The Last Magazine: A Novel (26 page)

I
pick up the slow mumble of Berman’s drawl as he leans up against the wall down from my cubicle. Delray M. Milius stands with his arms crossed. I figure they would have learned not to talk important business in the magazine hallways by now, but the crisis has made them more unsure of themselves, and they fall back into old patterns.

“Who’s the leak? Who’s the leak? . . . I can’t even talk in my office because it could be her, my assistant . . . Lawsuits . . . I don’t hate African Americans . . . You’re right, we can’t say that in a statement . . . All the advertisers have boycotted his show . . .”

“We need to change the subject,” Milius says. “We need to change the subject soon. We don’t want this to go on another week.”

“How are they taking it?”

“Not well. Charlotte has offered her resignation, citing racial prejudices.”

“Christ. This, this is bullshit—this is reverse racism. Just because I’m from Alabama, I’m a racist? Just because I laughed at a joke? And now that I’ve seen the clip of that basketball team, I can’t deny that they do look like nappy-headed hos, one of them even has a tattoo that says ‘ho,’ I mean, this is just so incredibly unjust—”

“Sanders, Sanders, please, this isn’t the time. Stay on message, and we’ll change the message soon. We’ll change the conversation.”

“How?”

“. . . A.E. Peoria . . .”

I’m surprised to hear A.E. Peoria’s name.

Should I warn him? But warn him of what?

Three hours later, A.E. Peoria rushes in.

“Mike, fuck, hey. I’m meeting with Milius. They don’t want to run the story this week, do they?”

A
.E. Peoria sits for a full five minutes without saying a word. He’s sworn to himself that he is going to do a better job at listening. Receive mode. He is in receive mode, sitting in a chair across from Delray M. Milius. It is an accomplishment that he is even back in this office after the mistakes. At first, he wants to start apologizing for the pencil incident, to tell Milius about his transformation, to tell him about Norm and his iced coffees and self-acceptance, to tell him again about how he has changed and learned to love himself, somewhat, how it’s a struggle he’s working on every day. But then he thinks, No, I won’t apologize, no need for me to bring up old news, he’s probably forgotten about it anyway. I will just sit and listen and absorb and show that I have changed, that I am reliable, that I am a good citizen of the magazine.

“So, can you give us a draft of the story by tomorrow night,” Milius says.

“The story?”

“About the transvestite.”

“Transsexual.”

“Right.”

“Of course I can, no problem at all.”

A good citizen of the magazine, he does not want to express any reservations; just say yes, agree to anything. Yes, that is his new philosophy of success, and this is the first time since his suspension that he is able to test it out.

So he says yes, I will do the story.

“All I have to do is get permission from Justina, you know, and then we should be okay.”

“Permission?”

“Yes, need to get her approval, you know, so I can write the story.”

“You haven’t told her you’re going to write a story about her?”

“No, not yet, you know, I was waiting, you know, but it’s helped because I’ve gotten really good stuff, you know.”

“Get her permission. We need this story. I don’t have to mention that this is really your last chance.”

A.E. Peoria leaves the office and walks out onto 57th Street. He has thirty blocks to go to his apartment on the Upper West Side. It is a fall day in New York, a beautiful fall day, and passing by Columbus Circle he nods happily at the immigrants waving laminated maps of the park and offering guided tours and he feels the need to walk. A walk in the city, what a pleasure, what a time to think, how amazing he feels, a man in the big city with a sense of purpose, with a renewed life. Is there any other street to have been walking on than Broadway with a view of Central Park, life, hustle, neurosis, energy, and attractive people? And it is only twenty minutes later that it sinks in what Delray Milius had actually said; he had said it so softly, with a strange inflection, that the offense wasn’t processed at the time.

This story is his last chance. A threat, really.

Of course, he tells himself, Justina will be happy to help me tell this story. She’ll be totally psyched about it, you know, I think she is
going to be totally psyched. He has a date planned with her that night—he’ll tell her after they see the movie.

He goes back to his apartment and starts to write. Where to begin?

No, I won’t make this about me, he says. I will start with her, with Justina. I will start the story where it all began, back in Iraq at the invasion.

From memory he writes, chronology his friend, starting with the anecdote of the ambush, then her descriptions of her stay in the hospital, then her recovery process—the surgery, the day that she sat in her bedroom and realized looking downward that she was no longer a man and didn’t want to be a man—then he writes about the GI Bill, and how it doesn’t cover sex changes, and how that is unjust, and that she got into Barnard even though the documents on the GI Bill said she was a male. But that kind of subterfuge is for civil rights, heroic, and previously never disclosed—this is breaking news you are reading here people, this is a test case, this is a story generated and produced and distributed underneath a great brand by the great A.E. Peoria, Magazine Journalist. This is the story that will spark debate and conversation and change policy—yes, this is a great story.

All he needs is his last step. To tell Justina.

He emails Mike Hastings. He sends him what he’s written so far. I need your files, he says, by tomorrow morning, the story is due tomorrow, and I need your files and you need to be ready to fact-check this fucker by Friday.

He closes his laptop. Tomorrow he will wake up and crash the rest of the story. The hours had disappeared as he’d entered his writing space, they’d just flown by, and the film he is scheduled to see with Justina starts in fifty-five minutes. He hopes they can still get seats.

He waits for her outside the theater on 68th Street, a massive Loews Cineplex, and he stands in front of a movie poster that has the
tagline “Sometimes, it’s only once.” Apparently a love story, and this makes his eyes wet on the edges, thinking of Justina, the gift that has been brought into his life. He saved her life, and now she is going to save his career. An equal trade in his world. He got tickets out of the electronic kiosk—two adults for the film, a romantic comedy, that year’s installment about a holiday get-together gone horribly wrong, dinner sequences with turkeys and cranberry sauce and accidentally offensive remarks and humorous, lighthearted, hilarious violence.

It is New York, so other pretty girls pass on the street, but he doesn’t watch them with desire, which is his usual fallback position. He doesn’t compare them on tiers or rank them with numbers; he feels no need to do that anymore. He has accepted himself, and yes, when he sees her, he thinks, Wow, this is the first time that I have waited for a girl outside the theater and felt lucky when she actually appeared. How strange is that? What am I to make of the fact that this feels so right?

Justina appears in a navy peacoat over a dress, her thin legs in black stockings coming out underneath. She has, out of self-consciousness, kept her female style quite simple, wearing knee-length skirts, pearls, peacoats, one season’s worth of outfits from J.Crew—and yes, for a former man, she looks quite good—you can’t tell.

“Popcorn?”

“Put extra salt on it.”

After the film, they go to the Italian restaurant, only five blocks away, where they had their first date not long ago.

“I have really big news, so big I can’t believe I was able to keep it in this long,” he says.

“I can’t wait to hear it,” she says, squeezing his hand, in between a dish of olive oil and a brass candleholder.

“The magazine wants me to do a story for them this week,” he says.

“That’s so amazing. I’m so proud of you.”

He waits. This would be the moment.

“I’m going to tell our story, your story,” he says. “Isn’t that great?”

“What do you mean?”

“I think we can get the cover, you know, I’m writing it, it will be your picture. I mean, it’s going to be huge. You’re going to be famous, and maybe we can get a book deal and a movie out of it too. I mean, I think it’s that big, you know?”

Her face does not change into the shape he expects. It does not glow. He recognizes a kind of pained anger, and for a moment he sees the same face that had rested beneath the Kevlar helmet years ago, in Iraq. A masculine face, a face of rage.

“You can’t do this. You can’t write about me. I’m not ready, I’m not ready for it.”

“But I thought you’d be cool with it. It’d be doing me a huge favor.”

“Not yet. Can’t you wait?”

“No, it really can’t wait—the magazine asked and I said I would deliver. I mean, I’d been talking about it with them for months, you know.”

“You’ve been talking with the magazine for months about this? And you haven’t told me?”

“Uh, yeah, I mean, didn’t I mention it?”

“I’m a fucking story to you,” she says. “I’m a fucking story.” She stands up from the table.

“If you do this, if you do this story, you will lose me.”

“No need to be so dramatic—I know you’re Latin and all—”

“Latina! A story! Throw our love away for what, for printed pages!”

She leaves the restaurant.

“But I saved your life,” he yells.

“Fuck you!”

“Don’t get in the cab.”

“I’m getting in the cab, get away from me.”

“Don’t get in the fucking cab.”

“I’m getting in the cab.”

He withdraws his hand before the yellow door slams on it, and he looks to see her through the window, but she has turned her head away. The only face he sees in the cab is on the small and newly installed video monitor, the face of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, reciting a public service announcement.

Relapse. Seven months of sobriety gone, just like that.

A.E. Peoria, magazine journalist, turns and walks into a bar, puts his credit card down, and starts to drink. Sober, yes, only drinking wine, which doesn’t count, and now he knows that the only response is to get totally fucked-up, totally wrecked, to embrace that abyss that had been missing from his life. Justina’s rejection has brought it back to him in full—oh, how good it feels, the beer and shot then another beer.

At 123rd and Lexington, three hours later.

“Put your fucking shirt back on, motherfucker,” the drug dealer says.

“I saw the shoes up the telephone line, and I know that that means you sell crack, right?” A.E. Peoria says, putting his shirt back on. “See, I don’t have a fucking wire.”

“Shut the fuck up, man! Give me the cash.”

“Give me the stuff.”

“Shit, hold on.”

The dealer goes over to a payphone.

“You still have payphones? That’s so strange—isn’t that, like, bizarre? I guess it’s a class thing. But it’s strange, I mean, even in Africa and shit, everybody has cell phones—they call them mobile phones, you know, because ‘cell phone’ isn’t really accurate. They
took the cells out of the phone a long time ago. And it’s strange that only in America they still call it a cell phone.”

A teenager runs down the street. He hands a small packet to the dealer, who goes up to A.E. Peoria and slaps his hand. Peoria takes the packet and kneels down.

“What the fuck you doing?”

“Oh, I keep my money in my sock when I come up here, but I guess I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“Man, just leave that shit on the ground and get the fuck out of here before I beat your ass.”

“Okay, okay.”

Peoria starts walking blindly down the street, crack secured. All he needs now is a way to smoke it. He threw out his crack pipe months before, during his self-acceptance and healthy-living phase. Which put him in a dilemma.

“Hey, handsome,” a woman in tight black latex pants says. “You holding? Want to make a trade?”

“You have a crack pipe?”

“Shhhh, you’re a crazy man, aren’t you. Come with me.”

“What do I get out of it?”

“I suck your dick for a hit.”

She grabs his hand, and she presses a buzzer on an apartment building, where rent is clearly paid late each month and with cash.

A.E. Peoria stumbles into a room with a white mattress in the corner, three people passed out on the floor. He unzips his pants.

“Let’s get high first.”

He hands over the crack, and she takes a few minutes to stick it in a glass pipe. She sparks a Bic lighter, and he stares at her callused fingertips.

She exhales and passes the pipe to him.

He inhales and falls back.

She starts sucking his cock.

“Let me just finish my way,” he says, looking at her and masturbating. She starts to push her breasts together and moan.

He stares at her breasts, but he isn’t getting closer to ejaculating. He closes his eyes, and opens them, and closes his eyes again, fixing his mind on Justina, then opening them to get the image of the fat whore, then closing his eyes to fix on Justina, then reaching out and touching the breasts of the fat whore, and finally, thinking of Justina, coming.

He takes another hit from the crack pipe.

Fifteen minutes later, he jumps up.

“What the fuck am I doing here? What the fuck am I doing here?” he screams.

He sees the street sign—89th and Columbus. He’s near Justina’s place. His mobile phone says it’s 5:45 a.m. He looks across the street and feels an agitating emptiness, an emptiness that stretches back years and years in his life that he can never quite fill, not with crack or with booze or a yearly gym membership or even with his career. No, this emptiness does not just reach across to the piled-up garbage bags and the trickle of yellow cabs crawling by in the empty streets—the only time of day when they travel under the speed limit, when the drivers drive cautiously, which is strange because it would be the safest time to go fast. The newspaper delivery trucks, and the neon sign promising the world’s greatest coffee, and the other neon signs promising the world’s greatest slice of pizza, and the emptiness of a metal grate pulled down over a fast-food juice and hot dog joint, or the emptiness of the Yemeni clerk in the twenty-four-hour bodega, guarding the stocks of booze in the back from drunks, having to say over and over again that he can’t sell again until noon. This emptiness that he sees stretches everywhere and far back into his own past.
His own life. That he knows that there is no hope and no god, and nothing at all, and he knows that the story won’t save him either, and he feels the crack leaving his nervous system raw and dry, and he knows the crack has abandoned him to life, and he wants to cry, and he wants to yell out, “Look, here I am world, on the corner of 89th and Columbus, coming down off crack, drunk, a magazine journalist, a New Yorker, a failure, and all I want is to be held.”

She answers the buzzer on the third obnoxious ring.