“Courtside.” Fred said.
They looked startled. And then wary. “How much you want for it?”
“Nothing. Cost me nothing.” He held the ticket out, leaving to them how to resolve which one would get it. One of them grabbed it, saying, “It’s my turn. You said it was my turn.”
“Fuck,” was all the other one could say, listlessly, suggesting that his whole life had been dominated by ill fortune.
During the first half, the kid had sat next to him, in a state of ecstasy, totally into the game, shouting himself hoarse, arguing with the refs, advising the players, cursing extravagantly at the opposition. All around them, people smiled at his intensity and laughed at his expressions of agony.
Fred had felt stupid, stuck with the extra ticket, embarrassed by his deception of Marion and his inability to think of someone to invite along that he would be comfortable with, but the accident of having provided a seat for that kid salved his conscience. You see it was for the best, he told himself. I’m a good guy, after all.
When they were released onto Seventh Avenue, surrounded by the happy departing crowd, Tom turned to Fred in a determined manner (as though this was something he had been considering for a while and had made up his mind to do because he had decided it was the right thing) and said. “I told Karl I’d drop by the poker game and play for the last couple hours. Why don’t we both go?”
“Uh …” Fred couldn’t think how to put it, and found himself telling the truth: “He didn’t invite me.”
“I know. Cause of crazy Sam. Well. Karl’s being stupid about it. Come along. Sam’s bark is worse than his bite. He’s a child. He has to be told no, or his demands just escalate endlessly.”
Fred tried to refuse, but Tom insisted, and later, sitting at the game, while everybody totaled up winnings and losses, and Karl was busy writing a check to Fred for thirty dollars. Sam said to him, “You really played good poker tonight,” in a tone that implied concession and acceptance.
I’ve won, he thought calmly, without the usual silly rush of adrenaline. He felt like tragic Ray Williams, head bowed, a champion at last, scarred to be sure, but with the home crowd finally — finally, at long last! — on his side.
David Bergman sipped his cold coffee. Presumably that morning its flavor had been heated and reheated away, and now it had even lost that one virtue — heat. But he liked sipping it. He was at the cover meeting, listening to a furious argument between Chico and Harpo over whether the Russian withdrawal from the Olympics was a Nation story (Chico’s domain) or an International story (Harpo’s bailiwick).
David listened dispassionately, enjoying, as were the other senior editors, the spectacle their supervisors were making of themselves. The effort Chico and Harpo put into disguising this battle of ego as a disagreement of substance was especially diverting. Harpo, with his longish blond hair, cheerful open face, and relaxed manner, contrasted well with Chico’s dark-haired, beady-eyed controlled rage.
The majority in the room felt friendlier toward Harpo. He now occupied, and had occupied in the past, a position of less power than Chico, but only part of the good feeling toward Harpo was a result of his having fewer natural enemies. After all, Harpo was a Marx Brother. He hired and fired, he top-edited, he had to (in theory) obey the law of middle management: toady to superiors, bully inferiors. But Harpo, unlike Chico, seemed to take Newstime (its intrigues, its etiquette, its self-delusions) less to heart than Chico. On a week when Weekly’s cover clearly bested Newstime’s, Chico seemed hurt and baffled, a grieving man, while Harpo made jokes, sometimes gallows humor to be sure, but jokes nevertheless, which implied he had a sense of proportion, a knowledge that after all, this was simply a job, and Newstime merely a magazine. Chico made people feel that to point out such an obvious fact to him would be roughly equivalent to informing Genghis Khan that a battle he had just lost was insignificant, and his quest, in general, merely a transitional phase between one empire and the next. Telling Chico the truth might get you decapitated and your head stuck on top of a hot-dog stand’s multicolored umbrella.
Today, however, Harpo seemed to be taking things seriously. “Look, five countries have pulled out. More will follow. There’s no way LA’s problems are bigger news than the international implications.”
“They’re national!” Chico’s voice squeaked. An amusing disparity with his huge body, it brought secret smiles to the faces of the senior editors. David looked away from Mary Gould (senior editor, back-of-the-book) because her mischievously twinkling eyes threatened to crack his smile into noisy laughter. He studied the only neutral face there— Rounder’s. “Who gives a shit whether Yugoslavia will come or not! This is really about Soviet-American relations, the MX, the effect on the election—”
“We’ve heard the list,” Harpo said dryly. “I agree, no question, there are obviously important Nation implications but, my God, how you can argue that the Olympics, by definition, isn’t an international story is beyond me.”
“Excuse me,” Rounder said. There were laughs around the room. But they were cut off by the surprised look on the editor in chief’s face. Apparently he hadn’t meant his polite interruption to be sarcastic. “We’re not going to put this in either Nation or International, are we? It’s the …” He hesitated, as though unsure. “… cover, right?”
David looked down. He had again caught the eye of Mary Gould and several of the other senior editors, and he felt himself want to laugh at their astonishment. It was astonishing. Surely Rounder should know what Chico and Harpo were really arguing about, namely whose writers were more qualified to cover the Soviet withdrawal, and therefore who was going to top-edit the story. Normally Chico could conduct a raid on someone else’s province like this without opposition, but today Harpo had decided to put up a fight (justifiably, David thought, since it really was an international story) and it was up to Rounder (as editor in chief) to resolve the conflict. Apparently he didn’t even understand its terms.
“Yes,” Chico said, his voice loud and impatient, “but who’s gonna write it?”
There was an uneasy silence. Rounder made the situation worse by trying to look imperious to cover what was obviously confusion. “Why don’t we first decide if it is the cover?” Rounder said haughtily, implying that Chico was the one who was asking foolish questions.
“The Russians withdraw from the Olympics!” Chico said so vehemently that a stranger entering the room might think the news had just broken and Chico was a proprietor of several large Los Angeles hotels. “What else are we gonna put on the cover?”
“Robert Redford in The Natural?” Mary Gould suggested playfully. That had been a proposed cover before the Russians had withdrawn, but she was kidding.
Chico, however, wheeled on her. “We’d look like assholes if we did that!”
“Sell more copies than with news that’s four days old,” Harpo said, throwing the line away. He meant this as bitter fact, not a rationale for giving in.
Again Chico chose to attack as though the speaker was in earnest. “Oh, great! So why don’t we just close up shop and let People Magazine handle all the news?”
“Maybe we should go with Redford,” Rounder said, only he was not kidding or musing philosophically. He spoke in a tone of wonder while making the suggestion, as if the notion hadn’t been discussed at all and he had just had a flash of inspiration.
His question hung in the air like a mysterious phenomenon of nature. They all looked incredulously at it, unable to guess at its origin, its future course, or what action could be taken. Primitive tribesmen couldn’t have been more stunned by a comet than they were by this naive indecisiveness.