by John Irving
Patrick didn't sleep. He lay listening to the traffic on the FDR Drive while rehearsing what he would say to Doris Clausen. He wanted to marry her, to be a real father to little Otto. Patrick planned to tell Doris that he had performed "for a friend" the same service he'd "performed" for her; however, he would tactfully say, he had not enjoyed the process of making Mary pregnant. And while he would try to be a not-too-absent father to Mary's child, he would make it very clear to Mary that he wanted to live with Mrs. Clausen and Otto junior. Of course he was crazy to think such an arrangement could work.
How had he imagined that Doris could entertain the possibility? Surely he didn't believe she would uproot herself and little Otto from Wisconsin, and Wallingford was clearly not a man who could make a long-distance relationship (if any relationship) work.
Should he tell Mrs. Clausen that he was trying to get fired? He hadn't rehearsed that part, nor was he trying nearly hard enough. Fred's feeble threat notwithstanding, Patrick feared that he might have become irreplaceable at the not-the-news network.
Oh, for his mild Thursday-evening rebellion, there might be a producer or two to deal with--some spineless CEO spouting off on the subject of how "rules of behavior apply to everyone," or running on about Wallingford's "lack of appreciation for teamwork." But they wouldn't fire him for his deviation from the TelePrompTer, not as long as his ratings held.
In fact, as Patrick correctly anticipated--and according to the minute-by-minute ratings--upon his remarks, viewer interest had more than picked up; it had soared. Like the makeup girl, the very thought of whom gave Wallingford an unexpected boner in Mary's bed, the television audience also believed it was "time to move on." Wallingford's notion of himself and his fellow journalists--that "we should summon some dignity," that "we should just stop"--had immediately struck a public nerve. Quite the contrary to getting himself fired, Patrick Wallingford had made himself more popular than he'd ever been.
He still had a hard-on at dawn, when a boat out on the East River tooted obscenely. (It was probably towing a garbage scow.) Patrick lay on his back in the pink-tinged bedroom, which was the color of scar tissue. His erection was holding up the bedcovers. How women seemed to sense such things, he'd never understood; he felt Mary kick the couch cushions off the bed. He held on to her hips while she sat on him, rocking away. As they moved, the daylight came striding into the room; the hideous pink began to pale.
"I'll show you 'testosterone-driven,'" Mary whispered to him, just before he came. It didn't matter that her breath was bad--they were friends. It was just sex, as frank and familiar as a handshake. A barrier that had long existed had been lifted. Sex was a burden that had stood between them; now it was no big deal.
Mary had nothing to eat in her apartment. She'd never cooked a meal or even eaten breakfast there. She would start looking for a bigger apartment, she declared, now that she was going to have a baby.
"I know I'm pregnant," she chirped. "I can feel it."
"Well, it's certainly possible," was all Patrick said.
They had a pillow fight and chased each other naked through the small apartment, until Wallingford whacked his shin against the stupid glass-topped coffee table in the paisley confusion of the living room. Then they took a shower together. Patrick burned himself on the hot-water faucet while they were soaping each other up and squirming all around, chest-to-chest.
They took a long walk to a coffee shop they both liked--it was on Madison Avenue, somewhere in the Sixties or Seventies. Because of the competing noise on the street, they had to shout at each other the whole way. They walked into the coffee shop still shouting, like people who've been swimming and don't know that their ears are full of water.
"It's a pity we don't love each other," Mary was saying much too loudly. "Then you wouldn't have to go break your heart in Wisconsin, and I wouldn't have to have your baby all by myself."
Their fellow breakfast-eaters appeared to doubt the wisdom of this, but Wallingford foolishly agreed. He told Mary what he was rehearsing to say to Doris. Mary frowned. She worried that the part about trying to lose his job didn't sound sincere. (As to what she truly thought about the other part--his fathering a child with her just prior to declaring his eternal love for Doris Clausen--Mary didn't say.)
"Look," she said. "You've got what, eighteen months, remaining on your contract? If they fired you now, they'd try to negotiate you down. You'd probably settle for them owing you only a year's salary. If you're going to be in Wisconsin, maybe you'll need more than a year to find a new job--I mean one you like."
It was Patrick's turn to frown. He had exactly eighteen months remaining on his contract, but how had Mary known that?
"Furthermore," Mary went on, "they're going to be reluctant to fire you as long as you're the anchor. They have to make it look as if whoever's in the anchor chair is everybody's first choice."
It only now occurred to Wallingford that Mary herself might be interested in what she called the anchor chair. He'd underestimated her before. The New York newsroom women were no dummies; Patrick had sensed some resentment of Mary among them. He'd thought it was because she was the youngest, the prettiest, the smartest, and the presumed nicest--he hadn't considered that she might also be the most ambitious.
"I see," he said, although he didn't quite. "Go on."
"Well, if I were you," Mary said, "I'd ask for a new contract. Ask for three years--no, make that five. But tell them you don't want to be the anchor anymore. Tell them you want your pick of field assignments. Say you'll take only the assignments you like."
"You mean demote myself?" Wallingford asked. "This is the way to get fired?"
"Wait! Let me finish!" Everyone in earshot in the coffee shop was listening. "What you do is you start to refuse your assignments. You just become too picky!"
"'Too picky,'" Patrick repeated. "I see."
"Suddenly something big happens--I mean major heartache, devastation, terror, and accompanying sorrow. Are you with me, Pat?"
He was. He was beginning to see where some of the hyperbole on the TelePrompTer came from--not all of it was Fred's work. Wallingford had never spent time with Mary in the hard midmorning light; even the blueness in her eyes was newly clarifying.
"Go on, Mary."
"Calamity strikes!" she said. In the coffee shop, cups were poised, or resting quietly in their saucers. "It's big-time breaking news--you know the kind of story. We have to send you. You simply refuse to go."
"Then they fire me?" Wallingford asked.
"Then we have to, Pat."
He didn't let on, but he'd already noticed when "they" had become "we." He had underestimated her, indeed.
"You're going to have one smart little baby, Mary," was all he said.
"But do you see?" she insisted. "Let's say there's still four or four and a half years remaining on your new contract. They fire you. They negotiate you down, but down to what? Down to three years, maybe. They end up paying you three years' salary and you're home free! Well ... home free in Wisconsin, anyway, if that's really where you want to be."
"It's not my decision," he reminded her.
Mary took his hand. All the while, they'd been consuming a huge breakfast; the fascinated patrons of the coffee shop had been watching them eat and eat throughout their eager shouting.
"I wish you all the luck in the world with Mrs. Clausen," Mary told him earnestly. "She'd be a fool not to take you."
Wallingford perceived the disingenuousness of this, but he refrained from comment. He thought that an early-afternoon movie might help, although the matter of which film they should see would prove defeating. Patrick suggested Arlington Road. He knew that Mary liked Jeff Bridges. But political thrillers made her too tense.
"Eyes Wide Shut?" Wallingford proposed. He detected an atypical vacancy in her expression. "Kubrick's last--"
"He just died, right?"
"That's right."
"All the eulogizing has made me suspicious," Mary said.
&nbs
p; A smart girl, all right. But Patrick nonetheless believed he might tempt her to see the film. "It's with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman."
"It ruins it for me that they're married," Mary said.
The lull in their conversation was so sudden, everyone who was in a position to stare at them in the coffee shop was doing so. This was partly because they knew he was Patrick Wallingford, the lion guy, with some pretty blonde, but it was even more because there had passed between them such a frenzy of words, which had now abruptly ceased. It was like watching two people fuck; all of a sudden, seemingly without orgasm, they'd simply stopped.
"Let's not go to a movie, Pat. Let's go to your place. I've never seen it. Let's just go there and fuck some more."
This was surely better raw material than any would-be writer in the coffee shop could have hoped to hear. "Okay, Mary," Wallingford said.
He believed she was oblivious to the scrutiny they were under. People who were not used to being out in public with Patrick Wallingford were unaccustomed to the fact that, especially in New York, everyone recognized disaster man. But when Patrick was paying the bill, he observed Mary confidently meeting the stares of the coffee shop's patrons, and out on the sidewalk she took his arm and told him: "A little episode like that does wonders for the ratings, Pat."
It was no surprise to him that she liked his apartment better than her own. "All this for you alone?" she asked.
"It's just a one-bedroom, like yours," Wallingford protested. But while this was strictly true, Patrick's apartment in the East Eighties had a kitchen big enough to have a table in it, and the living room could be a living-dining room, if he ever wanted to use it that way. Best of all, from Mary's point of view, was that his apartment's one bedroom was spacious and L-shaped; a baby's crib and paraphernalia could fit in the short end of the L.
"The baby could go there," as Mary put it, pointing to the nook from the vantage of the bed, "and I'd still have a little privacy."
"You'd like to trade your apartment for mine--is that it, Mary?"
"Well ... if you're going to be in Wisconsin most of the time. Come on, Pat, it sounds like all you'll really need to have in New York is a pied-a-terre. My place would be perfect for you!"
They were naked, but Wallingford rested his head on her flat, almost boyish stomach with more resignation than sexual enthusiasm; he'd lost the heart to "fuck some more," as Mary had so engagingly put it in the coffee shop. He was trying not to imagine himself in her noisy apartment on East Fifty-something. He hated midtown--there was always such a racket there. By comparison, the Eighties amounted to a neighborhood.
"You'll get used to the noise," Mary told him, rubbing his neck and shoulders soothingly. She was reading his mind, smart girl that she was. Wallingford wrapped his arms around her hips; he kissed her small, soft belly, trying to envision the changes in her body in six, then seven, then eight months' time. "You've got to admit that your place would be better for the baby, Pat," she said. Her tongue darted in and out of his ear.
He had no capacity for long-range scheming; he could only admire Mary for everything he'd underestimated about her. Possibly he could learn from her. Maybe then he could get what he wanted--the imagined life with Mrs. Clausen and little Otto. Or was that really what he wanted? A sudden crisis of confidence, the lack thereof, overcame him. What if all he really wanted was to get out of television and out of New York?
"Poor penis," Mary was saying consolingly. She was holding it fondly, but it was unresponsive. "It must be tired," she went on. "Maybe it should rest up. It should probably save itself for Wisconsin."
"We better both hope that it works out for me in Wisconsin, Mary. I mean for both our plans." She kissed his penis lightly, almost indifferently, in the manner that so many New Yorkers might kiss the cheek of a mere acquaintance or a not-so-close friend.
"Smart boy, Pat. And you're basically a good guy, too--no matter what anybody else says."
"It would appear that I'm perceived to be swimming near the top of the gene pool," was all Wallingford said in reply.
He was trying to imagine the TelePrompTer for the Friday-evening telecast, anticipating what Fred might already have contributed to it. He tried to imagine what Mary would add to the script, too, because what Patrick Wallingford said on-camera was written by many unseen hands, and Patrick now understood that Mary had always been part of the bigger picture.
When it was evident that Wallingford wasn't up to having sex again, Mary said they might as well go to work a little early. "I know you like to have some input in regard to what goes on the TelePrompTer," was how she expressed it. "I have a few ideas," she added, but not until they were in the taxi heading downtown.
Her timing was almost magical. Patrick listened to her talk about "closure," about "wrapping up the Kennedy thing." She'd already written the script, he realized.
Almost as an afterthought--they'd cleared security and were taking the elevator up to the newsroom--Mary touched his left forearm, a little above his missing hand and wrist, in that sympathetic manner to which so many women seemed addicted. "If I were you, Pat," she confided, "I wouldn't worry about Fred. I wouldn't give him a second thought."
At first, Wallingford believed that the newsroom women were all abuzz because he and Mary had come in together; doubtless at least one of them had seen them leave together the previous night, too. Now they all knew. But Fred had been fired--that was the reason for the women's mercurial chatter. Wallingford was not surprised that Mary wasn't shocked at the news. (With the briefest of smiles, she ducked into a women's room.)
Patrick was surprised to be greeted by only one producer and one CEO. The latter was a moon-faced young man named Wharton who always looked as if he were suppressing the urge to vomit. Was Wharton more important than Wallingford had thought? Had he underestimated Wharton, too? Suddenly Wharton's innocuousness struck Patrick as potentially dangerous. The young man had a blank, insipid quality that could have concealed a latent authority to fire people--even Fred, even Patrick Wallingford. But Wharton's only reference to Wallingford's small rebellion on the Thursday-evening telecast and to Fred's subsequently being fired was to utter (twice) the word "unfortunate." Then he left Patrick alone with the producer.
Wallingford couldn't quite tell what it meant--why had they sent only one producer to talk to him? But the choice was predictable; they'd used her before when it struck them that Wallingford needed a pep talk, or some other form of instruction.
Her name was Sabina. She had worked her way up; years ago, she'd been one of the newsroom women. Patrick had slept with her, but only once--when she was much younger and still married to her first husband.
"I suppose there's an interim replacement for Fred. A new dick, so to speak? A new news editor ..." Wallingford speculated.
"I wouldn't call the appointment an interim replacement, if I were you," Sabina cautioned him. (Her vocabulary, like Mary's, was big on "if I were you," Patrick noticed.) "I would say that the appointment has been a long time coming, and that there's nothing in the least 'interim' about it."
"Is it you, Sabina?" Wallingford asked. (Was it Wharton? he was thinking.)
"No, it's Shanahan." There was just a hint of bitterness in Sabina's voice.
"Shanahan?" The name didn't ring a bell with Wallingford.
"Mary, to you," Sabina told him.
So that was her name! He didn't even remember it now. Mary Shanahan! He should have known.
"Good luck, Pat. I'll see you at the script meeting," was all Sabina said. She left him alone with his thoughts, but he wasn't alone for long.
When Wallingford arrived at the meeting, the newsroom women were already there; they were as alert and jumpy as small, nervous dogs. One of them pushed a memo across the table to Patrick; the paper fairly flew out of her hands. At first glance, he thought it was a press release of the news he already knew, but he soon saw that--in addition to her duties as the new news editor--Mary Shanahan had been made a producer of the show. That
must have been why Sabina had so little to say at their earlier meeting. Sabina was a producer, too, only now it seemed she was not as important a producer as she'd been before Mary was made one.
As for Wharton, the moon-faced CEO never said anything at the script meetings. Wharton was one of those guys who made all his remarks from the vantage point of hindsight--his comments were strictly after the fact. He came to the script meetings only to learn who was responsible for everything Patrick Wallingford said on-camera. This made it impossible to know how important, or not, Wharton was.
First they reviewed the selected montage footage on file. There was not one image that wasn't already part of the public consciousness. The most shameless shot, with which the montage concluded by freezing to a still, was a stolen image of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. The image wasn't entirely clear, but she seemed to be caught in the act of trying to block the camera's view of her son. The boy was shooting baskets, maybe in the driveway of the Schlossberg summer home in Sagaponack. The cameraman had used a telephoto lens--you could tell by the out-of-focus branches (probably privet) in the foreground of the frame. (Someone must have snaked a camera through a hedge.) The boy was either oblivious or pretending to be oblivious to the camera.
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg was caught in profile. She was still elegant and dignified, but either sleeplessness or the tragedy had made her face more gaunt. Her appearance refuted the comforting notion that one grew accustomed to grief.
"Why are we using this?" Patrick asked. "Aren't we ashamed, or at least a little embarrassed?"
"It just needs some voice-over, Pat," Mary Shanahan said.
"How about this, Mary? How about I say, 'We're New Yorkers. We have the good reputation of offering anonymity to the famous. Lately, however, that reputation is undeserved.' How about that?" Wallingford asked.
No one answered him. Mary's ice-blue eyes were as sparkling as her smile. The newsroom women were twitching with excitement; if they had all started biting one another, Patrick wouldn't have been surprised.
"Or this," Wallingford went on. "How about I say this? 'By all accounts, from those who knew him, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was a modest young man, a decent guy. Some comparable modesty and decency from us would be refreshing.'"
