I burst into tears too.
That day left New Yorkers nervous wrecks, always jumpy and on the alert, suspicious of the solitary paper bag left on a subway train, of a backpack with no owner beside it. And others who suffered personal losses lived through a never-ending tragedy. A friend waited for her mother’s remains and possessions to be found bit by bit. Another friend, my colleague Dana, lost her love and the father of her only child in the wars that followed, left to raise her baby son alone. That baby would grow up beautiful and healthy and experiencing his father’s absence to the core. The rest of us could only learn to appreciate our loved ones even more. I also took stock of what a bitch I had been to some people. I thought about a boyfriend I had loved very much in my twenties and almost married, but had discarded in a manner I now regretted. I looked him up on Facebook and found him, happily married with kids. I called him not to apologize but to tell him that I remembered him, that I was grateful for having had him in my life, and that his happiness made me happy. I don’t know if the words came out right, but from then on I was conscientious about nurturing relationships and never taking those who mattered to me for granted. At least I’d try.
Mired in the aftermath of terrorism, I hardly paid attention when I heard through the grapevine that the new executive editor of the Times had decided to clean house and replace a bunch of national reporters with his own picks.
Four
Sparks and Fireworks (And No Crazy Dog)
I ran into Jim one morning in the newsroom. He looked beaten.
“What are you doing here?” I asked cheerfully, genuinely glad to see him.
We had not been in touch since my stint in the L.A. bureau, and he had been out of my mind. But when I saw him I blushed.
He mumbled something and looked even more miserable. He told me he had just been told he could not stay in Los Angeles and had to transfer back to New York.
“Do you want to have a drink after work?” I suggested out of pity and curiosity.
Jim living in New York? My pride was dissolving fast.
“A drink sounds great. I’m staying at the Millennium. We can meet at the bar in the lobby,” he said, still sounding like a zombie.
A few hours later, there I was again, at a hotel bar with this dashing but enigmatic man I kept stumbling upon.
The meeting with Executive Editor Howell Raines and company had not gone well. Every foreign and national correspondent knows the assignment comes with an expiration date of three to five years unless the powers-that-be bend the rules for you. These plum jobs—whether Los Angeles or Miami, Paris or Nairobi—are immensely coveted and rotational so that deserving writers all get their turn and the beats get fresh sets of eyes. But Jim’s time to move on came up sooner than he’d expected when he got caught in the crosscurrents of the passing of the torch from Times executive editor Joe Lelyveld to Raines. As it turned out, Raines didn’t last long. His tenure came crashing down twenty-one months after it began because of his autocratic style and a powerful trigger for the staff to push back against him—the scandal of deceit and plagiarism starring “the Fabricator.”
• • •
Before he was booted out, Raines recalled many well-respected national bureau correspondents back to New York. Jim was among the correspondents who couldn’t just pick up and return to New York as he had been ordered. Families can’t be uprooted at a moment’s notice and Jim, a devoted father, had two kids in California over whom he had joint custody. He had no recourse but to beg for his job. Jim was hoping that the new regime would appreciate that he had performed terrifically as a business reporter, a foreign correspondent in Asia, and a national correspondent in Los Angeles—most recently on high-profile stories such as the Wen Ho Lee spying case and the California energy crisis. He had won multiple Publisher’s awards, an honor given to Times reporters who produced the best work of the month. Raines’s predecessor had understood Jim’s family situation and allowed him to remain longer than usual in Los Angeles. Jim thought he might be able to persuade Raines to do the same. But it was not to be. Jim would have to resign if he wanted to remain in L.A. After eighteen years with the paper, he was about to lose the job he loved.
He was devastated but had no time to wallow. He needed to find another job in the couple months the Times gave him to return to New York.
“It sucks that you have to find another job in a hurry,” I told him as we sat in lounge chairs by the bar over glasses of wine. “Couldn’t you move to New York for a while and take your time looking?”
I thought he was about to make a huge mistake. You can use the Times as a springboard to another great job probably only once. He could squander that chance as he rushed to line up new work.
“No. I really couldn’t leave L.A., even for a few months.”
I changed the subject. “Who hired you?”
The recollection of those early years cheered him up. Jim’s ascent as a business writer was quick. In barely five years, he was sent to Tokyo to cover business and economics. He then went to Los Angeles as a business correspondent five and a half years later, before moving to the culture section, covering Hollywood, television, and the arts, and later national news as a West Coast correspondent.
For the next hour, we told tales back and forth about Times editors and laughed and gossiped. After a few drinks and two bowls of peanuts, we got hungry and Jim suggested Virgil’s, a great BBQ place across the street. I wasn’t about to eat messy ribs on our first “date.”
“How about Orso?”
We walked to that staple of the theater district, and once there we found ourselves seated only a few tables away from the singer Lou Rawls, one of Jim’s favorites. We talked and laughed some more, the mood and the feelings warm and relaxed. By the time we walked out of the restaurant, Jim was singing a Rawls standard, “Willow Weep for Me.”
~./’~./’~Willoooooooow~./’~Weeeeep~./’~ for~./’~Meeeeeeeeeee~./’~/’
He sang off-key on the sidewalk as I and passersby giggled. We strolled, very slowly, the two blocks to my subway station. We extended our good-byes until we had nothing else to do but look at each other awkwardly as people brushed past us into the subway entrance. Neither one of us invited the other to come home. That would have been too soon, at least for this lapsed Catholic. Then I remembered. “I’m going to be in Las Vegas in two weeks to run a relay race,” I said as we shook hands.
It seemed my fate to always be headed his way. My friend in Long Beach, Rose, had roped me into joining her media team for the annual Baker to Vegas run through the desert between California and Nevada. And Vegas was just a one-hour hop from Los Angeles by plane. There I was again, serving myself up on a platter.
“I think I can find a story to do in Vegas while you’re there,” Jim said with a wicked look.
I smiled and said good-bye, but this time there was no fantasizing on my way home. My mother had raised no fool. I cautiously looked forward to our next meeting with no expectations whatsoever other than a nice dinner.
Over the next few days I pretended not to care that I had not heard from Jim, but, as the date for the Vegas trip approached, I couldn’t help being annoyed. Here we go again. Jesus! What’s wrong with this guy? The Monday before the trip, I finally shot him an e-mail.
“Hi, Jim. Hope you’re well. My trip to Vegas is fast approaching and I need some suggestions. My needs, in order of importance: shops, swimming pool, blackjack, and anything else I can become addicted to in four days. Any help will be much appreciated.”
Jerk.
He made me wait all of five minutes.
“We’ll have to see what we can do about adding to the list of addictions, and the order,” he replied. “Would you have dinner with me?”
Loved packing, loved flying, loved running in ninety-degree weather in a demented race involving more cars than runners, loved finally getting ready for our first offi
cial honest-to-goodness date. I was so nervous that nothing was getting done. With only fifteen minutes to spare before Jim was to show up, I still had to do my nails and iron my blouse. I was staying at the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino on the Strip. The room, shared with Rose and two other runners, came with an impressive view of the Eiffel Tower. My exhausted roommates planned to crash for the night, ordering in and watching videos while I was out on my hot date. They were so amused at my frantic preparations that one of them pushed me aside to finish ironing my see-through top while another one pointed the blow-dryer at my hands as I finished my manicure. When we heard the knock on the door my three roommates rushed to take their seats. Showtime! And there he was, showered and crisply dressed in a white cotton shirt and jeans, just off a plane and completely unfazed. He wore a big (sexy) smile and confidently (and sexily) walked into the room, saying hello to everyone while I blurted out introductions and apologized for not shaking his hand.
“I just did my nails,” I said lamely.
He just kept looking at me, oblivious to my roommates and their winked approvals. That night, we dined in Santa Fe, strolled on the Brooklyn Bridge, and had pineapple vodkas in Red Square. Despite our fake world travels, everything between us felt natural and real. We spent hours talking about our lives. Jim and I shared a common background. We were both semireligious—not pious, but observant of traditions. We were both extremely close to our families. His mother, Levona, had died a few years earlier of lung cancer, but he still had his father, an engineer, and two brothers and a sister. He even grew up in hot and humid weather like I did, in his case in Florida, in one of the few Jewish families then living in Fort Lauderdale.
Jim had come to journalism in a roundabout way. As a restless teenager, he moved to Vermont for college and then spent a year in Europe, with his best buddy, Ken. They picked grapes in Provence, moved boxes in a wine cellar in Germany, and worked in a ski shop in the French Alps. After all that excitement he returned to the States to complete a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and cultural anthropology at Middlebury College. He was foggy about what he wanted to do, until he got into the literature program at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf campus and later the Bread Loaf program at Oxford University in England. He got the confidence to consider writing for a living and enrolled at Columbia’s journalism school. Upon getting his master’s, he lucked out. He landed an overnight-shift job writing and editing for the international wire service at AP/Dow Jones. Six months later, he was asked to open their Hong Kong bureau.
Jim had a girlfriend, whom he married, and they moved to Asia. The Times hired him less than four years later and brought him back to New York to cover Wall Street in the wild 1980s. He wrote a book about the collapse of E. F. Hutton, the venerable brokerage house, and went back to Asia to work for the Times’s Tokyo bureau. During his five and a half years in Japan, he and his wife adopted a girl, Arielle, and then a boy, Henry. Jim said he had always wanted to be a father. He was a natural. When I came along, he had already been divorced six years and was a self-sufficient single father who cooked, did laundry, coached softball, helped with homework, and worked as a national correspondent for the Times bureau in Los Angeles.
He had it all, almost. Like me, he was in a good place professionally but was missing a steady relationship. His dating record didn’t seem to be any better than mine. While I dated insurance scammers, he went out with porn stars. Okay, one porn star. They attended a screening of Boogie Nights. For “research,” he said, just to get an expert’s opinion on the movie’s accuracy in depicting the skin trade. The porn star—surprise!—showed up three-quarters naked, so, naturally, he took her to an outdoor restaurant on Sunset Boulevard where his date could stop traffic.
I laughed as he told the story over our pineapple vodkas at the Mandalay hotel in Vegas and felt completely at ease and happy. He said nothing about a crazy dog. We were having such a great time that when we tried to say good night we couldn’t. I decided to live for the moment. But the next day, Jim had to work. We were up and running early in the morning, trying to make it to the Hoover Dam in time for Jim to report a news story about increased security at the dam, a popular tourist attraction, in the post-9/11 world. I wandered around as Jim interviewed visitors, some of them still visibly drunk from their gambling all-nighters, others killing time before their flights home. As I watched Jim taking notes, I was on a buzz of excitement and possibility. I wanted this man who looked and felt so right. It’d be tricky to get to know each other long-distance, but dating is never effortless. We could make it work if we wanted to pursue a relationship badly enough. And we did. We both realized that Vegas, hookup heaven, was the start of something more serious. We were so ready.
From then on, we sustained a bicoastal courtship. Phone calls every day. E-mails every few hours. Some were no more than symbols for kisses, deep as we were in lovey-doveydom. A few weeks after our Vegas reunion, Jim arrived at my apartment late one Friday night with a bottle of California chardonnay. I had a checkered past in the kitchen but welcomed him with a supper culled from recipes from Gourmet magazine. Prosciutto-wrapped asparagus with mint dressing. Grilled tuna salade Niçoise. Smoked salmon and egg salad sandwiches with capers. As we nibbled, we made plans for the two romantic days that lay ahead. He would take the red-eye back to L.A. Sunday night. My turn to visit would be up next in a few weeks. Arielle and Henry awaited.
It was all going to be perfect.
Five
The Big Galoot
I arrived at Jim’s town house in Los Angeles all frazzled. It was a hot summer evening, and I had just spent four hours crawling north from San Diego on the freeway. On that hellish Friday I had been attending, again, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference. The traffic was not the only thing making me sweat. I was about to meet Jim’s gang for the first time.
Jim invited two good friends his kids liked, Angel and Michael, as buffers so the focus wouldn’t all be on this new “friend.” I had invited my own little security blanket too. Rose drove in half an hour from Long Beach. At his front door, I took an anxious breath, and pushed the doorbell. And there he was, my smiling boyfriend along with Greeter #2—the Barker. Jim had mentioned Eddie in passing so he wasn’t a complete surprise. The dog seemed excited to see me, barking in a nonthreatening tone as Jim and I kissed chastely. At the touch of lips, Eddie jumped on his master, his big paws reaching to Jim’s waist, seeking his attention.
“This is Mia. She’s nice,” Jim said, using the tone most of us reserve for toddlers.
Woof-woof-woof.
“You big galoot,” Jim cooed as he held his pooch to keep him from leaping on my silk blouse.
“Hello, doggie,” I said, careful not to touch him just in case he was overdue for a bath.
Eddie was covered in dark spots interrupted by a wide brown saddle wrapped around his muscular back and rump. He had a cute boxy face, but the spots were by far his most distinctive feature—not uniformly smallish spots like a Dalmatian’s, but smallish, medium, and big patches, like a fabric print with defects. Any of his victims (more on this later) could easily pick him out in a lineup. He calmed down after a few seconds, took a few quick sniffs around me, and looked up at Jim for his next cue. A scratch-fest involving impressive contortion followed.
“What’s a galoot?” I asked as the dog monopolized precious moments.
“A big tough guy,” Jim said.
As he petted Eddie, the dog lay down and turned over with no sense of decorum to reveal a pink belly and God knows what else. With his four paws in the air, squirming from side to side as Jim rubbed away, Eddie didn’t look so tough to me. I was relieved when Jim finally moved us on to the galoots that really mattered—Arielle and Henry. At eleven and nine, Jim’s kids were still little, shy, polite, and monosyllabic to my questions. I felt as shy as they did under the circumstances. Everything was okay. The point of this visit was to familiarize ourselves with one a
nother, to put faces to names. I hoped we’d have a lifetime to know one another. That night I had no expectations other than sheer success or utter failure. My friends’ kids always said I was “cool.” But winning over the children of the man you are falling in love with is fraught with danger. Would they be welcoming or would they be jealous? Would they help our budding relationship or try to torpedo it? Would they warm up easily or really make me work for it? I had no clue, mostly because loving from three thousand miles away shields you from everything except what the other person tells you. Jim was unflinchingly positive and cheerful about our bonding prospects.
Jim lived in a two-story town house he owned deep in a canyon in ritzy Pacific Palisades, home to the likes of Steven Spielberg, Kate Hudson, and Hilary Swank. His house was in the less glamorous area of the Palisades, in a neighborhood called the Highlands that could claim only singer John Mayer as its resident A-lister (and a visiting Jennifer Aniston when she later got involved with him). But Jim’s cozy home was sun-soaked and inviting, and next to trails of the Topanga State Park system. It had space to spare compared to my eight-hundred-square-foot Manhattan apartment. Much of it was taken up by Arts and Crafts–style furniture and Japanese art and pottery that Jim had accumulated from his years in Asia. He also showed a fondness for some Japanese traditions. At his townhome, shoes were left at the entrance.
“It helps you unwind when you enter your home,” he explained.
The place was neater than mine, very metrosexual. There was a high-ceilinged, roomy living room on the first level and a dining room overlooking the living area from a second level. Upstairs, the master bedroom was big enough to double as an office. Arielle’s bedroom was upstairs, Henry’s was off the kitchen near the dining room, and Eddie slept in a crate in the living room at street level. As the kids went off to do their thing and the adults chatted in the kitchen, Jim grilled some salmon on his postage stamp–sized patio and served it with asparagus and white rice—sticky, Japanese-style. I felt comfortable and relieved as that first evening proceeded harmoniously.
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