The Tender Bar (50 page)

thirty-nine
| THE EDITOR

I
LIFTED MY SELF-IMPOSED EMBARGO ON MY MOTHER THAT SAME
spring. Once again I phoned her regularly from the newsroom. She never asked why I’d stopped phoning, or why I’d started again. She understood, better than I, and picked up where she’d left off, offering encouragement and wisdom. Sometimes I would quote her at the bar—without crediting her, of course—and the men would compliment me on my sagacity.

Keep writing, my mother said. Keep trying. Maybe if I forgot the Kelly Debacle, she said, the
Times
would too. This sounded like too much to hope for, but I followed her advice because I couldn’t think what else to do.

Each week the
Times
real estate section ran an obscure feature called “If You’re Thinking of Living In . . .” A different town was highlighted every Sunday, and I proposed a piece about Manhasset. The editors gave me the nod, and for weeks I roamed up and down Plandome Road, interviewing people about my hometown. I was glad to be reporting again, and I enjoyed learning things about Manhasset, like the fact that the Marx Brothers used to go there specifically to get drunk. When I sat down in the newsroom with my notes, however, I was more blocked than when I tried to write the bar novel. Haunted by the voice of Stephen Kelly Jr., compulsively checking and rechecking the spelling of every name and word, I couldn’t get past the first few paragraphs. Eventually I took the story to Publicans on a quiet Sunday and sat with Mapes, polishing my words while he polished his brass letters. I wrote the whole story in longhand at the bar, which may have been why it started and ended there. The final word of the story was “Publicans.”

It ran on a Sunday in April 1989. When I walked into Publicans that night Steve was waiting. He came toward me, his face unusually red. I thought he looked furious. Maybe I’d misspelled the name of the bar. “Junior!” he shouted.

“Yes?”

He gave me his biggest Cheshire smile, the one he saved for his closest friends and his greatest softball victories, and folded me in a hug. “What a nice job,” he said.

I saw my story spread across the bar, his Heineken holding it down like a paperweight.

The story was trivial, a dry overview of Manhasset—schools, home prices, that sort of thing—and two mentions of its most important gathering place. But Steve acted as if I’d written
Finnegans Wake
. He said I had “a way with words,” and I took a step back, knowing that this was one of Steve’s highest compliments. Steve was a word man. It showed in the care he took naming his bar, in naming all of us, and in the crowd his bar attracted. Silver-tongued raconteurs, bullshit artists, florid storytellers. Also, maybe more than all the men, Steve esteemed newspapers, and seeing his gin mill mentioned in the world’s finest newspaper was one of the few good things to happen to him of late. I’d briefly taken his mind off the other Publicans, the dying Publicans, which had all but gone bankrupt. He was so appreciative, so kind, that I got carried away, and told Steve that I hoped to write a novel some day about Publicans.

He responded with about as much enthusiasm as my mother had when I made the same announcement to her, at about the same spot in the barroom. “Uh-huh,” he said. His reaction puzzled me, and thinking it over later I wondered if Steve believed that Publicans already
was
a book. Walking through the door always did feel like entering a sprawling work of fiction. Maybe Steve intended that feeling when he first named the bar Dickens. He’d created his own Dickensian world, complete with a Dickensian fog—clouds of cigar and cigarette smoke. He’d even named all the characters. Maybe Publicans was Steve’s Great American Novel and he didn’t see the point of someone writing another novel about it.

Then again, I thought, maybe Steve just had a lot on his mind.

The editors liked my Manhasset story, but not quite enough to forget my past sins. I was told that my case would soon be coming up for final review. The secret committee would meet and decide once and for all if J.R. Moehringer was
Times
material, and to help them in their deliberations I was “asked” to write a one-page letter, addressing the following question: “Why does a Yale graduate have so much trouble spelling?”

Bob the Cop shook his head when I told him about this humiliating assignment. I was considering writing the secret committee a letter in which I used a few well-chosen four-letter words, each spelled correctly, but he told me to stay cool, do whatever the secret committee asked. Steady as she goes, he said. You’re in the home stretch.

Working late in the newsroom one night, drafting my I’m-sorry-I’m-such-an-idiot letter to the secret committee, I got a call from Bebe, my barroom-loving friend from college, the only one of my friends who had ever “met” JR Maguire. She invited me out for a drink. We met at a Broadway bar we both liked. She threw her arms around my neck when I walked in. “Let’s get smashed,” she said.

“Twist my arm.”

We ordered martinis. They came in glasses as big as upside-down dunce caps. Bebe caught me up on the gossip from our class. I asked about Jedd Redux. She’d seen him recently at a party and he looked swell. While talking she kept one eye on the bartender. Whenever our glasses were half empty, she’d signal him to bring another round.

“Whoa,” I said. “I haven’t eaten any dinner. I’ll be flat on my back.”

She told the bartender to ignore me, keep the martinis coming.

As I finished my third martini she rocked forward and asked, “Are you drunk?”

“God yes.”

“Good.” She rocked back. “Sidney’s getting married.”

There are 206 bones in the human body and I was suddenly conscious of each one. I looked at the floor, then Bebe’s feet, then the bartender, who was standing with his arms folded, eyes narrowed, watching me closely, as if Bebe had warned him ahead of time what was going to happen.

“Honey, I wasn’t sure if I should tell you,” Bebe said tearfully.

“No, you did right. Tell me what you know.”

She knew everything. She heard it all from a friend of Sidney’s best friend. Sidney was marrying Trust-Funder.

“Have they set a date?”

“Memorial Day weekend.”

“Okay. That’s enough. I don’t want to know any more.”

I wanted to pay my check and hurry to Publicans.

The Friday before Memorial Day weekend I was separating carbons in the newsroom, thinking about Sidney and how to survive the next seventy-two hours, when I looked up. Beside me stood the secretary for the editor in charge of the training program. “He was just looking for you,” she said, pointing her pencil at the editor’s glass office.

“I’ve been right here.”

“I looked. You weren’t.”

“I must have gone for sandwiches.”

“That’s a shame. He wanted to see you.” She widened her eyes to indicate that the editor’s desire to see me was important and without precedent. “But he’s gone now. Left for the holiday weekend. Are you free Tuesday?”

“Is it good news?”

Her eyes still wider, she pursed her lips and turned an invisible key.

“It is good news?”
I said.

She turned the key again and threw it over her shoulder. Then she gave me a warm and congratulatory smile.

“I’m going to be promoted!”

“Tuesday,” she said.

How perfect. How fitting. On the same weekend Sidney became Mrs. Trust-Funder, I would become a reporter at the
New York Times
. If only I’d been at my desk when the editor wanted me, I might have spent the weekend reliving the happy scene, which would have helped blot out the recurring image of Sidney walking down the aisle.

No, I told myself, this will be better. The anticipation will be sweeter.

It was Game Six all over again when I announced at Publicans that I’d been promoted. The men threw napkins in the air and cheered. They tousled my hair and begged Uncle Charlie for the privilege of buying the reporter his first drink as a reporter. Steve insisted my promotion had something to do with my story about Manhasset, which he kept referring to as my “story about Publicans.”

I decided to spend my last weekend as a copyboy visiting college friends in New Haven. Still woozy from the big celebration at Publicans I caught a train early Saturday morning. I felt sad when the train stopped in Sidney’s hometown, but it was a sadness I could manage. Things were working out for both of us. We’d been traveling different roads, and now we’d reached our separate destinations at the same moment. Everything made sense. Everything had happened for a reason. Had I been wooing Sidney the last three years, fighting to wrest her from Trust-Funder, I wouldn’t have had the energy necessary to become a reporter at the
Times
. Still, I thought, she must look lovely walking down that aisle, her blond hair up, her face breathtaking as Trust-Funder lifts the veil. I couldn’t imagine how much more agonizing these visions would have been if my own special day weren’t hours off.

Before seeing my old friends at Yale, I visited my oldest and steadiest friend, my spreading elm. I sat beneath the tree, drinking a cup of coffee, feeling how far I’d come. I walked around campus, pausing at every bench and stone wall where I’d despaired as an undergrad. I visited the courtyards and street corners where Sidney and I had laughed or kissed or planned our future. I listened to the bells of Harkness, ate lunch at my old bookstore café, and I felt more grateful, more alive, than the day I’d graduated, because I considered this graduation, from copyboy to reporter, a greater miracle.

Tuesday morning I presented myself to the editor’s secretary at nine sharp. She made a motion for me to wait, then walked into the editor’s office. He was on the phone. I saw her point to me. The editor smiled and waved.
Come in, come in
.

He motioned to a seat across from his desk. “Overseas,” he whispered, pointing to the phone. I sat.

The editor in charge of the training program was a former foreign correspondent, and trotting around the world for many years had given him a worldly air. Though bald, his scalp was deeply tanned and the vestigial hair around the perimeter of his head was thick and yellow. He made baldness chic, enviable. His suit was custom-made—London, no doubt—and his shoes, chocolate brown lace-ups, had clearly been hand-sewn in Italy. Someone had once told me that this editor had been buying his shoes from the same old cobbler in Italy for years. I wondered if this was true. I’d also heard rumors about his affair with a notoriously trampy movie star, and his profound disenchantment when he discovered that her breasts were fake.

He hung up and folded his hands on his desk and asked about my holiday weekend. I told him about visiting Yale. “I’d forgotten you were a Yalie,” he said. “Yes,” I said. He smiled again. A Steve smile, almost. I smiled.

“Well then,” he said. “As you’ve probably suspected the editors have had a chance to carefully review your work—and it’s terrific. Truly, some of the pieces you’ve done for us have been outstanding. That’s why I wish I had better news. As you know, when the committee meets to consider a trainee, some editors voice support, others do not. A vote is taken. I’m prevented from telling you who voted how, or why, but I’m afraid the end result is that I cannot offer you a position as a reporter.”

“I see.”

“The feeling is that you need more experience. More seasoning. A smaller newspaper, perhaps, where you can learn and grow.”

He made no mention of pretzel fires and Kelly misspellings. He didn’t cite my ebb-and-flow productivity, didn’t refer to my I’m-sorry-I’m-such-an-idiot letter. He was a model of compassion and tact. He stressed that I could stay at the
Times
as long as I liked. If I chose to leave, however, if I wanted the kind of gritty writing experience that could be gotten only through daily deadline writing, the
Times
would certainly understand, and the editors would wish me well and send me off with glowing letters of recommendation.

He was right of course. It had been preposterous, and presumptuous, to think I was qualified to be a reporter for the
Times
. I did need seasoning, plenty of it, more than he knew. I thanked him for his time and reached across the desk to shake his hand. I noticed his fingers as they came toward me. They were slender and manicured. His clasp was firm, the skin soft, but not too soft, not effeminate. They were the hands of a concert pianist, or a magician, or a surgeon. They were the hands of a mature man, unlike my hands, with their split cuticles and tobacco-stained fingertips. Mine were the hands of an urchin. His hands had tapped out whistling dispatches from war zones, and fondled the breasts of movie stars. Mine had committed appalling errors, ludicrous misspellings, and had routinely turned to claws with a kind of creative rigor mortis. I wished we could trade hands for one day. And hair. Then I despised myself for this wish. The man had just told me I wasn’t good enough, and yet I couldn’t stop liking him, and coveting his body parts. As he offered me a few final words of encouragement, I wasn’t listening. I was telling myself,
Get mad!
There would be something healthier, I thought, in shouting at the editor, or cold-cocking him. Joey D would lunge at this guy, I thought, right over the desk, feet first. Joey D would take the editor by that yellow hair, that silky, luminous fringe—
how much did the man spend
on conditioner?
—and swab the desktop with him. I wished I were Joey D. I wished I were this editor, who was now guiding me out of his office and closing the door in my face.