But the real live explosion was gray. It was disappointingly quick, and sounded flat, though I laughed when Letterman pretended that they hadn't gotten the explosion properly taped and that the executive coordinator of NBC Sports, who looked as though he'd been given a kind of cosmic slap, was going to have to do the whole thing over again. For a moment the coordinator thought Letterman was serious.
"See," Ron had said as it became time for me to be made up, "there's no way he can be serious, Edilyn. He's a millionaire who wears wrestling sneakers."
"One watches him," my husband said, bent to check the fit of the cold pink plug in my ear, "and one envisions a whole nation, watching, nudging each other in the ribs."
"Just get in there and nudge," Ron said encouragingly. I looked at his mouth and head and cat. "Forget all the rules you've ever learned about appearing on talk shows. This kid's turned it inside out. Those rules of television humor are what he makes the most fun of." His eyes went a bit cold. "He's making money ridiculing the exact things that have put him in a position to make money ridiculing things."
"Well, there's been a kind of parricidal mood toward rules in the industry for quite some time," my husband said as we waited for the elevator's ascent. "He sure as hell didn't invent it." Ron lit his cigarette for him, smiling sympathetically. We both knew what Rudy was talking about. The Xanax was beginning to take effect, and I felt good. I felt psyched up to appear.
"You could say it's like what happened over at 'Saturday Night Live,' " Ron said. "It's the exact same phenomena. The cheap sets that are supposed to look even cheaper than they are. The home-movie mugging for the cameras, the backyard props like Monkey-Cam or Thrill-Cam or coneheads of low-grade mâché. 'Late Night,' 'SNL'—they're anti-shows."
We were at the back of the large silent elevator. It seemed not to be moving. It seemed like a room unto itself. Rudy had pressed 6. Both my ears were crackling. Ron was speaking slowly, as if I couldn't possibly understand.
"But even if something's an anti-show, if it's a hit, it's a show," Ron said. He got his cat to lift its head, and scratched its throat.
"So just imagine the strain the son of a bitch is under," my husband muttered.
Ron smiled coolly, not looking at Rudy.
My husband's brand of cigarette is a foreign sort that lets everyone know that something is on fire. The thing hissed and popped and gushed as he inhaled, looking steadily at his old superior. Ron looked at me.
"Remember how 'SNL' had those great parodies of commercials right after the show's opening, Edilyn? Such great parodies that it always took you a while to even realize they were parodies and not commercials? And how the anti-commercials were a hit? So then what happened?" Ron asked me. I said nothing. Ron liked to ask questions and then answer them. We arrived on Letterman's floor. Rudy and I got out behind him.
"What happened," he said over his shoulder, "is that the sponsors started putting commercials on 'SNL' that were almost like the parodies of the commercials, so that it took you a while to realize that these were even real commercials in the first place. So the sponsors were suddenly guaranteed huge audiences that watched their commercials very, very closely — hoping, of course, that they'd be parodies." Secretaries and interns rose to attention as Ron passed with us; his cat yawned and stretched in his arms.
"But," Ron laughed, still not looking at my husband, "But instead, the sponsors had turned the anti-commercials' joke around on 'SNL' and were using it, using the joke to manipulate the very same audience the parodies had made fun of them for manipulating in the first place."
Studio 6-A's stage doors were at the end of a carpeted hall, next to a huge poster that showed David Letterman taking a picture of whoever was taking his picture for the poster.
"So really being a certain way or not isn't a question that can come up, on shows like this," Rudy said, tapping an ash, not looking at Ron.
"Were those great days or what?" Ron whispered into the ear of the cat he nuzzled.
The locked studio doors muffled the sounds of much merriment. Ron entered a code on a lit panel by the Letterman poster. He and Rudy were going back upstairs to watch from Ron's office, where the wall of monitors would afford them several views of me at once.
"You'll just have to act, is all," my husband said, brushing the hair back from my ear. He touched my cheek. "You're a talented and multifaceted actress."
And Ron, manipulating the cat's white paw in a pretend goodbye, said, "And she is an actress, Rudolph. With you helping her we'll help you turn this thing just the right way."
"And she appreciates it, sir. More than she knows right now." "So I'm to be a sort of anti-guest?" I said.
"Terribly nice to see you," is what David Letterman said to me. I had followed my introduction on-stage; the sweatered attendant conducted me by the elbow and peeled neatly away as I hit the lights.
"Terribly, nay, grotesquely nice to see you," Letterman said.
"He's scanning for pretensions," crackled my ear. "Pockets of naive self-importance. Something to stick a pin in. Anything."
"Yas," I drawled to David Letterman. I yawned, touching my ear absently.
Close up, he looked depressingly young. At most thirty-five. He congratulated me on the series' renewal, the Emmy nomination, and said my network had handled my unexpected pregnancy well on the show's third year, arranging to have me seen only behind waist-high visual impediments for thirteen straight episodes.
"That was fun," I said sarcastically. I laughed drily.
"Big, big fun," Letterman said, and the audience laughed.
"Oh Jesus God let him see you're being sarcastic and dry," my husband said.
Paul Shaffer did a go-figure with his hands in response to something Letterman asked him.
David Letterman had a tiny label affixed to his cheek (he did have freckles); the label said MAKEUP. This was left over from an earlier joke, during his long monologue, when Letterman had returned from a commercial air-break with absolutely everything about him labeled. The sputtering fountain between us and the footlights was overhung with a crudely lettered arrow: DANCING WATERS.
"So then Edilyn any truth to the rumors linking that crazy thing over at your husband's network and the sort of secondary rumors. . " He looked from his index card to Paul Shaffer. "Gee you know Paul it says 'secondary rumors' here; is it OK to go ahead and call them secondary rumors? What does that mean, anyway, Pauclass="underline" 'secondary rumors'?"
"We in the band believe it could mean any of… really any of hundreds of things, Dave," Shaffer said, smiling. I smiled. People laughed.
The voice of Ron came over the air in my ear: "Say no." I imagined a wall of angles of me, the wound in Ron's head and the transmitting thing at the wound, my husband seated with his legs crossed and his arm out along the back of wherever he was.
". . secondary or not, about you and Tito's fine, fine program perhaps, ah, leaving commercial television altogether at the end of next season and maybe moving over to that other, unnamed, uncommercial network?"
I cleared my throat. "Absolutely every rumor about my husband is true." The audience laughed.
Letterman said, "Ha ha." The audience laughed even harder.
"As for me," I smoothed my skirt in that way prim women do, "I know next to nothing, David, about the production or business sides of the show. I am a woman who acts."
"And, you know, wouldn't that look terrific emblazoned on the T-shirts of women everywhere?" Letterman asked, fingering his tiepin's label.