The Girl Next Door (17 page)

“Were you in Bloomfield?” Tina prompted.

I considered saying that, at that point, I might have actually been in Newark—albeit downtown, several miles away from the bear, chatting with Big Jimmy. But that didn’t seem like it would aid my cause.

“Look, Tina, obviously I wasn’t with the kid,” I said. “We found the bear and the thing was up in a tree, and I really thought Lunky could handle it from there on his own. I was wrong. I apologize.”

Tina was making the kind of face I only thought was possible if someone was actively sucking on a lemon, but I continued:

“But, I’ve got to tell you, the story I’m working on instead is really—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Tina said immediately.

“No, I’m serious, I think—”

“I don’t want to hear it!” she said, now in full crescendo. “What you did today was totally inexcusable.”

“Tina, it involves—”

“
I don’t care
. Look, we’ll talk about this more later. For right now, it’s”—she looked at her watch—“quarter after six. I better have a story about a bear in my basket by seven o’clock. And if it’s not the very best bear story I’ve ever read, you’re going to ride the copy desk for a month.”

Tina knew there was no greater threat to a free-range reporter such as myself than a month chained to a desk, scouring for typos. I’d rather do time as a galley slave. At least the boat is going somewhere.

*   *   *

With no time for moping, I returned to the intern pod, feeling the usual charge of adrenaline that accompanies being on deadline. There are people in our business who can’t handle the stress: tender souls who eventually wind up following gentler pursuits, like public relations. Me? I love the rush. There’s nothing that focuses your concentration like knowing you have forty-five minutes to write six hundred words.

“So,” I said as I arrived, “what do we have so far?”

I scooted a rolling chair next to Lunky, who puffed out his mile-thick chest and proudly turned the screen toward me. I began reading.

By Kevin Lungford

In William Faulkner’s acclaimed story “The Bear,” which is rightly gaining its place as one of the finest works of twentieth-century American short-form fiction, the hunting and ultimate slaying of a lame-pawed bruin becomes a powerful symbol of European encroachment into the Native American way of life, and the tragic consequences therein.

In John Irving’s quixotic, madcap romp
The Hotel New Hampshire,
the strength and sorrow of bears are an important and continuing theme; and the character of Susie the Bear, a young woman so ashamed by her appearance she wears a bear costume, deserves greater scrutiny within the field of LBGT literature as an example of the ways in which lesbians are forced to, in essence, cloak their sexuality.

And, of course, most schoolchildren can identify Ursa Major and Ursa Minor—literally “big bear” and “little bear”—by their more common names, the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, yet do not know the names hearken to a classic story in Greek mythology that has been echoed in the canon of nearly every literary movement since.

I kept myself absolutely still for a few extra moments, pretending to be reading while I was actually trying to think of how to respond. My humane-to-interns policy was being rather sorely put to the test, but I was determined to stick with it.

“How is it? Pretty good, huh?” Lunky asked.

All I could think of was an article I read once that found the lowest-performing workers—people identified as being in the bottom twenty-five percent by their bosses—consistently rated themselves in the top twenty-five percent. While it seems to be a testament to the power of human self-delusion, the researchers concluded the real problem was that low-performing people lack the skills and training to know how bad they are.

Lunky clearly fit in that category, and I actually felt sorry for him. Princeton didn’t have a journalism program. No one had ever told him how to write a newspaper article. He just applied for an internship—to our sports department, no less—and the sports guys hired him because they thought a Princeton kid was probably smart enough to figure things out (and because they hoped he could hit a softball ten miles). No one had even given this kid Remedial Journalism, much less Journalism 101.

So I had to treat this as a teachable moment. And the best teachers start by building on strengths.

“Okay, so that’s a fine treatment on bears in literature,” I said, and Lunky grinned. “Now what about the, uh, bear in Newark?”

“Oh, I’ll be getting to that.”

“Yeah, you might want to consider moving that part up a bit,” I suggested.

“I didn’t want to rush the reader too much.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you. Did anyone ever tell you about the five
W
’s?”

“Wilde, Wells, Wordsworth … does Walt Whitman count as one or two?” he asked.

“Never mind,” I said, and started scrolling down.

Except below those three paragraphs was a cursor, blinking slowly and insistently, waiting for more copy that had not yet come. And below that was a fat little black bar that told me I had reached the end.

“Where’s the rest of it?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“This is maybe five inches. We’re on the schedule for eighteen.”

“Oh, I figured I’d get maybe half of it done tonight, then finish it tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning,” I repeated. “By tomorrow morning, this thing is supposed to be in a newspaper, lying on front porches throughout New Jersey. It’s due in”—I looked up at a clock on the wall—“thirty-nine minutes.”

“Really?” he said, as if this was the first he’d heard of it. I was beginning to grasp why the words “By Kevin Lungford” had not yet appeared in our newspaper.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s review some basic concepts: when all else fails, make your story start with a kid. Editors love stories with kids in them almost as much as they love stories with animals. So if you have a kid
and
an animal, they’ll be so happy they’ll wet themselves. Did you interview any kids?”

“Oh, sure,” Lunky said, opening to a page in his notebook and showing it to me. “You told me to interview the young and the old, remember?”

I grabbed the notebook and flipped a few pages until I found what I needed.

“Start typing,” I said, clearing my throat and dictating: “‘Before yesterday, the only bear six-year-old Newark resident Tashee Cunningham saw on a regular basis was Winnie-the-Pooh—and then only if he went to the library.’”

“Winnie-the-Pooh?” Lunky asked, horrified. I sensed his concern he would lose credibility at the next faculty tea.

“With all due respect to John Irving, Winnie will be a little more familiar to our readers than Susie the Bear,” I assured him.

I continued my dictation: “That changed abruptly yesterday when a two-hundred-pound male bruin came ambling outside his kitchen.”

I went back to Lunky’s barely legible scrawl until I found the only usable quote from Tashee, who was, after all, only six. I read it aloud: “I yelled, ‘Mama! Mama! It’s a bear!’”

Lunky looked up from the keyboard. “Don’t you think that’s a little, I don’t know, obvious? Wouldn’t you rather be more oblique? Maybe we could craft an allegory of some sort?”

“You know we’re supposed to write this at an eighth-grade level, right?”

“Oh right,” he said, then added, “The eighth grade is when I started reading Joyce.”

“You better let me type,” I said.

For the next thirty-four minutes, Lunky read to me the contents of his notebook, which I attempted to translate into something that resembled a newspaper article. I suppose it was sort of like Joyce, in that it was pretty much stream-of-consciousness crap. In the world of Princeton Ph.D. candidates, they call that literature. In my business, we have a different term for that kind of writing: meatball surgery.

Nevertheless, we reached our eighteenth and final inch at exactly two minutes to seven.

“Aren’t you going to put your name on it?” Lunky asked.

“No, this is your first byline, and I want you to have it all to yourself,” I said.

“Aw, that’s great. Thanks. And hey, if you ever need me to lift anything heavy for you, just give me a call.”

I assured him I would, then went back to Tina’s office to tell her the story had been filed. She wasn’t there, so I wandered toward the copy desk, expecting she would be harassing someone there. Instead, I saw her curly brown head poking out of Harold Brodie’s office.

“Carter,” she said, then added the five words that turned my legs into spaghetti: “Brodie wants to see you.”

*   *   *

At least outwardly, there should have been nothing remotely intimidating about our executive editor. To begin with, he was a small man, and ever since his seventieth birthday, he seemed to be shrinking even further. He had this high-pitched voice, these flyaway eyebrows, this near-constant need to urinate—all things that afflict men of advancing age and shrinking vitality.

Yet on the very rare occasions I was summoned into his office to discuss a story, my usual glibness was replaced with stumbling uncertainty. The instincts that served me so well elsewhere turned out to be false, as if Brodie’s domain was some kind of opposite world. Every note that came out of my mouth sounded off-key.

Something about the guy just frightened me. He had been the supreme ruler of the
Eagle-Examiner
since I was in diapers, and while most of the time he reigned with a velvet fist, he was still known to enforce discipline when and where necessary. There was always talk that in his younger days he had been so ruthless—diminishing hardened reporters to whimpering toddlers with the ferocity and precision of his attacks—that my older colleagues still referred to his office as “the woodshed.”

Still, up until now, I had never experienced Brodie as anything more than a kindly old man. I didn’t know what he looked like when wielding the paddleboard. And I guess that’s what scared me most: the unknown.

As I entered the office, Tina had her head bowed, like she didn’t want to look at me. I was a little miffed at her for running to Brodie with this bear thing. The cardinal sins of the newspaper world, transgressions that will get you fired immediately and without further comment, are things like plagiarism and making up sources. Insubordination doesn’t come near that list. We are, after all, reporters. Lack of respect for authority is part of our job description.

Still, I obviously had some kind of punishment coming my way or I wouldn’t have been summoned into the woodshed. Brodie gestured toward a chair in front of his desk, and I gingerly lowered myself into it. Some bit of classical music, heavy on the violins, poured from a set of small speakers next to his computer. Brodie closed his eyes and rested his tented fingers against his lips. He was either settling into deep contemplation or had fallen asleep. It was always hard to tell. He was famous for doing this—it was known as the “Brodie Think”—and it lasted as long as was needed for the old man to get his head around a situation.

For a long minute, I sat there in dreadful silence, waiting for whatever I had coming. Somewhere during that time, I decided that, since this was opposite world, I should do the reverse of what I normally did in Brodie’s office. So whereas I ordinarily would have sat quietly, waiting for the Brodie Think to end, this time I started talking.

“Look, before you start, let me just say I owe Tina an apology,” I said. “I know I should have just done what she asked. What happened with the bear is entirely my fault, and I accept full responsibility.”

Brodie opened his eyes and I could immediately tell that, as usual, I had said the wrong thing.

“Bear?” he said. “What happened with the bear?”

I looked to Tina for help, but she shook her head.

“Uh, never mind,” I said, now totally confused. Brodie settled back into his pondering, and I shifted in my seat. The violins had given way to something more ominous, something involving low brass. Brodie let another minute—or maybe it was a year—pass before speaking.

“Carter, I’m very disturbed by several things I’ve heard about you,” he said. “I just received a phone call from Gary Jackman.”

The name hit me with a jolt. What did this possibly have to do with him? The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach told me this conversation was not going to end well.

“Gary has been a friend to this newsroom during difficult times,” Brodie continued. “I don’t need to tell you how much worse things could have been had he not been an ally.”

I clenched my jaw. A friend? An ally? Why, because he hadn’t insisted on rolling a guillotine into the newsroom every time we had another round of layoffs?

“Now,” Brodie said. “He tells me you made a scene at a funeral home yesterday. Do you care to respond to that?”

“I … I wouldn’t call it a scene,” I said, my words foundering as usual around Brodie. “It was … We … We had a little run-in, I suppose.”

“He said you called him a name,” Brodie said. “Is that true?”

I scanned my memory and, oh shoot, it was. I just thought he hadn’t heard me.

“Yes,” I said timidly.

“What name did you call him?”

This was getting torturous.

“Dshbg,” I mumbled.

“Say again?”

“Douche bag,” I said, louder this time, and I could tell Brodie was unimpressed by my word choice. “But, in my defense, he really
was
being a douche bag.”

Tina, head still bowed, actually groaned. Brodie pointed a long, thin, old-man finger at me and raised his already high voice another octave.

“You are way out of line, young man,” he yelped. “Way out of line.”

“Sorry. Sorry, it was just—”

Brodie glared at me and I stopped talking.

“He also said you were sexually harassing one of his secretaries…”

“I didn’t harass—”

“… and that you misrepresented yourself as not being a reporter,” Brodie said, talking over me. “Is that true?”

“I … I was just…”

“Is it true? Did you misrepresent yourself or not? Yes or no? Did you say you were”—he looked at some notes he had kept—“Ted from accounting?”