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  A rubber band flew into the air. The editor retrieved it, then picked up a Suffolk County Hagstrom's and tossed it at me. He had the demeanor of a boy who had never been made to sit in the corner, a place he obviously belonged.

  Unless you have Typhoid Mary on the loose, food poisoning rarely makes a great, or even a conclusive, story. Was it the chef's fault? Or the dishwasher's? Have the waiters been spitting on the orders? Did somebody have the flu? Is the place in question a dive or a culinary jewel having a bad night? With Local Clams I could eliminate the culinary jewel possibility. But I did not discount the chance that this was a trick played on tryouts, a test to see if I could make a nothing story into something. Into anything.

  My thoughts were interrupted by a series of loud, quick stomps, an obscenity shouted into the smoky air, a round of cheers. I gazed up at yet another version of the Newsday male, better-looking than the others but potentially certifiable, just like the men I'd known in Albany. Not tall or dark but good-looking, if a bit Napoleonic. He wore a plaid short-sleeved shirt that fluttered in the air behind him as he stomped, more purposefully now, in the direction of me and Mr. Leisure Suit. He pushed by me and slammed his tapered reporter's notebook onto the City Desk Without a City.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the plaid back.

  The back ignored me. “I speak to cops,” he told the editor, slamming his notebook once more for emphasis. “Do not ever ask me to interview a police department public information officer again. I do not speak to anyone in public relations. I speak to cops, robbers, murderers, any level of mobster. I do not speak to PR men!”

  I tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” I repeated.

  “Huh?” He turned. There was a coffee stain a few inches below his shirt collar.

  “You shoved me.” He had curly brown hair, flaming blue eyes.

  “Who are you?” he asked, and looked me up and down. Unlike the other male reporters, he did not attempt to hide what he was doing.

  Without waiting for an answer, he stomped back out the door.

  “He walks fast,” I said.

  The editor stood still. I bet that didn't happen often. “Jim Mulvaney,” he replied, “is, unfortunately, a great reporter.”

  I'll be damned if I am going to spend all this time on a book about my husband.

  I myself went to Midwood High School, which had its virtues, even if being in Manhattan was not among them. Erich Segal, who wrote the best-selling book Love Story—and the movie, too—had been a Midwoodite. So had Woody Allen, although nobody remembered him.

  My high school friends and I played a game called “it could be worse.”

  “Worse than here?” someone would ask. “Worse than Brooklyn?”

  “Yeah.” I'd giggle back. “It could be Long Island.”

  I'd never been to Long Island. But I'd met Long Island kids at summer camp in the Catskills. At home, they lived their lives skittish about the city and stuck in developments—stuck in development, too—where they regularly prostrated themselves so that their parents would agree to give them lifts somewhere. Lifts anywhere. I made friends with one of them and felt proud, as if I had boarded a UFO and discovered an amicable alien.

  That fall I convinced my new friend to flee Long Island and visit me. Her parents drove her in and, when they left, I took her on the first subway we could catch to the city, down into that glorious rumbling darkness that does not exist in the suburbs. As the train doors opened, she clutched my arm and dug her nails in. Afraid of the Seventh Avenue IRT. It was the end of a beautiful relationship.

  • •

  My parents' two-story brick house stood just past the corner of Avenue I and East Forty-eighth Street. It was semi-detached, or semi-attached, depending on your philosophy of life and whether you were standing in the shared driveway or on the neighbors' stoop.

  If you did stand in that driveway and looked on a diagonal across the street, you could see Congregation B'nai Israel of Midwood, my parents' shul.

  A bus ride away, Brooklyn College stood closer to Midwood High School than the shul was to our home. My parents, demonstrating full-blown shtetl mentality, wanted me to graduate high school, cross the street, and go to college.

  I protested. Such an important rite of passage should, I argued, involve more travel.

  “Manhattan would be wonderful,” my mother agreed. “And you can still live with us.”

  It was in reaction to this that I wrote my first piece on deadline: a college admissions essay.

  In five hundred words or less I appealed to the higher sensibilities of the State University of New York in Albany, a comfortable 162 miles away.

  “Had I not been so busy with my numerous and varied extracurricular and charitable activities, I would have no doubt aced my SATs.”

  I vowed that when I graduated I would get a newspaper job in Manhattan, a reporter's dream, the city with the best stories in the world.

  CHAPTER 3

  Tryout with Stories

  No one had ever told the young manager of Local Clams not to talk to reporters.

  “So you fry fresh seafood?” I asked. We were only a few miles from the renowned clam beds of the Great South Bay.

  “No way,” he replied gravely. “Ours come frozen from Maine.”

  When he blurted out the names and addresses of two sick customers, I thought I had died and gone to Reporter's Heaven.

  Hagstrom's in hand, I located a bivalve victim. Giddy at the prospect of being interviewed by Newsday—and from throwing up too much—she threw open the doors of her aluminum-sided palace and made coffee.

  I did not have the heart to tell her I was only trying out.

  “Local Clams is my favorite restaurant,” she said, giving me the only quote I needed.

  “Why, I've been going since I was a girl.”

  When it rains it pours. Who knew Long Island had history?

  At the nearest emergency room, though, the physicians all refused to comment, citing “privacy,” as if they wouldn't cough up the goods on every one of their patients if some highfalutin medical journal wanted to study the bacterial implications of improperly defrosted bivalves. In the hospital lobby, I consoled myself with the best friend a reporter ever had, the local phone book.

  The headquarters of the Long Island Baymen Association—LIBA—stood, like its address said, at the end of a dock.

  To get there I had to walk past the rank and file, a bevy of baymen. Neanderthal peering, I concluded, was endemic in Suffolk County. They were still staring as I knocked on the sinister-looking door.

  “Is this a subversive organization?” I asked the man who opened it.

  His eyes—green—twinkled as he looked out at the placid bay and introduced himself as “LIBA's Chief Information Officer.”

  I twinkled back. He was tanned, with a graying beard, wide smile, good teeth. If he was chief, could there be more? I myself had no problem with PR men, particularly one like this. If I followed my own rule and believed only half of what he said, I'd be okay.

  We discussed the importance of buying local shellfish.

  Clams, though, were not an aphrodisiac.

  “Do you harvest oysters?” I asked the bayman/PR man.

  He said he didn't, so I drove back to Ronkonkoma. It was too close to deadline for a romance, anyway.

  As I reentered the Gloomroom, a swarm of newly arrived assistant editors flitted around Leisure Suit, begging to edit the day's best story, whatever that could possibly be.

  The editor swatted his assistants like flies. They were all male. His, though, was the only suit.

  “I'm a natural for clams,” one of the acolytes insisted. “Who's got the clams?”

  “Fischkin,” Leisure Suit informed them, as if I was miles away instead of standing right in front of him. “She's got the clams.”

  “Who's Fischkin?” the assistant asked.

  Still ignoring me, he motioned the boys into a circle around him.

  “Tryout with tits,�
�� he mouthed.

  Didn't this place have a women's discrimination suit? Even the Times had one of those. I skulked over to my desk, reminded myself that I had been granted a coveted tryout at America's Finest Suburban Newspaper, and wrote quickly. These computers might be new but I didn't trust them.

  I hit a button and heard a printer rattle in the distance. Before I could get up, one of the Men Who Didn't Write Naked Came the Stranger rushed over, shook his head, and pointed to another key: “Send.”

  So this was how a modern newspaper worked.

  “Fischkin, get over here,” Leisure Suit bellowed minutes later from the City Desk Without a City. He was playing with his own keyboard. The “Y” fell off and he stuck it back on. “You call this piece of shit a story?”

  Investigating clams—and then rewriting a perfectly acceptable story about them—seemed like a day's work to me. So after I sent Leisure Suit the “improved” version and answered a few dumb copy desk questions, I said I'd see him tomorrow. He shook his head and threw a ball of paper at me.

  “Open it!” he ordered jovially. The newspaper union, I knew, did not make him pay tryouts overtime.

  It was rumored—to a reporter looking for a job there is no word more depressing—that an unnamed state political figure planned to make a fortune selling high-priced disaster insurance to people who lived near the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant.

  A guaranteed IPdoubleS. Impossible to Prove Shit Story. And, without a name, what was I supposed to do? Call up everyone in the phone book and see who confessed?

  No. That wasn't what this excuse for an editor wanted.

  I was barely back at my lowly tryout desk when he made his way toward me, taking a circular route. What he wanted to do was stand at my desk and listen as I called my sources, so he could see who I knew and what phone numbers he could steal. How long, I wondered, would it take to break out of this office and flee these suburbs altogether? Get to Queens, at the least.

  He shot a rubber band in the air.

  “Thought you'd never ask,” he said, although I hadn't. “Stanley Steingut!”

  My mouth dropped open.

  “Big-time, huh?”

  “Big-time, yeah,” I said, trying not to giggle.

  Stanley Steingut, now on a voter-imposed “hiatus from politics,” had been a powerful Brooklyn assemblyman for a quarter century—and the speaker of the state Assembly in Albany.

  Which meant I knew him from two places.

  Even better, I'd been interviewing him since I was three years old.

  I dialed Steingut's office in Brooklyn.

  His secretary told me her boss was at a cop funeral; a local precinct captain had died.

  “I knew you couldn't do it,” Leisure Suit said as he bent over and tapped the letters on my keyboard. I examined this oddly dressed, twitchy man.

  “Watch this,” I said.

  I asked Steingut's secretary for the number of the funeral parlor that had the cop, then pointed to the phone. “These prehistoric contraptions have a speaker?” I asked Leisure Suit. The editor nodded emphatically as he pressed a button on the console.

  “Sweetheart!” Steingut's voice, hoarse from cigars and recognizable, boomed out over the Gloomroom. “How's ya pop?”

  Some of the Men Who Didn't Write Naked Came the Stranger stopped typing and swiveled to listen. I waved at them.

  “Stanley, I hate to make you confirm this . . .” Leisure Suit shook his head, flung a rubber band into the air.

  Steingut's heavy breathing resounded throughout the Gloomroom as we chatted.

  “Of course I'm selling people that insurance,” the former speaker of the state Assembly boomed into the phone. “It's a public service.” I ducked as Leisure Suit flung another rubber band, this one aimed better than the others, and wandered away.

  When I hung up, the Men Who Didn't Write Naked Came the Stranger applauded.

  I called Steingut's clients. They told me that buying insurance would move a nuclear disaster to the other guy's backyard.

  “You should get some yourself,” one of them urged before I had time to explain that I didn't have a Long Island backyard and hoped I never would.

  I finished the story and pressed “Send” as Leisure Suit made another uninvited appearance at my desk and instructed me to meet him in his “inner sanctum,” a hole in the wall behind the Gloomroom. The only furniture was an oversized desk chair that must have once belonged to a fatter editor.

  “How'd you do that?” he asked.

  “My father's been the president of Steingut's shul forever.”

  “Sounds Communist.” He twirled his too-big chair.

  “Would make the Kremlin weep,” I agreed.

  He completed another full twirl on the chair. “Fischkin, I like your work,” he said as he pulled a thread from the upholstery.

  I looked at him skeptically.

  “Ah, the clam story. That was just a test. You didn't yell back. We like that here.”

  What they liked was running a prisoner-of-war camp.

  “I'll let you in on a little secret, Fischkin, a professional secret, a reporter's tip.” His chest puffed with journalistic pride. “If an editor is yelling at you, it helps to think about something funny.”

  A technique I had already mastered in Albany.

  I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Leisure Suit without his leisure suit.

  • •

  The hotel where Newsday sent me for the night was not in Ronkonkoma but in another place, called Bohemia, which couldn't have been farther from the truth. One exit east on the Long Island Expressway; one more exit beyond civilization. I was now sure that I would be stuck in the middle of Suffolk County for the rest of my life. I drove ninety miles an hour hoping to break the curse and got a speeding ticket instead.

  I fell asleep too fast and dreamed not about an editor not at leisure, as I had feared I would, but about a man robbing a train. A bank, too. Jesse James with a hint of a brogue. A blue-eyed Clyde Barrow without Bonnie.

  When the posse found him, he said, “I do not speak to anyone in public relations.”

  My best friend, Claire Farrell, bristles when I suggest that perhaps she's the one who should tell her life story.

  “My life is true,” she sniffs. “You made up your life.”

  “You're confusing me with Mulvaney,” I tell her.

  “Impossible. How could I confuse two people who are so unalike?” Claire, like my mother, takes full credit for my marriage. But all she really did was suggest, during my early days at Newsday, that I get Mulvaney in the sack.

  “Remind me again why that was a good idea?” I ask.

  “Compatibility is boring,” she says. “The two of you have a better story, fabrication notwithstanding.”

  “And what story is that?”

  “Screwball comedy, like in the movies. You and Mulvaney are the perfect screwball couple.”

  I don't think this is a compliment.

  “You can't stand each other,” Claire says. “And you can't stand being apart.”

  “Doesn't sound like a very good movie,” I say.

  “It's an entire genre.”

  I review what I know about this and settle on my ideal couple. “Nick and Nora,” I say, kind of liking that idea.

  Claire shakes her perfect blond bob furiously. “Nick and Nora got along. Also, they were cool and calm.”

  Claire's hair used to be long and black, like mine. In middle age, though, she's acquired a new persona along with her new look: deliciously inaccessible. Faced with The Jim Mulvaney Story, I wouldn't mind looking that way myself.

  “He distracts me from whatever I am writing,” I say.

  “He distracts you because you want to be distracted by him. And he wants to distract you. Didn't you learn that years ago? If you just give in and write about him, he will leave you alone.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  CHAPTER 4

  How Could You Be So Stupid?

  I arrived
in the Gloomroom so early the next morning even Jim Mulvaney was at peace. The boy wonder sat quietly, drinking coffee he did not spill.

  At my own desk, a few rows away, I opened the newspaper to my Steingut story on page five. Nice.

  Newsday was a tabloid, in form if not content, which meant that headlines and photographs went on the cover and the best stories of the day ran “upfront,” on pages three through seven. If your story ran there, it meant you'd “got good play.” Everyone said it like that, as if it was a sexual act.

  As a tryout, I couldn't have gotten better play.

  I read my story, sitting sideways. Without moving my head, I shifted my eyes back, far as I could. He was still there. I turned again to the front page—“Steingut in Shoreham Scheme”—and sighed to signal that good play bored me. I got good play often.

  He stood, walked over quickly. Slowly, he held out his hand.

  “Hullo, I'm Jim Mulvaney.” He smiled but not with his mouth.

  He looked down at my legs and quickly up again. His blue eyes seared.

  They also steamed, accused, and sent troops to fight an ill-advised war.

  “Go away,” I said.

  “You always so good at making friends?” He examined me as if he were trying to imagine if I could be interested in him.

  I examined him back, trying to figure out if this was an act.

  He was dressed for a stakeout: cop shoes, another dreadful plaid shirt, coffee stain in place.

  “We've already met,” I said.

  “I don't think so.”

  So he had shoved me and did not remember. This Mulvaney wasn't merely a deranged Irishman. He was a deranged, self-absorbed Irishman.

  “Barbara Fischkin,” I said, knowing I shouldn't.

  “Where'd ya come from?” he asked.

  “Albany.” I'd meant to say Brooklyn.

  “Funny, ya don't look like one of those upstate broads. What'd ya cover?”

  “Mario Cuomo,” I said coolly.

  “Oh yeah? Cuomo. I used to be his paperboy. The old Long Island Press. He lived in Queens, ya know . . .”