"I know you haven't."
She holds her head in her hands, peeking theatrically through her knitted fingers. "I sound so awful when you describe me. And I can't even disagree. Well, I can. But not honestly."
He shifts his stool closer and, as her face emerges, he strokes her hair. He touches her forehead. "You," he says. "You again. You're still dear to me. You are goodness." He smiles. "I told you that before."
She shifts away. "What," she says hurriedly. "What are you talking about?"
"You-you're so driven. Like a mole burrowing in the earth, just pushing ahead. But I remember you." He smiles. "I remember you waking up. You sleeping. You getting the hiccups at the movie theater."
She can't talk.
"But it makes me sad," he concludes. "You make me sad a bit. I still love you, but we're not going to start anything."
Her eyes well up. Quietly, she says, "Thank you." She wipes her nose. "When I'm old and bent and sitting in a chair, you come and hold my hand. All right? That's your job. Okay?"
He takes her hand and kisses it. "No," he says. "When you're old and bent, I'll be gone. I'll hold it now. Later, you'll have to remember."
1962. CORSO VITTORIO, ROME
Newsroom noises drifted into Betty's office: guffaws and murmured gossip, the clack and bing of typewriters, copyboys emptying crystal ashtrays into the garbage can. She sat at her desk, unable to work, spirits sunk beyond all reason.
Ridiculous-that's how she felt. Absolutely laughable. She had no right to be mourning still. To have cultivated the notion that she and Ott had a particular bond. Looking at paintings together. But what about the old days in New York?
Everyone felt this way about Ott, she supposed-this amplified sense of their importance in his life. He had that effect. His attention had been a spotlight; all else dimmed.
However, she had exerted no such force on him. He had left her in New York, had gone back to Atlanta, pursued his life of profit and expansion. He had married, produced a son. Betty should have forgotten about him; his absence shouldn't have mattered as much as it had and for as long. Eventually, she moved away from New York, traveling to Europe to report on Hitler's war. In London, she met a fellow American reporter, Leo, and they married. After the war, they settled in Rome, she consuming more Campari than she'd imagined the first time she tasted the stuff, writing less than she'd planned, too.
Then Ott had turned up, his presence at once magnifying all the small compromises she had made over the years, while offering an escape from them. She wanted to write again and believed she could. He installed her as the voice of the paper. Leo had the title of editor-in-chief, but everyone knew she was the brains of the operation. She came back to life with Ott across the newsroom. But outside the paper?
Ott had never sought to resume anything with her. Their outings to buy paintings, their lunches at his mansion-meaningless. Look, she reminded herself, he never even told me he was sick. He never asked for help. He never contacted me when he was dying. I didn't have that role in his life. I have no right to this grief.
One night, when Leo was out boozing with the staff, Betty took a taxi up to the Aventine Hill and stood before the spiked fence surrounding Ott's old mansion. Nothing remained in there. Only the paintings they had collected together: the swan-necked Gypsy by Modigliani; Leger's wine bottles and bowler hats; the acrobatic blue chickens and emerald fiddlers by Chagall; Pissarro's cozy English parsonage, smoke twisting out the chimney; the sloshing shipwreck of Turner-all of them, hanging in the pointless dark. She held down the buzzer, ringing the empty house, knowing it to be futile yet pressing till her fingertip went bloodless white. She let go; the house fell silent.
Without Ott around, Betty and Leo diverged more and more on how to run the paper. They hid their discord at the office, but barely. So it was with trepidation that they greeted news of a visitor from headquarters in Atlanta: Ott's son, Boyd, who was to pass the summer of 1962 in Rome before starting his junior year at Yale.
Leo, eager to curry favor, lined up a series of glitzy events to impress the young man and dispatched cleaners to dust off the old mansion on the Aventine Hill.
As a teenager, Boyd had flown to Rome each summer to spend a few weeks with his father. The pinnacle of those visits came when he and his father spoke alone. Even Ott's most cursory remarks entered Boyd as purest fact, as certain as the planets. When each vacation drew to an end, Boyd yearned to stay, to quit school in Atlanta, to live in Rome with his father. But Ott never invited him. On the flight home, the teenager mocked himself mercilessly, recalling his errant remarks, stinging at the memory, deeming himself an idiot, a disgrace.
Now, two years after his father's death, Boyd had returned to the city, a young man. To everyone's surprise, he spurned Ott's old mansion in favor of a hotel. And he showed no interest in carousing with Leo and the staff. Boyd disdained alcohol, disliked food, and betrayed no sense of humor. His goal in Rome, he said, was to learn the business of newspapering. But he seemed more interested in learning the business of Ott. "What did my father think about this?" he asked. "And what did he say about that? What was his plan for the paper?"
"The kid strikes me as sort of angry," Betty remarked. "Do you get that at all?"
"Well, I happen to like him," Leo responded, almost scolding.
"That wasn't what I was saying."
Not until Boyd returned to Atlanta did Betty and Leo separate. She liked to say, "I got the record player, he got the paper."
Betty moved back to New York and found a desk job, editing features at a women's magazine that specialized in recipes utilizing cans of condensed mushroom soup. She rented a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn that overlooked a primary-school playground and, every weekday morning, awoke to children's squeals. She pulled her dressing gown from the nail on the door and sat at the window, watching them: boys wrestling, examining bleeding kneecaps, resuming battle; new girls casting about for friends, digging their hands into pinafore pockets.
Betty never did return to Rome.
"THE SEX LIVES OF ISLAMIC EXTREMISTS"
CAIRO STRINGER-WINSTON CHEUNG
HE LIES UNDER THE CEILING FAN, WONDERING HOW TO START. Every day in Cairo, news events take place. But where? At what time? He connects his laptop and reads the local press online but remains bewildered. These news conferences-how does one get in? And where does one obtain official statements? He wanders around his neighborhood, Zamalek, vaguely hoping a bomb might explode-not too close, of course, but within safe note-taking distance. He'd make front page of the paper, get his first byline.
No bombs go off that day, however. Nor in the following days. He checks his email constantly, anticipating a flaming missive from Menzies demanding to know what in hell he's doing. Instead, Winston finds an email from another person trying out for the Cairo stringer position, Rich Snyder, who announces his imminent arrival, ending with the line "Can't wait to see you!"
That's friendly, Winston thinks. But are we supposed to meet up? He composes a cordial response: "I hope you have a safe flight. Regards, Winston."
This prompts an immediate answer: "Hope you can pick me up! See you there!" He includes his flight number and arrival time.
Is Winston expected to fetch the man from the airport? Aren't they rivals? Perhaps it's professional courtesy. Nobody from the paper mentioned this. Then again, he hasn't a clue how journalism works. Since he has nothing else to do, he takes a taxi to Cairo International.
"You came all the way out here-that is so awesome," Snyder says. He grips the younger man's shoulder and lets a bag slide from his own. Snyder is nearing fifty and wears an army surplus jacket and a white T-shirt, souvenir dog tags clinking around his neck. A corona of thick curly hair encircles his head and pinprick eyes dart about under a thick brow. It's hard for Winston to ignore: Snyder resembles a baboon.