by Ward Just
But there was this one thing that they seemed unable to avoid, and maybe she had a point that there was something spoiled about the news business. The newsroom had a nearly fifty percent divorce rate. Hard drinking was the norm, and not only the staff but the spouses of the staff. During the past year Ned had wondered again and again if he would remain a bachelor for the rest of his days. He was happy enough with his own company and the company of his colleagues so long as a girlfriend was part of the ensemble. No question that Elaine had made his apartment livable, curtains and so forth, a serviceable kitchen, a fine kilim on the living room floor, and a tiny Miró in the bedroom. Gamma’s compliments.
Thus brooding, Ned returned to the newsroom, which, as it happened, was in full-blown crisis of the sort that put a smile on everyone’s face. An alderman had been caught in bed with a woman not his wife. Her husband discovered them and beat the alderman to death. What made the story most interesting was the spotless reputation of the alderman, well educated, hard-working, much admired. Ned did not arrive home until midnight, opening the door and calling for Elaine and finding only silence. She was gone. Her wardrobe was gone. She left no note.
Ned poured himself a large whiskey and sat on the window seat. He wondered what it was that fascinated El so about an empty street at midnight. Then his mind wandered back to the alderman, one of life’s puzzles. He was a daily communicant at Our Lady of Sorrows on the South Side, a mild-mannered, almost meek politician who had been an accountant before entering what he called public service. He was a little under five feet six inches, wire-rimmed eyeglasses, a little potbelly somewhat out of place in a man barely thirty-five years old. He had a reedy voice that seemed to belong in a choir. He rarely spoke during the tumultuous debates that took place in the City Council, and when he was noticed at all he appeared frightened. Yet the resulting legislation often bore his mark. He was a master of ambiguity, often helpful in writing a tax law or a revision of the zoning code. As it turned out, he was a favorite of City Hall. And at the funeral, with his wife and children gathered around his casket, a high shriek was heard from the fourth pew—his paramour near overcome with grief. To complete the confusion, his name was Kurtz. Ned himself did the extensive editing of the piece, an hour-long chore that tried to reconcile the anomalies and succeeded, mostly. Still, with all his skill Ned Ayres was unable to reach the pith of the matter, its essence. He was obliged to tread most lightly on the presence of the paramour, a handsome redheaded woman, age twenty-five, long-legged, shapely, daughter of a prominent lawyer, friend of the publisher of the newspaper.
It was often remarked that men and women in the newspaper trade became cynical early, adopting a side-of-the-mouth sarcasm owing to the base metals of what they called news, a mind-numbing hurly-burly of corrupt politicians and vicious gangsters, arsonists and sexual predators and all the rest. The cat in the tree. An infant lost and found. Their cynicism was honestly acquired but had little to do with the hurly-burly. It had to do with the milieu of continual surprise. Just when you thought you had a handle on the story something utterly strange presented itself. Something off-key. Out of sync, a person, place, or thing that did not belong. The reporter sought coherence, but there was no coherence. Instead there was whirl. Whirl ruled. And the facts fell willy-nilly from an overburdened tree, yet habitually a few facts short. As for the newsroom cynicism, it was also true that the worst thing a reporter could be called was naïve. A parasol in a pigsty.
So Elaine flew off to Capri and Rome and was silent for half a year. Then a postcard arrived, dateline Cape Town, written in her tiny script. The weather was clear, the city beautiful. She had arranged a safari with friends. At last she would see a rhino in the wild. They were traveling with a white hunter who promised elephants and Cape buffalo as well. They were a jolly crew, two British and a Frenchwoman and a languid Italian. Her father had been in good form; even the wife, Tre, was agreeable. Rome was gorgeous, the monuments and artworks spectacular, the food good. I bought you a Borsalino hat. She signed off, Love, E. Ned Ayres stood at the window of his apartment wondering where Cape Town fit into her scheme of things. He was in the dark. She seemed to be a wanderer, a vagabond, his polar opposite. The fact was, they were not on the same page.
Elaine receded in Ned Ayres’s thoughts, arriving occasionally in the evening hours. He concluded that he and Elaine were competitors as well as lovers, more alike than he thought, same pea, different pods. Or the other way around. Maybe what they were, were good friends. Ned lived in the present moment and Elaine Ardmore did not. The news business was a present-day effort with a nod to the past. The future was tomorrow’s paper. That was Ned’s context day to day. He feared that Elaine had no context because she did not work. The working life was a mystery to her, an interference instead of a context. A few weeks into their romance he discovered that she did not read his paper or any paper. At first he was offended, then amused. How could anyone live without the news? El spoke often of travel, going somewhere, anywhere that was, as she said, not-here. He never quite got the point of it, not-here as a destination. Not-here would soon enough become here, another here, and wouldn’t that require a reordering of things, a life of endless not-heres, the last stop always just out of reach?
Ned’s incapacity to get the point, a consequence of Herman. The incapacity was a legacy of Herman and there was damn-all he could do about it even if he wanted to. Ned had slipped with ease from Herman and Indianapolis to Chicago, but that was a matter of the job, where the work was. He could settle anywhere, St. Louis or Milwaukee, if that was where the job was. For the moment Ned Ayres was exactly where he wanted to be. You stayed in one place until you mastered it, and he supposed the opposite was true of El. She saw the world as her homeland or, to be accurate, her potential homeland, because so far she had rarely ventured from Chicago. And now she was in Cape Town, South Africa. He hoped they would meet again, in friendship if nothing else. Then he laughed out loud. Their nation could not exist half slave and half free.
Months later he received a cable at his apartment. The circumstances were forever in his memory. He was doodling on a notepad, trying to conceive a fresh means of covering the presidential election. Mahler’s Second Symphony was on the phonograph, a mighty inspiration. He wondered if campaign coverage could resemble a symphony, violins carrying the melody, a warning from the horns, provocation from the big bass drum. The melody now light, now grave. A presentation not excluding humor. All the relevant facts, but the facts made clear. Given context. Given verification. Made readable. He drew sets of intersecting lines as he listened to Mahler’s horns, warning signals. Ned looked up, irritated by the knock at his door.
Darling Neddy, the cable began. You must join me at once. You have no idea of the strangeness of life here, how vivid, how exotic. My heart beats to it. It’s a world apart and beyond fascinating. More like fabulous. The beasts of the field on a rampage, kin to tiny earthquakes. Strange birds float overhead, a rhino as big as a tank thunders by and the eland take no notice. Life untamed, Neddy. We think we are the rulers here because we are armed and the beasts are not armed. They are obeying their own laws, whatever they are, and look at us with distrust. As has often been said, we are the intruders here. To grasp this region is to grasp the tide of life itself. By the way, we have given up the Land Rover and are proceeding on foot, no fewer than ten miles a day. Also, by the way, I had a boyfriend from our group but he’s gone now. I’m glad of that. He was so insistent. You were never insistent, at least insistent in the way he was insistent. I can see us now, you and me, more clearly now. Can we begin again? Will you come to me?
Ned read the cable in a state of high alarm, remembering El’s voice, its timbre, its velocity. And all this time he felt her hand on his arm, her mouth close to his. She was whispering something. He glanced again at the cable, long lines of type. She spoke of the gorgeous sunsets, a blood-red sun against the darkening sky. Oh, you have no idea. He heard her voice, ever so slightly hoarse. And in the
morning the reverse, she wrote, the country lights up so slowly you can feel it on your skin, the heat rising, and you believe you are in paradise . . .
Ned stepped to the window. The time was late fall, a windy Saturday, leaves flying in the street. The room was silent, Mahler having vanished, and he hadn’t even noticed. Two girls passed under his window. They were arm in arm and laughing, a companionable moment. He was trying to imagine Elaine’s “region,” where it was precisely and what they were doing there besides walking and dodging wild beasts. He wondered if they sang while they walked, like the Volga boatmen. Ned held Elaine’s cable in his hand while he watched the street. The voice was not hers. The sentences were headlong, racing one another to some imaginary finish line. He had rushed through the cable and now he looked at it again. She wrote that she was arms-qualified, quite at ease with her Winchester. She had bought Ray-Bans with amber lenses. For the time being they were not shooting anything, content to watch the animals dance. She ended her manifesto with an expression of love and an apology for the way they had parted, her harsh words. She hadn’t known quite what to say. Well, it was not a matter of what to say but how to say it. She had let him down. She knew that. But she wished desperately for a reconciliation. The fates intended it. The final sentence was in a language Ned did not understand, probably Swahili. It ended, All my love, Your Baby. Baby? He had never called her Baby because she was not the sort of woman you called Baby. He called her Elaine or El, sometimes Elly. Once he called her Blue-Eyes and she laughed and laughed.
Ned took a step back, still looking into the street with its bright fall colors and the afternoon yet to reveal itself. He looked once again at the cable. There was no return address, unless the cable office in Nairobi was the return address. He wondered how you got there. No doubt the jumping-off place would be New York, then London to Nairobi. Ned’s mind was unsettled, thinking about Nairobi and the person who wanted to reenter his life. And what had happened to Cape Town? His life was not a revolving door. The first part of the cable he had understood well enough and had been tantalized by it. The rest of it was not the Elaine he knew. There was only so much you could know of another, just as there was only so much you could know of a news event. The one thing known for certain was that the first version was wrong. The second and third versions were also wrong, but less so.
He thought Elaine had gone off the deep end. He heard her voice but could not see her whole. They had been apart for the best part of a year, and no word from her except one wretched postcard. One postcard and now this: a summons from the back of beyond. She wished him to join her at once, as if he were free to do so. As if he were untethered, his newspaper world a kind of hobby like stamp collecting. He had made a life for himself and for the moment could imagine no other. Certainly not one in east Africa.
He looked at his watch and thought he would go to the office, see about the Sunday paper. But he did not move, continuing to stare at the street, now without foot traffic. He wondered what it would be like, being charged by a rhinoceros. What did they weigh, anyhow? A ton. Probably not much more than a ton. Ned was not fleet afoot. Neither was he Winchester-qualified. When he was a boy he owned a pellet gun, good for squirrels. There were squirrels everywhere beyond the Herman cemetery. A squirrel paradise. What was the justification for killing a rhino? The horn was valuable. The Chinese thought it an aphrodisiac. So that would be one justification, enhancing the sexual pleasure of the Chinese multitudes. He wondered if El thought about this when she was lining up a shot. And was the horn equally provocative to women?
When the telephone rang he was startled and moved quickly to pick up at the second ring. It was his Sunday editor, reminding him of the president’s news conference at eleven. Ned threw on a jacket and quitted his apartment for the office, a twenty-minute walk, thinking all the while about Elaine and her one-ton rhino. He did not know how to respond to her. No doubt she was lonely; black rhinos could take you only so far in life. He believed he had a responsibility toward her and he did not know what to do, how to respond. Judging from her cable, she had had a life-altering experience in Africa and this experience drew her toward him once again. She wished to resurrect lost time. The interim was a bridge into the past when they were together and compatible. Africa’s raw edges had carried her back to Astor Street where they could pick up where they had left off. The plains of Africa were an epiphany, a reordering of her world. Not their world, her world. She had turned the page. Today was tomorrow, and the truth was, she had left him behind. He was in the present moment and she was a step ahead. Ned returned the cable to its envelope and the envelope to his desk drawer, the one with the lock. He stood at the desk a moment, tapping his finger on the glass surface, and then he left for the office.
Ned Ayres stood in his office facing the glass wall that looked into the newsroom. He always thought of his office as an aquarium, but in this instance the fish were outside. The ceiling lights were as bright as a supermarket’s. His mood had improved the moment he walked into his office: the sofa, the coffee table, the refectory table with the most recent editions of the Chicago, New York, and Washington newspapers lying flat. A photograph of his parents had pride of place on the big desk next to the Royal typewriter and a coffee mug crammed with number-two pencils, including the one pencil with blue lead. A sketch of his friend Caroline Browne completed the ensemble. Caroline was a singer in great demand at Chicago’s North Side cabarets. They had had a brief romance, convenient because they kept roughly the same hours. The romance flourished and then ended when Caroline moved to the West Coast, a film opportunity she could not pass up. The sketch was done by an English painter much in vogue. Caroline’s pout reminded him of Piaf. She wanted him to come to L.A. for a long weekend but he had not yet found the time.
Then his door opened and the Sunday editor looked in to say they were ready to convene the morning meeting, unusually contentious because there were so many candidates for page one, even a sports yarn that was droll. A frog-jumping contest in Grant Park.
Begin without me, Ned said.
Are you all right, Ned? The Sunday editor looked at him strangely.
I’m fine. What do you mean?
You look as if you had seen a ghost.
No ghosts, Ned said. I’ll join you in a minute.
We have this train wreck and a killing on the West Side. Washington has a story about an ambassador’s confirmation, suddenly in deep trouble. Another girl problem. God, men and their zippers. Thing is, he’s from here. LaSalle Street lawyer. Lives very grandly out in Lake Forest.
I said I’ll be there. Go away.
Aye-aye, Cap, the Sunday editor said, and closed the door. Ned watched her go, moving her hands from side to side as if drying them of sweat, a mute announcement that Ayres was in a foul mood, unusual for him, so even-tempered most of the time. That was true enough. His life was orderly for the most part, seven-day weeks, twelve-hour days. He believed himself in charge of an alternate universe that demanded his full-time attention. His personal life, such as it was, did not interfere. In its own way editing was soul work, a deeply mysterious business. Page one, properly designed, was often a work of art, the lead story under a three-column headline and over a two-column explainer, news analysis, a photograph above the fold. The paper was fresh each day, a kind of miracle. The weather report was fresh. The obituaries were fresh. The box scores and the stock tables were fresh. The comics page was not fresh. Instead, it was familiar. That was its value, a page to go to and not be surprised. The comics page was consolation, along with the editorial page with its cartoon and roster of columnists, biased views nicely balanced. Ned watched the conference room door close and knew that he would have to move quickly. But he did not move, thinking once again of Elaine and her long cable. No doubt she was lonely.
Ned buttoned his coat, remembering that Caroline Browne was not enthusiastic about news. She thought of it as a product like soap flakes or toothpaste, something bought over the counter for a speci
fic purpose. In her case, the film reviews. Nothing else.
Ned looked up, stirred at last, opening his door and moving swiftly to the conference room, where he sat in his usual seat at the head of the table, taking charge. The LaSalle Street lawyer went on One, below the fold. The West Side killing was inside. The train wreck, near Carbondale, led the paper. The frogs went on One, below the fold. Ned always spoke in a low voice, barely audible at the rear of the room. The Sunday editor disputed the train wreck: Hell, Ned, there are only two dead and a dozen injured. Readers are drawn to train accidents, Ned said, looked at his watch, and left the conference room, not before telling the Sunday editor that she could do what she wanted with the president’s news conference, but in Ned’s opinion it belonged inside. Somewhere in the vicinity of page eight.
Later that year, in the winter, Ned received a three-line telegram informing him that Elaine was dead after a brief illness, a virus of unknown origin. On the advice of the doctor her remains were cremated and buried in the cemetery on Nairobi’s outskirts, not a suitable place but all there was. Ned closed his office door and stood staring at the flimsy yellow paper. It was sent from east Africa, some city he never heard of, from someone whose name was unpronounceable. He wondered if they had managed a Christian service. He heard a tap at the door but did not look up. His breathing was shallow and he felt lightheaded, his vision aswim. In their time together Elaine had never been sick, not even a common cold. Ned’s thoughts were every which way. Time came to a full stop, and when it resumed he walked unsteadily to his desk and made the call to the obit man and told him to come to his office at once. And when the obit man inquired into details, Ned was surprised at how little he knew of her. He did not know her birth date. He did not know her mother’s maiden name. He said to the obit man, You do the detective work.