Only, one moment Grissom looked up, and in came the TV people.
A tall Oriental woman went first, angular at the jawline and hip, unmistakeably a beauty even though from Grissom’s distance her face was vague. In her angles alone he could tell she was gorgeous. Her hair was tied back flat against her skull, her long body cinched up tight in a three-piece suit of that flecked, metallic green which was popular just now. To see her stalk in, trailing wires — so bright, so pinched and sectioned, trailing wires — Grissom thought of a hornet prowling the air. Round her long neck there tottered a steel mirror on a hinged apparatus that allowed her to look at herself as she walked. The reflected sunset coming through the open door behind her colored her small face oddly.
Grissom stared, in wary shock. He went on standing in the center of his living room.
The Oriental reporter stopped to check something in her mirror, parting her lips roughly with two blood-colored fingernails and revealing her teeth. As she paused, there strode past her a creature that seemed to have three heads, each with a different size and a different degree of mobility. Grissom squinted and blinked several times. Finally he managed to distinguish between the plastic half-moon of the microphone, the iron angles of the camera, and the emaciated young cameraman’s half-visible, red-bearded face. Meantime closer to Grissom something else went rushing by low to the ground. He didn’t get a good look at it: some kind of large black box, an uncertain shape. It made the air stir around his ankles. The man hauling the box however was impossible to miss, a tough working stiff in his prime, twice Grissom’s size, his body under its golden T-shirt as blunt and efficient as a dead-bolt lock. Gold, it seemed, was this guy’s thing. Along one side of his face dangled an earring a good two inches across, bright gold. His belt buckle also was gold, and worn up on his right hip to catch the eye. Then next, coming in the door next, now — a wide aluminum bowl, freestanding, with consoles of switches and toothed snap-latches bolted on both at top and bottom. There were nasty-looking yellow bulbs at the bowl’s center. Crossing the slate entryway, its wheels shrieked. How did it move? But the girl who entered next certainly wasn’t pushing anything. A frowning blonde who looked like she wasn’t yet out of her teens, she came through the door tilted sideways, groaning, uneasy on cheap-looking high heels. Under this girl’s chin swung a legal pad clipped to a board; up on one shoulder she barely managed to balance a steel briefcase with sharp, studded corners; cradled against her other side was a bone-white gallon jug crookedly labeled HOT STUFF. All was positive, hard-surface, solid evidence thrusting forth dynamically into uncut sunlight. Even this overloaded teenage girl had an upper body that mushroomed out into a high-school jacket with bulging shoulders.
The jacket’s elastic hem was hiked up, revealing her midriff. It was the only ordinary, untucked flesh anywhere among these people. To Grissom it seemed the girl’s belly was rising towards him, rising…the hairless teenage skin blending with her unbelted jeans….
“Say three, three and a half right now,” the girl said, or rather grunted loudly. She’d come quite close. “And with these curtains — minute—” she bent, set down her burden. Her midriff disappeared. “With these curtains, better make it two.”
“Starbaby, I told you, I got the meter right here.” This was the grip in gold, answering over his shoulder and through his earring. Grissom couldn’t be sure, but the man appeared to have a hand between his legs. “They got rooms upstairs. Starbaby! Let’s go be alone and shut the door.”
“Knock it off and give me six hundred.” The Camera/Face, who closed in on Grissom and then backed away. “And make it a wide six hundred. I want to go override and we’ll color-down right here.”
He pressed in close again, his black lens twitching.
“Starbaby,” the grip went on shouting, “I told you, you want to travel with us you got to decide. What’s it going to be girl? Them or me, girl?”
Oh I understand, Grissom thought, sounding the words against his inner ear with forced sensibleness. I understand. He’s trying to put the make on the blonde girl.
“That’s an old song,” the girl shouted back without looking at him. She waved around something that looked like a compass. “I mean I heard my grandfather singing that song.”
“Oh you just don’t know, girl.” The man was working expertly, hopping up and down like a gymnast, making swift settings on the aluminum reflecting bowl. “Starbaby it ain’t that I’m old, it’s that you’re new. Girl you ain’t even been born yet.”
“Go, just — just stay on the other side of the world from me.” She sounded uncertain. “Just, get us the count.”
Grissom stood watching them all come into his house. The girl’s midriff like a piece of his own flesh orbiting now behind him to his right. The topheavy cameraman, the jade-green reporter like a blade of metal grass thrust upright between the harsh lines of the grip’s shouting. Grissom thought he’d never seen these rooms so crammed with humanity. Although — he thought again — that was an odd way to feel with Syl out of sight. But ow, those few hard questions she’d asked him earlier. They seemed still with him, here like seastones under the carpet. Why, Syl had asked him, did Grissom leave it to her during this past month to reconstruct the whole twenty-five-year-long chain of events on her own? Why didn’t he come tell her straight out: first there was that original executive-level trek, and, and next, Grissom…He tried to answer, saying there were things he could tell his lawyer and the people in the media that, ah, naturally Syl, ah, well like my fat her used to say, Syl, there are a lot of bastards out there….
She’d reached out and taken hold of his chin. She’d thrust her face at him: Look at me, Grissom! Finally he’d had to rise from the sofa shouting you’ve got it backwards Syl, you’re looking at the wrong side of the question. The whole reason I’m going through this is so people will respect my family, this is business Syl. And with an open-handed downward gesture at the waist, Grissom had started striding round the living room.
Perhaps that was Syl he glimpsed now, a dark cone-shaped figure back somewhere near the telephone.
“Starbaby!” the grip kept shouting. “Let’s go be alone. Forget your mama, forget your daddy—”
“All right!” But that wasn’t the blonde girl’s voice. The blonde girl was pouting and had crossed both bulky arms of her jacket low on her body, covering her belly. Grissom looked elsewhere. He saw that the beautiful woman in the green suit had both narrow arms angled upwards sharply.
“All right,” the woman repeated. “They gave us a thirty spot, fifteen back on either side.”
The activity around Grissom picked up again. There was a general murmur that sounded, near as he could tell, happy. He heard also a lot of emphatic clicking.
Then the Oriental reporter was standing beside him. She’d changed her mirror somehow into a cylindrical silver appliance, about the size of a penlight, which she was pressing into Grissom’s hand. It was heavier than he’d expected.
“Mr. Grissom, I’m sorry to be so rushed about all this.” She spoke to him in a different, much quieter voice. “And I do hope you understand about the people in the crew kidding each other. We have a girl today who’s new, I mean she’s just breaking into the business, and so I guess we kid around with her to, ah, in order to get her legs under her. You do see what I mean, Mr. Grissom?”
“I understand how she feels,” the man found himself saying. “I was young once myself.”