The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom

by Jenny Holiday

  “He feels like you owe him something.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  “Enough sorry!” Nessa waved her hands in a dismissive motion. “Enough boys, too!”

  “I’ll second that motion,” I said, smiling sadly.

  “Let’s go to Boston,” she said, standing up and holding out her hand. “Just you and me, like we used to. If we leave now, we can be there by lunch.”

  We did used to make the ninety-minute bus ride to the city every couple of months, to see a Red Sox game or go shopping or just to hang out in some new scenery. We hadn’t been all year. I was exhausted, but…

  I took her hand. “That is an offer I cannot refuse.”

  Matthew

  Curry didn’t say anything for a really long time as he circled the portraits of Jenny. He didn’t light a second cigarette when the first one burned down.

  “You are in love with this girl.” It wasn’t a question.

  “What? No!” I had to take a step back, I was so stunned by the pronouncement.

  He narrowed his eyes at me and then looked back at the drawings. “Perhaps you hate her then?”

  “I don’t hate her,” I said, realizing too late that it came out sounding awfully defensive—the artist doth protest too much and all that.

  My maddening mentor shrugged, as if it were all the same to him. “These are the best I’ve ever seen from you. You’re finally getting somewhere.”

  “Because I cranked out some pastels of some chick?” I probably shouldn’t have been talking to him like that, but I couldn’t help it.

  “You are torturing yourself over this woman.” He smirked. Before I could muster a protest, he added, “It is not necessary to torture yourself to make great art.” He held up a finger, as if to forestall the rejoinder he thought was coming, but in truth, I was too shocked to speak. “But if you’re going to do it, better over a woman than something that doesn’t matter.”

  “I only met her a couple weeks ago, so—”

  “Torture yourself over a woman,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “That’s understandable. You can use that. But the rest of it? You’ve been torturing yourself about everything all semester. Form. Technique. God knows what else.” He turned to me. It was still so strange to see him without his trademark cigarette. “And how has that been working out for you?”

  “Suffering has nothing to do with art?” I shot back. “What about Van Gogh? Bacon? Arbus?” My voice rose, indignant, because he was wrong.

  “Some artists manage to leverage their suffering into greatness. But suffering isn’t a precondition to great art, Matthew. Caring is, though. You can’t just be a robot the rest of your life. You have to let yourself care about something.”

  It was the most he had ever said to me in one go. We stared at each other for a long time. How could this asshole presume to know anything about me? About whether I’d suffered. About whether my suffering was worthy. About what I’d had to do to get through the past four years. About what I’d had to do to get through the last twenty-two.

  “What I care about,” I finally whispered, shaking so hard with suppressed rage that I couldn’t make my voice any louder, “is not flunking out of college. What I care about is my goddamned senior portfolio.”

  Curry smiled as he stared at me. Seeing him smile was even weirder than seeing him without a cigarette. “I don’t give a flying fuck about your senior portfolio, Townsend. You do what you like, and I’ll sign off on it.”

  Then he turned and lit a cigarette, dismissing me.

  * * *

  It wasn’t late enough when I got back to campus. It wasn’t dark enough, the spring days having grown longer without me noticing. That I was planning to go out without sufficient darkness was a sign of how out of control I was. But I was beyond caring. I banged into my room and yanked the portraits of Jenny out of my portfolio. When I ripped the corner of one of them, it only fanned the flames of my rage. I didn’t even have a new stencil, for fuck’s sake. It showed how utterly distracted I’d let myself become in recent weeks. I slammed my backpack on my bed, intending to empty it so I could refill it with my supplies, but the already-wobbly zipper finally gave way, and all my shit went flying.

  Fuck it. I didn’t need the backpack. I just had to go, had to obey the fire in my limbs commanding that I keep moving. I grabbed a garbage bag, jerked my closet door open, threw all my paint cans into the bag, and headed out into the twilight.

  I could feel the fury starting to dissipate as I walked. It was like my junkie body knew it was going to get its fix soon, and it opened a tiny pinhole in my chest, allowing the rage that had accumulated there to begin to hiss out. By the time I was done, a couple hours from now, I would be okay, back to myself. I glanced at the art building up ahead. I’d be that goddamned wooden door, unchanging and impermeable.

  The art building sat at one end of a circular commons that formed the center of campus. It was lined with the university’s oldest, most stately buildings, anchored by Salter Tower, the campus’s iconic clock tower, and ringed by a roundabout used by buses coming into campus. As I approached, a regional commuter bus of the same variety from which I had recently disembarked pulled up in front of the student center, which was on the opposite side of the circle from the art building. I slowed my pace and averted my face. Some of the profs commuted to campus from Boston, and though it was unlikely that any of them would be arriving on a Sunday evening, I had to make sure no one with any authority saw me leaving campus with my sketchy garbage bag. As the bus pulled away, I allowed myself to glance over to see if I needed to worry about any of the passengers.

  One. There was one I needed to worry about.

  She was laughing, laden with shopping bags and jokingly objecting to something that Nessa was saying. She was back in her colorful armor: a denim miniskirt, purple leggings, and a matching loose purple T-shirt belted low across her waist.

  The pinhole that had opened up in my chest ripped itself into a huge, gaping rift, and instead of exiting in an orderly, drawn-out fashion, my rage was all sucked out of me in one heaving, horrible instant.

  You have to let yourself care about something.

  The shocking truth was that I wanted to fall to my knees before her once again. Right now and every day for the rest of my life. So I could taste her, yes, but also so I could beg the forgiveness I came nowhere near to deserving. So I could exhort her to have me.

  “Was I drunk to let you talk me into that?” Jenny exclaimed, looping her arm through her roommate’s. “Because I am never going to wear that shirt.”

  “Shut up! That shirt is amazing! You’re going to kill in it.”

  “It doesn’t even have a back, Ness! It—”

  Even if I hadn’t been watching them, standing there immobilized by the great roiling mass of fear and love and anguish and lust and guilt that had taken up residence inside me, I would have been able to pinpoint the exact moment she saw me. It was the moment the laughing, teasing, easygoing banter died. Killed by the sight of a boy who had broken her. Or tried to. Because even if she didn’t know it herself, no one could ever really break her.

  Her face took only a moment to catch up with what she was seeing. Then it rid itself of all outward sign of emotion. Like the door. The untouchable door. Oh God, it was like being lanced directly in the heart. Rainbow Brite wasn’t supposed to look like that. To be like that—immovable and impenetrable. She deserved so much better.

  So why, said a little voice inside my head, didn’t I think that I did, too?

  I watched Nessa take in the scene. She used the arm that was already linked with Jenny’s to pull her friend closer and began marching down the sidewalk. They’d been headed my direction, but Nessa rerouted them, sending them the long way around the circle so they wouldn’t have to pass me. When they were a good ten yards away, Nessa looked over her shoulder at me. I couldn’t hear, but I could read her lips clear as day: “Asshole.”

  Jenny, by contrast
, did not look back.

  I had to fix this. I had to fix a lot of things.

  I made for the art building. There was that door again. What the hell? Why had I assigned so much bullshit symbolism to it? I dropped my bag and pressed both hands against the wood, like I wanted to make sure it had no miraculous powers. Nope. Just a fucking door.

  Which I pushed open, a new mission crystallized in my head. I needed to find someone with a camera.

  Chapter Eight

  Jenny

  I woke the next morning to pounding. At first, I thought it was just my head, because after seeing Matthew on the circle, Nessa had taken me straight to a bar—not the one Matthew worked at—and gotten me drunk, and we’d stumbled home after last call.

  But it hadn’t been enough. I had wanted to forget him, just for one night. To numb myself. But it hadn’t been possible. My mind couldn’t let go of the images assaulting it. It was the contrast between them that slayed me. Him laughing as we fell together onto his bed. Him kissing me like he would die if he stopped. Then, just as vivid: him staring at me as I got off the bus, wearing that same, horrible, blank expression he’d turned on me earlier that morning. As if he didn’t even know me.

  But as Nessa stumbled toward the door, groaning—she’d had her own heartbreak to nurse last night, after all—I realized the pounding was coming from outside.

  “What?” she snapped, opening the door. Then her voice softened. “Tony?”

  “You have to come,” he said, barging into the room, aiming the order at me.

  “I’m not going anywhere today, Tony,” I said, turning over to face the wall. “Tell Beth to run the editorial meeting.” I’d been planning on recommending to the paper’s board that Beth get the editor-in-chief job next year, so it couldn’t hurt for her to get some experience now.

  “Jenny, get out of bed,” he said. “There’s something you need to see.”

  Something about the tone the usually mild-mannered photographer used to deliver his directive got me out of bed. I sent him outside to wait while I threw on some sweats and brushed my teeth. Just like two mornings ago in the bathroom at Matthew’s dorm, I didn’t look in the mirror. I didn’t want to see what he had reduced me to.

  “I was in the darkroom late last night,” Tony explained as he and Nessa and I set off across the quad, “when the door opened.”

  Nessa looked at me warily. I knew what she was thinking: Royce.

  “It was that Matthew Townsend kid.”

  “What?” Nessa said, her voice indignant.

  “Yeah, and he ruined an entire box of photo paper.”

  “What did he want?” I couldn’t help it. I wanted to not care what Matthew did, but if Tony didn’t keep telling the story, I would drag it out of him.

  I needn’t have worried, because obviously whatever happened had been weighing on Tony, and he was anxious to unburden himself. He wrung his hands as he walked. “He begged me to help him with his senior portfolio. He said he had all the art done—installations, he said. He just needed someone to walk around with him and take photos to document them.”

  I sucked in a breath. He couldn’t mean… “The graffiti?” I whispered.

  “Yeah,” said Tony. He’s the guy whose been doing all that political graffiti all these years. And his stuff—it’s amazing.”

  So why was Tony so worked up? He didn’t know about Matthew and me.

  “So we walked around,” he continued. “It wasn’t quite dark yet, so we got some good shots. There was more to do when night really fell, so we walked back to the circle and parted ways there, agreeing that we’d meet at the art building this morning to photograph the rest.”

  “It was nice of you to help him,” I offered weakly, not sure what else to say.

  “I did it for you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, for the art building,” he clarified. “I thought if I did him a favor, maybe I could get him to use any pull he had with the department, or that Curry guy, to protest the demolition.”

  Tears sprang to my eyes. Why couldn’t I have fallen for a guy like Tony? He was a Goth, which was not at all my type, and came off as kind of a playboy, but he was always doing these sweet, thoughtful things.

  “But, really, once I saw what he was doing, it felt, like…important to help him.” He seemed anguished, like he was apologizing to me for something.

  “I know,” I said, nodding, feeling like he needed me to dispense absolution for some reason I couldn’t understand. “His work could be really significant if he would just…allow it to be.”

  “Well, I’m exposing the film when I get back to my room,” Tony said angrily as we rounded the corner that would put us onto the circle. He’d taken us along a path that came up along the side of the art building and deposited us right in front of it.

  Nessa saw it before I did and gasped. I looked at her first, saw the horror on her face as she clasped a hand over her mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” Tony said. “I thought you should see it. I’m going to leave you here and go get some of the newspaper people together to see about getting it removed.” He patted my arm awkwardly and left.

  I let my eyes slide over the lettering, biting down on the inside of my cheeks to keep from wailing.

  FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL JENNY. 867-5309.

  In gold spray paint.

  You’re basically never going to see gold graffiti.

  “Let’s go,” said Nessa, tugging on my arms. But I planted my feet. I couldn’t stop looking at it. “You’ve seen it,” she added. “So please, let’s just go.”

  “He didn’t even make it look good.” In some ways, that was the bigger blow. He could create the most stunning works of art, was capable of such breathtaking, exacting work, even when in a hurry, as I had witnessed when we’d done the Reagan Star Wars piece together. But these were crude letters that looked like a kid had drawn them.

  But perhaps that was intentional. Crude letters to match the crude sentiment.

  “How could I have been so wrong about him?” I whispered, recognizing even as I spoke the words that they had been a feminine chorus since time immemorial. I’d chosen him because I thought he was different. More evolved. But he was no better than Royce.

  The very worst part about all of this was that he had made me question not just my romantic judgment, but everything about myself. Could I ever trust myself again? And if not, how was I ever going to have the guts to move to New York and will my way into a career I now wasn’t sure I was constitutionally capable of? An investigative journalist had to have, above all things, good judgment. She had to be able to trust her intuition.

  He had taken that from me, too. He had taken everything that mattered.

  “I need to get out of this school,” I said, though I wasn’t sure to whom I was speaking.

  “Just a month left,” Nessa said. Then she took my hand and squeezed it. “Three weeks of class. That’s six more newspapers. Then some exams. Then you’re free.”

  The pressure on my hand and the truth of the words functioned like anchors. Something to hold onto while a hurricane raged around me—and inside me. She was right. I couldn’t let him have everything. I had my friends. I had the newspaper—and Dawn had a huge story brewing that was going to run in the last issue of the school year. It was going to cause a lot of controversy, and I needed to make sure my head was in the game.

  I nodded. Nessa, the eye of my storm, wrapped her arms around me and gave me a quick, fierce hug. Then she tugged my arm again, and this time I let her lead me away.

  What else could I do except start counting the days?

  Matthew

  I hadn’t seen it because I had been in Boston. My plan had been to meet Tony as we’d agreed the night before. I was going to try to badger him into developing all the film right after we got back from our second outing, and then take it to Curry.

  But in the end, once I had decided, I couldn’t wait.

  You have to let yourself care
about something.

  I’d hopped the 6 a.m. Boston bus and gone to Curry’s house, where I pounded on his door until he woke up and answered it, cursing and smoking simultaneously.

  “And why didn’t you go to this girl first?” Curry asked as we cruised down the highway back toward Allenhurst in his late-model BMW. For all the ramshackle shabbiness of his studio, it seemed he did pretty well. “Why didn’t you follow her last night after you saw her get off the bus?”

  I had told him everything—about the graffiti and about Jenny. Because it was all mixed up so badly there was no point in trying to untangle it. If I had decided to do what Curry said and finally care about something, it was because of her. Because she made me not need to go out and do graffiti to feel okay. Which was confusing, because I was trying to argue to Curry that the graffiti should be my senior portfolio.

  “I needed to get my shit figured out first,” I said. “I didn’t want to come to her all…damaged. Without having changed anything.”

  “Because from my vantage point, it sort of looks like you’re leaving her hanging while you fart around with your senior portfolio.”

  I could see how it looked that way. What I wasn’t telling him was that I was going to move to New York when I graduated. I hoped with Jenny, but even if she wouldn’t have me, I’d go. But first I needed to show her—and myself—that I could do something that mattered. That I had a reason to move to New York and say, “I am an artist.”

  Curry razzed me pretty well all the way back to Allenhurst. But then when I took him to the first site and he got out of the car, he shut up. “And you’re saying there’s more?” he asked, turning to me.

  I almost laughed. “So much more.”

  “Well, let’s go, then.”

  After we’d been to a dozen or so sites, we headed back to the art building. He hadn’t spoken much during his perusal of my vandalism-turned-art, but on the way back to the car he insisted that we find Tony and get him to develop the film he’d already taken. He was even talking about hiring a professional to shoot the rest. “Although we could just ask your goddamned advisor to meet us in one of your alleys.” He snickered.