by Nina Siegal
21
Postscript
Mickey Rood’s obituary in The Paper was 250 words, a squib at the bottom of the page. It ran with the headline “Lifelong Newspaperman Mourned by Colleagues,” and the subhead “Veteran of Almost Sixty Years Started as Teenage Copy Boy.”
He’d died the previous night, in his comfy chair at home in his welfare hotel in Gramercy, reading the late edition of the Sunday paper, the one with a story, “Golden Heir Arrested in Death of Graffitist,” by Curtis Wright. A blues singer who’d once sung with his band discovered Rood slumped over just before nine o’clock. A little frazzled and unsure of what to do, she’d called Obits first and had reached Jaime, just when he’d arrived in the office after his Sabbath break. The desk had scrambled, using a clerk and one of the advance writers and squeaking out an Obit at the eleventh hour for the morning edition.
I’d watched Jeremiah do the perp walk on TV the night before with Amenia up at her apartment in Hunt’s Point, while Detain was in the other room, prepping Kamal for his court testimony. Jeremiah looked as wrecked as I’d ever seen him, even in the bleary-eyed dawns of our bathroom floor binges. Amenia said, “He’s just like all these white boys with too much money and time on their hands.” I can’t say it felt good because too much of my own frailty was linked to his fate. I wished I could feel superior and righteous, but there was part of the monster in me too. I’d fallen for him, after all. And I’d fallen for another one, just like him, just the same.
The cops had questioned me about Cabeza, but as I was telling them what facts I thought I knew—about his childhood in Aguas Buenas and life on the farm with his grandfather, his stint in Los Angeles as a young wannabe filmmaker, his move to 103rd Street in El Barrio, his early graffiti docs—I realized it was all probably lies anyway. Meaningful, well-constructed lies that seemed to hang together as some sort of truth. I’d have felt superior and righteous about him too, if I hadn’t been so good at creating those kinds of narratives myself. In the end, all I could really offer the cops were descriptions of his distinguishing marks.
They did better on their own. My darling Cabeza, it turned out, went by a few names other than “the brain.” The one he used to pretend he was a filmmaker was Jose Rodriguez; the one he used when he wanted to act like a curator was Roberto Hernandez-Gonzago, and he’d managed to acquire quite a reputation in Europe, it seemed, for his ability to acquire and exhibit singularly American works of art. But the one on his rap sheet—the one that was now being circulated around New York and across the nation, along with his mug shot—was Raoul Jimenez, from Huntington, Long Island. Turned out he was a middle-class kid from the ’burbs, whose mom was a math teacher and whose dad was a furrier who owned a little store.
He’d always be Cabeza to me, but I didn’t get a chance to tell him so. He’d skipped town before Detain could get to his Queens studio and he’d have been halfway to Managua or Reykjavik by the time the cops released his mug shot. Jeremiah might’ve found some way to tip him off, but it was also possible he’d just had a hunch I wasn’t coming back Friday morning while he was eating his onion omelet. It’s possible he did know me at least that well.
I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop: Cabeza’s little home movie. I was certain he’d release it to all the right people at just the right time; I just didn’t know when. Maybe when he felt clear of the cops, maybe once he was settled into a hot tub in Sweden. But I preferred to imagine him south of the border, in Acapulco at a cantina called Pablo’s, sipping bourbon with the ghosts of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Maybe someday, if the urge got strong, I’d go down and join him.
Even without Cabeza’s flick, I knew I’d be facing new notoriety. The Paper was already preparing a long mea culpa spread, explaining the background to the reporting on the Wallace story and noting the fact that I’d already resigned. Even if the facts in my original reporting hadn’t been totally off the mark, the article planned to say, the reporter had no business getting involved with a source, behind the scenes, and using facts obtained through that relationship to drive her investigation.
The German museum’s retrospective of early graffiti, featuring Stain, was still under way, except Roberto Hernandez-Gonzago was no longer the curator. Amenia had filed an injunction to prevent the Sotheby’s sale, and was also contesting ownership of the paintings Jeremiah had lent the museum. Darla Deitrick was helping. She said her own archival research indicated—as Malcolm had argued when he’d searched for the works the first time—that Wallace had only loaned her the paintings, so she’d had no right to sell them in the first place. The argument would cost her, but considering everything, she was willing to pay. Amenia had another plan: she wanted to get all of Stain’s paintings back and establish a Bronx-based nonprofit graffiti museum called Free People.
Of all the men I’d thought I loved that year, the only one left in my heart was Rood. I put down the paper and rolled my swivel chair over to his desk. It was dusted with those tiny white flakes. The tin where he kept the pictures of his grandkids was still on his desk, and the pencil holder with its white plastic fork. I reached for the other tin—the one with his smokes—and took out an unfiltered Lucky, putting it between my teeth.
I opened the filing cabinet and found his brown paper bag, reached inside, and felt the sardine cans, four or five of them, enough to make it through another week before he’d have to stock up at the bodega again. There was a brand-new pack of lemon sugar wafers too.
At the back of the drawer was a yellow manila file, marked “For Miss Vane.” I took it out and found inside the list of names my mother had sent, now with a few check marks. Attached to it, by paper clip, were a few other pages of handwritten text, all in Rood’s looping script. There were nine pages in all. Relatives of S. R. Miller. Actual people, connected to me. Maybe I did have a history out there, somewhere, after all. I put everything back and closed the drawer, except for the folder with my list. Then I went back to my former desk and began to fill up my cardboard box for the last time.
The phone rang. “Obits,” I said. “Vane.”
“Out of the Past is playing at Film Forum at eight fifteen,” said Curtis. “Want to come with?”
“Can’t,” I said. “Need to leave town for a while. I’d rather not explain, right now, if that’s okay with you. You’ll understand soon enough.”
“Such a mystery lady,” he said. “Okay, but you don’t get off that easy. I’m going to try you again soon.”
I told him that would be okay, and I hung up the phone. In my filing cabinet, I searched for anything salvageable, dumping old death faxes in the recycle bin and saving the odd folder that contained some stitch of worthwhile research. I found yellow pads with lists of old Style ideas: designer shrugs?? French chefs on private-jets?? What makes Ricki love PETA so bad? Jottings from a gentler era.
It was a lazy early morning in the dead heat of August. Randy Antillo was snoozing in his swivel chair in Rewrite, his head jerking into consciousness every few minutes when his chair fell too far back. Clint Westwood arrived sleepy-eyed, wearing seersucker, grumbling about the 4/5/6 train. Rusty Markowitz rushed to his desk, put down his briefcase, and swapped his penny loafers for a pair of black velvet slippers. Life here would go on without me, just as it always had, and maybe the world was better off with one less Valerie Vane.
Jane Battinger came by when my box was almost full. I still had the Lucky in my teeth. “You helped Curtis with a nice spread there, Valerie,” Battinger said. “It’s too bad the way everything turned out.”
“Thanks for saying so,” I said. “And I’m sorry about Mickey.”
She nodded. “Me too.”
I watched her walk away. Her gait was slower than usual; her hips swayed with the tune of melancholy. I wondered how she and Rood had spent the day on Friday. Maybe he’d taken her to the park to sort things out. Maybe they’d mended fences. I hoped so. Jane wasn’t all bad. It was possible that she’d been a looker in the old days, too, like R
ood had said. And I bet Mickey had always kept a spiffy shine on his shoes. I imagined the two of them, young again like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Maybe for a while they’d been a rat-a-tat duo in a newsroom full of copy boys and newsmen who wore cigarettes behind their ears and pencils in their caps. Rood would’ve been a go-getter willing to put sources in closets and climb out windows—anything for a scoop. Jane would’ve been gutsy and straight shooting, calling every card a spade.
Yes, it was true. I’d missed the best parts of Rood’s life, the glamorous past. He’d been there for me, all along, though, and the file he’d created that was in my hands was going to lead me to my own past. Whether it was glamorous or not, I didn’t yet know. I wouldn’t be able to thank him, and I was sorry about that.
But isn’t it funny how well you can know someone after they’re gone? Better, it turns out sometimes, than when they lived.
Acknowledgments
The following nonfiction books were useful sources for this novel: Fame at Last: Who Was Who According to the New York Times Obituaries by John Ball and Jill Jonnes, True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World by Anthony Haden-Guest, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir by Eddie Muller, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies by James Sanders, and The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection by David Lehman. So was the graffiti movie, Style Wars, directed by Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver.
This novel would never have gotten past chapter 1 without the early encouragement of Steven Wright, Leigh Newman, John Cassidy, and Lucinda Rosenfeld. My thanks to my aunt and uncle, Marian and Jack Krauskopf, who lent me their house in Chatham in 2001, where I wrote the first pages. I was fortunate, too, for the enthusiastic feedback of my Brooklyn writing group: Leigh, Lilly Kuwashima, Tim Brien, Amy Brill, Joseph Holmes, and Kim Sevcik.
At Iowa, Dina Hardy, Nam Lee, Matthew Vollmer, Nic Brown, Josh Rolnick, Austin Bunn, Amy Belk, and Leslie Jamison were my best critics. I would also like to thank Bliss Broyard for reading early chapters; Rob Sussman, for fact-checking the final draft with me in L.A.; and Jeremy Hobbs for shooting my author photograph. My residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire gave me time to polish the final draft.
For help with the graffiti sections of the novel, I’m indebted to Nicer, Bio, and rrBG183 of Tats Cru; writers Mosco, Kez, and Nato; and Hugo Martinez of the Martinez Gallery, who provided inspiration and helped me with details along the way.
I want to acknowledge all my professors at Iowa: James McPherson, Adam Haslett, Ethan Canin, and Lan Samantha Chang, but especially Margot Livesey and James Hynes, who both went well beyond the call of duty. I really can’t thank either of them enough.
I owe my greatest debt to my agent, Nina Collins, for her early and undying support for this book and to my editor, Peggy Hageman, who immediately made me feel as if we’d found the right home at HarperCollins.
Finally, I want to acknowledge my brother and sister-in-law, David and Rebecca, and my parents, Marta and Frederick, who have supported this project and my writing in too many ways to count.
About the Author
Writer and journalist NINA SIEGAL was born in New York City, and grew up in Manhattan and on Long Island. She received her BA from Cornell University and her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has written for such publications as The Progressive, the Wall Street Journal, Art + Auction, and the New York Times. She was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship in 2005, and received the Jack Leggett Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship to work on her next novel, which is set in Amsterdam.
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Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph by Emmanuel Faure/Getty Images
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A LITTLE TROUBLE WITH THE FACTS. Copyright © 2008 by Nina Siegal. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition January 2008 ISBN 9780061748493
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