Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  “Some, but then I heard the television. I stopped when I heard the television.”

  She considers this a moment, until it makes sense. “That it?” she says, when it does. “Anybody else die you need to tell me about?”

  “No,” Andrew says. “I just wanted to be sure you were okay.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No, I’m not sure, but I’m okay. Really. We were split, right? That’s why I hired you. I hired you because we were getting a divorce, right? We were about to kick his ass in court. It’s not like we were together.” She strings the words like a charm bracelet to make herself feel better. Underneath, she’s thinking, This is how I feel, this should be how I feel. Then, suddenly: “Anybody else in the car with him?” She doesn’t know where this comes from, but now that it’s out she’s burning to know.

  “Like who?”

  “Like anyone. I don’t know. That sitcom actress he was banging.”

  “I don’t think so,” Andrew says. “I don’t know.”

  “Which?”

  “Which what?”

  “Which?” Petra pushes. “You don’t think so or you don’t know? They’re hardly the same thing.”

  “I don’t know, then,” Andrew says. “They didn’t mention about anybody else. You’d think they’d say if there was somebody else.”

  “You’d think,” Petra considers.

  There’s an overlong pause, during which neither of them has any idea what to say. Petra takes the time to think what she’ll wear on the plane east.

  Andrew, finally: “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. I’ll call you later. That be alright, if I call you later?”

  “Fine, call me later.”

  “Good. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll call you later. Tonight. You gonna be okay?”

  “Andrew,” she says, exasperated.

  “You got somebody out there to come sit with you, someone to call?”

  “Andrew, I’m fine,” she says, “just get off my fucking phone.”

  Petra dials again when he does. Answering machine. Anita can’t come to the phone, but Petra’s call is important to her. Really, really. Petra listens to the tape and wonders briefly what kind of message she should leave, if she should just spit it out and deposit it, or if perhaps the enormity of what she has to say is too great for the technology. She guesses Anita already knows, given the time difference. She’s probably been up and about and caught it on the radio or somewhere. Step outside the house, turn on any appliance, and this is the kind of information that will find you before long. Plus, she’s the mother of Wood’s kid. (Oh, shit, Norman; she’d forgotten, for the moment, about Norman.) Surely someone’s called. This is the kind of information probably flows pretty quickly to the mother of someone’s kid.

  “Hi,” she finally says, caught short by the beep, “It’s me, Pet. Our husband died. Call me.”

  Fifteen minutes to deadline, and Pimletz has got his fifty inches nearly filed. He’s thinking this is probably the longest damn obit he’s ever written, can’t imagine any from his live file likely to surpass it. Ted Williams, maybe, but the way he’s going he’ll probably outlast Pimletz. He read somewhere that Ted Williams was admitted to some hospital somewhere, but that’s one tough bastard, that Teddy Ballgame, and now that he reflects on it, there is no way Terence Wood is more deserving of space than Teddy Ballgame. Not in Boston. He’ll be gone before long, and so will Red Auerbach, Kevin White, Betty Friedan, that channel five anchor lady, and any number of local heroes might beat out this Wood by a couple inches.

  There are few surprises left in Pimletz’s line of work, so he takes them where he can. With Rose Kennedy gone, about the only detail to keep things interesting is this right here, trying to figure how much space the Volpes will leave for each subject. That, the cause of death, and the order of assignments. He’ll get to all of them, eventually. They’ll all die of something, but who’s next?

  Right now, the day’s only surprise for Pimletz will be his lead. He has no clue how to play it. Volpe’s got someone else on the story, and Pimletz doesn’t have it in him to check with the news desk to see how the paper is handling it. Far as Pimletz knows, Terence Wood’s body has yet to turn up, the guy’s been missing or presumed dead less than twenty-four hours, and the story can go any number of ways: tragic accident, crossed signals, foul play, mysterious disappearance, apparent suicide, colossal misunderstanding.

  The way it goes will determine whether Pimletz plays his end as a straight obit, or a tribute, or something else. His lead, determined, will give the piece its tone and meaning. Whatever it is, he’ll stitch it to the next graph so it all fits and flows.

  Rest of it is all here: the infamous 1979 Playboy interview in which Wood challenged the Pope to a round of golf, incurring the ceaseless wrath of the religious right, left, and center; the actor’s tongue-wagging protest of the Vietnam War during the Academy Awards, when he marched to the stage to accept his best actor Oscar, waited for the standing ovation to sit down, placed his statue firmly at the edge of the podium, and made to leave it there, offering one of the most stunning acceptance/rejection speeches in Academy history (“I’ll come back for this when our boys are home”); his rumored romances with Twiggy, Cher, Madonna, and virtually every other one-named actress-model-whatever to have crossed the scene in the past thirty years; and his three dryings-out (a course record!) at Betty Ford—the last only a year ago.

  Pimletz even wanders beyond the tabloid realm, with enough of Volpe’s precious hometown color to fill a paint store. There are glimpses of Wood’s growing up, the only child of immigrant parents, raised in a cold-water tenement in Boston’s North End. There is Wood as a small boy, selling soda bottles to construction workers at the old Boston Garden site, chilling his inventory on blocks of ice stolen from the neighborhood ice man. There is Wood at twelve, sanding the raised letters on his father’s tombstone; Wood on his high school debating team; Wood on the Philco Television Playhouse; Wood in Korea; Wood on Broadway; Wood roaming the Raider sidelines at the Super Bowl; Wood at the still-birth of his first son, a child he refused to name despite the pleadings of his wife, Elaine.

  Not bad, Pimletz thinks, scrolling through what he’s written, waiting for his lead to come to him. When it does, finally, there is Volpe attached to its other end. “Hey, Axel,” he hollers across the newsroom, “you finished wiping your ass yet or what?” and, right away, Pimletz is back to yesterday. Jesus, he’s thinking. He knows. Everybody knows. Then he’s back to today, this. He’s thinking, that’s just the way he talks. Doesn’t mean anything.

  “Almost there,” he says, as Volpe reaches his desk. “Just waiting on the lead.”

  “Fuck is that supposed to mean?” Volpe barks. “You’re having it delivered? Domino’s is writing your lead?”

  About the only thing Pimletz can think to do in response is to stand and step from his desk, clearing the way for his boss. This is the routine when an editor comes to read over his shoulder. Volpe stares back at him contemptuously, sits, rolls the chair to the keyboard, pulls the obit up on Pimletz’s screen, and starts writing:

  A dramatic career came to an apparently dramatic end yesterday afternoon with the mysterious disappearance of internationally acclaimed actor Terence Wood, a Boston native whose life was the stuff of legend. . . .

  Pimletz looks on and can’t imagine how it is that someone can just sit down and write without thinking about it. Really, he has no idea. He can write, occasionally, and he can pretty much refrain from thinking, but it never occurs to him to try the two things at once.

  “There,” Volpe says, standing, “there’s your fucking lead. Fresh from our keep-’em-hot vans.” He holds out his hand, palm up. “I expect a tip.”

  “What about the rest of it?” Pimletz asks, overrunning the joke.

  “Fuck the rest of it,” Volpe says, pocketing his hand. “Deadline. No time for your dicking around. Just send
it to Copy and let them deal with it.” He backpedals as he says this, and, by the time he is through, he has placed six or seven desks between himself and the stormed Pimletz. At the third or fourth of these six or seven desks, Sam Haskins points a can of Lysol mountain scent air freshener at his boss’s nicotine wake.

  Pimletz sits back down, expecting to do as he’s told, only he can’t remember the commands for his computer. He has to fumble through his manual to remind himself of the motions he goes through every day, but when he finds what he’s looking for, he notices his screen has gone blank. Then it beeps, and there’s a fake human voice through his speakers telling him he has mail:

  Never mind, Axel. I’ll do it myself.

  Well, shit, Pimletz thinks, looking reflexively across the room to where he knows he’ll find Volpe staring back at him with those menacing eyes of his. There. Over by the news desk. Only Volpe’s not leaned over someone’s terminal sending silent criticism the hundred feet or so to Pimletz the way he usually is. No, this time Volpe surprises Pimletz. Oh, he’s staring, he’s always staring, but this time Volpe has got a thumb plugged into each ear, he’s waving both hands from the sides of his head, he’s sticking out his tongue. It is like a cartoon tease—nyah nyah, na nyah nyah—and Pimletz has no idea what to make of it, except to think, well, okay, this is something.

  Petra Wood, middle-seated two rows deep into coach, is running on silent fumes. She does not understand why it is she is made to tolerate so many insipid little annoyances in the course of an already bad enough day. She just moves from one bother to the next, and each has got her so bent out of shape it’s a wonder her leotarded Isaac Mizrahi pantsuit still fits the way it did when she first tried it on.

  First, there was this protracted nonsense on the telephone with some guy from TWA reservations, who claimed the airline’s discounted bereavement fares did not extend to first class tickets. Whoever heard of such a thing? What, people with presumed-dead husbands are not supposed to be comfortable on a five-hour flight? That it? Someone actually expected Petra Wood to sip from plastic? to pay for her drinks? at a time like this?

  “Ma’am,” this reservations guy wheedled into the phone, “I mean no disrespect, and all of us here extend our deepest sympathies, but I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.”

  Right, like all of them there had actually put their deepest sympathies to a vote. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing you can do,” she insisted. “This is not some farmer’s wife you’re talking to. This is not some lemming. There are always things you can do.”

  “Not here,” he said, trying to be pleasant. “I assure you.”

  “Well then, I’ll just consider myself assured,” she shot back, not trying at all.

  “Look,” he pressed, “ma’am, I’d like to get you on this plane so you can do what you have to do. I know you have to be somewhere. I can check if there’s room in first, if that’s your preference, but you’ll have to pay full fare.”

  What’s with this ma’am business, she wondered. She had dialed into some toll-free wasteland, with no way to tell whether she was talking to St. Louis, or Atlanta, or Dallas. Maybe if she knew she could place the ma’am: “Where am I calling?” she said.

  “TWA.”

  Duh. “No, I mean, where are you right now, what part of the country?”

  “We’re not supposed to give out that information.”

  “What?” This she could not believe. “Why? What possible reason could there be for TWA to care if I know where I’m calling?”

  “Policy, ma’am. Don’t ask, don’t tell.” He said this in a Jack Webb staccato and waited for his laugh. “That’s a joke,” he said, when he got nothing. “Gays in the military. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  “That’s a joke?” She really didn’t see it.

  “Well, it was,” he said. “Guess it’s not anymore.”

  “How ’bout you just tell me where you’re from? Where you were born? You can tell me that, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I s’pose I can.”

  “Well, then, do.”

  “New York,” he declared. “Queens, actually. That’s where I was born, although I wouldn’t exactly say that’s where I was from.”

  “Where, exactly, would you say that was?” Petra said, with a growing upset at having gotten tangled in such an unnecessary conversation.

  “North Carolina, ma’am. The Piedmont. Folks moved there when I was in grade school.”

  That would explain the ma’am, she thought.

  “Look,” he said, finally warming to this strange, bereaved, and apparently pampered lady on the other end of his line, “I can always issue you the ticket and you can worry about the fare later.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you still have to show up at one of our ticket counters with a death certificate and proof of immediate relations in order to qualify for the discount. Might be worth a shot to just go first class and play dumb.”

  “Like we never had this conversation?”

  “Exactly, ma’am.”

  “Great,” she said, “let’s do that, then.”

  “What? Pretend we never had this conversation?” He waited again for a laugh, but Petra Wood was a tough room. “Ba-dump-bump?” he tried, to sell the joke.

  “Another joke?” she asked.

  “Guess not.” Beat. “So, what’ll it be?”

  “Anything,” she said, trying to move this too-polite reservations guy along with as much economy as possible.

  “Anything, what?”

  “In first. Is there anything in first?”

  “Checking,” he announced, adopting a chipper voice evidently meant to convey not only that he was, but also that he was about to place his entire being into some electronic investigatory mode. Again, from somewhere along the information highway, to fill the silence: “Checking.”

  Petra Wood, now fully impatient, suddenly decided she had spent enough time on this transaction. She should have been fretting over Anita, or poor Norman, or frantic to learn if there was any news from Maine, or setting up a meeting with her attorneys for when she got back to see about the estate, but there she was quibbling over a couple hundred bucks. What the hell had gotten into her, she wondered. “You know,” she said, interrupting checking mode, “anything is fine.”

  “Good,” the reservations guy said, “because anything is all we’ve got. Our last block of first just disappeared from my screen.”

  “What does that mean?” By “anything” she had meant aisle, window, or whatever. She hadn’t meant to consider coach.

  “It means first is full.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. We went back and forth for so long someone else just snapped ’em up.”

  Great, she thought. Now it’s either the huddled masses or another airline. She didn’t have time to start all over again with another airline.

  “Ma’am?” he said, waiting for instructions.

  Oh, yes, him. “What do I want to do, right? You’re wondering what it is I want to do?”

  “Our next flight is two hours later, if you’d like to wait.”

  “Or?”

  “Or, I could book you in coach and we could pretend we never had this conversation.” He was running out of options. His tone was sunny, as if he didn’t mind at all spending his days with a phone cradled to his neck, or maybe with one of those sleek headsets she’d noticed some of these telemarketing professionals had taken to wearing, as if helping to arrange the last-minute travel plans of distracted, discourteous persons like herself were a kind of calling.

  “Coach, then,” she said, “unless you’d just like to chat for a while, give all those empty seats a chance to fill up, too?” Her tone was dark, laced with a touch more sarcasm than she intended, and she regretted it right away, attempting to smooth her demeanor with a joke of her own. “Ba-dump-bump?” she said, thinking this would do.

  Of course, it didn’t, because by then the sunny bastard had consig
ned her to her middle seat, too close to the damn bulkhead to watch the movie and not far enough away from this unusually tall, elaborately bearded Middle Eastern fellow seated directly in front of her, wearing a turban and smelling like he’d been dipped in a vat of curry.

  Okay, so that was the first thing. Or maybe the first and second things, if she counts her unfortunate seating as a separate nuisance. Next, there was some additional unpleasantness at check-in, when the agent attempted to check her carry-on bag, and some further words at the gate regarding the complimentary newspapers and coffee, and now that Pet has been settled uncomfortably in her seat, her nerves are in serious need of a good hem. Woman next to her, by the window, has commandeered what seems to Pet to be far more than her fair share of personal space. She’s all spread out and organized and much too comfortable. Right at this moment, this woman is doing some annoyingly serious browsing in the Air Mall catalog from her seat-back pouch. She’s making notes in the margins alongside some of the items, working a calculator to confirm her interest.

  “This is something you can’t do without?” Pet wonders, her voice still viscous with the sarcasm that put her here. She couldn’t help but notice her neighbor’s interest in a squirrel-proof bird feeder shaped to resemble Tanya Tucker.

  “Oh, why yes!” the woman kindly drawls, happy for the chance to share her dueling enthusiasms for country music and bird-watching. “I’ve already got the Judds side by side over the patio, and Dolly Parton is just a-smilin’ away outside my kitchen window.” The poor dear is tickled to have stumbled onto this common ground with this striking stranger. She just goes on and on: “Why, just the other afternoon, I was doin’ the dishes when this little ruby-throated thing set hisself down right outside my window, and, wonder of wonders, I’ll tell you, this little fella looked near set to go anursin’ on poor Dolly.” She laughs like this is one of the top ten funniest connections she has ever made regarding her country music bird feeders.