A Little Trouble with the Facts (7 page)

Jeremiah, too, made it all seem simple. Devil’s dust for him was de rigueur. How else could we keep up with our busy social schedule? Who cared if we spent half the day in bed? No one asked questions, and no one else mattered. If I started to make a few mistakes at The Paper, who was the wiser? People had learned to value Valerie Vane. A few corrections here or there wouldn’t fell me. And best of all: I no longer felt sad or angry, or anything, really, about that girl I’d left on East Fifth Street. Who
cared where I’d come from? To live in Manhattan was to be born again and again and again.

So, three months later, when we were sprawled on the floor of Ilin Fischy’s bathroom, snorting off the toilet seat, I found the opportunity to share my secret with Jeremiah. We’d been at it for three days. Hopping from party to party, bathroom to bathroom, dumping vial after vial on mirror after mirror. I’d blown off work for a few days as the stories I was working on were, I kept telling Buzz, “taking up all of my time.”

Jeremiah gave me my cue. “You know what’s funny?” he said, sniffing and knuckling his nose. “Ever since I met you I’ve had this funny feeling.”

“What’s that?” I slid across the floor and took the straw. We were running low again.

“Like I’d known you before. Like we went to the same elementary school or something. You know? A weird sensation, like I knew you somehow before.”

“You just don’t remember,” I said, getting on my knees over the toilet. “We met.”

“We did?”

I took the razor from him. “We went to Veselka. We drank dirty martinis. We kissed, and I suggested we eat dinner sometime. Then you gave me a little lecture on New York City manners and sent me home.”

Jeremiah thought it over for a moment and I saw his eyes brighten with the distant memory. “The pink dress? The matching gloves?”

I nodded.

“The country cook?”

“The country cook.”

He sat stunned for a moment. Then he crawled across the bathroom floor and took my face in his hands. “Valerie Vane was
once that girl? Oh, honey. What a marvelous transformation!” He laughed for a while, holding me. He pushed stray hair behind my ears. He brushed some dust onto my lips, then put a finger in my mouth and rubbed it into my gums.

“That was me.”

He climbed on top of me. “Isn’t it romantic, Valerie? Maybe someday we’ll be married and we’ll tell our kids about our first date, how you were a bumpkin from the sticks and I was a fancy-pants socialite and how I converted you.” He cradled my head as he kicked off his loafers. “My very own Eliza Doolittle. My Cinderella. My jewel in the rough. A pea in the mattress.”

“Yes, kids, your grandmother was once a string of clichés.”

Jeremiah started unbuttoning his pants. “Maybe I should,” he said. “Maybe I’ll take you down to city hall and make an honest Oregonian out of you.”

“Jeremiah, stop…”

“Why? You think I wouldn’t? You think I only want some aristocratic princess? I could. I would marry a girl just like you. A real girl next door.”

“Come on, Jeremiah. Don’t tease like that. It’s not fair.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to believe a girl would change for me.” Suddenly, he was full of sentiment. His eyes got moist. He took my hands and pressed them to his chest. “You did, didn’t you? You changed for—for me?”

What was the right answer?
You flatter yourself, Jeremiah, that’s absurd?
But the truth, if I was going to admit it, was that I had, sort of. I’d molded myself into someone who could handle a Jeremiah Golden. Then I’d been what he wanted me to be.

He rolled off me and started to take off his pants. “That is so hot. You’re so lovely,” he said, tugging them off. “You did that for me! Oh, sweetheart. Would you? Would you marry me?” He pushed up my skirt and yanked down my panties.

“Marry?”

“Betroth. Wed,” he said, tossing my panties into the tub. “Would you be my wife? Mrs. Jeremiah Sinclair Golden Jr.?”

Context, as they say, is everything. I ignored the fact that we were on the bathroom floor, two days into a three-day binge. That girl from East Fifth Street, the one who still believed in fairy tales and Linus Larabees, was there with us, still.

She took it for a genuine proposal, even though Jeremiah wasn’t exactly on bended knee.

“Would you?” he asked. “Would you,” with every thrust.

“Yes,” I cried at last. “Oh, God, Jeremiah. Oh. God. Yes!”

T
here’s nothing like the acrid scent of half-brewed coffee and a fresh stack of death faxes to make everything seem normal again.

When I arrived at my desk in Obits the next morning, I looked for a memo asking me to attend a correction meeting. I didn’t find one. I looked for a note from Jaime saying, “Talk to me.” But it wasn’t there either. The only thing I found was the morning edition, with LaShanniah smiling up at me from under the fold.

Nine a.m. staccato: fingers clicking keyboard, headset pressed to lips, tone commanding.

“That was 12:34 a.m.,” said Detective Pinsky.

“One two three four,” I said. “Confirm. We got
D
as in daylight,
A
as in aspirin,
B
as in blinding,
R
as in radio,
O
as in off,
W
as in water,” I said. “
Ski
as in bunny.”

“Dabrowski. That’s right.”

“We got middle initial
P
as in prick.”

“
P
as in pick your poison,” he repeated.

“Two middle initials?”

“
O
as in operator.”

One of the clerks dropped a white envelope on my desk. I picked it up. “V. Vane” was printed in careful calligraphy on the outside. I turned it over in my hands, feeling the weighty card-stock.

“
O
as in…,” Pinsky said, searching for me. “Oh, Valerie?”

“Oh, wait a sec.” The envelope was sealed at the back with a faux wax stamp. I touched the raised label, the edges of the wax. It was an invitation. A genuine invitation!

“As in,
other
people calling. Can’t spend the whole day on the phone with one reporter.”

“Right,” I said, as if from a slumber. “I’ll have to call you back.” I felt blindly for the cradle and hung up on Pinsky.

I held the envelope up to the light. Could it be? A real invitation? Could it be that my exile was finally coming to an end? That I was to be admitted back into society? I took a stab at the possibilities: Madame O’Hara’s unveiling of her new penthouse? A backstage pass to the Dalai Lama’s Central Park appearance? I began to tear the edge of the envelope, then I stopped. Could it be? Dare I imagine? An invite to Janis London’s annual picnic on Liberty Island? Wherever it was, I’d walk in like a traveler just returned from the wilderness, a little dazed, a little emaciated. “What was it like out there?” Janis would say. Or Madame O’Hara. Or the Dalai Lama.

I dropped the envelope and felt around in my drawer for the silver letter opener that my mother had given me when I’d started on Style. It was the only gift I’d received from her in years, antique Deco with a firefly just above the handle and a long thin blade. I didn’t use it for just any old letter. I used it for important invitations, the kind with mulled-over guest lists. I found it enclosed in its velvet case at the very back of the drawer.

I slid the letter opener’s narrowest edge under the envelope’s fold and carefully slid it back and forth. I reached inside and took out the card, relishing the soft crinkle of the paper. I saw the words, stenciled elegantly into the front of the plain white card, understated and stark: “In Memoriam.” I put down the paper knife and pushed open the card. “Please help us celebrate the too-brief life of Malcolm Wallace, who touched us all.”

Without thinking, I clenched the letter opener in my palm and it nicked me, a shallow slice. It clattered onto the desk. I grabbed one hand with the other and jumped to my feet, glaring over the top of my cubicle wall accusingly. But I’d forgotten about the cord of my headset, which tugged at my head and choked me. I sat down and tore the headset off my head with my good hand and stood up again. It would’ve been comic if it wasn’t so sad. Who was to blame? Was it the clerk with the red ringlets? No, she was chattering on the phone, looking innocent. Maybe Will, the mailroom clerk? I started to call out, but his name stuck in my throat.

Cabeza. There was no question. He wasn’t going to get gone easily. No matter how many days and how many death faxes passed between us, I knew now that he’d be there, waiting for a correct.

I was sucking the slice at the base of my palm when Jaime leaned over the top of my cubicle. “Nice work,” he said, holding up the late edition. “We’re finally in the clear.”

He opened the paper to show me LaShanniah’s spread: LaShanniah in a gold bikini, LaShanniah in a glittering black gown, LaShanniah driving her gold-plated Humvee through Compton, and a candid at the beach with her last boyfriend, Bo-Charles of the boy band Flex. Then there was a large panoramic of fans during a candlelight vigil at her beached and busted yacht. My name wasn’t on it. The byline only read Curtis Wright.

“You guys really gave us the whole deli counter,” he said.

“Everything but the pickles.” I was about to tell Jaime that I could’ve delivered a whole platter of dills, if he’d given me a shot the first time. I had contacts for her stylist from her Edible Panties tour, and two phone calls would’ve gotten me the butler at her Santa Monica ranch and the driver of the second yacht involved in the collision.

“As a reward for your hard work,” Jaime said, “I’m assigning you an advancer.” Advancers were standing obituaries on people we expected to pass posthaste. Obits had a three-drawer padlocked metal filing cabinet filled with them. They included not just the elderly, but also some A-listers who didn’t take well to terra firma: actors revolving through rehab, action heroes hell-bent on lethal stunts. Your Robert Downey Jr.’s, your Jackie Chans, your David Blaines. They were written by a kind of carrion club, who were rumored to keep a “ghoul pool,” wagering on the dates their items would run. “I want you to look at Sally Firehouse. I think she should be fascinating for you. The morgue will have most of what you need. Take your time with this one, give it that classic Valerie Vane flair.”

I already knew a thing or two about Sally Firehouse. But then, who didn’t? The celebrated 1970s Lower East Side performance artist set off alarms all over town with her “feminist bonfires.” For thirty years, she’d crowded punk clubs for her acts of self-immolation. But she’d come through miraculously unscathed and survived to an anarchist’s cozy old age on Avenue C.

When Jaime left I turned to Rood, who was hunched over his desk, having his lunch. It wasn’t so much a meal as a sacrament, performed each day at exactly 11:45. Mickey opened his filing cabinet and pulled out a crumpled brown bag. From it, he removed a tin of sardines packed in oil, a pint of apple juice, and a package of vanilla sugar wafers. First, he ate the wafers, pulling each layer apart from the next. Then, he opened the sardine coffin and plucked them out with a white plastic fork. After the ser vice, the fork would be washed in the men’s room behind the International desk, and returned to his pencil holder. Then, and only then, he drank his apple juice.

I held my breath to abate the stench, and I told him about my prize for helping with LaShanniah. There were cookie crumbs
on his chin and white chunks in his teeth. “Lunatic dame,” he said. “But good news for you, Val. Means Jaime is warming to you. Work your heart out on that one. No one’s done the prebit interview yet. If you do it well, Old Man Cordoba might throw you a bone.”

I folded a congratulatory piece of gum under my tongue. I punched Firehouse’s name into the digital archives. The first thing I looked for was her age: fifty-five. Not a good gamble for the ghoul pool. Still, how well could she be faring with a lifetime’s worth of sucking smoke? And she was still performing. At any moment, a match could stick in the wrong place or a fire could get out of hand. Encouraged that I might soon get my own byline, I picked up the phone and dialed the morgue.

This time, I wouldn’t cut corners. I’d do all my research. I would circle my words and triple-check my facts. I was turning over a new leaf—hell, I’d upturn an oak if needed. While dialing the morgue, I had another smart idea: I’d get the file on Malcolm Wallace and set that straight as well. A woman answered the phone at the morgue and I asked her for both files.

“Fifteen minutes” was all she answered. “Ninth floor.”

Rood tapped me on the shoulder. “By the way,” he said, “put me down for April. Those lungs can’t last forever. Five bills.”

I had fifteen minutes to kill. I called Pinsky back and started again with
O
.

Curtis Wright was walking across the newsroom. I sat back to take in the view. He was wearing a clean white button-down, brown tapered slacks, and a pair of square-toed shoes. He was better groomed than the majority of men at The Paper. But it was the mug that really set him apart. His pecan skin was flawless. As a Style reporter, I’ve logged hours with million-dollar faces—supermodels, actors, princes, and people bred to look that way. Most of them needed a little airbrush here and there
so the cameras weren’t too damning. Curtis could take any kind of light.

“I came looking for you this morning,” he said, at the edge of my cube. “I wanted to apologize that you didn’t get the byline. I tried to convince Battinger but she refused to double it up.”

“Having my name next to yours would’ve only caused you trouble.”

“I wouldn’t mind that kind of trouble,” Curtis said.

“Don’t speak so fast,” I said. “Your tongue might not like it.”

“My tongue goes where I go,” he said, and winked.

I heard the sound of my schoolmarm’s ruler for the first time in months, and I took heed. “I seem to have lost my tongue.”

Curtis smoothed his hand across his pate and back over his dreads. “Listen, Val, there’s something else. I’ve been getting a lot of calls the last few days about a graffiti artist who died, someone I knew back in the day.”

“Yeah?”

“A guy named Wallace. Quite a character. I saw we ran an un-bylined Obit. Was that you?”

“Oh, right,” I said. This was it. It was already starting. Curtis knew about my mistake. Cabeza had called Battinger and now he’d called Wright. “Yeah, yeah. The Stain guy.”

“Good. I’m glad we got something into the paper, even if it was short. Some folks called over the weekend saying we should do a feature. They say he was an unsung graffiti great. I’m thinking about it. There’s a lot of resurgence of that history now. You know, people who want us to finally do the definitive treatment on Curtis Blow or Fab Five Freddy. I can see what they’re getting at, since these folks didn’t really get their due in their day. But I don’t know. Is it worth a spread? What do you think?”

I didn’t know if Curtis was playing cat and mouse. Why would he be asking my feedback on a story idea? I didn’t rate as a peer, even. “Who’s making the argument?” For the moment, I didn’t
want to give anything away. I would go for neutral. But I kept my hand on the clutch so I could shift into reverse if we hit a snag.

“A few people, at least one heavy hitter who might have influence with the masthead. But I’m not convinced. You’re the closest to the story. It’s sad he killed himself. Did you think he was worth more words than what he got?”

Neutral was working out fine so far. “Everyone down here thought three hundred words was plenty. To be honest, I just filed a quickie, and I guess I thought it was plenty, for what I knew. But you probably knew him better. Was there a lot I missed?”

Curtis let that marble roll on his roulette wheel for a while and finally it found a slot. “Wallace was quite a character. We go way back, actually. He used to call me with so-called scoops. A real golden gadfly. He was always talking about someone who’d been wronged, how the community was being ignored, he was often threatening to sue people, but I don’t think he ever really did. I liked him well enough. Actually, I love these conspiracy theorist dudes. Just…well, I had to take it all with a salt lick.”

He scratched his head. He had long fingers, and they danced like a daddy longlegs through his dreads. He looked pensive for a moment, and then almost sad. “When someone dies you start to wonder if maybe you should’ve done things differently, you know? I guess, mainly, I didn’t really listen to his pitches because what he was talking about was all too small for us: some Bronx artist ripped off some style or some club fight erupted over longtime beefs. The real style wars, the petty crap.
Village Voice
material, maybe. That’s what I told him. Call Michael Musto.”

“Sounds like you were probably right. No need to feel bad.”

“I do feel bad, but you’re right, Val. We gave him plenty. Most artists don’t even get an obit.”

Exactly.

“Okay, it’s time I confess,” said Curtis. “The real reason I came down was to ask you if you’d like to join me for a Bollywood film festival at the Film Forum tonight. I’ve got to do a feature for Weekend. What do you say? A good nine hours of singing and dancing in Hindi, and hundreds of soaking saris?”

Two invitations in one day. And I hadn’t received a single one since the Incident.