Who’s That Girl?

by Celia Hayes

  “No, I’m not,” he admits after a while, while massaging his temples. He’s the editor of one of the most widely read newspapers in the country, so he can never afford to be impulsive. Like all big decisions, it looks like he pondered this one for a while before making his mind up. “That’s not what I said. But I am obliged to do something,” he points out, leaning back in his chair.

  Dave doesn’t react, or at least not immediately. He should feel more relaxed after hearing that he still has a job, but there’s a strange look in Tom’s eyes… He’d always been a very straight up guy, one of those people who speaks their mind freely and clearly and who will tell you to go to hell to your face if they have to. So why is he taking so long to get to the point? What exactly is on his mind? Nothing good, that’s for sure. “Come on, then – spit it out!” snaps Dave eventually, unable to stand the tension of waiting any longer. “What do you want me to do? Get down on my knees and beg for forgiveness? Whip myself in public to prove that I repent? Stick twelve dollars in the collection plate down at St Joseph’s?”

  “Don’t be stupid. And I have no intention of giving in to Hoffman’s threats either. If Walker can’t handle his wife, that’s his problem. And anyway, none of this makes Hoffman’s situation any more or less serious. He was caught in a car with a girl who isn’t even eighteen years old, so he has absolutely no excuse.” He clicks his tongue in satisfaction. “That was a good one and we are going to keep pushing it.”

  “Okay. So what exactly are you thinking?” asks Dave, unable to disguise his anxiety or his irritation.

  “So from this moment on, you have to be totally beyond reproach.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean, Dave! No more screwing around! No more nothing, period.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Ok, then I’ll try and make myself crystal clear,” Tom sighs. “From now on I don’t want to see you at parties. No more flings. No more romantic jaunts to Costa Rica for the weekend. No more getting papped on yachts or with Playboy models…”

  “What? Oh come on…” Dave groans as it dawns on him what Tom is saying.

  “The whole world has to think you’re a saint,” Tom continues, regardless of Dave’s reaction. “And I want to see you sitting on the front row in church every single Sunday, if that’s what it takes!”

  “Oh, for fu—”

  “No, Dave!” shouts Tom, leaning towards him across his desk and pointing an accusatory finger at him. “Maybe you don’t realise how bad this is. You’ve risked a lot here, believe me – a lot!” He warns him. “You’re a great journalist, and a great deputy editor, and the only reason I am saving your ass is because there’s nobody in this office that’s worth half of your big toe. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose The Chronicle because of you!” he mutters through gritted teeth and a clenched jaw. “Do you know what I did when I got my promotion, Dave? Do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” Dave admits laconically.

  “I glued the seat of my pants to this damn chair, and so if someone wants to get me out of it, they’re gonna have to shoot me first and cut me off it. Am I being clear? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, quite clear,” Dave stammers.

  “Great, so take my advice and get these words into your stupid, stubborn head: if I find out you’ve been anywhere near anything that even looks or smells like a woman, or if you’re even caught looking in the window of a lingerie shop, you’ll be out on your ass. I won’t accept any excuses or justifications and there won’t be any exceptions. Do you think you can manage that?”

  “Tom…” he hesitates.

  “I want an answer, Dave, and I want it right now.”

  “For how long?”

  “At least until after the elections.”

  “But you’re asking me to abstain for almost three months!”

  “Yeah, and that means that in three months time you’ll still have a roof over your head and a salary at the end of the month which you will be able to spend on sex toys and all the edible underwear you can eat, with the compliments of the newsroom. So what do you say?”

  Dave thinks it over for about a second before realising that being fired in his field means ending up in the obituaries office or, even worse, writing bitter articles about conspiracies and celebrities on some sad personal blog. Dave knows that he has no choice: if he doesn’t agree, he’ll be moving back into his parents’ basement.

  “I…”

  No, he just can’t do it. And not because he doesn’t understand where his priorities should be – it’s that he knows himself: there’s no way he’ll be able to stay cooped up at home for three months. That’s just who he is. He has certain… needs, so to speak. And anyway, this isn’t a normal thing to ask! Who can survive for three months without—

  “Think of it as a way to test your willpower. Dammit, Dave, would you really throw away all the work you’ve done so far just for some nookie? Don’t you want Hoffman to pay for what he did? Imagine his face when they throw him out of the party. Think of how much alimony he’s going to have to pay his wife.” Dave still doesn’t look convinced. “Isn’t all that enough to convince you? Well, listen to me, then… As soon as this story is over, you will have carte blanche to do whatever you decide you want to.”

  “Define ‘carte blanche’.”

  “It means you’ll have my permission to do whatever you want to him. To take him down!”

  “Tom, are you giving me your word about this?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Don’t you trust me?”

  “I want the front page, Tom. I want to put Hoffman on the front page under a headline of my own choosing.”

  “Okay,” Tom concedes.

  “And I also want to be free to decide what goes in there, with no editorial interference from you.”

  “Okay, okay, whatever.”

  “And I want a raise.”

  “Get your ass out of here right now!” shouts Tom loudly.

  Dave bursts out laughing. “Okay, okay – but come on, it was worth a try.”

  “Fine – you tried, and you failed. Now get the hell out of here, because thanks to you, I have a million goddamn problems to fix.”

  Dave nods and stands up, but before leaving the room he murmurs an embarrassed, “By the way, thanks…”

  They look at each other in silence, neither feeling the need to add anything. They both know that if Tom hadn’t intervened, Dave would have been fired today. Very few people would have taken a risk like that, and The Chronicle could have found a dozen unscrupulous reporters. They probably wouldn’t be as good as Dave, but still…

  “Get out, before I change my mind!” Tom scolds him good-naturedly, and Dave takes the hint and leaves Tom’s office.

  Chapter 3

  The Bow Tie Challenge

  “Will you take these? And these? No, not these. Take these too, and…” Regardless of the amount of documents she keeps piling up on my arms in an increasingly wobbly pile, she has the nerve to say, “And take these too,” before putting a couple of folders on top that she’s probably been hiding in her drawer since her first day in the office.

  “Great,” I say, as I set off.

  “Ah, hold on!” says Margaret, raising a cautionary finger.

  I knew it was too good to be true…

  “I forgot these,” she says with an angelic smile.

  “Nothing else?” I ask sarcastically.

  “Hmm…” she ponders. “I think…” she turns round and looks at her desk. “Yes, that should be everything. But I’ll call you if something else turns up,” she says, dismissing me and instantly forgetting I exist.

  Welcome to The Chronicle. On your right, a harpy clad in a red pants suit known as Margaret Banks, head of the Culture and Entertainment section and, contractually, my boss. She’s a lovely person except for this bad habit she has of overloading me with work – a habit that everybody who ends up in the office for more t
han a week or so seems to develop: if they need someone to spend two hours of their life searching through the archives, they ask me. The same thing happens when there’s a delicate phone call to be made. And who do they turn to when there’s some bizarre character to interview? Always and exclusively me. Except when it’s time to share the credit, in which case it becomes “Who? Sam? Sam who? Never heard of her. Does she work here? Seriously?”

  And that’s my career in a nutshell.

  Trying not to trip over, I leave her office and walk in a straight line until I bump into my desk. My workstation is a very small cubicle in a corner just by the window. There’s a grey table, a grey office chair, a grey desktop PC, and an imposing card index cabinet, the only object in my little personal space which is a completely different colour: black. Well, off-black, if I’m totally honest, so I should probably say it’s another shade of grey, but I still like to think of it as black so I don’t get too depressed. It’s pretty hard to keep your spirits up when you spend all your days crammed into eighteen square feet.

  “Ah, Sam…” says a voice from across the hall. “There are some e-mails that need sending.”

  “Sure, fine…” I grumble, dumping the pile of documents I’m holding onto my desk. I start cursing to myself even before knowing what these e-mails are about, hoping that spontaneous combustion or something will save me from this boring task. I know from previous experience that I’m very soon going to find out what he’s talking about in any case.

  It’s a fact: whenever there’s a problem, one way or another it always manages to find its way over to me, so all there is for me to do is sit down and decide where to begin. Before I start, though, I check the time. It’s only ten, I know, but I’m already as desperate for my coffee break as a camel is for an oasis after crossing the desert. I can’t stop staring at the clock, hoping that soon it’ll be time for me to get out of here and find solace in one of those styrofoam cups. Caffeine… It’s the only thing stopping me from munching my way through those cookies I’ve got hidden in the third drawer of my desk.

  It wasn’t always like this. At the beginning I was actually happy to work for a newspaper, especially because The Chronicle is not just any newspaper, it’s the newspaper around these parts. And these parts are San Francisco. When they offered me an internship here, I couldn’t believe it. I was twenty-three years old, I had just finished college and I had a head full of dreams. I could already picture myself holding a Pulitzer prize, and had a very moving speech prepared for the occasion. Three years later, I wish I could say that there’s been some progress, but unless you count me now having a company badge, nothing has happened. I’m paid the same salary and my colleagues treat me just as dismissively and look at me just as suspiciously. Only my workload has tripled. The long and the short of it is that I live my working life squeezed between a cheese plant and the printer, and instead of dreaming of a Pulitzer, nowadays I dream of being able to afford a top of the range vacuum cleaner. In other words, the expectations I had for my life have been drastically downsized. I’m not a natural pessimist, it’s more like the direct consequence of the failure of yet another diet which Vogue promised was ‘infallible’. To be more specific, I’m talking about the lemon diet which I tried last year after me and the waistbands of my pants had a bit of a falling-out. It felt like this time it was going to work, but as it turned out I didn’t lose a pound and I wasted four hundred dollars on buying a small greenhouse for our garden, plus another two hundred on the doctor. On the bright side, my mother can now grow strawberries in December and there is always a cheesecake in the fridge.

  “What a face!” says Terry as she joins me. She’s in the same boat as I am, working in the same department with the same approach: grim tolerance while we await the day of our revenge.

  “I just found out that I’m going to be spending the whole day searching through publications, newspaper articles and reviews for stuff about Millie Brown – you know, that artist who creates her pieces by vomiting up paint,” I tell her, while staring dejectedly at all the files Margaret gave me.

  Terry comes closer, looks at my desk, then, without a word, steals a chair from another cubicle and sits down next to me. “Sounds like an interesting artist. I wonder what she could do with a chocolate milkshake…” Strangely, she isn’t giving me a hard time, and that immediately puts me on my guard.

  “What are you planning?” I ask her suspiciously while spontaneously pushing my chair back.

  “Nothing, what do you mean?” she says, feigning innocence, and in the meantime takes a file out of a folder and looks it over. “Let’s see…” she murmurs thoughtfully, caressing her face and pressing her fingers on her lips. When she reaches the bottom of the page, she raises her head and looks at me carefully.

  “What? Do I have something in my hair?” I ask, touching it instinctively.

  Terry doesn’t answer me, she just keeps examining my appearance: the dark rings under my eyes and the rolled up ponytail that resembles a scruffy porcupine. I must be looking awful.

  “So?”

  “No,” she murmurs. “We are going to dump this task on Bob,” she decides eventually, crossing out some notes with a big black line before moving to the next point in her endless to-do list. Ok, now I know what’s going on.

  “No, please,” I beg, when I realise what she’s about to ask me. “I’m already up to my neck in work!” I point again to all the files Margaret gave me to underline the drastic situation I’m in.

  “Don’t worry, it’s practically nothing,” continues Terry regardless, passing me a freshly printed memo. “Here it is.” I would love to ignore it, but I’m too curious and scan through the document.

  “Who the hell is this Otis Farrel?” I ask.

  “Someone who broke Jin Songhao’s world record by staying under the snow for forty-seven minutes and twelve seconds.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “Not at all,” she replies seriously.

  “But why? Why did he do it?”

  “Apparently he’s Judge Farrel’s son and our editor’s nephew has a thing with the judge’s sister’s brother in law. I got the call directly from Tom’s office. They’ve scheduled an interview for this afternoon at four.”

  “No, you’re going to have to do Otis, I haven’t got time to leave my desk today,” I say, trying to hide behind my numerous commitments. Terry raises her eyes to the ceiling in frustration, but when she sees just how much of the office backlog I’ve got to deal with, she gives up.

  “Ok,” she snorts. “In that case, you can take something from tomorrow’s list.”

  “What have you got?” I ask, taking back the list. “Oh, that’s not bad: Carl Urban visits the Lewis Baltz exhibition. I think I could sacrifice myself for that,” I say, with a sly smile.

  “Forget it – there’s the interview with Grieg Murphy first.”

  “With who?”

  “Grieg Murphy.”

  “I don’t want to sound repetitive, but who?” I’ve never heard of him.

  “He’s the owner of the funeral home Murphy & Son in Japantown. He was one of the first to use permanent make-up on corpses. To celebrate their thirty years of being in business they’ve decided to put their most successful, err, clients on show.”

  “Hey, no way, José – I am not writing about funeral homes!” I explode, throwing up my hands.

  “You have to.”

  “No, I don’t have to.”

  “Yes, you do. It’s your turn, because if you remember I had to interview the Belgian explorer in your place because you’re scared of spiders.”

  “Come on, that’s totally unfair! And anyway I already covered for you last Wednesday when I had to sit through that two hour conference about the growth of the nesting population of beetles in America.”

  “Okay, fine. We’ll just have to play for it and see who wins.”

  “I agree,” I say, accepting her proposal immediately and we both turn towards the cubicle where Nicholas
writes his obituaries.

  “Green with polka dots,” says Terry.

  “Wrong!” I laugh. “Red stripes. Today is Monday, so Mel from typography will be coming by, I reckon he’ll have dressed up for her.”

  “Is that your final answer?” she asks in a low voice, trying to make me waver, but that’s not going to happen: my body is a temple and my mind is a fortress. Well, sort of.

  “You bet it is!” I say confidently.

  “And I say that it’s green with polka dots.”

  “Yeah, sure it is…”

  “Who’s going to check, you or me?” she asks.

  “You can. He hasn’t been speaking to me since I asked him to write up a note about Judge Johnson passing away,” I confide.

  “Hold on, I don’t follow you? Why isn’t he speaking to you?” she asks, sounding surprised.

  “Well…” I mumble, fiddling with my hair. “I think it’s partly down to his personality, but I also guess he would rather have written an obit for someone who was actually dead.”

  “You’re the worst.”

  I can’t help sniggering.

  “I’m not kidding,” she says, “you are going to burn in hell.”

  “Just get your ass in gear and find out!” I say, elbowing her. “I can’t wait all day.”

  “Shut up, you’ll ruin my mission!” hisses Terry before lifting her head, coughing a couple of times and calling out, “Hey, Nicholas! Do you know the phone number of the mayor’s press office?”

  “Here we go… the moment of truth,” I whisper, crossing my fingers and repeating, “Red stripes, red stripes, red stripes…” I peer over the card index cabinet to take a look and…

  Aw shit, no! I bang my head on the desk in despair when Nicholas pops up over the cubicle dividing wall wearing a green bow tie with polka dots and a ridiculous plaid shirt. “How the hell did you know?” I ask quietly while she pretends to write down the number.

  “I read on a post-it he had on his monitor yesterday that said ‘Dinner with Mom’” she reveals when she’s finished.