A Dangerous Age (6 page)

“I know it needs cutting. How about the series? May I do it? We’ll have to pay for some of the pieces.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know yet. It will have to be on a piece-by-piece basis for a while.”

“No, it won’t. You can have two hundred tops for each piece. Get a standard contract and stick to it, no kill fees. Pay the subscribers a hundred if they send something in. I don’t want to pay anyone unless we pay everyone.”

M
Y EDITORIAL RAN
on Sunday. By Monday afternoon there were ninety-six e-mails offering to write essays. By Wednesday we had sixteen articles set up, beginning with one by a physician who runs a weight-loss program in Muskogee, to be followed by a piece by a retired United States senator about the importance of being an informed voter. That would be followed by an engineer writing about how to buy a house, to be followed by a local banker talking about debt. Then a piece by a television weatherman about preparing for tornadoes and what to do if one comes.

The series was a huge success and was given credit for the rise in circulation we saw in May and June.

So the year wore on and the war in Iraq got worse and more
confusing. We were depending on the Associated Press for feed, then Knight Ridder and the
New York Times
.

In June, Big Jim and I flew to Kuwait and spent a week talking to generals and embedded reporters; we learned nothing we couldn’t have found out from the Associated Press feed, and I went home more confused.

“It’s not confusing,” Big Jim kept insisting on the flight back to Tulsa. “You want a big picture, and the big picture is hundreds of years old and worldwide. You need to study maps.” He kept getting out a map of the Middle East and studying the geography. “Think of it as Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana. We need maps of religions, sects, Shiite and Sunni strongholds. Look at Lebanon, for God’s sake, sitting right on top of Israel, Syria looming to the side. We need maps of where the oil is. It isn’t confusing. It’s about oil. It’s about oil and geography and ports. Nothing else. To believe otherwise for a moment is to
become confused
. Well, maybe it’s also about nuclear power—plutonium’s been found in Iran, they’re mining it, and they’re processing it—but that’s secondary.
It’s about oil
!”

“If I didn’t work for you, I’d marry you,” I said. “I’d take you away from Linalee. You’re the only person I ever knew who could italicize words when you talk.”

“Our advertising revenue was down for the year. That’s three years in a row. Are you aware of that?”

“Then fire me. I’ve gained four pounds since I became editor.
I have fat on my waist. My pants are too tight. I haven’t gotten laid in twenty-six months. I wish you’d fire me.”

“It’s not your fault. No one reads, so they don’t buy newspapers. We need better maps, Olivia. I want to put some maps of the Middle East on the front page, with oil fields and refineries and ports. I want the ports in red. I want maps on the front page
and
the editorial page whenever we write about the war.”

I put my hand on top of his large, powerful, fat hand. I patted his hand until I fell asleep. In my sleep I dreamed about the geography of the Middle East, the mountains of Afghanistan, the nuclear bombs in Pakistan and India, the port of Dubai, Syria looming, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Iran, the oil, the oil, the oil.

The 747 in which we were crossing the Atlantic Ocean would burn enough fuel to lose 20 percent of its weight by the time we got to the United States. Gasoline had reached $1.79 a gallon in Tulsa while we were gone. In another few years it would be almost $4.00, and the cost of printing and distributing the
Tulsa World
would almost have doubled.

Live in the present, I told myself each night before I fell asleep. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing ever did. I really need to get laid, but it’s so much trouble. I’ve had good men and I didn’t keep them because I’m too selfish and I won’t put out the effort. I’m going to end up living with pets if I don’t realign my priorities.

S
o
I
MADE
it through the winter and the spring and summer by doing what I hoped was valuable work in the world. But I was lonely and I didn’t know I was lonely as fall came to Oklahoma and the elections of 2004 drew near. There is nothing more dangerous than being lonely without knowing you are lonely. I was getting set up, that’s for sure. I was about to be used.

S
ATURDAY
, O
CTOBER
30, 2004. It’s three days before the election, and trying to run a newspaper under these circumstances is like shoveling fleas, a metaphor Abraham Lincoln used to describe being president of the United States, which is what this election is about and/or for. Which one of the disparate groups of people who not only don’t want their oxes gored—they want to graze up everybody else’s fields, oxen, cattle, horses, oil, sheep, water, air, you name it—will win? This election is about keeping what is mine and getting some of yours. And so what? What else is new in the human race?

T
HINGS ARE LOOKING
up in the newspaper world. As of today our circulation is forty-eight thousand, up two thousand from last year, either because of my essay contest, Big Jim’s maps (we now have school contests to draw them, and we publish the winners in the Sunday paper), the election, or the
war. People like to read the names of the dead, I guess, or the commentaries. Who knows what they like? Anyway, circulation is up two grand, but what good does that do me this week? We are so besieged by e-mails, telephone calls, and letters to the editor, we can’t even print the news.

There are other things going on in Oklahoma this week and I’m trying to put some of that news on the front page, but my staff is fighting like a pack of wild dogs for their separate and bitter agendas.

Not to mention the Cherokee faction, of which I am a fully licensed, if not full-blooded, member. I’m not full-blooded because my mother fell in love with and was impregnated by and briefly married to an aristocrat from North Carolina. She ran away from him before I was born and had me in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where she thought I belonged, not thinking about North Carolina’s being the beginning of the Trail of Tears, or about anything else, for that matter, since she was only twenty years old when my birth took her life—something nineteen years of psychotherapy has finally cured me, I guess, of thinking was my fault. My birth ended her life; that’s a fact. But I didn’t mean it to, nor would I have chosen to end it. No matter how much I know that intellectually, I still suffer guilt. Everyone has his burdens; that’s my main one.

A
S FOR THE
presidential election of 2004, the Cherokee Nation is split. If national polls show George Bush and John Kerry neck and neck, the Cherokees are for once in lockstep
with the nation. Here’s how it’s split: the young people and dope addicts and malcontents and trial lawyers and social workers and some of the veterans, against the old people and rich people and doctors and the rest of the veterans. I don’t think I need to waste words telling you who is for whom. Breathe in, breathe out. What they are fighting now is one another. Everyone is so mad. If I printed the really interesting letters to the editor, I would have mayhem to answer for. Of course the Cherokees are always fighting, plus farmers versus oil people and small towns versus Tulsa and so on.

Has anyone ever written about what great lovers Cherokee men are? I wish I dared, but then I’d have to move and the Cherokee women would say, Why don’t you write about what great lovers we are? and I’d say, Because I don’t desire women, and then the lesbians would jump on me. Public discourse, not good now. Some days I think I ought to quit this job. I could freelance like my cousin Louise. Of course she had some family money. Well, so do I, or I did until I bought that land down on the river. That’s a sinkhole for my salary, but at least I don’t keep men.

S
UNDAY
, O
CTOBER
31, 2004. A double-witching day. At six this morning I threw on my clothes and went down to the office to start combing through the
Chicago Tribune
and the
Denver Post
and the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
and the
Washington Post
and the
Oklahoman
and the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
because I wanted to see if there was anything I needed to recap in
Monday’s paper, and also because I couldn’t wait to see what other editors were pushing for in the last days before this fucking election, which isn’t going to make one goddamn bit of difference in the real foreign policy of the United States of America because when anyone becomes the commander in chief, this bunch of—because we are free—still wild (thank goodness) people will storm Washington, stop paying taxes, or do what they have done so many times before, which is actually go out and vote and elect a Congress from the most extreme bands of the other side if they don’t like what their newly elected president does. I love the dark, sweet heart of the American people, and I trust them to keep the ship of state sailing on through any storm, and I’m going to write an editorial for tomorrow’s paper saying so.

S
O
I
WAS SITTING
at my desk, hungry, drinking coffee and eating unsalted sunflower seeds, when my old love Kane Malloy comes in the door and just stands there. I haven’t seen him in three months, and in two seconds I’m sounding like a sixteen-year-old girl. What can I say? I love the man. I’ve had two loves in my life, and this is the troubled one. So he’s married. Put me in the jail and throw away the key. I didn’t know he was married the night I met him at a party at the Tulsa Country Club (a party for a golf tournament he won the following day). And it’s not my fault that his fat, rich wife sits in their house in Oklahoma City and lets him roam. Roaming—that would be a good nickname for Kane. And I’ll tell
you something else: he would love me to the exclusion of every other woman on the planet if I would be his mistress, but he’d never leave Arlen Vinci Malloy because of her money and their children. The facts are the facts, but I know damn well he loves me. Everyone in Oklahoma knows it, as well as everyone in Arkansas, where he’s from, and anyone anyplace where old football players play golf, and definitely everyone in heaven, where we have to justify these things.

“W
HAT ARE YOU
doing in town?” I asked, and sat up straight and pulled my shoulders back and down, à la Pilates class, and pushed my lips out and pulled in my stomach, à la Tahlequah High Cheerleading Squad, 1984, not coincidentally the year I found the photographs and learned my father was the brother of the famous writer Anna Hand of Charlotte, North Carolina. It was the year I began to believe I was somebody special and could do anything I dreamed of doing.

“Selling bonds, baby, and spices for my daddy. Same thing I’m always doing.”

“Don’t give me that. You don’t show up in Tulsa three days before the election to peddle bonds. I know who you run with, Kane. So what’s your role, revving up the old professional athletes in general or just the old football heroes? You could have saved the time and money. This state is all red and it’s sewn up unless the student population surprises me by actually voting, which it won’t except for the born-agains.”

“Oh, baby,” he begins. He takes a step nearer to my desk, and
I get a whiff of the pheromones and I might as well go on and take off my clothes, since he can do this to me on the telephone, let alone when he’s standing in my office in his perfectly tailored gray slacks and his soft Italian long-sleeved polo shirt—as if clothes could cover that incredible body, as if anything could hide that power and those reflexes and the sheer unbelievable intelligence of his physical being, not to mention the gentleness and pain and courage and intensity, the stillness and quiet and truth, of his great, sweet heart.

“I’m going to talk to some people for the governor. We need some poll watchers. But that isn’t why I’m here. I came to see about you. Are you still mad at me?”

“Sit down. I was never mad at you. I get mad at myself because of you and then I take it out on you. You’re married. I will not have an affair with a married man. I am not going to spend another Christmas waiting for you to come over in the late afternoon. I’ve done it, Kane. I can’t do it anymore.”

“Well, I love you. You know that.” He hung his head, not that it’s possible for him to hang his head because his shoulders are so perfectly designed that they hold his head up like an emperor’s or a king’s. He is the most beautiful man I have ever seen in my life, and he’s half-Chickasaw, from the tribes in the Mississippi Delta, so I recognize as well as love him. Half-breeds, both of us, Irish, Celtic music running with the Indian blood. Mixed blood, the best, the wildest, purest strain there is.