“Not quite.” Jane inched forward on her chair. “I see it this way, David: people are tired of hearing about the extraordinary. They don’t watch television for edification, they watch it to feel better about themselves. How else do you explain talk shows and court TV and the cop things with the pathetic bare-chested junkies handcuffed and shoved into cruisers?”

Desmond could hear Jane turning the crank on her peculiar mediocrity argument. He disagreed with the small portion of this argument he understood and saw it as a highly unlikely selling point. And right now, sitting across from David, watching the paper clip in his hand and feeling sweat trickling down his back, he felt very much like a salesman. “We’re talking about geniuses of a different sort,” Desmond said. “We’re talking about artists whose genius is found in the honesty of their art. People are turning to real-life talk and court shows, as Jane said, because it’s honest, even if it is ugly. So much mass-produced, commercially viable art is synthetic and dishonest, you can’t be sure of a point of view or a true emotion. Pauline Anderton, the singer Jane just mentioned, wasn’t a perfect performer, but when you listen to her, you hear something true.”

“Even if it is ugly,” Jane added.

“And these are the people we’ll be profiling,” Desmond added. “The artists of truth.”

David was fiddling with the paper clip, and Desmond could sense this meeting would be over in another ten minutes, at best. Desmond gave a quick summary of Pauline Anderton’s career, making note of a few of the highlights he found more interesting and then, when he sensed that David wasn’t quite convinced, dragging out the old standbys of alcoholism, her husband’s cancer, and a mild gambling addiction.

“And this would tie in with Desmond’s upcoming book,” Jane said, “which we could easily use for fund-raising purposes.”

David tossed down the paper clip, a sure sign that he’d heard enough. “I see what you’re getting at here,” David said, “but here’s the problem: we can’t do a bio series on people whose life stories are told every other week on Lifetime, but we also can’t do a series on some drunken housewife with a ten-minute career. Even if her story is interesting, who’s going to turn on the show to bother to find out?”

“You’re not seeing the potential in this,” Jane said. “You do promos, you get Desmond on some radio shows to talk about her, make a teaser showing her doing a header off the stage. People will be riveted.”

“Still, they never heard of her.”