“Look at you.”
Benjamin’s desolation rose like nausea in her throat, but she found a way to reduce it to vapor. She studied herself.
“I put it on. I take it off.”
SHE walked into the Prospect like a woman, not a man. Long strides, yes, but different, her hips swaying slightly under the slacks, as if her center of gravity had shifted to her gut, every movement coming from her middle, not her extremities, her brother silent, moody.
“Benny?” the receptionist asked. That name as a question repeated as she moved up the spine, through the reporters’ room, past all the desks, to Mac’s office, from which Jane heard a wailing.
She opened the door to see Sweetie sobbing into Mac’s chest, his arms around her, uneasy, a guy who doesn’t know how to comfort a girl. Jane understood.
“Get out, freak,” Mac said when Jane stepped in front of them in her new form. He took impressively little time to recognize her. Sweetie had talked.
“This is the real . . .”
“You heard me.”
“I’m a girl. I was lying before.”
“Well, no kidding. When have you ever not been lying?”
“I had no choice.”
“Everything’s a choice!” Sweetie screamed, her face wet. “Every minute’s a choice!”
“I had to work, Mac. Would you have hired me as a girl?”
“Girls work here.”
“Would you have hired me as a copy boy if I were a girl?”
“Don’t be idiotic.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“Well, let’s call Darwin, let him know his theory’s working.”
“This is me. I’m not Benny.”
You are.
“Whoever you are, go. Again. Before I call the cops. Do you smell the smoke from the darkroom you destroyed? Burning up this place.”
“I have the evidence.”
“Get out.”
“This is different.”
Sweetie swung all the way around and screamed in Jane’s face. “You shot my papa! You and your trash mother!”
“What do you think you know, Sweetie? You were talking to Uno all this time, weren’t you? We’ve never had a secret.”
“You lied to me. I heard you telling it to Rivka. My papa didn’t kill your daddy.”
“Tried to. Or maybe me. You were talking to Uno all along, weren’t you? Weren’t you?”
Mac interrupted. “Stop it, Hopper.”
Sweetie glowered. “We’re calling the cops. Telling them we’ve got you.”
Mac wrapped her up in his arms. “Sweetie, honey, stop. Quiet.”
“Quiet? Are you quieting me?” Her round lips stretched out, thin, taut, her nostrils flaring, her teeth bared. “After all the tending . . . I have shown you all the tenderness . . . all the love . . . left everything . . . and now you quiet . . . my . . . feelings?”
“Give, give, give,” Jane interrupted. “Ain’t there some taking going on there too?”
“What?” Sweetie looked shocked, as if she hadn’t considered she ever got anything herself in one of those transactions. “No! You listen to me, Mac! That is not it!”
Mac enclosed her in his arms, like you do with a baby in a tantrum, the smart thing to do, but his face was miserable. Jane saw he didn’t want to be bound by her. Oppie said Mac would tire of her, and this was what he meant. He might commit to a woman, but it wasn’t going to be Sweetie. She wasn’t so wonderful when you got used to her. A small part of Jane even felt hurt for her, disappointed in Mac. Sweetie was a kind of sister to her now. The sister to her sister. But that was just a small part of what she felt.
“Lovie,” Mac said, rubbing Sweetie’s back while Jane stood outside their orbit. “Sit, let me work this out.” And he settled her into the couch before yelling, “Jorge!”
The door opened instantly—he must have been just outside listening.
“Bring her something.” Though Jorge was not the sort of person who fetched things, this was not the job for a copy boy.
He returned and handed a hot cup to Sweetie, the smell of whiskey and coffee filling the room. She took the cup and set it down to blow her nose and wipe her face, before beginning to drink between sobs.
Jane poured the ledgers out of her bag and onto Mac’s desktop, knocking off a jar of pencils.
Mac shoved them all off the desk onto the floor to join the pencils.
“Just let me . . .”
“Just let you what? Humiliate me again? Put the paper further at risk? I got teams of lawyers working on your last extravaganza. I got construction guys recreating operations, just so we can put out a paper. Mr. Mercer—I don’t know what he’s going to do.” Even his forearms and hands looked hot.
“Listen, this story—all of this—is complicated.”
“No kidding?”
“She tried to bribe me when I was getting these account books. I hurt her.”
“What the hell!”
“Self-defense. And Sweetie’s right. Her papa’s hurt.” She’d already decided but still had to do it. “I shot him, getting my mother and sister out of there. Uno was Wright’s photo pimp, helped her cheat, steal . . . all that. He’s the one who attacked Vee.”
“No!” Sweetie yelled.
Mac said, “Slow down.”
“You haven’t any heart at all, Jane!”
“I have all the evidence now. This scheme of theirs, to make special pictures, sensational pictures, so much more moving than everybody else’s because they were faked. He got paid well because she got the applause, we got pictures that sell papers.”
“Of course they do! But we didn’t know . . .” Mac said.
“I’m not saying we knew. I’m saying this is part of the story. Uno did it for the money. But not Wright. I think she just wanted to make the best pictures. Have the biggest impact. Be the best.”
She took the negative of the dying man out of her pocket again and laid it on Mac’s desk, and he pulled it toward him, looking down.
“How’d you get it?”
“When I went to get the Family picture, I . . . I went into the darkroom looking for it, and I found this.”
“And you took it?” Jorge said. “Took it?”
“I did take it. Yes, I did. Because that’s what I had to do.”
“This just gets better.”
He held the picture close up to his eyes and then stretched his arm out, looking at it from a distance and then close up again.
“Stole it. Broke into Wright’s darkroom and stole it,” Jorge repeated.
Mac held his hand up, stopping Jorge.
“Come on, this should have been called Death, not Hunger. Should have called it Murder! They let him die, left him there. They didn’t pay his family. We ran that picture. Paid her for it. Now we have evidence.”
“Everybody ran it,” Mac said. “It wasn’t exclusive.”
“Right. It’s the story Vee wanted to give us—the story of the man they let die for his picture. That’s why Uno attacked her, put her in a coma. He couldn’t let her stop the gravy train. He made it look like my daddy did it . . . I can’t explain it all . . . need to write it . . . but then he tried to kill Daddy, or me, I don’t know. Because Daddy was talking about Jesson now too. Uno’s small-time, nothing, but he’s the one who swung the pipe, choked her.”
Sweetie yelled, “Liar!”
“She fed him information, told him where to find us.”
“Liar! I didn’t tell him to attack anybody! I just told him where Abraham was working.”
Jane felt weak in every part of her body.
“And those pictures,” Sweetie yelled, “got food, housing, for people all over Sacramento! People we know!”
“They didn’t save Tom Jesson. They could have driven him to a hospital, but they didn’t.”
That picture might have killed Daddy and her. What did it really give Noreen or her kids? P. B.? But still, Sweetie was at least partly right.
Mac wal
ked around his desk, punching one fist into the palm of the other hand.
“You shot my papa!” Sweetie’s snot was flowing.
Jorge got up, opened the door, and yelled to the newsroom, “Out! Everybody!”
The four of them waited for the floor to clear. Finally it was silent. Just them.
Jane straightened up to lie. “Your father attacked my mother. It was a terrible fight . . .”
“No!”
“I tried to help but failed.”
Then, “Defending her, I shot him.”
Sweetie sobbed into her hands.
“It was a fight between man and wife, brought on by the stress they were under.”
Mac nodded. “The stress they were under.” He sat down on the couch next to Sweetie. “Your papa was under tremendous stress.” Several lines dropped out of his face.
Sweetie whimpered.
“Wright’s a hard woman, very hard. She made impossible demands on him. It was not his fault, Sweetie.”
Sweetie kept nodding.
“Nobody will know he’s your father. We won’t put his name in the paper. It doesn’t have to be part of the story.”
“No!” Jane started.
Mac looked at her sharply. “His name won’t be part of the story.”
Sweetie turned into his shoulder, burying her face.
“It’s the heart of the story!” Jane insisted. It couldn’t all fall on Grete. It needed his name.
“Sweetie, we’ve got to get you safe, out of here.”
“What?”
“We won’t let some gossip guy follow this up to you.”
“I was just helping him, helping Papa. I had no idea . . .”
“I know, I know,” Mac said. “But I’ve got to get you safe. I’m not going to keep you here, selfishly. For myself. I’ve got to protect you, Sweetie.”
“Protect me . . .”
“I have friends in New York, the fashion district.”
“Fashion?”
Jane thought she saw a prick of light in the palest blue part of Sweetie’s right eye. Then she thought, She’s like me, hopeful.
“Ruby will get you a cab back to my place. Get yourself cleaned up, packed, right away. I’ll be there tonight, and we’ll get you on a train.” He knelt in front of her, put his hands on her cheeks. “You did the right thing by your papa.”
“Thank you, Mac, thank you!”
She hugged him hard once more and got up, left, without looking at Jane.
Mac was a good idea man. And a bit of a coward.
When Jane heard the elevator doors close, she said, “That was a display.”
“What’s this alleged evidence?”
She picked up the ledgers, setting them back on his desk. “Records of the people, the picture subjects, she paid to pose in her documentary pictures. Their names, amounts paid, the list of photos they appeared in, newspapers that ran them.”
Mac interrupted. “So it’s a government and corruption and murder story?”
“Murder?”
“Not yet,” he answered.
“This time with evidence,” Jane said.
Mac asked, “What did you have against Wright in the beginning, before you knew?”
She thought of Grete’s pictures, beautiful pictures, and how they were lies, a whole harvest of invention, lies that made the people she knew look hapless and weak, not like they were. Or not entirely. She thought of Noreen, who hated the way she was photographed, for pity. But Jane also understood something about them was true. She didn’t answer.
Jorge said, “This could get us out of the piss-storm we’re in because of her first story.”
Mac mumbled curses.
“Let me write it,” Jane said.
Mac set down the ledger. “I can’t trust you.”
“I’m the one for this,” she said.
Mac kept flipping through the book.
“Please. I have to do it,” she begged.
Let me prove myself, re-prove myself. Do it right this time.
“You’re a disaster,” he said.
She looked out the glass at the writers trickling back in. “I’ll fit in.”
“They’ll eat your lunch.”
“Let me deal with them.”
“Who are you, anyway?” he asked.
Jane could feel his shift.
“Who are you?” he repeated.
“Jane Benjamin,” she said.
Jorge laughed at her new name, her third name.
“It’s not a joke,” she said. “Don’t make fun of me, Jorge. I mean it.”
Mac said, “Okay. Get every damn thing right. Jorge, you sit right next to her. Check every word. Make sure she backs up everything, double, triple. But Jane, I’m putting Jorge’s name on it. Not yours, for Chrissakes!”
“That’s fine.” She understood.
“But you’ll do the work,” Jorge added. “All of it.”
This was good. But she had to twist the screwdriver one more time to make sure.
“So you want me then?”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Mac. “Now you are a girl. Get to work.”
“Mac?”
“What!”
“Lambert?”
“Heading to New York, whoop-de-doo.”
She tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear and knelt to pick the remaining ledgers and pencils up off the floor. She did feel bad about Lambert, somewhat. She wasn’t sure what she felt.
“Jane.”
She looked up from her knees.
“You look fine.”
She stood up but dropped her head, hiding the red in her cheeks. That capillary rush made her angry at herself. This man seemed smaller to her now. The Mac she’d pined for wasn’t real. She’d made him up, a suit of her own crafting. She’d longed for the suit and not this man, which was a good thing to see. She didn’t need to calculate the effect of his loss as a potential lover. He was still her boss, for now, and he wasn’t going to fire her, for now. So that was blush-worthy.
Yes, she still wore a costume, but this one got closer to the skin. She wondered, Does anyone ever present a pure naked self to the world?
Even in this rush of relief, underneath she sensed Benjamin’s shrinking, his fear of disintegration. He needed her as his shell. Without her being Benny, would he dissipate completely, his particles spread over the landscape, ungathered?
The writers were mostly all back in, at Jorge’s command, silent, staring. Books in her arms, she left Mac’s office and went out to the newsroom, all eyes on her, and set the books on Lambert’s old desk.
“Okay!” she yelled, looking around. “I was faking it. I needed the job. This is me. I’m not Benny. I’m Jane Benjamin. Got it?”
From the back of the room, somebody said, “Sheesh. That time of the month?”
“Okay, okay.”
Hank Ikeda stood before her, his mouth open. “How do you do this?”
“Choose it and do it,” she answered, knowing it was more than that.
She rubbed her hands over the sticky top of Lambert’s desk, took a handkerchief out of her bag, wiped off his cigar smudges, laid out a ledger, pencil in hand, and got to work.
EPILOGUE
This was the hour when she became I, when I first began to speak with my own voice, the one I’d use in the Prospect for the next eight decades. They kept me, even with all the trouble I’d caused, all the trouble I’d cause in the years to come.
I said before, “You think you’re a body, but you’re not.” You’re the power inside it. But you get that power from your voice. It was complicated. It still is. I haven’t worked it all out. I never became the person I intended to be. But I did become someone. And in a way, partly, it began that afternoon, rewriting that story, the right way, fixing my mistakes, learning how to do it right, defining myself for myself, understanding that I would move from point to point on an infinite continuum.
BY the time I got back to Rivka’s that night, Elsie was asleep on the sunp
orch and Momma and Rivka were cleaning house—a strange sight, Rivka wielding a washcloth. Better that than to sit at the table and be hectored by Momma, I guess.
The front parlor was gleaming—the connecting one still full of dusty crates—but Momma didn’t appear to be tapering off.
Rivka jerked her head toward the kitchen and I followed.
“Your plan?”
“I’ll find her a place.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I mean, she’s connected to trouble.”
Rivka rolled her eyes. “Your mother? Connected to trouble?”
“She needs some kind of work, work she can do, needs to be someplace safe she can afford. Where she won’t be looked at too close.”
“You want her among relatively safe outlaws.”
“That’s it.”
“Outside Lands.”
“Pardon?”
“Sunset District.”
The neighborhood of Topsy’s and Jones-at-the-Beach.
GRIT stung the skin on my face and arms as we trudged from Jonesie’s wind-stripped Victorian to the abandoned railcar.
“Almost there,” he hollered, against the wind.
I followed close on his heels, my arm shielding my eyes. Momma was just behind me, one hand under Elsie’s bottom, the other holding her baby’s head to her chest. It wasn’t really that far between the two structures, but in a sandstorm, it seemed like miles. The Outside Lands, all right.
“There’s the outhouse!”
She was going to hate this. It’d be worse than the government camp, worse than a tent by the river. Away from everything, out here in the blowing grit, just to be a cleaning lady. It’d be like what she’d originally run away from—dust piling up past windowsills, looking like snow, blocking the door. Having to climb out the window to go anywhere, hang wet sheets on doors, stuff windows with rags. Still, the dust would get in. Outside Lands looked like Dustbowl Texas.
Finally I could see it. Closer to the surf sat a railcar, its blue paint chipped away to a pale, watery color, some kind of washed-up carcass. Curtains in the window. A fire pit, made of busted-up concrete with a grill on top, sat just to the side.
Jonesie waved his arm for us to follow.
We walked up the steps to an entry slider on a metal track. Through the rectangle of glass on the top half of the door, it was dark. He turned the handle and the door clanged open. Inside, a cat jumped off a table, out the door, yowling. We entered and Momma shut the door behind her.
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