Chapter 2

TWO HOURS AFTER Helen Marshall left, I finished writing Love of My Life Episode Number Seven Thousand, Nine Hundred and Six, printed out the pages for editing later and walked the three flights downstairs to my home.

My five-room co-op is on the Dakota’s third floor. The living room, the den and the bedroom look out onto Central Park. The kitchen window faces the building’s inner courtyard. My dining room, situated between the kitchen and the den, has no view. I’ve compensated with mural blowups of some of Ian’s extraordinary wildlife photographs. It is my shrine to him.

John Lennon lived directly below my apartment, in a place three times the size. His widow lives there still. I’ve seen her from a distance, but I’ve never met her. Lennon was murdered outside this building when I was barely eight years old, when I had no idea where life was going to take me. How did a nice girl like me come to live upstairs above the ghost of John Lennon? It’s a new twist on an old story that begins, “You see, I met this man . . .”

I was a nineteen-year-old sophomore theater major, attending Columbia on a scholarship and waiting tables weekends to cover living expenses. On the day that changed my life, a famous wildlife photographer and photo-journalist came to Columbia to give a lecture on endangered species. Ian Malcolm Angus Tyler was thirty-eight years old, not tall, but he had powerful arms. His dark hair was cut short, and he had the greenest eyes I had ever seen. He was even better looking in person than he was in the picture on the back of his book jacket.

He was an outdoors man. I was an indoors girl. He was on stage, standing at the podium, talking. I was in the fourth row of the auditorium, listening. We couldn’t take our eyes off each other. After his lecture, we introduced ourselves, and then we were together almost every minute until we were married, exactly one week later. Before we had done anything more than kiss. Before we had seen each other naked.

We were married in a civil ceremony at City Hall. Ian’s best man was a stranger he met in the hallway and lured into the judge’s chambers with a ten-dollar bill. My maid of honor was my best friend from Columbia, Nancy Cummings. Impossibly blonde, impossibly slim and altogether dazzling, Nancy was so drop-dead stunning that I was afraid when Ian met her he wouldn’t want me. “You’re crazy,” she said when I confided this to her. “We were sitting together when he gave his lecture. He never looked at anybody but you.”

Nancy chose my wedding outfit—one of her designer dresses. Ivory silk, knee length, with a tight waist, high neck and long sleeves, it was the most beautiful dress I had ever worn. We were still letting it out in the bust and shortening the skirt moments before we had to leave to go to the ceremony. Two hours after Ian and I exchanged our vows, with grains of the organic brown rice Nancy threw at us still in our hair, we were on a plane to East Africa.

To his world.

I lost my virginity on a bedroll in the soft grasses of Tanzania, beneath the Southern Cross. Ian never called me Morgan; he called me Emma, after my favorite novel, Jane Austen’s Emma. He taught me how to operate his cameras and trained me in the art of wildlife photography. He taught me how to move through the bush, holding my cameras without metal clinking against metal, without making sounds an animal wouldn’t make. He taught me how to shoot rifles and revolvers. I was his wife, his protégée and his partner in adventure. He was fearless, and I would follow him anywhere.

We had almost six years together.

Two thousand and seventy-eight days of making love, making pictures and sometimes making waves with them when we recorded devastation or the results of corruption. Then one morning in the rough terrain near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, our Land Rover blew a tire, spun out of control and crashed.

I was thrown out of the vehicle and suffered a shattered left wrist.

Ian was killed.

I came back to New York at the urging of Nancy Cummings. Although separated by half the globe, we had kept in close touch through e-mail. Still my best pal, she convinced me that the city was the finest place to repair my wrist and invited me to stay with her for as long as I needed. During the years I was in Africa, she had been busy, too—she had graduated from law school, passed the New York State bar exam and was now an associate in a large midtown law firm.

It took three surgeries and six months of intense physical therapy before I regained the use of my left hand and most of my dexterity. Experimenting, I found I could still operate my cameras, but I realized the passion I had felt for my work was missing. I could not imagine living what had been our life without Ian.

“I’m twenty-five,” I told Nancy, “an ex-wildlife photographer with not quite two years of college, and my second language is Swahili. I’ve got to find a new way to make a living, but what am I qualified to do?”

“There must be somebody who’ll appreciate that crazy résumé,” she said. “But I can’t think of who.”

The answer appeared in, of all places, TV Guide.

Nancy saw a small article, got excited, waved it in my face and started reading aloud: “The Global Broadcasting Network is looking for people with imagination and energy to be trained as soap opera head writers,” she said. As she quickly scanned the whole piece, she told me, “They don’t want writers with soap opera experience. No . . . it says they want ‘fresh minds with fresh ideas.’ They’re especially interested in hearing from novelists, journalists and playwrights. You can submit writing samples to—blah, blah, blah—here’s the network’s address.”

“I can’t—”

“Of course you can! You’re a playwright, Morgan. You wrote plays when we were at Columbia. One was produced off-Broadway.”

“Waaaaaay off-Broadway,” I said. “In New Jersey, in a forty-seat theater. Two performances, and they were free.”

“You are a produced playwright,” she insisted. “You don’t have to volunteer where. Send them the play. If they like it, they won’t care where it was produced. I’ll make copies for you at the office. What can you lose except postage?”

They did like the play, or at least liked it well enough to pay me to write a sample “document,” which they explained was six months’ worth of story for the characters in one of their daytime dramas. “We don’t refer to our dramas as ‘soaps,’ ” I was told.

My instructions were to watch Love of My Life for a month, then stop watching. I was not to turn the show on again while I was writing. Instead, I was to pick up the story and carry it forward using my own imagination. I had to bring the stories they were telling to a conclusion, and then begin my own.

Before I began writing this audition piece, someone from the network delivered four large cardboard boxes to Nancy’s apartment. They contained the personal histories of all the characters, sample story documents, sample scripts—even scale drawings for each of the one hundred and fifty-seven sets that were in various pieces in a warehouse, ready to be pulled out, assembled and dressed or re-dressed as needed.

I started creating romantic jeopardy and mystery stories for the show’s characters.

It was a lot more fun than thinking about my own life.

For the first two years of my training in this “endless novel” form of storytelling, I wrote scripts and breakdowns under the guidance of head writer Harrison Landers. When he had a disabling stroke, I was quickly promoted to “acting head writer” to maintain the continuity of the show. Then Harrison fell into a coma.

I spent every evening at his bedside, reading to him, convinced he could hear me even if he couldn’t respond. I adored Harrison. He was a sweet man, and he was more than a professional mentor to me. Sometimes I fantasized that he was the father I never had. He was in the coma for weeks; when he finally woke up, his mind was sharp, but he couldn’t speak or walk. I wanted to keep visiting, but Harrison refused to let me see him. He barred everyone except his housekeeper, his doctor and the nurses who looked after him. After a few weeks of this, it became clear to the network he would not be able to return to the show, and I was officially given the head writer job. Tommy Zenos, the show’s executive producer, told me Harrison had written a note urging I be named his successor.

Love of My Life was regularly in the top five in the ratings book when I took over. The show is now telling the stories I’ve created, and for the last year we’ve been in the top three. Success is exhilarating. And it’s terrifying. I read a quote from some famous person who said, “The trouble with success is that you’ve got to keep on being a success.” Of course, keeping our show in the top three is not the only problem I have.

Another is dealing with Damon Radford.

Damon should have his picture on the cover of every manual about sexual harassment, with a red circle around it and a red slash running diagonally across. His piggish behavior toward me has always varied from mild to outrageous, but he’s not worried I’ll bring charges against him; he’s careful to spring his traps when no one else is around. With no witnesses it would be my word against his, and as Global Broadcasting Network’s Vice President in Charge of Daytime Programming, he’s in the power position.

It would be easier if I was writing one of the daytime dramas on ABC, CBS or NBC. The heads of daytime programming on those networks are based three thousand miles away in Los Angeles. It’s my bad luck that Damon is the personal protégé of Winston Yarborough, Chairman of the Board. Mr. Yarborough wanted Damon’s office close to his own, for ease in consulting on a variety of projects, so Damon was allowed to make New York his home and travel to Los Angeles twice a month.

Ironically, post-Helen, I was glad “Damon the demon” was in New York; I needed his agreement to an important story change I’d decided to make.