Bernie’s face flushed scarlet, he was close to hyperventilating, and he was shaking. Mary Lisa knew he was feeling exactly what she’d felt. She hugged him. “You’re wonderful, Bernie, congratulations-but hurry, you’ve got one minute before they pull the plug on all the TV sets in the world.”

Bernie made it to the stage in twenty seconds, accepted the Emmy after hugging Juliet Mills for a really long time (since he’d been in love with her for twenty years), accepted the Emmy from Steve Burton, saw the furiously blinking red light, and said into the microphone, “I’ve got the greatest group of writers in the universe, the most wonderful actors and actresses, and of course there are the countless experts who-” The red light blinked faster. “Thank you all from the bottom of my-”

To those watching the Emmys on TV, no one really complained about being cut off since they knew what his final word was. But they’d have been wrong. The audience in the Kodak Theater heard “Thank you from the bottom of my tap-dancing feet.” And when they cut away to commercial, Bernie said, “This is for both Mary Lisa and me”-and he did a little jig.

Malibu, California

Mary Lisa was minding her own business, wearing big Audrey Hepburn sunglasses that covered most of her face, tatty plumber jeans that would have showed off a lot of stomach if she hadn’t been wearing an equally tatty oversize Packers sweatshirt that pooled around her butt, and high-top sneakers. A Yankees baseball cap sat low on her head, her hair, too distinctive, as red as a violent sunset over the ocean, stuffed under the cap, unseen.

She was fretting over the upcoming plotline: Should Sunday really go that far over the line to actually sleep with her weak, treacherous half sister’s sleazy husband? Tit for tat-her half sister, Susan, had gone over the line, hiring that bozo to terrorize Sunday, something Sunday knew her mother was actually behind, but the two of them were like evil twins-but still, actually sleep with Damian? That was the best revenge they could come up with?

She immediately took back that stupid question. In the world of soaps there were no lines the writers wouldn’t cross. Well, maybe still a couple. On Y &R they’d cut off a budding interracial romance, and on another soap-she couldn’t remember which one-a mother and son very nearly slept together, barely avoiding a kinky Oedipus deal. Hmm, maybe they’d flinch too at a relationship between athletic Nurse Markham, at Community Hospital, and her rescue Saint Bernard. Not a good visual. She stopped, burst out laughing.

Then she realized another reason she didn’t want her character, Sunday, to sleep with her half sister’s husband, maybe the real one. It was a case of art imitating life and it gave her indigestion. It had been three years since her sister Monica had married Mary Lisa’s ex-fiancé, Mark Bridges, and left her hollowed out with bone-deep humiliation, and a goodly dollop of rage. What a fool she’d been. At least it had been more than a year now since she’d wanted to smash Mark’s face.

Art imitating life, she thought again, and crossed the road between the Malibu Library, one of her favorite places in Malibu, where the staff was efficient, friendly, and still talked about how Robert Downey Jr. had been hauled into the court right next door in shackles. It was the corner building in the Malibu Civic Center.

Down the road a bit, across Civic Center Way, was the Malibu Country Mart, one of three small shopping centers in Malibu, all nearly within spitting distance of each other. It was only a block from Highway 1, or the Pacific Coast Highway, or simply PCH, as she’d learned to call it when she’d moved to the Colony in Malibu a year and a half before. She loved Malibu, not really a town, she’d tell visiting out-of-towners, but it was quite a place, loaded with movie stars and just plain rich folk who wanted privacy, a precious commodity, and they found it here because, she’d learned, most long-timers who worked here in Star Mecca didn’t really care if you were Jennifer Lopez or Godzilla.

Malibu started out as a skinny strip of highway set between high bluffs on one side and the ocean on the other, until the cliffs receded making room for some scattered strip stores, inns on the water, lots of eateries, from Chinese to fat-heavy beach cuisine, the library and city hall, a small sheriff ’s station, and not much else except beautiful homes, outrageous sports cars, and truckloads of money. Besides the local high school, Malibu was home to Pepperdine University, just to the north, which had expanded to its current size in the early 1970s.

It was in the mid eighties today, the hazy sun scorching gold overhead. She’d walked to the library to check out the newest Harry Potter, and had it tucked in her huge tote.

Suddenly she saw a man duck into the shaded doorway of a small bagel shop-a paparazzo, a blight on the landscape, his camera at the ready. The paparazzi were everywhere, even in lovely private Malibu, the jerks. She’d bet the Baby Ruth in her tote it was Poker Hodges, her nemesis for years now. She called him Puker, ever since he’d caught her on film squeezing a roll of toilet paper at a local 24/7 six months ago and her photo had appeared in the Star the next week with some dumb caption that she thankfully couldn’t remember. That must have appealed to his perverted brain because she was now his main target. He’d tracked and stalked her to the extent that she’d managed to get a restraining order to keep him at least one hundred feet away from her. That had helped, up to a point, but he was still there, whenever she happened to look up. Was that bagel doorway one hundred feet away? No, she’d bet it was no more than eighty feet. She knew he was taking photos of her with a telephoto lens. But who cared? Who would publish them if no one could recognize who she was? And thus her cap and huge sunglasses. She ducked into Luther’s Army Salvage, caught by the sight of army combat boots piled high in a barrel. She looked through them but didn’t find her size. Then she saw the pile of pea green knit sleeveless T-shirts, perfect for workouts and running on the beach. None of the three older guys in the store gave her a second look. She bought three identical pea green T-shirts, paid cash, pulled one on in a cramped dressing room, and slipped out the side door, then ran the block to PCH. She looked back, didn’t see him. She turned right and ran at a steady pace on the side of the highway, her tote banging against her side. When she reached Webb Way, she paused at the red light, then charged across just as the light was changing, the traffic on PCH still idled. All she had to do was keep up a nice fast pace until she reached the kiosk at the entrance of the Colony just three blocks away.

No sooner had she gained the other side of Webb Way, right next to the Malibu Plaza, when she ran smack into an old woman pushing a grocery cart piled high with brightly colored afghans, all neatly folded. She apologized profusely, saw the woman eyeing her pea green T-shirt, reached into her store bag and pulled out another one. She thought the woman would kiss her, but she only nodded and gave her a stingy smile. Mary Lisa looked back to see the woman unbuttoning her ancient red blouse with its Peter Pan collar. She really didn’t want to see the woman wear the T-shirt, she really didn’t, not weighing two hundred plus pounds.

Mary Lisa looked around and didn’t see Puker. Only another couple of blocks to go and she’d be safely through the gates into the sanctuary of the Colony. She began whistling, feeling quite fine, and found herself thinking again about where the writers were heading with the plot. She’d cornered head writer Bernie Barlow yesterday morning. “Listen, Bernie, Sunday doesn’t even like Damian. She knows he’s a jerk and a sleaze, that he’s a fake, she knows he married her half sister for her money, knows he’d like to finagle his way into her mother’s company. There’s no way Sunday would ever sleep with him, no matter the provocation.”