Out of Range: A Novel

by Hank Steinberg

  “Oh, forget it,” the woman said, laughing and grabbing the girl’s hand. “Come on, Ollie. Meagan wants to go see ‘It’s a Small World.’ ”

  As Quinn followed them, trading his olive fishing hat for an auburn golf visor, he couldn’t help but smile.

  Indeed, he thought. It is a very small world.

  Chapter Three

  Charlie threaded through the bullpen, nodding to his colleagues as he arrived for the day. There had been a time when he’d managed to convince himself that the LA Times would be an exciting place to work. Going to a zoning board meeting in Encino wasn’t the same as bombing around western Afghanistan in a Range Rover, but in the beginning the job still held its challenges. The first couple of years, he’d had to build up his network of contacts, learn the city, and absorb the breakneck rhythms of daily journalism. For better or for worse, those days were

  long gone and Charlie could now sleepwalk through most assignments.

  Today, though, he was feeling a bit more enthused. He’d been chasing down a lead on corrupt spending in the L.A. public school district and the spiky-haired young computer jockey named Mac had apparently come up with something juicy for him.

  Fingering his earring and staring at the computer as Charlie approached, Mac grabbed a stack of papers and tossed them toward Charlie without missing a beat. “Got that background you were looking for,” he added with false modesty.

  Mac was a smart kid with good instincts but more than that he was something like a genius when it came to digging up information in cyberspace. Charlie was reluctant to use the word in front of anyone at the paper, but Mac was essentially a hacker. A hacker who should have been working for the NSA or Wikileaks, but somehow didn’t realize how much his talents were being wasted here.

  Charlie flipped through the dense pages and marveled, “This is the actual public schools budget?”

  “Every line item in the entire county. You want to know what Beverly Hills High spent on toilet paper, it’s in there.”

  “How’d you—” Charlie shook his head and smiled. “Never mind, I don’t even want to know. Just be discreet, huh?”

  “That’s why they call me Deep Throat.”

  Charlie managed a chuckle and headed for his own cubicle.

  “Oh, hey,” Mac called after him. “Sal was looking for you.”

  Charlie felt a catch in his chest. The recession and a declining readership had been slowly strangling the paper for years now. Only last summer, twenty-six people had been laid off and for several months Sal had been hinting that Charlie might need to show some “flexibility” if he was going to avoid the next round of cuts. He knew that Sal had been angling at those cuts for the early spring, and lo and behold, April had now passed into May.

  Was today the day the shit hit the fan?

  Charlie dropped his bag off at his cubicle and headed for Sal’s office. When he got there, Sal held up a finger, indicating that Charlie should wait for him while he wrapped up his phone call.

  Charlie sat down on Sal’s beat-up leather sofa and found himself gazing at the framed photos on the wall. One in particular caught his eye: Charlie and Sal in Tibet, fresh out of journalism school. They had been there as freelancers to cover the Workers’ Hunger Strike and had somehow found a way to grab the first and only interview with Zhou Yong, its organizer. It was a major coup for two twenty-four-year-old guys and only confirmed for Charlie that they were on the path to greatness. Together they had planned to be the last of the gonzo journalists, searching out the toughest stories in the most out-of-the-way places, righting society’s wrongs, shining the light of truth on falsehood and abusive power. But when they’d returned from Tibet, Sal had shocked Charlie by taking a staff writer’s job at the Chicago Sun-Times. Within a few years, he’d worked his way up the managerial ladder inside the Tribune papers—a fact which Charlie had ribbed him about on every possible occasion. Of course, after Uzbekistan, Charlie had to admit he was grateful to have such a close ally in such a conventional place. And even though he was now Charlie’s editor and boss, Sal had gone out of his way never to treat Charlie

  like an underling. They were friends and friendship meant everything.

  Sal hung up the phone, looked up from his paper-strewn desk, and sighed. He was a big bear of a man with a thick shock of close-cropped black hair and a gut that was one size larger than his waistband. “Close the door, would you?”

  Charlie knew what was coming. “You spoke to the board?”

  Sal nodded. “They’re digging in their heels on this one. Unless you start taking on long lead assignments internationally, there’s no way to justify your salary.”

  “So they want to fire me.”

  “You know the kind of cutbacks we’ve been making. I can hire three smart kids straight out of J school for the money we’re paying you.”

  “You think some kids out of J school can do what I do here?”

  Sal’s face took on an evasive expression. “Look, Wallace was supposed to be covering the economic summit in Shanghai, but he’s getting bogged down on this Libya thing. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for you to get out there again. It’s an analysis piece. Two weeks, maybe three, you’re home again.”

  When Charlie didn’t respond, Sal spread his hands impatiently and warned, “Charlie, you need to get out in the field again. You’re overqualified for what you’re doing.”

  “We agreed when I came here—”

  “That was six years ago—”

  “We agreed that I could stay in town and work domestic. That was the deal.”

  Sal leaned forward, rested his chin on his hand and gave Charlie a long, skeptical look. “What does Julie say about all this?”

  Charlie picked up a stray paper clip off Sal’s desk and flicked it toward the trash can.

  Sal kept after him: “Two months this has been brewing and you haven’t mentioned it to her?”

  “I didn’t think it was real until today,” Charlie replied. Even before he spoke the words, he knew how lame that was going to sound.

  Sal leaned back in his chair, his body retreating. “Look,” he said, “I know what you all went through, but don’t you think it’s time you put it behind you and got back out into the world? I really don’t think Julie would have a problem with it.”

  “She said something to you?” Charlie read Sal’s hesitation—clearly he didn’t want to sell her out. “What did she say, Sal?”

  Sal leaned forward, trying to calm the tenor of this. “Come on, kid, when you met Julie, you were both tearing up the world. She’s not a soccer mom . . .” He waved his hand around the cramped, paper-strewn office. “And you’re not this.”

  “What did she say?” Charlie demanded.

  “She’s suffocating, Charlie.”

  “She told you this?”

  “She told Laura. Laura told me.”

  Laura was Sal’s wife and had become a good friend to Julie, so this hearsay evidence, as galling as it was, had an air of credibility. And Sal was anything but a shit-stirrer.

  Searching for confirmation, Charlie’s mind drifted back to that morning . . .

  Julie’s defensiveness, the way she’d acted with him at the car. The cursory “Love you, too,” her tearing out of the driveway like she couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  Suffocating. I’m suffocating my wife.

  Sal wasn’t through. He apparently had a lot to say, and one way or another, he was going to get it off his chest.

  “You can tell me to go jump off a bridge if you want, but I’m gonna give you some of my pearls of wisdom about marriage. I’m on my second go-round here and I can tell you what screwed it up the first time. It wasn’t that we were fighting. We should have been fighting. Instead we were so damn polite with each other we ended up strangers. Strangers with secrets. I don’t want to see you go down that road.”

  Charlie sat silently for a moment. He knew if he stayed in Sal’s office, he would say something to fracture their f
riendship or cost him his job. Without a word, he rose and jerked the door open.

  He strode through the bullpen, averting his eyes from his colleagues, and made his way to the elevators. He hit the call button and waited, but he had no idea where he was going.

  Chapter Four

  Julie sat in the boat with Meagan and Ollie, bobbing slowly through “It’s a Small World.” The trippy 1950s-style animatronics, the almost hypnotically repetitious song and the slow, rocking motion of the ride seemed uniquely suited to the turbulent state of her mind.

  One hates what one wrongs, she thought. It was her favorite line from her favorite film. Richard Burton explaining to Peter O’Toole in Becket that O’Toole’s King Henry “hated” the commoners precisely because he treated them so badly.

  The phrase had caught her fancy as a teenager the first time she’d seen the film and had always stuck with her because she felt it explained so much of human nature. And it helped her understand now why she had treated Charlie so shabbily this morning. She had wronged him—and rather than admit it, she had been edgy, intolerant, and passive-aggressive, preying on his weaknesses while refusing to show any of her own.

  It made her sick that it had come to this. Particularly because she still loved him deeply and still respected so much of who he was, even if the man she’d fallen in love with had in some ways retreated from the world. But how could she possibly explain her lies to him now? Part of her wished he had seen the baggage claim ticket on her suitcase, or that she’d had the audacity to leave it there for him to find. At least that would be a way to begin the conversation.

  “Mommy, look!” Meagan cried, tugging on Julie’s sleeve and snapping her out of her introspection. She was pointing at the kaffiyehed Arabic dolls. “Why do they wear those scarves on their faces?”

  “It’s part of their religion,” Julie tried to explain. “Like some Jewish people wear black hats and coats. It’s almost like a uniform.”

  “Like Santa Claus?”

  Julie couldn’t help but smile. “Sort of, yeah.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy Meagan and she resumed watching in wonder at the spectacle around her.

  For a moment, Julie was able to see the ride through Meagan’s innocent eyes, appreciating the fantasy that all peoples and cultures could somehow exist side by side.

  Her work for World Vision had taught her, sadly, that people were essentially tribal, that by nature they almost always needed some kind of Boogeyman to align themselves against and that choosing one’s particular Boogeyman inevitably became a central and inescapable part of one’s identity.

  It occurred to her that in some ways she had unconsciously made Charlie her Boogeyman. The source of her unhappiness, the person she blamed for whatever was lacking in her life. It wasn’t fair and she knew it couldn’t go on this way.

  She gripped the safety bar at the front of the boat. It had to be tonight. She would come clean with him and let the chips fall where they may. For the first time in a long time, she breathed a full, deep breath. Though she was buzzing with anticipation and fear, she felt as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

  The boat emerged from the dark tunnel, shimmying along the rail, delivering them into the afternoon sun. As it came to a stop, she took the hands of both her children and led them up the ramp into Fantasyland.

  She felt free.

  Chapter Five

  Charlie found himself driving aimlessly down Olympic Boulevard, swirling and blending Sal’s incendiary words in his mind. Was Julie really suffocating? Keeping secrets? Had they, in the process of tiptoeing around each other, become strangers?

  One moment, he was sure that Sal was being melodramatic—possibly as a way to shake Charlie into action. The next, he had the sinking feeling that Sal was not only on the right track, but that he only knew the half of it.

  But there was no denying the central fact: over the past year, he and Julie had drifted apart. The usual banter and humor that existed between them had largely dissipated, replaced instead by methodical, almost clinical, conversations about the banal details of their domestic life. Who was taking which kid to which class, what couple they might be having dinner with on which night, who was going to call the gardener or plumber . . . And their sexual encounters—which had always been dogged and feverish—had become tepid and infrequent. Even discussions about the children, always an animating and uniting force between them, had begun to feel lackadaisical and rote.

  Before today, he’d understood all of this to be a unique phase, a downward rhythm in the natural parabola of any marriage. But if what Sal said was true—and his own gut was confirming this—they were in real trouble.

  The sound of an incessant, droning car horn startled Charlie. It took a moment for him to realize that he was sitting idly at a green light, cars whizzing past him on the left while the frustrated driver behind him waved furiously for him to get moving.

  As Charlie put his foot to the accelerator and continued west, it occurred to him that he should probably choose a destination. He supposed that he had been unconsciously driving home, but sitting alone in the house staring at the family photos, wondering where the love had gone, didn’t exactly feel like the choice. Then again, what was he supposed to do? Hit the driving range at Rancho Park? Grab a latte at Starbucks and watch all of the wannabes work on their screenplays?

  When he stepped into the house, Charlie put down his laptop and grabbed himself a cold beer. He sat at the kitchen table and looked around—the French pots and pans oh so carefully chosen from Williams-Sonoma, the table and chairs from Restoration Hardware, the Riedel wineglasses, the Wüsthof knives . . . what exactly was this life they had constructed?

  He had grown up in the blue-collar confines of Youngstown, Ohio, and had spent most of those seventeen years desperate to escape it. He’d wanted to play on a bigger field for higher stakes. He’d wanted to get out into the world and make a difference. The night before he’d left for college, he’d gotten drunk and scaled a rusting iron ladder to the top of the tallest chimney at Republic Steel and yelled down toward the feeble lights of his dying hometown: “Go to hell, Youngstown!”

  Was the narrow little existence he’d created here in Los Angeles any less stifling? How had he let it come to this?

  He opened his computer and checked his email. Sal had sent him a bunch of material on the Shanghai conference with a succinct note: “Time to get back in the saddle.”

  Charlie downloaded the material and thought about what it would mean to be flying all over the world again. He knew that his worries for his family were largely irrational, that there were countless investment bankers, marketing execs, sales reps from every business sector who traveled the globe three-quarters of the year without contemplating the idea that they were leaving their families unprotected. But they hadn’t been through what he had. They hadn’t seen their wives hooked up to a breathing tube in the ICU or their premature babies poked and prodded for weeks in an incubator.

  Charlie perused the documents for a few minutes, trying to picture himself on that plane, in that hotel, calling home and Skyping every night; to imagine how the physical distance from Julie and the kids would gnaw at him, how his worries about them would begin to take its toll. And even if he took all of that concern out of the equation, what would it be like to miss all those days of their lives? To miss their Little League games and their dance recitals? And how was he supposed to repair whatever was damaged in his relationship with Julie if he was suddenly away from home for huge chunks of time?

  He pushed the computer away. None of it could really be considered until Julie got home and he was able to talk it out with her. He hopped up from the table and began making dinner. Assuming Julie didn’t let them go crazy with cotton candy and other junk, the kids would be ravenous when they walked through the door. He’d greet them with their favorite—spaghetti with Charlie’s famous marinara sauce—and then, after the kids went to bed, he would begin the soul-searchin
g conversation that would set him and Julie on a course of reparation.

  He sautéed a couple of onions and garlic in olive oil, added some fresh tomatoes and spices, then let it simmer. He turned on the sink, filled a pot with water, then put it on the stove and ignited the flame under it. It would take fifteen minutes for the water to boil, another twelve for the pasta to cook. Hopefully they would be home by then.

  He flicked on the TV, looking for a ball game when his cell phone rang. It was Julie.

  He answered with a chipper hello.

  “Calling from the greatest place on earth!” Julie shouted, her voice sunny.

  “You’re still there?”

  “Just got in the car,” Julie said on her Bluetooth. “We had an amazing time, didn’t we, kids?”

  Charlie heard Meagan and Ollie shouting joyfully in the background.

  “Oh, that’s great!” he said.

  “So how was your day?” Julie asked.

  “Fine. The usual. How soon before you’re home?”

  “Looks like traffic’s jammed on the 5.” Charlie heard a loud honk and then Julie shouted, “Oh, bloody hell!”

  Charlie felt his blood pressure rise. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, just some a-hole driver.”

  Charlie stifled the urge to caution her and waited for her to make the next move.

  “Maybe I could speed things up going that fancy way you told me about,” she said.

  “It’s like six different freeways,” Charlie said. “Why don’t I stay on with you till you get to the 405?”

  “I thought you didn’t want me on the phone when I was driving,” she said.

  Charlie wasn’t just being paranoid. L.A.’s freeways were a maze that sometimes confused even people who had spent their lives in the city and Julie had a notoriously terrible sense of direction. Nevertheless, he forced himself to keep his voice calm. “I know what I said, but there’s a lot of merging. It would really be easier if—”