“Okay. But the girl’s had a hard time of it, Lansing. If I can get her to talk to me, get her side of it in there … I just don’t want her to come off like a bimbo.” I put my hand to my forehead. It was beginning to ache. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get myself killed before I get myself fired. It’ll ease the blow of losing my job.”
“I can’t believe I’m listening to this. Wells, you can’t let tomorrow’s paper run without this story.”
My head throbbed. Too many people on my case this morning. My throat hurt, too. I had smoked too much. I jabbed out my latest. “Look, forget it, Lansing, okay? It’s not your problem. I’ll figure it out. Forget it.” I swiveled back to my phone. I plucked the receiver from it. I started to dial. I looked over my shoulder. Lansing was still there. The color had risen in her high white cheeks. Her blue eyes flashed at me.
“You know,” she said. “I get really sick of you sometimes.”
I hung up. Faced her. “Oh yeah? Well, you’re not having one of your best weeks either, sister, all right?”
She leaned toward me, both fists at her waist now. “You’re … you’re arrogant!” she said.
I gazed at her. “I’m arrogant. Half of me’s dead and the other half’s on relief. How am I arrogant?”
“You’re arrogant, and you’re … bullheaded.”
“You lose your way to your desk, Lancer? Get out of here.”
She straightened at that. Her cheeks got redder still, but her eyes stopped flashing. They were swimming now. “You talk about all this like you’re being so … noble or something,” she whispered. “Is that what you’re supposed to be? Noble?”
I waved her off. “Yeah, yeah,” I said.
“With your typewriter and your … your fistfights and all this bravado with the mob and everything. You get all …”
“What bravado? I’m covering …”
“You get all the young people in here to worship you.…”
“I’m covering a story. Anyway, I can’t help that.”
“… and it’s all bullshit, isn’t it?” A tear spilled down her cheek. She swiped at it angrily with the filmy sleeve of her blouse. “It’s all bullshit. You’re not noble. You’re not noble, you’re … you’re self-destructive, that’s what you are.”
“Oh, thank you, Dr. Freud. Now buzz off.”
“Wells! You have no right to jeopardize your job like this. You have no right to let Cambridge make a fool of you. We need you here.…”
“No one’s …”
“We need you here to stop him from turning the paper into a comic book.”
“No one’s making a fool of me.”
“The hell they’re not!” she hissed. She would’ve shouted it, but we were already drawing glances from outside the cubicle. “He is … and she is, too.”
“Who?”
“This girl …”
“What are you talking about: You don’t even know her.”
“I don’t have to know her.”
“Oh great.”
“I mean, look like a bimbo.” She was still hissing. “She is a bimbo, you idiot.”
Now I started hissing back. “What do you know about it?”
“What did she do, cry for you? She throw herself into your arms?”
I got out of my chair. Lansing took a step backward. But then she dug in. I moved in close to her, but she held her ground.
“Listen …” she hissed.
“Look,” I hissed. We sounded like a couple of steam heaters. Curious reporters wandered by outside. Peered in at us. Passed. “I’ve been taking shit from you all week,” I said.
Lansing’s mouth fell open. “Oh! Oh, you’ve been taking it? You …”
“That’s right, and I’ve had it. All right?” I cut the air with my hand. “I’ve had it!”
“I’ve been listening …”
“Friendship only goes so far!” I hissed.
“Oh, I know it does! I know it does! Everything only goes so far with you!” she hissed back.
“What the hell does that mean?”
We were nose to nose. The tears were streaming down her cheeks. “You never get close to anyone!” she said. “You never go all the way for anyone!”
“Maybe you want too much from me!”
“I don’t care! I don’t care! You don’t have the right!”
“What the …”
“I don’t care if it’s your dead daughter or this … stupid half-life you live or … It doesn’t give you the right to be above everything, to hold back from everything. Not from everything, and not from me!” She retreated a step. Her hands came up to cover her face. Her shoulders shook. She cried hard.
I stood there stupidly, silenced mid-hiss. Why was everybody crying at me all of a sudden? What had I done to them?
I reached out for her. I touched her arm. She shrugged me off. “Leave me alone.”
“What’s going on here?” I said. “What the hell is going on with you, kid?”
She lowered her hands. She tried to compose herself. She did not succeed. Still, she managed to reclaim some dignity. She stood erect anyway. She faced me again, though her eyes were swollen and blurred, her cheeks streaked with mascara.
“What is it, Lancer?” I said again. “What are we fighting about here?”
Again, she trembled on the brink of breaking down. “Nothing,” she whispered. “Nothing. Just congratulate me, Wells. Okay? Congratulate me.”
“What?”
“I’m getting married.”
Then she turned and strode swiftly from the city room.
19
She headed down the hall. I went after her. I wove through the office maze with the eyes of every staffer in the place going after me. Looks of curiosity, gossipy leers. I ignored all of them. I came into the hall in time to hear Lansing shut the conference room door. I went to it. I pushed it in. I saw her collapsed in the chair at the head of the table. She was fighting for control of herself, wiping her cheeks clean with first one palm then the other.
I came in, shut the door behind me. I lit a cigarette and perched on the table’s other edge. I watched her. She sniffled. She pouted angrily at the table top. She looked up at me fiercely. The fluorescent light turned crystal, reflected in the tears in her eyes.
“I met him while I was in the islands. On St. Martin’s,” she said. She caught her breath.
“Okay,” I said.
“On the beach.”
“Okay.”
“He’s rich. He’s in real estate and he’s very rich.”
“Okay.”
“And he’s my age. He’s thirty, which … well, it’s close enough. And he’s handsome.” She sniffled again, but the crying was just about over now. Her hand moved over the top of her head. “He has hair the color of corn.”
“The color of corn,” I said. “Okay.”
Lansing heaved a big sigh. It shuddered as it came out of her. “And … what else? He’s very nice. Very nice,” she murmured. “My mother likes him.” She laughed miserably. “She’s been calling me all week to find out if I’ve made up my mind yet. She’s driving me crazy.” She brought her hand to her eyes for a second. “I mean, really, Wells. She really is.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well: your mother.”
“Well, you worked hard to make her hate you,” she said.
“It was a Christmas party. I was drunk.”
“You could have been nice to her a little bit.”
I nodded. “Okay,” I said.
Her hands dropped heavily onto her lap, a movement of surrender. “That’s it. We were together for a week there. On the island. He says he loves me and he wants to marry me.”
I nodded.
“I know it’s just a week, but that’s what he says.”
“Okay.”
“So?” She looked up at me. “What else do you want to know?”
I shrugged. “Start with why you’re crying.”
“Oh, I always cry at engagements.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m confused, that’s all. I’m sorry if I’ve been taking it out on you. I’m just confused.”
“What about?”
“Well … he wants an answer.”
“Give him one.”
She stared at me. “Any suggestions?” I said nothing. She looked away. “I don’t know, Wells. I don’t know how I feel. It’s got me all crazy. Really. I mean, I’m a newspaperwoman.”
“You can be a married newspaperwoman.”
“He lives in Colorado.”
“They have newspapers in Colorado.”
“He says he wants to move to California someday.”
“So you’ll work for a magazine.”
She laughed miserably. “It’s not funny.”
“Sorry.”
“I mean, he wants to have kids. I want to have kids. Having kids is serious. You have to take care of them.”
“So hire someone.”
She put a thumb to her chest. “I take care of my kids, Wells.”
“Okay,” I said. After another moment, I stood up. I reached down and touched her hair. Very soft, her hair.
“You know,” I said. “I don’t think I can help you with this.”
Lansing took a deep breath. “Yeah. I do know.”
I stood with my hand on her hair. I tried to think of something else to say. I couldn’t. I let my hand fall. I walked to the door.
“I’m sorry,” said Lansing.
I opened the door, paused.
“That stuff I said about your daughter and everything. I’m sorry.”
I lifted a hand to her. I went out, shutting the door behind me. I stood in the hallway, smoking.
“Damn,” I whispered.
20
I left the office. I went to a diner near Grand Central Terminal. I had a grilled cheese sandwich. I stared at it where it lay on the plate. I pushed it around the plate with my fingers. Sometimes I took it off the plate and brought it to my lips. Then I set it down on the plate again. I had a cup of coffee, too. Sometimes I brought that to my lips and stared across the steam. The steam twisted off the top of it. On the other side of the steam, on the other side of the counter, there was a long mirror. I stared at my face in it. It had never been a pleasant face. It was lean and craggy and mean. The widow’s peak of gray hair high on my forehead gave it a sharp, almost jagged look. The brown eyes were flat and fierce. It was never a pleasant face, and today it was also battered and purple. The high forehead was split, one cheek was slashed. The whole structure of the thing seemed to have caved in a little, and it made the fierce eyes seem to burn brighter, fiercer still.
I did not look like a happy man, this hot, muggy Friday afternoon. I did not look like a man imbued with the joy of existence. Not quite. I looked—just judging from this superficial image in the mirror, mind you—I looked very much like a man who had missed the last train out of a ghost town.
I sipped a little coffee. It tasted fine.
Lansing had not looked happy either when I left her. But that didn’t mean much. She was just being emotional, that’s all. Underneath all the rough stuff, she was the emotional type, was our Lansing. She had a big decision to make and it had her all distraught, that’s all. She would look plenty happy soon enough. When she went down the aisle with this handsome, dashing millionaire her mother liked. How could she miss being happy then? She’d be ecstatic. Sure she would. Beautiful, too. Hell, Lansing in white with maybe a veil, maybe some flowers in her hair: it’d be one for the fashion pages. I could picture it. I could see it as if she were standing right there in front of me. It was going to be great.
It would be a loss to the paper, though. The Star would miss her. She was a good one, there was no doubt about that. She wasn’t an old-time pavement-pounder, a senior-citizen sleuth like me. She was more like one of those caring types, those sensitive, perceptive journalists who usually get on my nerves. Only Lansing made up for it with some regulation grit and fire.
About six months ago, just as spring came on, she did a series on domestic violence. Cambridge gave it some lurid title like BATTERED WIVES: WHAT GOES ON BEHIND CLOSED DOORS. Still, it was a good series, solid stuff all the way. After it ran, a lawyer called up, and asked Lansing if she’d do a piece on his client, a woman named Barbara Dell. Dell had been charged with attempted murder. She’d stabbed her husband Larry in the chest with a steak knife. This lawyer claimed Dell had only been trying to defend herself against the man, who’d been banging her around for years.
Lansing spoke to Mrs. Dell. The woman swore she’d reported the abuse to the proper city agency again and again. But she was black and she was poor and she’d gotten nowhere. The agency claimed they did not have a record of her reports.
Lansing checked it out. She went after the people in the agency, the workers, the underlings. She went to see them at home. She convinced them she could be trusted, and that she gave a damn about what she was doing. After a while, some of them started to open up. Some of them even went into the files for her.
One night during that time, Lansing drove home from work and parked her little Honda Accord in her apartment garage. She was about to turn off the ignition when she’ looked up into the rearview mirror—and found herself staring into the angry eyes of Larry Dell. From the back seat of the Accord, Larry Dell explained how displeased he was about the work Lansing was doing. He even showed her a switchblade to impress his displeasure on her. Lansing was impressed. She was so impressed she stepped on the gas pedal and ran the Accord into the wall of the garage. Dell was still pulling his face out of the front seat as Lansing ran up the driveway to the attendant. Dell got away. Lansing stuck to the story.
In about two weeks, Lance had herself a genuine grade A cover-up. As good as any I’ve seen. Mrs. Dell, it turned out, was telling the truth. She had reported the abuse and the city hadn’t done a thing about it. When Mrs. Dell finally took after her husband with that steak knife, a couple of agency supervisors got nervous about losing their jobs. They hit on the bright idea of pleading ignorance to the whole thing. Lansing nailed their hides to the barn door and Barbara Dell was cleared.
But Larry Dell was not arrested. The case was cold, the D.A.’s office said. Whatever proof of abuse had existed was gone now. It was impossible to make a case.
By then, of course, Barbara Dell was not living with Larry anymore. She and her two kids had moved in with her mother in an apartment in Washington Heights. About two weeks after the charges against her were dropped, she was found dead in the bedroom of that apartment. She’d been beaten and stabbed repeatedly. Larry Dell was charged with the murder.
I came into the office one night late and found Lansing sitting alone in her cubicle. She was sobbing. She wasn’t just crying. She wasn’t dabbing the occasional tear with a handkerchief. She was leaning forward in her swivel chair as if she’d been sucker-punched. She was rocking herself and sobbing and sobbing. Bawling like a child.
I perched on her desk. “We just tell them,” I said to her. “We don’t make them up, ya know.”
She fought for control. It took her a long time. Finally, when she could speak, she looked up at me. I expected her to tell me how guilty she felt. Or how it broke her heart to have her work go for nothing. Or how it made her ache to see a life lost to the stupidity of government drones. She did not tell me any of that. She said only: “They’re mine, Wells. Every last one of them. Every last one of them is mine.”
It was a bloodbath. The city never stood a chance. Seven people resigned because of the stories she wrote in the next few weeks. One was an agency head, one was an assistant D.A. She’d have nailed two more, I think, if the mayor hadn’t gotten his rich friends to lean on Bush who leaned, in turn, on Cambridge. By then, anyway, vengeance had been hers. She was satisfied. I drove her to the cemetery the day she laid flowers on Barbara Dell’s grave.
I drank my coffee. I stared at the mirror across the counter. Lansing was good al
l right. The Star would miss her. So would I.
I don’t care if it’s your dead daughter or this stupid half-life you live. You don’t have the right to hold back from everything. Not from everything and not from me.
“Oh hell,” I murmured to myself. I set the cup in its saucer. I lit a cigarette. I rolled the filter between my fingers as I drew in the smoke. Oh hell, I thought, what does she want from me?
There had been women in my life since my wife walked out on me. There had been women in the six years since my daughter walked off into a forest near her summer camp and hanged herself. There had been enough women to make the nights go by, and some who stayed for nights and nights on end. Some of them I thought I needed. But I did not need them, it turned out. They left and I survived. I thought I loved some of them, too. But it had not been love, it had never quite been love. And nowadays, love and need—they seemed like memories of another man’s lifetime. I was not looking for them anymore. I wouldn’t even have known where to look.
Lansing could not understand that. She was not supposed to understand. She was twenty-six. She thought everyone was hungry like she was hungry. She thought everyone yearned the way she yearned. She was supposed to feel like that, like she would die for someone, like someone would die for her. All that crap. And when the yearning and hungering and so on died down, she was supposed to find someone who could be around for her. Someone handsome. Someone rich her mother liked. Someone young, her own age.
I was forty-six. I smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, sometimes four. I had since I was seventeen. I drank too much some days. Some nights, I slept too little. Some of the meanest men in the five boroughs lay awake in their beds wondering what I’d look like with a bullet in my chest. Lansing did not worry about such things when she pinned me with those eyes of hers. But I did. When her lips parted and the black of those eyes got wide at me, I could hardly think about anything else. I thought about how I’d be fifty when Lansing was thirty. I thought about how, when she was thirty-five, I’d probably be dead.
The Rain Page 14