Any Place I Hang My Hat (28 page)

“I know.”

“It’s not just being responsible. Just think about them: a criminal and, with all due respect, a leg waxer/shoplifter. Isn’t it amazing? I never thought of this before. Both of them had good character. You have good character. Where do you think you got it from? Phyllis-Véronique? No, you got it from the people who brought you up.”

Tatty and I wound up at Chop Meat Charlie’s, a dingy coffee shop in her ’hood that residents embraced because they thought it delightfully sincere. Among Charlie’s offerings was a tuna salad that tasted so close to the glop we’d eaten at Ivey it became our comfort food. Objectively, we knew proper tuna salad should not be as sweet as lemon meringue pie. Nor should it be studded with chopped pickles. Still, this was what we yearned for. We hit Charlie’s every few weeks. After the tuna, we split a dish of coffee ice cream, so by the time I got home I was feeling properly comforted.

It was only about eight-thirty. Naturally, before I even took my sweater off, I checked voice mail. Two messages. The first, from In Depth’s production department, was something between a plea and a demand not to go over fifteen hundred words. The second was from John Orenstein.

“Hey, Amy, it’s me. John. Listen, I want you to know that if you’d like to come to our Seder, you’re still invited. This invitation is from me and also my parents. I know with all that’s …” He hesitated for a second, and tried to cover it up by making a big deal about swallowing. “… that’s happened you might not think the invitation is still in effect, but of course it is. I promise you, you won’t feel uncomfortable. Well, let me know if you can come. I’ll probably drive up early that day. If you take the train, I’ll pick you up at the station. Okay, hope you can make it. Bye.”

“Did your mother put a gun to your head?” I blurted out after I slammed down the phone. I might have gone on a rampage for a few minutes, but I was so upset my digestive processes went into shock and I kept hiccuping tuna-pickle and coffee ice cream fumes, which not only made me nauseated, but hurt my ribs.

I said, “Go fuck yourself, John,” more decorously, then sat in the middle of the couch?bed and did some yoga breathing. This took a while since, besides my anger at being an Orenstein family object of pity, I couldn’t get over being broken up about how our relationship had gone from great to stale to broken beyond repair. I was torn apart, too, at the thought of how much of the blame was mine.

Once I calmed down, I got myself all fluttery again when it occurred to me that maybe John was using the holiday as a means of getting back together, consciously or subconsciously. I immediately divided myself in two so I was able to have a heated debate as to whether or not John was too direct in his dealings to use such an adolescent—Aha! But was it adolescent?—approach.

Naturally, this got me nowhere. I picked myself up from the couch and found a pen so I could deal with my response in a rational manner. As a first, I decided to make a list of talking points in order to sound compos mentis when I spoke to him. However, after jotting down appreciate offer/other plans, I drew a blank. I realized the wisest course would be to sleep on it. Naturally, two seconds later I was on the phone.

By the third ring, I knew John wasn’t home, which of course put me on the road to rage again, thinking: He calls me relatively early in the evening. I return the call later in the evening, when he should be home, but of course he’s not because, having offered the invitation, he also has to make it clear that it’s in no way an opening to resume the relationship. At this very moment, he’s probably banging La Belleza standing up, in her five-hundred-square-foot walk-in closet, so that if I call him on his cell phone, he can be out of breath—and she won’t be able to repress a giggle.

I had already altered my grip on the phone so that when I smashed it down again I wouldn’t break my nails. That was the instant it dawned on me that even if I hung up before his voice mail clicked in, my number might still register on his caller ID and how pathetic it would look if I called back an hour or two later, obviously dying to speak to him in person. His voice mail said, “This is John Orenstein. Please leave a message.”

“Hey, John. Amy. Thank you for the invitation, and please thank your parents for me as well.” So what that my heart was pumping double-time and squeezing all the blood through my arteries to my head and that I could truly feel my once and future stroke coming on? “I love how your family celebrates Passover, but even though I know I’d enjoy the Seder, I don’t belong there. I appreciate your wanting to include me. I hope you and your family have a great holiday. Oh, and just to let you know, the search for Phyllis Moscowitz Morris Lincoln Véronique Groesbeck Hochberg is going well.”

The next morning, I was watching my cursor blink on and off, debating whether to call Thom Bowles the bête verte of the Bush administration’s environmental policymakers, when my phone rang. It was Happy Bob: He wanted me in his office, “to talk about Thom Bowles.”

I traipsed down the narrow hall without looking into anyone’s cubicles. God, how I hated coincidences like that: I think Thom, two seconds later someone else says Thom. Normally a summons to Happy Bob’s office meant he was too uncomfortable to do his usual drop-in: clomp into your office without a May I, squint at your monitor to see what page you were up to, sit on your desk, crumple your papers with his ass, and direct his breath up your nose.

Everyone knew what was wrong when he was unable to walk. His discomfort was due to either flatulence or shin splints. The former was evident when you opened his door. The latter became clear when he’d draw up his slacks and, with two fingers on either side of the tibia, massage up and down his legs, occasionally emitting a squeal when he tugged at one of the few hairs on them. Now, however, his request sounded ominous.

“Have a seat,” Happy Bob said. I was sitting on the only chair he had by his desk, a ladder-backed piece he’d bought at auction and told everyone was Shaker. Everyone said Wow or I love the stunning simplicity. The chair was pitched in a way that it pushed you forward a bit, not a great position to be in after two bowls of Frosted Mini-Wheats. “The environmental piece almost done? It would be good if you handed it in before lunchtime.” He was wearing his least luminous smile.

I decided to be brave and inhale through my nose rather than my mouth. No gas. “It won’t be finished until three or four,” I told him. “I did a lot of interviews, probably too many, and I want to give each candidate approximately the same space, going to the depth, or the lack of it, of their commitment, and also who their advisers are. And then I got a call last night telling me fifteen hundred words, which I took to be a twisted joke.”

“Look, what with Iraq and what’s going on internationally, you’d be lucky getting a mere five hundred words. But I’m generous. You want to make extra work for yourself and write more than fifteen hundred? I can’t stop you as long as you get the piece in by five-thirty, but I can guarantee you it will be cut and there won’t be time for delicate surgery.” He was being his usual irritating self. My fears about a looming Thom Bowles-related disaster abated. Too soon. “What the hell has been going on between you and this kid who’s stalking Bowles?”

I asked, “Do you want me to write about the kid?” with a great deal of amazement that I didn’t feel.

“Now Amy, you know I don’t.” He said this with his really broad smile, which besides being repulsive, was an omen that his next sentence would be far worse than the previous one. “Have you been talking to this Fernando Carrasco on the sly?”

“On the sly?”

Someone from the Bowles campaign had learned that I’d talked to Freddy. For a reporter at In Depth, folly, but certainly forgivable. No one cared if you talked to a kid making a paternity accusation, as long as you didn’t demand to write about him. But for me to have counseled Freddy, to have gone out of my way and gotten him a lawyer, was probably as much unethical as it was foolish. This wasn’t exactly a news flash to me. I’d known when I gave him Mickey Maller’s number that this wasn’t one of my more stellar moves, but I hadn’t cared. Freddy was a kid in search of a missing parent and I was compelled to help him. Also, I figured the chance of anyone’s finding out about my involvement was close to zero. Not close enough.

“I talked to Freddy Carrasco, but certainly not on the sly.”

“About what?”

I took a deep breath. With it, alas, I discovered Happy Bob had indeed said Fill ’er up at the gas pump. “About his claim that Thom Bowles is his father,” I explained. “Listen, there are two types of interesting stories: the ones that are fit for publication in In Depth and those that aren’t. Right? This kid didn’t seem like a stalker or someone who’s unbalanced. I wanted to hear what he had to say. I bought him a cup of coffee and I listened. There’s a decent chance he’s telling the truth.”

“Why didn’t you tell me anything about this?”

“Because it’s the type of sleaze we wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole or anything else.”

“Isn’t that for me to decide?”

“Trust me.”

“No, I trust myself.”

“Are you the Potter Stewart of sleaze, Bob? You know it when you see it?” True, this was not the polite way of resolving an issue between an associate editor and the editor-in-chief. I realized that I ought to make some move that could be construed as an apology for my big mouth. Except Happy Bob was one of those people in journalism who overvalued guts, probably from having seen All the President’s Men too often and envisioning himself as the Golden Mean between Jason Robards Jr. and Robert Redford.

Since I couldn’t apologize without being seen as a wimp, I kept talking. “Bob, I’d always taken you at your word. During Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, I let you be my guide. I learned a lot. Just as Greg”—the reporter who covered the Republicans and the right—“learned from you during the Gingrich and Livingston brouhahas. At this magazine, as you run it, there has always been clear lines between what’s news, what’s analysis, and what’s crap.” He tilted his head to the side for an instant, his ’tweren’t-anything gesture. So I added: “And you’re the one who drew those lines the staff doesn’t cross over.”

He swiveled back and forth in his chair. “Next time,” he said, poking his index finger at me, “if anything like this comes up, I want to hear about it.”

“Absolutely.” True, he’d been pissed, but part of what he was saying was also I want to hear the gossip. It always amazed me how so many high-level newspaper and magazine editors, far from the street and their old sources, retain a mean-spirited cub reporter’s insatiable appetite for dish, the nastier the better. “So,” I began with a smile, “who from the Bowles campaign subtly designated someone not in the Bowles campaign to complain to you about me?”

A bigger smile, a display of more teeth, even a crinkling of eyes. You’d expect a smile like that from an editor at one of Rupert Murdoch’s lesser tabloids. “Forget about it, kid,” he said. “Get back to work.”

“Are you busy?” I asked Gloria Howard. It was an unfair question, because it was Tuesday, the day articles were due to be edited and copyedited by Wednesday. No one was not busy. She swiveled from her monitor around to me and adjusted the clasp of her seed-pearl necklace so it was in perfect alignment with her cervical vertebra. The jacket of her dark green suit hung on the back of her chair. She wore a pink silk blouse and looked ready for a Junior League luncheon or an interview with the Dutch prime minister. In all the years I’d known her, in and out of the office, she had never dressed as if she were expecting a minor moment.

“Yes. I’m busy. I’m trying to explain in detail as well as in depth how Germany and France are trying to pound a silver stake into the U.S.’s heart. It’s going slowly. My article, not the stake.” Because she was a senior editor, Gloria had an actual office, not just a cubicle. Except for a bust of Cardinal Richelieu she’d picked up at a flea market, she had not embellished the room. The furniture, a blond wood desk and two chairs, along with a red ceramic lamp that looked like a fat derriére in too-tight slacks, appeared to be of the Danish modern school and probably came from one of our Revered Founder’s later marriages. I always wondered if after accomplishing a successful coup de rédaction and becoming executive editor, Gloria would redecorate Happy Bob’s ex-office.

“Can you give me two minutes?” I asked. “That probably means no more than five.”

“Come in. Have a seat.”

“It’s Happy Bob,” I told her. “Someone not in the Bowles campaign was told by someone very much in the Bowles campaign to give Happy Bob a message: that I was getting too friendly with that kid who’s claiming that Bowles is his father. Too friendly in the ethical sense, not in the sexual. So I did my Come on, Bob, get serious song and dance and I think calmed him down a little. But he really, really never liked me and now he has more fuel for his fire. I’d even say he hates me if I thought him capable of any interesting emotion.”

“And your question is …” Gloria asked.

“What should I do?”

“About … ?”

“Give me a break, Gloria. You’re using up my minutes with—whatever the hell this is. Socratic dialogue. What should I do to get Happy Bob to loathe me less?”

“If it were I, I would do nothing.” What I liked about Gloria was that she kept talking and didn’t make you say, Oh, tell me what you mean, Great Oracle. “Why bother? No matter what you’d do to get him on your good side, he would view it as weakness, which would only confirm whatever negative view he already has—if in fact that’s the case. You don’t have to worry. He is well aware that you have what this magazine needs: a talent for writing in an incisive and interesting manner.”

“Are you sure I shouldn’t do anything?” I demanded.

“When have you known me to be in doubt? I’m not claiming certitude is my finest quality, but there you have it. If you want the total truth, Amy, and I’m assuming you do, it’s that you are too sensitive. You want to be liked. Fine. Lovely. You’re gifted at being likeable. But if someone doesn’t like you, you don’t necessarily have to do anything about it. Just keep a respectful distance and do your work.”