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woman doing serious work. The makeup person was on her side, too: eyeshadow that seemed heavy in the flesh came across with just enough emphasis on the screen. The one attribute she could not see on the monitor, slightly off to the side, was what her favorite reviewer said was unique to Viveca Farr: a direct look into the camera with cool deep-blue eyes that riveted the viewer.
    Nodding curtly to the stage manager, she told the prompter operator,“From the top,” and started to run through her lines. She came to a word she didn’t like in a line about the President’s appearance that evening: “The President praised her indomitable will …” She knew she would fluff “indomitable.”
    “Give me another word for ‘indomitable,’ ” she told the producer in the booth.
    Through her earphones, she could hear the wiseguy’s voice: “You pronounced it perfectly, Viveca, and that’s the word the President used.”
    “Let’s not argue. I want another word, if you know one.”
    “How’s ‘indefatigable’?” She could hear the snickering in the booth and on the set.
    “I want another word or I want another producer,” she snapped. “Get professional.” She could see her lip glistening in the monitor, and motioned for makeup. “Who writes this stuff, anyway?”
    “Sometimes the on-air reporters have been known to write their own news,” the producer said sweetly. That stung; Viveca knew she could not write well and resented the fact that everybody else knew it. Her talent for communication was oral and visual, not bound to a word processor. A stagehand attaching the microphone to her blouse fumbled and brushed the lapel of her jacket; she recoiled, hating to be touched by the stage help, and would have done it herself but for the union rules. Her assistant, placing the water glass under the table out of camera range, picked up the newscaster’s nervousness and spilled some. “Mop it up, for crissake!” Viveca hissed at her, then, “Never mind, wasn’t your fault,” because she did not want the reputation of driving her aides to tears.
    The stage manager languidly held up four fingers. “I like to hear it,” she said, because the guy sometimes held his hand in such a way as to make the finger count unreadable. He dutifully said, “Four minutes to air,” adding, “Actually two to first commercial, three to second commercial, three-fifty to local promo,” to annoy her. This was the guy who had saddled her with the sobriquet “Ice Maiden”; better that than the opposite reputation.
    She picked up the reading copy, shuffled the pages together, tapped them on the table to straighten out the tops, and then muddled them up again. That’s what the pages were for; not to be read but to be held, to be looked at in a pretense that no prompter was causing the scriptto be crawled on a screen directly in front of the camera, and finally to be gathered up in a pretense of tidiness to convey an illusion of finality at the end of the telecast. Show business. It galled her how the news types made much of their profound knowledge of what they were reading even as they played the game of make-believe, holding the pages of a script never meant to be read.
    Her hairdresser came on for the final touch-up with spray and comb. Viveca was glad she had put having her own hairdresser into her contract, along with her own makeup person, even though her television agent said it looked un-newswomanlike. That agent wouldn’t like her going to Matthew McFarland to help her create a book, either, but she wanted the best literary rep around to handle her debut in the bookstores. Her publicist had told her that the slob sitting on his spine in Matt’s reception room was some big-name print journalist, made to cool his heels while her potential best-seller was being discussed; Viveca liked that.
    A book was a ticket to seriousness; a well-received book said you mattered. Her mentor back in Nashville used to say the world was