Hard News

by Mark T Sullivan

  Bugs under the Rock …

  NEIL HARPSTER, THE POST’S Assistant Managing Editor for Form and Content, lay in a sleazy motel on the other side of town enjoying the liquid buzz of hypercarnal pleasure.

  Harpster had told his wife, Lydia, that he’d had to work late. In fact, he’d left the office shortly after six, shortly after picking up the phone in his office and punching in the extension of Connie Mills, his buxom, hard-rumped twenty-something research assistant.

  “Connie Mills,” the husky voice had answered.

  “I know a motel on State Street,” he’d said.

  “Is that a fact?”

  “It is. And I know that there will be a leather satchel on the bed in room 11 B.”

  “Hmmmm. And what might be in that satchel?”

  “Blindfolds and earplugs,” he’d whispered.

  There was a pause, then Mills’s voice fluttered. “There are many dark corners in room 11 B in the motel on State Street.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “It is,” she replied. “And if two people were to start in two different corners, blindfolded, their ears filled with wax, they might be reduced to the tactile sense, groping for a…a generous, helping hand in the darkness.”

  “It might take a long time to find that helping hand,” Harpster croaked.

  “It might,” Mills purred. “Then again, good things come to those who wait.”

  At that Harpster hung up the phone. He hurried from his office clutching the satchel, unaware that he was closely observed by two sets of trained eyes.

  Now in the damp darkness of room 11 B, Harpster rejoiced at the heightened sensations that had resulted from this excursion into deaf and blind sex. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Connie,” he announced.

  Being unable to hear a thing, his research assistant said nothing; she just continued the gentle lingual ministrations on the in-sides of his upper thighs she’d begun after their first climactic Braille and sign language session.

  Harpster groaned at the insistent pleasure Mills wrought, not allowing himself to pause more than a moment on the plain fact that Lydia would not have joined him in this psychosensual interlude in a million years.

  Lydia liked flora, not fauna. A trained horticulturist and heiress to her family’s PVC pipe fortune, she lived her life in the garden metaphor. She saw sex as a necessary function of procreation. She was a pistil, he nothing more than a bee carrying pollen. Trouble was, Lydia had no interest in children and therefore little interest in his stinger. It was a marriage of convenience. Harpster had financial security and a base from which to plot his ascent to newspaper power. Lydia had someone to dig holes for her on weekends.

  Mills shifted. With her tongue she wrote a novel of manners on his penis. Harpster bellowed in ecstasy, then clamped his right hand over his mouth in the realization that someone outside the motel room might get the wrong idea and bust down the door. He bit into the flesh between his index finger and thumb as the hungry research assistant writhed over him, utterly delighted when it dawned on him that he was now an adventurer in the sexual world of the deaf, dumb, and blind.

  An hour later, as they were dressing, Mills said, “Do you think Ed Tower will ever leave the paper?”

  “You angling for my job when I’m promoted?”

  “You know I am.”

  Harpster grinned. His research assistant was as crazy about status and weird sex as he was. “You’ll be my number one recommendation.”

  She had her thong panties on now and she crossed to him, marvelous tits bouncing, and ran her fingers through his chest hair. “How is Lydia these days?”

  Harpster shivered with delight. “Don’t start anything you can’t stop.”

  “I can stop it anytime I want,” Mills said in dead seriousness. “How’s Lydia?”

  “Rooting around in the dirt as usual,” Harpster said.

  “She doesn’t pay attention to her man,” Mills remarked. “A stupid woman.”

  “A stupid woman with a large bank account and a prenuptial agreement.”

  Mills stopped the rubbing motions. “As you so often remind me.”

  “It’s just how it is, Connie,” Harpster said. “But someday when I’m editor and you’re running research, she won’t matter.”

  She came up tight against him. “You promise?”

  He gazed down at the way her jutting nipple penetrated his chest hair. She reached down inside his boxer shorts. “You promise?” she demanded.

  “I promise,” he squeaked and they tumbled back onto the bed, groping for the earplugs and blindfolds.

  Across town, Bobbie Anne Pace, the Assistant Managing Editor for News and Information, shut her drapes and turned to Margaret Savage who was busy uncorking a bottle of organically grown California zinfandel while a pot of brown rice and a stir-fry of fresh broccoli, wheat gluten, and ginger simmered.

  “You appear tired,” Savage said.

  Pace sighed, “Dealing with the constipation of the white male editorial mind will do that to you.”

  The P.C. Oracle nodded without emotion. “You must imagine yourself a warrior, Bobbie Anne. Women have been underrepresented in the media power structure for too long. You’re one of the few to have achieved this level. You have the obligation to push on and bring the rest of us up behind you.”

  “I know,” Pace said, but there was no conviction in her words.

  Savage said, “Think of what Vanity Fair wrote about us. We’re offering groundbreaking journalism.”

  “Yes, yes, it’s just that sometimes I wish there was something beyond my career,” she said, then hesitated. “It’s all happened so fast. Fashion writer, then features editor, now top management. I used to have so many friends, a social life before …”

  “Before you met me?” Savage said, popping the cork from the bottle.

  “No!” Pace cried. She dropped her chin. “Well, yes.”

  Savage set the cork down, opened the pot of brown rice, and ran a wooden spoon through it. “You have become someone different than who you were. Such transitions are painful. But this pain will make you a better leader, a better woman in the long run. The moment I met you, Bobbie Anne Pace, I knew you were born to run with wolves. You were born—and I mean this in the most positive sense—to be an Alpha bitch.”

  Pace listened, wide-eyed, her hands trembling at the words of a woman who seemed to know her better than herself.

  Savage went on, “So if you hate me for what I’ve done to help you in that transition, I accept it because I know that in the long run you will realize I was right.”

  “Oh, Margaret,” Pace said, her voice cracking. “I don’t hate you. And of course I know you’re right! It’s just that, well … does being an Alpha bitch rule out having an Alpha male to snuggle with at night?”

  “Beta male,” said Savage, who allowed herself a rare smile. “But don’t hold your breath. As the success of daytime talk shows indicate, most men are mangy dogs.”

  “You don’t say that with any anger.”

  “I’m not a man hater. I’m not a man lover, either. Nor woman lover for that matter.”

  “Then what?” Pace stammered.

  “Asexual,” Savage responded matter-of-factly.

  “You mean, you have both or no …?”

  “Please, Bobbie Anne, I’m no freak of nature. I’m a woman anatomically. It’s just that I’ve never had feelings one way or another.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “My, that’s tough.”

  “I used to think it strange,” Savage replied. “But I realize now it’s a blessing in disguise. I can concentrate my energies on making the world a better place without the hormonal distractions others experience.”

  Pace turned the conversation over in her mind several times. She admitted to herself that she wouldn’t even be an assistant managing editor without Margaret Savage. And it dawned on Pace that maybe what the sharp tongues in the newsroom said was true
without even knowing it; maybe Margaret Savage was some kind of divine oracle who foresaw the future. Her future.

  “Margaret,” she said at last, “I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to become an Alpha bitch.”

  Deadline in five minutes. She typed furiously, trying to finish. Two minutes to go now. The keyboard froze. She smacked it with her hand, stared at the screen. The computer became a mouth. The pouting, rouged lips opened to reveal teeth composed of eighteen-point headline type. The teeth opened and inside the gaping cavity fire seethed from the throat. Now she was inside it, feeling the flames lick her ankles, twist past her knees. From the flames came a snake thick from years of undisturbed rest. It coiled and raised its head. Dead diamond eyes. A purpled, forked tongue flicked, then grew and came at her with malicious …

  Claudette X woke with a start, sweating. It was pitch-black and she jerked about, trying to figure out where she was. Her living room. On the couch. “Oh, my god … Oh, thank god!”

  She held her hands to her temples. Fifth nightmare in two weeks. She was beginning to fear sleep. She glanced blearily at the digital clock on the video machine. Only 10:00 P.M.

  Last thing she remembered, she and her five-year-old daughter, Stacey, were watching a movie. Now the television was dark. A cotton blanket was drawn over her. The executive assistant city editor got to her feet, stretched, and made her way upstairs. She could see the girl’s dim form in bed.

  If only all parts of my life were as simple to understand, Claudette X thought. She shook her head wearily. She’d expected the news business to be tough. That hadn’t scared her. Her whole life had been tough. She just never expected newspapers to become so arbitrary and bizarre.

  Claudette X eased Stacey’s door shut and crossed into her own room. She tried to shake off the nightmare by doing sit-ups and push-ups. When she’d finished fifty of each she walked to the window to consider her neighborhood under the streetlights.

  The houses were all freshly painted or stuccoed. Solid tile roofs. Clean windows, tended lawns and gardens. Two cars in most of the driveways. A boat or two. Three or four recreational vehicles. A safe place for Stacey to grow up in. No shootings in the night. No helicopters overhead. No junkies on the corner.

  Claudette X had busted into this world the way she’d busted into everything in her life. That was the way it was growing up in Watts. If you didn’t fight, the pack turned on you, ate you up, spit you out, made you a criminal or an addict or a hooker. Or all three.

  Claudette X’s mother, Sarah Forbes, wouldn’t have it that way. Her own sister had ended up a junkie. Her husband a convict. She’d be damned if her sons and daughter would end up that way. Her children would be something. They would take her anger and make it their own.

  Claudette X’s older brother, Marcus, was a doctor. Philip was a television producer. Carl taught history at Wisconsin. She chose journalism because she believed she had an obligation to explain the world in a different way. Her way.

  She knew that The Post considered her an agenda hire; a black woman on staff helped the paper maintain the facade that the news business demographically represented the society it covered. The editors quickly learned, however, that Claudette X was no agenda hire. She was the real thing: a fire-breathing reporter who relished the difficult, dangerous story. Better yet, she could write.

  Still, Claudette X never forgot she was the only black woman at The Post. Being a good reporter would never alter that situation. She became an editor to change the system.

  That was two years after she married and became pregnant by Todd Winter, a linebacker for the city’s football team. He was the only man who had ever made Claudette feel small. She liked it. She knew Prentice LaFontaine had cruelly joked that they’d married for genetic purposes, but she had genuinely loved the man.

  The team paid Winter very well for his abilities and, for the first time in her life, Claudette X had security. There was this house in a nice neighborhood. An Acura to drive. And soon a little girl to care for, to teach to fight. But two years ago she came home early from work to find her husband in bed with one of the team’s cheerleaders.

  She picked up a Louisville Slugger and chased the half-naked bimbo and one of the meanest linebackers in the NFL down the middle of this quiet, suburban street. Most of her neighbors were still scared shitless of her.

  Claudette X turned off the light and got into bed. She allowed herself a nanosecond of self-pity. Though she had never seriously entertained the thought of a reconciliation, she had always figured her ex-husband would do the right thing by Stacey. He was still behind on his alimony payments. His selfish attitude ate at her. Almost as much as the newsroom these days. Too much backbiting, too many egos to stroke, too little spine in her fellow assistant city editors. And now, these horrible nightmares. Maybe she should see a shrink?

  Claudette X pulled the blanket up around her chin. I’ll let it go another week, she told herself. She tucked her anger away under her pillow and rolled over, hoping against hope the serpent wouldn’t rear its head again and invade her dreams.

  It was well past eleven when Prentice LaFontaine opened the door to his ground-level condominium, entered, and called out to the darkness. “Dear one, I’m home!”

  There was no response. News sighed and said, “Out again with the boys I take it.”

  He flipped on a light in the living room and crossed to a bar. He made himself a margarita, drank it down, made another, then plopped into a black studio chair, enjoying the way the drunkenness made the room shift and roll.

  The decor of the condo was deliberately kitchy—everything played off a 1950s Hollywood theme: the Dumbo, Mickey Mouse, and Pinocchio Hummels, the James Dean photographs in the loo, a painting of Ava Gardner in a cowgirl’s uniform, a still of Clark Gable on the set of Mogambo, a replica of the handlebar of the Indian motorcycle Marlon Brando rode in The Wild Ones. And his pride and joy: the small working movie marquee bought at auction and mounted over his bed. Every week he changed the movie title on the marquee to fit his mood. The latest offering at Cinema LaFontaine was The Blob.

  Underneath the sarcastic, flinty surface that he presented to the rest of the world, that’s how he saw himself these days—as an amorphous, smothering, troubled sack of goo in the night.

  LaFontaine went to a photo on his desk. A younger LaFontaine lolled in the arms of a dashing man in a gray beard on a beach in Jamaica. When was it taken? Six, seven years ago? Seven. It had been six since Gene left. The only decent man LaFontaine had had in his life. And he’d blown their seven-year affair, smothering the man until he’d fled off to West Palm and a new life with a Cuban-born architect. Since then it had been the bar scene and one destructive fling after another. And not even that in more than a year.

  Tears welled in his eyes. “You bastard, Gene!” he shouted, and flung the picture across the room. It shattered against the wall.

  LaFontaine stumbled into his bedroom and fell down on the bed whimpering to himself. “You bastard, Gene. You bastard, how could you leave me alone like this?”

  At that same moment, Augustus Croon and Abby Blitzer stood at the security gate to her apartment complex. “Do you think we go to a better place, I mean after?” he asked.

  Blitzer blinked several times. “I try not to think about things like that, Croon. In recovery you learn to take one day at a time.”

  “I was thinking of the little old ladies jumping the first night we met.”

  “Pathetic visions like that are often haunting,” Blitzer said.

  “You like haunting, pathetic things, don’t you Abby?”

  Her fists balled loosely. “I don’t think like is the right word. But seeing them helps.”

  The big photographer put his hand on Blitzer’s shoulder. “Helps what, Abby?”

  She shrugged. “Just helps.”

  “I saw you cry tonight,” Croon said. “I’ve been on beaches in Grenada and Panama with bullets whizzing. I swam in and walked the streets of Kuwait City the
dawn before the attack. Nothing has scared me as much as seeing you cry.”

  “I told you, hormones,” Blitzer said.

  Croon looked down at her without speaking. She squirmed out from underneath his hand. “There’s some things so pathetic they aren’t haunting, okay? I got to go now.”

  “What’s eating you, Abby?”

  “Croon,” she said wearily, “maybe racing off to witness the harsh twists of reality isn’t much to base a relationship on, but it’s something. Can’t we just share what we have for now?”

  He saw he might lose her. He said: “Sure, Abby. We’ll just do that.”

  “Thank you, Augustus,” Blitzer said. It was the first time she’d called him by his given name. She stood on her tiptoes, pulled down his massive head, and pecked him on the cheek. “Good night.”

  A first kiss! Well, sort of. “Good night, Abby!”

  Blitzer opened the gate and ran up the stairs to her apartment. She shut the door behind her. She hesitated, then crossed to a chest of drawers and pulled out some old yellowed newspaper clippings. She read the words as she had a thousand times, wishing with all her might for a drama that would make this story’s pathos fade.

  Tears rolled down her face as she carefully returned the clippings to the chest. She peeked through the curtains, knowing what she’d see and somehow that gave her solace. Down at the gate stood the giant photographer, his face wedged between the iron rods, mooning up at her window with all his might.

  When McCarthy got home he was surprised to find a light streaming out from under Carlos’s door. The boy, engrossed in a Hardy Boys mystery novel, didn’t hear him come in. A large boy for nine. Big hands, big bones, big feet. All softened by his mother’s brown eyes. Carlos had inherited more of his mother’s American Indian blood than his sister, whose features were a smoother, muted interpretation of Tina.

  “What are you doing up so late?”

  Carlos yawned and shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Big game tonight?”

  “We won,” Carlos said. “Wish you could have been there.”

  “Me, too, but I had to work. You pitch?”