Riley writes everything, even captions. He writes great quantities quickly and easily; his sound is never wrong. Everyone in the office marvels. But really it is nothing special, a trick rather than a gift, a type of accidental serenity. His lacks make it possible: a lack of ambition, a lack of taste, and — he must admit — a lack of curiosity; that is to say, of a curiosity immediately engaged. He operates always at several removes, straggling, aimed elsewhere. This is fine. All under the city there is furious burrowing: cabbies just short of a doctorate, waitresses studying with Merce Cunningham. Riley is grateful to be spared.
Today, for OTL, before even removing his parka, he does “I Joined an Abortion Club” and “My Daughter Is Trying to Kill Me.”
ACCORDING to his only source, her niece, a sous-chef, she’s gone to look after her Connecticut grandfather. Will her name and the town’s be enough on the envelope? He fills three pages, but it’s a letter to someone else. He looks at the perforations of a stamp and wonders how they are made.
Watching Million Dollar Movie is sad also. How she would fill in dialogue of her own, hang on the most obvious plots. Her lips pulled back in concentration, like safety padding over crooked teeth. He gets up to look for the nail clipper, orders himself back down. To make this into the pathos that comes quickly and easily, he tries to think what her grandfather is thinking.
The bedroom is an oblong perpendicular to the hall. A single window, off center, overlooks the street. From this height it is barely possible to read an address painted on a trash can. A mirror is the oldest thing in the room, its silvering eaten away at two corners. Under the bed, in a chronology of blue, yellow, white, are hardened knobs of Kleenex. The clock face glows in the dark.
RILEY studies while riding. The texts of cycling posture: racers sleek and low over their handlebars veer in and out of the traffic pack; casuals pedal with arms folded, rock to bunge-corded radios; dutifuls stiff-armed and high in the saddle badge themselves with filtration masks, crash helmets. Riley, though, is a neutral, his three-speed unfashionably thick, his text pared to one word: conveyance. Passing over the invariable route — down Ninth Avenue, east on Fourteenth Street, the bins of cook pots and rubber sandals already pawed through, south again on Broadway — he holds in mental foreground his image of the wheeling masses of Beijing.
Moretti snaps pencils; he pleads and paces. T/C has to be at the typesetter’s by three, and Riley has just now begun the feature. “PLO Using Mind Control.” Riley abandons his lead, rolls in a fresh sheet. Moretti groans. Mrs. Vega, the Subscription Department, goes downstairs for more milk.
Lina comes out of the file room, biting her lip.
Riley glances. “How recently were they used?”
“Three issues ago. But I can crop differently.”
With the Pratt students who come in to do paste-up, Lina is the Art Department.
“This one — the hands out — I thought might go as a psychic trance.”
Lina is so dark: her eyes, hair, skin, a round depth to her voice. She is very small, very serious. She wears plain black clothes. Her people are Calabrese.
“I don’t know. He looks ill.”
Lina and Riley would sleep together, but thinking about it, they agree, is better. The work abets. Editing, doing captions at opposite ends of a desk, they are thinking about it all the time.
“No panic. I’ll look some more.”
And Lina adores her husband, who is shy because of his faulty English, blind in one eye and retired from boxing.
Riley finishes just before two and goes for lunch. Wendell, the Advertising Department, takes him for pastrami, then talks too much to eat. The great Park Row press wars. The scoops, hoaxes, flash bars.
“See? It was right out there.”
Wendell points to the corner cut-rate luggage store. Probably it had once been a saloon; possibly an editor had been shot in the doorway over a love nest scandal. But Wendell lives with his mother and romances a time before he was born. He is as hopeful as anyone wanting to add bustline inches, to lose weight while sleeping. Transformation is real to him. Instant $$$—song poems wanted. Sharpen saws at home — be your own boss.
Riley says, “I bet there isn’t a thing you’d rather be doing.”
Wendell grins, tips heavily.
Too many coffees at La Campaña. The caffeine, the glucose … Riley’s problem is not his inability to sleep but the lack of a routine to meet the situation. He tries crossword puzzles, a hot bath. The muscle strips along his spine are cramping and he cannot distract himself. “Scared” is the wrong word, but he wishes the phone would ring.
HE signs in, and the guard, without shifting his eyes from Muhammad Speaks, runs him up in the cage. There are brass fixtures in the Starrett Building someone still takes time to polish. Riley believes in the marble, that it isn’t something else finished to look like marble. He goes up two flights, down the long shadow of a hall, turning, as if on a dance floor, to face each frosted pane, bowing. Mail Exchange. School of Fashion. Loan Broker. Patent Attorney. To punch out the glass to see what’s inside. So Riley feels his curiosity engaged and does not like it.
He keys both locks of the Gravity office, waters the plant, feeds Mrs. Vega’s angelfish, makes soup from a packet. It is still dark outside, untinged. He goes to the farthest room back, sits under bright lights, against bundles of Air Disaster! a “Collector’s Item” on coated paper, and blows ripples in the soup.
Breathless and overgroomed, Moretti arrives at eight-thirty, takes a few minutes to be surprised.
“You’re not supposed to be in. And where’s that bike?”
His face is at once pallid and aggressive; he might be wearing Kabuki makeup. “You’re the cog, Riley, so we keep turning. Stand still in this business, you know …”
Moretti has been in sportswear, outdoor advertising, an adult motel. Now finally, with the magazines, he is making a go. Perhaps this does not agree with him.
Lina is so tiny she has to buy schoolgirl sizes, like this sappy pleated skirt. But she is so grave in it. Lina sits on the edge of her desk, where Riley has been typing since dawn.
“Early,” she says.
Riley looks down. Her feet barely reach the handle of the middle drawer. She is wearing Mary Janes.
“I needed some extra time for thinking.”
Lina smiles, touches his first page of copy, “Nebraska’s Pantyhose Strangler,” smiles, nods.
A LITTLE after ten, Riley collapses onto the sofa Wendell brought up from the street and crammed into his office. Hopeful Wendell. He is on the phone trying to land a major for OTL. They are coming out with a line of feminine towelettes. And neuroelectric fatigue twitches for Riley, fragments of “Gay Bikers’ Homicide Cookout” that he hasn’t written yet, and stickpin revival (Wendell’s bulging Park Row vests) without the scars from molten lead for type, and seeing Angelina, old and dried under her full name, blinking through Catanzaro street dust, sucking Fanta orange from a cup. This is Riley’s quality of mind when working, elaborative; and true, he controls in part, moving here to there like a photo stylist. But distance is lost, his removes collapsed and overrun. Awful, this layered weight on him, like something made up and come round, revenge of his written victims giving back what he’d stuck them with. He turns away from clatter, Wendell’s tricked face, into the cushions. “Scared” is now the word, even as he falls asleep.