Talk Show Tragedy With a Hollywood Ending : BABY DREAMS <i> by Maxine Paetro (Simon & Schuster: $17.95; 337 pp.) </i>

There is nothing fun about pacing the floors in the middle of the night with a wailing infant on your shoulder. Particularly if you have to go to work the next morning. Particularly if you’re a woman, unmarried, and you have one of the hottest, most glamorous jobs in New York where you must look fabulously alert in front of 10 million TV viewers.

This is precisely why Stephanie “Stevie” Weinberger decides to forgo motherhood for career despite her approaching 39th birthday. A talk show host can’t risk sleepless nights, gushy emotions or silk blouses splashed with baby vomit. Besides, her handsome tweed-and-leather lover, Philip, is vehemently against babies. They cramp his style. He’s already pen pals with his teen-age son and daughter in California; since fatherhood didn’t work the first time, why try for a second?

So life perks along for Stevie and Philip. Vacations in France, a Victorian house in the country, candlelight dinners and separate, exquisite apartments in the city. That is until Carol Wilder reappears in Stevie’s well-ordered life and a tragedy from her past comes rolling forward.

Twenty years earlier, Stevie aborted a love-child conceived with her college sweetheart, Andy. Due to some twisted circumstances, Andy and Carol married, only to divorce shortly after their daughter, Lisa, was born. Now Lisa becomes an assistant at the network and Stevie is filled with pangs of regret. This could have been her daughter.

During a tense ride in the back seat of a limo, Carol tells Stevie what she’s missing. “Having a child is an unimaginable experience. It links you to every other person who has had a child. It enlarges you, increases your capacity for love.

“I wouldn’t want to be childless in this big lonesome world.”

Stevie shrugs. Yeah, but. The job. She’s worked so hard. Then there’s Philip, the man of her dreams even though the topic of marriage is on the bottom of their discussion list, right around the topic of babies.

The more she evaluates her life, the more Stevie realizes she never stopped grieving for her lost pregnancy. When a colleague admits she doesn’t want to have the baby she’s carrying, Stevie gets livid. “It’s not like getting a tooth pulled. Dammit it! If you have an abortion, this person . . . will no longer exist.”

Her relationship with Philip becomes strained, her demeanor in front of the camera falters, and she’s told to take a week off. Unfortunately, she admits, her job allows no margin for goof-ups.

”. . . If you’re going to act stupid, you’re better off acting stupid without 10 million people watching.”

Predictably, Andy swoops in, ready to pick up with Stevie where they’d left off so long ago. And, he’d love to have a baby with her. Talk about pressure! He forecasts a “Hollywood ending,” which there is. But it’s kinda nice seeing a couple you’ve grown attached to, walk through an orchard in the countryside, “arms wound tightly around each other.” What the heck.

This is “Baby Boom,” “thirtysomething” and “Broadcast News” rolled into one. It’s hip, it’s thought-provoking, and it’s great reading all the way through.