EVERYTHING ABOUT MABEL BODGE was contradictory, beginning with the relation of her name to her persona. She had been extraordinarily beautiful even as a baby, and by the time she was five or six she was so spectacularly lovely as to frighten off a career child-molester who was on the point of trying to lure her into his van when by accident he actually looked into her sapphire eyes. He flinched and said, “Sorry, miss! I thought you were my niece.” “No, you didn’t,” said little Mabel. “You are a sex criminal.” At which he accelerated away, but not before she memorized the numbers on his license plate. The pervert was soon apprehended, and Mabel got a special commendation from the police, who were in awe of her self-possession.
As to her names, first and sur-, neither “Mabel” nor “Bodge” seemed suitable for a person with hair like a silken skein of gold and velvet skin. Her mother had chosen “Mabel” with the confident expectation that it had been so long out of fashion that it would definitely have returned by the time the girl had grown up, putting her ahead of the curve, but it failed to do so. As to “Bodge,” there was no reasonable explanation for why it had awkward sound, for “Lodge,” “Dodge,” and “Hodge,” distinguished only by their initial consonants, did not. However, when the bearer of “Mabel Bodge” was someone with the attributes of the girl at hand, the misnomer was a harmless irony that provoked a smile. Not to mention that Mabel had no enemies, being far too superior, in every area, to incur envy, which we can feel only when within a seemingly overcomable distance from our competitors: silver- and bronze-winners envy the taker of gold; the slowest runner does not. Mabel was as bright as she was beautiful, her strength in high school and again in college being mathematics, to which at the latter she added Mandarin Chinese as a twin major.
She acquired a succession of learned degrees from a series of institutions that included Harvard, M.I.T., and, abroad, the universities of Bologna and Beijing. When she had at last completed her formal education, her problem was what to do with it. Teaching did not appeal to her; now past the midmark of her twenties, she had yet to experience life as it is lived by the preponderance of humanity elsewhere than in the groves of Academe. Her parents, solid citizens both of whom worked in lower-level jobs and though okay-looking would not turn heads, could with the best will in the world provide no guidance, sharing as they did the awe that Mabel inspired in all, and she was as notable for her modesty as for her intelligence and beauty.
Government intelligence agencies soon get wind of students who show an aptitude in difficult foreign languages that are peculiarly useful in the contemporary world, and several made overtures to Mabel, whose mathematical prowess was attractive to big businesses in various fields, technology of course, but also in the complex projections of high finance and the actuarial calculations of the insurance industry.
But the offer Mabel accepted was from a television network news department, which had been looking for a youthful replacement for an aging legend in that field, the renowned Millicent Bridgewater, who could remember in detail every presidential scandal of the last five administrations, but had proven so discreet about them that she had been a confidante of every White House. Millicent, who with her pugnacious jaw and squinty eyes had had to work the hard way up from internship to seven figures (still less than the male anchors elsewhere), naturally resented Mabel’s quick ascent, with no experience whatever, from zero to stratosphere, and could only assume it was due to the cut of Ms. Bodge’s jib and not the breadth of her intellect, but was astonished and overwhelmed when the young woman confessed that Millicent had been her lifelong idol—an enthusiasm easy enough to fake, but Mabel proceeded to cite some of the major coups of the Bridgewater career, the interviews with mass-murderer dictators who never talked publicly with anyone else; the pope’s revelation, the first made to anyone out of the Vatican, that he had been born of a Jewish mother (Millicent’s response, which became instantly famous, was “like Jesus”); the hilarious give-and-take with the action star and former wrestler Huck Webb, who insisted he was, beneath the loincloth, a woman and insisted she check him out: of course it turned out to be a joke, but as Millicent told him, “You had me goin’ for a while!”
Mabel displayed such winning ways that Millicent found herself miraculously liking the youngster, with an emotion she had never before genuinely felt for anyone female including her mother. (Her addiction to men, invariably the most deceitful of them, had ruined her private life.) So she took Mabel under the formidable Bridgewater wing, supplying her with a wealth of TV newsroom lore, including many foolproof tricks of a trade notorious for them, not confined to on-air technique but also dealing with the all-important sources, government leakers, industry whistleblowers, et al., and ingratiating oneself socially with the powerbrokers of Manhattan and its Hampton adjunct as well as DC and environs.
Mabel’s immediate success was bitter-sweet for Millicent, whose ratings had fallen consistently throughout the preceding three years, but who now felt at least partially responsible for the rocketlike rise that began with the first appearance of her replacement on the Evening News. Male media reviewers were at pains to deny that Bodge’s pulchritude had had any effect on Mabel’s having been hired, on the public that tuned in in droves and stayed on for the week, then the months, or on their, the critics’, assessment of the job she did, which in objective point of fact was outstanding, extraordinarily well-informed yet never condescending, sincere yet enlivened by a wit without a hint of mean-spiritedness. The females who wrote about Mabel made no reference however slight to her corporeal self but commended her lavishly for an unprecedented display of the principal abstract virtues; in some cases this was at the expense of poor old (55) Millicent, who was accused by her once favorite critic as often “unable to conceal a growing acerbity.”
Yet Mabel was so genuinely sweet (and having seen them all come and go, Millicent knew when graciousness was horseshit and when it was real) that her successor could not be resented, and declaring the young woman her protégée, with Mabel’s wholehearted acquiescence, made it possible to participate in a triumph instead of degenerating in defeat, though sometimes, in secret, it was a hard pill to swallow when Mabel soon began to threaten Millicent’s record, the product of decades, in getting exclusive interviews with world leaders and show-biz headliners (and the little bitch was still under thirty!), in the course of every one of which startling news was made: Premier Georges DeLattre of France revealed he had once been arrested for procuring; the latest teen sensation, the singer who billed herself as Chrysanthemum, confessed to having been sixty years of age before her transformation to nineteen by state-of-the-art surgery and chemistry; and the terrorist Abu bin Yussef, whom Mabel met at an undisclosed location (thought at first to be in remote Pakistan but actually at a Motel Seven in Oklahoma), when asked what he did to relax after a session of torture and murder, said simply, “Drink beer and watch porn.”
Millicent’s newscasts at the end of her run were not only the least-watched of the mainstream programs but consistently trailed the leading cable network; Mabel’s had risen to the top within six weeks of her debut. By the end of her first year, the President of the United States, having endured a period of unpopularity owing to a brief recession, begged her for an interview but was turned down. When a certain secret enemy of his, embedded in a West Wing office, leaked this story to the media, President Billy Hancock became the current laughingstock of late-night talk shows, so reliably deridable that comedy hosts could evoke orgiastic screams from their audiences by simply uttering his name.
When Hancock in the following year was defeated for reelection by a candidate even his followers confidentially admitted was pathetically inadequate, Mabel Bodge was given a significant part of the credit by the political cognoscenti, as having provided the first shove at the top of the incline. Her next contract gave her the kind of money commanded only by the hottest of movie stars or the latest New York Yankee.
But, to show you the kind of person Mabel remained, her closest friends were those she had had all her life, her family and the pals of her girlhood in a small town in Idaho, all the latter being female except for a gay fellow named Hal Twerly who was the local optometrist. The fact was that Mabel had never had a date with any man but Hal her life long, and of course it was not really a date to be with him, who could be put into the affectionate category of an old pair of slippers, as for that matter she was to him despite her celebrity.
The problem had always been, and had grown much more so by now, that Mabel was far too attractive and gifted to be tolerable on the intimate level to any heterosexual male, and in consequence, having no inclination toward Lesbianism, she was a stranger to any kind of intimacy aside from the familial. This learned, sophisticated, powerful woman knew nothing about sex from experience, and such pornography as she had scanned or glimpsed appalled her with its bad taste. When she said as much to her friend Hal, he replied, “That’s its point. The bad taste is what’s exciting.” But Mabel found this irony absolutely foreign to her. On the other hand, neither could she identify with the conventional concept of romantic love in which all the gasping, sweaty stuff could be transformed into something acceptable that might serve a reproductive end, the only justified purpose for sexuality.
Not that Mable felt any deprivation, being above an emotion that she considered unworthy of someone with her natural advantages. She was also, for the same reason, immune to envy, jealousy, spite, and fear of any kind but that of physical harm, which was understandable in her profession, given the threats routinely directed toward anyone in the public eye. Not a day went by without anonymous promises, via telephone, e-mail, and the postal service, of death and dismemberment in retaliation for her reporting certain news stories, speaking certain phrases, or simply looking the way she did on the TV set of the fanatic du jour. She believed it only prudent to be accompanied everywhere by a six-four bodyguard who carried a Glock in a shoulder holster. There were those who took this man to be her lover; he was anything but. Hulking brute though he appeared to be, Jerry was so intimidated by his employer that he hardly had the courage to shake her svelte hand when, along with the Xmas bonus, it was proffered.
But being the superior person that she was, Mabel had no idea there were people in the world, even among those who admired her, who wondered why she had little or none of what was commonly thought of as a private, i.e., romantic or at least sexual life, until she finally assented to the reiterated plea of many years from Muriel Spawn for an interview. Mabel’s network colleague, Spawn was famous for probing, invasive yet empathetic questioning, often too subtly malicious for the subject to understand at the moment of occurrence but recognized by all when the edited product was broadcast. Warren Doakes, the celebrated giant of industry, famous for generosity to charitable causes, somehow emerged from his session with Spawn as, given his enormous wealth, a pinchpenny. Actress Holly Parks, who had risen to fame playing charming airheads, as herself came off as not stupid but rather a suffocating bore, who unless a script called for it, could not even perform her ingratiating giggle. Barton Fitzgerald, who had served with distinction as charismatic US ambassador to the United Nations, was somehow manipulated by Muriel Spawn into reflecting unfavorably on certain elements in the undeveloped countries in terms that verged on bigotry.
Why Mabel agreed to speak publicly with Spawn remained a mystery, unless perhaps it was an uncharacteristically competitive urge to take on and dominate the other leading diva at the network and establish once for all who was Numero Uno. The only condition asked by Mabel, who was professionally aware of how raw tape could be edited to result in a product that differed significantly from the intent of what had originally been stated, was that she be permitted to see the interview before it was aired. Breaking with precedent, Muriel assented.
Mabel subsequently underwent almost five hours of Spawn’s questions, from which an hourlong program was skillfully edited, which was to say forty-seven minutes of airtime, allowing for commercials and announcements. Watching the result, alone in her office, Mabel gave it her imprimatur as being keen but fair, not by any means softball—with plenty of Spawn’s trademark edginess (“Would you call yourself a babe?” “How’d you get the job, with no experience?” “Do you dislike men?”)—but nothing underhanded or conspicuously snotty. Indeed, Mabel wondered whether it would do Muriel’s career any good to be seen as essentially deferring to a younger woman who was her chief rival: might she not be thereby displaying a weakness?
But in fact, because of a series of events that neither Muriel Spawn nor any possible co-conspirators of hers at the network could have managed, though they were quick to take the advantage so offered, that version of the interview was never broadcast. In the week for which it had been scheduled, a middle-aged senator who promoted the space program as a solution for overpopulation was found dead in the aftermath of what seemed a sexual orgy with several teenaged boys; a privately funded team of female astronauts landed on the moon to shoot an infomercial for some new and improved sanitary products; and a black man became archbishop of Canterbury. In its weekly hour the network’s news magazine could hardly do justice to the big stories; the interview with Mabel Bodge was shelved for a less eventful period.
When one came a month hence, the program that reached the air was not that which Mabel had previewed but rather another version incorporating material previously left on the cutting-room floor, offering a portrait, in her own damning words and body language, of a woman spurned personally by those she dominated professionally: not understanding that state of affairs, she displayed a naive wistfulness incongruous in someone at her level of achievement, as well as an unattractive, perhaps even contemptible vulnerability.
Mabel had no memory of saying that she looked forward to having children when the time came, yet there it was on videotape, and worse: “the whole nine yards, Muriel, the picket fence, the SUV, the Golden Retriever.” “But that’s some time in the future?” asked Spawn, her thick eyebrows making it even more dubious. At which Mabel’s face fell visibly in merciless close-up, illustrating the faltering reply, “Looks like it.”
Fortunately Spawn’s office was on the floor below hers, else in her fury next morning after the broadcast Mabel might well have gone on a vis-à-vis attack, for while her sweetness was not bogus it shared her character with certain other emotions that she had never had to use thus far in life but turned out to be available in full vigor in a time of extremity. Her hand clutched at the telephone but eventually withdrew without placing the call. Spawn would only have been gratified to learn how deeply her talons had penetrated. The wisdom by which Mabel had come so far, so quickly, prevailed. When she finally phoned Muriel she was complimentary though not so fulsomely as to sound disingenuous, with the intent of confusing Spawn, who was given to interpretations so obvious she could present them as delicate. For example, when she asked the Central American tyrant what had become of the brother with whom he had originally shared power and he answered, “He’s on family leave,” Muriel smiled sweetly and said, “But he hasn’t left the family?”
“I just hope,” Spawn said now to Mabel, “I made it clear what a fan I am.”
“You did, you did,” Mabel replied, “and I want to thank you.”
Reflecting afterward on the event, Mabel admitted to herself that though she probably did not deserve another favor, having been granted so many since birth—but then is fate a game that is supposed to be fair?—she really wished that, if only for the record, she could have a love affair, but only one that would not interfere with her career or involve her so deeply as to be a potential source of discomfort, or, or, or... The conditions proliferated to the point of no return: it was a ridiculous thought for an adult to entertain.
Yet, at the end of the day, when her bodyguard came to escort her home, she suddenly saw him in a new light. Not only was he assertedly virile in appearance, conforming ruggedly to her sense of male beauty, which despite her time in the big city remained provincial, he was suitably diffident in manner. True enough, he was an employee, but Mabel had never been a snob, having loved a father who had worked all his life as a meter reader for the water company.
When they reached her apartment and Jerry had performed the ritual inspection of every room for intruders—he had found one such, three months earlier, hiding under Mabel’s bed with a digital camera, broken his arm, and had him arrested—pronounced the all-clear and was about to leave, Mabel pointed to the Chinese-lacquered highboy that was the liquor cabinet and said, “Pour us both a glass of cabernet, Jerry, and come sit down here with me.”
Jerry proved to be just what the doctor ordered, to use the phrase that was still current with her mother, and Mabel amazed herself by actually falling in love with him though she came to understand that what he felt for her was at most loving kindness, which at least was genuine, and so she could tolerate his addiction to whores when pursued discreetly. For a time she even considered marrying him but decided against it when she realized that running off on assignment to Cairo or Kuala Lumpur would be unfair to their offspring and the picket fence and dog would have no point unless children went with them.
After a while, having at last broken the ice, she replaced Jerry with, one at a time, a series of other lovers. From there on, Mabel always had someone on hand, somebody who was male, no more than a decade older than she, and not noticeably overweight. She really had no further wishes.