Been There, Done That (33 page)

I called a couple of my friends at
Salad
, but all they could tell me was that Richard had been behind closed doors all day. I called Sheila.

“I’ve been meaning to call you,” she squeaked as soon as she heard my voice.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” she said. “You’re my friend. I know you and Richard have had your differences, but that doesn’t change anything between you and me.”

“Thanks,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“I keep hoping you’ll show up at the gym,” she said.

“I go during the day now. It’s less crowded. And someone less annoying than Stacey teaches the aerobics class.”

“Right,” she said, her voice trailing off. Then, “So . . . no job yet?”

“No,” I said. “But I’ve got some good leads.” Also known as the help wanted section.

“If you ever need a recommendation . . .”

“Right.” The silence grew uncomfortable, and I was about to hang up when I remembered why I’d called in the first place. “Did Richard see the paper this morning?”

“Oh, yeah. He can’t decide whether it’s good news or bad news.”

“How could it possibly be good?” Leave it to Richard to find a silver lining in a broken marriage, a ruined career, a humiliated, possibly felonious wife, and a disfigured man on life support.

“Well, he’s happy to get
Salad
’s name out there. But he’s not so happy with the way it was described.”

“‘A regional, lightweight, ad-heavy magazine with national pretensions?’” I quoted.

“Something like that.” One of the papers described
New Nation
as “a redundant Internet ‘zine’ with little funding and less attention.”

“Richard’s been on the phone all morning,” Sheila continued. “Trying to sell the rights to the story.”

“What story?
My
story?”

“Of
course
not,” she gushed. “Just the information he picked up on his own. Not many people know this, but Richard is a gifted journalist.”

thirty-eight

Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. I thought I’d reached bottom, but I was wrong. While I sat home, eating microwave brownies and drinking wine (I seemed to like it sweet these days), the local papers and television stations followed the Archer’s story. Then, because it was a slow news week, the story finally hit the national media with a new twist. “How far will the media go to uncover a scandal?” asked one major newspaper. Another proclaimed that “
Salad
magazine, a heretofore unknown regional monthly, sent a reporter out to search for scandal—any scandal—at a quiet college campus. Not surprisingly, she found it.”

Among all the reports, the gist was the same: I had gone undercover for no good reason. I had uncovered marital infidelity (“Hardly a newsworthy item in this day of disposable marriages” commented one editorial, ignoring the dean/student issue). My publisher and
New Nation
, “
Salad
’s Internet arm” (Tim would hate that, I noted with a rare smile), had tried to make a splash with the story and failed. “No one paid any attention—except the university trustees, who are in the process of terminating Archer, and, of course, his wife, who is being held in a local jail under charges of aggravated assault.”

As much as the media condemned our muckraking, they positively delighted in the whole dog-mauling angle. They talked about previous dog-mauling incidents and their legal ramifications. They described Dean Archer’s injuries in repulsive detail. They quoted dog psychologists. I’d never even known there were dog psychologists. Or, rather, I’d heard of them but always assumed they were an urban myth. There was a lot of speculation as to whether Mrs. Archer had truly sicced the dog on the dean or whether she had simply failed to call him off. All surmised, however, that the question would have been moot had
Salad
magazine never come digging at her doorstep. “Could a lawsuit be imminent?” One asked. I made a frantic call to Dan, who assured me that, while Richard’s ass could be on the line, mine was free and clear. Another rare moment of joy.

A couple of reporters waited outside my building. “No comment,” I yelped, fleeing back inside. I only vaguely noticed a camera flash. It wasn’t long before my “adult” picture was being broadcast alongside my Mercer “pig book” picture. My Mercer picture actually looked slightly more mature; I vowed to get a decent haircut once I got another paycheck. (Richard had given me two weeks’ severance, which he had the nerve to call generous.)

On their request, I drove out to Mercer one last time to make a statement to the police. I reiterated the facts that had come out in the original news story, while making it clear that I had not written the article myself, nor had I agreed to being tape recorded or quoted. In fact, I said, I had initially written a story about the burglaries and about the Mercer Police department’s valiant efforts to fight big city crime in a small community. (Okay, perhaps I’d retained a touch of bullshitting ability.) The cops still held me in their good graces for ending the burglary headache. One even suggested I consider an in-depth feature on the department. I said I would sketch out some ideas and call them if I could find an especially punchy angle. I was telling the truth, believe it or not; unless I landed a salaried position, I would have to scrape by as a freelancer.

The police station was less than a mile from campus. I drove the mile with my brain turned off. I found a spot outside the dorm and turned off the car. But I didn’t get out. I told myself I just wanted to see it one last time, for closure. But I’ve never been good at deceiving myself. I was staking out the dormitory in hopes of seeing Jeremy.

After fifteen minutes, Katherine strode by with some guy I didn’t recognize. They walked with their hips bumping, their hands in each other’s back jeans pocket. I slumped in my seat, and she didn’t see me. Five minutes later, Amelia passed with a guy from our dorm. Tanner? Trevor? Something like that. He was small and fair and bookish. He and Amelia wore identical navy blue back-packs that seemed too heavy for their small frames. He looked at Amelia intently and briefly stroked her hair, which was growing out and not nearly as spiky as before. Then they, too, disappeared into the dorm. All I had to do was open my car door and run up behind them—“Hold the door!” (I’d left my key on my dorm room desk)—and I’d be back in my old world, Katie again, wise beyond my years. Except I couldn’t, of course. If Jeremy were any indication, I was hardly a hero in these parts.

I tried to imagine Jeremy, what he would be wearing, who he would be with. That’s what got me. What if he showed up with Brynn? But no: he’d told me she’d dropped out. Still, there were plenty of other pretty, age-appropriate girls vying to walk along with their hand in Jeremy’s back pocket.

I turned my key in the ignition and headed away from the campus. On impulse, I pulled into Chantal/Cheryl’s parking lot and walked up to her gloomy front door before I lost my nerve.

I was about to leave when the door swung open. She was wearing her flannel bathrobe, her tangled blond hair wet from the shower. “Hey, Woodward—where’s Bernstein?” She was the first person in a long time to look pleased to see me.

“Bernstein and I are no longer on speaking terms,” I said.

“The nerds are always the biggest assholes. Didn’t I warn you?”

She poured me a glass of chilled pinot gris—in a Reidel glass, no less. One of her clients, an unreformed wine snob, had bought her two Reidel glasses for every varietal imaginable. “Aren’t you impressed that I know who Woodward and Bernstein are?” she asked.

“Not really. You always struck me as being smart,” I said, surprising myself with the truth of my statement.

“Yeah, whatever.” She took a sip from her own oversized glass (perfect for her pinot noir). “One of my regulars, he teaches this class, Ethics in Journalism? He likes to stand up and lecture to me while I sit on a chair and pretend to be one of his students. And, like, listening to him talk about Joe Klein or something gets me so hot that I start taking off my shirt, then my bra. And I rub my nipples and start to moan like this:
Ooohh . . . Mmmmnnn.
” She smirked. “Then he tells me to pay attention or he’s gonna fail me. And so I say, ‘I’m so sorry, Professor, it won’t happen again.’ But he says it’s too late, he has to punish me. So he drops his pants and I blow him.”

She shrugged, took a healthy gulp of her wine, and flicked some lint off her bathrobe.

I gawked at her. “Ethics in Journalism? I took that class.”

“How was it?”

I thought for a moment. “You know, now that I think about it, the instructor did always seem kind of distracted.”

I took another gulp of my wine and put the mostly full glass on her coffee table. I stood up to leave. “I don’t think I’ll be coming back to Mercer, but I was just wondering, and this is nothing I’m going to write about, but was there ever any hooking going on at the college?”

She hesitated. “A couple more trips to Denny’s and I probably would have told you.”

“Gerry?” I asked. “The Snake Pit?”

She smiled. “You found out anyway. Figured you would—hotshot reporter and all. I saw your picture in the paper.” She sounded genuinely impressed, which made me feel even more ashamed.

I felt like I should press a wad of money in her hand, offer her some kind of ticket out of her life of desperation. But the truth was, she probably had more money than I did. And she didn’t look so desperate.

“Take care,” I said lamely.

She tucked a damp lock of hair behind her ear. “I’ll be okay. You take care.”

I had only one more thing to do before heading back to the city, and I half expected myself to chicken out. If I’d seen anyone I’d recognized, I would have fled, no question, but when I walked into The Human Canvas, the place was empty except for the legendary Thor. True to reputation, a tattooed snake slithered over the bridge of his nose. His right bicep read, MOTHER. Sweet, except when he turned, I read the left bicep: FUCKER.

“You do belly buttons?” I asked.

thirty-nine

“How could I have missed it?” Dennis and I were eating salads at an old, crowded McDonald’s. I couldn’t believe I had fallen this far. “I mean, I met Gerry,” I said, spearing a cucumber. “I thought he was a sleaze. And yet it never even crossed my mind that he might be involved.”

“Tim didn’t exactly help,” Dennis said. Dennis had never met Tim, but he hated him nonetheless. “He told Gerry you were reporters. You never really had a chance. How’s your salad?”

“Crappy. Yours?”

“Crappy. We should have gotten french fries.”

“Tim’s not entirely to blame,” I said, stirring the excessive ice in my oversized Diet Coke. “I got so fixated on Troy and Brynn and the Red Hots. Something could have been going on right under my nose and I wouldn’t have noticed.”

“What could have been going on? What could you have possibly seen?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something out of the ordinary. Girls coming and going at odd hours.”

“In college, everyone comes and goes at odd hours,” Dennis said. “Next time, will you please let me take you out to lunch?”

“You took me out once this week already.”

“If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me.” He reached over with his plastic fork and took a bite of my California Cobb salad. “I think yours is better.”

“You can have it,” I said, shoving the plastic container over. “I’m too depressed to eat.”

“Oh, shit,” Dennis said, pulling out his silver cell phone. “There’s this potential client John told me to suck up to, and I totally forgot to call him this morning. Do you mind?”

“Of course not,” I said, as he punched in the numbers.

“I swear,” he mumbled, “sometimes it feels like John is my pimp.”

I started to smile and suddenly froze. “Oh my God,” I gasped. Dennis looked quizzically at me as he asked for the client, who was, not surprisingly, out to lunch.