Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

On-screen, the white guy is now driving alone through a place with palm trees. L.A.? No, no. Miami. Is that Don Johnson? No. Too fat. The sun bright. The sea blue. Miami. A town he’s never seen except in the movies or TV. And will never see now.

3:45 p.m. Sam Briscoe. His loft, Manhattan.

A siren wakes him. An ambulance, for sure. The soprano sax of emergency. The sound fades but he does not return to sleep. He glances at the clock. Three forty-five. Day, not night. He is in bed in the dark bedroom, but doesn’t remember getting there. He was on the couch. Now he is here, in a sweat suit under the covers. He turns, groping for the cool part of the sheets. As if he can find another half hour of warm darkness.

Why, oh why, do I…

He sees Cynthia Harding for the first time, when she was young and he was too. She is on the stage at the Village Gate on Bleecker Street, and Art D’Lugoff is alive, the guy who ran that wonderful joint, and Charlie Mingus too, and the place is packed. Telling himself now: Write all that. Write her on the stage to make the case for books. Speaking for just a few minutes, too quickly, because she is not an actress. Speaking for the library, not herself. For all kids and all old people and everybody in between. For those who need books in order to live. She quotes Robert Louis Stevenson about how young writers must read like predators. And she says that all of us, not just writers, must read like predators too. For books are food, she says, for every single one of us.

Write how the rich crowd stood and cheered her words in a reserved uptown way, while the jazz crowd maintained its permanent cool, and she seemed embarrassed and made a small nervous steeple of her fingers, and bowed, and then smiled, and Mingus fingered his bass, and the group bounced into “If they asked me, I could write a book…” and Briscoe wanted to meet her. And then D’Lugoff waved him over.

He sits up now, wanting to write for the first time in years. Remembering more clearly that first meeting. When he was still married to Joyce. And Cynthia was married to her first husband, a professor at Columbia. When there was not yet a New York World. When his daughter was not yet born. Cynthia at once shy and strong. A lifetime ago. He stares at his hands. He wants to take a yellow pad and a good fountain pen in his right hand and sit with a board in his lap and write. He knows that his hands have memory. But his hands now are blotched with age spots. They carried no spots when he met Cynthia Harding. Nor did hers. Time does the spattering. Later, she seldom complained about the way they lived in the world. She would sometimes erupt in exasperation, and go away, for as long as a year. She even married a guy she didn’t love, and that was another two years. Briscoe would rush to the safety of covering a war. Or the troubles of others. When they were together again, there was never an accounting. Not from her. Not from him. She didn’t speak about him to anyone else. He lived by the same rule. Once, when she mentioned marriage to him, he told her he didn’t think he had the talent for it.

— Maybe I don’t either, she said.

— Maybe nobody does, he said, and they both laughed.

— What’s the line from Chekhov? she said. If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.

And they laughed again. She tried marriage anyway, that second time, and retained Briscoe as an option to ward off the loneliness. Briscoe — and books too. “With a book in my hands, and a soft light,” she said, “I’m never alone.” And she lived that way, with Briscoe, or without him. She had her year of living dangerously, he knew, but never went into details. He didn’t describe to her his own long series of episodes with women after Joyce died, most of them enclosed in parentheses as part of a longer story. The story that was hers too… At first Briscoe thought she saw him as a book she took down from the shelf, savored, and then returned to a higher shelf. But it lasted too long, like a serial by Dickens that had great gaps and greater and greater richness as it went on. He loved her more last week than he ever had, the richness of her, the plenitude of her that was part of his own consciousness, even when he slept alone. Now, some son of a bitch has torn away the last phase of that long narrative. We’ll never live those final chapters.

He must write it all, Briscoe thinks, good times and bad, cataloging his sins of cowardice and evasion and, yes, cruelty. And all the amazing good times, the laughter, the surprises, the intelligence with which she dissected the world. Write it all, to get it out of his fucking head.

He leaves the bedroom in a heavy robe and walks slowly past the books, wondering how many of them were gifts from Cynthia Harding. Hundreds? Maybe more. She made him promise a few years earlier that in his will he would put her in charge of his collection, and absolutely not allow them to end up on eBay or the shelves of the Strand. He told her that was a deal. He didn’t ask about her collection and where it would go if she died first.

He leans against the bookcase. Fingering the bindings with his spotted hands. He knows that for as long as Cynthia was alive, he was never alone. She’s gone. And now he no longer has the much less intimate comfort of the newspaper. The clock no longer moves without pity to the deadline. No more deadlines. But surely another chapter is beginning in this story without a last act. His story.

4:10 p.m. Bobby Fonseca. Victoria’s apartment.

He wakes alone. The blue door is open, the toilet empty. Nobody sits at the round table, or the narrow desk holding the laptop and printer. Maybe she’s playing games. From under the bed. He speaks her name. No answer. He pads to a chair, finds his cell phone, checks messages. Six of them. One matters. Big meeting in the city room at five o’clock. No guests. Staff only. Maybe that CelineWire prick is right. Maybe…

He returns to bed, lies there. Today’s my day off. Sunday to Thursday. That’s the gig. He closes his eyes. But what if it’s really all over at the World ? The Times is laying off people. Who knows what’s up with the Post and the News ? I see their reporters on stories, they’re very worried. Except the old guys, the guys in their fifties. They figure it’s all over. Playing out the string. Hoping to latch on as flacks somewhere, until Social Security kicks in, or Medicare. Worried about paying tuition for the kids’ schools. Feeding the family. Paying the fucking mortgages. The World dies, my father will say, Hey, I warned you, Bobby. I couldn’t explain to him why I loved it. Going to work where every single day it was something new, some new story, where I could learn about people, and sudden death, and human pain. Not reading about them. Seeing them. Then telling their stories. I tried to explain to him, Dad, I don’t want to be rich, I don’t want to be famous, I want to be good. And he said, Why can’t you be good at something like banking?

Thinking: Dad doesn’t get it. Maybe he never will. And maybe now I can never show him what it means to me. I’m a newspaperman. I’ve got the clips to prove it. I want to be a newspaperman for the rest of my fucking life. But maybe now, it will end. Just like that. At five o’clock this afternoon.

He thinks: What the hell time is it?

And hears a key turn twice in the door lock. There she is. Victoria Collins. Who just wants the chance that I got at the World. Her back is turned as she relocks the door. Shorter than I thought she was when she stood above me at a table, taking an order at Nighttown. A hard firm body. Small breasts. Short legs. Thighs that might get fat, but not for a while. She turns.