Love Monkey (31 page)

“There's just that
thing
, missing,” she says.

“The mystery,” I say.

“Maybe.”

We drink silently for a while. I wonder if just possibly she is unaware of how I feel about her. Maybe I should unload.

But she's too quick. That's why I like her, isn't it? She can figure things out.

“Shall we?” she says, motioning to the door. It's only eleven-thirty.

“In a second,” I say. “How do you think I feel about you?” I say.

Finding something fascinating to examine at the bottom of her glass, she says quietly, “I think you've said.”

Bob Dylan say:
I offered up my innocence, got repaid with scorn.

I've said too much. And yet I haven't said what I want to say. Because she doesn't want me to say it.

There are questions I want to ask her. Questions I don't want to know the answers to. Because they'll take me closer to the point where I know I'll have to give up.

“My brother called me up yesterday,” she says. “We talked for an hour. He said he went to the library and ripped out all of the articles I'd ever written for
Tabloid.
”

I hold thumb and forefinger up to the waitress and sign a pretend check. “He's the one?” I say.

“Mmm-hmm. He's just…
me
,” she says.

“You don't feel that way about any of your friends?”

“With all of my friends, there's something missing,” she says. “Like we don't communicate on some level.”

“So what's missing with me?” I say.

“With you,” she says, “I communicate on all levels.”

And now I'm perfectly bewildered. Has she just said I'm her only real friend?

We're back on Forty-eighth Street, walking out to Eighth Avenue. We go by the parking garage, the one where she stole up behind me
in March, that night. That night I caught her in midsneak, bear-hugged her, scooped her right up and whirled her around in the air. And she laughed and laughed.

“Remember that garage?” I say. “You coming up behind me?”

“It seems so recent,” she says, and something occurs to her. “It's been an adventure.”

And as we pass the corner and wait for a cab I give her: “Why do you hang out with me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what's the point?” I say.

“You're my friend,” she says. “You buy me drinks.”

Even then, as she heads for her getaway cab, I worship the ground she walks away on.

T
he day before Thanksgiving. The director's cut, the extended remix of holiday weekends, the four-day reprieve, the time you see your family for the first time in months, the signal to begin your patriotic holiday shopping orgy. At the office everyone is in that hurtling holiday mood, smiling at each other in the hallways, being visibly
nice.
I have grown used to anticipating general misery around the holidays. If you go through life expecting bad things to happen, you will rarely be disappointed.

I call Bran's cell.

“Why are you calling me?” she says.

“Bad time?” I say.

“Tom,” she says, “don't you know I'm working on This? The attacks? The airports? The anthrax?”

“Sorry,” I say. “I thought maybe you only worked on it twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes a day.”

She sounds like she's having four other conversations.

“What?” she says. “Never mind. Gotta go.”

“Hey, Bran?” I say.

“What?”

“You know how in the movies, when the guy sometimes doesn't get the girl you thought he was supposed to get? The girl he thinks he wants? And how sometimes he instead just gets together with his best female friend? The one who you knew all along was just perfect for him, except they couldn't see it in each other? They squabble; they stop speaking to each other. It takes them a while to see why they're perfect together. Didn't you ever think we had that kind of thing? Can't you see us putting everything aside and just admitting we have feelings for each other? This is me being honest.”

“Tom,” she says. “This is me hanging up.”

“Give it some thought,” I say.

“Tell it to the dial tone,” she says. “And Tom?”

“Yes?”

“Don't ever call me.”

“Ever? Ever is a long time. What if I get cancer?”

“Okay. Exception. You can call me if you get cancer. But only if it's terminal.”

“How terminal? What if I have a disease that's bound to kill me in the next forty years?”

“I'm hanging up.”

“You're hanging on.”

“Up.”

“Can I call you next week?”

“Next week? No. I'm beyond busy next week.”

“So I
can
call you. Just not next week. What about next month?”

“Next week is next month.”

“Next
year
. Come on. My final offer.”

“Next year?”

“Next year. Five weeks of suffering. Of pining for you.”

“Okay,
why
should I let you call me again, ever?”

“Because you were the first one I called on September eleventh.”

Where did that come from? This thought has never occurred to me before, but as soon as I say it, I realize it's true.

“Now you're just cheapening something a lot more important than you and me,” she says.

“Of course I am,” I say. “But look around. Everyone in this city has been acting crazy lately. People opening their mail wearing rubber gloves. People buying gas masks. People buying a lifetime supply of antibiotics. People who have lived here twenty years moving to the suburbs.”

“So what?”

“So. You're not leaving town. I'm not leaving town. You're not buying a gas mask. I'm not buying a gas mask. We're sticking. Why? What have we got in common?”

“Okay, what?”

“We love the chaos. Chaos is sexy. Anybody who can't see that deserves to be living next to a strip mall.”

She thinks about this for a second. “You never did send me a huge fucking bouquet, you know.”

“Is that your price?”

“Send me one and find out,” she says.

And then she really does hang up, before I can ask what her favorite flower is. But in a second, I realize I already know. Lily of the valley.

I'm holding on to the receiver with a stupid look on my face when a voice comes parachuting out of the fluorescent lights.

“Here he is, right where I left him. Simba. A lion of the word game, pacing in his cage, bloody of claw. Give him a wide berth, ladies and gents, beware the fanged carnivore in preparation for All Gluttons' Day, thinking about carving up some turkey and Ethan Hawke.”

“Mr. Thrash,” I say. “How was Afghanistan?”

“Brutes, can't get a drink there, strictly BYO, bombs away, corruption, devastation, detonation. The horror, the horror. Murder and move, fold your tent and run, shivering in the desert, sudden movements with the troops, thump in the night, saddle up, lads, and here we go, move on to the next hole in the ground.”

“You loved every minute of it,” I say, having already seen the expense sheets showing he spent every night but one in the presidential suite at the Islamabad Hilton. We ran the photo byline every day: Rollo, in his Kevlar and flak jacket, looking like a man who can't wait to get bombed.

“Nothing in life so exhilarating as to be shot at without success,” Rollo says. “Winston Churchill said that, boy.”

“Or maybe it was his rewrite man,” I say.

“Yeah, cheers,” he says. “My invisible friend. Your services have not gone unnoticed, except outside this newsroom.”

“So what's next for you?” I say, gingerly.

“Can't go back to the movie reviews,” he says. “News on the march. Back to the thrice-weekly column, real reporting, rattle the cages, bang it like a gong, mate. Also, Cronin told me your reviews were better.”

The phone. A voice I don't recognize.

“Tom Farrell?”

“That's me,” I say. Rollo looks impatient. I tell him to hold on a sec. He drifts away to regale rewrite.

“Hold for William Winterbottom, please.”

Winterbottom. Name's familiar. An editor of some sort, somewhere.

“Mr. Farrell?”

“Yeah?” I say.

“William Winterbottom, executive entertainment editor, the
Daily News,
and how are you today?”

“I'm fine.” A newspaperman. One of us. This could be good, but it's starting out like America's Most Boring Telemarketing Calls.

“Excellent. It has not gone unnoticed that you have been on your way to achieving something of a reputation in the criticism community,” he says. I'm picturing the city room as being larger and better decorated than ours, but what is that sound in the background? It's hard to identify. Oh yeah: silence. No phones, no fights, no CNN. The guy could be calling from an assisted-living community in Boca.

“My gratitude for taking a charitable view of my talents,” I say. Where are these words coming from?

“Would it be possible for you to envision honing your skills so as to befit the nation's third-largest newspaper?”

“You're asking me to cross the street?” I say. No one's ever head-hunted me before.

“We feel certain we can offer an attractive compensation package, superlative benefits, and the respect that comes with writing for 1.1 million paying readers every day,” he says.

“Every day?” Let's not get carried away here. “I'm a film critic.”

“Yes, no, you're right, I envision your criticism running on Fridays, along with more in-depth examinations of trends in the film industry, perhaps on Sundays? As you know, we offer our writers up to two thousand words to afford them the freedom to explore issues of interest.”

Two thousand words. Of real writing. No more hit-and-run six-hundred-word pieces. Analysis. Criticism. Ideas instead of puns.

“I like where this is going,” I say.

“Of course,” he says, his voice humming like a Mercedes, “we are not
Tabloid.
At the
Daily News,
standards of decorum prevail. You would be expected to fine-tune your material. I myself, as you may be aware, began my career at
The New Yorker.
”

“But the
News
, well,” I point out. “It is a tabloid.”

“
Tabloid
is a tabloid,” he says. “At the
Daily News
we prefer to
think of ourselves as a newspaper that happens to be printed on reader-friendly stock. Otherwise we consider that the two papers are no more similar than
Hustler
and
Architectural Digest
.”

I've never spoken to upper management at the
News
before, but this explains the unfocused quality of their stories, which cover the same ground as ours but eschew the crackling monosyllables, the all-caps headlines, the rakish wordplay. I'd always thought they were trying to be like us and missing the point, which is why we always call it the
Daily Ruse
. Turns out they think their way of doing it is actually better.

“What sort of compensation are we talking about?”

“We have been discussing a figure of—”

And here William Winterbottom of Nyack and Martha's Vineyard reads me a number that I associate with other professions entirely. Like international jewel thief. My voice sounds like I'm on helium.

“I think that would be acceptable,” I say.

“Perhaps you could stop by the office today?” he says. “I've got a few quibbles, of course, notably with your
Training Day
review, which I thought may have crossed the line into mean-spiritedness about Ethan Hawke. His publicist is a long-standing friend to this newspaper, of course, and I remember running into her at a party and discussing with her some changes in tone that she felt would have been appropriate. I couldn't disagree with her. After all, it is not our business to be gratuitous, is it?”

And speaking from the forty-second floor of the house that gratuitous built, I say the words, “No, sir.”

The next time the Toad shuffles by I stop him.

“Guess what?” I say.

“Guess what. What kind of question is that? What are you, four?”

“Okay, enough. I just got an offer from the
News.
”

“For Christ's sake, you don't want to work there. I talked to Max just the other day, he's miserable. When they hired him, they said they loved him, told him they wanted him to keep doing what he'd been doing, but they piss on all his ideas. He's not even city editor anymore, he's deputy assistant managing editor for information or something. Not news: information. It's like working for the UN.”

“Can I just tell you how much they're offering me?”

“What?”

I tell him. The Toad can't believe it.

“That's it,” he says. “Go. Clean out your desk.”

“Aren't you going to make me a counteroffer?” I say.

“Look, we're a mom and pop operation, they're Bloomingdale's, we can't match it. That's more than I make. We're not in this business to make money.”

“So why are we in it?” I say. “The artistry? The thanks of a grateful nation? The view of Fu Ying?”

“We're in it because we're a club. We're a club for people who hate people who join clubs.” And he walks away.

I'm thinking about that when the phone rings.

“Hey,” says Julia.

“Hey,” I say.

“What are you doing for the weekend?” she says.

“Going to my grandparents' house in Maryland,” I say. “My mom'll be there. But before I get there it's hours of I-95 hell on the bus.”

“That sucks,” she says sympathetically. “I'm heading for Grand Central.”

“What time you leaving?”

“The 4:14,” she says.

Check the watch: 3:32. She didn't leave a lot of time for this conversation.

“I just wanted you to know,” she says. “I quit my job.”

“Oh,” I say. I'm wondering if this is going to be the worst sixty seconds of my life.

“You're moving, then,” I say.

“On Saturday,” she says. “I'm going to Madison.”

“Here's an idea,” I say. “Don't go.”

“Huh,” she says.

We don't say anything for a minute.

“I just feel,” she says. “I have to be there with him.”

Horrible as it is, I don't want this conversation to end. But there is nothing to say.

“So good-bye,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say.

And she hangs up.

The Toad comes by my desk as I'm about to call Winterbottom back.

“Look,” he says. “Don't cross the street. We found another ten grand a year for you. But you have to take it in expenses. Expenses are fully tax-deductible for the company, right? So you get yourself a book of receipts from a restaurant-supply store, charge us two hundred a week, you get reimbursed in cash, tax free, no questions asked, everyone's happy.”

“Irv,” I say. “It's not enough.”

“What?”

“Look, I'm packing my stuff.”

“What else can I give you, partial custody of my cats? Read my lips, I have
nothing left to give
,” he says.

“But you do,” I say. “That.” I nod over his shoulder.

He turns around. “That's it?” he says. “Done.”

And for the first time in my life, I have an office. A real columnist's office with a sofa and a TV/VCR combo, one that they were saving for a personage of rank. Irv says I move in Monday.

My entire department is out the door by five. I linger till six-thirty, reading the papers, killing time. Just to punish myself I decide not to take the subway. Instead I head out into the thrust and teem of the concrete carnival. The city is simultaneously emptying and refilling. All of us who live and work here are going to meet our relatives in the suburbs. All the bored families in the suburbs who haven't sent their children to live in the city think, Let's go into town to look at a big-ass dead pine tree propped up in Rock Center.

I head for Port Authority on foot in the cold, in the dark. I've got a lot, but I don't have Forty-eighth and Eighth. I walk by it shivering and stand there for a minute. I can't get into the parking lot. It's closed. There's a blue painted scaffold around it. A sign says it's about to be torn down to make way for an apartment building.