John Kenney - Talk to Me

Ted suddenly hated her. He watched the crew member walk away and saw Natalia stare at him with a big smile, a smile Ted took as ridicule. How dare she, here, in his studio. But he would roll with it, showing his professionalism and magnanimity.

Or not.

“ Eye line , you Russian whore!” Ted screamed, his voice exploding through the studio, all ten monitors in the control room showing his rage-filled face.

The moment he said it Ted remembered she was Polish and also didn’t know why he’d used “whore,” a word he hated.

Her eyes went wide.

Sean missed three. He didn’t say “three.” It’s on the tape. He’d been so shocked by Ted’s voice, by the word “whore” and the volume at which Ted said it, that, standing next to the camera, arm up, in control, about to tell the crew they were going live, he missed three. To his great credit, he managed to get out “two” and to point to Ted. He never said one, a thing his boss, his predecessor, had advised him, on the off chance the feed came in a beat early. Sean also hadn’t realized that, with his other arm, he had gently moved Natalia back, as if to protect her.

Sean pointed to Ted, the red light on camera one illuminated, and Ted Grayson appeared in living rooms all over America.

“Our final story tonight took place one hundred and five years ago today, about two miles south of where I’m sitting now, at what was once the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. One hundred and forty-six garment workers, almost all of them poor immigrant women, burned to death. Cary Simmons has our story.”

If you go back and look at the clip—and you can, on YouTube—if you go back and look you can see that Ted wasn’t himself that evening. Notice the sweat at the hairline. It’s minor but it’s there. Notice how hard he’s gripping his pen, the pen he always held during the newscast, during any speaking engagement or interview. How his voice sounded a bit labored. Small things you probably wouldn’t notice during the actual broadcast but that, when it became what it did, when the tape of what would happen next was released… well… you noticed.

They cut away to the prerecorded story as Ted tried to gather his breath. He pulled at the collar of his shirt, as he found he was sweating, which was surprising, considering how cold the set was. He could hear the story, see the video of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A rag caught fire in a sweatshop on the eighth floor. The doors were locked and many of the women hurled themselves from the windows as horrified spectators watched from the streets below.

Natalia was still reeling from Ted’s words. She stared hard at her feet and had difficulty breathing. She wanted to run and hide. She was afraid. She lacked her younger sister’s confidence, her father’s strength. For her, this kind of confrontation was a series of emotional dominoes, trip wires hit in rapid succession; shame/fear/embarrassment/self-loathing/sadness/anger. It took about seven seconds, at which time, without realizing she was going to do it, she somehow managed to force up her own personal flag at Iwo Jima by raising her middle finger and glaring at the king of nightly news. She also managed to mouth, “Fuck you.”

Ted shared Natalia’s shock. Who was this person? How dare she? This was Ted’s set. Ted’s home. It was his goddamned birthday. The feeling that came over him. Like the feeling of having the wind knocked out of you, or hitting your head so hard, as a child, and you knew you were about to cry, to scream and cry, the terrible pain of it on the way, but still a small moment before it came, the inhalation before the scream.

They were suspended for a moment, Ted and Natalia, and neither seemed to know what to do. It all lasted only a few seconds but time seemed to slow for both of them, to hang in the cold air of the studio, her thin, nail-bitten middle finger standing tall, Ted staring back, mouth open, confused look on his face.

For Natalia, he was every asshole she’d had to deal with since coming to this cruel city where people were so rude, so not European, so obsessed with money, so clueless and ungrateful for the extraordinary privilege of being a citizen of this country where taps had clean water, the streets were safe, the government wasn’t entirely corrupt, where the courts meted out justice. English was hard and poverty was harder and the noise of the city was grating and she couldn’t breathe. She worked every day she could. She tried. And this rich man calls her a whore?

For Ted, she was Claire. She was Franny. She was Ted’s brittle and insecure psyche. She was Ted’s bald spot. She was Ted’s dreaded, depressing birthday. She was youth and possibility and hope, where he was the failed old guard. She was lost time and the place Ted rarely went but seemed to go more and more these days. Regret. Where had life gone?

And then a loud voice could be heard. Ted initially wondered where it was coming from but soon realized it was from him. Lou, Sean, and the two cameramen all pulled their headsets off, the sound was so loud.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?!! Show some goddamned respect!” Ted was out of his chair, pointing, leaning over the cheaply made anchor desk. “How fucking… Do you know who I am? I am somebody! I am somebody! I am Ted Grayson! You fucking Russian whore! You’re a Russian whore! Get off my set!”

Lou ran in from the control booth. He’d not seen Ted like this in his three years. The temper, yes. Anger. But not this kind of volcanic eruption. Lou grabbed a production assistant on the set and told him to get the girl out of there. Lou started to make his way to Ted’s desk but Ted held up his hand. “Not now, Lou!”

Lou scurried back to the control room.

Ted’s tongue ran hard against the back of his lower teeth.

Sean, cool as Elvis, said, “Back in five, four, three…”

Ted looked at Sean, then looked to camera. He was rattled. He was blinking too quickly. Two seconds of dead air. Three…

For a second Lou thought the battery in his headset had died. Others thought someone had hit the mute button. They talked about it later, after it all happened, after it got bad. Ted was going out live to eight million viewers and 238 affiliates in all fifty states and Lou actually snuck a peek at the “on-air” indicator because this couldn’t be happening.

Later, people would think—focus groups bore this out—they would think that Ted had been so moved by the Triangle Fire story that he was unsettled. They thought he was being sensitive.

Four, five…

“Ted,” Lou said quietly into his mic on his headset. Mild panic. No. A bit more. Would he have to shut it down? Go to credits?

Six, seven, eight… Jesus Christ.

“Get ready to go to…” Lou started.

And then Ted spoke.

“March 25, 1911. May God have mercy on their souls. For all of us here, I’m Ted Grayson in New York. Good night.”

What man isn’t interested in sex?

For a time, dating roughly to the middle of Ted’s stint as anchor, during which the marriage had fallen into a Cold War–like détente, Claire had focused single-mindedly on Franny, squash, and the Bedford house, with Ted coming in a distant fourth. He worked late hours, traveled often. They went weeks without a meaningful conversation. Yups and nopes. The occasional Franny updates. Passing in the kitchen. True, they were still seen in public at major functions—the Goya exhibit at the Met, the Memorial Sloan Kettering annual fund-raising gala. But it was a farce, neither talking to the other the entire evening, silence on the car ride home, off to their respective corners of the too-big house.

Later, when he would see their picture in the New York Times Sunday Style Section or in the pages of Town & Country , he wondered who they were, those good-looking, happy-seeming people.