Authors: Katia Lief
“Oh, sure, if I can. I’ll ask around about how that works. But shouldn’t I read something of yours first? Do you have any writing samples?”
“Definitely. I’ll send you something.”
I folded the wax paper around my remaining sandwich and shifted to reach into my purse. “Here, I’ll give you my email address.” I fished around for my business card holder.
“It’s in the company directory,” he said. My heart jumped at that: had he already looked me up? “Isn’t it?”
“You’re right, it is.” I dropped the card back into my purse and looked at my watch. “Better be getting back, don’t you think?”
“My supervisor would think so.” Joe laughed and so did I.
As we left the lawn behind us and were on our way out of the park, past the fountain, my cell phone began its ragtime ring. The call was coming from a cell phone number I didn’t recognize but I had left a lot of messages that morning and so I answered it with my workaday greeting: “Darcy Mayhew speaking.”
“You have questions about Atlantic Yards.” It was a man’s voice, one I didn’t know.
“Yes, just the one lot. Who is this?”
“Not now. Meet me at the lot, tomorrow, six a.m. I have something to tell you.”
Before I could protest –
Who are you? Why so early? Can’t you tell me on the phone?
– he hung up.
My heart raced as I closed my cell and walked alongside Joe through a lunchtime crowd that hadn’t thinned at all since we left the office.
“Everything OK?” Joe asked.
“Yup.”
“If I were a parent, I think I’d always worry in the back of my mind about my kids, you know? When I wasn’t with them.”
I looked at him. He wasn’t a parent so how could he know about that? Had his own mother over-worried about him? I did think about Nat when we weren’t together, but he was thirteen years old and already, two months in the city, knew how to get around on his own. And I was learning that it was time to start giving him some space and independence.
“I try not to worry about him too much,” I said. “He’s a good, smart kid. And trust me, you learn early that if you worry too much you’ll go insane.”
“So the call wasn’t him.”
“They’re not allowed to use their phones during the school day. Is that why we’re talking about this?”
“Because your phone rang.”
“My phone always rings.” Though not with anonymous callers.
“I wish mine rang more.”
That was a remark I simply could not respond to. I was out of gas for Joe. My mind was already back at work:
Who was that caller? What could he possibly have to tell me that couldn’t be said on the phone?
We passed through the revolving doors into the lobby of our office building. It was relief to be back,
to
have finished with that lunch. I had done my duty by Joe. I would complete my duty by reading his writing sample when he gave it to me. If appropriate, I would pass along his name to the
Times
’ internship program. And then I would be finished with any obligation I might have to this earnest young man.
We waited for an elevator, I for one going up to the newsroom, he for one going down to the mailroom. The indicator lights above the elevators showed us that mine would arrive first.
The door opened with a
ding
. “That was a nice lunch,” I told Joe as I stepped inside. “Thanks.”
“Maybe we can do it again.”
“Maybe. Work’s about to get pretty busy, but we’ll see.” The elevator door scrolled shut.
Finally
. It really had been kind of a pleasant lunch and I wasn’t sure why I felt so glad to be away from him. But I did.
The newsroom was busy when I returned just after two o’clock. Afternoon was the time when every work shift intersected. Morning reporters were finishing up. Evening reporters were getting started. Regular nine-to-fivers like me were eating at desks or returning from lunch. (Nine-to-five being a misnomer, of course, since most of us never stopped working. We tended to carry our company-issued laptops everywhere we went. Some reporters even claimed to sleep with them in their beds.)
Keyboards
clacked, voices hummed and even in this age of cyber-documents papers littered desks like fallen leaves. Desks were pressed together, separated by aisles punctuated with support columns decorated by clocks, calendars and maps. Personal muses, things like family photos and children’s drawings, were positioned low to give a sense of individual space and also to spare everyone else your idiosyncrasies. One desk, however, stood out. A political writer of some renown had built a castle wall out of Lego pieces glued together along the aisle edge. Incredibly, with all the activity, with people whizzing along the aisles in pursuit of late appointments or extra coffee to fuel whatever story they were chasing at the moment, that Lego wall was never compromised. Not even a dent. I had come to think of the newsroom as a stage where a kind of dance took place. Despite the clutter, there was a sense of precision here, a Pilobolus of highly intentioned actions and reactions which each day resulted in one of the world’s most-read newspapers.
I walked to my desk, greeting anyone who wasn’t absorbed in something. On the way, I ran into the city editor, Elliot Lee. A skinny man of about forty-five, with sleek black hair grey-dusted at the temples, he was the most formal person in the newsroom and looked terrific in the handmade suits he wore, like
today
, when he had meetings with outsiders. Other days he tended to dress down in pressed grey pants, blue shirt and no tie, trying to fit in by being more relaxed without compromising his authority. It was a delicate balance, which I understood perfectly. Like me, his parents were immigrants, in his case from China, and he was always on the lookout to squash any tendency that might set him apart. One day, without explanation, he wore a peace medallion around his neck, an experiment he never repeated.
Approaching each other in the center aisle, Elliot smiled. His teeth were crowded, with one top front tooth slightly overlapping the other. He raised a flat palm to give me his customary greeting, a stiff high-five.
“How’s it going, Darcy?”
“Great.”
“Need me for anything? I’m out the door in half an hour so now’s the time. Won’t be back until after you’re gone.”
“Nope, I’m good. Thanks.”
We slapped hands, smiled and kept on going.
A knot formed in my stomach. Shouldn’t I take the opportunity, before he disappeared, to tell him about the mysterious call? Certainly it would earn me a point or two that I had been singled out for a scoop. And it never hurt for someone to know where you were at any given time, particularly at odd
hours
of the early morning or late night … No. I wasn’t going to vanish, and I didn’t need to tell Elliot about the call. Not yet. There were more seasoned
Times
reporters than I already working various angles of the Atlantic Yards story. What if Elliot decided to hand my source over to someone else? Besides, it was not unusual for people to contact reporters with tips that were dead on arrival. I would see what it was all about before deciding how to handle it.
Settled behind my desk, I listened to voicemail and checked email. Nothing important. Meanwhile I kept replaying that call in my mind: “Meet me at the lot, tomorrow, six a.m. I have something to tell you.” The tone was confident. From the moment I answered the phone, he directed the conversation. I assumed he wanted to meet early, before anyone would be at the site, so that we wouldn’t be seen together, which meant he wouldn’t want to be associated with the information he planned to give me, which meant it had to be good. I had always wondered how reporters cultivated sources whose assured anonymity promised the best scoops. Now I saw that maybe it was the other way around: maybe the source cultivated you. Freelancers who weren’t famous did not receive such calls. It was because I was here, at the
Times
, that I had been selected to be the recipient of sensitive information and I admit that
this
new sense of position, of nascent power, gave me a small thrill.
“Mom,
be there
.” Nat slapped a blue photocopy onto the table next to my dinner plate with its little heap of chicken bones, bits of yellow rice and smears of whatever sauces and spices made this Dominican takeout so good.
Variety Show
, the blue paper announced. Nat had been putting his all into practicing a song from
Guys and Dolls
.
“They scheduled it for
tomorrow
?” I said. “Does that say five p.m? On a work day? They tell us
now?
I guess they don’t really want people to attend.”
“They sent it home last week. I forgot to give it to you. Sorry.”
“Oh,
Nat
.”
“Can you come, Mom?” Nat, stationed in front of me with his blue bookbag splayed open on a chair beside him, spilling textbooks, notebooks and papers. Nat, who had recently matched my height and was growing by the minute. Nat, with a pimply mustachioed face his father had never seen. Nat, who showered nightly but could never get his suddenly oily hair clean enough. Nat, who was growing that sticky hair into a mop. Nat, my baby, his every vulnerability exposed by hormonal chaos, standing wobbly on the bridge to manhood.
“I’ll be there.” I got up and stuck the paper to the
fridge
with a hamburger magnet that was one of a comfort-food set Nat had given me as a stocking stuffer two Christmases ago. Hugo had taken him to shop for me. “Afterwards we’ll celebrate by going out to dinner.”
“Great.” Nat grinned. “We can grab a bacon burger at Gravy.”
“Ha ha ha,” I said in my most deadpan voice, which set Nat chuckling. It was the hamburger magnet: a constant reminder of my legendary lapse from sort-of vegetarianism. During pregnancy my cravings had centered on red meat. Right after Nat was born I went back to drawing the line at chicken and fish but I was never able to shake off Hugo’s amusement at seeing me consume those late-night half-pounders. He had loved a good steak and my sudden intense relationship with burgers validated his carnivorous appetite. After that, I never again tried to sway him on the issue of red meat though he made a point of buying the organic version, for whatever it was worth.
“I’m thinking more like Japanese or Mexican,” I said. “Pacifico maybe. But it’ll be your night so you can decide – as long as it isn’t Gravy or the diner.”
“Or Boco or Raja House. Mom, there are like a million choices along Smith Street and you’ve outlawed half of them.”
“With so much good food around, we can afford to be picky.”
“If that’s your defense, stick with it.” He winked, zipped closed his bookbag and hoisted it to his shoulder. “I’m going to do some homework.”
“Clear your place first, please.”
“Hey, Mom,
chill
.”
“I am chilled. I just want you to clear your place.”
“Obviously you can’t hear your own tone.”
But what had been wrong with my tone? Lately he’d been accusing me of being “neurotic”. But I wasn’t neurotic; just sad and anxious since losing Hugo. I believed my sensitivity was normal and hoped it would pass. Anyway I figured that my newly teenaged son was himself oversensitive, which was also normal, though lately both of our emotions had run very, very high. Which was also
normal
. Our shock and grief and loneliness for a dead man were
normal normal normal
. Knowing that didn’t help us much, though I found myself constantly repeating the mantra of our normality to reassure myself.
Nat cleared his place with his two-ton bookbag lagging off one shoulder, dipping him to the right. I wanted to point out that this imbalance could someday lead to back problems but kept it to myself.
“How much homework do you have tonight, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Some.”
“I have to be out really early tomorrow morning, OK?”
“No problem.”
“I mean
early
, about five forty-five.”
“Whoa. Don’t wake me up.”
“I won’t, just be sure to lock up and carry your cell phone to school and—”
“Yeah, Mom. OK.
Got it
.”
I smiled at my son. He nodded and smiled back as he moved through the kitchen into the adjoining living room and the staircase leading upstairs where we had our bedrooms.
“I’ll be up in a few minutes,” I said, but he gave no indication that he’d heard me. It didn’t matter. I had decided that this would be my tactic:
To be there for him
, a constant presence, whether or not he asked me to.
To love him
regardless of tone of voice or choice of words or style of clothes or level of attention or quality of attitude.
To communicate with him
without holding against him the silences enforced by unanswered questions or rejected cell phone calls. He was a teenage boy and he showed his love for me on whim. He was the child, I was the grown-up. He needed me and I knew it. And I never, ever forgot that this boy had lost his father.
I scraped my plate into the garbage can, the bones gathering atop a pungent cantaloupe rind from that morning. Mitzi and Ahab, our cats, came running as always on the assumption that sounds from the kitchen meant a feeding; they loved their food. I
rubbed
their faces, scratched their backs, petted their stomachs. When they realized they weren’t getting a second dinner, they wandered away. I did the dishes and shut off all the downstairs lights.
Upstairs, Nat’s door was closed and music was playing. I could see from the cracks around his door that the light was on. He was probably studying – or about to begin.
Nightgowned and washed, I settled into bed with my laptop perched on my stomach. I entered the time and address of tomorrow’s early meeting on my calendar and then made an online order for a few pairs of jeans for Nat to replace the ones from six months ago he’d already outgrown. Then I checked my email – nothing important – and wrote one to my best friend Sara, one of the many treasures I’d left behind on the Vineyard. Moments after sending it the instant message box appeared on my screen telling me that she was online. We rarely phoned each other at night so as not to wake anyone; these late-night chats had become almost a habit.