Also under my care was a wirephoto machine which, by some electronic process I could never grasp, transmitted images simultaneously to subscribers great and small. Unfurling one afternoon from its slowly turning drum was a picture of a former First Lady arriving at or departing from some airport, her glamorously delicate breasts clearly visible behind a gauzy blouse. Its caption was followed by the parenthetical slug “Editors please note: This photo may contain offensive material.” What, I pondered, could possibly offend? Those royal breasts, curiously upturned like a pair of Persian slippers, with their intimations of…All right then, into the wastebasket, so disposed. On to the next historical square — a ditch full of corpses or a race driver grinning in victory lane.
The wire machines were equipped with a simple menu of alerts: One bell for, say, the World Series final, two bells for a major disaster, natural or manmade, three bells for the assassination of a head of state, and four bells, which could only mean a nuclear exchange, so that every time the system kicked in it brought on a Pavlovian apprehension that this would be The Time, and that fourth bell would go off. What relief to find that it was nothing more than a prime minister fatally slashed.
Yes, many and varied were the mental contortions necessary to the profession. How, for example, to maintain the traditional hardbitten, seen-it-all demeanor alongside reverent gravity for information control and the public trust? How to reconcile instinctive skepticism with the “objective” approach? Much wiser to straggle.
Our newsroom, a large oblong space where bottling operations had taken place in the days of the old milk factory, was irrevocably, if invisibly, divided between the “radio side” and the “TV side.” These phrases were often spoken bluntly, challengingly, in the manner of a Maverick saloon rat, lacking only the casually accurate jet of tobacco juice. If the resentment of the radio tribe — purveying their drab and archaic product to cabbies, potato farmers, and the bedridden — was intense, so likewise was the scorn in which they were held by the glamour boys and girls on the other side of the line.
I straggled sure enough, barely avoiding classification as a deserter.
“If you’re just here to take up space…” warned my supervisor.
Where were my ambitions? My dreams of network glory? Right where they belonged, in the Dumpster with yesterday’s firsthand combat accounts.
“This is no stand-pat type of game,” my supervisor declared, fingering the ivory polar bear at the far edge of his desk.
I said: “Milk but no sugar, right?”
Straggling home from work that night, I came up against Sabra, my moll of high school, in a crowded subway car. She was slender as an asparagus and ripe with patchouli oil. Her eyes glistened. We swayed coyly under an advertisement for breath mints.
“You’re looking great,” I said.
“Your job really sounds exciting,” she returned.
We got off at the next station and found a nearly empty bar. Sabra ordered Kahlúa and milk and I broke the seal on a third pack of cigarettes.
“So I just found a place near Morningside Heights,” erasing milky residue from her lips with curled tongue, “and I’m sleeping in one corner, with paint rags and spackle cans all around.”
I blew across the rim of my beer glass. “Noxious fumes. You should protect your singing voice.”
Behind the words shinily coated with an oozing caution, we reviewed our past, the missteps and misgivings of frightened romance.
“Oh, that’s a lost cause more or less. I’d like to get into personal management now.”
The unfinished business between us would be completed that night, we were confident of that. And as we concurrently imagined each ideal and tender phase, an occult mental fusion — confirmed by what we could see of ourselves in the other’s eyes — flamed inside the forlorn brownness of the nearly empty bar. Sabra’s olive face lightened, expanded, and the Formica seemed to heat and move under my hands. Dazing cranial pressure slowly released and our breathing stopped. I squeezed shut my eyes, wanting to prolong this astonishing conjunction, but it was finished the very moment I did.
Sabra had curtained herself behind a tumble of black hair. My knees shimmied as I crossed to the bar to reorder. Someone dropped a quarter in the jukebox and the garish tones of Sergio Franchi invaded the brown room.
What do you say afterwards? Desperate to fill the emptily echoing air, you may blare out the first and worst thing that comes to your mind. I asked Sabra about her sister.
“Rachel lives in France now. She’s the organist at the cathedral in Arles.”
During the summer between my junior and senior years, Rachel, both tireless and regally calm, had shown me how it was done. By late August ten pounds had drained from me and been soaked up by her designer sheets. Sabra, feigning disinterest, had spent the summer snorting heroin and learning her Sarah Vaughan records by rote.
Now here was a wedge of history to be reckoned with, a site we could spend all night picking through with trowels and sieves and little archaeological brushes. This was history of a kind not so easily disposed of, a deeper stratum. But the reflexes of the newsroom made me incapable of shame.
“A Jewish girl playing liturgical music for the froggies,” I said. “Do you have her address?”
“It’d make quite a feature piece for the weekend news,” the little sister said hopelessly, jotting on a napkin.
We emptied our glasses and went home, she to her noxious fumes and I to a spiral notebook in which I made a few lugubrious attempts at letter writing before shredding Rachel’s address.
It is said that when sparrows in the city of Peking became an infestation, citizens gathered by the thousands in the central square to shout and sing and scream, keeping the terrified birds in the air for many hours until they fell to the pavement twitching with exhaustion and died, also by the thousands.
But we are all individuals here, each in our own precious compartment, walls smoothly spackled and painted sea foam or egg yolk or terra cotta, but rest assured, a color of our own choosing. Multiplicity, diversity — privileges for which to kneel in gratitude and launch red glaring rockets. Inalienable conflict, indivisible confusion. And in our little compartments we hoard like survival rations our opinions freely arrived at (here, here!), our memories of perfidy and injustice, our strategies for advancement and revenge. One nation, underdog. One rugged individual after another pleading for attention. Looka me, ma! Looka me!
And, when it all becomes too much, you may embark — no questions asked — for a tropical isle where unique coral formations may be seen, or for France, where a cathedral organ awaits your special hands.
Back at my desk assistant’s desk next day, I methodically filled the ashtray and beheld the urgent diversities that unrolled from my machines. The governor of Wisconsin revealed that a serious fiscal shortfall was due to his compulsive golf betting, elections in Paraguay were once more postponed, a former middleweight champion appealed for the return of school prayer, black nationalists continued to occupy the lobby of the Dunes Hotel, rivers in the Southwest crested dangerously with more rain expected, preparations were under way for the state visit of Golda Meir, a diabetic Omaha baker was arrested for rape and dismemberment, and angry Sikhs in the state of Punjab had flung a dozen pigs’ heads into the courtyard of a mosque.