Laura Lippman - Baltimore Blues

Everyone proved to be Whitney and Tess. The other reporters and ex-reporters hurried back to their jobs, while Feeney turned his beeper off and Whitney phoned the office to say her engine had thrown a rod.

"I'll tell you one thing," Feeney said to Tess when they were well into their third pitcher of Rolling Rock. Whitney was at the bar, trying to convince Spike's cook to make her a sandwich that didn't require frying or grilling. "He read the wrong Housman poem. You couldn't have dragged Jonathan kicking and screaming from these fields, no matter how short-lived the glory."

"What would you have read?"

"Terence, this is stupid stuff."

"Hey, I'm not a Housman scholar. No reason to get rude."

"That's the name, ‘Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff.' It was going to be part of a volume called The Poems of Terence Hearsay . It's about a guy who drinks and eats until he's stupefied."

"That doesn't sound like Jonathan. He ate and drank, but only to fuel some inner machine. He didn't want to dull his senses."

"How's this? ‘Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,/I'd face it as a wise man would/And train for ill and not for good.'"

"Better, but I'm not sold."

Feeney took this as an invitation to perform. He stood up, placing one foot on the booth's cracked vinyl seat, his right arm across his chest. He looked like Washington crossing the Delaware. But when he spoke, his voice stripped of its gruffness, everyone in the bar turned to listen. The words took on an Irish lilt, the kind Tess's father developed midway through a six-pack of Carling Black Label.

"… And down in lovely muck I've lain ,

Happy till I woke again .

Then I saw the morning sky :

Heigh-ho, the tale was all a lie ;

The world, it was the old world yet ,

I was I, my things were wet ,

And nothing now remained to do

But begin the game anew ."

He gave a little bow and took his seat. It was a side of Feeney Tess had never seen. The editors he terrorized would tear him limb from limb if they had ever sensed the melancholy poet beneath the crust.

"How do you know so much Housman by heart?"

"Mad Ireland hurt me into poetry."

"That's Auden, writing about the death of Yeats."

"She shoots, she scores!" Feeney gave her a high five.

Whitney approached with a huge sandwich, overflowing with cold cuts, cheese, lettuce, and hots. "Oh, great, the English majors' convention is in town. How would you like it if I started jabbering in Japanese, my major?"

She took the top slice off her sandwich, picking at the contents with her long fingers, licking mayonnaise from her French-manicured nails.

"Whitney, that's gross," Feeney said.

"Am I offending somewhere here at Spike's? This is the only way to eat a sandwich. Bread is just a buffer, something that gets in the way of you and the meat. It's like the preface and the footnotes. You don't really need it. It's nothing. It's nada."

"Nothing," Tess repeated. "Nada."

"Nada, nada, nada," Feeney droned, then laughed. "An old man is a nasty thing." He was quite drunk, Tess realized.

"Hemingway," Whitney said. " A Clean, Well-Lighted Place . I can play, too."

Tess stood up abruptly, grabbing Feeney's car keys from the table and tossing them to Spike. "Have someone drive them home when they're done, OK?" She turned back to her startled companions. "You're both too drunk to drive. Just tell Spike when you're done, and he'll have someone take you home. And tell him to put everything on my tab." Which was another way of saying it was on the house. Spike had never taken a dime from Tess.

"What about you?" Whitney asked. "Are you in any shape to drive?"

"Unfortunately, yes. I've never been more sober."

In the Toyota she raced along the curves of Franklintown Road, running every yellow light and a few red ones. She took the stairs to her apartment two at a time and thought of Jonathan doing the same thing not even a week ago, when he was on the verge of a discovery. Now she knew what he had felt.

She turned her computer on. Abramowitz's disk was still in the drive. There it was again, the nada wallpaper at beginning and end. But she had never looked at the middle of the long manuscript. That was the problem with shortcuts. She instructed her computer to look for the one word she knew was in everyone's copy, the word one could not write without.

"Find ‘the,'" she told her Mac. The computer complied. Twenty pages into the file, she found the meat in the sandwich.

" Monday, Monday ," it began. " I actually like the beginning of the week now. I can trust this day. I come in, thinking, ‘This time will be different. I will find work to do. I will force them to give me work to do. I will take a criminal case pro bono.' But it's no good. Having forced myself in here, I can't remember what I hoped to gain. I can't bear to practice law, in any form, yet I can't leave here. So I come in each day and draw my percentage as a partner and I count paper clips and I make bets with myself about the seagulls I see outside the window. I can't wait for spring. I wish there were more day games at Camden Yards. With the radio on and a pair of good binoculars, it's better than a sky box ."

The writer-Abramowitz, it must be Abramowitz-had then written in the words to "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." This was followed by several lines of poetry, many of which meant nothing to her. But she recognized Milton toward the end: " When I consider how my light is spent ." This line was repeated for three pages, until it changed subtly: " When I consider how my life was spent ." And then, for two more pages, increasing in type size as if he were screaming: " My life!" "My life!" "MY LIFE! "

It was like a little boy writing on the blackboard after school, but this little boy had devised his own punishment. It was like Finnegans Wake , if Joyce had been a pudgy Baltimore lawyer without much feel for language. It was like a frog dissecting himself. Fascinated, she continued to work her way through the dense, difficult prose.

He wrote about Northwest Baltimore in the 1950s, going to synagogue in the old Park Heights neighborhood, where many of his mother's people still lived. His family apparently was Orthodox, and he was obsessed with trayf .

" I am nine ," he wrote. " I must eat something nonkosher. I have thought about my betrayal at great length. My sin must be a large sin. I walk miles, so I am far from the neighborhood, so I am somewhere no one I know has ever been. Or so I think. I order a cheeseburger and a milk shake. It is amazing how much significance I place on these two foods. I am certain that the world will change when I take a bite from that cheeseburger. And I'm right. I still remember that first bite, juice coming out of the burger like venom, cheese running down its side. I have high expectations for sin, and all of them are met. Sin is wonderful. I will be drawn to it all my life ."

The Proust of Park Heights, she thought. What an odd little guy. Then, just as the narrative seemed to be leading somewhere, he spent ten pages writing the Bill of Rights over and over again, italicizing different words in each version. Was he having a nervous breakdown, or just trying to fill his days, days that were mysteriously empty? A little of both, she suspected.

The Bill of Rights gave way to a discussion of the death penalty, filled with legal cites. Now he appeared to be working on a brief, aimed at releasing everyone from Maryland 's Death Row. But the legal argument gave way abruptly.

" Because I didn't want to face the difficult decisions posed by my personal life, I chose a professional life. Now that I've lost my professional life, I have no personal life to go back to. After being asexual for much of my life, how do I start being sexual, much less homosexual, at age forty-two? I don't have a clue ."