The Travel Writer (4 page)

“You have a book on South America.” That’s what Hilary had hired me for.

“We used to. We dumped it. It didn’t sell.”

“Caravan Guides has a book on Bolivia. I wrote it.”

“Caravan Guides suck.” Her skin flattened and relaxed as the conversation settled once again on familiar ground. “The paper’s like newsprint and the maps look like they were drawn by a monkey.” I bit my cheek; I had drawn some of those maps myself. “But what do you expect?” she continued. “They can’t be making a fortune on guides to Bolivia. Why would anyone go there?”

“Bolivia’s a beautiful country—it’s got mountains and jungle and hardly any McDonald’s, and people still chew coca leaves and speak Aymara and Quechua instead of Spanish, and the Indian women in the city wear petticoats and bowler hats,” I said, trying to recall exactly how I’d put it in the intro to my book.

“Maybe it is beautiful—all countries are beautiful to somebody—but it’s a loser. Except for that damn hotel. Everybody says it’s the shit. That’s why when Hilary told me she’d swung this press trip from someone who used to work at Guilford—do you know Guilford?”

“Sure. The travel PR agency.”

“Then you know how pathetic their press trips are.”

This time my knowing nod was genuine.

“But why did the Matamoros invite Hilary when you don’t even have a Bolivia book?” I asked.

“The hotel’s looking to expand.
Was
looking. They wanted financing for two new branches deeper in the jungle, I heard, and started dealing press freebies to get the hype going. So when Hilary told me she scored this one, I told her don’t worry—just go and enjoy it. She only started here a year ago, and she didn’t have any contacts and hardly ever landed anything good, except those pitiful Guilford trips. I kept telling her to get aggressive. Go to the press fiestas in town, deal out your card to anyone who’ll take it. It’s good for the editors to get out of the office and check out resorts and see how you writers live. Besides, people stay longer at this job if they score freebies.
You
know how it is. That’s why I stay. I hoped this one would change her luck. Give her the killer instinct.”

“The newspapers said she was on assignment.”

“That’s what we told the reporters, me and the publisher. You and I know about freebies, but you can’t tell
them
!” She slapped her hand against the desk so hard I winced. “That’s off the record, by the way. This whole conversation is off the record.”

Kenny poked his head in again. “Did you just call me?”

“Get out, Kenny!”

He pulled his head out of the room like a turtle.

“You can’t call ‘off the record’ now,” I said.

“The hell I can’t.”

“Sorry, Lisa,” I said, appealing to her sense of journalistic fair play, “you know the rules.”

“Rules! What is Hilary to you anyway? You’re an international ambulance chaser.”

“And you sit here every day,” I said, “with just enough ambition to despise yourself but not enough to get up and do anything. You’re a real editor.”

Lisa picked up her cup of pens and dumped them on me, like I was a drunk coming on to her in a bar. They bounced off my chest and into my lap—red, blue, and black, and a few pencils for marking up cover mock-ups. I stood and let them tumble to the floor. She didn’t bother to order me out; she just sat and rubbed her hand and scowled into her computer monitor.

* * *

I almost knocked Kenny over on the way out; he had been trying to listen through the door. “You really a reporter or just a travel writer?” he asked when he regained his balance. I assured him I was a reporter. It’s not like you need a badge.

“Thought you’d all given up on her,” he said. “Like I said, if you’re looking for the scoop on Hilary, you’re sniffing up the wrong hole, like the rest of them. I know her better than anyone.”

The cubicles around us were occupied, but the workers were all mesmerized by their monitors. Someone in an office, perhaps another editor, pulled her door shut. What ever happened to office gossip? Maybe the pain or fear inspired by Hilary’s loss was still fresh, or even still growing; more likely the prior flood of reporters had drowned their appetites for notoriety.

I suggested a beer after work. Editorial assistants will jump on any freebie they can get. We agreed to meet at Siberia Bar at 5:30.

I met Kenny outside the entrance to the Fiftieth Street subway station three minutes past the appointed time. He was already tapping his heel irritably, so that his whole leg fluttered. His nose and chin jutted like a gargoyle’s. He stood with his toes pressed together and his heels apart, like a snowplowing skier. They must have laughed at him in gym class.

Siberia Bar is an unheated, uncooled, subway-car-size cave connected to the station entrance. It is said to be a hangout for journalists from the nearby Associated Press offices, but all I saw was the usual after-work midtown crush of young professionals: baseball-capped fraternity alums, admin assistants still in office khakis or skirts, furtive intraoffice couples pressed so close they had to tilt their heads back like cobras to avoid banging noses. I loaded up at the bar with four Buds, and Kenny and I sliced our way to the far end of the cave, under a blown-out speaker. We held our backs to the milling roar and discovered to my surprise that we could hear each other. There was even a ledge for our two reserve beers.

“Is this on the record or off?” Kenny asked, inserting his Ichabod Crane body into the space under the speaker. “Lisa warned me about you.”

I took a slug of beer to clear my head. “Tell me,” I said, licking dribble from my lips, “which you’re more comfortable with.”

“Off! You’re okay”—he jerked his head at the extra beers—“but most of those fuckers
just want gossip. And they get it. Those goddamn stories!”

“What stories?”

“You know the stories.”

“Ah. You mean the ones about how she might have been a little …” I trailed off. Wasn’t he supposed to supply the information? “Everyone agrees she was very pretty,” I finished.

“Code for slut.”

“It was you who said she was pretty.” He had been quoted so in the Morristown
Herald News
.

“That’s a lie! I said she was
beautiful
.”

From somewhere behind us, a hairy arm shot forth to drop an empty Corona bottle next to our Buds.

“Watch it!” Kenny said, but luckily for him, nobody heard. Kenny’s body was just the sort of thing a drunk likes to pound on for a warm-up before trying his luck at meaner bars.

“Lisa said you just want to get rich,” he said. “Sell some BS to cable news. She says it’s never gonna happen.”

“I don’t need to get rich. What I like to do is travel, and that’s my job. Tell me about the stories.”

“Some of them are true,” he conceded. “Sure, Hilary likes a cosmo and gets goofy pretty quick. She’s doesn’t have any meat on her. Hundred and five pounds, no more. And I would know.” He lifted his eyebrows meaningfully. “And yeah, she dated low-life dipshits, like her plumber. She had democratic tastes! And they say she went skinny-dipping at the hotel. All right. I believe it. So what?” In the heat of Siberia, his forehead was already covered with globules of sweat.

“So what!” I said. I recalled that a few published reports (citing unnamed sources at the Matamoros) had suggested that Hilary might have lacked the moral prudence befitting a young American woman traveling abroad.

“So now they think they know everything about her! And it all fits in one word:
‘slut.’
You call that an investigation? You call that a psychological profile? They could have interviewed her colleagues and friends. They could have interviewed
me
! But unless someone’s saying she smoked pot with the pool cleaner, they don’t want to hear anything about her.”

“But you knew her for real,” I said.

“Knew her? I loved her. There’s your first big scoop.”

I wasn’t surprised. Kenny would fall hard and heedlessly for someone like Hilary, if she just once grinned at his joke about the muddy office coffee.

“But she loved her plumber instead,” I said.

“He wasn’t a real plumber.”

“What are you saying?” I imagined a Nixon-era CIA operative, and the prospect of an international political conspiracy starring G. Gordon Liddy flashed before my eyes.

“He was just a handyman in her building,” Kenny said. “Fresh off the boat from wherever. Big guy. Chunky fingernails. She’d take him out drinking with us and he’d sit there drinking ice water ’cause he couldn’t afford a Bud and laughing when we laughed. Well, he wasn’t fooling
me
. No English. Can you believe that? But she knew Spanish—she’s a fucking genius—and she’d sling her arm around him and they’d jabber away and the two of them would be laughing like maniacs. Somebody asked her once what it was about him. The sex? The macho appeal? The danger? No, she said, he was just hilarious. So next time we went out, a few guys who had done Spanish in college tried him out and translated for the rest of us. Hilarious, my ass. Sometimes she’d even bring him to the office. Security guard would make him wait out in the lobby until she came to get him.”

He traded his empty beer for its reinforcement. He sniffed warily at the new bottle, and then took a long pull.

“After she dumped his fat ass,” he continued, “he came to the office to see her. But she wouldn’t go out to get him, so the security guard wouldn’t let him in. On my way to lunch I saw him sitting out there staring at a
Time
magazine. Like he could read it! He looked up when I passed, in case it was her. No luck, Chuck! So I complained to the security guard and he threw him out before I came back with my Wendy’s. Not bad, huh?”

“Kenny, you’re a real prick.”

He smiled, as if I had just rumpled his hair and chucked him on the chin. “I told you. I loved her.”

“When did she dump this guy?”

“Months ago. Somebody told me they got back together after, but I don’t buy it. I never saw him again.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Did you get anywhere with her?”

“You media assholes are all alike! Who the fuck do you think you are? Can’t you respect anyone’s right to privacy? You make me sick!”

Kenny sneered, but he leaned his body still closer, with all the grace of a construction crane redeploying. “All right, you filthy hack,” he said. “I’ll give you your juicy little tidbit. Put it on the front page of the
Post
! Maybe I’m drunk—I just don’t fucking care.” He planted his beer on the ledge. “Here’s something nobody knows, not even the police. They never asked.”

The blisters of sweat on his forehead were popping. One of them dripped down his forehead into the filter of his eyebrow. He blinked and swiped at his forehead with a soggy cocktail napkin that had been stuck to the side of his beer.

“The night before she left—I kissed her. No one else in the world knows that.”

“No one?” Had I really spent the price of four beers for the story of Kenny’s First Kiss?

“No one. We were here, in this very bar—but Tuesday, so it wasn’t so fucking suffocating—and a bunch of us had had a few after work but we kept on talking and when it was just the two of us, I leaned over, like this.” And he stabbed with his head at me, like a pigeon; I recoiled. “Right on the lips. And you know what? She kissed right back.”

“Unbelievable.”

“You gonna write that down?”

“I’ve got it all up here. Any tongue?”

“You fucking journalists! A little tongue. You know. A taste.”

“And afterwards?”

“Well, we had work the next day, so I didn’t make my move. What I was doing—you understand—was laying the groundwork.”

“Right.”

“I can’t believe I gave you this stuff. ’Cause it’s gold! I should be the one writing this up! But I’m just the office gofer. For now! You’re a lucky bastard. This blows everything out of the water. She must have been thinking about me down there. Maybe she went out with someone else, but she was thinking about me while it was going on. And maybe that’s why someone got pissed off at her. But one thing’s for sure. She wouldn’t have run off. Not knowing I was waiting for her. Not with that, that issue, you know, still out there. Unexplored.”

He glugged manfully at his beer, but there was still a sudsy inch churning when he slammed it back on the ledge.

“Maybe you think I’m full of myself,” he said. “But there are a few times in life when you don’t have any doubts. And I always have doubts! But not then. Not when she kissed me back. The next day I wanted to talk to her, but I said to myself, take it slow. Lay the groundwork. Give her time to think it over. And then the day after that I learned she was off to Bolivia, on her press trip. She left work early. No biggie, I figured. I’d talk to her when she got back. And now she’s gone. And that’s why I’m serving up my secrets. Because maybe if you know them you can find her.”

And I did know her better now. I saw a woman sweet enough to talk to the dork of the department, and either kind enough or drunk enough not to push him away when he did the bravest thing he could ever do. I imagined her smiling at him afterward, touching his sleeve and
telling him she had to go home. And now that kiss that should have tingled on Kenny’s virgin lips for a few weeks would burn in his lonely soul forever. But what was the harm in that? Kenny would have his own little tidbit of tragedy to savor and brood over.

The bar was growing yet more crowded; the heat and noise had all the urgency of rush-hour traffic. Kenny leaned back to finish off his beer, but someone jostled his elbow as he was drinking and the dregs spurted on his shoes. His eyes widened in puzzlement. He didn’t know where to direct his rage.

“Why do you get to go to that hotel?” he demanded. “Why not me?”

* * *

That night I called American Airlines to move up my departure date two days. I was informed that since the Hotel Matamoros had paid full fare for me (but full coach fare, damn them) American Airlines would be delighted to accommodate me on the Wednesday morning flight to La Paz, the only other flight that week with seats available. I hung up, chortling at my diabolical cleverness, and though it was almost midnight, blasted off an email to the Gran Hotel París in La Paz, providing a list of my credentials and explaining that I was coming down to conduct research for
The Caravan Guide to Bolivia and Ecuador
, of which I was a coauthor (I added the title page as an attachment, as if a well-formatted Word document were unfakeable), and also to write an article on La Paz for the renowned publication
Condé Nast Traveler
. I always mentioned
Condé Nast Traveler
when writing to South America. It was often the only magazine PR people had heard of, and while they were congratulating themselves on having heard of it, they usually gave me a free room without further scrutiny. In the end, as in all my freebie letters, I emphasized that whether or not the esteemed marketing staff of the Gran Hotel París was able to help me further the cause of journalism, they could rest assured that I would continue to review their hotel fairly and impartially, with all the integrity they had come to expect from the esteemed publications I was representing. Pilar had once told me she thought that was the best part of my comp-request letters—the gentlemanly bow at the end.