by John Kenney
* * *
• • •
He met Polly for lunch at a coffee shop on the East Side. It was still cold for late April, a raw day. A tuna sandwich sat in front of him. Lightly toasted white bread, tuna, iceberg lettuce, a dill spear, a small pile of ruffled potato chips. What a perfect plate. How many plates like this had sat before him? The meal of children after school. The meal of the elderly. So simple, nutritious, honest. Could a sandwich be honest? In his current state, Ted felt it could. He also felt like he might cry. And that thought made him laugh, which he did now.
“Ted, you’re freaking me out a little here,” Polly said. “You know that sandwich or something?”
He stared at Polly, smiling at her. Then did something he had never done before. He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead.
“Ted, I’m eating here,” she said, a lump of egg salad at the corner of her mouth.
He told her about the plan.
He’d come across a story online about passage, for very little money, on container ships. The accommodations were spartan and the food wasn’t particularly good but it was quiet at sea. He would leave New York for Mumbai. He figured he’d make his way around India, the Bay of Bengal, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam. It didn’t really matter where to him. He would travel by bus, perhaps make his way to Bhutan and their Gross National Happiness.
“So?” Ted asked her. “What do you think?”
“What do I think? I think it sounds disgusting. I think there will be bugs. I think you’ve lost your freaking mind. Do you want pie? I’m going to have some pie.”
They had pie. Ted listened to Polly talk about her house in the Berkshires. Her garden. How maybe it was time to sell the apartment and go there. She had friends in the area. They had dinner parties.
“New York is over,” she said. “Our New York. It’s gone.”
* * *
• • •
They were standing on Madison in the Seventies.
Polly said, “You going to be able to navigate in a foreign city without producers and handlers and no corporate credit card?”
“It’s unlikely. So this could be the last time you see me alive.”
Ted grinned. Polly started to smile but her expression changed quickly.
She had always stood by him, always a friend, this squat, badly coiffed woman who lived alone with a cat.
She reached up and held his face with both hands. “You’re a good boy. Be happy.”
She blinked back tears. He gave her a squeeze and she held on for a time. They parted and Polly started walking north. Ted watched her.
He shouted, “Call me if the Today show is looking for a woman-hating anchor.”
She half turned, one arm in the air, and shouted back. “You’ll be my first call.”
* * *
• • •
He’d been asked by every network and cable station to do an interview. He declined all of them. Just a few days ago, a producer from CNN had emailed saying that Anderson Cooper 360° was doing a show on the state of social media. They were bringing in a number of writers and thinkers on the subject, including Henke Tessmer. Would Ted want to appear on a segment of the program? He had not responded.
He emailed her now. He said that both he and his daughter would be happy to appear. He urged the producer to email Frances.
* * *
• • •
Franny stared at it for a moment. The idea of telling it, admitting to it, of being forgiven. She said she’d be there.
We’re live with Ted and Frances Grayson.
We’re live in ninety seconds.”
Ted settled into the chair at the desk and the PA began to put the lavalier mic on him but Ted smiled and took it, put it on himself. He could do it with eyes closed. Raise his seat, sit on his jacket, blow down lightly on the mic, turn to the sound engineer seated off to the set’s side, a guy who can’t help smiling and giving Ted a thumbs-up.
It’s a cocaine rush, the moments before live TV. You can’t know it unless you’ve done it, unless you’ve sat in that chair, ready to stare down that big lens and all it represents, all that’s out there.
A PA walked Franny to set—they’d kept them in separate green rooms—and Ted could tell she wasn’t ready for this. She had on a demure dress, navy blue, just below her knee. The PA mic’d her and sat her on the other side of Cooper, who walked to set and took his seat.
“Thirty seconds. Clear the set, please.”
Cooper sat between them and turned to Ted, extended his hand.
“Ted.”
A hair and makeup woman appeared and did a light touch-up on Cooper, though God knows he didn’t need it. She turned to Ted and lightly touched his hair, smoothing it over with her hands. The woman looked at Ted and it unnerved him.
“Thank you,” he said.
Anderson Cooper turned to Franny, reached over, and touched her hand. “It’s going to be okay. There are no surprises here. I don’t do gotcha. We’ll talk. Just . . . talk to me.”
Franny nodded.
Cooper looked at notes, though Ted sensed he was composing himself. Anchor’s prayer. Calm the breathing. Clear the throat. Energy up.
In five, Anderson . . . four . . . three . . .
* * *
• • •
“This is 360, I’m Anderson Cooper. We open tonight with the state of the media, social media. Of truth, lies, and videotape. We’ll talk with some of the leading figures in media today, including the head of Google’s ethics commission, Sloan Kent; Facebook’s social policy leader, Ann-Marie Olivery; and Henke Tessmer, CEO of the website scheisse. But first up, Frances Grayson, formerly a senior correspondent for sensationalist website scheisse.com. And her father, Ted Grayson, the longtime anchor and managing editor of the evening news, recently resigned. We’ll take comments and tweets right after this.”
* * *
• • •
Anderson was talking, giving the context of the story, the video showing Ted calling Natalia a “whore.” But Ted’s remarkable memory was playing back the little book. The feeling was odd. He no longer heard Anderson Cooper’s voice. He saw his mouth move but heard nothing but his own breathing. He turned to Franny and heard his own voice. Heard himself reading the story. Harold and the Purple Crayon.
“So Frances,” Cooper began, “I said no surprises, but I have to ask, did you lie?”
Except time stops and Franny is four and they lie on the floor of the studio. It’s a bed. Ted and Claire’s bed. The big bed, Franny called it. That’s where she liked to go to sleep. Frog and Toad and The Cat in the Hat and Are You My Mother and The Polar Express and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. And Harold and the Purple Crayon. Always the last one. It was, for a long time, the book she needed when she was calm and still and ready. The one when she stopped talking, pulled the blankets up, folded her arms behind her head, like an old man on a chaise lounge. That’s when you knew sleep was coming. Her eyelids got heavy and Ted slowed his voice, his wonderful voice, her favorite voice, until it wasn’t, deep and strong and soothing, a good reader, knew the cadence, the pauses, the word to hit. Quieter now. Eyes almost closed.
“You’re Harold, Dad.”
Ted’s middle name. Franny loved that. Imagining Ted as a small boy. “We would be best friends,” Franny would say. “I would take care of you.”
Ted looked at Franny and then looked—if you go back you can see it on the tape online, it’s there—Ted looked off camera. He looked off camera and stared at a space. The producer wondered what he was looking at and even Anderson looked for a moment, listening to Franny answer.
Couldn’t they see what Ted was seeing? he wondered. It was so clear. Ted and Franny, lying in the bed, Ted still in his suit, tie loosened, sleeves rolled up, his big clean-smelling head, his bay rum aftershave, the lingering scent of it after a
long day, still there. A scent Franny would forever find comfort in, a deep sense memory. Her father’s smell. Her father’s voice. She was safe.
What if the entire universe is in your children? What if every answer you’ve ever been looking for is in your children?
Ted looked at Franny. He’d not seen her, really seen her, in so long. He’d seen his own failing, his own fear, his own anger, his own wish for what he’d wanted her to be. He hadn’t stopped to see her, this separate being. But he did now. And he saw the world. The universe. The history of time and space and whatever might or might not be out there. She was it. He had been born to be her father. God bless Walt and his brief, brief life. But she was here now and he was here now and someday he would be dead and she would have children of her own and they might ask, What was your father like?
What would she say?
* * *
• • •
“Did you lie?” Anderson Cooper asked Frances Ford Grayson.
Franny’s hands were shaking but she had to say it. She had to tell the truth. But she never got the chance.
It’s so easy, Ted thought. It was a gift. He was being given a gift.
“No, she didn’t,” Ted said, voice strong. “I did.”
Ted’s eyes were locked on Anderson’s. He knew how to do this. He knew how to tell the truth. And it was the truth. The emotional truth. The larger truth. He was there but in body only.
He could feel Franny staring at him. Felt the crew staring at him. But he was used to this. He was comfortable in this. A life being watched. People waiting for him to speak.
“I’m sorry, Ted. What are you saying?” It was Cooper.
“What she wrote was true. I’m not sure this young woman . . . the woman who tweeted . . . who’s been saying she saw me there when my daughter was . . . ill . . .”
Cooper steps in. “I believe what this woman . . . Lauren Loeb is her name . . . what she claimed is that Frances overdosed and that you were there.”
Ted nodded, the story coming to him so naturally, as if it happened.
“My daughter was ill at the time. There was a winter storm and she was in the infirmary. My wife called me in London, while I was waiting for a flight to Kosovo. I chose that over . . . over my daughter, when she needed me. I’m not proud of it. My wife . . . Claire . . . is . . . an . . . exceptionally kind woman . . . a wonderful mother. I’m sure she told Franny I was on the way. What child wouldn’t want to hear that?”
“Why would Ms. Loeb lie?”
“I can’t answer that. I do know people like attention, like to try to take people down. I think what my daughter did in that piece took courage. I’m not proud of the kind of father I was. I’m not proud of the kind of husband I was. And it is exceptionally difficult to have that revealed to the world. It’s a level of shame that is . . . that has left me ruined professionally and personally. I say that not for pity. But I would ask for privacy. I’m no longer a public person. Nor is my daughter.”
Cooper. “Why didn’t you come forward sooner?”
“The honest answer? Because I was weak. I was embarrassed. Because I wanted my job back. You know what it’s like to live in the bubble. The money, the entrée into worlds others don’t get to see. You could pick up the phone now and get an interview with most any major politician, CEO, movie star, athlete in the world. Couldn’t you?”
“Well, I’m not sure . . .”
“Of course you could. Because you have that microphone. Because people respect you. Because you are good at what you do. Because you are trustworthy. I was, too. And I didn’t want that to go away.”
There is a moment, maybe two, when Cooper seems touched by the whole thing, a bit thrown from his game. He pauses. He looks like he wants to push, ask more. But instead he says, “What have the last few weeks been like for you?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Ted said, looking at Franny, who forced a grin.
“Ted Grayson. Frances Ford. Thank you for being here tonight. Perhaps we do owe you privacy. Our conversation continues with the CEO of scheisse media, Henke Tessmer, when we come back. This is 360.”
* * *
• • •
This was where Claire dropped her fork.
She was at Dodge’s, along with another couple, preparing dinner, and the TV was on. She was holding a serving fork and she watched her soon-to-be-ex-husband and her daughter on the television in Dodge’s kitchen and the emptiness that she felt was frightening. The feeling of standing at the check-in counter to fly home to see a sick child only to find the flight has been canceled. A fear and panic. She knew only that she had to get to them. She dropped the fork when Ted spoke, when he told the story. It wasn’t true. But she believed it. She wanted to believe it. She picked up the fork and looked at Dodge. “I have to be with my family.”
She walked out of the kitchen, grabbed her coat by the door, and left.
* * *
• • •
Henke walked to the set, accompanied by a PA. Ted saw him as he passed through the corridor. And maybe he would have kept going. Maybe he would have simply walked on. But Franny froze, just for a second. She stopped walking. An abrupt thing. A thing she used to do when she was scared. Ted looked over and saw it on her face. She looked at Henke and then looked away. Things seemed to move slowly for Ted. He heard his heart beat in his eardrums, this loud beating, as he took in Franny’s face, her fear, the change, and the bravery as she starting walking again, as she stared directly at Henke. This tough kid. Tough woman. Who she’d become, through no help from him. But then he turned to see Henke smiling. Not a friendly smile. Taunting.
Why are we here? What’s the point? After we are stripped bare, naked before the world, after everything is taken away, all we have is our children. And we have two basic, fundamental jobs as parents. To love them. And to protect them.
Ted gently pushed Franny back, making space. And Henke stopped. He would think about this moment for a long time after, about stopping and saying what he said. If he had just kept his mouth shut. But he didn’t. He leaned forward and whispered to Ted. “She didn’t want to run it. The story about you. She asked me not to. I did it, anyway. I ordered the photo of her getting out of the cab, too.”
He smiled, his bulbous, Teutonic head jutting forward. No self-respecting kid from the streets of Woonsocket would ever be dumb enough to do that. There was the briefest hesitation from Ted. A small shock, really, that a person could be this way. Henke seemed to be the embodiment of everything ugly about social media. Shocking and angry and ugly and mean. I’m sorry for all of us, Tamara had said.
By the same token, fuck him.
The shock faded fast, replaced in full force by anger, by the moment, by his own absence and apathy as a parent, by his own sins as a father and husband. Ted found a quickness and strength he’d not known in years. A muscle memory from his tougher days, in the gym, punching a big bag. He reared back now and hit Henke as hard as he could in the face, smashing his nose. Henke’s head snapping back, the sound a comical Hollywood Foley, a fist hitting a head of iceberg lettuce. Except it wasn’t lettuce. It was a smug, spoiled German wearing surfer clothes. Henke’s legs buckled, a Wile E. Coyote moment, except this was an actual man and he seemed to hang for a moment before dropping to the floor like a string of bratwurst dropped from a great height. He moaned loudly. Remarkably, no one had an iPhone trained on the incident and it went unrecorded. The punch, that is. The evidence of the felony. The moments after, however, were, indeed, recorded.
His hand went to his bloodied nose, his eyes wide in disbelief, the searing pain of it, displaced cartilage, the electric pain of the impact itself. All of it captured as his guttural German spilled forth. He tried to stand, unsuccessfully at first, though eventually he made his way up.
Franny’s hands covered her mouth but Ted could see that she was smiling. She stood behind him,
leaning her head out. She reached one hand out to hold on to his back, to his sports coat. And in that gesture, he felt whole. He could have died then and there.
“I’ll kill you,” Henke screamed. “I’ll fucking kill you. You’re nothing! Your fucking daughter is nothing! Do you know who I am?! I’m going to ruin you!”
A small crowd had formed, cell phones trained on the event, humans turned to space aliens watching this bizarre scene unfold.
“Ruin me?” Ted asked, oddly calm. “I couldn’t get a job cleaning toilets. I have nothing. But you . . . you are nothing.”
“Fuck you!” Henke screamed, drawing even more of a crowd, turning even redder, more iPhones. There was already a tweet. “Henke Tessmer losing his shit on Ted Grayson.”
“What is it you do? What’s the point of it? To embarrass people? Harass them? Spread gossip and slander? Ugliness? You’re a bottom feeder. You’re not a journalist. How dare you call yourself a journalist. We tell stories. We tell the truth. You ran that story when you knew my daughter didn’t want to. You disgust me.”
Henke wasn’t able to form words now. His rage was too complete. He was shaking. He wanted to strike Ted but he was also afraid of him.
“One more thing,” Ted said. “If you ever come near my daughter again, I’ll kick your teeth down your throat.”
Here Ted took a step toward Henke and Henke stepped back, his hands going up to his face. It was an image that would be played millions of times on YouTube over the coming weeks, an image that would become a meme for fear and overreaction, one shown for ungracious athletes, pouting starlets who didn’t win an Oscar, grumpy politicians. It would be watched the world over and become a symbol for standing up for what’s right. Ted Grayson’s High Noon moment, they called it.