Private Scandals

is a little favor you could do for me.”
    “Of course.”
    “Would you make reservations for dinner for me tonight, at La Fontaine, seven-thirty, for two? I simply don’t have time to deal with it myself, and I forgot to tell my secretary to handle it.”
    “No problem.” Deanna pulled a pad out of her pocket to make a note.
    “You’re a treasure, Deanna.” Angela stood then to take a final check of her pale blue suit in a cheval glass. “What do you think of this color? It’s not too washed-out, is it?”
    Because she knew that Angela fretted over every detail of the show, from research to the proper footwear, Deanna took time for a serious study. The soft drape of the fabric suited Angela’s compact, curvy figure beautifully. “Coolly feminine.”
    The tension in Angela’s shoulders unknotted. “Perfect, then. Are you staying for the taping?”
    “I can’t. I still have copy to write for Midday. ”
    “Oh.” The annoyance surfaced, but only briefly. “I hope helping me out hasn’t put you behind.”
    “There are twenty-four hours in the day,” Deanna said. “I like to use all of them. Now, I’d better get out of your way.”
    “ ‘Bye, honey.”
    Deanna shut the door behind her. Everyone in the building knew that Angela insisted on having the last ten minutes before she took the stage to herself. Everyone assumed she used that time to go over her notes. That was nonsense, of course. She was completely prepared. But she preferred that they think of her brushing up on her information. Or even that they imagine her taking a quick nip from the bottle of brandy she kept in her dressing table.
    Not that she would touch the brandy. The need to keep it there, just within reach, terrified as much as it comforted.
    She preferred they believe anything, as long as they didn’t know the truth.
    Angela Perkins spent those last solitary moments before each taping in a trembling cycle of panic. She, a woman who exuded an image of supreme self-confidence; she, a woman who had interviewed presidents, royalty, murderers and millionaires, succumbed, as she always did, to a vicious, violent attack of stage fright.
    Hundreds of hours of therapy had done nothing to alleviate the shuddering, the sweating, the nausea. Helpless against it, she collapsed in her chair, drawing herself in. The mirrorreflected her in triplicate, the polished woman, perfectly groomed, immaculately presented. Eyes glazed with the terror of self-discovery.
    Angela pressed her hands to her temples and rode out the screaming roller coaster of fear. Today she would slip, and they would hear the backwoods of Arkansas in her voice. They would see the girl who had been unloved and unwanted by a mother who had preferred the flickering images on the pitted screen of the tiny Philco to her own flesh and blood. The girl who had wanted attention so badly, so desperately, she had imagined herself inside that television so that her mother would focus those vague, drunken eyes just once, and look at her.
    They would see the girl in the secondhand clothes and ill-fitting shoes who had studied so hard to make average grades.
    They would see that she was nothing, no one, a fraud who had bluffed her way into television the same way her father had bluffed his way into an inside straight.
    And they would laugh at her.
    Or worse, turn her off.
    The knock on the door made her flinch.
    “We’re set, Angela.”
    She took a deep breath, then another. “On my way.” Her voice was perfectly normal. She was a master at pretense. For a few seconds longer, she stared at her reflection, watching the panic fade from her own eyes.
    She wouldn’t fail. She would never be laughed at. She would never be ignored again. And no one would see anything she didn’t allow them to see. She rose, walked out of her dressing room, down the corridor.
    She had yet to see her guest and continued past the green room without a blink. She never spoke to a guest before the tape was rolling.
    Her producer was warming up the studio audience. There was a hum of excitement from those fortunate enough to have secured tickets to the taping. Marcie, tottering in four-inch heels, rushed up for a last-minute check on hair andmakeup. A researcher passed Angela a few more cards. Angela spoke to neither of them.
    When she walked onstage, the hum burst open into a full-throttle cheer.
    “Good morning.” Angela took her chair and let the applause wash over her while she was miked. “I hope