Read 50 Online

Authors: Avery Corman

50 (7 page)

BOOK: 50
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“It’s nice, Doug,” Reynolds said, “But it doesn’t have anything to do with our guidelines. Two out of twenty-one columns written to our guidelines is not the ratio we’re looking for.”

“We have different approaches, Robby. You take a reading of pulse, then you respond. I like to—”

“—wing it. Seat of the pants. A real New York kind of guy.”

“I
am
your New York columnist.”

Robby closed the door of Doug’s office.

“Doug, I’m telling you the future of this newspaper doesn’t reside exclusively in New York. This is a national publication, and when we feed you survey results to boost our national figures, you don’t do the
Sports Day
team any good by ignoring them.”

“I don’t know how accurate those surveys are.”

“They’re accurate, and it’s not your job to worry about the accuracy. I’ve got people for that. Circulation is up ten thousand. This newspaper is going through the roof. But we don’t want to have recalcitrant columnists. Especially, popular ones. You’ve got to understand the reality, Doug.”

“The reality is you’re a strong-minded guy with a need to put your stamp on this newspaper.”

“Only partly true. I’m also very successful. And very smart. You think I’m some dumb cowboy because I wear boots? I made businesses grow in other industries and I’m going to do it here. But I can’t have such an important writer on my paper working against me. So you make up your mind. You can quit. You can turn down a chance to be even bigger than you are in your field, with even more readers, on a paper that keeps getting bigger, with ads to the public featuring you, with a ten percent pay increase. Or you can take some suggestions on subject matter for your column. Once every two weeks you follow the guidelines and write a column on a designated subject. Nobody’s telling you how to write it, but I expect you to work with the surveys. Accept those terms, Doug. Give one to our numbers every once in a while. Take the raise. Or quit. Whatever you decide.”

I can’t quit. I can’t afford to.

“What’s it going to be?”

“I’ll play, Robby.”

“Great, Doug. Welcome aboard.”

Jeannie placed a story in
Women’s Wear Daily
about a circus-motif promotion Susan created for Filene’s in Boston. Jeannie told Doug she learned from Susan the initial money for the new business came from a loan given by Susan’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. Brook.

Susan’s father was a man of medium build with a porcelain-smooth face, his nails always manicured, his hair cut by a barber who came to his office once a week. Ethel Brook was a petite woman with Susan’s dark-brown eyes and hair, a heavy shopper who changed her clothes so often Doug used to think she could have had a nightclub act. Doug never called his father-in-law Charles or Dad. Mrs. Brook referred to him as “the Doctor,” even to Doug, and Doug called him Doctor, and the man was comfortable with this. Doug was aware of how disappointed they were that their daughter chose a sportswriter. From their tone over the years, and the fact that they seldom read his pieces, they made it clear they considered him to be in the blue-collar section of journalism. When Karen and Andy were born and there were birthdays to be celebrated, Doug and Susan’s apartment became the place where both sets of grandparents mingled across social lines. After the divorce, Doug’s parents and Susan’s parents never saw each other.

Doug’s father, Frank Gardner, was a portly man, bald, with dark features, five feet six, with a double chin. Norma Gardner was similar to Frank in size, a round woman, a half inch taller than her husband, with a face that was moon-shaped, the outline of a face crying out for jolliness but fixed in the melancholy of financial struggle. Norma had worked for years as a cashier in a coffee shop. Frank was the owner of a small costume-jewelry company, Norma Creations, which made “items,” as Frank referred to them, mounted on white cards, which sold for under ten dollars. His dream had been to sell Woolworth, if only he could have sold to Woolworth, and they would have been rich and lived in an elevator building instead of a walk-up on Amsterdam Avenue. When the Woolworth chain began to fade economically he tried without success to sell to the new suburban stores in shopping malls. He placed his line in the five-and-ten-cent stores that were still scattered throughout the country, using a novelties wholesaler, which reduced his profits. His efforts to upgrade the line always failed. He never could move to that position in business where his leading “item” was on a piece of satin in its own box, for twenty dollars. Norma Creations leased space in a plant in the South Bronx where two men physically produced the line that Frank created in rough pencil sketches. That Frank Gardner evidenced no other artistic interest, never went to a museum, and could barely draw the designs that became the “items” had always been disturbing to Doug. He believed his father had little flair for his profession and was a man permanently pinned to the wrong card.

Frank and Norma Gardner came to the apartment on a Saturday to visit with Doug and their grandchildren, Frank carrying a plastic bag of flounder he had caught that morning on a fishing charter out of Sheepshead Bay. “Sweet as sugar,” he declared, then cleaned the fish and expertly cut them into fillets. Doug observed his father and the pleasure he took from his fish, working at the sink with powerful, precise movements, humming. Fish moments such as these were the only times Doug saw passion in his father.

Rain was falling, and they spent the afternoon indoors. Frank and Andy were busy with gin rummy, Norma and Karen made a cake for dessert, then they all played Monopoly together. After dinner Norma drew Doug aside.

“Paint is chipping in the rooms.”

“I know. A couple of years and it starts to go. The steam does it.”

“So why don’t you get it taken care of?”

“Because the landlord uses a painter who’ll ruin the place and the estimate for a regular painter was about two thousand dollars and I wasn’t ready to spend it.”

“I saw on TV, children can eat it, the lead in paint.”

“They’re big children. They don’t eat paint.”

“They eat it and they die,” she said, not quite tuned in to his station.

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Next weekend your father and I will come and fix the rooms. You buy the paint.”

“It isn’t necessary.”

Two roly-polys wearing paint hats arrived the following week, to remove any evidence that could suggest their son was not making Big Money.

For the past three summers Karen and Andy had gone to a day camp with grounds in New Jersey. Andy, too old to be a camper the previous summer, had worked assisting the counselors. Doug thought they might enjoy being at a sleepaway camp, freed of their continuing home and home series for a while. The day-camp director had a partnership in a camp in the Berkshires where Karen could be a camper and Andy could have a job as a waiter. The children liked the idea, and after researching camps, favored this one. The camp fee for Karen was twenty-five hundred dollars. Susan offered to pay half when she received payment in the fall from a project she was working on for Neiman Marcus in Dallas. Taking Karen and Andy by cab to the bus-departure point near Lincoln Center, Doug was the one nearly carsick from the separation.

Visiting day was the last Saturday in July. He and Susan were not in touch with each other, and he rented a car and drove up to the camp alone. He parked in a clearing for cars and entered the camp area. In the distance was a girl with a resemblance to his daughter, brown from the sun, hair blowing freely, a towel wrapped around her neck, cruising on a bicycle. “Daddy!” Karen shouted and pedaled toward him. Her movements, the emerging sexual being that she was, startled him. She had been momentarily unrecognizable. They walked arm in arm toward the bunks, and he saw Andy sitting with his back to a tree, reading a book. His hair was unkempt and wild and he, too, for a beat, did not look familiar to Doug. Susan appeared in an antique Victorian lace dress with an antique bonnet, a ribbon down the back, moving elegantly through this background of children, rustic cabins and casually dressed parents like Claudia Cardinale in a Fellini movie. Over the next hours the generally reasoned acceptance about sharing the children with each other, the knowledge that the children needed the other parent, collapsed. She was there everywhere he turned, an intruder, and he was there everywhere she turned. By nightfall they had had enough of each other, and after they said goodbye to Karen and Andy they walked to their separate rented cars without another word.

As he drove back to the city he thought about the time they decided about the divorce. They had exchanged unpleasant words over nothing, it seemed, over reading habits. On a Saturday night they were sitting with the early edition of the Sunday
New York Times
scattered on the floor. Susan was looking at a fashion supplement, which Doug would not have bothered to read. He had the sports section and the Week in Review.

“You still do that. The Week in Review is one of the first things you pick up. Nobody picks that up first.”

“I also have the sports section. Do you ever bother to look at it? I am in that field, you know.”

“Would you read the fashions? Do you read
Vogue?
All your magazines, and you never read it. I am in that field, you know.”

“It’s a little different. You don’t write for
Vogue.
I write sports.”

She glanced at the front page of the sports section. The lead story was about a horse race at Aqueduct.

“I’d read the sports if I were a jockey. I’m not a jockey.”

“Maybe we should have an electric scoreboard and keep a tally on cutting remarks.”

“Maybe we should just call it quits.”

“That’s a good idea.”

There it was, after years. “Maybe we should just call it quits.” “That’s a good idea.” Once they started the discussion of how they would break up, they never questioned whether they would, and they were soon talking to lawyers. “Maybe we should just call it quits.” She had offered that tentatively, not, “I want a divorce.” “I’m moving out.” “You’re moving out.” If he had said anything other than “That’s a good idea,” might they have stayed together? he wondered. He saw himself again sitting there with her. You don’t say, “That’s a good idea.” You say, “It’s not a good idea.” You say, “No, Susan. When the kids were little we were involved with each other and we worked together. We have to work together again, on the marriage, on doing things together, on taking an interest in each other. And it starts right now. Give me the fashion section. Give me Vogue. Let’s talk hemlines. Let’s talk anything. I love you.” And you get up. You get out of your chair. You cross the room. You take her in your arms. And you do that the next time and the next and it starts right there. Get up! Walk across the room. Don’t just sit there. Get up!

He recalled his culpability, the times he returned her distance with his, her doubts with his, the times he had not transcended their arguments, their crises by saying, “We have to survive this.
We
are crucial.” He had joint custody of the failure.

Doug was going to be 48. When he was a child he wanted so much to be older he expanded his age. “I’m almost nine.” As this birthday approached he never would have said, I’m almost 48. On his birthday the children gave him a sports encyclopedia as a gift, and they went to dinner in a Chinese restaurant where Karen and Andy arranged for Doug to be served a pineapple for dessert adorned with sparklers, several waiters singing “Happy Birthday.” “If you have to be forty-eight, you’re the people to be forty-eight with,” he said to his children. He also received a few birthday cards, from Jeannie, his parents, his brother and sister-in-law. For people my age maybe they should have the reverse of belated birthday cards. “Sorry. I remembered.”

An imperial Russian ballroom was Susan’s creation for Neiman Marcus, a fashion show against a backdrop of mirrors, chandeliers, hostesses in gowns, uniformed guards, Russian wolfhounds. The event was covered by
Women’s Wear Daily
through Jeannie’s efforts. Doug received a check from Susan for her share of Karen’s camp expenses and checks continued to arrive at intervals to be applied toward the children’s tuition. Then she sent him thirty-five hundred dollars, her full share of the children’s latest tuition bill, the largest check he had ever received from her. His first response was elation. Irony took over. It would envelop him at random times, while he was paying bills, while he was at work. He would have a sinking sensation in his stomach like an anxiety attack. This is my own invention, an irony attack. Is it possible you’re going to become successful now, when we’re not married anymore? All those years when I lay awake nights worrying about the bills, when I felt everything was on my shoulders and you weren’t concerned about finances and you become concerned now. If I were going to mess up a marriage I should have been smart enough to wait for you to earn some money. But for you to make a move to be successful
now.
That has a real edge to it, Susan. It’s the ultimate Fuck You.

5

T
HE NEW YORK CITY
Marathon produced a number of calls to Doug at the newspaper, people looking for publicity, the first Abraham Lincoln to run the race (this was an actor promoting his one-man show), a Watusi warrior in full regalia promoting “Watusi Tall Fashions,” Grandma Peters, an 81-year-old marathoner representing “Grandma Peters Exercise Equipment,” and Tony Rosselli for Kwan Doo Duk, “the world’s tallest midget wrestler-marathoner.”

Doug wrote a column related to the Marathon, ignoring the publicity seekers. He discussed the prize money in track as a means of resurrecting the reputation of a forgotten distance runner of the 1950s, Wes Santee. Santee had been America’s foremost miler. The A.A.U., which presided over American track-and-field athletes, had accused him of accepting a total of fifteen hundred dollars over “allowable” expenses for seven track meets. Santee insisted at the time that he had not committed a crime, expense money was routinely accepted by competitors. Doug pointed out that in later years it became required, along with substantial prize money. Santee’s position was a challenge to the power of the A.A.U., which terminated his career, barring him from track for the rest of his life. As Doug wrote, Santee was banished for crimes that ceased to be crimes and perhaps never were.

BOOK: 50
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