Chapter 16
AFTER WE LEFT the coffee shop, Phoenix and Flynn dropped me back at the Dakota. I didn’t stop at my apartment; instead I took the stairs directly up to the sixth floor. I admit I use work the way other people use drink or drugs. I take my mind off my own troubles by creating havoc in the lives of my characters.
The phone was ringing as I unlocked the door.
I hurried inside, dropped my handbag and snatched up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Morgan? It’s Penny Cavanaugh. Remember? Matt’s nutty Aunt Penny?”
“This is a nice surprise.” I sat down and let out a deep sigh. “Truthfully, Penny, you’re the only nice surprise I’ve had today.”
“That’s too bad. When I have a day I’d like to rip out of the calendar, I cook. Actually, I do that when I’ve had a good day, too.”
“I can roast things over a fire in the ground, but the only thing I know how to make indoors, on a stove, is scrambled eggs.”
“I’d like to ask you to come over for dinner tonight, but Matt’s acting like a bear. He growled that I can’t invite you because you’re a suspect in his murder investigation.”
“He’s barred me from your house?” I managed to keep my voice level, but I was gripping the receiver the way I would like to have been gripping Detective Phoenix’s neck.
“I don’t think you killed that man, Morgan. But if you did, I know you must have had a good reason.”
I wished Penny Cavanaugh was my aunt. I needed a loyal Aunt Penny more than Matt Phoenix did. “Penny, I have an idea. I’ll take you out to dinner at a restaurant. The good detective didn’t say you and I couldn’t go out together, did he?”
“No, he didn’t think to close that loophole,” she said. There was a note of sly humor in her voice.
“How about tonight?” I said.
“Tonight is fine. Matt can make his own dinner. He won’t like it, but that’ll teach him not to act like my father.”
“Where would you like to go?”
“I read about a restaurant up on Ninety-Sixth and Broadway,” she said. “It’s a Cuban place. They say the food is great.”
“Cuban sounds perfect.”
We agreed we’d meet at seven-thirty, and hung up.
For the next six hours, unless Detective Phoenix decided to break down the door and arrest me, I was going to work on a new love story for the character of Jillian. Harrison Landers cast the actress who plays Jillian six years ago, when she was just fifteen. The audience had watched her develop into an ethereal beauty. Jillian’s last story line culminated in her barely escaping death at the hands of a maniac. After all of that drama, I rested the character for a while. Now enough time had passed for her to be in one of the front burner stories again.
She was perfect for the story of love and jeopardy I had in mind.
I turned on the computer and began to outline the scene in which shy, frightened young Jillian Lowell meets Gareth Anthony, the older mystery man who will become “the love of her life.”
By six o’clock I had outlined some three months’ worth of scenes.
Things would not go smoothly for Jillian and Gareth. Both would first deny and then resist their attraction to one another. Jillian was terrified of making another mistake; the last man she trusted, the sweet-faced but homicidal Michael, had almost killed her. Gareth did not want to fall in love with Jillian, because he was hiding a tormenting and dangerous secret from his past. The outline would be filled in with dialogue by the scriptwriters I’d assign, and the resulting scenes folded into episodes that would play out over the next several months.
As a general rule, breakdowns—outlines of episodes—are done six weeks in advance of air. Scripts are written four weeks in advance (to give me time to do any rewriting that may be necessary) and episodes are taped two weeks before the air-date. Actors get their scripts a day or two before they are scheduled to work.
In hour-long daytime dramas, there are usually three main stories going at once, involving characters that span a range of ages. Something for everybody in the audience is the theory. One story would be in the early stages of its development, another further along, and the third story would be intensifying toward one of its dramatic peaks.
We plan those peaks to occur during November, February and May.
These are the months when all of the shows on television, whether entertainment or news, throw maximum excitement at the audience in order to attract the highest possible number of viewers. The higher the ratings, the more the networks and the local stations can charge advertisers for commercials, because commercial time is sold to advertisers based on the number of viewers each program attracts during these months.
If planning stories according to the calendar isn’t complicated enough, we also have to design episodes to honor contractual obligations to the actors. That means if an actor is being paid on the basis of three performances a week, the head writer has to be sure that the actor is used that often; otherwise money is being wasted.
Fortunately for us writers, honoring actor contracts doesn’t mean that the actor has to appear rigidly each week on this schedule. The total episodes for which he is paid are calculated over a thirteen-week cycle, which makes the planning of story episodes a little easier. As Harrison Landers explained it to me, the job of a daytime drama’s head writer is part creativity and part geometry.
I had another hour before it would be time to leave to meet Penny.
I wanted to spend it getting Jillian and Gareth to let down their defenses and admit how they feel about each other. In my outline, Jillian had arrived at Gareth’s office late at night, unexpectedly, to deliver a gift she had made as a surprise for him. But Jillian is the one who gets the surprise when, hearing her behind him, Gareth reflexively whirls around and levels a Glock 19 pistol at her:
The expression of shock, of horror, on Jillian’s face stabs Gareth in the heart. He pulls her into his arms, caresses her, murmurs that he is sorry, he didn’t realize she was there, that when he heard someone behind him his old Marine training just took over.
Jillian tells Gareth to stop lying to her. What she just saw was not his old Marine training. It’s time he told her the truth. She trusts him, why won’t he trust her?
All right, he will tell her the truth, but not here. Gareth puts the pistol in the pocket of his jacket, closes his safe and replaces the panel that conceals the door to the secret room. As they are leaving the office, Gareth brushes against a large, heavily wrapped and padded object. What is it?
Jillian forgot; that’s the reason she’s here in Gareth’s office tonight. It’s a surprise and she wanted to hang it on the wall before he returned.
Gareth tears open the wrapping paper to find an extraordinary, poster-sized photograph that Jillian took of one of Gareth’s favorite rare stamps, the beautiful 1882 one-cent Dolly Madison. Jillian’s had it enlarged and framed like a painting.
Gareth is more than pleased; he’s touched at what Jillian did for him. What was his response? He nearly shot her. He can’t bear that thought. He takes her hand and promises that he will tell her everything. He’ll confide in her where they met, on the grounds of his partially restored imported castle outside of town.
Alone together in the quiet beauty of the park-like setting, Gareth tells Jillian the truth about himself. Most of it. He tells her about The Club, and about the fact that he was an espionage agent from his final year at the Sorbonne until shortly before he came to Greendale, to begin a new life.
Although he gives her no details that could endanger anyone else, he tells her that he’s been called back into service for one last important assignment, one that he cannot refuse. He does not tell her why he cannot refuse, that he is being forced back into that dark world by blackmail, the same way he forced his superior to let him out of it.
He tells Jillian that he has now put his life in her hands by telling her this, and that her own life will be in danger if anyone ever discovers what she knows. Her protection, and his, depends upon Jillian’s ability to keep silent.
Can she do that? Can she keep Gareth’s secret no matter what anyone in her family, or in town, might say about him? Can she hold her tongue and keep her head no matter how angry she may become at what she feels are unfair comments about Gareth? Does she realize that she is in love with a man she cannot defend, because to do so would endanger his life?
Gareth tells Jillian that the best thing she could do for herself would be to leave him now. Jillian should go and never look back. Gareth will leave Greendale; she need never see him again. All she has to do is say the word.
Jillian touches his face with one soft hand.
If that speech is a proposal of marriage, she whispers, then her answer is “yes.”
For a moment, Gareth is speechless. Then he smiles at her and replies that such a question, phrased in that way and posed to a gentleman, can have only one answer. Gareth tells Jillian that he wants her in his life more than he has ever wanted anyone. He wants her formally, legally, conventionally and forever. But would she consider marrying in secret, and keeping their marriage a secret until it is safe to go public with their relationship? It will mean eloping, without family, with none of the beautiful trappings that Jillian deserves to have on her wedding day. Is Jillian sure that marrying Gareth is what she wants to do, really, under these difficult circumstances?
Yes, she is sure.
Gareth tells her that he will find a place where a couple can marry without anyone knowing. However, there is one formality he must take care of before he can make those plans.
What is that?
Gareth takes one of her hands in both of his. Will Miss Lowell do Mr. Anthony the great honor of becoming his wife some forty-eight hours from now? Yes, she will. And they kiss. And kiss . . .
God, I love this stuff!
At six-thirty I had to shut down the computer, because I was planning to walk to the Cuban restaurant. Two long blocks west to Broadway and then twenty-four blocks of normal length north would work out the kinks in my legs and back that came from sitting and writing for hours.