Love Monkey (25 page)

We all stand around looking at each other. No one does anything. Someone coughs.

“Good on them,” Rollo says, the shoulder pads of his charcoal pinstripe looking deflated. “Round one. Caught with our knickers down, that's one up the arse. All fine. Knock us down. End of overture. Curtain up. Act one, scene one. Our story begins. Civilization and savagery. Ultimate confrontation, good versus evil, apocalypse now. Our shout now. We'll roast 'em to a turn. And the toll? How many'd they get?”

“Maybe ten thousand,” Hyman Katz says.

“Only two things left to do, then,” Rollo says, counting on his thumb and forefinger. “Lock, and load.”

Eli brushes some dust off his leather jacket. He looks at all of us and shakes his head like a man who has weathered a personal insult. “Can you believe those motherfuckers?” he says.

Everyone works past eleven, when the Metro edition comes up,
and most of rewrite goes when Max finally checks out at one
A.M.,
the last deadline for the Late City Final. The other papers are late coming in, though, and if they have anything important we don't know about, we can steal it and make last-minute changes by stopping the press run until three
A.M.
There's really no need for anyone but the Toad to wait that long since he's Night Desk, but a few stalwarts buzz around anyway, playing with our shard of history. Someone has turned down the volume on the bank of TVs and the copykid who is supposed to answer the phone has put his head down on his desk.

I hadn't realized Eli was still here, but he comes over to take me aside for a word.

“If anyone was going to write my obit,” he says, “I would have picked you.”

“Yeah?” I say.

“Hoff would have spelled my name wrong,” he says.

“Thanks, Ignatz.”

“Good night, Pappy.”

A
nd my first thought when I wake up in the morning is, Buildings crashing. Lethal explosions. Fire. Devastation. Horror.

My second thought is,
Cool. I'm not thinking about her
.

I'm not due in until three this afternoon. Today's like an evil snow day. Everyone on the Upper West Side has the day off. Even the bark and snarl of the streets has been tranquilized: most of the bridges and tunnels are closed. Nobody wants to come in anyway. At last, the day has come when you start to understand the point of New Jersey. There are hardly any cabs on the street: cabdrivers are often Muslims. Driving a cab in this town is dangerous on a good day.

Haven't heard from Julia. At least she must be safe: she's in a third-world country where there isn't much to blow up. That's okay. There's no reason for her to call me. There was no reason for me to have been downtown. I call Liesl. No answer. Weird. Couldn't get hold of her yesterday either. Call Bran. Maybe I'll tell her about how I've been thinking about her. What with everything that's happened.
Have I? Well, sort of. I mean, the mere fact that I've been thinking about telling her I've been thinking about her must count for something.

I get her on her cell.

“Bran,” I say.

“I can't talk,” she says. “I'm in Boston.”

“People talk in Boston,” I say.

“Haven't you been keeping up with current events?” she says. “I'm on
a story
.”

Boston: where two of the planes took off. Oh. I'm an idiot.

“About the airport?” I say.

“Yeah!” she says. “I gotta go, all right?”

And she does.

So I call Katie. If circumstances warrant, I could just dump my Bran speech on her.

“Are you all right?” she says, sounding genuinely worried.

“I'm fine,” I say. “I've been thinking about you.”

“Me too,” she says.

“Were you down there?” I say.

“Please, I was three blocks away!” she says. “You know where my law school is.”

“So was your building damaged?”

“It's inaccessible,” she says. “What am I going to do?”

“You'll have some time off,” I say. “Might as well make the most of it.”

“I want to go back to class,” she says.

“I thought you hated your classes,” I say.

“I do. That's why I want to get them over with.”

“So what are you doing today?” I say.

“I've got to work on this paper,” she says. “It's due next week.”

“You would think at a time like this people wouldn't be so interested in working obsessively,” I say.

“I'm not obsessed,” she says. “I'm just looking to catch up.”

Sigh. Is everyone in New York thinking this way? Major terrorist attack = a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for extra credit?

I join the slow-moving throngs looking for newspapers on Broadway. A sign of the times: there is no sign of the Times. Everyone wants printed validation of the absurd Jerry Bruckheimerness of what we watched yesterday. Every newsstand has hand-lettered
SOLD OUT OF
signs, with lists of the names of pretty much every paper. Even the
Amsterdam News
. People are saying “Please” and “Thank you” and “Have a good day” to the Arab news vendors.
Poor things,
everyone thinks. Not their fault. Hope they don't get blamed.

I check a dozen newsstands but all they have is magazines, their covers now looking as up to date as the Edsel. Heading back home at West End and Eighty-third, I see a blue
Times
delivery truck heading north. On the southeast corner there is a freshly filled metal
Times
box. “U.S. ATTACKED,” in
Tabloid
-sized headlines. Events have raced past hyperbole, lapped it. I feed the box three quarters.

Mike invites me over for lunch and commiseration. Over our sandwiches we watch CNN. Odd gurgling noises emerge from the bathroom. Not the baby. The mother.

“Kuh-wee! Kuh-wee!” comes the sound of Karin dunking the baby.

“Not the same world as it was yesterday, is it?” says Mike. “At some point, you start to get the idea that no one likes us.”

“Living in New York,” I say, “you really have to learn to love having your heart broken.”

Karin returns, bearing an overswaddled child. “Bubbie! Aw, blubblub-blub!” The kid is going to develop brilliantly. She'll be speaking fluent gibberish at fourteen months.

“Kind of a compliment, though, isn't it?” Mike says. “They hate us the most. Like when your ex-girlfriend starts calling you in the middle
of the night just to hang up on you. It drives you nuts, but then you brag about it to everyone.”

“Yeah,” I say. “We're number one.”

Karin has a different take. “Shooo, shooo, shoooo. Ah-dubbadubba-dubba. Pish, pish. Joopie? Joopie?”

This woman has an MBA. One baby and she's Jar Jar Binks.

“Which reminds me,” he says. “I got an e-mail from Nina.”

“Really?”

Nina was Mike's college girlfriend. All four years, nonstop. The guy majored and minored in nooky. Sometimes the two of them would show up red faced and smirky at
lunch.
On a
week
day.

“She said she was thinking about me when she watched the news,” Mike says.

“You didn't tell me that,” says Karin, rejoining the adult world.

“When was the last time you heard from her?” I say. I haven't heard from Maggie or Besty or anyone else I ever used to date.

“Couple of years,” he says. “She has a baby now. Another one on the way.”

This attack, it's like a *69 for the whole city. Quick: redial your last conquest.

“You heard from her two years ago?” says Karin. “We've been married for four years.”

“I always liked Nina,” I say.

“I know!” says Mike. Winkity-wink.

“What was so great about her?” Karin sniffs.

“Of course I like you better,” I say.

She beams.

I'm back on the street when my cell phone bleats.

I figure it's Julia, desperately worried about me.

“Hey,” I say.

“Oh my God,” Liesl says. “Do you be
lieve
this?”

“I called you at work all day yesterday,” I say.

“I know, our whole switchboard went down.”

“Did you go home right afterward?”

“Well, I had some pleadings to copyedit,” she says.

“So you worked a full day after the biggest terrorist attack in U.S. history?” I say.

“Didn't you?”

“I'm a journalist!”

“Well,” she says. “Not really.”

It's the unintentional insults that hurt the most.

“Of course I am. I work at a newspaper.”

“But. Don't you do the fluff?” she says.

“I—,” Well, yes. Ours is a navel-gazing profession and I'm the lint. “I did my part, though,” I say, grouchily.

Then I remember something from when I covered the story the first time around.

“Didn't your firm represent the guys who bombed the trade center in ninety-three?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Our lawyers actually know a lot about all this from the guys who got convicted,” she says. “Apparently they wouldn't stop bragging about the details. They just talked about all kinds of stuff. Which obviously I can't discuss.”

“Attorney-client privilege?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I guess there are just boxes full of transcripts.”

“You weren't home last night, were you?” I say. “I called a few times. You okay?”

“After work I went down to see if I could give blood,” she says. “They didn't need it. And I ran around trying to find someplace I could volunteer.”

“You sound shaken up,” I say.

“Where were you?”

“I had jury duty,” I say. “So I was downtown. Saw the whole thing.” I have to learn how to say this without sounding like I'm proud of it.

“Oh my God—are you hurt?”

“Wasn't that close. I was on Chambers Street.”

“When do you think they'll start finding survivors?” she says.

“Liesl,” I say. “There aren't going to be any survivors.”

“There have to be,” she says. “I'm going down there tomorrow.”

“I don't think they'll actually let you, y'know,
sift through
the
rub-
ble. They have unionized emergency workers to do that. And they're getting the biggest overtime bonanza of their lives.”

“How can you
say
such a thing?” she says. “I'm going down there tomorrow.”

“Be careful,” I say.

We hang up.

At work I boot up my computer and am greeted with one of those magical little fairy-dust whooshy sounds.

T
he Internet user EMonahan582 has sent you an instant message. Do you accept?

E
veryone in the city has been talking about This for five days. That's what we call it: This. “This is going to change everything.” “I wonder if This will make the economy tank.” “Do you think they're planning more of This?” I have spent the previous few days doing the following: Going to work. Hanging out at Mike's. Ordering in food. Listening to the new Dylan CD (which adds another classic Juliacentric line to the Dylanguage: “Gonna look at you till my eyes go blind”). And, occasionally, turning on the news. Which I can only handle in ten-minute disaster bites.

The German has spent these days doing the following: watching the news, reading the news, discussing the news, attending memorial services, lighting candles, writing heartfelt letters to the
Times
, and calling me, frequently, to ask if I'm okay. Never once does she mention the supreme charitable act she could perform that would hugely improve the morale of a New Yorker, and all she'd have to do
is come over and take a shower with me. Much better than schlepping supplies, no?

“You all right?” I say on the phone.

“I don't know,” she says. There is a wistful tone to her voice, though, and if I can't get lustful, I'll take wistful. Maybe when wist grows up it gets a tattoo and a naughty piercing.

There must be something happier to talk about.

“Hey,” I say, for no reason at all. “When is your birthday?”

“Uh, tomorrow?”

I realize you're supposed to get this knowledge committed to paper as soon as you start seeing someone. On the other hand, if you don't know, you can't screw it up, with the Scarily Expensive Gift or the Lamely Chosen Trifle that shows lack of interest or the Wrong Color Gift that shows lack of attention to detail. Birthdays are a deal breaker for girls, no question about it. When was the last time you heard a guy say, “Oh, I had to dump her. She got me a Gap gift certificate for my birthday. Talk about a Weirdly Impersonal Gift!”

I put down my spy novel and pick up something far more difficult to master: a stack of
Randy
s. I turn to the sex pages. Okay, that's most of them, but specifically the how-to guides. This is because of the vague sense that
all my life I've been doing It wrong. Randy
will set me straight.
Randy
knows all.

After a few hours of devoted study, I take the train down to Midtown. Stop by work. See if they need any help. The Toad is on the Desk.

“You workin' today?” he says, holding a phone in one hand and chopsticks in the other. His hair is writhing on his head. It looks fake but rewrite rumor has it that it's actually real.

“Not supposed to.”

“I didn't hear that. Take a seat. Louise's got some stuff to dump.”

“What's that?” I say, nodding at his desk. There's a weird little
wooden tray with a thin layer of sand. There's a miniature bush and a little rake. The sand is immaculate.

“Tom, please. We need you to translate Louise. She's all excited.”

I extract the who-what-when-where-why out of the hoarse gibberish our third-string City Hall reporter Louise has gathered after following the mayor around all day and rewrite a couple of Reuters items. Around twelve I walk over to shoot the shit with the Toad. He's raking sand placidly, arranging every grain.

“Nice dollhouse,” I say.

“It's a bonsai garden,” he says. “Keeps me sane.”

“Too late,” I say.

“You hear about Max?” he says.

“No, what?” I say.

“He's going to the
News.
I did not tell you this.”

“Why?”

“Remember that fight he had with Cronin last week? When they were screaming at each other and telling each other they didn't know shit about newspapers and told each other to suck each other's cock?”

“The one on Monday?”

“No, the one on Wednesday. Anyway, apparently Rutledge-Swope heard the whole thing.”

Tyrone Rutledge-Swope is known to call in from his yacht or his jet or his Hollywood bungalow several times a day. The guy owns half a dozen of the biggest newspapers on the planet, plus a network and a movie studio, and still he reads every smudgy caption of ours. We're his baby.

“The big boss was here?” I say.

“No, he was on the phone. One of the copykids had him, was trying to get Max's attention but she couldn't. She should have put Rutledge-Swope on hold. But she's new. So Rutledge-Swope heard
the fight. Anyway, he told Max to pack his bags. He said he's the only one allowed to call Cronin a shithouse bitch.”

“You say that with a distinct twinkle,” I say.

“Cronin called me in for a chat,” he says. “Looks like Claudius takes over a week from Monday.”

“The drooling idiot,” I say. “Did I mention how fine you look in your Sansabelts today?”

“You're the best hack I have,” he says. “Don't leave town, I may have some plans for you.”

“Aye aye, Claudius,” I say.