by CJ Hauser
That she would talk to him and not tell me was a maternal atrocity. I’d thought we were in things together. I thought I wasn’t talking to him, seeing him, knowing him, out of some kind of solidarity with Marta. And if she was talking to him, then, well, why wasn’t I? I was mad enough to spit. Mad enough to spit was something Marta said a lot once she got diagnosed, usually about people she imagined had slighted her: doctors, waiters, neighbors. Before she got sick, Marta was always beautiful and always angry. The way she swept around in a rage it was like the old Greek gods.
Marta had thick hair she never tied back, a deeper red than mine, and she wore long wrap skirts that orbited her as she strode. She wore sandals until the first snow and jingling silver bracelets she only took off in her pottery studio. Don’t give me any of that Ghost shit: when Marta threw pots she straddled the wheel, her arms strong and unmoving, her tits jiggling as she pressed the pedal to spin the clay faster. She barely moved her hands; the clay just became what she asked of it: a vase, a bowl, a vessel.
And then, suddenly, she was tired. Tired! Tired and delusional enough to think now was a good time to call Carter. Carter who was busy with his band, and his touring, and his midlevel fame and taxidermied animals. That morning in the kitchen I hocked a ball of spit into the stainless-steel sink to see if that would make me feel better, but it didn’t. Marta was asleep in the bedroom, a soporific saint for one quick minute. I checked for the evenness of her breathing before I dialed the number on the phone bill.
He didn’t sound much like the recordings. All that warbling isn’t the same as talking. His voice rang like a gong over the distance of the phone wires. Hello? He sounded suspicious. He sounded like the sort of fucker who would leave his lady and child. This, I knew even then, was a lot to read into a single hello. I also knew I had to say something to him, because he was breathing into the line. Waiting. I had a lot of options, but I panicked. All I got out was Your refrigerator’s running before I slammed the receiver down.
And then I folded over, the breath knocked out of me, weeping like the fucking tree she wanted in Marta’s doorway. What wrecked me most of all was that a person as great as her could get stuck with nobody better than me to look after her. What a lousy fucking deal. I stayed there for a while, listening to her breathing in and out, and paying too much attention to the minutiae of the dirty floorboards.
“WHAT ANGLE DO you think we should take?” Leah says, and I almost drive off the road. She white-knuckles the console. She says, “I was thinking we could spin it like, ‘New Budget to Decide Local Lives.’ Or even, ‘The Disappearance of the American Fisherman.’ ”
I look at Leah, because this is too good. “Seriously?” I say.
“Seriously what?”
I crack a smile and relax my death grip on the steering wheel. “Charley really hates your guts,” I say. My pant cuffs are still soaked where Leah splashed me and my ankles are freezing.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Her posture gets real straight, defensive. Like she knew Charley hated her but maybe thought it wasn’t apparent to the rest of the world.
“What just happened,” I explain, “is you got hazed. Charley sent us out there because there was no way in hell you’d find a story on the Deeps’ lobster boat.”
Leah looks back at her notepad, where she’s been scribbling in impossibly neat handwriting. She looks sick for a minute.
“Well, I guess she was wrong,” she says, and goes back to jotting. This damn woman is unshakable and I’m almost out of viable reasons to defend my senior editor status. I cut a hard left into the Star parking lot and Leah’s pen drags across the lines. She flips the page and starts over.
THE STAR OFFICE is a ground-floor, two-room affair. The burgundy carpet is musty from when a pipe burst once and flooded the place. None of the furniture matches and the overall effect is more junk shop than hub-of-all-news. When Charley opens the door to her office we get the stink of the eight thousand cigarettes she smokes in there. Her face is remarkably smooth for a lady with so much rat poison in her lungs, though her long, tapered fingers are stained yellow at the tips. “Let me see if you managed to keep your thumb out of any of those photos, Winters,” she says.
“I already found the best one,” Leah says. I’d try to one-up her but good Christ, it’s starting to look like I’m outmatched. Leah shoves the camera in front of Charley. It’s the shot I took of Billy pulling a dour face next to the cut trap rope. Billy’s face has come out looking serious and the angle is clear: young man can’t believe after hauling and hauling he’s found nothing at the end of his rope. All three of us press our heads together to look at the image on the screen.
Charley says, “Good. Now write it.”
Leah sits down and spreads her notes out at a wobbly desk that might have once been a lady’s makeup table. She waves me over. I shake my head and wave her over.
“I’ve got the notes,” she says.
“I’m senior editor,” I say.
She refuses to stand up but instead wheels her seated body over by pulling at the carpet with her heels. She rolls until she’s right up in my face. She has the sort of lashes that create the illusion of an unbroken black outline around her eyes. “Okay,” she says. She flips through her pad. “Why don’t we lead with the budget vote?” This is a perfectly reasonable suggestion that I’m not going to take because I’m in charge.
“I think we should lead with the complaints about the dead boats in Deep’s yard,” I say.
“But that’s minor news compared to the vote!”
In my best Barbara Walters voice I say, “I think we should lead with ‘The Disappearance of the American Fisherman.’ ”
She gives me a deadly look.
“Who’s in charge?” I say, and Leah’s face crumples. It’s unfair, I know, but I’ve been working here four months longer than her, and so I get to be Bernstein, be Dustin Hoffman. That leaves Robert Redford for Leah.
Listen, I know that in real life both of those guys went on to be successful. I know Woodward wrote books and dedicated his life to service and the news and was, after all, the one who initiated contact with Deep Throat and probably the more famous one when you really get down to it. But have you seen the movie? How cool Dustin Hoffman is as Bernstein? The way he flirts with ladies and shows Woodward how to edit copy? How he kicks his feet up on the desk and has a mouth no one in the newsroom can handle? Have you counted how many cups of coffee he drinks and fully appreciated the extinct sort of rogue journalist he was?
“You are in charge, Quinn.” Leah puts her pen down on the desk. A white flag if ever I saw one in this office that is, in and of itself, one gigantic white flag. I look at Leah with her copious notes and straight posture. Leah with her half-decent headlines, pulled from thin air. The truth that I already know but don’t want to admit is that she is Dustin Hoffman. She is Bernstein, who goes solo and cracks the pretty lady. Gets the interview. Runs the show. I don’t stand a chance. I’ll always be the guy who fumbles around and catches a few lucky breaks. Lurks in garages. I’m Woodward, goddammit. I’ve even got the Redford hair.
“Oh, of course we lead with the vote,” I say.
Leah sits up and shouts, “Great!” I move my chair closer so I can help her. If I’m honest, I’ll take this duo any way that I can get it. I’ll be Woodward. Watson. Sundance. The sidekick. Anyone, just so long as my sidecar’s hitched to something.
9
Leah
When Quinn drops me back at the Stationhouse the sun is half sunk beneath the restaurant’s tarpaper roof. Henry had suggested we celebrate my first day at the family business tonight, but I know he will ask me how my day went. It went badly. I got hazed by your gene pool. It was disappointing.
But truthfully, even today, when I’ve made a fool of myself, taking notes then making sense of them on the page is good for me. I have my own ideas about what the world should be like, but when I write down actual facts in my notebook, when I smooth those fa
cts out into a true point-A-to-point-B story, it’s like a tether that keeps me from floating away. My Gazette editor told me this made me good at the job. I didn’t just like writing the news, I needed it.
How was your day? Henry will ask if I go home. We never firmly made plans. I don’t want to go home and explain today, even though I should. In Maine, Henry told me, family rituals are not optional. All occasions are marked with mandatory dinners, toasts, parties. Hank used to throw a birthday party for June every year, even though she’d beg him not to. One year she wound up baking her own cake, a huge white-frosted vanilla one big enough to feed sixty guests. By two in the morning everyone had left except “the singers.” The singers were two men from the docks who sat with Hank in the yard, drinking and warbling old Irish songs and Hank Williams and all the dirtiest shanties. They made June join in. At four, when the night was at its blackest, dark as the inside of a pocket, Henry said, she went inside, and found Henry and Charley in their pajamas, barely awake but peering out the screen window, amazed to hear their parents singing. June scooped them up and brought them to bed, where they all curled together, June still wearing her party dress. June still smelling like vanilla cake.
And yet.
“Quinn,” I call. She cuts a funny profile standing on the porch. There is a sloppy elegance in the way her too-big clothes hang upon her frame. The sunset lights her hair up strawberry.
“Can I buy you birthday dinner?” I point at the Stationhouse.
She grins. Her scrawny face opens up, just like that. “Fuck no,” she says. “But you can buy me a dozen drinks.”
AT THE MONKEY’S Uncle there’s a wooden cutout of a monkey sheepishly clutching his tail above the door. The monkey, I think, is ashamed of something he’s done in this bar. Inside, the lights are low and warm. Men with muddy boots and stocking hats hold beers. Three women, all wearing cable-knit sweaters, laugh and drink from clear glasses with limes in them. Playing pool in the corner is a gang of boys with pitiful facial hair, definitely not twenty-one. They all wear shirts from the ironworks. A line of people teeter solo on bar stools.
A woman behind the bar is waiting for me to place an order by the time I make it there. Quinn says, “Buy me a Jack and ginger, Leah.”
“One Jack and ginger,” I say, “and do you have any drink specials?”
The bartender has silver-and-black hair pulled off her face. She says, “It’s real special that we have beer and liquor.” She is tanner than a person should be, and wirier. She wears a blue thermal with the sleeves pushed up. Her arms look winnowed down to bone and muscle alone.
I order a beer and she ducks to get it from a fridge. Quinn says to me, “Sara Riley. It’s me she doesn’t like, not you.”
“I like you fine when you’re sober,” Sara says as she comes up with my beer.
Quinn wanders over to the jukebox and puts on Guns N’ Roses.
When she returns to the bar a half-asleep man in a checkered shirt wakes and says to Quinn, “I knew it was you, because of the song. But you were with a different one.” He points at me before laying his head back in his arms.
“Let’s sit in the garden,” Quinn says. “I want to smoke a cigarette.” She grabs a sack of peanuts from behind the bar.
Outside there’s plastic furniture in a gravel pit with a view of the parking lot and a generator shed. “I’m technically quit, an ex-smoker,” Quinn says as she lights a cigarette. “So, is your husband as much of a hard-ass as Charley?” She is exhaling not only smoke but also her own breath made visible in the cold. The pink rims of her eyes are inflamed and her mouth is lively with mischief. She pulls her red hair out of the neck of her sweatshirt so it falls across her shoulder.
“I don’t know what Charley is like, really,” I say. “She barely talks to me.”
Quinn splits a peanut in two and the nut skitters across the table. She picks bits of red skin off the table with her finger and eats it. “That’s just how it goes,” she says. “She rode my ass when I first started too. Sent me maple sugaring for my first assignment.”
“When did she stop picking on you?” I say.
“When you showed up!” Quinn says, and laughs a rumbly cigarette laugh, coughing, letting it build and roll over.
“Maybe I should recruit another employee,” I say.
“Oh yeah, just call up your friends at the Gazette. Tell them you’ve got a real great opportunity up here. Prime-time shit.”
I crack a peanut and eat it. “It’s like she’s already made up her mind about me,” I say. “Henry isn’t like Charley. Henry is solid.”
Quinn pinches the bridge of her nose twice, a liar’s tic, and stares at me. “Solid?” she says, an octave too low.
“What’s wrong with solid?” I say. I eat another peanut.
“Solid sounds boring.” Quinn leans on her elbows. “I thought marriage was for when you found someone life re-magnetizing, or reason-for-living-producing, or good in bed.”
She waits for me to respond, but I’m not sure what life re-magnetizing might mean. My old editor definitely would have struck it. She would have put a red line through Quinn’s whole phrase. I grab a handful of peanuts and start lining them up on the table, rank and file. I say, “Solid is good. You’ll see. Eventually you just start caring about different things in a relationship.” As soon as it’s out of my mouth I realize this is something my parents once told me.
“That is condescending as hell,” Quinn says. She pulls a peanut from my line and smashes it open. “How old are you anyway?”
“Twenty-four.”
“And today is my birthday, so, so am I. Are you saying I’m going to experience revelation in my sleep? Is the archangel going to come down and give me the news that what I’m now looking for is a solid woman?”
“No, not like that,” I say. I can’t really believe we’re the same age. I also wonder if I should follow up on that last bit. In spite of her total lack of journalistic skill, I find myself liking Quinn. I like the way she’s testing me. So I do:
“Woman?” I say.
“Women,” Quinn says. Her whiskey hovers halfway to her mouth, which is set in a challenging line.
“But never solid ones?” I say.
Quinn grins. “Never. I make a point of it.”
I press my fingers to my mouth. Quinn drinks.
“I haven’t been here very long,” I say. “But it seems to me that Menamon is exactly the sort of place to look for unstable women.”
Quinn laughs and can’t keep from spitting her drink back in the cup. She wipes her mouth and smiles. “I know,” she says, and shakes her head.
QUINN DROPS ME home late at night, a little worse for the wear. When we get to my house I say, “This is me.”
Quinn puts a hand to her forehead and looks at the bull’s-eye glass above our door. She looks at our symmetrical shrubberies. “You live here? Leah, this is a grown-up’s house.”
“I am very grown up,” I tell her, and climb out of the car. Before I even have my keys out, Henry has opened the door. He stands in the doorway. His face is cast in darkness and the hallway light glows around his silhouette, and I think of a story he told me once:
Henry accidentally set the neighbor’s barn on fire when he was twelve, a campfire experiment gone wrong. He ran home to hide before anyone found out it was him, but of course when he got there his father was already standing in the warm square of the doorway. Henry said that was the most scared he’d ever been. Hank took him back next door and made him watch the barn burn while the firemen tried to put out the blaze. Hank explained that they were too late; the barn was ruined and would need to be rebuilt. Henry rebuilt that barn all summer. Hank taught him how. It was so much work, Henry said. It was so difficult to raise a thing from the ground like that. I remember all the details Henry told me because whenever he mentions how strict his father was, I think about how he was so, so lucky.
My own parents used to catch me coming in late. I’d take my sneakers off outside the
apartment, lift the doorknob as I pushed, thinking maybe I could make it past them if only I could keep walking on the balls of my feet. Mostly they caught me. My father still up and working on briefs with a red pen, sipping a tumbler of club soda for his stomach. Wearing a set of actual pajamas, light blue linen with dark blue piping. His longish black hair, gray at the temples, swept back. His papers propped on his belly like that’s what he had it for. He’d look over his enormous tortoiseshell glasses and say something vaguely interested-sounding like, Late night? I’d kiss his forehead, hope he didn’t smell the night’s trespasses on me, and jaunt off to bed. In the morning it would be my mother’s turn. I’d sit on a high stool at the bar in the kitchen eating too much organic cereal from a bowl that was meant for soup while my mother used the kitchen mirror to do her makeup. Your father says you had a late night, she’d say to herself in the mirror as she clipped on large gold-knot earrings. She had short auburn hair feathered around her face and always smelled of mature perfumes that came in frosted glass bottles. She’d pick up her matching necklace, hand it to me, and turn around. I’d do her clasp for her, and as I did it I’d say, Yes, I did, and that would be the end of it. I love my parents, I do, but I always felt it was as if the three of us were members of the same exclusive club that just so happened to have its headquarters in our penthouse. It was an old and dignified bond that brought us together in our blood, but like all those old clubs, we’d been at it so long we’d lost our sense of what we were there to do.
“Where the hell were you?” Henry says now, and I am delighted he is angry. That he cares I was gone. I have burned a barn and he will be strict with me! I throw my arms around him.
“You are mad!” I say. I kiss his cheek. “I was at the bar with a friend,” I tell Henry. “I forgot to call. I’m sorry.”