John Kenney - Talk to Me

Hal Winship’s thirty-year tenure as the most trusted man in America had come to an end the previous year. George Beebe was Hal’s handpicked successor. A good man and a fine reporter, he was an unfortunate choice for the anchor desk. He had a crippling fear that the teleprompter would go down and blinked so often that the network routinely received calls wondering if George was having a stroke.

“It’s New York. They want ratings, not news.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Yup.”

“Who are they replacing him with?”

“They’ve offered it to me.”

If one went back, if one could go back, could somehow look at a life, a marriage, and see the plot points, the X-ray on the light box, then one could see this moment as the beginning of the end. This, to Claire’s mind years later, was the moment Ted began to change.

“Are you kidding?” Claire asked. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

“No,” he said, trying to suppress a smile.

“What… how did it… ?”

“Simon came by at lunch. Said he was taking me out. Said George just wasn’t cutting it. That they’d focus-group tested me and that I’d done really well. Like, really well. And they wanted to offer me the chair. It’s a one-year contract worth five hundred thousand dollars. And if it goes well… there’s more.”

Ted’s salary at the time had been $85,200.

Claire was confused. She wanted to be excited for him but she needed to understand the change. He loved being a reporter. He loved the work and the writing. The chair wouldn’t be that.

“Are you sure this is what you want?”

“It’s the chair,” Ted said, wide-eyed, smiling. “You know how many guys would kill for this?”

“I know. I think it’s great. I just… you’ll be reporting less.”

“I’ll be able to do both. Special assignments, things like that. And it’s New York, Claire.”

She hugged him. Or rather, he hugged her. A huge bear hug, picking her up off the floor.

The phone rang. It was someone from the network. This was another plot point, another shadow on their marriage X-ray. Their little bubble of a family, their small world and needs, just each other and time, a chicken and some wine, some strained carrots and time to talk and be, was slowly, imperceptibly, being taken away. A small fissure. But they couldn’t see it…

After the move to New York, they talked about a brother for Franny. But she’d learned with Franny that she had a unicornuate uterus. Only one fallopian tube worked. Much scarring from the first pregnancy. A doctor on the Upper East Side told them their chances were extremely slim but that she’d had success with a procedure she’d pioneered. They met with doctors, in vitro specialists. It was exhausting and expensive and unromantic.

But again, it didn’t happen. A year, two, three. Coming home from work midmorning to have sex, bright winter light showing every blemish on their bodies, faces turned away from each other, trying to concentrate, Claire desperate for it to work.

Ted closed his eyes, imagined women from the office, pictures from dirty magazines and websites. But he felt guilty doing this. And really, all he had to do was look at Claire, at her lovely face. “Kiss me,” he always said, in the moment before he could no longer hold back. He whispered it, embarrassed at the need for something so seemingly unmanly… so… he didn’t know the word. Claire knew. And kissed him, deeply, passionately. Knew she had that power over him.

It was a boy.

The months during the pregnancy, the planning, the euphoria of finally getting pregnant, changed Ted, Claire thought. He was softer, more caring. When she got up at night to pee, he bolted up. “What’s wrong?” he’d ask. The way a pregnancy alters your worldview. Names considered and discarded and finally settled upon. You think about the person, what he will look like. It will do her good, Ted and Claire thought. A brother to care for, to share attention with, fight with, watch cartoons with. They will have bunk beds. Franny had trouble going to sleep. She was afraid of the dark, needed a night-light, the door opened all the way. Ted and Claire had to keep their door open, too. She had an owl that played music, soothing piano music, on a loop. Over and over it played as she lay there, struggling to relax. Ted would sneak up and watch her sometimes, his heart breaking at this small person struggling so mightily with life.

Claire never looked more beautiful than when she was pregnant. Her coloring was high and healthy in her cheeks. Her breasts swelled and she liked the way her body looked, fully female.

Ted was nine minutes from going live when his phone rang. It was Nancy, Claire’s friend.

“Ted. She’s fine, but she lost the baby.”

Ted did the news, though he remembered little of it, then drove to Westchester Hospital and brought Claire home. She sat holding Franny, silent, tears running down her face. She wouldn’t eat. Ted put her to bed, put Franny down. It was raining. He walked around the house and checked the doors and windows, the small leak in the guest bedroom he’d caulked the previous spring.

He sat up for a long time, looking out the window, listening to the rain, sipping a chilled vodka. Claire’s ob-gyn had come by the hospital room. She said, “The baby wasn’t viable. He wasn’t ready to be born.”

Walter. They were going to call him Walt.

It was Franny’s idea to go away to school.

After the move from D.C. to New York. Then the move to Bedford and private school there. By then she was seeing a therapist twice a week, taking fifteen milligrams of Lexapro, and not talking to Ted. The more they reached out to her the deeper she seemed to disappear into herself. Sometimes it felt like other people were tuned to a very low volume and she couldn’t turn it up. Her brain ran a constant interference, like a foreign government scrambling a channel. Nobody knew her. Not really. Not deep down, not what she felt and thought, who she was. The anger seemed to come from nowhere, overtook her.

She tried not to let others see that side of her. Not at school. Not at squash. Not at parties that she began getting invited to. She was pretty and fit and a cool kid. True, she would sometimes break a squash racket, swear on court. But she won most times. Her coach felt she was fiery. Other players thought she was a psycho (their word). The tantrums turned into more. Hitting her parents. Throwing a shoe across a room, scratching herself until she bled. She was twelve when they began losing control of her.

Sometimes a person had patience. Sometimes you could find it within yourself, after a long day, to sit and listen, to withstand the storm of screaming and thrashing, the hitting. Withstand the umpteenth door slam, withstand another tempest, yet another evening ruined. You tried. The therapists for her. The family sessions. The schools. The camps. The nights of talking with Claire about it. But the more you tried, the further away she seemed to go. The therapist said it was the opposite, that she hated herself. That she desperately needed her parents and that what she was really feeling was a profound anxiety and fear, bordering on terror. So you tried harder. But the job, the responsibilities of it, the travel, the nights and weeks away, at exactly the time she needed you most.

Sometimes a person had patience. And sometimes you didn’t.

Sometimes you said, You miserable, spoiled brat.

Sometimes you said, What in God’s name do you want from us?

Sometimes… no… no, that couldn’t have happened… you said… no… you must have imagined it. But you said it.