Thief of Words

by John Jaffe

  The meeting space on the second floor at the Bethesda Barnes & Noble was packed that Wednesday night. Women were sitting cross-legged in the aisles and standing back among the magazines. In the previous half hour, Jack had learned that he and his kind were responsible for crime, pornography, MTV, AIDS, SIDS, NATO, and holes in the ozone layer. He also learned that he must hand back the planet to women, who had previously run things in a long-lost golden age, known mythologically as the Garden of Eden, until, as the She-Devil put it, “men, with swords in their hands and swords between their legs, captured the human race.”

  Jack, who had nothing against NATO and kind of liked MTV, had tried to ride out the typhoon of rhetoric like a sailor, but instead of a mast, he clung to the sight of Annie sitting at the author’s table. She was wearing loose, flowing pants and a matching blouse that managed to be pale and bright green at the same time. Her hair tumbled down past her shoulders like a fallen halo. She looked cool and smart and Jack had the sudden thought that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life. But just as quickly, he cautioned himself: maybe you’re simply overreacting to the surrounding piercings and buzzcuts.

  Jack had arrived just as the She-Devil began her talk, “She-Speaks.” When he squeezed himself between the last row of folding chairs and the end of the New Age/Spirituality aisle, he discovered he was the only man in the crowd.

  It was when the subject turned to cloning that he finally caught Annie’s eye. The She-Devil, spotting the lone swordsman in the crowd, pointed to him and said, “In twenty years he’ll be irrelevant.” The crowd laughed and Jack looked for help from the author’s table. Annie stuck out her tongue, smiled, flushed, and looked away, brushing aside an invisible strand of hair.

  The She-Devil finished up her talk to rowdy applause. When she began signing copies of Confessions of a She-Devil, Annie walked over to Jack. “How’d you like it?” she asked him, radiating fake innocence.

  “Not bad, for a castration,” he said.

  Annie gave him one of her quick laughs. “Would it hurt too much to walk over there?” she said, pointing to the café. “I’ll just be five minutes and then you can buy me a cup of coffee. Oh, wait; first come meet the She-Devil. Don’t worry, she won’t hurt you. She even thinks you’re cute—for an oppressor.”

  As if she’d known him forever, Annie took his hand and led him to the author’s table.

  “Eda, meet Jack, he’s the man I told you about.”

  Eda Royal was a short dumpling of a woman, with a round pumpkin face. She squinted at him as if she were examining road-kill. Or at least that’s how Jack felt under her gaze.

  He was starting to stammer something about it being a pleasure to meet her, when she broke into a belly laugh. “Oh, for Christsakes, it’s anything but a pleasure to meet me, after what I just put you through. You know I was only kidding, about the swords and all that stuff. It was just a locker-room pep talk, that’s all. I got the idea from Monday Night Football. Anyway, it is a pleasure to meet you. You’re a brave— or exceedingly stupid—man to come here tonight. Or”—she looked over at Annie—“exceedingly smitten.”

  Annie and Jack were soon elbow to elbow at a little round coffee table in the Barnes & Noble café sharing lattes and biscotti. This time there were no first-lunch jitters or first-impression nerves. Jack didn’t drop any food on himself; Annie stopped worrying that her voice was too bright or her expression too brittle.

  “You know what was the best thing about your e-mail?” Annie asked.

  “The brilliant writing?”

  “Yup,” Annie said, “that, too. But the really brilliant part is, now, when I think of Spain, I don’t see Trip crouched over a bunch of maps. I see the sweat dripping down Renatta’s back. You know how a tape recorder records over things? That’s what your words did. They wrote over my past.”

  They talked for more than two hours about everything: her job, his job, body piercing in general, body piercing in specific (the silver stud in Sarah the Firehook Bakery girl’s tongue that made her lisp), where they’d be living if they could live anywhere (she Colorado, he Arizona), her upcoming “bonding trip” with her mother, his trip to Utah this summer with Matthew, and on and on. When the bookstore closed at eleven, Jack, Annie, and a kid with matted hair who looked like he’d just woken up were the last out the door.

  It was a warm night and the restaurants were still open; well-dressed people, gazing at each other over flickering candles, jammed the outdoor tables. Couples walked through the glow of window displays showing the latest hand-stamped linen dresses.

  “Where are you parked?” the two of them said at the same moment. They laughed, then paused, waiting for the other to finish.

  “No. You first,” said Jack.

  “Over there,” said Annie, pointing to the outdoor lot across the street.

  “I’m in the garage,” said Jack. “Let me walk you to your car.”

  It wasn’t until he stopped in front of Annie’s Mustang that the significance of the moment struck him—struck him like a cartoon anvil shoved off a ten-story building. He was going to have to … he was going to try to… kiss Annie Hollerman good night.

  At the prospect of this, something giggled up inside him so fast he had to turn away so she wouldn’t see the silly grin on his face.

  The question was how. It had to be a sophisticated approach, he knew, yet something manly. He decided to reach out for her hand then gently pull her to him. A dance move. Something suave. Something Fred Astaire. He turned back around, then hesitated.

  It was Annie who moved first.

  She put her hand gently at the back of Jack’s head and made the inches between them disappear. She pressed her lips against his mouth. Softly at first. Then he furrowed a hand into her hair and pulled her body against him. She pressed hard at his lips and circled her arms around his neck. Then she wrapped her right leg around his left. A single tiptoe connected her to Earth.

  Jack walked his fingers slowly down the ridges of her spine, down to the base of her curve. He pushed hard against her; he could feel the heat of her against his thigh. She could feel him against her hip.

  Her mouth opened, she slid her tongue into him.

  CHAPTER 23

  Laura arched her left eyebrow as Annie sat down next to her at a window table upstairs at Teaism, a quirky café in Dupont Circle. “So? How was last night?”

  Annie grinned and gave her the thumbs-up. “This guy could teach John Gilliam how to kiss.”

  “Way to go. I haven’t seen that cocky grin on you in a million years. This is a good sign, a very good sign.”

  Then Laura started singing loud enough for people at the next table to turn around. “ ‘Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match …’ So I take it things are right on track with Jack?”

  “You could say that,” Annie said.

  They were meeting in D.C. this morning because Laura had an afternoon interview with a lieutenant in the Russian mafia at an as of yet undisclosed location near the White House. Getting there was going to involve secret phone booth calls, passwords, and limousines.

  Between bites of tea-cured salmon, Annie filled her in on last night’s events. Laura sprayed her oolong-oolong when Annie told her about the She-Devil’s meeting with Jack.

  “And he stuck around after that? Impressive,” Laura said between laughs.

  “More than stuck around. We closed the place down,” Annie said.

  Laura arched an eyebrow again. “And?”

  “And what?” said Anne. “And did I take him home with me? You can stop looking at me like that. The answer’s no. No ‘ands.’ Jesus, Laura, I barely know his last name.”

  “It’s DePaul. What else do you need to know? He’s a great guy. He’s got a great ass, I think. And by my count you haven’t been to bed with a man for what, eight months? And that was with the energy geek, so it didn’t really count.”

  “Nine, as long as you’re counting,” Annie said. “But that’s why Kma
rt sells vibrators. That is where you bought me my last birthday present, isn’t it?” Annie shook an accusatory finger at her friend. “If your mother only knew that her daughter shops the Blue Light Specials.”

  Laura rolled her eyes. “It’d be enough to put her in her grave, if cancer hadn’t gotten there first.” Then she stretched her hands across the table. “I miss her,” she said.

  Annie put her hands over Laura’s. “Me too,” she said.

  Bunny Goodbread had died fourteen years before. Laura was far too young to lose a mother—as if you’re ever old enough—and was so lonesome for a maternal presence that she had glommed herself onto Annie’s family. Joan Hollerman Silver, the woman who never wanted to be a mother, found herself with a second daughter.

  “Speaking of mothers,” Annie said, “thanks to you, my mother’s office has a little pool going on whether Jack’s a keeper.”

  “I know. I put twenty dollars on yes.”

  Annie shook her head in disbelief. “Even for you, Laura, that’s going too far. Besides, it’s insider trading. I hope you lose every penny.” She paused, then said, “Well, maybe I don’t. I don’t know what I want, Laura. The truth is, he seems great—we’re going out again, on Saturday night. He’s funny and smart and, okay, yes, he’s sexy. But—”

  Laura held up her hand, stopping Annie’s words. “I know, sweetie. Believe it or not, I thought about it a lot before I told Jack about you. He’s a journalist. You were a journalist. Very past-tense. You are an agent now. It’s time to bury that past once and for all. For Christsakes, Annie, what’s the worst thing that could happen?”

  CHAPTER 24

  The conference table was too big for the room. It had nearly historic dimensions, as if designed for the signing of a peace treaty. The seven Star-News features editors who gathered around it each morning invariably clustered at one corner so they wouldn’t have to bellow across its shiny, laminate bulk.

  This Thursday morning the corner was strewn with the usual meeting flotsam: newspapers, printouts, photographs, coffee cups, coffee mugs, and a box of Krispy Kremes. The strewing had been done by the usual participants: Jack DePaul, Features editor; Mike Gray, Arts editor; Melissa Pendragon, from the design desk; Kathy Turnbow, editor of the Sunday magazine; Jerod Council, the features photo chief; Lisa Petrillo, who ran the home and family sections; and everybody’s boss, Steve Proctor, the features managing editor.

  “Did you guys see Kurtz’s column in the Post this morning?” Turnbow asked as she stood over the Krispy Kremes wrestling with temptation. She was a resolute woman in her late forties with a health club figure and pretensions of youthfulness. “He had an item about a weird plagiarism case at the Pittsburgh paper. A writer there—a rising young hotshot, by all accounts—took a prize-winning story from the eighties and copied the exact form of it, paragraph by paragraph, just filling in new information.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Proctor.

  “The guy was pretty clever,” said Turnbow. “Both his story and the original—it won a Penney-Missouri Award—had to do with a new medical procedure on a child. The Penn-Mizzo piece had a complicated structure; it went back and forth between the surgeons in the operating room, the family waiting for the result, and the science behind the procedure. The Pittsburgh guy did the exact same thing, he just had a new procedure, new surgeons, and a new family.”

  “I’ve never heard of structural plagiarism before,” said Petrillo. “Is that so bad? Doesn’t every Ravens game story have the same structure?”

  “Yeah,” said Council, “is it a theft or an ‘homage’?”

  Jack wiped Krispy Kreme crumbs from his mouth and jumped into the conversation with both loafers.

  “‘Homage’ my ass, Jerod. You telling me it would be okay if one of your photographers copied a National Geographic spread picture for picture, but he just shot them a year later and at different times of day with different lenses?”

  All the editors at the table smiled. Jack was starting to speak in italics. “Oh boy, here we go,” said Council, who was expecting just such a response. Jack had the same role in the morning meetings as coffee: to awaken and agitate. He loved fomenting debate and challenge. It wasn’t universally appreciated, but the features group depended on Jack to shake things up. That morning, his opening comment had the desired effect. Everybody piled on, talking at once. After a couple of minutes, Turnbow regained the floor.

  “It wasn’t just structure,” she said. “This guy also borrowed phrases and descriptions. Apparently, that’s what tipped off some Pittsburgh editor. Turns out he’d been a Penney-Missouri finalist the same year the original story won. What are the chances of that?”

  “What happened to the guy?” asked Proctor.

  “Suspended. Six months unpaid leave,” said Turnbow.

  “That’s bullshit,” Jack exclaimed. “How about: Fired. Six months’ hard labor.”

  This remark generated another round of hubbub, during which Jack asked, “How did Pittsburgh justify this, Kathy? What did they say: ‘Dear readers, we’ve decided that credibility isn’t important anymore so we’re keeping our plagiarist on the payroll’? I don’t get it. I don’t get the people who do it or the papers that allow it. If newspapers don’t have some basic integrity, we might as well turn ’em all into Web sites.”

  “Jesus, Jack, did you just fly in from the planet Black-and-White? These things are never that simple,” said Gray. “There are gradations and circumstances.”

  “Bullshit,” said Jack, folding his arms against his chest, as if this were some kind of final ruling. Of course, it wasn’t. The meeting sidetracked into everyone’s favorite gradation. The name Janet Cooke came up; so did Stephen Glass, Patricia Smith, and Mike Barnicle. (“Barnicle,” Jack snorted in disgust. “Now he’s got a fucking TV show.”) Somebody remembered that Michael Bolton had plagiarized a song from the Isley Brothers; somebody mentioned Martin Luther King’s Ph.D. dissertation.

  Finally, Proctor, glancing at his watch, said, “Look, guys, if we’re generating this much talk, there’s gotta be a story here. What is it?”

  “For me it’s ‘Why?’ ” said Jack. “Why do they do it?”

  “Why don’t you ask the Pittsburgh guy, Jack,” said Council. “That’s it,” Jack said, pointing a finger at him, “let’s ask the Pittsburgh guy. That’s the story. We find out who this guy is, what drove him to it, what he was thinking when he did it, and everything.”

  “Yeah, but do readers care?” Petrillo asked. “Isn’t plagiarism just an issue for journalists?”

  “It’s not about plagiarism,” Jack said, his enthusiasm growing the more he talked about it. “It’s about everybody. It’s about inspiration and failure. It’s about the difference between ‘homage’ and theft. It’s about the pressure to perform. It’s about…it’s about… the hubris of human ambition.”

  “Oh no, not another Hubris of Human Ambition story,” said Gray, pounding his head in mock despair.

  Everybody laughed, Jack included. “It’ll be great,” he said. “We’ll call it ‘Thief of Words.’ Proc, do you think we can get Gammerman to do it? She’d be great.”

  “I’ll ask Metro. What about some other cases? I can’t believe that Isley Brothers thing. Somebody should do a Nexis search on all the plagiarizing hotshots of the past who fell to earth. Let’s track them down and do a where-are-they-now story.”

  “Brilliant, Proc,” said Jack. “Steinberg should be finished with the Camden Yards story in a week or two—he’s only been working on it since the nineteen-forties. He can start the where-are-they-now part after that.”

  CHAPTER 25

  The three o’clock coffee run had come and gone. The main feature stories for the next day had been sent to the copy desk. The little imps of panic that live in every newspaper office slipped back into their hiding places—at least in the Features department; over on the news side they still had hours of vigilance.

  Jack stopped fretting over Laura’s Russian mafioso
interview and the USDA’s denial in the biogenetic corn story. He felt fairly confident about his Solomon-like decision on the Sisqo quotes. He’d left in one “bitch” and one “nigger” but cut out everything that even hinted at “motherfucker.”

  He leaned back and put his feet up on his desk. He spread yesterday’s Times across his lap, but ignored it. It was time to consider more pleasurable things. Like Annie Hollerman, for example. Musing about Annie was becoming a treat for Jack, like wrapping his hands around a cup of hot chocolate on a February afternoon.

  He liked her presence. He tried to put the right word to it. Maybe “alacrity.” She had a kind of cheerful readiness. Alacrity Hollerman. He liked how she had kissed him first, and strongly, too. He could feel again her thigh pressed hard against him, hard between his legs. “Bold” and “sexy” were good words, too. And she had a spray of freckles down each arm.

  But there was something else. Ever since Matthew had made it safely out of adolescence, Jack seemed to have fallen back in. He was feeling insecure and incompetent; he moped. He wanted to feel safe with someone. Safe to reveal the deepest truths about himself, even if the deepest truth was that Jack DePaul wasn’t nearly as deep as he had always assumed. After just two conversations and one kiss, he was beginning to feel safe with Annie. He was sure this feeling didn’t come from desperation or Kathleen rebound. Nothing about Jack and Annie felt forced or fake. Their banter was barbless. He could make her laugh. She banished mopiness. There was nothing fraught about their times together. And everything concerning Kathleen Faulkner had been fraught.

  It was in this mood of happy melancholy that Jack wrote Annie the following e-mail.

  “Annie,

  “During our lunch and after the She-Devil, I tried to regale you and make you laugh. But my jollity wasn’t completely true. The truth is, I’ve been feeling dried up and hollow lately. Not myself. Not the self of years past. Now the wind blows right through me sometimes.