ride, and this story would have worked out differently. I was quite successful, for some time, getting from point A to point B on what I didn’t know.

I have an interview that isn’t stunning or awful, but just good enough for her to offer a nonpaying internship. I snatch it up like the Golden Ticket. Forty hours a week filing videotapes, making dubs, and taking phone messages for
20/20
.

“Can you start Monday?” she asks. Though it’s more a directive than a question.

Oh, my God,
I think, and answer, “Yes.”

“You can get an ID across the street at Forty-Seven West.” I am dismissed. Then, she adds as I walk out, “Oh, and we don’t really dress up that much around here.”

I have a moment of panic after I leave her office that repeats itself intermittently for the first two years I am here: the irrational certainty that when I get in the elevator Peter Jennings will be inside, that he’ll eye me suspiciously and then ask a question about a congressional race or what I think of the shift in Middle East policy. I will freeze and then blurt out something ridiculous; he’ll see I’m overdressed and know instantly I am a fraud. He’ll make one quick call from his office and I’ll be gone. The questions vary.
Who are the nine Supreme Court
justices? What did you think of Gorbachev’s speech to the UN? Where did you say you went to college
? But this day the elevator is empty.

A woman in the security office tells me to stand in front of a white screen. She takes my picture, presses it into a plastic badge, and now I am Carole DiFalco, Intern, ABC News.

I’m a third-year English major at Hunter College, living at home with $300 in the bank, student loans about to come due, credit card bills, and a car payment for a brand-new Datsun. I sell the car right away and buy an old Toyota from my new boss, Mike Drucasian, for $150. It is rusted, and the driver’s seat doesn’t have a back, so he rigs up a wood brace with a seat cushion. I have to open the door with a screwdriver, but the engine runs well enough to get me to and from the city. I have a copy of
How to Talk with Practically Anybody About Practically Anything,
by Barbara Walters. This is what I’m equipped with to make my way through ABC.

I start in November 1986 on the bottom rung and my strategy is simple: now that my foot is in the door, I will not take it out. I interviewed a politician once who defined
relentless
as the ability to come back, time and time again, until your opponent gives up his will to resist. I am relentless. I love everything about news—the journalists in wrinkled clothes, the cigarette smoke, the energy in the newsroom before Peter Jennings goes on the air. I love the way reporters always know the inside story and the shorthand way that they talk. I love the stories they tell about getting the story—the chases, the near misses and dead ends. I love the cold dark of the editing rooms, where producers huddle with editors and create the piece frame by frame. I love the frenzied
crashes,
the last-minute feeds, the terrifying quiet of control rooms when stories air.

I love picking up my coffee at Elite diner two blocks from the office and eating my lunch at my desk because it seems like a New York thing to do.

I observe a few things early on: few people at ABC went to public school or Hunter College or spent summers in Kingston. I notice that the production associates’ cubicles are papered with Ivy—three Harvards, a Columbia University, and then me. I learn that
Dunster House
is Harvard and that people never tire of saying it, because while it might be boorish to announce you went to Harvard, you can say
Cambridge
repeatedly or drop the name of the house you pledged to make the same point. I notice that the Ivy Leaguers rarely have to master the videotape library.

I learn that everyone has a footnote. There is the producer related to a von Bülow, the associate producer whose father is a famous reporter at the
Times,
the young production associate at
20/20
of the Welch’s grape fortune. Anthony’s footnote is, of course, his family. I don’t have a footnote, or a tagline, or a phrase between two commas, but I suppose later Anthony’s is tacked onto me.
She’s married to Anthony Radziwill, Jackie O’s nephew.

As an intern I start and end my days in the basement, behind the Dutch door of postproduction. The
20/20
producers bring me audio-cassettes to be transcribed and Beta tapes to be dubbed, and I fill out the work forms and send them out. I relieve the production secretaries on the phones every day, while they all have their breaks. And once a week, I stay late to clean the supply room. I spend hours sorting the paper clips, Post-it notes, and cartridges of typewriter ribbon. I label the three-ring binders and reporter’s notebooks according to size and style. I am obsessive, and it pays off. In what I consider a vote of confidence and a good omen for my career, Annette Kriener lets me order the supplies, and I approach this with a solemn intensity. I make it my business to know which producers like the razor flair markers in black and which prefer navy. I know that they all favor the small reporter’s notebooks on the road and the legal pads in the office, and I stock accordingly. I run the supply system like the Pentagon, as though our national security depends on it.

At night I waitress at the Ramapough Inn in Suffern, and on Saturdays I work for Pam Hill. Pam is a senior vice president at ABC and executive producer of the news show
Closeup
and was looking for someone to work for her part-time. Her assistant asked if I would be interested.

Pam and her husband, the
New York Times
reporter Tom Wicker, have a brownstone on Eighty-Fourth Street and two other homes, in Canada and St. Lucia. They hire me to “organize” them. I think it could be a huge break—if I am impressive enough at her house, she might hire me at
Closeup.
If I can keep the houses outfitted, I think, my career in news is made.

She leaves lists of errands—
pick up the dry cleaning, call US Air and cancel reservations, rebook earlier flight back from New Hampshire
—and stacks of catalogs littered with Post-it notes:
send this to St. Lucia!, send this (black m.) to Canada, send two of these to St. Lucia and one to Canada.
Every Saturday I arrive by 10 a.m., go straight to her office on the third floor, and work all day. It is fairly straightforward: order the items marked in the catalogs, charge them to either her credit card or Tom’s, ship them to the right home. I have things running smoothly until one Saturday when I order two of everything she has double-underlined in
Williams-Sonoma
—one set for each house, I think. Too late, I realize the mistake.

“Whose card was it on?” she asks when I tell her what I’ve done. I tell her Tom’s card, and she seems relieved, but it is my last assignment for her. It takes weeks to straighten out, and just after the card is finally credited, the fiasco all untangled, I get a paying job as a production secretary with
Closeup
—$225 a week.

As a production secretary, my job is to assist the producers and associate producers. I man the phones, sort the mail, stack the morning newspapers for them to pick up. I book their travel and keep compulsive track of their profiles. One producer goes to Washington often, and I know always to book him a room at the Ritz, never the Mayflower across the street from the bureau. Another prefers American Airlines, so I learn ways around the company policy requiring travel on Continental. I memorize their employee ID numbers, sign their travel vouchers, collect their cash advances from the credit union, and babysit their children when they are out of town. One producer always takes calls from B—, a detail I learn the first time I refuse to connect her when he is in a screening. He calls me into his office later that day to tell me, “You are
always
to put her through. Oh, and if my wife calls, tell her you moved my car for alternate-street parking and dropped your barrette in the backseat.” There is nothing I am unwilling to take care of.

But the action is on the phones. I have a chunky, flesh-colored phone on my desk with the extensions of all the producers. The telephone, or, more specifically, the person answering it, is critical. This is a time before cell phones, voice mail, or e-mail. A time, still, of
While You Were Out
, the pink slips on which you check a box to indicate whether the caller was returning a call, expected to be called back, or left a message, in which case you wrote it down on the black lines at the bottom. The phones are a lifeline.
I’ll transfer you
is a solemn promise, a contract. There are producers calling from the lobby of the Commodore Hotel in West Beirut, from satellite phones in Moscow, and in my mind, a disconnected call might be the difference between life and death, or worse, might cost us a story. The phone connects me to places I read about in the papers and hear the veteran producers discuss in the halls. On the other end of the phone are the places in my dreams, where I imagine I will go one day to cover a story. I want to stay at the Commodore, with its well-stocked bar and talking parrot in the corner. I want to be asked at the front desk, “Do you want a room on the car-bomb side or the artillery-shell side?” I want to have stringers and drivers and sources and call from the bombed-out Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, where electricity is unpredictable but there is an espresso machine in the lobby. I want to be reached at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, conducting off-the-record interviews with members of the PLO. This is where I have set my sights.

In the meantime I am happy logging stock footage and running tapes to the editing rooms behind the newsroom. We call it
slant track
—a group of cold, dark, windowless rooms named after the angle that video ran through the old-style tape machines. They have a bank of monitors and two chairs, one for the producer and one for the editor. This is where it happens—the flotsam becomes a three-minute news spot. I sometimes sneak in and stand quietly in the back and watch them. The producer next to the editor, sitting in the dark, pointing, rewinding, forwarding frame by frame, sometimes screaming.
Cut
—
no, dissolve fifteen frames, play that sound bite.
Weaving together sound bites and b-roll and file footage and rushing to feed the piece to the control room, where it will be dropped into the show.

I am eventually assigned small research projects: collecting articles on the drug war, compiling crime statistics, tracking down archival footage.
Call the Washington desk—find out what gun control legislation is pending on the Hill.
The best way I see to be promoted to PA is to
be
a PA, so I squeeze research in between phones, travel itineraries, and tape searches.