Free Soap Opera Slaughters by Marvin Kaye

head I cradled was so vastly different from Roberta Jennett, the fiercely independent woman she played on “Riverday.”
    As the hush of twilight muffled the city, I began to doze, too. Bits of phrases, scraps of logic and music lulled me as the faint flush of morning crept through the thin curtains and warmed my closed eyelids.
    The alarm was as shrill and startling as if someone had splashed ice water on me, cubes and all. I bolted straight up as Lara reached over and shut off the clock.
    Every new romance has tricky moments when the bond so recently formed either holds fast or begins to fray. We were facing our first crucial test: waking up together, feeling oddly shy and vulnerable. There was such an equivocal expression on Lara’s that I suddenly was afraid to say or do anything, lest it inadvertently hurt her. She tried to smile, but her eyes glistened, and she pulled the covers to her chin with an after-the-fact modesty that was both poignant and endearing.
    No longer tongue-tied, I put my hand reassuringly over hers. “Lainie?”
    “What?” she whispered.
    “Remember what I said last night? About love?”
    Lara nodded, eyes wide with uncertainty. “The similarity’s growing,” I said. First she smiled.
    We had to hurry. I did what I could to make myself presentable, but without fresh clothing or toiletry articles, it was a haphazard job. Lara loaned me the razor she used on her legs, and I managed to shave without cutting myself more than one or two thousand times, but at least there was styptic.
    The studio limo picked us up in front of the building Lara lived in. The driver followed West End all the way down to Fifty-third. It was so early, there was hardly any traffic. We were the only passengers, a minor mercy, considering that my metabolism wasn’t yet aware I was supposed to be awake.
    The car pulled up in front of an ugly gray concrete monolith on the north side of Fifty-third The Hudson glinting in the distance was the only sparkling sight in an otherwise dingy neighborhood. Ramshackle hovels squeezing together on the south side of the street were crowded by greasy warehouses and garages. I wouldn’t walk there at night, and even broad daylight didn’t much appeal to me.
    As we disembarked, a fat young man with a camera slung round his neck hurried over to us and got Lara’s permission to photograph the two of us together. I was stunned that even the most rabid fan would hang around that forbidding block so early in the morning. Lara signed his autograph book, then handed it to me with a wink. I scribbled in it, too, figuring, what the hell, he probably had no idea who Tom Mason was.
    Lara steered me to the front entrance of the squat network building. It resembled a stone fortress or prison: grim, bleak, few windows and all of them streaked with grime.
    “Once,” Lara told me, “this was the biggest production facility in the East. Some of the ‘golden age’ dramatic series were broadcast from here. Then TV went west, and this became the biggest white elephant in the East—at least until WBS bought it”
    “And now the only things they use this gothic horror for are ‘Riverday’ and the news?”
    “And for storage and general administrative space. Maybe as a partial tax writeoff, I don’t know—though the revenues they get for ‘Riverday’ are astronomical.”
    I opened the lobby door. We entered a commonplace reception area devoid of any furniture other than one long bench and a desk behind which sat a burly, red-faced security guard in his late twenties. Lara signed a list he pushed across his desk, and motioned for me to do the same.
    Taking back the list, the guard asked me for identification. As I pulled out my driver’s license, he flipped through a separate sheaf of papers but was unable to find my name anywhere.
    I explained that I’d been invited by Florence McKinley. He shook his head and shrugged apologetically.
    “I’m sorry, but I’ve got nothing here to clear