by John Kenney
It stayed light later now. Still cool but a sense of spring in the air, the smell of the grass and the flowering trees, the colors of daffodils and crocuses. The sounds of the party faded and were replaced by the water hitting the rocks at the far edge of the property.
He stood and looked out over the Sound. What if he removed his clothes and waded into the water? He was a good swimmer. He imagined the shock of the water, temperature in the low forties at this time of year. His body would adjust. The stroke of swimming so natural and miraculous, moving through the water with grace and speed. The idea of running to the edge of the lawn and removing his clothes pleased Ted enormously. But here, quite suddenly, and for no reason he could think of, the image of his father lying in his last bed came to him. Ted winced at the image, his father’s head leaning off to one side of the propped-up pillows, lips pursed, parchment skin pulled tight to his face, the beginnings of a skeleton. It was a hospice just outside Providence. This was ten years ago. Ted’s mother had died the year before, his father never really recovering, alone in the house. He was a lifelong smoker who didn’t believe in doctors and let the coughing go until it was far too late, when all they could do was give him a morphine drip. Ted and his younger sister, Susan, sitting in the room for days. Susan was going through her second divorce, drinking too much, as always.
Long days in a room with a dying man. Adjust his blanket. Place an ice chip under his tongue. Smooth his hair. Watch the nurses come and go. Notice the clock on the wall, the barely audible tick. Notice that time slows down. Ted would stand at the window and look out at a parking lot as he listened to his father’s breathing, the long delay between labored inhales and exhales. How does a man’s life come to this, to this place? There was a small closet in the room and the door was open and his father’s pants were on a hanger. His pants and a check flannel shirt and an old beige cardigan and a heavy parka from L.L.Bean that Claire had sent him many Christmases ago. And his shoes. Scuffed brown shoes, size nine-and-a-half.
A job with the railroads. First New York & New Haven and later Boston & Maine. Assistant operations supervisor. Overnights to Worcester, Nashua, Portland, Bangor, Montreal. He would bring Ted model trains with the company’s logo on the side.
“I run those,” he’d say.
Later, as the railroads faded, his father was forced to accept a buyout and a reduced pension after their labor union lost a protracted court dispute. For a time, he tried cleaning-supply sales, traveling New England in a much-used Ford Falcon station wagon. He’d stay at Howard Johnson motor lodges, sitting in a booth alone in the evenings with a glass of beer and an evening newspaper, chain-smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes. He’d bring back saltwater taffy for Susan and chocolate lollipops for Ted. They had horses on them. Cars. The Apollo missions. What were those evenings like, alone, a day with no sales, days when no one would see him, days when he’d leave a card, keep smiling, get back in the car, keep going. He never said, I just don’t find the work fulfilling. I’m thinking of taking a year off to find myself, do more yoga, maybe talk with a life coach.
He should have been sitting next to him, holding his hand, talking to him. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it. It felt like a bad movie. So he stood at the window and looked out. And that’s where he was when his father died. With his back to him.
They buried him on a bitterly cold day in January.
Six months later, Susan—Zee, Ted called her, his nickname for her, or Zeebee—was swimming in Little Compton. She drowned. That’s what the report said. She’d been captain of her high school swim team. An early swimmer. A little fish. Their mother put her hair in pigtails. This doe-eyed girl. Ted had driven to Rhode Island to identify her body. The memory caused Ted to cover his face with his hands, to rub his face as if to rub the image away.
It was this image that Claire saw when she looked over from the small group she was standing with, laughing, making small talk, feeling wonderful, feeling pretty and wanted and alive and hopeful for the first time in years. She saw Ted standing alone with his hands at his face and wondered if he was crying and for a moment, for just a moment, she felt herself start to go to him.
He turned and started back to the tent, hands in his pockets, head down, unaware he was being watched.
* * *
• • •
“You must know the Freudlichs, Ted.”
Diana was back, thankfully. She popped a small toast point with a baby shrimp and pesto into her mouth, scanning the party.
“I don’t know them personally.”
“Leopold is a descendant of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He grew up in Paris. They have a home there, in the Sixth. Do you know the Sixth, Ted? Of course you do. They live half the year there and half the year here. They have a place in the Carlyle. He’s never worked a day in his life. He paints. She’s a dominatrix.”
“I’m sorry?”
“A dominatrix. She flies around the world. Very high-end clientele. She tried to show me the ideal blow job technique once using a peeled banana. But I was hungry and I ate the banana. What would Freud say, Ted?”
Diana chuckled.
“Doesn’t her husband mind?” Ted asked.
“No. She bought more bananas. Ted, I should do stand-up. For Chrissakes, I’m joking. No, Leopold is gay. They’ve been together for thirty-five years. Best marriage I know.”
“Sounds like Claire and me.”
Here Diana raised her eyebrows. She looked like she was going to say something but stopped.
“Thank you for coming to this, Ted, especially considering your new status as feminist pariah. I joke. Also for your paltry donation. Ten grand more would’ve killed you? Ted, they’re poor. They’re homeless. Do you find it hard, Ted?”
“Do I find what hard?”
“Dirty,” Diana said, flirting smile. Ted was lost. “Caring,” Diana said, switching gears fast. Ted said nothing.
“Your catatonic expression and weird silence tell me yes, you find it hard. Let me tell you what happens to me. I watch the nightly news. Not yours, by the way. The shootings. The racial divide. The refugees from the wars we ignore. The pain is overwhelming. What are we to do? With the information? With the outrage? Is voting enough? Throwing a lovely and perfectly planned fund-raiser? Because I don’t think it is anymore. I feel like something fundamental is breaking. Now that could also be the recent change from Lexapro to Wellbutrin. I have this nonstop buzzy thing in my head. My question is this: Are we worse people than we used to be?”
Ted opened his mouth to respond, but Diana said, “Don’t speak, Ted. You looked like you were going to speak and it was a rhetorical question. I think the ugly truth is that we’ve always been awful. Humans, I mean. Not just the rich. I’m funny, Ted. And I think you’re partially to blame. You, the media. This new world we are living in? Every conceivable horrible image is at our fingertips, being pushed on you every minute of the day. You don’t do news. You do horror. The nightly horror, with Ted Grayson. What is to be done? I am a woman of substantial means and I feel powerless. Should I tweet my outrage, Ted? Should I tweet it? I’m no Luddite. I like technology. But fuck Twitter. Toxic trash. I say that, I might add, as a substantial investor. Should I go on a TV show, on Fox, on MSNBC, and shout about it, go for cheap applause? Tell me what to do. Because most times, knowing I can do nothing . . . I drift. Ted, I was four pages into the devastating piece on reparations on The Atlantic’s website when a pop-up ad appeared for Fossil watches. Do you know what I did? I clicked on the ad, spent five minutes looking around the Fossil site, bought a beautiful messenger bag. That site led me to another site about handmade bicycles, which led to a story about a company that does high-end tours of Italy, which led me to book a trip next summer to Italy. Which I’m so excited about. How’s Claire?”
* * *
• • •
Claire was a schoolgirl at a dance with the handsomest boy. Her
e, on the lawn, in a dress she loved, heat lamps under the white tent keeping the evening chill away. She had long ago buried any hope of feeling this way again. She was surprised to find it still there. Surprised at how wonderful it felt.
Claire had known Dodge was going to be at the fund-raiser. But she still felt the electricity in her when she saw him. This secret of theirs. She would conduct herself as she always did. She’d simply stand in this small group, chatting, feeling Dodge’s eyes on her. The way it made her stomach tingle, the tips of her fingers. She felt like someone in a novel, a Virginia Woolf novel, the young girl having the affair. Which one was that? Mrs. Dalloway, maybe. Or Tolstoy. She was Anna. Dodge was Vronsky. The illicit affair, being wooed by this dashing man, slowly succumbing to it, as Claire had. Not looking for it. Telling her suitor no, in fact, that she was a woman of high ideals who refused sordid things. But the attraction was too powerful. Anna’s/Claire’s awful husband. Count what’s-his-name. Older and unattractive, though Claire still found Ted annoyingly and effortlessly handsome.
Had she been a good wife? She asked herself this from time to time. Had she played any role in the marriage’s ultimate ruin? Could she have reached across the divide? At her angriest, she was sure it was entirely Ted’s fault. But late at night, not quite sure of herself, she wondered if she weren’t at least partially to blame, if she hadn’t superimposed her ideals of what he should be, ignoring the things he was. No. Wait. This was getting away from her. Also, didn’t Anna throw herself under a train at the end, after ruining most everyone’s lives? She was thinking about Anna under the train, furrowing her brow, when she saw Ted and Diana strolling across the lawn toward their little group. This couldn’t be. Diana wouldn’t do that. Wait. Yes, she would, the tramp, the slut. Claire could see it all on Diana’s face. Were Diana and Ted having a thing? She knew Diana would but, somehow, she also knew that Ted wouldn’t. Yes, he’d had flings, but she knew they meant nothing to him. Why was she standing up for Ted’s flings? Diana and Ted were ruining Claire’s reverie. She closed her eyes, tried to retrace the path, to find that good feeling from a moment ago. It was gone. Claire looked over at Dodge, who was looking at her. He had a smile on his face, a man in love.
* * *
• • •
“Is that him?” Diana asked, looking past Ted.
“Who?” Ted asked.
“The man she’s leaving you for.”
Ted stared at Diana before he turned and followed Diana’s gaze. There, across the lawn, under the white tent, in a group of six people chatting harmlessly, Claire among them, Ted saw him.
“Dodge Ramsey,” Diana said. “Some kind of international lawyer. He’s a lord or something. A viscount, whatever that is. Has his own plane. But then, who doesn’t?”
Ted watched his soon-to-be-ex-wife gaze at her boyfriend and it was so clear, so startlingly obvious, that she loved him. Ted felt a wave of jealousy and anger. Dodge looked happy. He’s happy, Ted. He was smiling and talking and he was the center of the conversation, people laughing at his witty stories.
“Poor Ted,” Diana said.
Ted turned to see Diana staring at him.
“How long have you known?”
“A bit.”
Diana’s eyebrows went up like a cartoon. “Bit late to the story, aren’t we, Captain Anchor Boy?”
Ted didn’t know what to say.
“C’mon,” Diana said. “Let’s have some fun. Let’s see how awkward we can make this.”
She slipped her arm through Ted’s and led him over to the group.
* * *
• • •
“Who needs a drink?”
It was Diana. She had Ted and a waiter in tow, the waiter holding a tray with flutes of champagne.
Ted shook hands with two men who smiled and both said it was nice to see him again and yet Ted had no memory of ever having met them. He air-kissed another woman who also seemed to know him well and then shook Dodge’s hand, which seemed quite strong. He didn’t know what to do with Claire, whether to kiss her, shake her hand, or ignore her.
As the waiter left, there was a moment, just the briefest time, when the air was wonderfully thick with tension. And it had nothing to do with Claire and Dodge. It had everything to do with Ted. Ted and his video. He felt it in the way that they didn’t look at him and instead examined the grass as if they were turf specialists. But Diana was too expert at working a room to let the awkwardness last.
“He’s going to ban the immigrants and cut off Medicare for the elderly now. What do we think? What are we going to do?”
A few of them turned to Dodge, who had a wry smile on his quite handsome face.
“We were just talking about that,” said the woman. Ted felt he ought to know her name. Jane. Jan. Pam. One of those.
“Dodge is a human rights lawyer,” Claire added, looking at Dodge.
“A small cog in a large wheel,” Dodge said with Hugh Grant charm and posh public school accent.
“What about you, Ted?” Dodge asked. “How do you see the situation? As a newsman, I mean.”
Ted blanked. He blanked and wondered if Dodge was asking about the Syrian refugee crisis and the battle for Aleppo or about the evacuation of Muslim women and children in mountain towns in northern Afghanistan. Or was it Nigeria and the ethnic slaughter by Boko Haram, the long lines of women and children on dirt roads there? Or the civil war in Myanmar? Or South Sudan? Or the Democratic Republic of Congo? Or Donbass, Ukraine, where more than ten thousand fatalities had occurred? He didn’t know. They had done so many stories lately and now they were all washing together for Ted, the colors and textures and faces and locations and details fading into one another. This from a man who once prided himself on names and dates and history. Now he read the words on the prompter. He then turned it over to the reporter on the scene. Or was it the Somali civil war? Maybe Aleppo. He just kept thinking of the word “Aleppo” and the images of a seemingly endless stream of humanity walking along the road to nowhere. Also, hadn’t they done a series of stories lately on poverty in Guatemala? Ted was blinking quickly. He knew he needed to say words, that words needed to come out of his mouth.
“I think we’ve only seen the start.”
Ted hoped this was vague enough to keep the conversation going, though the confused expressions suggested otherwise.
Dodge, English grace at the ready, rescued Ted. “I think that’s exactly right, Ted. I would add, though, that . . .”
And here Ted tuned Dodge out. Why was it that lately, a man who had made his living talking, easily and fluently and intelligently, was finding simple speech so difficult?
For a time, Ted had tried to read, to keep up with the important books, fiction, nonfiction, the biographies. He had, long ago, been a reader of The New York Review of Books. They still arrived at the house and were stacked in a neat pile by Rosa, their cleaning lady. But Ted almost never read them. Nor The New Yorkers, The Atlantics, The Economists. The piles grew, stress-inducing symbols of his laziness, his intellectual wanting. With each Netflix series and each SportsCenter, he fell further and further behind, a man who had faded in a race, miles behind, the energy gone. He also found he simply had no attention span. The books were too depressing, too long, too boring. They sapped him of hope. His concentration had waned, especially in the evening, after a glass of wine, an internal drifting mechanism took over his operating system. He watched sports. He rewatched movies he’d already seen.
The breeze must have shifted because Ted caught the smell of the ocean. It caused him to turn his head and look out at the water. Ted had wanted to buy in this area. They’d found an old house in Southport that Ted loved. But Claire had preferred Bedford. Which was probably just as well. This area had become, to Ted’s mind, an unholy place, once a quaint artist town now soiled by the moneyed vultures of private equity. Ted did not express these thoughts to anyone, cer
tainly not his hosts, who were now feeding him truffles, which Ted found exceedingly delicious. Ted found himself smiling, which his drinking companions took to be a sign that he found Dodge’s good-natured ribbing funny. Ted had, in fact, missed a good forty-five seconds of conversation and wry commentary from Dodge. And now everyone was smiling and looking at Ted waiting for a response.
“Well, Ted?” the woman next to him said, smiling. “Dodge wants to know. Are you mad as hell?”
Ah, yes. Howard Beale. Network. I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. The lunatic anchorman.
“No,” Ted said finally to Dodge, trying for lighthearted, but hearing an edge in his voice. He looked at Claire, who was staring at him, wide-eyed, worried.
“Surely, though, Ted. There must be evenings during your show when you just want to scream or tell the real truth.” It was Dodge.
Ted found himself blinking more quickly, felt his nostrils flare. Who was this little shit to tell Ted what he thought? Yes, Ted was a roiling ball of gastric goop inside, but he was still Ted Grayson, still the man who had sat across from presidents, dictators, and terrorists and challenged them in interviews, thanks to Lou’s questions and Ted’s hard stare (two-camera interviews, so they could get Ted’s stare).
“I think we do just fine,” Ted said.
Dodge was clueless and on the edge of a good drunk and plowed ahead.
“Prescient, though, Network. No?”
“How so?” Ted asked, instantly regretting it, seeing the fat softball down the middle of the plate he’d just lobbed.
“Why . . . the end of network news, of course. News as entertainment. The vaunted anchorman now a relic of a bygone era, a time long ago when people actually cared about what you said.”
Dodge smiled, enormously pleased with himself and this splendid party, his plane, perhaps the thought of Claire’s marvelous rump. He gulped at his drink.