John Kenney - Talk to Me

She lifted a wet leg out of the tub and admired the shape and tone of it. She briefly toyed with the idea of pleasuring herself but felt she should listen. She had a decision to make. Tamara’s job, as she saw it, was simply this: to see into the future. To see what the world would be a month from now, a year from now. To read the landscape as it was being written and formed. To date in her career she had been exceptionally good at it.

What should she do, head of a large, plodding American network, an old-school newscast that was losing one million viewers a year but that still made substantial profits? Should she stand behind a man who’d been with the company for twenty-plus years, a loyal and valued employee, the face of the news division, the nightly news leader half a dozen years in a row? Should she mount a campaign of apology and support? Or should she realize that Ted’s time was over, that the past meant nothing now, that he had committed a cardinal sin in the new world; he, a rich, famous, privileged person, had been caught on camera spewing his wrath.

She knew her answer. But she needed to wait for the emergency board meeting tomorrow. In the meantime, it was agreed that an apology was needed. Ted said he would write it. Tamara hung up, called Maxwell, her head of PR, and told him to draft one instead.

Murray was in early. He liked the office before the phones started ringing. The newswriting staff worked most nights until seven or eight, so most people didn’t start arriving until nine or ten, unless they were on the morning show.

He sat with a large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, black, and read the paper versions of The New York Times , The Washington Post , and the Daily News , and, presently, the New York Post , which he leafed through quickly, holding its pages as if they might have dirt on them. In all of the papers he scanned headlines, read the first graph of a story, sometimes more, looked at the photos, read the captions. He saved the Times book review and crossword for lunch at his desk.

Papers finished, he should have begun work on a long piece they were preparing on an upcoming United Nations assembly. Instead he watched the video again. He’d seen it, of course. Everyone in the newsroom had the previous day, when it had broken. You heard it as you passed an edit bay, as you passed one of the kitchenettes. You heard it from a desktop or an iPhone. Reactions varied. Lots of men laughed. It was the clueless laughter of man-boys, of white guys, frat guys, former lacrosse players, men whose façades projected an All-American decency but whose deeper beliefs were far less attractive, especially about women.

Nice tits.

See that ass?

I’d fuck that.

Laughter all around.

They saw nothing wrong with these comments. So Ted let off a little steam. Lighten up. What’s the big deal?

The three of them had watched it together. Grace, Jagdish, and Murray.

“This does not strike me as the Ted Grayson I know,” Jagdish had said.

“We don’t know the context,” Murray had said, desperate to protect Ted.

Grace shot him a look.

“I’m just saying,” Murray said sheepishly. “Maybe the girl…”

“Woman,” Grace said. “She’s a woman. Not a girl.”

“Sorry. Woman. Did she say something to him, piss him off? We don’t know the context.”

“Maybe she was having her period, Murray. You know how annoying that can be for men.”

“Oh my,” said Jagdish.

“I’m just saying…”

“Why do you fight so hard for him and not her? Why do you assume she’s to blame when he used those words?”

Grace didn’t wait for an answer, though Murray didn’t really have one. Not one he would ever share, anyway. His only answer was that he simply couldn’t allow himself to believe that the Ted Grayson he had worshipped for twenty years would be capable of saying that.

So Grace worked on a story about Syrian refugees, Jagdish had wildfires in California, and Murray worked on his long piece about the UN. They spoke little the rest of the day.

Jagdish and Grace walked in together that morning and Murray briefly wondered whether they were having an affair but then recognized the thought for what it was: the thought of a jealous man who hadn’t had a girlfriend in many years.

Murray looked up, his version of “Good morning.”

Grace and Jagdish took off their coats and settled in, stared at their computer screens. Each went about their tasks, quietly tapping away at keyboards, cross-referencing facts, double-checking population numbers, casualty statistics, the spellings of names in Urdu, Hindi, Mandarin. The speed at which fire moves. The number of people a wooden boat normally holds, the amount of time a body can survive in fifty-eight-degree ocean water. Arcane, seemingly meaningless things that were the backbone of news. Unalloyed facts. Truth. The last stronghold of democracy. Or so Murray believed.

Murray was in the middle of writing this sentence—“While the Russian ambassador was later found to be drunk during his speech…”—when he looked up and said, “He made a mistake.”

Grace and Jagdish looked up at him.

“What was that, Murray?” Jagdish said politely.

“He’ll apologize,” Murray continued, as if to himself, as if trying to convince himself, as if he hadn’t been shocked by the video and deeply disappointed. “I heard talk… They’re going to do an apology.”

“That would be wise,” Jagdish said. But Murray wasn’t really talking to Jagdish. He needed Grace to make it right.

“Grace,” Murray said.

“What?”

“It was a mistake.”

She was staring at a spot on the floor. She stood suddenly. “I’m getting more coffee. Anyone?”

Jagdish shook his head.

“Grace,” Murray said again, more urgently.

She turned and faced Murray.

“A mistake? Have you lost your fucking mind? I was on the phone with my sister last night, who urged me to quit in protest.”

“Grace,” Murray said. “Let’s not overreact…” He knew it was a mistake, a poor word choice, the moment it was out.

“Don’t you dare,” Grace said, angry.

“I’m sorry… I didn’t…”

Grace stared at him and said, “You have no idea what it’s like to be a woman.”

And she walked out.

It was Christmas morning at Fox News, CNN, MSNBC. The websites—TMZ, Vice, Huffington Post—were giddy. They’d caught a great white. Their anchors and bloviators, their consultants in psychology and sociology, on anger management, on brain trauma (a story that surfaced briefly claimed Ted had suffered a head injury years before during a car accident; although the story was totally without foundation, CNN reported it for seventy-two hours). They spoke with earnest expressions, exactly like Ted would have done had he been reporting on some poor sap who had made a mistake. They played their roles, one talking of how we can’t rush to judge, the other talking indignantly about a nation’s trust, about anger, about white privilege, about how we really know so little about people in power, about misogyny. They spoke with the surety of people who knew nothing.

Tamara woke early and went to the pool to do laps. So she missed Hal Winship on the first hour of the Today show. Some smart producer had gotten him in and there was Savannah Guthrie showing Hal the video of Ted on a large screen behind them and asking him the question “Should the anchor of a major network news organization speak this way?”

Before Ted sat in the chair, Hal Winship invented the chair. Hal invented the news. Hal was better in every way than Ted and his phony, coiffed colleagues. Hal was eighty-two with the hairline of a twenty-year-old. He was Harvard when Harvard turned out diplomats, philosophers, and presidents, not bankers and twerps who built websites.