A Little Trouble with the Facts (5 page)

For six months, I’d submitted to the cruelty of an ordinary life: the hollow echo of the dripping faucet in a barren apartment, the alarming, persistent hum of a midsize refrigerator, the mismatched dishes piling up in the sink. I’d tasted sobriety and I didn’t like it. It had the rubber texture of sushi from the corner deli, looking for takers since noon.

My new apartment had all the charm of the inside of a tennis shoe. Five hundred square feet of wall and floor divided by white Sheetrock; a mini-bake oven; a refrigerator large enough for condiments; a place to blow your nose. It was all one room: half bedroom, half dining room, and half kitchenette, which left minus one half for living.

I’d moved uptown to get away from all the people who had known me when things were swell. But I hadn’t really committed to the place yet. The walls were bare and the bookcases empty. Most of what I owned was still in boxes piled on the floor. There were four pieces of furniture: a sofa, a coffee table, a chair, and a mattress on the floor. The phone rang, and I kicked away some boxes to answer it. No one was on the line. I listened for a while, wondering whether I’d hear that smoky voice, but finally it was a dial tone, and I put down the phone.

The apartment’s best asset was a large picture window that overlooked the Broadway Mall, a strip of grass and cobblestone where, at the moment, some neighborhood drunks were passing a bottle in a brown paper bag and I felt jealous. I had no pals; I was officially off the booze. My new nightlife was all on the small screen. I’d started watching old movies again, famous black-and-whites. But this time, I passed over the screwball comedies that
made the city swirl in gleeful symmetry. Instead, I traveled to the dark side of the screen. My new companions were fedora-clad detectives, dames pursing cigarette holders between (presumably) bloodred lips, cackling mobsters, faceless trench coats silhouetted in the hall. They weren’t pretty and they didn’t end happily. I’d adopted them all from the gap-toothed VHS peddler down the block. The titles dropped me deeper and deeper into the darkness.

Tonight I had
Sweet Smell of Success
. I needed only a Vanitini. I gazed out the window at my drunken neighbors on the median. Oh, hell. Just one wouldn’t kill me. I went to the cupboard and pulled down a tumbler. I lifted the ice tray out of the freezer, cracking it hard. The Russian landlord had left me a bottle of Vladimir, as some kind of welcome gift. I’d saved it for a moment like this, when I wanted to leap headlong off the wagon. So what if it wasn’t top shelf? I poured some vodka into the martini shaker. Then I remembered the grenadine, but I didn’t have any. So I poured out some of the juice from the maraschino cherry jar. No vermouth, either, but I had a tad of cooking sherry, so I waved it over the top of the shaker, and rattled it up fast.

I downed my Vanitini—the first one I’d had in months. It was definitely a sad pour. The cherry juice made it sweet, but its aftertaste bit back. Still, it reminded me of a feeling I hadn’t had in months: weightlessness. I mixed myself another, rattled it up, and slugged it back. I pressed
Sweet Smell
into the VCR.

The opening credits rolled and the jazz blared. Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, screenplay by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman. I went back to the kitchen and poured myself a third Vanitini as the soundtrack swelled. I drank that one standing up. Pouring myself another, I moved to the couch and kicked off my shoes. A city skyline full of bright lights. The camera comes up on the back end of a printing press as workers throw stacks of newspapers into delivery trucks. Blaring horns grow louder as
the truck bumps through Times Square, past the blinking
CANADIAN CLUB
sign, past the hot lights showing off showgirls, past the dime stores and all-night hot dog stands.

Sidney Falco walks onto the screen. He’s a pretty boy with slicked-back hair and a starched shirt, but his pretty is the menacing sort, the kind you know means trouble. He yanks one of the papers out of the stack on the sidewalk and scans a gossip column by J. J. Hunsecker. Whatever he’s looking for isn’t there, and Falco scowls and dumps the rag into the trash. He is a flash of nerves as he climbs the stairs to his second-floor office, where his name,
SIDNEY FALCO, PRESS AGENT
, is taped on the door. He moves into the back room, where he coincidentally also sleeps, and changes into his clothes for an evening on the town. His girl Friday follows him into the bedroom, sits primly on the edge his bed, and stares up at him, doe-eyed. “Where do you want to go, Sidney?”

On my couch, in my Vanitini haze, I recite the words along with Curtis:

“Way up high, Sam, where it’s always balmy. Where no one snaps his fingers and says, ‘Hey Schmitt, rack the balls,’ or ‘Hey mouse, mouse, go out and buy me a pack of butts.’ I don’t want tips from the kitty. I’m in the big game with the big players. My experience I can give you in a nutshell and I didn’t dream it in a dream, either: Dog eat dog. In brief: From now on, only the best of everything is good enough for me.”

I tipped my head back to get one last sip out of my tumbler, but nothing was coming. My head fell into the cushions and the glass tumbled to the floor. The blue shadows of the TV light danced on my plaster ceiling. It was beautiful and wild, a fantastic waltz of light against the darkness.
The best of everything.

Then everything went black.

T
he scene: a housewarming party at my very own three-thousand-square-foot loft. Glitterati on the davenport, fashionistas on the fire escape. Uptite shows a humming brood of design aficionados through the room. Caviar on the medical sideboards, crudités on the gurneys. I’m playing hostess in a fitted silk gown that plunges back and front. But tasteful. Understated. Hot. My hair is coiffed by Jules Freelove, Broadway stylist. My barman is handing me a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

Not a VHS-induced dream. It happened. That was me, back then, when I was shiny spanking new, and it was all my own, my own, my own.

And Jeremiah Sinclair Golden Jr. walked through my door. He was bracketed between two sets of silicone implants he’d filched from a
Penthouse
party uptown. He was grinning, and who could blame him, given what he had on each arm?

It’d been a year since he’d left me on the East Fifth Street curb, and since then, my tabloid study had informed me that his Astor heiress left him at the altar. She’d complained to Liz Smith that his $20,000 budget on her gown “simply wasn’t sufficient,” but the scuttlebutt had it she’d become aware of his extra-premarital affairs. Jeremiah rebounded fast, and the string of socialites he’d dated since would’ve made a mighty pricey necklace.

Now he walked right up to me, and said, “May I?” He took the
champagne from my hand and popped the cork. The fizz spilled down the neck of the bottle and onto his hand. He licked it off, saying, “That’s tasty.” When he caught my grimace, he added, “I’m enchanted to finally meet this Valerie Vane I’ve been hearing so much about.”

He was looking right at my face. He could’ve read the birth-marks on my neck like tea leaves. He was close enough to smell my Obsession. And he didn’t recognize a thing. “It’s amazing we’ve never met,” he said.

Amazing, indeed. In a sense, though, he was right. That girl he’d left on Fifth Street, the one who’d wept into her pillow while her roommate stuck needles in a voodoo-doll Golden, was playing banjo elsewhere with Holly Golightly’s pre–alter ego, Lulamae Barnes. I’d shed Sunburst Miller’s skin when I’d put that cotton-candy gown down my incinerator shaft. And now, I didn’t even blame Jeremiah for the way he’d spun me and let me fall. I blamed that bumpkin I’d been, so ripe for a grifter’s scam.

I poured Jeremiah a glass of Veuve Clicquot and he and his silicone twins worked the room. I watched them admire Uptite’s design, the chrome surfaces, the glass beakers, the framed forceps and scalpels. The Three
I
’s assembled—
“Isn’t he…Ohmygod, that’s totally Jeremiah Golden…Yikes, lose the bim bos!”
—and prattled. They were still my posse in spite of the exposé, since all press was good press, as publicists all agreed.

Eventually, Jeremiah circled back. “I’d like to get a delivery here, if you don’t mind,” he said.

I knew what kind of delivery he meant, but I told him it was okay. Plenty of people had already suggested doing lines off my medical cabinetry—the irony, it seemed, was far too inviting. By the time his dealer arrived, his silicone sweethearts had already huffed out the door. At five a.m., my glass coffee table was powdered white and Mr. Golden was a fixture on my Eames settee. I was too bemused to complain.

“You ever try one of these?” he said, taking a cigar out of his jacket and pointing its obscene length at me. “My D.P. brought this Cohiba back from Cuba, but I haven’t had a good reason to smoke it yet. I thought I’d save it to celebrate something, and now seems like the right moment.”

I took the cigar from him and twirled it between my thumb and forefinger, sizing it up. “What are we celebrating?”

“It seems to me,” he said, looking from one end of my loft to the other, “you’ve got plenty to celebrate.”

“And what about you?”

He took the cigar back, cut the tip with a silver cigar razor, and considered. “My good luck in meeting you. I’ve been reading your column,” he said. “You’ve managed to skewer all my favorite people. And boy, did they deserve it.” He laughed at his own joke for a minute, but I didn’t join him. “You don’t just feed the beast,” he added, “you really draw a picture of the city, you give a sense of the whole scene. I bet you’re a native. Am I right?”

My cynicism was so thick I could’ve cut it like a cake. This was the same exchange we’d had so long ago, only in reverse.

“Native?”

“Native New Yorker. Am I right?”

“What makes you think so?”

“Ha,” he laughed one note. “Only a native New Yorker would take offense. And, of course, the column. You know everyone in town.”

“I’m not on the column anymore,” I said. “They’ve got me on features now.”

“They had to!” he declared, his voice cracking oddly. “With what you know, you could be filling that entire magazine. Am I right? The gossip stuff is good, but you’ve got real insight.”

I put the cigar to my lips and wondered if I’d really been quite so blind to flattery in the past.

“Light it,” he said. “Go on. I think you’ll like it. It’s actually sweet.” He moved next to me and pressed a hand to my thigh. It was as familiar as an old song you played over and over for a month until you got sick of it and tossed the whole CD. He flipped open a Zippo and I inched toward its blue flame.

“You know how to do that? You’ve got to puff it a few times and don’t inhale. Just go slow, sweetheart. There you go.”

A plume of smoke enveloped me. The taste was tart and strong and it nipped my tongue. Not exactly sweet. I knew I’d be coughing something awful in the morning. I politely passed it back to Jeremiah, and then I moved a little away. He was a charmer; that was a fact. But he no longer looked like a Larrabee. He didn’t hold that sway over me, because now I could hold my own. He no longer had his Astor. And I wasn’t about to let him get close enough to let me down again.

“It’s been a long evening,” I said, yawning.

“Of course, of course,” he said, standing fast. “I’ve overstayed my welcome.”

“Not at all,” I said. “But it is getting late.”

“Of course,” he said again, pulling on his jacket and nervously patting the pockets. “I’d love to take you out to dinner some evening. Could I? Might I take you somewhere nice?”

Well, wasn’t that touching? Suddenly he had time for dinner dates. “I don’t really do dinner very often these days,” I said. “I’m so busy.”

“I guess that’s a no, then?” he said, turning it over like a foreign currency he’d never used. “You don’t hear that very often.”

“You don’t?” I led him to the door. “It was lovely to meet you,” I added, suppressing, the “again.” I let him kiss my hand.

After I heard his footsteps make the ground floor, I went back to the settee. I surveyed my new loft. Everything was in its place. I picked up Jeremiah’s Cohiba where he’d left it burning and put it between my teeth. Maybe it did taste a little sweet.

The next morning, The Paper came calling. I was padding around my loft in socks picking up empties when the phone rang. Burton Phipps introduced himself and said he’d been following my work in
Gotham’s Gate
. He wanted to know if I had any interest in newspaper work “of the slightly more urbane sort.

He said, “Why don’t you come over and have lunch? There aren’t any jobs here at the moment, but we should get to know each other in case something opens up. They call Zachariah Zip, over there, don’t they?” he said. “I love that. If it makes you feel more at home, you can call me Buzz. Some of the reporters here do already. It’s kind of a tease.”

I was pretty sure this Phipps just wanted to eyeball me so he’d know how to spot me in a room. But I realized at my interview that he’d be my future boss, if I’d have him. He flipped through my stack of clips and clucked, “Quite a nose for news.”

Buzz Phipps had a face like a new BMW sports car: sleek aerodynamic curves and a buffed, hot-waxed patina, tested for maximum performance on scenic mountain roads, seen idling in French hamlets before quaint patisseries. Around town, I knew, Buzz kept a harem of hair-care specialists, massage therapists, manicure-pedicurists, personal trainers, wardrobe consultants, eyebrow experts, ear-and-nose-hair pluckers. And there were fashion designers and boutique managers throughout Manhattan who’d rescheduled a Rothschild to offer Buzz a fitting.

I told him I wasn’t seeking a job at The Paper.

“Nonsense” was his answer. “You’re no slouch, but working for that glossy doesn’t say so,” he added confidentially. “Even a year here would make you legit. But you should already be thinking about your career, big picture. Not just your next little scoop.”

Nothing on him moved. A Kansas-style twister couldn’t put a single hair on Buzz Phipps’s pate out of place. His blond hair
cambered off his brow with a gravity-defying curl. His slacks were pressed along the fold, his fine leather belt polished black and his buckle shined. A form-fitting shirt revealed a neat thicket of brown hair just beneath his bronzed throat. His lips were ample and pink, his teeth porcelain. And his eyes were, with the aid of contacts, pale blue verging on gray.

“I’ll think it over,” I said.

On the way home, I considered my mother back in Oregon, who paid five dollars weekly for the Sunday edition. She’d moved off the farm some years back, but she still had her ideals. Even if I didn’t work for the investigative team, writing for The Paper would prove I’d made something of my life.

The next day, I told Zip I wouldn’t be able to cash his blank check after all. He leaned back in his massage recliner and turned the volume to throb. “They were smart to steal you; you’re just what they need to shake up that sleepy section. But if you ever get tired of the scholarly life, come join us again in the gutter.”

I learned quickly that my life at The Paper wasn’t going to be cush. First off, the hours were a working stiff’s. At
Gotham’s Gate
writers arrived at noon and milled at the water cooler till six. At The Paper, reporters started at ten, worked till ten, and called home nightly to say they were running late. Second, there were new rules I had to obey: I couldn’t accept freebies over twenty-five bills—none of the gentle exfoliating cleansers, acid-free jojobas, or aloe vera extracts that arrived on my desk by the ribboned bagful. I had to bundle those off to Goodwill. No junkets, and free tickets were allowed only if I was really writing about the event. The bigger glitch for me, though, was the almost-outright ban on unnamed sources. I couldn’t quote half my friends. It was like running a pub during prohibition: traffic only in teetotalers.

The Paper was rigorous with the facts. Everything that ap
peared in print had to be both true and verified. This was new territory for me. So, in my first few months on Style, I inadvertently became a star feature in the “Corrections” column, on page two. The copy desk checked stories before they ran, but if they missed the smallest fault, there were always a million amateur fact-checkers among our readership ready to point out a mistake. When the Letters desk got a call, Buzz got a call, and then I got a call, and I had to oblige with a correction.

After some months had passed like this, Buzz called me into his office and sat me down in his Aeron chair (a gift from his partner, not the manufacturer or its flack). He leaned close and produced a silver tube of L’Occitane shea butter and offered me a dab. I shook my head. I didn’t need any lubrication. If he was going to chide me, I’d take it dry.

“I want to go over something with you,” he said, taking out a marked-up copy of my most recent story on Nora Sumner, the editor in chief of the glossiest fashion glossy in town. “First off, I want to talk about a few words you’ve used here:
editrix
.”

“Editor, you know, but with a touch of dominatrix.”

“Oh, I
get
it,” Buzz said flatly. “I’m
familiar
with the term. That’s just not what we call one of our media colleagues. How about we go with plain old editor?”

“Sure,” I said, and swallowed.

“Okay, now. We’re talking here about a rumored affair with an unnamed millionaire fund-raiser for the Democratic Party. And this just pops up in the sidebar, unattributed.”

“It’s attributed—”

“It’s attributed to ‘the Sumner camp.’ Where, may I ask, is that? Rhinebeck?”

“It’s on good authority from two executive secretaries. They don’t even know each other. They work in different departments.”

“Hmmm. That doesn’t give us the right to call it a ‘none-too-
secret dalliance.’ And meanwhile, her lawyer says she’s not seeking a divorce. We have him on the record. His statement is going to stand up against two unidentified secretaries. I suggest we scrap this sidebar altogether. There’s nothing on this loin once you remove the gristle.”

“Okay, Buzz, but I know we’ll look silly if we don’t even mention it. Everyone else in town is running it already.”

Buzz leaned back in his chair and sighed. He took the tube of L’Occitane off his desk and squeezed some yellow cream into his palm. “That’s just it. We’re not everyone else, Valerie. This paper writes the first draft of history. We can’t afford mistakes, and we can’t be putting out unverified items about any old
editrix
. If you get something wrong here and, by some fault of our system, it gets in print, it stays wrong. It gets reported in other papers wrong, it goes out on the Internet wrong, and then it turns up wrong in the history books. Then it’s always wrong, and it’s our fault. That’s a big burden we shoulder, but it’s one we all share.”

The way Buzz was rubbing the lotion into his hand made it seem like he was working up to something. He wielded the word
wrong
like a battering ram.

“So, you’re saying we need to cut that section about the affair? What if I got some more publishing world insiders?”

“I know what’s happening here,” Buzz continued. “You never worked anywhere but
Gotham’s Gate,
and that’s the kind of reporting you know—the kind where facts don’t ever get in the way of a good story. Maybe you had fact-checkers who were supposed to comb for flaws, but they were using their combs for their bangs.
Gotham’s Gate
is as full of mistakes as a colander is full of holes. I knew all this when I hired you, and I blame myself for not taking the time out to help you. I’ve been remiss.”