Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  Which is all to say that every time the elevator stopped at floor number seven and the bell rang and the doors opened, an entire city room raised its eyes, all holding the same question: Is this person armed?

  The woman who came off the elevator wasn’t armed—this Spooner knew instinctively, just as he knew she could not be talked into abandoning an old dog by the side of the road. He would wonder later if these sorts of insights counted as love at first sight.

  He gaped openly at the woman from his desk—he was on the telephone at the time or he would have gotten up and found some excuse to move close enough to sniff her—and not only wasn’t she packing, her shoelaces were tied and she had hair that shone and an elegant bottom he could not stop picturing bouncing in a saddle, and in fact one evening twenty-five years later, sitting in a pretty good restaurant, he would fall out of his chair trying to kiss it as she walked by on her way to the bathroom.

  But that is further down the road. For now, a summary of the romance: Spooner became habitual with the woman with the elegant bottom and took her out on romantic dates and one night set his hair on fire as he leaned over the candle on the table of another pretty good restaurant to kiss her, and she said she thought it would be all right if they skipped the flammable parts of the romance now and moved in together. Next they bought a little house on a shallow, clear lake in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, and got married in a bank and had a baby girl.

  For the first time in his life Spooner found himself content to be where he was, although over time this would come at a price, the earliest sign being that sometimes he would catch some glimpse of Mrs. Spooner and the baby together and find himself barely able to move, at the fear of losing what he had. The truth was, Spooner wasn’t wired much for getting what he wanted, and had never given a thought to protecting what he had, in fact had never considered that any of it could be protected or that it was even in his hands. Until the woman came along, and then the baby, he had always taken it for granted that anything that fell into his lap would also fall through his lap, sooner or later.

  Jobs, for instance. Spooner ran again and again into the same problem at the places he worked, connected in some way to the matter of natural selection. That is to say that even though he was frequently willing to do his work and even sometimes to follow instructions, he had no idea how to go about behaving as if a supervisor’s claim—not on his time, but on his person—did not run uphill of human nature. Which over the years had led to the loss of a dozen jobs or so—in and out of newspapers—all on the grounds of insubordination.

  In Philadelphia, though, there were labor unions, and they were serious business here, and it was no easy matter to get rid of a reporter, particularly on the grounds of insubordination, which, aside from a broken typewriter, a few dents in company cars, and an incident at a staff chili party thrown to improve office morale, was really all management ever had to work with. And which wasn’t nearly enough to fire him. In Philadelphia a formal case had to be presented, evidence gathered, files kept, written warnings issued, and in the first twenty-four months Spooner was in town, none of the three city editors who had set him in their sights had lasted long enough to do the job. Bitter world that it is, there was no union for city editors, and firing one of them was the easiest thing in the world.

  Strangely, it never occurred to any of them simply to ask him to leave.

  Further evidence that the world had swung Spooner’s way: A new boss took over, and not only was the new boss unthreatened by Spooner, he didn’t particularly want Spooner to go away. The man’s name was Gilman, and he came in, looked around, and immediately took to bed—more accurately, took to the davenport that sat against the rear wall of his office. He was a tall, elegant, accident-prone man—each of these traits unusual in newspaper editors who make it to the top—whose small physical calamities (Spooner had never seen an adult actually kick over and then step into a trash can before) perhaps hinted at the arguments he had going on all the time in his head. Gilman liked a cool, wet towel over his eyes when he argued with himself, and an ashtray on his stomach so that he could chain-smoke in the dark, lighting one cigarette off the stub of the other, although in this configuration he occasionally set fire to himself or his couch.

  But then the man had a lot on his mind. Gilman was a gentle, instinctively reasonable human being who one day of his own free will gave up a comfortable, respected, midsized newspaper in New Jersey to take over what was probably the least comfortable newspaper in the world, at least for the editor who had to run it. On his arrival, half the city room was planning mutiny. There were late-night raids into management files in which letters warning and reprimanding the reporting staff disappeared, and embarrassing evaluations of various middle management showed up in the morning on bulletin boards all over the building. There were daily shouting matches in the city room and threats, one day a fistfight, the next day an eighty-five-year-old staff photographer showing up at a national convention of inner-city housing directors, asking if this was the place he was supposed to come to take pictures of the jitterbugs.

  Six calendar days after Gilman’s arrival, the grandson and namesake of the owner of the newspaper chain that owned the Daily News, the heir apparent who had been sent to Philadelphia for seasoning, was shot in the gizzard with his own spear gun during a one-night romance with a boy whore and died on the floor of his elegant Rittenhouse Square apartment. A week after that, two of the paper’s columnists—one of whom had a short-lived radio show—got drunk on the air and welcomed Gilman to Philadelphia, assuring him that the time he’d served at Joliet state prison for child molestation would not be held against him by the staff. Another columnist lent a company car to a woman he met in a stripper’s bar, who lent it to her boyfriend, who used the automobile, a four-door Chevy Citation, in a series of convenience store robberies over the following week, at least some of which were recorded—robber, vehicle, and license plates—by security cameras. “Vehicle in 7-Eleven Robberies Traced to Daily News,” ran the headlines in the Evening Bulletin.

  The incidents kept rolling in endlessly, like the tide. New problems, old problems, a catastrophe a day, and Gilman would fix one and a new one would take its place, and all the while a line formed outside his office door—copyboys on up—waiting to make some pitch for attention, to get in on the bottom floor with the new boss. At the front of this line was Howard Buckle, the city editor and Spooner’s direct supervisor, the giver of chili parties to improve staff morale.

  At this time Buckle was still operating under a management system called specific performance incentives, and one of his specific performances was supposed to be the removal of Spooner from the Daily News. Buckle was not the first city editor who’d been given this incentive, but he worked at it harder than the other ones had, and over time the resulting frustration brought out a certain pettiness in him—perhaps in them both—that turned more bitter and personal by the day. Buckle now kept notes on everything from Spooner’s messy desk to his unusual work habits to his abuse of company cars to his acts of disrespect and, yes, naked insubordination. And yes, there was the night of the chili scare, but before that there had been the alleged death threat, which occurred after Buckle inserted a readers’ poll into a maudlin piece Spooner was assigned to write about a comatose young skateboarder in suburban New Jersey asking readers to vote on pulling the plug on the respirator that was keeping him alive. Yes, no, undecided.

  This being very close to the smarmiest thing he’d seen Buckle do yet, Spooner went to the city editor and congratulated him on his neat desk, and in the course of this conversation said, “If anybody should get his plug pulled around here, it’s not the kid who fell off his skateboard.” Which Buckle interpreted as a threat to his life.

  Then Spooner, whose name was attached to the story and the poll, walked into the city room and picked up the first typewriter he saw, which as it happened was being used by poor Delores Schultz to take notes from the Round House, and threw it at the
floor—not out the window, as it is often claimed—loosing a pain in his throwing arm the likes of which he had not felt since the night in Billings, Montana, when he allowed X-ray technicians to manipulate it back and forth to take its picture. Certain factions in the city room stood and applauded, but Delores fell to pieces, bending over into her handkerchief making terrible squealing noises, and then turned violently on Spooner, baring teeth and nails and a hideously runny nose when he tried to touch her shoulder to assure her that he would take the blame.

  Spooner backed away from her slowly, fascinated at the transformation, and a day later found her sitting back at her desk near the door, still crying. In the end, it developed that she’d snapped, and afterwards, even after she was given the city hall beat, which, with the exception of an occasional fistfight in city council meetings, was rarely violent, she would still sit at her desk and sob. Much later, Spooner heard that the sobbing went on twenty years, right up to and then through her retirement party.

  The typewriter incident did not just go away, of course. Howard Buckle put another letter of reprimand in Spooner’s file, and for his part, Spooner filed a letter of complaint to company headquarters in Miami, accusing the city editor of molesting comatose children. Everyone except Delores had a wonderful time, and grudges were set in cement.

  So it surprised nobody when, only ten days after Gilman arrived in Philadelphia and on the day of the heir-apparent’s funeral, Howard Buckle went into Gilman’s office to engineer Spooner’s departure. Ordering the hit, as they called it in the newsroom. By now, the city editor’s file on Spooner weighed several pounds, and he took it with him, perhaps, in addition to getting rid of Spooner, to impress Gilman with his own work ethic, as the managing editor Gilman had inherited from the previous regime—this being the job just above city editor—had been invited to leave almost as soon as Gilman arrived.

  And now Gilman sat quietly as Buckle described Spooner’s poor work habits, his abuse of company cars, his disrespectful manner, the broken typewriter—leaving out the part about the kid who fell off his skateboard—his cheekiness, his negative influence on office morale…

  “Wait a minute,” Gilman said. “Cheekiness?”

  “Ask anybody of his supervisors, they’ll all tell you the same thing.”

  Gilman nodded and Howard Buckle picked up where he’d left off. Presently, Gilman put a cool washcloth over his eyes and lay down, and taking this signal the wrong way, Buckle ventured into practical problems of firing a member of the Newspaper Guild, and the tactics he was employing to get around the rules. And Gilman lay on his davenport, listening, thinking, his feet hanging off the far armrest, smoking Virginia Slim cigarettes, and when Buckle finally stopped, Gilman thanked him for coming in and told him he was fired.

  The new boss, it developed, detested stoolies, which as far as Spooner knew was not only unusual but unprecedented in the history of bosses, particularly the bosses of newspapers.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Gilman picked his new city editor from the ranks, a city hall reporter named Stradivarius, and a month later promoted him again, this time to managing editor, and soon came to depend on and love this Stradivarius like his own son, and for that reason more than any other reason also promoted Spooner, giving him a column and an office on the fourteenth floor, where he would not be in Stradivarius’s hair or even his line of sight.

  Gilman was lying on the davenport with his eyes covered when he called Spooner in to inform him of the change. A cigarette was going in the ashtray on his stomach. “Nine hundred words,” he said, “three times a week. That’s it.” Yes, Gilman loved the lost causes, and yes, Spooner saw the connection, but took no offense. You might even say that he loved Gilman back.

  “Now,” he said to Spooner, not unkindly but pointing in the direction of the window (had he meant to point toward the door?), “please get the fuck out of my office.”

  In the years ahead, as they grew more and more familiar, this phrase would become a kind of code between Gilman and Spooner, meaning more or less that Spooner should get the fuck out of Gilman’s office, and Spooner, for reasons unknown, never received these words without a feeling of wild affection for his boss, and never left the man’s office without thinking that someday, when he had the money, he would find a way to repay Gilman, maybe buy him his own jockey.

  Much later on the day of the promotion there was a phone call from South Dakota. Ten minutes before Spooner and the dog and the woman with the elegant behind had returned home from a remote spot in the Pine Barrens where they’d drunk several bottles of iced Boone’s Farm apple wine to celebrate Spooner’s new column, and by now had showered and put calamine lotion on the two hundred or so chigger bites they’d collected rolling around in the grass and pine needles, and Spooner picked up the phone, still naked, as the calamine hadn’t dried yet, catching his reflection in the big window at the back of the house, and stared at the image a moment—he did not look good freshly plucked—and even as he stared his mother’s voice was in his ear, telling him that Calmer had just gotten himself fired.

  That was how she put it, gotten himself fired.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  He was not so much fired, though, as demoted. Calmer had been principal of the new high school in Falling Rapids, South Dakota, for six years and then was asked to take over as assistant superintendent, a step away from running the whole show. The man he was asked to replace, out of jail on his own recognizance, had disappeared a month before his trial and was never caught, taking at least four hundred and ten thousand dollars of the school district’s money with him.

  In Falling Rapids the wiseacres said, And they say there’s no money in teaching, and voters swore that no bond issue for the schools would pass till pigs flew and hell froze over, which in Falling Rapids meant a long time.

  The house they bought sat on a homey little street canopied with elm trees, a block from the oldest park in the city, and was roomy enough so there wasn’t any more talk about additions. When Spooner’s mother complained about the house these days, it was in regard to how she was supposed to keep it all clean. She wanted a part-time maid.

  The woman directly across the street had a maid, possibly the only black face ever seen on Ninth Avenue in Falling Rapids. The woman’s house was bigger than Lily’s, with a bigger lawn and bigger trees, and her husband was the superintendent of schools, the man who had set Calmer up and demoted him to a classroom at Toebox Junior High, which is what Spooner’s mother had meant when she said Calmer had gotten himself fired.

  Dr. C. Merle Cowhurl, Ed.D.

  Can the world ever have enough doctors of education?

  Spooner flew out to South Dakota and stopped at a store on the way from the airport for a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. Calmer would never buy good Scotch for himself, and they put away most of the bottle that night, sitting at the kitchen table, and Spooner’s mother came out of the bedroom at hourly intervals to fill her water glass and then squint at the clock. She wore an old robe with Kleenex stuffed into the pockets, and covered her mouth with her hand, not to offend anyone with her sleep breath. All her sisters did that, one of the tricks of the trade they’d picked up learning to be ladies in the grand old house in Milledgeville.

  “Are you two going to stay up all night?”

  “I’ll be in in a little while, my love,” he said. He’d called her my love since the day she accepted his proposal of marriage, all those years ago, and all those years ago she had stopped hearing it.

  Around midnight, Calmer went to the sink and made drinks—he used a shot glass to measure, something in his nature wanting the exact amount—and with his back turned, affording him at least that bit of privacy, Spooner asked what had happened.

  Calmer didn’t answer at first. He brought the drinks back to the table and sat down. Spooner saw that the whole thing was too big for Calmer to get hold of now, that he didn’t know where to start. Spooner was familiar with the feeling.

  Calmer rubbed his e
yes and considered his drink. He remembered something then and reached over the drink for an old copy of the New Yorker magazine lying behind the salt and pepper shakers, and the heel of his hand bumped the rim of the glass and spilled it over. Calmer made no move to catch the glass, did not even set it upright on the table. He did pick up the magazine to keep it from getting soaked, and watched the ice cubes drop off the table one by one, and pretty soon what was left of the drink pooled and began to drip through the crack where the two sides of the table fit together.

  He smiled at Spooner and shrugged, as if the spill were the explanation. Spooner got up and made another drink and then looked out the kitchen window and thought of Calmer stepping out his front door every morning to pick up the newspaper, and every morning glancing across the street at the house where Cowhurl lived.