They stood there staring at each other for a moment, and Alison had a slightly ghostly quality from the greenish tint of the hallway lighting.
“There are some things you have to do in person,” she said—kind of sadly, he thought.
“Yeah,” Jason exhaled, mentally trying to brace himself for another crash, but hoping for something better.
“So…can I come in?”
“Oh, yeah…sure,” Jason said, making a space for her to duck through while holding the door open.
She walked in and sat at the table. Jason followed, subtly playing up his limp. He wished he hadn’t left the cane in the kitchen.
“You wouldn’t believe—”
“I know,” she said. “Adam called and told me everything. It’s incredible. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Apparently it’s not really a collapsed lung,” he said with a weak smile.
“What about Adam? He sounded pretty bad on the phone.”
“Really? He doesn’t have a scratch on him.” At least, none that he didn’t want, Jason thought to himself.
“Oh, I know, that’s not what I meant. But, you know, it’s all over—no more grand conspiracy for him to chase. And I think for him it’s more about the hunt than the catch. It’s weird; I moped around for a week after I handed in my dissertation. I felt like an idiot till someone told me it happens to everyone. And he’s got it worse—he finally reeled in the great white whale, and then he had to throw it back. What’s he going to do now?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Jason said slowly, replaying his conversation with Adam in his head. Had he been selfish, or tone deaf, or did Adam talk differently to Alison than he did with him?
“Of course,” she said tentatively, “I’m a little more curious about what you’re going to do now.” She looked right at him, but her eyes had a little less certainty than usual.
“Look, about the other day—”
“I don’t want to talk about the other day,” she said firmly, before he could make any progress into the Clarence Darrowesque summation of his defense that he’d rehearsed in his mind a thousand times.
“But we have to. It’s important—”
“No it isn’t. I don’t need to hear this speech. I’m not interested in some version of events, or some retrospective interpretation of what it means or didn’t mean.” She stood up, looked toward the hallway the led to the bedroom, crossed her arms, and then sat back down. “Look, Jason, I’m not going to tell you that I don’t care about the other day. I was pretty upset when I got home. Then I finished my paper, and then got upset all over again. But that’s not…but I won’t be.…” She stopped for a moment, trying to find the right words, and when it looked like Jason might speak, she raised her hand to silence him. Then she clasped her hands and leaned forward on her elbows. “The bottom line is, I, we, people like us—some of us—aren’t living the life our parents lived.” Her eyes focused with purpose. “These are the rules we have chosen. And it’s naïve to think that they don’t come with their own complications.”
Jason didn’t have anything that could compete with what she was putting out, so he tried retreating. “But if you don’t want to talk about it, how will we be able to—”
“Who would that discussion be for, Jason, you or me?” she said, cutting him off. She stood up again, and this time walked away from the table. “Maybe one day, maybe even soon, we’ll come to our own understanding about what our relationship means. Assuming that we have one. But we’re not at that point.”
“And you don’t even want to know that—”
“I don’t want to talk about that day,” she repeated, now definitively. “I want to talk about all the other days.”
“All which other days?”
“All the days of the rest of your life.”
“What do you want me to do?” Jason said, raising his voice and stretching out his arms in an overly dramatic way.
“Something. Anything.”
Epilogue
The next few months flowed rather easily. They were both fired from the station—Adam unceremoniously, Jason after a nice heart-to-heart chat with Harry, who even wanted to throw him a going-away party. They were each offered six months’ severance pay, which Jason wanted to turn down; he knew it was Morgan’s way of trying to keep them quiet, or of insulting him with the suggestion. But Adam offered him a better deal: if they both took the money, he promised not to find another job in TV.
Jason wasn’t sure about it until he talked it over with Sammy, who had already saved his life once. Sammy had showed up too early that Sunday and bumped into a couple of thugs just as they were leaving the roof. He’d had no idea what they were up to, but they had pulled their guns and had hidden up there till Jason showed, telling Sammy if Jason didn’t take off, they’d kill them both.
Sammy now told Jason to take the money, and sat him down and told him that life was a never-ending struggle between doing right and getting by, and he needed to get by if he wanted to do right, and it was okay if he had a little fun along the way. Of course he told it in the form of a story, and after several detours, explained that the Reverend Gary Davis once told Sammy that this, more than anything, was the message of his 1957 album Pure Religion and Bad Company.
It was almost Thanksgiving, and Adam and Jason were sitting at the Irish Cottage over a pitcher of beer, arguing about nothing.
“I never said that,” Adam said, smiling. “Never.”
“Yes, you did. The waitress from the coffee shop.”
“Oh, her,” Adam said, his voice raising an octave. He looked into the distance, thinking about it. “Possibly.”
“Possibly? How can you not be sure? You said you have to turn your entire—”
“Best player ever?” Adam said loudly. “The big O. Oscar Robertson. No doubt about it. You just say Frazier cause you’re from here. Now I love Clyde, but—”
Jason looked up to see that Alison had arrived.
“Shaker, the only time I hear you talk sports is when you don’t want me to know that you’re talking sex.”
Adam looked at Jason. “Sounds like there’s a reporter in our midst.”
“There are,” Alison said, dropping the New York Times on the table. “Two.”
“Tomorrow’s Times?” Jason said excitedly. “Is it in?”
Alison nodded and Adam took the paper and unfolded it on the table. The right-hand side had a large four-column headline: COHEN WON’T SEEK THIRD TERM. The sub-headline read “End of an Era.” Adam flipped it over, searching below the fold. On the lower left side of the page there was a picture of Carol Chase, with the headline CHASE NAMED SECOND WOMAN TO ANCHOR NETWORK. He pointed at her picture. “Hey, what do you know!”
“Nice to see old friends get ahead,” Alison said sweetly.
“Uh…where are we?” Jason asked, tugging the paper across the table away from Adam.
“There.” She pointed to the lower right, to a smaller headline: BRONX DISTRICT ATTORNEY LINKED TO EVIDENCE TAMPERING, by Adam Shaker and Jason Sims.
“To our first win,” Adam said triumphantly, lifting his beer glass.
“We’ll see,” Jason said. “This guy ain’t gonna just fold. We’ve still got a ways to go.”
“To your first fight,” Alison said, revising the toast.
The sound of electric instruments coming to life began to fill the room. Pat was standing on the stage, next to Oz and the band, who were waiting for him. Pat rarely ventured on stage, but he had his hand on Oz’s big shoulder and it looked like they were sharing a private joke.
“Whoops, that’s me,” Jason said, taking a quick drink of beer, kissing Alison, and running over to the stage.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Pat announced with gusto, “We’ve called the band back to play this one last song for you tonight. So once again, here’s One. Mile. Short!”
There were cheers from the crowd, and the band started to play the intro to the Jimmy Reed song, “Baby What You Want Me
To Do.” It was a song that could not miss. After letting the instrumental go long, Oz growled into the microphone: “You got me running, you got me hiding.” He was in rare form and built to a roar when he reached “any way you want to let it roll,” letting the audience fill in an exuberant “yeah, yeah, yeah.” But when he reached the chorus, he stepped back, and with dancing eyes pointed at Jason, the way John Lee Hooker would tell you it was your time to go. But Jason looked more like a kid who didn’t expect to be called on in school, and didn’t move. Literally without missing a beat, the band took another trip through the first verse, which Oz ripped through, before he pointed again.
This time Jason was ready, leaned into the microphone, and looked out across the room. His voice was a little rusty, but it was on key, and it was real. “You got me doing what you want me…baby, what you want me to do.”
About the Author
Jonathan Kirshner is a professor at Cornell University, where he teaches in the areas of international relations, political economy, and the politics of film. His most recent books are Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society and the Seventies Film in America and American Power after the Financial Crisis. He lives in Ithaca, New York with his wife and two sons.
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