Talk to Me

by John Kenney

  “Why did you decide to get into news? Your father worked on railroads.”

  Your father. Not my grandfather.

  “I needed a major in college. Seemed like a good idea.”

  “No . . . influences or mentors?”

  How could she not know this?

  “My uncle worked in radio. A station in Providence. Read wire service reports, weather, sports scores. We’d hear him. He’d come over for Sunday dinner sometimes and I thought it was like Frank Sinatra visiting.”

  A half smile from Ted at the memory of it.

  “He brought me into the studio once. I thought it was pretty cool. This is Laurence Grayson for WPRI radio news.”

  Ted sipped his coffee and looked out the window. “I remember it very clearly because it was summer and I was home and my mother had the radio on . . . He was the one who announced . . . the first I heard of it, I mean . . . that President Nixon had resigned. It was an amazing thing. A relative of mine, this man who’d been to our house, who I knew, was saying these words that tens of thousands of people were hearing and would change their lives. It seemed important. August 9, 1974. A Thursday.”

  Her head was cocked to one side, her mouth open a bit. She looked six.

  “You went to the University of Rhode Island,” Franny said.

  “Yes.”

  “You played football.”

  “Yes.”

  “Quarterback.”

  “Yes.”

  “Second-team All-American.”

  Ted snorted what he thought was a self-deprecating laugh at the recitation of the Wikipedia facts from his daughter, at the second-team All-American line. Franny assumed that he was laughing at her.

  “What’s funny?” she demanded.

  Ted put his hands up, a gesture of peace but to Franny false and melodramatic.

  “Hey. I was laughing at the thought of me as a second-team All-American. From Rhode Island. It wasn’t that impressive.”

  Franny was looking at Ted’s eyes, the caramel brown, the shape, his long eyelashes. They were the same. They had the same eyes. This bothered her.

  Her phone buzzed and she reached for it immediately.

  “The Post got hold of internal numbers on Bryce Ringling,” she said to her screen.

  Ted said nothing.

  “They’re . . . good,” she said, still reading.

  “Oh.”

  “They beat yours.”

  Ted nodded.

  She watched him get up out of the chair and wince.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Just old.”

  She watched him walk to the kitchen and take the pot from the Breville coffee maker and walk back and fill her cup, then fill his cup, then walk back to the kitchen. He didn’t look at her, in the way you don’t need to look at a family member, someone you know so well, have been around so often, physical proximity a given. He was wearing a powder-blue dress shirt and he had hair on the back of his hands and a tiny scar near his eye from when his sister threw a shoehorn at him. He smelled of bay rum. It was the safest smell she knew.

  Ted stood by the window.

  “Do you mind?” he asked, his back to her. “It’s easier on my back if I stand.”

  She craned her head around, looked at his back. “No.”

  She was about to check her notes but her phone buzzed. Something about the noise, the relentlessness, bothered Ted. He knew it was about him and he knew it was bad. He turned and watched her hold her phone, inches from her face. It was a kind of mother’s milk, this thing. The answer to all of life’s questions. It was life, itself.

  “The Columbia interview is trending.”

  He turned and stared out the window at Columbus Circle. The vendors, the hot dog carts and pretzel carts and cheap T-shirt vendors, the tourists on bicycles and the weird guys on Rollerblades and the buildings along Central Park South. The Essex House sign. There was a man walking a dog. No one paid any attention to the man. Ted wanted to be that man.

  The double-pane windows kept most of the street noise out. Thick carpet. The tick of a ship’s clock on the wall, a present from Claire. The coffee machine in the kitchen occasionally hissed steam, like it was exhaling.

  Her phone pinged over and over. Each ping was a paper cut.

  “Playing squash?” he asked the window.

  Her initial reaction was to lie. She wasn’t sure why. She felt she should be playing squash, living a cleaner life. But she wasn’t and she felt guilty about that. But her guilt annoyed her. Why can’t she not play squash? He had been so proud of her when she was younger, the promise she’d shown, the day she beat Claire when she was only fourteen.

  “No.”

  She was looking straight ahead, at a painting Claire had bought years ago in Provincetown, at one of the art galleries on Commercial Street. A lone cottage on a steep dune, a winding road going off in the distance. It looked wonderful to Franny, a place to escape to, a place she wished she could step into.

  “Why not?” Ted asked.

  “I don’t know,” she answered too quickly. “Life. Work. Stuff.” None of that was true. There was plenty of time. She smoked too much, drank too much, stayed up too late. She did things she didn’t really want to do and wasn’t sure why. Things that, as she was doing them, she questioned, looking at herself from a distance. The “Why not?” had a cascading effect on her. Why not, indeed? Why not play more squash, go to bed earlier, live healthier, leave scheisse, go to Vox, go somewhere better, start her own place, return to the blog she’d started and stopped? Why not meet nicer men? Why not stop hooking up? Why not treat herself better?

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  They said nothing, backs to each other. They stared and didn’t hear the clock ticking.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Can you walk me through the evening of the broadcast?” Franny said.

  He suddenly felt very tired. He was done with this. It was a bad idea and he felt foolish. Let her write what she wanted.

  “Which one? I’ve done four thousand, one hundred ninety-seven. I added it up the other night. Not to mention special reports.”

  She heard the shift in tone in his voice. She knew his voice and his smell and the softness of his shirts and his face but she didn’t know him at all. Life and friendship and family are composed of terribly small things, ridiculous conversations. Calls to your mother about a chicken you made, the sea salt you used, how one deals with an ingrown toenail, the trip to the dentist, the old friend from high school you saw, the argument you got into with a brother or father or sibling over where to have Thanksgiving dinner. Small things, day after day, year after year. A visit to a cousin’s game, birthday, graduation. You stay close. You make it matter.

  But what if you don’t? What if you let it slip away? Well, then you sit, back-to-back, interviewing your father.

  “I had a bad night. It happens once in a while after nearly twenty years on live TV.”

  “Did something precipitate the outburst?”

  Well, yeah, as a matter of fact, it did. Your mother told me two days before that she wanted a divorce and was in love with someone else. And it was my birthday and no one in history has ever enjoyed turning fifty-nine, with the possible exception of the terminal cancer patient who was supposed to be dead at forty-five. The questions, coming from her—from anyone, revisiting that evening—but from her, after all this time, the history . . . he felt the anger building.

  Also, you couldn’t find three seconds to type happy birthday in a text?

  The thing was—and he couldn’t really get his head around this—he didn’t fully trust her.

  “It was my birthday,” he said, unaware that he was going to say it.

  She’d remembered. Of course, she’d remembered. She’d just chosen to ignore
it.

  “Oh. Happy birthday.”

  “Thanks.”

  He’d listened to a radio program recently, late at night. Online. About religion and philosophy. A writer and poet who used to be a Catholic priest. He said he used to have to give last rites and that was a wonderful gift sometimes because you could feel the people who’d lived full lives. But the saddest were those who, he said, had a look on their face as if to say, That was it?

  Ted thought of his mother for some reason and the image of the sink in the house he lived in growing up, a chip of porcelain the size of a nickel in the right corner, of walking in after football practice to her peeling potatoes. He’d watch her, tell her about his day. She was so proud of her broad-shouldered, popular boy. So handsome. She peeled and scratched her nose with her wrist, the clinking, rasping sound of the peeler on the potato, the earth smell. He would give all the money and all the fame and everything he had to stand in that kitchen in that moment talking with his mother.

  “What’s your story about?” he asked. He asked it in the same tone he used with young reporters who had taken three minutes to explain a story idea they wanted to do.

  Franny looked up. “You, obviously.”

  “Yes, but what about me? That I called this woman a bad name?”

  “It wasn’t a bad name. You called her a whore. You screamed at her.”

  He hated the word, hated hearing it out loud. Vulgar, guttural, shameful.

  “I’m aware of that,” he barked back. “But that story’s been told, don’t you think? A few hundred times.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “So then what are you writing about?”

  She felt herself getting angry. Felt herself getting ready to react. She tried mightily to rein it in.

  “I don’t love the tone of your voice,” she said. “I don’t work for you.”

  “I’m aware of that. I just want to understand what we’re doing. Is this a profile piece? Because there are a fair number of those out there already. What’s your angle? What’s the story?”

  She snorted, annoyed. “My angle?”

  “Yeah, because . . .”

  “My angle,” she said in a voice a little louder than her normal register, “my idea, my story, is about the end of network news as personified by Ted Grayson. It’s about pulling back the curtain on a tired, archaic offering that dies a little every day. One that if Edward R. Murrow watched he’d throw up in his mouth. And mostly, it’s about the face of the offering. And how he is one giant lie. That’s what I’m writing about. Okay?”

  She was breathing heavily. Her hands were shaking. She thought she might cry.

  He wasn’t surprised. He knew from the moment she emailed him. How could he not? Yet why did he also welcome it? Why did he want it?

  “Sounds like a helluva story,” he said.

  * * *

  • • •

  She might have asked a few more questions. Ted wasn’t sure. These exchanges with her left him depleted, unable to focus. They lingered, an emotional hangover. It had been so long since they had done this but it was so familiar.

  She asked to use the bathroom. When she came back she gathered her things and he walked her to the door, held it open.

  “Okay then,” she said.

  She made no move to embrace her father. It wounded him. He was surprised how much. He wasn’t angry. Just sad. Empty and sad. He wanted her to go.

  “You know what they want you to write, yes?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “You should write what you need to write.”

  She stared at him. Then turned and left.

  No one said anything about a tumor.

  As the days passed, as the story continued to grow, new groups jumping on to say how outraged they were—the National Organization for Women, the Komen foundation, the Girl Scouts of the USA, the LGBT community—Ted began to wrap his head around the thought that he would be fired. That he would need a plan for life after. He had assumed that he was simply too valuable, too important to be replaced. He was stunned to learn how fast it could happen, how fast everything could be taken from him.

  Polly had called to check in. She left messages. She sent a gift box from Zabar’s containing chicken soup, smoked salmon, and rugelach.

  He finally picked up.

  “I talked to Simon,” she said.

  “And?”

  “Bryce Ringling’s numbers are good, Ted.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. They want to meet us Monday. Tamara’s office. Me, you, Simon.”

  There was silence on the line for a time, neither quite sure where to go.

  Ted said, “Polly, are we going to get through this?”

  “I don’t know, Ted. I don’t know anything at this point.”

  * * *

  • • •

  They had urged him to stay in his apartment. The PR people. It was going to get worse. Stay home, they said. Stay hidden.

  The press, maybe eight of them, had gathered in front of his building, waiting for him. A reporter from TMZ slipped a note in Ted’s Chinese food delivery saying that they would “pay you $50,000 for an exclusive interview/tell-all.”

  So he sat in the apartment alone. He couldn’t bear to watch the news programs. And yet he couldn’t stop watching them. At first it was a dream-like quality, the reaction, the words coming out of colleagues’ mouths. People he knew well saying things on national broadcasts about his character and temperament, looking into his childhood, showing photos (where did they find these?) of Ted and Claire, years ago, on vacation, with Franny, talking about him in the most intimate ways while enormous photos scrolled slowly behind the panel of talking heads. One network had brought in an expert on xenophobic profanity. On the etymology of the word “whore.” Middle English. Old English. Dutch. Latin. For “dear.” If only he had used the word “dear.” Russian dear. Dear Russian.

  On CNN, the chief marketing officer of a major bank that had, the previous year, been accused of fabricating more than two million fake loans on existing customers’ accounts (they settled) spoke about ethics and morality and how the bank didn’t want to be associated with this type of behavior.

  After Walter Cronkite questioned America’s involvement in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson said that if he’d lost Cronkite, he’d lost Middle America. If Ted had lost the banks, he’d lost the network.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Adhesive capsulitis, Ted,” Dr. Foot said. “Common in elderly women. I’d like to start with a cortisone shot directly to the affected area. It will hurt. Then I’d suggest PT. Physical therapy.” Foot said these words as if they were a new app from Facebook. “Then, in about two weeks, I’m going to give you another cortisone shot, this one far deeper and far more painful. A lot of people pass out from that one. I’m kidding. About half do. Of course, none of this may work at all. Worse comes to worse, it should heal itself in about two years.”

  This wasn’t unusual, of course. It was the time of life when mornings brought new and unwelcome surprises from his own body. Aches in his lower back. Knee pain upon first standing up from bed. Sharp pains in the chest. Shooting pain in the right temple to the point where he had to close his right eye and hold his head. Urination was interesting. Why did it take so long to develop a steady stream, where once it was as simple as introducing his little anchorman to the stall, a powerful stream of urine spilling forth? He slept poorly, for a few hours at a stretch, waking at 3:45 almost to the minute. The occasional night sweats. He routinely forgot to zip up his fly. Of late, Ted had screaming pain in his shoulder and back. And, of course, his testicle. With long, empty days to pass, his anchorman purgatory, he thought a visit to his doctor might be in order.

  Ted had known Foot for decades. They’d met through Claire, who was friendly with th
e doctor’s wife. Foot was in his early seventies, gray crew cut, tweed blazer that he’d probably had at Andover. Ruddy complexion. His wife, Margot, was a DuPont. He saw patients as a hobby. Snuck up to Winged Foot when he could. He’d taken Ted out a few times. Ted could hit the ball a mile, but he three-putted if he was lucky. Foot would laugh his good-natured laugh. “You have no feel for the game, Ted. You’re like a man wearing a ski glove holding a firm breast.”

  His offices were in the East Seventies, between Fifth and Madison, in the ground floor of a granite mansion that he and his wife owned. He’d done little to it in forty years. It looked like the inside of a men’s club. Dark woods and old leather, his diplomas on the wall, ten-year-old copies of National Geographic in the waiting area.

  Foot asked Ted to remove his shirt and felt his upper body, asked him to move his arms, palpated his stomach, kidneys.

  “Put your shirt on. Physicals are a waste of time and money, Ted. I’m not going to learn anything playing with your testicles. Cough all you want, I’ll still never see pancreatic cancer. How’s Claire?”

  “She’s leaving me.” The words—the phrasing of them—surprised Ted. He’d meant to say We’re getting a divorce.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Ted stared out the window, suddenly embarrassed. “She met someone.”

  The image came fast, surprising. Claire at twenty-five, tanned in the summer. In Cambridge. Claire on the beach on Cape Cod. She had a white sleeveless dress she used to wear. Simple, conservative. Her hair down, no makeup, the day’s sun on her flushed face. The memory caused a sinking feeling in his stomach, a sadness at the loss of something.

  Foot opened a drawer in his desk and took out a pack of Dunhill cigarettes. He removed one, lit it, and moved to the window, which he opened a few inches. He inhaled deeply. “It’s a miracle any marriage lasts. It’s an outdated technology. Like bloodletting.”

  “How’s Margot?” Ted asked.

  Foot took a drag, exhaling from the corner of his mouth before he said, “Ted, I don’t have any idea. I assume she’s fine. We live in the same house, share the same bed most nights, though she’s often in the Hamptons with her annoying sister. Too much money is a curse. People don’t understand this. A person needs to work. My wife knows my name and could recognize me in a police lineup. After that, who’s to say? But it works for us. Bit worried about your testicle.”