Marion looked at him. “Right? She’s got a great racket going. Lousy food, horrible decor, the worst tables made into the chicest. The woman’s brilliant.”
Fred spotted the owner seated only two tables away. Marion’s speech, in his mind, was as loud as a PA broadcast in a public school. “Shut up,” he said. “She’s right over there.”
Marion smiled at Tom about Fred and put a hand on his head, patting it. “Poor boy. He lives in fear of everybody.”
Tom’s eyes went to Fred, as though the proof of her observation was visible on Fred. The look burned through Fred. He imagined he could see Marion’s statement click into place for Tom, characterizing Fred for him, belittling him.
“That’s bullshit!” Fred said, desperate to discredit Marion’s remark. “It’s rude, that’s all.”
Marion looked triumphant. “See?” she said to Lear, who was watching with greater interest than he had shown all night.
“See what?” Fred said. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“Fred.” She said this like a command, a confident dog owner announcing: Heel. “Come on. I was teasing.”
“Fred,” Tom Lear said gently. “We’re all afraid.”
“It was rude.” Fred stared at the table. He felt hot in the face, unable to meet their eyes. Somehow he had been made into a jerk. “It was rude,” he heard himself repeat petulantly. He didn’t look up. He knew the shame and hurt would show too clearly on his face. There was a heavy silence before Tom said something — obviously to distract the conversation — about an article in that morning’s Times. Lear kept that going for a while, long enough so that the suggestion they get a check wasn’t placed too close to the angry exchange between Fred and Marion. It was smoothly done. The departure had no more than a trace of the embarrassment of that silence.
But during that silence, during the long moment of peering at the blue-and-white-checked tablecloth, while Lear and Marion said and did nothing to ease his wounded feelings, Fred had felt his bright new world collapse around him.
David, the faithful spy, tattled effortlessly to Chico about the senior editors’ reactions to the cover-meeting argument. David had no worry that by repeating everything said he might harm anyone’s reputation with Chico, because the comments had been universally disparaging about Rounder, even the remarks made by two people whom Rounder had hired. A few joked about Chico’s childish manner but there was admiration for him as well for having called Rounder on his foolish naiveté. Thank God I didn’t volunteer to do this for Rounder, he told himself, watching the pleased expression on Chico’s face. They were having dinner together at an Italian restaurant near Newstime on a Thursday night that looked to be a virtual all-nighter for David. A major Midwestern bank had suddenly appeared near to collapse in midweek and they were scrambling to get a story together. David had put his best writer on it, but his early draft had been awful — the explanation of how it happened was muddled, and there was a complete absence of drama.
“But there is no drama,” the writer complained. “The computers showed up with bad numbers.”
“Somebody punched the numbers up on a terminal, didn’t they? That person had a reaction, didn’t he?” David asked. He wanted to grab the bureau reports and write the story himself. But he had done that early in his tenure as senior editor (doing a total rewrite on one of the aging hacks under him), and Harpo, figuring it out when David submitted the story — he could recognize David’s touch — told him that was not being an editor. “You’re supposed to help the writers write, not make it clear they don’t know how.” Since then he had left them to do the writing, even if that meant five or six revisions to get it right. But the frustration of standing by while someone floundered in waters he himself could easily swim never lessened. Tonight would be one of those late nights that, as a writer, he could have ended early.
Why complain? It had its advantages. He could go to dinner with Chico and do himself some good. And he could drink! He sipped his third gin and tonic (when the thermometer reached seventy-five degrees that afternoon, he decided to inaugurate his summer beverage) and enjoyed Chico’s rapacious pleasure at hearing Rounder criticized. “That’s all,” David finished to the eager face.
“Well,” Chico said. He looked off. “I wish Mrs. Thorn could have been there.”
“She must know.”
“Know what? How the staff feels?”
“No. What a bad job he’s doing. She reads the magazine,” David said, and then laughed at the thought that maybe she didn’t read it.
“Presumably. But she’s happy no matter what’s in Newstime, unless her Washington friends complain.”
David vividly pictured Henry Kissinger, in a tuxedo, at a fashionable Washington dinner party, holding up a copy of Newstime over his (what? lobster newburg?) and making faces, holding his nose maybe and saying, “Yecch,” like a kid rejecting spinach. But no matter how silly he made the image, it still impressed him, as it had years ago when he joined the magazine straight out of college, just how important every word, every decision, every action that a writer or an editor of a national newsmagazine could be. Nobody notices you until you fuck up, he thought with masochistic pride. After all, it takes a pretty tough and remarkable person to withstand that pressure.
“I got to get him off my back,” Chico said.
David nodded. “He’s a disaster.” Is Rounder a disaster? he wondered the moment he had said so. David always retreated from absolute statements once he had made the initial advance. An uncertain general, he preferred to marshal the troops of judgment and seek higher ground rather than commit them to the mess and chaos of battle.
Chico added to his regret by staring at him. His small eyes fixed on David. “Do you think he can last long?”
“I don’t know,” David said. He had no idea. The truth was he found the firing and hiring of Grouchos hard to imagine or understand. Hiring Rounder had been so obviously wrongheaded. An inexperienced outsider was sure to create ill feelings among the veterans — and, predictably, he had. “Maybe she’d be too embarrassed.”
“Mrs. Thorn? Embarrassed?” Chico smiled. Apparently that was impossible, a naive remark.
“I guess not,” David said.
“She has the selective memory of the rich.” Chico went on. “When she fires Rounder, she’ll probably also fire the president of Newstime, thinking, by then, that it was his fault she picked Rounder.”
“We should let him sink,” David said thoughtlessly. He heard himself almost slur the last word. He stared at the water glasses, and they quavered in his vision. I must be drunk, he thought, wondering if his capacity was diminishing.
“What do you mean?”
“Stop protecting his ass!” David said, aggrieved, as though he, not Chico, were the main victim of Rounder’s presence. “He wants to ignore the Russian boycott and put Redford on, let him! He’s the editor in chief. Let him run it.”
Chico shook his head. “I can’t. When she made the decision, she spoke to me privately, saying that eventually she wanted Rounder to become sort of the spokesman for the magazine, help the company formulate new projects, that I would be the editor in chief within a few years. She expects me to watch him. If he doesn’t keep his nose clean. I might be blamed for not having wiped it.”
“Bullshit,” David said. He felt at ease with Chico: his equal. A sudden elevation of status that Chico’s manner— curious, interested, even slightly abashed — confirmed. “She’s suckered you. She knows she needs you to run the magazine. But if you run it for free, there’s no reason to promote you. She can’t ask you to do the work of Groucho without giving you the mustache.”