by Warren Adler
He seemed on the border of hysteria, but late into the evening, with the presses grinding relentlessly and most of the exhausted staff in heavy pursuit of information, Charlie dozed off on the couch in the conference room.
At one point, well into the early morning hours, Nick looked up from Charlie’s desk, where he had been working, into Myra’s pale face. It was odd to see her in the city room at all. Seeing her reminded him how effectively she had been cut out of the life of the Chronicle.
Nick sensed her annoyance at seeing him at Charlie’s desk and felt compelled to offer apologies.
“He took it very badly, Myra,” he said, standing up. “He’s resting.” He pointed in the direction of the conference room.
He was sure she was holding back her anger, having expected to be offering solace to a grief-stricken husband in this rare moment of potential reconciliation. It was no secret that their marriage had become a nightmare. But she was protective of her dignity, as always, and sitting on a chair, reached into her purse for a cigarette. She lit it carefully, ceremoniously.
“I’ll wait,” she said quietly, looking off into the city room. He could feel her envy.
She was, after all, a victim of Mr. Parker’s medieval view of the world, the right of blood to property succession, the role of woman as helper to man, the paternalism of ownership. When his will had been probated, it was revealed that he had given one-third of the paper to his employees, in proportion to their service and responsibility within the newspaper hierarchy. Charlie had not been included. In the old man’s he controlled the paper through marriage, and marriage was inviolate, ending only in death. It did, however, produce progeny, and progeny inherited property. Blood succeeded. He had taken his genetic snobbery to the grave.
Ironically, it was Charlie who made the announcement to the employees, an occasion of solemn thankfulness, appropriately ending in prayer and a moment of silence for Mr. Parker. Nick, too, had received his share and was grateful, although he could feel his friend’s anguish. It was a terrible legacy. Myra owned what she could not have and Charlie had what he could not own.
“She can fire me, you know,” Charlie told him. “She has the power to do that.” He paused. “But the old boy was pretty shrewd. If she does that the stock reverts to a trust. And the trust can only be abolished when my children reach their majority.”
“But you have no children.”
“Sticky, don’t you think?”
“Incredible.”
“She does, however, retain full control over the stock in the event of my death. The old boy couldn’t hedge all his bets. He assumed that we would have kids, sons.”
“But you said that Myra had had her tubes tied.”
“He didn’t know that and we wouldn’t dare tell him. But he kept his secret well, too. When the will was finally read, she made a mad dash to the gynecologist to see if she could get him to untie the goddamned things. He said it wouldn’t help.”
“You could always adopt.”
“No. Only blood. And she thought only my side of the family had a screw loose.”
“What if you divorced?”
“He didn’t miss a trick. In the event of divorce it’s back to the trust. It’s rather obscene when you think about it. I really loved the old boy. I also understand what he was trying to do. The Chronicle had become a kind of extension of himself, just as I had, and he wanted it to be protected as much as possible. Actually, even in death, he still holds the strings.”
“Could she take legal action?”
“I’m sure she considered it. But he had it written by the best legal brain in the country. Even she knows that it would be too traumatic for the Chronicle. No, kid, she has only one real alternative.”
“What’s that?”
“Read Agatha Christie. There are hundreds of variations of doing away with the old body.”
He had chuckled over that. Watching Myra now, waiting stiffly, Nick could sense her alienation and her bitterness, as her eyes swept the city room.
“They were very close,” she said suddenly, meaning the assassinated President and Charlie. He had grunted some answer, feeling her intrusion like a weight. Then, as if her voice in that environment had thundered an alarm, Charlie was standing in the doorway of the adjoining conference room, his hair disheveled, eyes glazed, still heavy with torpor.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked. His tongue’s heaviness had cleared.
“I thought perhaps you might have needed me,” she said meekly. Nick, embarrassed, started to leave, but the ring of a telephone held him. He picked it up thankfully, but could not blot out their conversation.
“Well, I don’t,” Charlie said. “Go on home. We’re busy.”
“Let me help, Charlie,” she pleaded.
“You hated him,” Charlie said venomously, showing a cruelty Nick had not seen before.
“That’s absurd.”
“You jealous bitch,” he said, his voice hissing through clenched teeth.
“There’s no reason for this, Charlie. No reason. I’m your wife. We can help each other.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“Everybody needs help.”
“I don’t need yours.”
Nick could tell by the cadence that this was a well-trodden path, an endless routine.
“Charlie. Please. Let me in on something. Please.” Nick could see her hands clasped helplessly together, the cigarette burning precariously low on her fingers. The voice at the other end of the phone clicked off and he was forced to hang up. A copy boy came in with a remake of one of their editions. They had been replating through the night, as new aspects of the story became available. Interrupted by the aide’s arrival, Charlie picked up the paper and looked it over, his mind apparently cleared now, his sense of command returning.
“So they caught the bastard,” he said, ignoring Myra’s presence.
He had missed a good portion of the breaking story while he was asleep. Now he read greedily.
“I don’t believe it,” he said. “There’s more to this. Put more people on it. How many people have we got in Dallas?”
“Just Ben. But others are already on their way.”
“Good. I want everything you can get on this guy. There’s more here than what we’re getting.” He picked up a telephone, began to dial, then looked at Myra.
“Go home,” he hissed.
“I belong here,” she said defiantly.
Charlie shrugged, continued to talk on the telephone while Myra turned, her eyes misted, and peered into the city room. She sat down, a curious apparition, silently watching the turmoil.
“It’s been a blow, Myra,” Nick whispered, as Charlie turned his back. “He’s not himself.” I’m sorry, he wanted to say.
“I don’t know what his real self is anymore, Nick,” she said, her lips trembling.
He reached out his hand and touched her shoulder, feeling the shudder in her body.
“It’ll pass.”
“Sure,” she said, shaking her head in contradiction.
16
In front of him the concrete circular monument of Fox-hall loomed like the prow of a ship slipping through the fog. He wondered if Jennie might be in his apartment after all and, suddenly hopeful, he increased his speed.
“Good evening, Mr. Gold,” the doorman said, tipping his hat. The pleasantness of his greeting raised his optimism. Letting himself into his apartment, he made deliberate noises with his key. The apartment was still, its deadness nerve-racking to ears used to a world of noise. He walked around the silent apartment, poking into each room as if expecting to find her playfully hiding.
Opening a bedroom closet, he saw her clothes hanging limply. He fell heavily on the bed, his shoes on the bedspread, ignoring a compulsion for neatness taught by his mother. Lifting the bedside phone, he punched Jennie’s apartment number, letting the cold instrument lie against his ear as it rang. The long series of rings gave him hope that she had return
ed. But the harried voice of the answering service intruded. He let it inquire repetitively, almost a welcome sound in the dead silence. Leaving the phone beside him on the bed, he heard the click of the broken connection, then the frenetic bleeps that the telephone company used to indicate a receiver off the hook. He replaced the receiver and lay back on the bed again, staring at the ceiling.
He had known from the beginning that Jennie had zeroed in on him, a pinpointed target carefully reconnoitered, the attack preceded by a barrage and culminating in a final assault. Perhaps he thought of it in that way because her father had been a general. He had been moderately successful as a logistics expert, which planted two stars on his epaulets. But his real calling had been that of a social lion, a companion in demand, handsome, witty, charming. He had been divorced early and Jennie had spent her childhood in a series of girls’ boarding schools, growing into attractive womanhood, a tall thin high-cheekboned articulate woman, who moved with an exaggerated model’s grace, an air of cool self-possession.
By the time Jennie was ready to stake out her own territory, General Lynn was an important social fixture in town, a gallant dashing figure, living in the aura of past conquests, an old roué. He doted on his daughter and, in retrospect, had manipulated his maze of Washington connections in a burst of activity aimed at getting her on the staff of the Chronicle.
“You must meet my daughter,” he had said to Nick one evening at a dinner party at the Argentine Embassy. Later he realized that the old man must have put the pressure on his friends to insist that he come. As a single man, he had been placed next to Jennie at the dinner table. His first brief assessment was that she was too thin, much too thin, far too flat-chested to remotely tantalize his libido. She told him that she had free-lanced articles for the two years she had been out of college.
“Your coverage of most Washington social events is a dreadful bore,” she said, smiling broadly under her polished cheekbones and whipping her long eyelashes together. She spoke in an anachronistic, Noel Coward cadence with a slight British accent. He recalled trying to frame an answer, but before he could, she attacked again.
“You portray all of these people”—a thin arm swept the assemblage in the ballroom of the embassy—“as pieces of cardboard, razor thin, as if the mere mention of their names is enough to give them character.”
“We’re newspaper people, not novelists,” he had protested, struggling to stick his spoon into an unripe melon.
“There is a lot of subtlety here. Your reporters completely miss it.”
“Oh,” he had said politely, amused at her method of gaining his attention.
“Absolutely,” she insisted. “This is actually a den of wolves. That old Senator there, for example, is an alcoholic and has been having an affair with that woman there, the wife of our esteemed Ambassador from Morocco, for years. That’s why he’s never been transferred. And that lovely lady there is a professional freeloader. I’ll bet you thought she was loaded herself. And if your taste runs to sexual aberrations, Congressman Geegaw there”—she actually pointed and smiled—“is a transvestite. As for our host, he’s big on little girls. And see that haughty grande dame in the corner? She’s a compulsive masturbator.”
He gave up trying to negotiate his melon and, putting his spoon down, turned to face the girl.
“You sound as if you spent a great deal of time at keyholes.” Assuming that she had engaged his interest, she proceeded to press her advantage.
“And that fellow next to you is a necrophiliac.”
“Good God!”
“Common knowledge.”
“I won’t ask you how you know that.”
“Not unless you have a strong stomach.”
“Are you for real?” he said finally. She patted his hand.
“I’m just trying to illustrate how second-rate your coverage is. You need someone to crawl beneath the surface.”
“Like who?” Nick asked.
She stretched her hands outward, palms up, and bowed her head.
“We’d burn out a hundred blue pencils a night.”
“Not if you’re subtle enough. You could be cleverly euphemistic, like the Li’l Abner strip, dirty as hell. But then you’d have something. The real people would know.”
“How would you work in that necrophiliac business?”
She thought for a moment, then laughed.
“I’d describe what he put on his buffet plate in lascivious terms.”
“And the masturbator?”
“She’d be playing with her earring.”
“And the freeloader.”
“Second helpings.”
Despite himself, he had become intrigued.
“It would all seem very civilized,” she had said.
He had danced with her, but had not asked to take her home. That was his womanizer period and, since she was not to his sexual taste, he hadn’t been inspired to make any moves.
When he began to receive letters from prominent figures, urging him to hire her, extolling her talents, he knew that there was a campaign afoot and he was determined to resist. It was Myra who revealed how far the campaign had progressed.
“You know our social stuff is getting to be a bore,” she told him.
“So they’ve got to you, too.”
“Who?” she asked innocently in her usual oblique way. “I met the kid at a dinner party. A charming girl.”
“Did she point out the necrophiliac?”
“And more. Lots more. She’s actually quite amusing.”
“If she had her way, she’d turn us into a gossip rag.”
“Maybe we need some of that,” Myra said. They had been over this ground before. “You now we have been getting a lot of flack from the women’s movement to change the concept of our so-called social pages. They’ve got a good point, Nick.”
“Are you saying that I’m a male chauvinist pig?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.” She smiled. What had evolved was their Lifestyle section. He had invited some of the top guns in the women’s movement to lunch and they had convinced that his present coverage was an anachronism. It was one time he welcomed the pressure, convinced that they were right, and one day they simply changed the masthead of the section. Margaret was, of course, ecstatic when he announced his decision to her over drinks in Myra’s office.
“Finally,” she said, her eyes misting. “As the cigarette ads say, ‘We’ve come a long way, baby.’ ”
“It’ll mean a restaffing,” Nick said. “We’re going to need to put some bite into it.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You were always pretty good when it came to bite,” Nick said. It had been meant only as a wisecrack, but the remembered pain of their marriage rushed back.
“She’ll do a great job,” Myra said, kissing Margaret lightly on the cheek.
After the first week of the new Lifestyle, he got a call from Jennie, preceded, of course, by additional letters of recommendation.
“See, I was right,” she said, her voice crisp and seductive.
“I never said you weren’t.”
“So hire me.”
Perhaps it was her voice, her method of articulation, with its beautifully pitched snottiness and carefully timed little shocks that began to attract him. He asked her to lunch with him at the Sans Souci. She was waiting for him at a table against the wall, champagne glass raised to her lips. Paul, the maître d’, moved the table to enable him to get beside her, pouring champagne into his waiting glass. He could see she was determined to make a final assault. Despite his previous impression, he found himself expectant. She seemed beautiful suddenly. Even her flat chest in her tight bodice appeared mysteriously attractive. And she was deliciously young.
“I’ve been sitting here composing a story in my head about all the people in this place.” She clinked her glass with his and sipped champagne.
“A potpourri of aberrations.”
“You see that man in the corner. . .”
<
br /> “Enough,” Nick said.
“You don’t want to hear about his proclivities?”
“Not at all.”
“Then how about mine?” She reached for his hand under the table, enmeshing her fingers, squeezing his.
“I’m sure it would be interesting,” he said, warmed by the champagne, feeling her sexuality emerging. She held his hand until their lunch arrived, releasing it, finally, to slice her veal.
“You really should hire me,” she said, lighting a cigarette, lifting her coffee cup. “I’ve got all the requirements, a powerful sense of observation, great contacts. I know everybody. At least my father does. I’m not bad-looking, although I am missing a bit in some departments.” She dropped her eyes to her chest. “But then I have compensating characteristics. You, Mr. Big Shot Editor, actually need me.”
“Can you write?”
She puffed deeply on her cigarette, a first sign of some agitation.
“I’m workmanlike,” she said, as if it were an admission. “I’m no Anaïs Nin, but then again, I’ll have you.”
“Me?”
“You’re an editor, aren’t you?”
He wasn’t interested in being a Pygmalion, he told himself. Later when she excused herself to go to the ladies’, he watched her cross the room. Observing her tight, rounded rear, he remembered her reference to compensating characteristics. Somehow it seemed tied to the decision to give her a free-lance assignment. What the hell, he thought, he was not above trading his position for flesh. It was, after all, one of the fringe benefits of influence. Was it really a form of rape? He snickered at the reference. I am a male chauvinist pig, he thought.
For obvious reasons, Henry Landau was the go-between with Margaret, who immediately saw through the ploy.
“I thought I was going to pick my own staff,” she had complained to Nick. “Henry has ordered me, literally ordered me, to give this kid an assignment.”
“I’ll check,” he said innocently, calling her back later.
“She might be exactly what you’re looking for. You make your own judgment after you see her copy.” He chuckled over the conspiracy.
“I wasn’t born yesterday,” Margaret fumed.