PART ONE
I
“Branford! I’ve got really big news and I am not leaving you a voicemail about it. I absolutely need twenty minutes with you tomorrow at eleven. I will be sitting upstairs in the cafeteria pretending to mind my own business.”
Amy Tuckerman left me that tease of a voicemail yesterday when she knew I would be in the budget meeting, which is not about money but about which stories will run on Page One the next day, above the fold, below the fold, front page of the Metro, and so forth.
Intrepid, cutting-edge urban journalist that I am, I already know Amy’s news. At least I think I do. She is being offered a plum of a job right here at the Boston Morning Transcript, an amazing package for a young woman who won’t turn twenty-five until Christmas Day. The “package” includes a reporter’s job covering the permanent national political campaign, but it is combined with a tryout chance at a once-a-week political notes column in the Saturday paper, the kind that built guys like Brian Mooney and Marty Nolan into revered figures among this town’s ink-stained wretches. I helped create the package, although I continue to play that close to the vest.
I go through the cafeteria line and grab a cup of hot water, a little packet containing a single bag of Green Tea, and a blueberry yogurt. Before paying I turn toward where Amy is sitting in the furthest corner near the front window and hold up what I am buying, an item in each hand and a question mark on my face. Amy stares through me and shakes her head. It is a dual-meaning headshake. First: “No, I do not want a yogurt or a tea, to be sure.” But also: “Were you born yesterday, you hayseed?”
“Remind me never to try to set up a secret rendezvous with you, Branford.”
“I don’t do secret rendezvous, Tuckerman.”
“I believe you are leading with the obvious, boss. You’ll never sell papers that way.”
One of the myriad ways in which Amy regularly demonstrates her spectacular coolness, to me at least, is in the way she makes light of, and even riffs off, our status as an “item.” Over the three years I have known her we have been mentioned at least three times in the gossip columns of one of Boston’s other newspapers, the Herald. We have never actually been named, but the details of identification have been sufficient that any numbskull in our business – and there are plenty of them – could figure out who was being mentioned. The first mention came a mere six weeks into Amy’s tenure as an intern in my department:
Who was that nubile Nubian knockout who was listening so attentively (adoringly?) to the paternalistic pontifications of one of the Transcript’s tedious tome-typists in the ambience-free zone of the back-corner booth at Linda Mae’s last weekend?
Not enough for us to start issuing denials, but the titillation factor was there all the same. With a couple of other mentions along the way, we were an “item” without ever having been an item. Well, I hope I am conveying what I intend here – to wit, our innocence.
“Selling papers is so 20th century,” I say. “I am a content provider.”
“You are incredibly hip, Branford.”
“A well-kept secret. Have any others?”
“I’m leaving the paper,” she says.
I should point out here that, by “the paper,” Amy does not mean the Transcript. Two years ago, with my blessing, she shunned an offer from the Transcript in order to go to work for the gray lady, the alpha and omega of American newspapers, the paper of record. From the first weeks of her initial internship in my department I had been convinced and determined that Amy was going to become a special journalist, and I was equally determined to help her distance herself – if briefly – both from the Transcript generally and from me specifically so that nobody would ever be able to make, gratuitously or otherwise, the kind of misogynist charge that, I am ashamed to say, is used just as frequently to slander the means of career ascent of attractive young newspaperwomen as it is used with female actors or with ascendant young women in any other corporate realm. It is one of the shameful little concomitants of the somewhat better known “glass ceiling” phenomenon, and it is all the more sinister because the slander is almost always traded in secrecy, and often by women who are colleagues of the woman slandered.
“Well, our gain will certainly be a deeply felt loss for the men and women of the Times,” I say.
“No.”
“No?”
“I’m not coming back to the Transcript, Stanley.”
I widen my eyes and try to keep my jaw from dropping into my teacup.
“You aren’t going off to law school, are you?”
One of my greatest fears, with many of the young reporters for whom I have played the role of mentor, is that they will hit some little bump early in their newspaper careers and let insecurity suck them into law school. My view of such a decision is that, the rather considerable issue of compensation aside (as I realize it seldom is), a potentially talented journalist opting out for law school would be throwing away a real chance at access to power and policy and even the making of history in order to spend years and probably decades as a well-paid but faceless slave to the billable hours racket.
Amy gazes at me coolly, dispassionately, with an absolutely captivating and irresistible look of appraisal all over her face. This is the moment, if this were the 70s of just about any other decade other than the last two, when she would exhale a meaningful stream of cigarette smoke in my face. But of course she is not smoking.
“I’m not going to law school, Branford. I don’t want to become a well-paid but faceless slave to the billable hours racket.”
I maintain a poker face so as not to reveal the cheap pleasure I experience when one of my protégés parrots my platitudes and prejudices.
“I’m coming back to Boston, but I have a really cool offer from the Globe, and I need to take it.”
“The Transcript’s offer is perfect for you, Amy. Saturday morning is big.”
I have told her before that Saturday morning is the best time to have a column in the paper, because people actually have the time to read and reflect on what you have to say, and it is the thinnest paper of the week, so the chances are greater that they will actually be able to find and read your column.
“So you were in on it. It would have been helpful to know that, Branford.”
“That might have made you feel like it was personal, and it wasn’t. I want you to help build this newspaper’s political staff. We need you.”
“Oh, Stanley, bullshit. It may not be personal to you, but it is to me. I’m twenty-four. I’m not prepared to go to work each day with a guy I have offered myself to on a silver platter only to have him politely decline my offer with barely a second thought.”
I lift my eyeglasses high up on my balding forehead and prop them there as I massage my forehead and the sockets of my eyes wearily. I hate this.
“What?” she asks.
“Well, it’s just kind of ironic.”
“Oh, Stanley, bullshit. It’s not ironic. Not everything is ironic just because life gets a little complicated sometimes. What’s ironic?”
“Well, you know, we have this code of behavior to protect young employees, young women usually, from sexual harassment, and at least part of what it is all about is to protect people from having their careers compromised or used to exploit them by people, middle-aged men usually, in positions of power.”
“And your point is?”
“Well, now I find that this middle-aged man, me, by not becoming romantically involved with this talented young woman, you, I have driven you away from the Transcript forever.”
“Please. First, Branford, nobody said forever. I’m just not going to take this particular job at this particular time.
“Second, you never even got close to consulting any corporate code of behavior in this matter. You steered clear of me because of Diana, and because of who you are, Branford, and you know it as well as I do.
“Third, I do not recall any conversation about becoming romantically involved. My suggestion, if you can remember it, Branford, was that we should do a very specific and finite thing.”
“Oh, believe me, I remember it. You said it would be a shame if we didn’t do that thing once, Tuckerman.”
“If we were going to do the time….”
“We might as well do the crime,” I finish for her.
“Well, it’s good to see that your memory isn’t entirely shot even with your advanced years.”
Her cheap slap at my advanced years aside, one of the many differences between us is that my memory operates less finitely than hers. When I recover a piece of a conversation I tend to dwell there, recovering and even inhabiting more of my thoughts and feelings from that interaction.
“The problem,” I say, “was that the very specific and finite thing did not seem only specific and finite to me. If it were, I have no doubt it would be immensely enjoyable to me. But if it weren’t, it would be a pretty good recipe for blowing up my life.”
“Because you’re in love with Diana and you couldn’t deceive her.”
“There’s that, but it’s not the only thing.”
“I’m sorry. This shouldn’t still be so important for me to hear.”
“Again.”
“Yes, again. I’m still pretty needy for a chick who is so unbelievably cool.”
“You may be cool. You may even be needy. But you are not a chick.”
“Whatever, Branford. You’re the mentor.”
“Is that like ‘You da man?’”
“Anyway.”
“Yes?”
“Tell me the other thing. Again.”
“Okay. If I were to sleep with you I would fall hopelessly and irretrievably in love with you,” I say. I have said this to her half a dozen times, at the very least.
“Yes. You would. I believe it, Branford.”
“The first time I told you that I could barely breathe.”
“But it’s easier now?”
“The breathing, anyway. Let’s talk about what you are going to do.”
“I told you. I’m taking the job at the Globe.”
“Great.” My lack of enthusiasm is palpable.
“Funzie Indrisano is offering me a team leader position on the Spotlight team.”
“Indrisano is the best in the business when he’s sober.”
“Like a pit bull.”
“Tougher than a pit bull. Any other pieces to the job?”
“I tried to get a promise of a weekly column. I told them about the Transcript’s offer.”
“Gee, I feel like Dan Duquette to your Bernie Williams.”
“Huh?”
“Even as terrific as you are, you would come a lot closer to being every Boston man’s living, breathing dream woman if you could develop your command of Red Sox history a bit.”
“Boy oh boy, there’s a goal worth giving my life for.”
“Well, maybe not. Did Funzie bite on the column?”
“No guarantees. He said he would take a look at it.”
“Glad he hasn’t lost his touch with the euphemisms.”
“Any advice for me?”
“On getting a column? Take the Transcript’s offer.”
“On anything. On life?”
“Keep your weight on your downhill ski.”
“My people don’t ski.”
“It’s not only about skiing.”
“You’re an asshole, Branford.”
“You’re just trying to sweet-talk me into the sack. Have you told Timmy Sales you’re turning him down?”
Amy never asks me for more than twenty minutes, but she always gets much more than that, and she is never to blame. I acknowledge here that this little paradox is emblematic of the way that middle-aged professional males often behave when they become besotted with women half their age. I experience my conversations with Amy as almost ennobling of the time, care, and sentiment I invest in them, but I suspect that any objective observer might well judge these interactions differently: as amusing, at best, and tawdry and embarrassing, at worst.
I try not to be bothered by this awareness. After all, I am inclined, even with the existence of our sexualized banter cluttering the table between us, to see my engagement in a solid if two-tiered friendship with Amy, and my ability thus far to resist sexual temptation with her, as self-defining in a positive way. My relationship with her is what it is, and I am mostly confident of my ability to set and maintain boundaries with her. These boundaries are practical rather than puritanical, and are not intended as a denial of the fact that I enjoy and appreciate her as a woman, but I am determined that she will be no threat to my marriage or even to my love for my wife, Diana.
It is not my intent to be or to seem smug about this confidence of mine, or to posture as if I am morally superior to other men. I am not. If anything it is perhaps that I am more attentive to my own moral life, and to my personal expectations of myself with respect to morality, than most of my male friends and colleagues seem to be. And as I carry on with these preoccupations, which are integral not only to my sense of myself but to my vocation, as I reason out the practical consequences of various moral (or immoral) paths or actions, I occasionally hit upon nuggets which pass, for me, as wisdom.
For instance, it has been my observation that the enjoyment, and the rewards for the ego, of the kind of sexual tension or chemistry that is obvious between Amy and myself tend to remain much greater if that tension never crosses a critical line and becomes an affair. Once an affair begins, more often than not, the whole mess becomes sordid and the people involved become desperate and pathetic, where before they were appealing and venerable. I feel lucky to understand this.
My sense is that many men do not realize this. As to women, I do not know.
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