Her computer takes forever to load up. "Come on." She is about to lose this job. "Thank God." Almost time to celebrate.
Her computer has stopped whirring; it's ready. She can picture the email. It'll say: "Ruby, please call me at home. It's about a very serious matter. Thank you." Who will have sent it? Kathleen? Or Herman? Or Accounts Payable?
Ruby logs on. All the routine emails are there: a festive edition of the Why? newsletter; something about turning off the lights in the bathrooms to save money; a reminder of how much it costs per minute to be late for deadline. But her dismissal?
She checks again.
Where the hell is it?
She keeps refreshing her in-box. She can't find it. It isn't there: no email. But there must be one.
No, there simply isn't.
She rises, sits back down, then stands once more and hurries into the ladies' room. She closes herself in a stall, sits on the toilet, covering her mouth.
Her breathing increases, her insides seem to swell. A tear runs down her face, slides ticklishly under her chin. Him-that's Dario's smell. The cologne from the night before. She never washed it off, and her tears have activated the scent.
She takes out her cellphone. Swallowing, wiping her nose, she brings up his number. She reads his name aloud. She dangles the phone between her thighs and lets it fall into the toilet. It splashes and bobs in the water.
She claps her hands once.
"I get to stay," she says.
She wipes her eyes. She can't stop smiling.
"I get to stay."
1975. OTT GROUP HEADQUARTERS, ATLANTA
Frantic calls poured in from the paper in Rome: yet another caretaker editor had quit and no one was in charge anymore. After years of neglect, Boyd had to take action.
His previous trip to the paper had been when he was still an undergraduate at Yale. Then, he'd stayed at a hotel in Rome because he lacked the stomach to visit his father's empty mansion. This time, Boyd was braver.
But from the moment he entered he fell into a dark mood. He snaked his finger along a picture frame, leaving a winding path in the dust. What are all these paintings for? A woman with a ridiculously long neck. Wine bottles and hats. A chicken in midair. A shipwreck. These things must have come with the place-Ott would never have wasted money on ornaments. Boyd called in the housekeepers and, not bothering to greet them, ordered that the mansion be scrubbed, top to bottom. "Also," he told them, "cover these paintings."
He opened the shutters. His father would have looked out from here, through the spiked fence, down the lonely lane. To think that Ott had acquired this spectacular house-not to mention the rest of the family fortune-from nothing. It was astonishing; it was humbling.
Boyd considered the living room, its soaring rococo ceiling, the worn Oriental rugs, the bookshelves, the old telephone on the wall. How grand it had been when his father marched across this room! Boyd could picture Ott striding over the carpets, up the stairs. Boyd always imagined his father like this-in perpetual motion. He could never conjure the man sitting still. Indeed, he had no sense of Ott simply living here, month after month, for years in the end.
Why had Ott stayed here so long? This place hadn't been his home. That had been in Atlanta. But buildings adjusted to Ott, not the other way around. He had deemed that the world needed the paper. So he damn well set about inventing it. He never sat still. That was how the great man had been.
Thinking of the paper's current state, Boyd went rigid with anger and shame. It was an affront to his father's memory, and Boyd himself was responsible.
The next morning, he met with all the section editors and asked them to hold tight-a new editor-in-chief was on the way. When Boyd returned to Atlanta, he employed a headhunting firm to poach a star from a top American newspaper. Someone young, bright, with spark. He got two out of three.
Milton Berber was hardly in the first bloom of youth. He'd already had a long journalistic career at a Washington paper, starting after military service in World War II. He'd reported on district court, got a break covering the State Department, became deputy metro editor, then deputy national editor, then deputy assistant managing editor. But by 1975 he had to admit it: he wasn't going any higher.
This annoyed him, since he believed he'd make a fine boss. But no one had ever given him a chance, not when he was driving a jeep around Naples for the U.S. Army, nor as an editor in Washington. True, it was not exactly a dream come true to work at a second-tier international newspaper. But at least he'd be running the place.
Boyd flew out to Rome with Milton to introduce the man around. After meeting the downtrodden staff and grasping the paper's mood, Milton had doubts. But Boyd-not the most charming man, perhaps-did seem intent on turning the paper around. So Milton said yes.
He gathered the staff and told them, "Newspapers are like anything else: they're pure and incorruptible and noble-as far as they can afford to be. Starve them and they'll kneel in the muck with the rest of the bums. Rich papers can afford to be upstanding and, if you like, self-important. We don't have that luxury right now."
"So you're saying we have to kneel in muck?" a reporter asked.
"My point is the opposite. We need to start making money here. People don't read us at the moment. We're writing stories we think we should write, but not what people actually want to read."
"Hey," an editor objected, "we know what our readers want."
"Look, I don't intend to ruffle feathers here," Milton proceeded. "I only want to be straight with you. And this is how I see the situation. The paper started out as a pamphlet."
Boyd bristled at this, interrupting to say, "It has always been more than that."
"Broad strokes, I'm using broad strokes here. Bear with me."
The staff wondered if they were witnessing a fiasco. This was Milton's first public encounter with the owner and the employees, and he was on the verge of alienating both. "Withhold your judgment," he said. "I'm going to say some lousy things. Awful things. You ready? Here goes. This publication started out as a cute pamphlet-please don't fire me on my first day, Boyd!"
Everyone laughed.
"The paper started as a terrific idea," Milton went on. "But somehow it has ended up as blotting paper. That's what it is now. That's not meant as a slight against anyone here. It certainly isn't a slight against the institution itself. I'm saying it's time to make this paper into a real paper. The way we do this is with two ingredients-the same two you need for any success: brains and hard work. I want to quit the wishy-washy approach. We don't have to match the big newspapers all the time. And we don't have to be renegades just for the sake of it. I want serious stories that are our own, on the one hand, and entertaining trifles, on the other. All the rest we run in the briefs column. And I want laughs. We're too scared of humor-so reverent all the time. Bullshit! Entertainment, folks! Look how the Brits do it. They print pretty girls, offer weekends in Brighton. And they sell a hell of a lot more copies than we do. Now, I'm not saying we turn this into a red top or a big top, let alone force anyone to go to Brighton. Heaven forbid. But we've got to acknowledge that we're entertainers of a sort. That doesn't mean phony. Doesn't mean vulgar. It means readable in the best way-so people wake up wanting us before their coffee. If we're so reverent about public service that nobody reads us, we're not doing the public any service at all. We're going to raise circulation, and make money doing it."
The staffers were right to applaud with circumspection. Milton's remarks did not bode well for everyone, particularly those who had always relied on brains and hard work not being requirements of the job. Boyd, for his part, was tempted to fire Milton immediately. But he knew how badly it would reflect on him. He'd chosen the man, had flown all the way over here. He would give him a year, then fire him.