She nodded yes, perhaps even pleased.
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Half an hour later, uptown, I passed through the newspaper's first-floor lobby, nodding at Constantine, the security guard. “Good morning, Mr. Wren,” he said, with a generosity that confounded me. Constantine had been at the paper for almost two decades and had known hundreds of reporters, editors, deli delivery boys, photographers, advertising salespeople. Three years prior, he had been seen filling out lottery tickets, penciling in the circles behind his desk. At first he did several
a day, but in time he came to fill out dozens a week. Meanwhile he smiled and continued to nod hello. Soon the educated professionals passing by could not help but stop and bring up the topic of Constantine's lottery tickets. They expressed worry that he was gambling compulsively. Did he need help? A therapist? Did he realize that lottery tickets were a form of regressive taxation? That the odds were poor and that he could probably not afford to spend so much on this obsession? That was before Constantine won twelve million dollars. Still, he had been content to keep working as a security guard, and now people in the building brought him their lottery tickets to fill out.
I rode up in the elevator with a young reporter holding a paper bag from a deli down the street. His hair was wild, as if he'd been tearing at it, and he blinked in thought to himself, tapping his foot.
“Just lay brick,” I said, not remembering his name.
“What?” He looked at me worriedly.
“You having trouble with a story?”
“Iâyes, I can't get it right, how'd you know?”
“No coat. No notebook. Lots of coffee. You went out and came back.”
“What did you say again?”
“Lay brick.”
He nodded his understanding. “Yeah.”
We got off the elevator and the young reporter whisked off toward another part of the newsroom. I scuttled along the back wall. Years ago I felt a certain camaraderie with the other reporters, but that was when we were all on the way up. We used to sit around and talk about Ed Koch, how we were going to pin something on him that would stick. But we never did, and a lot of people moved on to other papers or took PR jobs for three times the money. Or blew up. You see a few people whom you got older with, and the rest of them seem ever younger. They all want to hang up a few pelts. Then there are the investigative reporters who are getting tired of the research. Too much legwork for the money, pal. They've got wives and husbands and kids and mortgages, and
they're strapped in. They have to come up with the big stories and sell them to the editors and then go deliver. I did that; I was in City Hall and the police department and the DA's office and the federal courts. I sat in the chairs. I put in the time. When you get sick of being an investigative reporter, you try to become a columnist. They all think I'm paid too much. I can see it in their faces. My salary was reported in
New York
magazine. Leaked by somebody. It's embarrassing. They look at me and I know what they're thinking. They don't understand the pressure to be “Porter Wren.” They can hide behind the screen of objectivity, but a columnist has to push it, has to break stories, hit page one. A newspaper column three times a week is a vulture that eats your liver away as fast as you can grow it back. You are chained to the rock, the bird approaches, eyes bright, beak stinking of its last meal, and, alighting suddenly, it pecks and tears at the wound it abandoned two days before, eats its fill, gulping the pieces, and then flies away. The other reporters think that they understand this, but they don't, and I resent their resentment of me. So I sneak in, keeping my coat on, walking along the back wall of the newsroom, scowling, not saying hello. Go away. Don't bother me. I just cheated on my wife.
Richard Lancaster tore
out
his tubes
, said Bobby Dealy's strangely precise handwriting on the piece of paper taped to my screen.
Dying pretty fast
. This was the fifty-six-year-old insurance man who had killed Iris Pell. The longer he lived, of course, the better the story. I stared at my notes from the day before. The jagged scratchings disgusted meâhow was it possible to describe what had happened to Iris Pell in eight hundred words? Did anyone care? What did a column about her amount to, really? I'd rather be in Caroline Crowley's shower. I called the hospital, where I knew the spokesman; he would only state that Lancaster's condition had worsened due to infection in the brain, and would not comment on whether Lancaster had successfully pulled out his tubesâthe admission of which might be used by Lancaster's family to allege that the hospital staff silently overlooked his actions, which was probably the case. “The word is he tore out the
tubes,” I told the spokesman “I can't confirm,” he answered. That meant
Yes, but get another
source.
Maybe this wasn't the way to work the story; all the TV guys would be on a Lancaster deathwatch. And the only good source would be a nurse or orderly, who by now had probably been silenced by the hospital administrators. I flipped over the pages of my reporter's pad. The last number belonged to Iris Pell's mother. Maybe she would talk more easily knowing Lancaster was on the way out.
I love deadlines, I flirt with them, I caress them and make promises to them, I lie to them and to myself about the lie. But the deadline always arrives, and so it was time to call the mother of the dead girl. You have to do this carefully. Someone has died, for God's sake. Ten years ago I used to blow this kind of call when I was in a hurry. Now I almost always get it right; you have to respect the grief, not be rattled by it or embarrassed for the person. You have to stand and take it, just unfold yourself to it, and forget about the deadline, forget about everything else, and when you have forgotten everything else, they know that you care and they tell you, which is what they really want to do. I call this the point of dilation. On the phone Mrs. Pell was careful at first, as if she were biting her fist before saying anything. Then she opened up a little. Then gushed. No one had talked to her, no one had
asked
. Her daughter had walked at ten months. Her daughter had shown ability in math at age four. Her daughter had raised goldfish when she was seven. Her daughter had given blood every six weeks since she was eighteen. Her daughter had studied accounting. Her daughter had gotten a job that paid $41,000 and, after a few years, had joined a health club in Midtown, where, in the manner of the age, huffing professional people pedaled stationary bicycles stationarily or climbed mechanical stairs mechanically. In the lobby of the health club, some enterprising memberâno doubt an investment bankerâhad placed a stack of prospectuses for an IPO, an initial public offering of stock in a company. It was a strange place to find an IPO prospectus, which of course was the idea, since people might actually look at it, and Iris Pell,
the accountant, noticed. Flushed with her workout, possessed of a head of thick dark hair, she, in turn, was noticed by Richard Lancaster, the insurance executive. He made a casual comment. She gave a response. They saw in each other the appreciation for the forms and complexities of money. They discussed the prospectus. How amusing that it was sitting in the lobby of the health club, what a comment on the way we now live. Hah. Yes, hah. And so on. What they were really discussing was the prospectus for a relationship, and in that first ten minutes, in the nodding and smiling and careful observation, the deal was made. No matter that Lancaster was so much older. Soon came the wine, the bed, the plans. Iris Pell had told her mother everything. Five months later, the Pell family wedding dress, sitting in a cardboard box in a cedar closet in a suburban home in New Jersey, was solemnly taken out of mothballs. Some thirty-eight women had been married in the dress. The seams had been torn out and resewn, the bodice adjusted, either to reveal or conceal cleavage (depending on the charms thereof, the mother's concern with appearances, and the daughter's sauciness), but the dress, the basic dress, had wrapped in whiteness the dreams of thirty-eight women over a span of ninety yearsâalmost all of the centuryâmothers and daughters and cousins and daughters-in-law, and although the lace had been defiled with perfume and lipstick and cigarette ash and champagne and cake icing, and although a typical percentage of the marriages had gone bad, the dress itself remained sacred to the Pell family; the dress suggested to a working-class New Jersey family that they had values in a valueless world. Yes, Iris Pell's wedding dress had made its last, late-night dance under the fluorescent lights of a Chinese laundry on the Upper West Side, that last dance being the sudden turn that Iris Pell took when she glimpsed her jilted lover, Richard Lancaster, as he lunged into the shop and fired the gun he was carrying, the bullets perforating the wedding dress before they perforated Iris Pell's heart, and then, from afar, the heart of her mother. The daughter fell, the killer fled, the police arrived, the mother grieved. The dress was quickly photographed by the police and returned to the mother, who,
possessing a mother's knowledge of the sacred and the profane, had the wedding dressâ
her
wedding dress, her
mother's
wedding dressâincinerated. And then, weeping, told me about it: “I had to do it, you see, it just wasn't right to keep it anymore. I didn't even discuss it with my husband, Mr. Wren, I just had to do it. I could never look at that dress again, I could never ⦠Iâplease excuse me a moment ⦠I'm sorryâshe was my daughter! She was my daughter. Why is my daughter gone? Why won't anyone tell me?”
Yes, Bobby Dealy was right, I like the romantic angle. And if the newspaper column is a vulture, then it restores me even as it tears from me. Listening to, say, the grieving confessions of a humble, decent woman in her kitchen in New Jersey, I find that there is a moment when I am made whole by her suffering, when I glimpse the humanity of a stranger, am made better than I really am.
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When the column was done my thoughts returned to the previous afternoon, and I suppose that if my marital guilt were a cave, then I meant now to feel along the dark, damp walls for the sharp places and for the size of the cavity I had opened within myself. I wanted to mull the thing over, to decide whether I was to make a confession of it to my wife and, if so, when and in what form. And if there was
not
to be a confession, then how was I to think of myself? I expect that other adulterous husbands ponder the same questions. I also expected that Caroline Crowley might appreciate my ambivalence, my hesitation, and, in this, not press me too soon for more contact. And perhaps she had her own remorse to plumb, given that she was engaged to the young executive I'd seen at Hobbs's party. But I was wrong. No sooner had I shipped the column than she called.
The talk between us was brief and full of more sexual possibility. I told myself never to see her again and I told her I'd meet her in half an hour uptown at a place off Park Avenue with a lot of abstract fish sculptures on the walls. I got
there first and asked the waiter to keep the wine list, and then there was Caroline outside the restaurant window, in a fur and blue jeans, and I knew all over again why I had done it She came inside, and all the men looked, and they kept looking as she took off her coat and handed it to the waiter. Now their day was just a little better; they were keeping a bit of Caroline for themselves, taking her in and putting her in the place where the private treasure was kept. She kissed me, and sat down with the happy sigh of a woman who has just walked twenty blocks in the Manhattan air, her eyes bright, seeming younger than when I'd first met her.
“I like this place.” She looked around. “You come here a lot?”
“Never.”
“Are you hiding me?”
“Yes, but in plain sight.”
“What if you see someone you know?”
“I won't.”
“You might.”
“Yes, I might.”
She giggled. “I could pretend to be your wife.”
“Won't wash.”
“I could be your assistant.”
“Don't have one.”
“I could be an important source.”
“You are an important source.”
“Of what?”
“Guilt.”
“Well, I don't feel guilty,” Caroline announced. “I know I seemed sort of contemplative before you left, but I'm not moody or glum or anything, I was just thinking about how sweet you were and how I wanted to tell you some things and how it was kind of hard to do it, and so I think what I'd like to do is just show you and then take it from there. IâI'm ⦔ She played with her napkin, and I saw her fingers were trembling, ever so slightly. I'd held those fingers, against the sheet. “I'm actually sort of alone, Porter. I see Charlie, you know, but he's young. I mean he's a very good person ⦔ She lifted
her eyes, anxiously, and then looked down again. “He thinks we'll get married this June, probably ⦔ She waved her hand in disgust. “So, this is sort of a long way of saying I want to show you the thing I've been talking about. This afternoon. Now. If you have time.”
I nodded. We fell silent and I ordered a pot of tea against the cold. Caroline desired something particular from me, and what it was I couldn't sayâat least not yet. She clearly wanted attention, even love, but there was no reason for her to think that I might provide her with these things, for my energies, as was obvious, were almost entirely devoted to my family and work. And if it was sex she was after, thenâwell, I suppose I'm as adept as the next guy, but if she wanted to pick and choose, all she would have to do was hang out in a bar for a minute or two and she could have turned up the lover of her choice. And this goes for all the lesser distractions, too; she could have turned up brilliant conversationalists, starving prophets, sweet-tempered heroin addicts, cold-knuckled businessmen with expensive hobbies, magnetic ghetto activistsâwhomever. I was a married newspaperman. It didn't make much sense to me. It didn't need to, not yet.