Alexandra Waring (8 page)

Summertime rolled around and, after a brief visit to Kansas, they drove back to San Francisco in the navy-blue MG Alexandra inherited from David. Alexandra moved in full time with Gordon and worked full-time at KFFK. It was a wonderful summer, one of exploration and excitement, the last summer that Alexandra would ever have anything that resembled free time.

Theoretically speaking, they lived together for the next three and a half years, though they lived very different lives that only occasionally crossed and most often in bed, though sometimes that wasn’t possible either. By the end of her sophomore year Alexandra had gone from unpaid intern at KFFK to gainfully employed researcher/writer, and by her senior year was a full-fledged newswriter for their weekend news as well. She still carried a full load of classes and her schedule left her so exhausted some nights that someone from KFFK would call Gordon to ask his opinion as to whether they should wake Alexandra up or let her sleep where she had crashed in the lounge off the newsroom. As for Gordon, he too was working very hard, only now he spent much of his time shuttling back and forth from L.A. and on-location sites, and it wouldn’t be until the end of Alexandra’s senior year that he would be faithful to her.

Alexandra underwent some dramatic changes in those years. When she first moved in with him, a lot of his male colleagues had raised their eyebrows at his choosing such a young girl nobody. But by the time she hit twenty-two, when KFFK put her on the air once a for a segment called “San Francisco Under 30,” the only question his colleagues ever had concerning Alexandra was whether or not Gordon would let them know if they ever broke up.

Alexandra graduated, was promoted to senior writer of the KFFK weekend news, continued to do “Under 30,” and Gordon proposed to her. She said she thought maybe yes, eventually. In November, Gordon was offered a tremendous job in L.A. and Alexandra started looking for work there. She was offered a promising position at one of the network-owned-and-operated stations and then, out of the blue, KSCT in Kansas City made a pitch to the congressman’s daughter. And so twenty-three-year-old Alexandra had a decision to make: she could move to Los Angeles with Gordon and be a rookie consumer affairs reporter in the number two market of America, or she could move to Kansas City without Gordon and be an investigative reporter in the number twenty-eight market of America.

And so Alexandra went home to Kansas.

“How’s that?” Gordon asked her, straightening up. He had just moved the huge oak table that Alexandra had chosen to use in her office in lieu of a desk.

“Great. Thanks,” Alexandra said, running her hand over its surface. “But I’m still meeting the real estate broker tonight.”

Despite the fact that Gordon owned a large place on Gramercy Park (that he had inherited from his maternal grandparents), Alexandra insisted she needed an apartment on the West Side somewhere, somewhere closer to work.

“Excuse me, sir,” a woman wearing green overalls said to Gordon, wheeling a plant past him. (Alexandra had selected so many plants and trees for her office that Plant Heaven had sent a professional gardener and her assistant over to “put them to bed” for her.)

“Yeah, sure,” Gordon said, stepping aside. He walked around the table to Alexandra. “Come over after you get through tonight,” he said, meaning that she should spend the night with him in Gramercy Park.

“You come over,” she said, meaning that he should spend the night with her in the Plaza Hotel.

“With Darenbrook down the hall, great,” Gordon said, rolling his eyes. “Probably be listening at the door.”

“He won’t even know,” Alexandra said.

“I don’t care if he knows,” Gordon said. “I just don’t feel like having him next door.”

“He’s not next door,” Alexandra said.

“Hi ya, Miss Waring,” a man in a white denim jump suit said at the door. It was Clancy Stevens, from maintenance. “I’ve got the TV stuff you wanted and a couple of lugs to install it for ya.”

“Great,” Alexandra said, “bring it in. I’d love to have it working before tomorrow.”

While Alexandra made Gordon move furniture around, the gardeners were plunking, potting and pruning plants, three men with hammers and electric drills installed a giant TV screen and a four-cartridge video recorder into the wall.

Jackson popped in. “Need anything?” he called from the door to Alexandra.

I’ve got everything—and everybody,” she added, laughing, gesturing to all the activity.

“Lookin’ like Tarzan land in here,” Jackson said, prompting the gardener to scowl at him from behind a ficus tree. “Hey,” he said, turning his attention to Gordon, “what are you, the Welcome Wagon?” And then he was gone.

“Now what was that supposed to mean?” Gordon said.

Alexandra walked over to examine one of the trees. “The apartment I’m seeing tonight has a living room and master bedroom overlooking Central Park,” she said to him, holding some leaves in her hand. “It’s on Central Park West.”

“Yippee,” Gordon said without a trace of enthusiasm.

“With plenty of room for two,” she added, glancing at him.

“One of us already has room enough for four,” he said. “I was thinking maybe you’d like to come over and see it again.”

Alexandra had taken a pinch of soil out of the pot and was rubbing it between her fingers. “What kind of fertilizer are you using on these?” she said in a louder voice.

“Kato,” the gardener said.

“What number?” Alexandra said.

“Six,” she said.

“That’s what I thought,” Alexandra said, putting the soil back.

The gardener glanced at her assistant and then back to Alexandra. “Something wrong?”

“Hmmm?” Alexandra said, turning. “Oh, no, I think you’re doing a wonderful job. I just wanted to know what we were using so that when the summer light starts in here I’ll want to cut back two grades.”

“Hey,” Clancy said loudly, swinging in through the doorway, “before I forget—the wife wants to know how the shoulder’s doin’. It mending okay?”

Alexandra turned and smiled. “Tell her it’s mending great, thanks.”

Gordon fell in love with Julie Stantree while he was working on a TV series called
Highland
Street
and Julie was starring in a sitcom that was filmed in the studio next door. He asked her to marry him, twice, and shortly after her series was canceled she said yes. They were married, moved into a large rental in Beverly Hills and, eleven months later, had a baby, Christopher. Julie was thirty-five, Gordon was thirty-one, and the year was 1984, the same year David Waring and his wife came to visit and told him—while Julie was in the back of the house, putting Christopher down for his nap—that Alexandra was getting married in the fall.

“Huh,” Gordon said.

“Name’s Tyler Mandell,” David said. “He’s a big architect-builder in Kansas City. I think he’s too old for Lexy—he’s thirty-eight and sort of a buffoon, if you ask me.”

“But no one’s asking you,” David’s wife said. To Gordon, “He’s very handsome and everyone says he’s going into politics.”

David looked at Gordon. “I don’t know, I still wish you guys could have—”

“David!” his wife said, clearly horrified at what she imagined her husband was about to say.

Three months later David called Gordon and told him that Alexandra had suddenly called off the wedding, offering no explanation except that she wasn’t ready.

“Huh,” Gordon said.

“Mom and Dad are going nuts,” David said. “They’re convinced Mandell did something—you know, has a mistress or something—but Lexy won’t tell them anything.”

“What do you think?” Gordon said.

Crackle, crackle went the long-distance line.

“I think,” David finally said, speaking slowly, “that Lexy might have done something. She’s got that look these days.”

“Which?”

“The sphinx.”

Gordon knew that look. It was the same look Alexandra had had between the time she made up her mind to take the KSCT job and when she told him.

“Someone else?” Gordon said.

“I don’t know. But there’s something,” David said. He hesitated and then asked, “You don’t know anything about it, do you?”

“Jesus, David,” Gordon said.

“Sorry. I just didn’t know who else it could be.”

Two months later, in October of 1984, Julie left Gordon for Émile Ruvais, a French film director some twenty-two years her senior. Ruvais was considered to be the national treasure of France and, since he was also one of the most powerful men in the movie industry, irreproachable in all matters, including the battle for custody over Christopher, and the Stantree-Strenn divorce. Caught completely by surprise, Gordon had to change lawyers four times over the course of the court battle to find someone who could take on Ruvais’s legion of attorneys, but by then it was too late. He was divorced against his will; he lost custody of his son; and he had over three hundred thousand dollars in legal bills—which that son of a bitch Ruvais then offered to pay. Gordon did not take him up on his offer.

Badly shaken, drinking a bit too much, crying some and sleeping around a lot, Gordon moved to New York in 1985 to start work on
This Side of Paradise
for public television. He flew to Paris once a month to visit Christopher and getting used to that, in combination with his work, helped to steady him. By the time Alexandra arrived in New York to anchor the news at WWKK in 1986, Gordon had settled into a meaningless but stable relationship with a twenty-year-old model.

Alexandra was no more the same young woman he had known than he was the same young man she had known. To begin with, there didn’t seem to be anything very young about either one of them anymore. And while Alexandra was as beautiful and dynamic as ever-more so, actually—there was something closed off about her now. After a few weeks of friendly chats and showing her around New York, Gordon put his finger on something else that was different: Alexandra no longer trusted him.

As always, if he didn’t pick up on the message indirectly, then Alexandra practically spelled it out for him. No, she didn’t say, “Gordon, I don’t trust you.” What happened was, they went out to dinner one night with Alexandra’s boss, Michael Cochran, and his wife, Cassy. It was really an awful dinner, with Michael getting very drunk in the restaurant and slobbering all over Alexandra while they all tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. When they finally got the Cochrans out of the restaurant and into a cab, Alexandra wanted to walk for a while and so they did, up Fifth Avenue and then across 59th Street, along the south wall of Central Park.

That was the night he told her the whole long, horrible story of Julie and Christopher. Alexandra held his hand, her head bowed, as they walked, and she was genuinely moved by what he told her. But she was not moved enough to tell him, in return, why she had called off her wedding in Kansas City.

Truth was, Gordon had been hoping that she would say, “Because David came back from Los Angeles and told me he thought you loved me.” Or, “David told me your marriage couldn’t last.” Or, “Hearing about you made me realize that I couldn’t marry a man I didn’t love.” But no, Alexandra didn’t say any of those things.

By this time they had crossed the street and were walking back east, along the string of hotels facing the park. They were passing the Berkshire House when he asked her why she had called off the wedding and Alexandra stopped, there under the light, and looked at him. Her eyes were steady, but her face had flushed scarlet. Then she said, quietly, “I don’t want to lie to you.”

“I don’t want you to lie to me either,” he said.

“Then drop it, Gordie, please,” she said, taking his hand and walking on.

And he let it drop, though when he made love to her that night it was on his mind, which perhaps had something to do with why he made love to her in the first place. Neither one of them was ready to get re-involved; he knew it the moment after he came inside her when, instead of feeling close to her, he felt like slamming her up against the wall and demanding to know if she was happy that she had ruined his life by leaving him. But he didn’t do that, and it was Alexandra on her own initiative, sat on the edge of the bed and cried, apologizing for what she said she didn’t even know, but that she did know she couldn’t do this, not with him, not now.

And so he let her go. Because he couldn’t do it either, not with her, not yet.

But, with summer, Alexandra’s popularity exploded in New York and Gordon would stare at her face on the side of buses in midtown traffic at lunchtime and wonder at how screwed up he must be to let her go so easily. And then he would be so filled with adrenalin and excitement he would think, Who cares?
Just go see her—now!
and he would dash over to WWKK, demanding to see her, and she always saw him, no matter how busy she was, and he would just sort of sit in the corner, watching her—in the newsroom, in the editing room—for five minutes or so. And then as he was leaving, Alexandra would smile, gently, as if to say, “I know. I need to know you still exist too.”

And then, late at night, when she got home from the studio, they would talk on the phone just long enough for Gordon to make sure that she was not about to run away and marry someone else. Once that was ascertained, he felt okay again, and so he would climb into his bed with his model.

It all changed after Alexandra joined The Network. They were talking one night, as they had started doing as soon as she moved to Washington, and suddenly Alexandra had started to cry, saying that she thought she was going to die of loneliness, and that he was the last person she should drag back into her life but knew that that was what she was about to try and do. Gordon said she couldn’t drag him back into her life unless he wanted to be dragged back in—what did she have in mind? She said she was so confused about everything that she didn’t even know. He asked her how much the fact that she lived in Washington and he lived in New York had to do with it, the safety in knowing they couldn’t be together full time anyway. She said she didn’t know and then she broke down again, saying that she was the last person in the world he should get involved with, that if they tried to resurrect their relationship again it might only wreck everything between them.