by John Kenney
Why did men suck?
Her father sucked. Greg sucked. She and Greg had dated for three months and he’d talked about moving in together and then last fall he texted that he wasn’t over his old girlfriend and that they were giving it another shot but that he hoped he and Franny could stay friends. Franny had texted back. Absolutely. Call me and I’ll perform your bris.
Dalton. Rippowam Cisqua Northfield Mount Hermon. Trinity College. American history major. She’d been a standout squash player. She and Claire still played together once in a while, Claire occasionally winning and leaving Franny in a bad mood for thirty-six hours.
It was that time of life when her friends were getting married. So many weddings. Two last year; three the year before; three invites so far for this summer. Now she would go dateless, or maybe with her gay friend Brian. She would turn twenty-eight in May and this, too, caused her mood to foul, as she fully expected to be married or at the very least seriously involved with someone at this point. And that further angered her because she felt that she should not need a man to be happy even though she wanted a boyfriend to be happy.
The prospect of nearing thirty frightened Franny. It didn’t seem possible. She felt both far younger and far older, though she didn’t quite know how to explain that. Twenty was a lifetime ago. Thirty was ten short years to forty and that both blew her mind and depressed her to the point of dizziness.
She’d recently stopped dating, stopped hooking up. No more Tinder or Bumble. Last New Year’s Eve, with friends in Stowe, Vermont, she’d stayed at a small inn. While most everyone was in the tavern getting hammered, she’d rung in the New Year talking with an older couple in the living room, sitting by a fire. The three of them toasted with small flutes of champagne and Franny listened as the couple talked about the cruise they took on the Queen Mary for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The man laid his hand over his wife’s as she talked and didn’t take it away.
After they’d said their goodbyes, Franny walked outside and stood looking out over a field of snow, listening to the silence of the night, inhaling the smell of the clean Vermont air, wood smoke and pine. So many stars, so far from city lights. Later, she went back to her room and took a yellow legal pad, and wrote as fast as she could think, the fleeting lightness of New Year’s Eve hopes dancing across the page.
Read more.
Find peace.
Call Mom more.
Be a better daughter to her.
Be a better friend.
Find a new job.
Take time off.
Travel.
Learn French.
Get in shape.
Play squash again.
Don’t be afraid.
Be clean again. Detoxify.
No hooking up.
Find someone.
Children.
Volunteer.
Silent retreat.
Dad.
Here she stopped, surprised to see the word.
* * *
• • •
An air horn blared. And even though she was wearing headphones, the noise startled and annoyed her. Someone had used the word “millennial” in a story. Henke’s rule.
Franny hadn’t planned to be at scheisse this long. In the few days that her post–New Year’s high lasted, she promised herself she’d quit at the end of the year, get rid of her apartment, put her things in storage, and travel. Mexico, maybe. Or Guatemala. Maybe Vietnam. Someplace inexpensive. Someplace she could find . . . what? She wasn’t sure. She just wanted to escape. Ironically enough, that’s exactly what she felt the readers of scheisse craved. Did she buy into Henke’s manifesto? Not really. But she did believe that old media was dead, that they didn’t understand the new world and the way people consumed information, what they wanted from information.
Real life, Franny believed, was boring. It was traffic on the Major Deegan, on the 405, on the highways and byways of this vast land. It was a delayed, uncomfortable flight to Chicago. It was whining kids and an unappreciative husband. It was rote. A shower where you forget you were showering. A meal where you later had almost no memory of eating. The gurus and yoginis and SoulCyclists wanted you to believe that life was best lived in the moment. Horseshit, Franny thought. What people wanted was the exact opposite. And that was where the money was.
What the networks and the serious newspapers didn’t understand was this: people didn’t want more bad news. They wanted less. Because what was happening on their screens—their phones and tablets and desktops—was overwhelming, nonstop awful. And now it was everywhere. Constantly being packed and manufactured and made newsworthy, even though most of it wasn’t. Breaking news: tax bill passes. Breaking news: Famous Actor out of rehab. Breaking news: last remaining midget from Wizard of Oz dies. Breaking news: little people community up in arms over use of the word “midget.”
Yes, we wanted to know the news. Flood? Fire? War? Okay. Good to know. But let me show you this video of the singing monkeys. We wanted to go home at day’s end, lock the door, sit down, and hold back the tide. We wanted to stop the world for a bit. Each of us retreating to a device of some kind to watch Netflix or Amazon Prime or HBO or some easy-to-swallow network sitcom or the shows where people sang and cried to a live audience and a panel of judges, as well as reality TV that went as far as it possibly could to shock. The Real Erections of San Luis Obispo. We wanted to sit on the oversized couch and hold that clicker and escape. We wanted to get into bed fully clothed with a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and a liter of Pepsi and hold that iPad and read about Jennifer Aniston’s obsession with Greek yogurt or Surprise! Angelina Jolie’s travel loafers are actually affordable!
And it wasn’t merely escape from the outside world. It was escape from ourselves. It was a muting of our inside voice. Once, people sat after dinner on the back porch, as evening gently overtook the day, watched the fading light, listened to the din of crickets, to a dog barking down the road, a train going by in the distance. Alone with their thoughts. The bravest thing. Today we would do anything to run from our own thoughts. The noise of our minds. So we check the phone, the text, the email, the alert. Why look inside for the answers when you can look outside? Hey look, a sale at J.Crew.
Thus, Salma’s plump breasts. A salve. A momentary respite. The mother’s milk (ha!) of escapism. Was that so wrong?
* * *
• • •
Henke appeared at Franny’s desk, startling her. A thing he did, approaching people from behind, standing too close. He leaned forward, beefy, nail-bitten Teutonic hands on her desk, face close to her screen and Salma’s mighty breast. He smelled of cologne, too much and too strong.
“Christ, Henke.”
Henke ignored her, a man deep in thought, too important, too brilliant for the niceties of life.
“Tit for tat,” he said. “There’s your headline. That’s why I’m a billionaire.”
“You’re a billionaire because of your father.”
Henke turned and stared at her. “Yes, Frances, famous fathers, right?”
He turned back to the screen. “I imagine yours are better,” he said.
He looked at her, smiled an ugly smile.
He did this. All the time. Not just with Franny. One never got used to it, but Franny would never give him the satisfaction of thinking she’d been shocked, offended.
“You’ll never know.”
It starts as a tiny heartbeat.
It had been three days since the broadcast, which had been on a news-quiet Friday evening, a typically lower-than-average ratings night. Ted had canceled his dinner plans and gone straight to the Manhattan apartment, taken a hot shower, downed a Big Gulp–sized Ketel One neat, popped an Ambien (happy birthday to Ted!), and gone to bed, waking ten hours later, feeling rather splendid.
The days passed and the world turned on its axis and humanity did what it al
ways did: fought wars, killed one another, committed perjury. Professional sports teams did noteworthy things; powerful people had intercourse with people who weren’t their spouses and got caught. Nature wreaked havoc. Unprecedented storms ravaged Caribbean islands. A cargo ship disappeared in the Indian Ocean. The Russian army blew things up. A drone strike killed the leader of a terrorist sect on a road from Damascus to Beirut. A blind softball pitcher in Oklahoma continued an uncanny streak of strikeouts for his local team.
And Ted’s network reported on all of it, snippets of bite-sized news-like items that were neither helpful, informative, nor particularly interesting. Much of it seemed déjà vu–like. Haven’t I heard this exact story before, like, a week ago?
The weekly Nielsens were in and they were superb. No one knew why but they attributed it to Ted’s moving Triangle Shirtwaist closing. The hair-and-makeup girl was ancient history. It never happened. Ted was king.
And, to celebrate twenty years in the anchor chair, the network was launching an advertising campaign. They were releasing it Friday evening, during the broadcast, and running it all weekend during college basketball (males, forties to fifties) and the NCAA women’s hockey Frozen Four (the moms of the players: a key Ted demographic). Ted had, over the past few weeks, watched the rough cuts with the marketing team, half a dozen earnest men and women speaking a language Ted didn’t really understand. Click rate. Digital extensions. Transformation imperative.
The campaign was called “You know Ted” and it consisted of a series of TV commercials and web films. Shots of Ted over the years, around the world, at the anchor desk, interviewing heads of state and various popes, sitting forward and pointing at CEOs and mendacious politicians and third-world terrorists. Shots of Ted in war zones and in refugee camps, wading knee-deep in the ocean to help a father and baby off a listing raft, and his time in Bosnia, holding a baby, Ted having been hit by the tiniest piece of shrapnel in the history of warfare, perfectly placed and made for TV, on his cheek, a line of deep red blood mixed with dust and dirt. The first of many Emmys.
A song was purchased, at great cost, from an Austin, Texas–based alternative band called Explosions in the Sky. It was called “Remember Me as a Time of Day.” Ted found it haunting. They’d gotten a Hollywood star to be the voice-over.
“You’ve seen him, in good times and bad. In sickness and in health. In crises and crashes. When lives were at stake, when hope hung in the balance. He was there. And you were there with him. The times of your life have been brought to you by Ted Grayson.” And then the big finish. “This is your life. This is Ted Grayson.” And here, at the end, a shot of Ted and Claire, walking the English gardens of the Bedford house.
Simon Samson, head of the news division and Ted devotee, called a meeting of the news staff and introduced the campaign, showed the commercials to great applause, as Simon had made sure to film snippets of as many newsroom people as possible to boost morale. Young Murray with hair. Grace, Murray, Jagdish, and Ted working on a story. Producers, production assistants, camera operators. Even Ruth Silverman, the longtime receptionist, had a cameo.
Simon couldn’t know for sure but his sense was that the commercials seemed to generate an excitement that permeated the newsroom. A renewed belief, perhaps, in Ted, in the mission of news, in their work. That it still mattered.
As they made their way through the newsroom, Ted and Simon stopped by the writers’ room.
Ted did this from time to time, though less often than he used to. Weeks went by where he didn’t talk with the writers, the producers overseeing the assembly-line–like machinations of the broadcast, ferrying the words that Ted needed to say to the teleprompter. The visits never ceased to thrill his writers. Like a parent in a large family who takes one child out for the day.
“Ted,” Murray said. “How wonderful to be you.” He’d meant only to think that but it slipped out.
They had been together since the beginning, Murray and Ted. Of the original nine writers on the news staff when Ted took over the anchor chair, Murray was the only one left. He’d been there for September 11, their finest hour, when none of them left for five days.
Grace had come on board three years ago, having completed a master’s degree at Hunter College in social work. She took a job in the outpatient psychiatric unit at Elmhurst Hospital, Queens, and lasted exactly four days. She could write about pain. Seeing it firsthand was something else entirely.
Jagdish took the job on a whim. A friend of a friend who was a producer. None of them had expected to be there so long. But unlike so many jobs, theirs was new each day. And when large stories hit, they felt they were at the center of something. And, of course, Ted. Their proximity to Ted, to a man watched by millions of people. “For God’s sake,” Murray would remind them, “the president of the United States watches Ted. Which means he’s listening to the words we are writing in this room.”
Ted sat on the arm of an old couch. His spot. A Christmas morning excitement at having the great man in their office.
“What’s the word, Gracie,” Ted asked. “How’s the world’s greatest band?”
“About to go on tour. Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Greenville, Hampton, Columbia, New Orleans, Lexington, Philly, then to New York May first and second. I’ve got tickets to both shows.”
Grace said this as a single sentence while putting Carmex on her lips, a thing she did ten to twelve times a day.
“You going?”
“Ted. Please.” Grace smiled.
Grace had suggested a story last year about the band. Ted agreed and to this day it was the greatest assignment of Grace’s life. It was the only story that she didn’t have to do any reporting for. Ted brought her to the interview with Eddie Vedder, at the Mercer hotel in SoHo. Grace could have died that day and lived a full life. Grace’s therapist felt differently but so be it.
“Jagdish. Getting any sleep?” Ted asked. Jagdish had a baby at home.
Jagdish smiled and walked over to Ted, holding out his oversized cell phone revealing a photo of a cherubic face, wide-eyed, loony smile.
“Look at that. What is she, a year?” Ted asked.
“Ten months.”
“Tell me her name again.”
“Sita,” Jagdish said, beaming. “It means goddess of the harvest in Hindi.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“Any advice?” Jagdish asked, smiling.
A second. Maybe two. Maybe a bit more. Ted wasn’t sure what to say.
No. No advice, actually.
Don’t love them too much.
Get ready to be hurt.
“You’ll know what to do,” Ted said kindly, half smile. He stood up.
“I just wanted to stop by and say . . . I don’t think I say it enough . . . you guys make me look a lot better than I am.”
“That would be impossible!” Murray shouted, though again, he’d not meant to speak.
Grace stood and walked over to Ted. She hugged him and Murray died a little inside. “Thank you, Ted.”
Ted was unsure what to do, so he simply patted her back. The hug went on too long.
“Okay, then,” Ted said. “See you tomorrow.”
* * *
• • •
Murray had meant to mention Cassini to Ted. He hustled down the hall.
“Ted,” he shouted.
Ted and Simon turned to Murray, looking at him as if at a crazy person.
“I forgot . . . Cassini, Ted.” Murray was grinning.
“Is it getting near?” Ted asked.
Murray nodded. “Ted, we have to do something.”
Simon said, “What the hell is Cassini?”
Ted started to say something but Murray jumped in. “The NASA probe to Saturn. It launched the year after we did. Almost twenty years ago. Pretty soon it’s going to crash into the surface of Saturn. A p
lanned death. What a way to go.”
“Fascinating,” Simon said, fake smile.
They turned and walked away.
* * *
• • •
“You canceled on me. Who cancels on an old woman?”
It was Polly, Ted’s longtime agent and lawyer. Ted wasn’t sure how old she was. Maybe sixty-five. Maybe older. Five foot four, perhaps, and “pleasantly plump.” (Her words. “Ted I look like a god-damned pear. But a ripe one, I’ll tell you that.”) Never married. Lived in a stunning top-floor apartment on Riverside Drive with her cat, Hannah Arendt.
“Polly,” Ted said. “I didn’t cancel on you. I asked that we move it a few days.”
“‘A few days,’ he says. Like I’m chopped liver.” They were seated at Ted’s corner table at Cafe Luxembourg. Ted sipped a Ketel One, rocks, and Polly was chewing one of the three olives she needed for her martini. She chewed with her mouth open, unaware of the sound. Ted had never gotten used to it. They were waiting for their food. Ted had ordered salmon and Polly had ordered a steak with a side of mashed potatoes.
Polly raised her glass. “Happy freaking birthday.” Ted raised his glass and they drank.
“How long you want to keep doing this?” she asked.
“Drinking? A while.”
“I love Irish humor,” she said without smiling.
“The job? What else would I do?” Ted said. “Maybe five more years.”
“Do you still like it?”
Ted sensed a small change in tone. Polly was playing with the toothpick the olives had arrived on.