Rubout (7 page)

Charlie shrugged. “We may lose a few old farts,” he said, obviously not including himself in that category. “But our focus groups indicate the name has high appeal in the eighteen-to-thirty age group. We need younger readers.”

So we offended our older ones. And didn’t get the young hip readers, either. They could get better info off the Internet. But that was something else I couldn’t say. Evidently Charlie thought I’d said enough, anyway.

“I don’t like your attitude, Francesca,” he said, but he sounded avuncular rather than angry, which should have warned me the sawed-off sleaze was about to pull something sneaky. “You have lots of theories about how a newspaper should be run. You have lots of criticisms. But you have no practical knowledge. That’s why I’m putting you on our Voyage Committee. Our publisher has hired one of the finest consultants in the business to help guide us into the next century. You’re always complaining that we have only white males on these committees.
Well, Francesca, you’re our official female newsroom representative. The first meeting is this weekend.”

“What?” I felt like he’d punched me in the gut. Except a punch in the gut would have been quick. This was going to be slow and painful, like having my arm sawed off with a dull knife.

“Charlie, I’d be wasted on that committee,” I said, overcome with modesty for once. “Also, I have a four-day-a-week column to write. And you want a special story on the Vander Venter murder.”

Charlie handed me a thick envelope. “Stretch yourself,” he said, giving his creepy little smile. “Consider this a sign of my confidence in your ability.”

Consider this a trap so Charlie could get rid of me once and for all. I left his office fuming. At my desk, I pushed aside a pile of old
Gazettes,
mail and phone messages, and opened the envelope. There, on creamy stationery that must have cost my next raise, was a letter from our publisher.

“Dear Citizen of Gazetteville,” it began.

Dear citizen? The publisher didn’t know the name of his best-read female columnist?

“We are about to sail into the twenty-first century on a Voyage of Discovery that we hope will take us in new directions. You, as a member of our Voyage Committee, will be one of the people at the helm of the Good Ship
Gazette.
This committee is hand-picked from the paper’s newsroom and business people.”

Terrific. The two groups that are traditionally at each other’s throats will be locked in a conference room together. The business department felt they could get this newspaper going if they could just
make the effete, arrogant snobs in the newsroom understand that there has to be some connection between ad content and news content. The newsroom believed the business department couldn’t sell the fine product we created. All they knew how to do was sell out. The ad reps were always trying to find sneaky ways to persuade writers to do nice stories about major advertisers, including questionable car dealers and siding contractors.

The letter blathered on. “We will take you all on a Voyage of Discovery to learn about yourself and your newspaper.

“Our objective is not to improve circulation, but to improve the internal dynamics so that the paper will naturally improve as the committee goes on a voyage of personal discovery. We must improve the product and the profits, while engendering the capabilities for enthusiasm, innovation and community involvement.”

I groaned. This looked like weeks of what I had a low tolerance for: bullshit meetings. For me, being on this voyage was more dangerous than sailing on the
Titanic.
I looked around for my life preserver. Thank God, there she was. I spotted my mentor, Georgia T. George, assistant managing editor for features, going into her office on Rotten Row. I called her number. “Georgia, you won’t believe what that little reptile Charlie has done now,” I began when she answered, but she quickly cut me off.

“Francesca, I know how you really feel about Charlie,” she said soothingly while I stared at the phone. Why was syrup pouring out of it? This didn’t sound like my funny, foul-mouthed mentor. Had she been
taken over by the pod people? “Your blood sugar must be low,” she said, much too sweetly. “I want you to have a relaxing cup of tea at Miss Lucy’s Lunchroom. Promise me you’ll be there in ten minutes.”

She hung up before I could ask what the heck got into her. Tea? At Miss Lucy’s? Tea never sullied Georgia’s lips. She drank scotch, and like most of the newsroom staff, would rather mud-wrestle naked on live TV than go to a tearoom. A light finally dawned. That’s why she wanted me at Miss Lucy’s in ten minutes. So we could talk without running into anyone from the
Gazette.

Miss Lucy’s was just around the corner from the
Gazette
but light-years away. It was staffed by sweet elderly women in ruffly pink uniforms who called you dear and seemed to mean it. I ordered oolong and cress sandwiches for two, because I’d read about them in English novels. The oolong tasted like ordinary tea and the cress sandwiches tasted like buttered grass.

“Your ass would have been grass if I hadn’t shut you up,” Georgia bellowed when she steamed through the tearoom’s candy-pink door a few minutes later. The tearoom was empty, but the sweet pink lady pouring the oolong looked so shocked, she slopped tea into my saucer. She apologized and fluttered back to the kitchen to get me another cup.

Georgia settled into a spindly pink chair, smoothing the wrinkles on one of her expensive, ugly suits. The woman had a genius for picking corporate clothes that looked all wrong on her. Her elfin face and slight figure were lost in boxy suits the color of
fungus. Maybe she thought it was the only way to be taken seriously. Maybe she was right. She usually was.

“I couldn’t talk to you because the fucking phones are bugged,” she said, lowering her voice an octave. “The company is also monitoring the effing e-mail and reading the frigging files on computers. Charlie announced it at the morning meeting today. Said it’s the first step toward getting rid of the deadwood.”

“Sounds like a worthy goal to me,” I said.

“That’s exactly what management wants you to think,” she said sharply. “But your definition of dead-wood is different from theirs. With your smart mouth and high salary, you could be Charlie’s next target.”

“I should know you can’t count on management to make a sensible decision. The
Gazette
is notorious for promoting goofoffs and driving off talent. Charlie chased off a really fine black reporter by giving her dog assignments. Now she’s a war correspondent at the
Washington Post.
But Charlie told everyone she was awful and didn’t work hard while she was at the
Gazette.
Even I believed him. I didn’t realize it was because he gave her such awful stories.”

“Gazette
management specializes in divide and conquer,” Georgia said. “If the staff is at one another’s throats, they won’t notice management is reaming their asses.” The sweet pink lady had returned while Georgia was making that speech. She was so startled she oolonged on my wrist.

“I’m so sorry,” the tea lady said, and pulled out an embroidered handkerchief to mop up the spots on my sleeve. She turned pinker than her uniform at
Georgia’s language. Georgia was a news woman of the old school. When she started at the paper, women were automatically sidetracked into the society section. Georgia talked her way out of covering society stories and into a serious city hall beat. She used a two-pronged approach. First, she convinced management she was a good reporter by getting scoops. Second, she used language so foul her editors were afraid to let her near a so-called society lady.

When the pink lady went back for another fresh cup for me, Georgia said, “Now, what’s the problem?”

“Charlie put me on the Voyage Committee,” I said.

“That’s good,” she said.

“That’s bad and you know it,” I said.

“Only if you open your big mouth. I’ve warned you about that.”

“But I hate long meetings,” I said. Even to me, this sounded whiny. “They’re hot-air machines. I listen to the bullshit and get restless and the next thing you know I say the wrong thing.”

“Then let this be a test of your willpower, Fran-cesca,” she said sternly. “It’s about time you developed some. This committee can make your career. You’ll be very visible. The publisher will be there—it’s his personal project—and he can see how intelligent and charming you are.”

I snorted and nearly ruptured my sinuses.

“I mean this, Francesca. It could be your showcase. The paper is sinking half a million bucks into this Voyage of Discovery.”

I was outraged. “What! That’s obscene. They could
spend that money on staffers and stories and have a really good paper.”

“That outburst is an example of exactly what I mean,” Georgia said, fixing me with a glare. “Learn control. We both know that Charlie expects you to lose your temper in front of the publisher and damage your career. There’s only one way you can hurt Charlie: Keep your mouth shut. Except when you have something positive to say. Besides, you won’t be alone. I’m on the committee, too. I’ll be with you.”

“But this committee is useless,” I said. “We just had an expensive survey taken last year. We had a focus group study two years before that. We had an in-depth telephone survey three years before that. The Voyage Committee will make the same recommendations the other surveys have made for the last thirty years. They’ll say the paper needs younger readers. It needs more women readers. It needs reader involvement. It should have lighter, brighter, shorter stories. It needs more local stories.

“The surveys all have the same conclusions. And management always reacts in the same dumb ways: We’ll have to do a silly series of ‘Tell Us What You Think’ features. Write a bunch of boring celebrity interviews. All stories will have to have a local angle, and we’ll go crazy trying to find one. Last time we went through this, Japan was hit with a major earthquake and the only way we could get that news into the paper was to interview two local families who had relatives living there. Reader response to all these changes will be underwhelming. In a few months, the paper will slip back to its old ways.”

Georgia clapped when I finished. “No shit, Sher
lock. Tell me something I don’t know,” she said. I could feel her sarcasm etching into me like acid. “Francesca, idealism is embarrassing at your age. The
Gazette
is a mediocre paper because it’s run by mediocre people. And it will continue to be that way, unless one of them wises up and says ‘Damn I’m dumb, I think I’ll fire myself.’ Mediocre people only hire other mediocrities. I know this Voyage Committee will go nowhere. The answer is already predetermined by the consultants we hired. There are consultants who recommend you beef up your features and local stories and the ones who recommend you improve your hard news. The
Gazette
hired soft-news consultants, and they will make exactly the recommendations you said. The publisher knows that. He’s not buying an unknown quantity.”

“You’re not mediocre. Why do you work here?”

“I’m fifty-five years old. I have a fourteen-room penthouse overlooking Forest Park and a private office at the
Gazette.
I have a nice salary, good bennies, and an impressive title. I like my life in St. Louis. I couldn’t work out of our Boston headquarters and live this well on my salary. Does that answer it for you? Now, can I go back to work?”

“One other question. What’s corporate casual? We’re supposed to wear that the first Voyage Committee meeting.”

“Something preppie. Khaki slacks and a Polo shirt will do fine. No black leather or thigh-high boots.”

“Oh. You heard about those?”

“Babe made you sound like you moonlighted as a dominatrix.”

“At least I’m not boring in his reports to management.
I don’t know why they want to bug our phones and monitor our e-mail when they have Babe spying on everyone.”

“They’re gathering solid evidence of insubordination” she said. “So remember that when you e-mail your pals or talk to anyone on the phone.”

I had one last question and I had to know the answer. I didn’t care if she laughed at me. “Georgia, is there really no hope for the
Gazette?
Will the paper ever be a major national newspaper again, the way it was fifty years ago?”

She looked at me with pity and patted my hand, a rare gesture for a tough woman like Georgia. “The
Gazettes
glory days are dead and gone. The paper’s old and tired. It’s had a monopoly for too long. It forgot how to fight, except with its own employees. Now all the consultants in the world can’t turn it around. You know what our former mayor said about the
Gazette?”

Probably something unprintable. The ex-mayor was as foul-mouthed as Georgia. The two were old cronies, who liked to sip scotch and swap city hall stories in his law offices.

“Hizzoner said ‘That newspaper couldn’t sell whores on a troop ship.’”

There was a resounding crash as the pink lady dropped my teacup on the floor.

They looked like a golf foursome ready to tee off, which I guess was the perfect illustration of corporate casual. The big four at the
City Gazette
were sipping coffee and waiting to embark on their Voyage of
Discovery in Conference Room ? at the Chesterfield Executive Center.