I wrote for him.
I had a readership of one. I needed to turn okay into great.
It was irony itself that creating a story about a dead National Guardsman named Lowell Beaumont finally did the trick.
Of course, there’s a problem with finally getting what you’ve been thirsting for. Once praised, you need to feel it again, to have all that love and approval poured over you like champagne in the championship-starved 2004 Red Sox clubhouse.
I kept it up for longer than should’ve been possible.
I kept it up until it wasn’t possible.
Until I accompanied a certain reporter for drinks, and it all blew up.
During the course of one week, this editor, this friend, went from glorified ombudsman to vilified incompetent. It was followed weeks later by his sudden retirement.
He should’ve known, they claimed-they mostly being all the lesser lights he’d eclipsed on the way up. He should’ve been on top of things. He should’ve been doing his job.
His public desecration was only mildly less brutal than mine, his fall ten times greater.
Of everything I managed to ruin-and I was pretty much a one-man wrecking crew, trashing my career, my marriage, my reputation-destroying him is the thing I’m most shamed by, the worm that continually gnaws at me, that I occasionally try to drown through serial shots of tequila.
Sometimes it makes me dial the number of a faded country house in Putnam County and recite soundless words of contrition.
Hello, I say, it’s me. I’m sorry.
I can picture him there, holding that old-style black receiver in his hand, his bifocals sloped down over his prodigious nose, and I swallow the words down, ingest them whole, and they slide back into my gut and make me sick.
But not tonight.
No.
Tonight I was Carl Woodward, a hybrid between journalistic fervor and rampant horniness. Wine had loosened my tongue, all right; I was up on a soapbox with no intention of coming down. I was showing off.
“We may be in the democracy-exporting business-I mean that seems to be our only foreign policy these days, our crusade-but who protects democracy in a democracy? Those nine geriatrics on the Supreme Court? What protects the USA today is USA Today. Scary, huh? I’m not kidding. Like it or not, democracy’s in the sweaty little hands of the working press. Even if we don’t really know it. Even if we don’t really want it. I’m using we loosely here. Because truth always gets the first bullet.”
Truth-blithely using the one word in the English language I was least familiar with.
I was half-listening to myself, wondering if I sounded like a dangerous madman or, just as bad, a bore. But Anna seemed to be listening with semirapt attention. She seemed to like this me, this superhero of truth, justice, and the American way.
Then she said: “Why did you need a break?”
“Huh?”
“You said you came out here because you needed a break. What from? It sounds like you loved it-your work. Being on important stories. Why did you bury yourself out here? I don’t mean bury-I mean…”
I should’ve been more careful.
I’d started the night talking about things unrelated to journalism, hadn’t I? The New York Yankees, rattlesnakes, Caddyshack. Somehow, without quite realizing it, I’d navigated My Dinner with Anna back into dangerous waters.
“I had a problem at my last job.”
“Oh? What kind of problem?”
“Ethics, sort of.”
“Ethics, sort of,” she repeated. “Something you want to talk about or something you want to pretend I didn’t ask you about?”
“Something I want to pretend you didn’t ask me about.” It’s possible to become suddenly and shockingly sober-my purple haze had disappeared like protective netting blown off by an ill wind.
“Fine. Ethics sounds kind of interesting, though. Even a little dirty.”
“It was. But not in the way you mean it,” I said.
“Oh. Well, whatever it was, I’m sorry. I mean, you obviously adored being a reporter-you’re still a reporter, you know what I mean…”
“I made things up.”
There.
Sooner or later it was bound to come out. Sooner or later, she’d mention my name to one of her friends or acquaintances and they’d tell her how familiar that name sounded-that if they didn’t know any better they’d say it sounded like that reporter guy who nearly took down a newspaper. The one who wrote about things that never happened.
The liar.
“Tom Valle,” she said, as if sounding out a foreign language. “Oh shit.”
I tried to glean what I could from her expression-those few seconds when pure shock left her unguarded. Was it simple embarrassment I saw there? Disgust? Pity?
“Wow,” she said, lifting the wine glass to her lips, then placing it back down on the table with an awkward deliberateness, like someone relearning to use their extremities after a stroke. “When you said you needed a break, you weren’t kidding. Do you mind me asking… why you did what you did? I won’t if you don’t want me to.”
I didn’t respond right away. I could’ve said yeah, I’d rather you didn’t, and changed the subject. I could’ve trotted out something tried-and-true and meant for public consumption only. I was wrong. I didn’t mean it. I was going through a lot of stuff at the time. I could’ve editorialized.
I told the truth.
How it began. The morning I woke up late. The little exercise in creative writing.
“How many times?” she asked me softly. “After that?”
“I don’t know. They ended up auditing every story I’d ever written. They said there were fifty-six of them. Where I’d either partially or totally fabricated a story. I didn’t think it was that much. Maybe it was.”
“Why? You were a good reporter, right? I mean, you had a respected career. You worked at a great newspaper. You didn’t have to.”
You didn’t have to. The great mystery of Tom Valle’s criminal life.
“Ever walk into a reporter bar?” I asked her. “There’s a hierarchy in those places-you’re either holding court or bowing down. Maybe it was nice being bowed down to for a change. Besides, when you’re a mediocre student, being teacher’s pet feels pretty good. Being on page 1 instead of section 2 feels even better. It was nice making the B-list of talking heads, too. I even did Larry King Live. Once-Ben Bradlee was on the panel. Interns from the Columbia School of Journalism sought me out for pearls of journalistic wisdom. Other reporters stuck pins into Tom Valle dolls, when they weren’t falling all over themselves to buy me a drink. Which turned out to be my downfall, actually-one of those reporters bought me several drinks. It’s hard to keep your facts straight on four margaritas.”
She asked me how I ended up here.
“Here’s pretty much the only place that would have me,” I said. “The week I knew the jig was up, that it was all going to come crashing down around my head-the editors were already circling the wagons, beginning to sift through the wreckage; they had forensic accountants checking my expense accounts against my bylines. I mean, if I had eggs and coffee in a diner in New York on the third, I couldn’t have been at a DNC conference in Washington, right? Anyway, I got wicked drunk and went up there at 3 in the morning. I must’ve had the vague intention of stealing anything incriminating, which in retrospect means I would’ve needed a forklift. I don’t really know what I thought I was going to do. I broke into the national editor’s office and tried to find his computer files; I ended up passed out on the floor. It gave them the excuse they needed to press criminal charges, as opposed to just a nice public firing. I got probation instead of jail time-they weren’t going to throw me in jail for that. For one year I did nothing much but hibernate. My PO is related to Hinch Edwards-he owns the Littleton Journal. Hinch took pity. End of story.”