Talk to Me

by John Kenney

  Really? You pompous English twat. Twenty-two million Americans watching one of three networks every night. Ted nodded, smiling, finding his calm.

  “I remember who you are now,” he said, smiling at Dodge. “You’re the man who’s fucking my wife.”

  He had him. Ted had him. The small group reeled. Claire closed her eyes. The woman next to Ted gasped.

  But Dodge . . . Dodge never broke his easy smile, his English charm.

  “Well, yes,” Dodge said. “Yes, that’s right. But then, someone had to.”

  It was Diana who laughed out loud.

  * * *

  • • •

  Diana stood with Ted in the driveway, waiting for an Uber, smoking a cigarette she’d bummed off the waitstaff.

  “Well played, old sport.”

  Ted couldn’t tell if Diana was serious or not. She took a deep drag, held it, then released the smoke from her nostrils, a seasoned smoker.

  “You think it’s over, don’t you? Your . . . life.”

  She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking across the lawn, toward the road. It was quiet now; the hum of the party seemed a long way away. Ted had lent Diana his sports coat to fend off the night’s chill.

  “It’s not,” she said. “This is what it is for people like us. The money. The . . . stuff and the houses and the . . .” She trailed off. “How do you explain to people that none of it means a thing?”

  She took a deep drag.

  “He fucks other people,” she said, as if to herself, looking out over the lawn. “All the time.”

  She turned now and looked at Ted. “What’s wrong with you guys?”

  Her voice was different. Lower. It wasn’t trying so hard.

  “We give you everything. Children. Our body. Our love. And you treat it like it’s . . . like it’s nothing.”

  And here her voiced cracked, on the word “nothing.” And it seemed as if she was doing everything she could not to cry. She snorted, flicked the cigarette across the stone driveway, widening her eyes, looking up to the night sky, to the stars, to the hope of an answer.

  Diana wrapped Ted’s coat tighter around her. She was an actress backstage, after the play had ended, tired from the week’s performances, almost herself again, but part of her left on the stage, as if a bit diminished.

  She took a deep breath. And in doing so it was as if she reverted back to something. Someone. Ted wondered what it would be like to really know Diana.

  “She’s gone, Ted. You fucked it up. But you’ll be fine. It’s not like you’re a hedge fund manager who actually did real harm. Or a lying politician. I mean, what did you do? You called someone a Russian whore. If I had a nickel for every time I did that in a day . . .”

  Diana looked at Ted and he had the distinct impression that she was deciding whether or not to suggest a room next week, midday, at the Four Seasons.

  A black Cadillac Escalade pulled into the long drive, the tires crunching along the gravel.

  Ted said, “Why aren’t we happy?”

  Diana looked at Ted for a time, a half smile on her face, as if trying to figure out if Ted was serious.

  “Sweet Ted. You really are lost, aren’t you? Only a buffoon or a morning talk show host asks that question. This is America. We’re lucky, not happy. We’re rich, which is better than happy, better than everything. We’re healthy. Look at my teeth, Ted. It’s like a perfect photo of teeth. Cost me thirty-five thousand dollars. Happy? I mean . . . that’s like asking if there’s a God. Here’s what I know. I don’t care for abstracts. I like a planned day. So tomorrow late morning I’m getting on a private jet and flying to Telluride to meet my perennially erect husband, who will have ‘secretly’ had sex with his twenty-two-year-old assistant. We’ll ski. The kids will do what they do. Smoke pot, copulate with similarly spoiled private school teenagers, stare at their phones as if they were the face of Jesus incarnate. Happy? What a funny little man you are. But with the help of prescription medication and a small handful of made-up stories I tell myself in the moments before sleep, I stay sane.”

  The driver got out, opened the back door for Ted. Diana handed him back his sports coat.

  She snorted. “‘You’re the man who’s fucking my wife.’ Why can’t you tell the truth like that on your little newscast? You’d be a star.”

  #TEDGRAYSONISAWHORE

  The world continued to make news and Ted continued to report on it each evening. But his own world was closing in. He was becoming the story.

  Protestors had begun appearing in front of the network headquarters in Midtown. At first, when the story broke, it had been a small group of mostly women, a few signs. But a movement had grown. Dozens of protestors arrived each morning. They had created a website with a GoFundMe page. Volunteers showed up by the busload and set up tables and hot coffee and donuts. Building security, at the network’s behest, had tried to disperse the crowds and force them off the sidewalk but that backfired spectacularly when a guard pushed a young woman too hard, the woman slipping and falling on the sidewalk, opening a small cut on the back of her head that required stitches. The young woman was fine, but the video and still photos that followed—Ted’s large head in a split-screen with the young woman with blood on her face—simply poured gasoline on the already growing fire.

  The head of the National Organization for Women urged a boycott of Ted’s newscast, launching #TEDGRAYSONISAWHORE.

  The Russian Consulate in New York issued a strongly worded statement demanding an apology from Ted and Ted’s network, saying both had defamed Russian women.

  Rachel Maddow did an entire show on Ted, expanding the subject to misogyny, the power struggle between men and women, female pay inequality, and the continuing danger white men posed to women and society as a whole.

  The New York Post ran unflattering photos of Ted, face contorted, with headlines like this: SKANCHOR MAN; TED MAN WALKING; and, somehow finding a photo where it looks like Ted is laughing, HO, HO, HO!

  A new episode of South Park had a newscaster character named Fred Whiteman yelling at a blind nun, tripping the woman, and stealing her Bible.

  * * *

  • • •

  Advertisers were being urged by some groups to boycott Ted’s newscast. They met in hastily called meetings, high above Manhattan’s filthy streets, behind closed doors, trying to assess the PR risk in being associated with Ted’s broadcast versus the benefit in reaching a wonderfully impotent, incontinent audience. Morality versus money. It was an easy call. Corporate America stayed with Ted.

  * * *

  • • •

  At scheisse, Franny sat in meetings to discuss what stories they were focusing on. She listened as people talked about “Ted Grayson.” People in her group covering it, writing about it, researching Ted’s life. She didn’t know what to do, to say. A story formed in her mind. She knew how to tell it. She knew all the facts, all the players, the timeline. It was the story of her life. Ultimately, of course, she said nothing. She stopped going to meetings. She wrote her stories. And as luck would have it, an NFL player had been caught on video pushing down women and children while trying to escape a false fire alarm in a Las Vegas hotel. So, there was a good story for a week or so.

  * * *

  • • •

  If only he hadn’t taken the anchor chair. He blamed Claire. Of course, he blamed Claire for everything bad, including Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, and any time he burned his mouth on hot soup. Claire was to blame.

  Ted had told himself the story that Claire had wanted him to take the job. Fame, money, entrée into the world of Claire’s moneyed West Hartford people. Claire a third-generation Miss Porter’s girl. But that was bad reporting. Check the facts, Ted.

  The affiliate in Boston had given way to a job in Washington, where Ted covered the Pentagon. He and Claire had rented a Federal-style town house
on P Street in Georgetown. It had a run-down, musty charm. The fireplace worked and Claire loved having a fire in the evening. After Franny’s bath, Ted would come home and the three of them would sit close to the fire, Franny in her pajamas, the kind with the feet in them, a zipper up the front, her plump, round body, bath-smelling body plopped in her father’s lap.

  Ted remembered the night he came home and told Claire. He was later than usual and Franny was asleep and Claire was roasting a chicken in a Le Creuset they had received as a wedding present. Claire’s comfort meal. “I was thinking of roasting a chicken,” she’d say. It meant family. Ted hadn’t known what a Le Creuset was and made fun of it, referring to it when Claire mentioned dinner. “Will it be in the Le Creuset?” Ted would ask, needling her. “You know I must have it in the Le Creuset, otherwise I can’t eat it.”

  He asked about Franny. Claire told the small stories of the day, the things Franny had said, interactions with someone at the supermarket, at the dry cleaner’s. She had been an early talker, blurting out whatever came to her mind, obsessed with all things pink. “I like your pink pants!” she’d yell to a woman in line at a coffee shop.

  Ted listened with a smile on his face. He would sneak into her room when he went upstairs to change out of his suit, peek in on her, put his face close, smell her skin, her breath.

  Ted kept a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka in the freezer and took it out, poured himself a small glass. He poured Claire a glass of white wine. He always waited with personal news. He held it, drew it out, the surprise of it. He knew and Claire didn’t and in that knowing he felt something exciting. Maybe that’s what had drawn him to news, to the knowing of a thing when so many didn’t.

  “I talked to Simon today,” Ted said as casually.

  “You talk to Simon every day,” she responded, sautéing green beans.

  “They’re moving George out of the chair.”

  George Beebe, Hal’s replacement.

  Claire looked up. “What? Why?”

  “Bad ratings.”

  “But it’s only been six months. What do they expect after Hal?”

  Hal Winship’s thirty-year tenure as the most trusted man in America had come to an end the previous year. George Beebe was Hal’s handpicked successor. A good man and a fine reporter, he was an unfortunate choice for the anchor desk. He had a crippling fear that the teleprompter would go down and blinked so often that the network routinely received calls wondering if George was having a stroke.

  “It’s New York. They want ratings, not news.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Yup.”

  “Who are they replacing him with?”

  “They’ve offered it to me.”

  If one went back, if one could go back, could somehow look at a life, a marriage, and see the plot points, the X-ray on the light box, then one could see this moment as the beginning of the end. This, to Claire’s mind years later, was the moment Ted began to change.

  “Are you kidding?” Claire asked. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “No,” he said, trying to suppress a smile.

  “What . . . how did it . . . ?”

  “Simon came by at lunch. Said he was taking me out. Said George just wasn’t cutting it. That they’d focus-group tested me and that I’d done really well. Like, really well. And they wanted to offer me the chair. It’s a one-year contract worth five hundred thousand dollars. And if it goes well . . . there’s more.”

  Ted’s salary at the time had been $85,200.

  Claire was confused. She wanted to be excited for him but she needed to understand the change. He loved being a reporter. He loved the work and the writing. The chair wouldn’t be that.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?”

  “It’s the chair,” Ted said, wide-eyed, smiling. “You know how many guys would kill for this?”

  “I know. I think it’s great. I just . . . you’ll be reporting less.”

  “I’ll be able to do both. Special assignments, things like that. And it’s New York, Claire.”

  She hugged him. Or rather, he hugged her. A huge bear hug, picking her up off the floor.

  The phone rang. It was someone from the network. This was another plot point, another shadow on their marriage X-ray. Their little bubble of a family, their small world and needs, just each other and time, a chicken and some wine, some strained carrots and time to talk and be, was slowly, imperceptibly, being taken away. A small fissure. But they couldn’t see it . . .

  After the move to New York, they talked about a brother for Franny. But she’d learned with Franny that she had a unicornuate uterus. Only one fallopian tube worked. Much scarring from the first pregnancy. A doctor on the Upper East Side told them their chances were extremely slim but that she’d had success with a procedure she’d pioneered. They met with doctors, in vitro specialists. It was exhausting and expensive and unromantic.

  * * *

  • • •

  But again, it didn’t happen. A year, two, three. Coming home from work midmorning to have sex, bright winter light showing every blemish on their bodies, faces turned away from each other, trying to concentrate, Claire desperate for it to work.

  Ted closed his eyes, imagined women from the office, pictures from dirty magazines and websites. But he felt guilty doing this. And really, all he had to do was look at Claire, at her lovely face. “Kiss me,” he always said, in the moment before he could no longer hold back. He whispered it, embarrassed at the need for something so seemingly unmanly . . . so . . . he didn’t know the word. Claire knew. And kissed him, deeply, passionately. Knew she had that power over him.

  It was a boy.

  The months during the pregnancy, the planning, the euphoria of finally getting pregnant, changed Ted, Claire thought. He was softer, more caring. When she got up at night to pee, he bolted up. “What’s wrong?” he’d ask. The way a pregnancy alters your worldview. Names considered and discarded and finally settled upon. You think about the person, what he will look like. It will do her good, Ted and Claire thought. A brother to care for, to share attention with, fight with, watch cartoons with. They will have bunk beds. Franny had trouble going to sleep. She was afraid of the dark, needed a night-light, the door opened all the way. Ted and Claire had to keep their door open, too. She had an owl that played music, soothing piano music, on a loop. Over and over it played as she lay there, struggling to relax. Ted would sneak up and watch her sometimes, his heart breaking at this small person struggling so mightily with life.

  Claire never looked more beautiful than when she was pregnant. Her coloring was high and healthy in her cheeks. Her breasts swelled and she liked the way her body looked, fully female.

  Ted was nine minutes from going live when his phone rang. It was Nancy, Claire’s friend.

  “Ted. She’s fine, but she lost the baby.”

  Ted did the news, though he remembered little of it, then drove to Westchester Hospital and brought Claire home. She sat holding Franny, silent, tears running down her face. She wouldn’t eat. Ted put her to bed, put Franny down. It was raining. He walked around the house and checked the doors and windows, the small leak in the guest bedroom he’d caulked the previous spring.

  He sat up for a long time, looking out the window, listening to the rain, sipping a chilled vodka. Claire’s ob-gyn had come by the hospital room. She said, “The baby wasn’t viable. He wasn’t ready to be born.”

  Walter. They were going to call him Walt.

  Save the date for the ten-year reunion!

  It was Franny’s idea to go away to school.

  After the move from D.C. to New York. Then the move to Bedford and private school there. By then she was seeing a therapist twice a week, taking fifteen milligrams of Lexapro, and not talking to Ted. The more they reached out to her the deeper she seemed to disappear into herself. Sometimes it felt like oth
er people were tuned to a very low volume and she couldn’t turn it up. Her brain ran a constant interference, like a foreign government scrambling a channel. Nobody knew her. Not really. Not deep down, not what she felt and thought, who she was. The anger seemed to come from nowhere, overtook her.

  She tried not to let others see that side of her. Not at school. Not at squash. Not at parties that she began getting invited to. She was pretty and fit and a cool kid. True, she would sometimes break a squash racket, swear on court. But she won most times. Her coach felt she was fiery. Other players thought she was a psycho (their word). The tantrums turned into more. Hitting her parents. Throwing a shoe across a room, scratching herself until she bled. She was twelve when they began losing control of her.

  * * *

  • • •

  Sometimes a person had patience. Sometimes you could find it within yourself, after a long day, to sit and listen, to withstand the storm of screaming and thrashing, the hitting. Withstand the umpteenth door slam, withstand another tempest, yet another evening ruined. You tried. The therapists for her. The family sessions. The schools. The camps. The nights of talking with Claire about it. But the more you tried, the further away she seemed to go. The therapist said it was the opposite, that she hated herself. That she desperately needed her parents and that what she was really feeling was a profound anxiety and fear, bordering on terror. So you tried harder. But the job, the responsibilities of it, the travel, the nights and weeks away, at exactly the time she needed you most.

  Sometimes a person had patience. And sometimes you didn’t.

  Sometimes you said, You miserable, spoiled brat.

  Sometimes you said, What in God’s name do you want from us?

  Sometimes . . . no . . . no, that couldn’t have happened . . . you said . . . no . . . you must have imagined it. But you said it.