Thief of Words (2 page)
Laura’s money was on the ambitious assistant city editor, Kathleen Faulkner, an attractive brunette with boarding school bones. The joke was she had the biggest balls in the newsroom. One time at a party, Laura overheard the managing editor tell the business editor that Faulkner “clanged when she walked.” She was particularly tough on her female staff, who called her Captina Queeg behind her back.
Rumor also had it that Kathleen and Jack had hooked up at a management skills conference in New York City. That was a month before Jack stopped wearing his wedding band. Kathleen never took hers off.
In any event, something had changed recently, because twice in the past three weeks Jack had asked Laura if she knew of any women he could meet.
She figured Jack was lonely; she knew Annie was. They were perfect for each other. Almost. There was the journalist part. Annie could barely talk to Laura about their days together as reporters at the
Charlotte Commercial-Appeal.
Getting Annie to agree to a blind date would be hard enough. Except for a brief affair with an energy analyst, Annie had been moldering around solo since her divorce two years ago. Getting her to go on a blind date with a journalist would be nearly impossible. She’d tried before and Annie had dug in her heels deeper than Laura could dislodge. And if anyone could dislodge anything, it was Laura Goodbread, generally regarded as the pit bull of the
Baltimore Star-News
’s Features department.
Laura knew why Annie refused. She didn’t want any reminders of her past. When Laura had pushed so hard a few months back, trying to fix up Annie with the new city hall reporter, Annie had finally slammed the phone down and refused to talk to her for three days. When they started talking again, Annie said, “It’s too painful to date someone who has the life I used to have.”
Uncharacteristically, Laura gave in. She wished she hadn’t, though. Annie was becoming a hermit. This time, Laura wouldn’t take no for an answer; she’d even enlisted her daughter—Annie’s goddaughter—in the mission. Sure, Jack was a journalist, but he was also funny, smart, and soulful.
And when he walked away, the view was good.
The phone started ringing. “This is Laura Goodbread,
Baltimore Star-News.
”
“And this is Annie Hollerman, agent to the stars. Is Becky all set for this weekend?”
“Set? Are you kidding? She’s rolled and rerolled her sleeping bag a million times. You know what she’s told all her friends? That she’s going camping with Xena, Warrior Princess! She can’t wait. I could hardly get her to school this morning. I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re doing this. You know how I feel about peeing outside. However, I do have the perfect thank-you present.”
Annie laughed. “I bet it involves a man, right? Some guy you want to see naked but never will so you want me to tell you what he looks like. Right? Am I close?”
“I guess this means you haven’t read my e-mail yet.”
She could hear Annie groaning on the other end of the line. “Stop it,” Laura nearly shouted into the phone. “You need this. You need something.”
After the groan came the sigh. “Laura, I don’t need anything. Especially a man with a big butt.”
“Hold on, girl, I’ve never said anything in my life about big butts. Great butts, yes. Big butts, no.”
“I know your taste. I’ve known your taste for the past twenty years. Every man you dated, from John Gilliam to the man you married, they all look the same from behind. I don’t care if it’s big or great or flat or whatever. I’m not interested. Not now.”
“When, Annie? When you lose your looks? You know, that’s not a perpetual flame on top of your head. Someday it’ll go out. You’ll go gray and then you’ll get wrinkles or vice versa. Let me tell you, Annie, it’s time to start living before you start dying.”
“Laura. Stop. Tell me about Becky. Tell me what wonderful new things my goddaughter has written.”
Laura looked up to see Jack DePaul walking her way, motioning that he needed to talk to her.
“Annie, I’ll tell you Friday when you pick up Beck. Your future husband’s coming over. Gotta go.”
Laura hung up the phone and turned toward the man standing by her desk. “Jack. Do I have the woman for you.”
A
s soon as Annie put the phone back in the cradle it started ringing again. Mondays were the worst. She was so busy she barely had time to eat lunch. Authors. Editors. All pulling at her thirty-seven different ways.
Right off, it was bad. First call of the morning. The publicist from Simon & Schuster saying the
Today
show people were apoplectic after Lynn McCain’s on-air tantrum. “Do something,” the publicist had said. “She’s got three more interviews this week. You’re the only one she sort of listens to.”
McCain, Annie’s most successful mystery writer, refused to be called a mystery writer and got nasty when anyone did so. She thought of herself as a Reynolds Price, so when interviewers compared her to Sue Grafton, she came back punching.
This morning, Katie Couric had interviewed McCain about her new book,
Shadow on the Shenandoahs.
“I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun figuring out who the murderer was,” Couric had said, flashing her Kewpie-doll smile.
Annie almost spit out her latte when she heard McCain’s response. In an exaggerated Appalachian twang and a look that could make a baby cry, McCain said, “And I bet you figured out who done it in the Bible, too?”
Unfortunately for Annie, Couric was just one of many McCain had offended on her latest book tour. At its start, the head of Simon & Schuster publicity told Annie she was through mopping up after McCain. “Five book tours of abuse is enough. I just don’t have the staff or budget to make nice after her anymore. She’s your client, handle her.”
And so Annie tried. So far, Annie’s assistant had sent $780 worth of flowers to irate bookstore owners, radio reporters, and magazine writers.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Monday morning got worse. The editor at Scribner’s backed out of the auction on a book by an author Annie was sure would be the next Alice Hoffman. And just when she thought things had bottomed out, she learned that her hottest author, Eda Royal—aka the She-Devil—had gotten arrested the day before in Nashville, Tennessee. She’d taken off her underwear at the Centennial Ladies Club luncheon and set them on fire.
Now Laura had some guy at the
Star-News
she was trying to pawn off on her.
She felt as stretched as saltwater taffy, the kind she used to eat on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. It made a pop when it broke apart if you stretched it too hard, what she thought her brain might do any second if she had one more problem with an author or an editor.
She tried not to think about snapped taffy or finicky authors or lying editors. Instead she thought about the Mr. Planters Peanut Man who used to strut back and forth across the sea-grayed planks of the Boardwalk, tapping his top hat with the tip of his black cane to all the ladies in their spike-heeled shoes. Once, her mother got her heel stuck in a crack, and it was Mr. Peanut who so gallantly pulled the glossy black patent shoe back from the Boardwalk’s unforgiving bite.
Saltwater taffy. Mr. Peanut. Summers in Atlantic City. Days on the beach. Singing Sam the Ice Cream Man and his nickel chunks of dry ice. Her mother baking in the sun; Annie frying on the sand. Her father? She knew what memories came next. Sitting on the steps crying. Her father on the sofa crying. Thank God the phone was ringing.
“Annie Hollerman.”
“Xena? Warrior Princess, is that you?”
“Yes, my faithful subject, it is I,” Annie said. “All ready for this weekend?”
Annie heard a giggle on the other end. “Yeah, sorta. But Mom called me to tell me to call you to tell you to read your e-mail right away—whew, I can’t believe I got that out. She also said that you have no choice. If you don’t do as she says, she’ll make your life miserable. And Annie, she can do it, believe me. I know better than anyone.”
They both laughed because they knew how true that was. “Okay, I’ll check it. Now, tell me who you’re reading these days. Moved out of the horse books yet?”
“Sort of,” Becky said. “Does
The Horse Whisperer
count? It’s not completely about horses.”
“Ugh,” said Annie. “Stick with
Black Beauty,
it’s better written. For the life of me I’ll never figure out what it is about girls and horses.”
All the other lights on her phone were blinking, but Annie ignored them. She didn’t have an auction today. So much for the next Alice Hoffman. To hell with them all, she could afford the luxury of ten minutes with her goddaughter.
When they hung up, Annie turned away from the blinking phone and looked through the little round window near her desk. Her office was the second floor of a small art deco building on P Street in Dupont Circle. The building’s theme was nautical, hence the portholes and the stone-carved ropes at the entrance. On the first floor was Diego’s Hollywood Barbers and the Firehook Bakery, and on the third floor the National Hellenic Society.
Annie thought about the last time Laura had tried to fix her up with a man from the
Star-News.
She’d lost it. She’d acted like a jerk, slamming the phone down, and refusing to talk to her. Annie felt like such an ass that she showed up at Laura’s door three days later with two bottles of Yoo-hoo and a half dozen sticky buns from Firehook. “Forgiven?” Annie had said.
The funny thing was, after she’d made Laura back off, she wondered if she’d made a mistake. When she was married, she thought it was worse to be lonely with someone than without. Now she wasn’t so sure. Her nights were blurring into one long run of gym, take-out dinner, and books.
When Monday night salsa-boxing class became the most exciting part of her personal life, she knew things were seriously out of balance. But Washington isn’t an easy place to meet single men, especially where she lived: Dupont Circle—the Fruit Loop, as her gay friends called it.
A few of her friends had met men on the Internet or through the classifieds in
Washingtonian
magazine. One time, Annie even circled three of the ads but couldn’t bring herself to call.
So now that Laura had started in on her again about going out with someone from the newsroom, a part of her wanted to say yes. But there was always another part, a bigger part, that warned her to steer clear of her past and anyone who might pry it open. And if that weren’t enough to keep her away from journalists, there was the good-bye scene with Andrew Binder to make her say no to Laura’s fix-ups.
It wasn’t particularly dramatic. A big blowup would have been better. That way, there would have been a definite end, a border, a knife’s edge delineation between A-Squared and A-Alone.
They were sitting at a corner booth at the Park Road Deli. Pastrami for him, a Reuben for her. She’d driven in for the weekend; he had tickets for a Leon Redbone concert at Spirit Square.
She’d been living at her mother’s house in Greensboro since that horrible morning at the
Charlotte Commercial-Appeal.
For the first week, she and Andrew talked every day. He said all the right things—“I’m with you Annie”; “You can work your way back”; “We’ll be fine.” But she’d heard it in the silence when she first told him what happened, and she heard every time he called—he was already gone.
Over the next few weeks, they talked less. He was busy working stories. In the past, they’d talked shop for hours. They’d give each other blow-by-blow descriptions of interviews; she’d pull out her reporter’s pad and read him quotes; he’d describe the flattened
a
’s of his source’s Michigan accent; she’d tell him how she unearthed a slumlord’s fraudulent tax returns.
Now she had nothing to tell him.
“Could I get another cherry Coke?” Andrew said to the waitress who’d just brought their sandwiches. He’d been fidgeting with the straw, looking for something to do with his fingers—and his eyes. Only a few sentences had passed between them while they’d waited for their food, mostly about a news show WBTV had pulled because it had zoomed in on two men holding hands.
Annie looked at him. As always, he was weeks overdue for a haircut. Brown curls looped down his face. When he wasn’t noodling the straw, he was pushing the hair from underneath his wire-rimmed glasses. His eyes were the most surprising pale blue she’d ever seen on a Jewish guy. The glacial blue of a Siberian husky.
They ate their sandwiches. They’d been going to the Park Road Deli since they’d met. It reminded them each of home, her of the Forum 6 Diner in Paramus, New Jersey, and him of Hymie’s Deli in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.
Three-quarters of the way into her Reuben, Annie couldn’t stand it any longer. “Heard anything from the Inkie?” she said.
Andrew looked down, as if his pastrami sandwich had the answers. Annie took his hand in hers—did she feel him pull back just a little?—“Andrew?”
He kept looking at his sandwich and said, “Yeah, they offered me a job. It’s the Montgomery County bureau, but it’s a start.”
The Inkie, the
Philadelphia Inquirer.
At that time it was regarded as a Pulitzer Prize factory. A month before everything came crashing down, they’d both applied for jobs there.
He left two weeks later. She never heard from him again. Damn Andrew Binder and his downturned eyes. How long was she going to let what happened in Charlotte control her life? Or, at the very least, whom she had a glass of merlot with?
Maybe she wouldn’t fight Laura this time. Maybe it was time to stop pushing back. Annie was tired of pushing people away. Truth be told, she was getting tired of her Monday night salsa-boxing class.
She typed in her password on the computer and listened to the modem’s chipper little song.
Laura’s e-mail, entitled “Great asses of civilization,” said the following:
“What you need, Annie Hollerman, is a man with a good ass. And I have just the one, I’m watching it as we speak. But there’s more to him than that. Trust me on this one. And stop scrunching your face up. You’ll get even more wrinkles. Really, sweetie, this guy is fabulous. He’s smart, funny, screams across the news-room, ‘Hey, Goodbread, are we gonna edit this fucking story or not?’ AND…. he actually improves my brilliant copy on occasion. You know there aren’t many people I willingly let fondle my words. This guy’s good. He’s divorced, has a grown son and the gossip around here is that his heart’s been tromped by a woman meaner than Cruella DeVille. He needs you. But more to the point, YOU NEED HIM, you just don’t know it. It’s time to get past this journalist bullshit. Andrew was an immature little ass-hole. Jack, on the other hand, is a mature asshole (only when he cuts my copy), so why would he care about something you did when you were a kid?