17

DARLENE DIDN’T BELIEVE they were really serious. This was her third reality show—fourth, if you counted The Stand, though you probably shouldn’t—and in her experience nothing that happened in reality was serious. She’d been a contestant on Build Your Own Beauty Parlor and a survivor on The Zaniest Challenge of the Year! and would have been a fiancée on The Stand if that fellow hadn’t turned out to be all icky, and she had to say that not one of those shows had been any more serious than first love.

This one, that Doug Fairkeep kept calling The Gang’s All Here although apparently he really didn’t want to, would just be more of the same. This “gang” wasn’t going to steal anything. They were just a bunch of guys who could look like bank robbers in some B movie somewhere, that’s all.

Just look at the variety of people inside the “gang”: that was the giveaway. All of these cast-to-type characters, the ugly monster for the “muscle,” the sharpie with the line of patter, the gloomy mastermind, the testy driver, and the innocent youth, that last one so the audience would be able to see it all through his eyes. Everything but a black guy, so maybe you didn’t need a black guy any more.

One good thing about the arrival of the “gang” at Doug’s apartment was that it opened Darlene’s options considerably. She had just reached the point where she’d have to decide if she would go to bed with Doug (a) now, (b) indefinitely later, or (c) never, when circumstances suddenly changed and off she could go for an evening’s mixer with the fellas.

Darlene Looper was a product of North Flatte, Nebraska, a town that had had its peak of population and importance in the 1870s, after the railroad arrived and before the drought arrived. The railroad turned out to be a sometime thing, but the drought was the natural condition of the Great Plains, it being a kind of a joke on the European settlers that they got there in the middle of a rare rainy streak.

All the time Darlene was growing up, North Flatte was getting smaller, until there was nobody left who cared enough to correct the POP. sign on the edge of town, which would apparently read 1,247 forever. (In truth, the comma had moved out a long time ago.)

When your town is too small for a movie theater and your combined regional high school is an hour away by bus and too small to have a football team—much less anybody to play against—you are a deprived teenager, and there wasn’t a teenager in town who didn’t know it and didn’t dream of the day when the Trailways could take them away to anywhere in the world that wasn’t N. Flatte, Neb.

The first place the Trailways took Darlene was St. Louis, where she got a waitress job at a diner, lost her virginity, had an abortion, and learned how to avoid that sort of thing in the future, by which she didn’t mean abstinence. The waitress job gave her money and independence and leisure to go to the movies a lot, which was already an improvement over North Flatte, where the choices had been television or comic books, and not much of either. The movies taught her that a girl with looks and self-confidence and native wit could do well for herself, at least for a few years, as an actress, and so the Trailways next deposited her in LA.

Where she lucked into an apartment-mate named Bette Betje, a few years older than herself and trying her hand at the same racket, who gave Darlene some invaluable advice. Never do porn; once you enter that ghetto, even the Pope couldn’t get you out. Make sure there are never any naked photos of you anywhere. Never screw more than one man on any job location. Don’t gamble on anything, don’t get a weird haircut, and don’t fall in love.

Following Bette’s rules and her own sense of self-preservation, Darlene did moderately well in LA. She was always going to be soft-bodied, which would prove a problem someday but for now meant she could play younger than herself. At twenty-three, she could still audition for high school roles in commercials and infomercials and lesser horror films, and occasionally get one. Then came reality.

Reality was a revelation to Darlene. It seemed to her it must be very like the way the soap operas used to be, when they were the hottest thing around. Sure you’re all professionals, but nevertheless you’re getting together every day like kids in a barn to put on a show. It’s open-ended, it’s seat-of-the-pants, and it’s fun.

It also, through The Zaniest Challenge of the Year!, brought her to New York and a new roommate, Lauren Hatch, an investigative reporter wannabe, currently a gofer for an online gossip columnist. A skinny, sharp-featured laser-eyed workaholic, Lauren was Darlene’s age but appeared to have no interest in sex of any kind unless it concerned other people and could be spread on the Slopp Report.

The Stand was supposed to have been Darlene’s big break, playing a real-life bride on prime-time television, known and loved by the whole world. Doug had explained to her that the marriage would have to be a legal one, but the fix was in and an annulment would be the easiest thing in the world. All she had to do was swear in court she hadn’t meant it when she said, “I do,” which would be the truth, and there she’d be, single again, with an already guaranteed exclusive on the Slopp Report (a four-hour exclusive) in which she would explain that marriage wasn’t for her, she was wedded to her career.

Well, that hadn’t happened, entirely because Kirby Finch was something that had never been seen in North Flatte, Nebraska, at least not by Darlene, so far as she knew. He was entirely unnatural, Kirby was, and Darlene considered herself well out of it, particularly with the “gang” already in place to give her another chance of a lifetime.

Of course, if she were to hook up with the “gang,” she’d have to hook up with one particular member of it. Group sex could be implied in the world of reality, but not confirmed. Besides, Darlene, who hadn’t tried it, didn’t think she’d like it.

So it kind of came down to the kid and the sharpie, and it wasn’t an easy decision. They were very different, but both were fun, both were quick-witted, both could look appropriate as her escort; at an awards dinner, say.

The question was, which would be right for her, her needs, her future, her image. There was a lot to be said for both of them. Fortunately, she didn’t have to decide right away.

From Doug’s place they walked, not very far, to a bar/restaurant on West Fifty-seventh Street called Armweary’s, a funky dark wood place, pretty full for a Monday night, with waiters who appeared to be waiters and not actors between gigs. The place was loud, but not too loud to hear the people at your table, and Darlene quickly noticed that, while everybody had a lot to say, nobody had anything at all to say about the show they were going to be on or the “robbery” they were going to pretend to commit. All of that seemed to be off-limits somehow, so, even though there was a lot about this crowd and their series she would love to know, she was smart enough not to push the envelope.

They all chipped in to buy her dinner, which was sweet. Then it was time to go, and out on the sidewalk, while she was preparing herself to say it had been a wonderful evening but she was really tired right now, all the others were telling one another so long and planning when they would meet again.

The kid did finally turn to her and say, “How do you get home?”

“Oh, I just walk up to Seventy-sixth Street,” she said. “It’s nothing, I do it all the time.”

“Oh, okay,” he said, and everybody took off, in various directions.

Walking up Broadway, Darlene found herself brooding over the fact that not one of them had even tried to come home with her. She hadn’t wanted any of them to, but still.