by Bill Turpin
“What is she doing with that jerk?” he asked his friend.
“Maybe she got tired of waiting for you to do something,” was the reply.
At that moment, Max foresaw a long, perhaps indefinite, period of sexual purgatory ahead of him.
At the same time, he found himself drawn to the campus newspaper.
“Aha,” said the Guru. “Finding yourself outside the tent, you elected to join a group of budding journalists, a group dedicated to assailing those inside the tent.”
Max believed he had been lost in thought. Now it seemed he had been speaking his thoughts to the Guru.
“You’re suggesting life is better lived inside a tent?” Max asked.
The Guru mulled it over.
“No. I guess not. On the contrary. Point taken.”
1985
CFA Shows Flair
for Halifax Real Estate
A MONTREAL FIRM is showing a flair for real estate in Halifax.
Golden Cat Real Estate bought 17 properties in the last 18 months, sold half of them at a profit and financed apartment complex proposals with the proceeds.
But some Halifax councillors say the project violates community values and will oppose it even though it meets planning bylaws.
The feisty owner of Golden Cat, a national company, says she is undeterred by the opposition . . .
“Hey Maxie, did you see this real estate story this morning?”
The Wife is eating breakfast while reading the Paper. Max is standing by the toaster with bated breath.
“I don’t read advertorials,” he says.
“And yet you knew it was an advertorial . . . you don’t recognize the Montreal woman’s name?”
Max marshals his thoughts. Marriage has not diminished the Wife’s power to tie his tongue in knots.
She smiles at him like an angler, waiting for him to tire himself out and be reeled in.
“It’s funny you don’t remember. She was arrested in Montreal for arranging sex parties in private houses. Maybe you were dodging Latin American bullets back then. Or maybe you knew her by her professional name — Goldpussy.”
The Wife raises her head from the Paper and looks expectantly at him. She’s wearing a peach silk blouse and a muted grey skirt suit. Max likes the way her legs look in high heels even while wondering how she can walk in them. A silver pendant glitters in the hollow of her throat. She is dressed like the consummate PR pro she has become. She exudes self-possession and competence. Moreover, her decision to abandon print reporter fashions has made her first impressions “easy on the eyes” as they say. Max figures he’s lucky to have married her before the competition realized what a catch she was.
“Hmm. Goldpussy you say? Could be,” says Max. “So, you say she was acquitted?”
“By golly she was. But I didn’t say that. You did. Maxie . . . do you know Goldpussy or not?”
Max raises his eyebrows, expels a breath and shrugs, as if to say that no one really knows.
“Well, yes and no,” he says.
“How is that possible?”
“Well, ‘yes’ in the sense that I know her, and ‘no’ in the sense that I didn’t know you ever heard of her.”
The Wife flushes and her voice lacks its usual certainty.
“So, in all our time together, it never occurred to you mention that you have a friend who is a prostitute?”
“Prostitute? She’s not a prostitute. She was a stripper, that’s all.” Max is horrified. He feels like he’s in free-fall. “She’s one of the nicest women I’ve ever known. She’s my friend.”
“She could still be a prostitute. It fits with lining up girls for the sex parties.”
“That was never proven.”
“Maxie, did you have sex with her? And, if you place any value at all on your marriage, don’t say ‘yes and no’.”
“Once. Well, one night.” Don’t say it, he begs himself. Stop now. “Well — full disclosure — four times but . . . one night.”
She flies out of her chair, red-faced. “FOUR TIMES!”
Max briefly thinks he can control things by warning her that the Son could overhear, but the boy’s at camp.
“FOUR TIMES! You’ve never done it with me four times in a row, but with some tramp — no problem.”
“No-no-no-no,” Max says. “I didn’t even know you then and she wasn’t a tramp. And even if she was, or is, she’s still my friend.”
“Four times? I worked hard to get you, to make sure you were the right one. Now I feel so cheap.”
“She was my first time,” he says. “I had lots of pent up . . . energy. If it had been you, it would have been six times.” He pauses: “You worked hard to get me?”
“You were my first time, Max.”
“But . . .”
“Yes, I know, I seduced you. It’s the only way to get your attention sometimes.”
“No,” says Max. “It’s the other way around. I seduced you.”
“Oh, puhlease. How many guys with staples in their shirt-cuffs can seduce anybody?”
Max doesn’t say it, but it occurs to him that his stapled cuffs have a pretty good track record.
Max makes a quick trip to the old lecture theatre of the mind. His unusually rapt audience clearly sides with the Wife. But an embarrassed young female student walks to the dais and silently passes him a note. Max reads it. Eureka!
“Okay,” he tells the Wife. “But our count is five. We did it three times, plus that other thing you did — twice — so that’s five. You’re the world record holder.”
“You should have been a lawyer, Maxie. You certainly know how to miss a point.”
Max’s special male instinct tells him that raising the Wife’s count to five isn’t having the desired effect. He tries another tack.
“If it was your first time? How . . . ?”
“Research and planning,” she says. “You may not have noticed, but it’s not terribly difficult to seduce a man in his twenties. Any woman with a temperature above freezing can do it.”
Now Max understands why the Copy Editor inexplicably left them alone in the bar on that momentous night.
“You set it up? You got him to leave?”
“Yes. I asked him to leave us alone if the second button on my blouse mysteriously came undone. He was more than happy to help.”
The Wife looks nothing like the girl who seduced him that night. The reporter clothes — shapeless jean skirt, white blouse — are gone. Her eyes, which he once idiotically complimented as “probing”, are in fact warm and inviting. She’s blessed with what Max’s grandmother called an “old soul”.
“Nobody seduced anybody that night, Cactus,” he says. “A smart, beautiful woman with a generous heart got my attention long enough for me to realize that I had been in love with her for months and always would be. It was the most important and unforgettable night of my life.”
The Wife leans over and kisses him. Max is surprised to notice some dampness near her cheekbone. She smiles, blinking a little.
“Now you’re talking, Maxie,” she says.
1988
Bingo!
MAX CAN’T WAIT for the Paper to move to its new building. He is sitting in the same windowless room where he first met the Cobra, who is at this moment using the same jumped-up closet as a washroom. The drywall remains unfinished. The toilet is still flushing when he emerges.
“You said you wouldn’t run the story about the bingo fraud,” he says to Max on the way to his desk.
“No. I said I would think about it,” Max says. “Like you, when I say I will think about something, I mean I will do what I want.”
“Well, the Archbishop is pissed,” the Cobra says.
“No problem. I’ve been condemned to Hell since the day I was born a Protestant.”
“His
Excellency says your coverage is irresponsible.”
“I have the right and a duty to be irresponsible.”
“He said to remind you that he sits on the board of the university.”
“So what?”
“That’s where your wife works, right? How would you like to be a one-income family?”
The Cobra coils into his chair and turns his attention to a specially-marked file from the Paper’s accounting department. He holds up an invoice from the Lawyer with the bottom line highlighted. Max can see that the number is north of $10,000.
“I guess you also said you’d think about not opposing publication bans,” he says.
“Yep.”
The Cobra believes sending a lawyer to oppose a judge’s publication ban is “interfering with due process.”
The previous month the Paper’s lawyer had to appear three times to lift a ban on the name of a city councillor charged with drunk driving.
“It cost us $12,000 and look what you’ve done to the man’s reputation,” the Cobra says. “He hasn’t even been convicted yet and you’re smearing his name. You don’t see the Other Paper doing that.”
“No, you don’t,” Max says.
“It’s expensive and the Courts don’t like it,” The Cobra says. “It’s not the way we do things in Nova Scotia.”
• • •
Max is not worried about the legal bill because the Owner supports him on that issue, but he is concerned about the threat to the Wife’s job. It would be easy to make that happen if his Excellency could find the right excuse.
He cuts through the composing room on the way to his office. The Collective, as usual, stare at him resentfully. Time does not heal all wounds, Max thinks. It’s been seven years since he wrested away their God-given right to decide the content of the Paper.
The newsroom, now organized by newspaper section, finally has the quality Max wants most: intent. The people in the room know why they are there. Even the Sports department, a mulish group in a mini-wing set 90 degrees to the rest of the newsroom and ankle deep in fried food containers, is as good as he has a right to expect. Far better than the one across the harbour at the Other Paper.
Who was the opposing team when Jean Beliveau scored his last regular season goal? The Sports department knows. (The Rangers, of course.) In 1960, Mickey Mantle batted .400 in the World Series final. Who was the opposition? Sports has the answer. (The Pirates, of course.)
Who’s hockey’s brightest prospect? Why, it’s this hardworking young guy born right here in Halifax.
The latest market study suggests the Paper is regarded as both credible and irresponsible. Or, as the marketing expert put it, people believe what they read but many think it never should have been written. At the meeting where the results were presented, Max did his best to appear disturbed by the news.
Two of the reasons for this seeming contradiction — “unprecedented” the marketing guy said — are within shouting distance of where Max stands. The City Editor, today wearing the mid-thigh black dress with a plunging neckline and Goth eyeliner, has a knack for hitting every hot-button in the region. So much so that Max sometimes wonders if there might truly be 14 easily-offended families running the province, primed to fulminate with every edition of the Paper.
Then there is the Cartoonist, who could pass for the lovechild of Jack the Ripper and Shirley Temple. A stocky guy with blond hair flowing to his shoulders, he lurks a few yards away, waiting for an opening. He wears the expression of the perpetually falsely accused; layered upon that is an expression of saintly forbearance for his accusers.
The Cartoonist is brandishing a fresh drawing. Max steels himself. He likes the Cartoonist and his work, which is brilliant and routinely provokes outrage — the kind of outrage that sells newspapers. The cartoons are well-drawn and clever. But Max knows that the greatest single threat to his employment is a single pen-stroke from the man with the hot stare walking toward him.
“Just wanted you to see this,” he says, handing his work to Max as he pirouettes smartly and starts on the way back to his lair. Max recognizes the warning sign. The only reason for a cartoonist to leave before receiving the praise he so deeply needs but so routinely disdains is that he has drawn something he doesn’t want Max to notice. It’s also why the approval process is taking place in the middle of the newsroom: no editor wants to appear chicken in front of his staff.
Max does a pantomime of a cowboy roping a steer, dragging the Cartoonist back into the conversation. The energy of the room changes as reporters and editors quietly tune into the action.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Max says.
It’s a drawing of the Speaker of the House, routine except that he’s not wearing anything except black knee socks and garters. Mercifully, his back is turned, although his buttocks look like two sacks of potatoes.
Max is okay with it, but a small voice in his head tells him to keep looking.
“You see?” says the Cartoonist. “It’s The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
This is meant to distract Max’s attention from the drawing.
Finally, Max sees it: an almost imperceptible pointy object dangling between the great man’s thighs. Imperceptible, that is, to everyone except the Cartoonist’s detail-oriented fans and rabid critics.
“What’s this?” Max asks.
The Cartoonist peers at the drawing, clearly intrigued. “Well, it could be a smudge or a stray mark.”
“Hmm, it could be,” Max says. “But what is it actually?”
“Well, some people might think it’s a penis.”
They go back and forth like this until the Cartoonist admits that the object could be seen as a penis because he drew it that way.
Max admires him for having the gall to try something like that, but mostly he is angry. Max feels his face turn red.
The cartoonist notices: “It’s just a small one. If it’s about the size, I can . . .”
Max cuts him off.
“Kindly erase buddy’s organ and bring the drawing back to me for approval.”
The Cartoonist looks stricken, a sincere working artist cut down by “the Establishment” in front of his colleagues.
“You know,” he says sadly. “It’s not my job to self-censor. It’s my job to draw cartoons as I see fit and your job to spike them if you see something you feel is inappropriate.”
Max doesn’t disagree, but he’s acutely aware of his audience, which now includes everyone present. Most are still green and need to know where the line is and not to cross it.
A macho declaration, he decides, is best for all, including the Cartoonist, who will soon be retelling the story of how he got Max to lose his cool.
“Well, take note, because this is an example of inappropriate,” he says with all the menace he can muster. “And if you’re so interested in dicks, I’ll arrange things so you can use yours as an eraser.”
Not exactly out of the Modern Leader’s Handbook.
The eavesdroppers snicker. The City Editor wonders aloud if such a thing is possible.
“Eraser? How would that work?” She shouts at the retreating Cartoonist: “Oh, wait . . . are you circumcised?”
The Entertainment Editor is waiting for him in his office. It seems HR wants to dock her new writer two weeks’ pay on the grounds that he wasn’t in the newsroom.
“You mean that prematurely bald guy? His father was sick in Vancouver?”
“Yeah. His father died,” she says, near tears. “He’s flat broke.”
“But you and I decided we’d keep it off the books,” Max reminds her.
The Entertainment Editor, it seems, is worldly in the ways of the arts, but not bureaucracy.
“Right. And that’s what I told HR,” she says.
“No problem,” says Max. “But ‘off the books’ means we don’t tell HR. W
e just unofficially let him work overtime to even things out.”
The Entertainment Editor flushes and covers her face.
“I’m so stupid,” she says, her voice muffled by her hands. She offers to let Max deduct the money from her salary, which isn’t much better than the writer’s.
“First,” he says, “we don’t hire stupid people here. So, you’re not stupid. On the contrary, I would say. Second, your offer is very kind, but unnecessary. Just tell HR I said that I will look after it.”
“You’re going to pay for it yourself?” she asks.
“Good God no!” he says with theatrical emphasis.
“So, what will you do?”
“Nothing,” Max says, smiling at her.
“Won’t they bother you about it?”
“Maybe, but eventually they’ll drop the issue. The longer I stall, the harder it is for them to explain themselves to Accounting. In the end, they’ll decide it’s better just to forget about it. Now, go in peace.”
“Thanks. I feel smarter already,” she says on the way out.
And so does Max, who is starting to feel like an old hand, and likes it. He is also fond of almost everybody on his staff. They are smart, funny and surprisingly kind for a group that works in a newsroom.
May I always love this job and may it always love me, he thinks.
1973
Smoked Meat
Provokes Wild Encounter
THE NEW LOVERS have spotted Max’s roommate eating smoked meat at Schwartz’s and have decided to go directly to his apartment on l’Esplanade because it’s one place they can think of where they haven’t “done it” yet and they know it must be empty. Turned on by the risk of the Roommate returning early, they’ve left Max’s bedroom door open to heighten the excitement, stripped naked facing each other, and hopped onto his bed.
