“I wasn’t putting her on that time,” he said. “Pretend to be a little interested, even if you aren’t,” the woman said.
“I listen to this stuff night and day. How am I supposed to keep it all straight?” The man finished his drink and took a sip of his wife’s wine.
The waitress came back to the table with the bill. There was a little piece of paper with “Stephanie Sykes” written on it. Edward looked surprised. He handed it to Nicole. Nicole read it and shook her head. She handed it to Lucy, seeming slightly embarrassed. “I am just a dishwasher,” the note said, “but I love Stephanie Sykes. I will treasure your ginger ale glass always. — Harry Woods.”
Maureen read it over Lucy’s shoulder. “It must be the strangest feeling to be recognized. Especially if you don’t even know who’s watching you,” Maureen said.
“Really,” Nicole said. “I mean, you have to think about it because there are a lot of guys like that guy Hinckley.”
“Don’t even talk about it,” Lucy said.
More fireworks exploded. Maureen laughed nervously. Hildon rubbed Lucy’s knee under the table, so hard that the top part of her body swayed. Maureen saw her moving, and Lucy looked down, pretending that she had been moving intentionally and that something was wrong with the seat of the chair.
“Jodie Foster was so great in Taxi Driver,” Nicole said. “It’s too bad he couldn’t have picked somebody obscure to give her career a boost.”
“That’s thinking business,” Edward said, raising his empty brandy snifter to Nicole.
Nicole said, “It’s getting breezy. I wonder if we’re going to have a tornado.”
“A tornado?” Edward said. “That isn’t likely. Of course, I guess people never expect a tornado. Do you really think they cause as much destruction as people make out?”
“Are you crazy?” Maureen said. “Of course they do.”
“There was that one in New England,” Nicole said. “That one in the early fifties in … Worcester. Sixty people died, and there’s no telling how many were hurt.”
“Did your family have friends in Worcester?” Maureen said.
“No,” Nicole said. “That was just one of the most damaging tornadoes, so it was the one that came to mind.”
As they walked away from the table, Maureen said to Noonan, “Imagine that. She’d never heard of one of the presidential candidates and she knew about some tornado that hit New England before she was born. You’ve got to wonder what kind of an education kids are getting nowadays.”
Noonan put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed. He was smiling ear to ear.
“What?” Maureen said. “I’m being stuffy?”
With his free hand, Noonan reached in his pants pocket. Noonan had stolen the ashtray.
7
THE newspaper assigned Myra DeVane to write the Country Daze story. There was no background information on any of the staff, so for most of the story she was going to have to rely on interviews. She wanted to do a good job, because she wanted to move on from Vermont to an important paper like the Boston Globe. She needed some more impressive press clips before she applied for a job like that though. If this group of people was anywhere near as interesting as their writing, it wasn’t going to be difficult to write a good story. The new publisher, whom she had spoken to in person, had about as much class as John Belushi, doing Samurai Swordsman. She couldn’t wait to see what the editor was like.
On Monday she went to the Country Daze headquarters, a remodeled turn-of-the-century house off the main street. Tomato plants were staked on the front lawn. It had been recently painted, but the yard, with patches of burned grass and bushes in need of trimming, made it look a little run down.
The law office to the left had a neat privet hedge across the front and window boxes filled with geraniums. The window boxes on the Country Daze house were empty. Perhaps this lack of concern with exteriors indicated that real work was going on inside and there was no time for perfecting their image. If she liked them, she would mention that in her lead.
Downstairs, as she came in, was a young woman in her twenties. Her bangs looked like overcooked bacon. The rest of her hair was pulled back in a bun. She was typing on what looked like the horizontal control panel of a jet plane. The typewriter looked particularly out of place next to the telephones, both circa 1950 black, that sat beside it on the desk. The desk was a round oak table. There was a straight-back oak chair pulled up to one side, as if someone might be dropping by for tea. A two-foot-high plastic pig carrying a red suitcase stood at the front of the desk, in lieu of a bud vase. It was studded with memos. As she answered the phone, the secretary took messages and peeled pieces of paper off a pad, which she stuck to the pig. Someone had put a little toupee between the pig’s ears.
The secretary led her up the stairs to Hildon’s office. He had on white gym shorts, a black T-shirt, socks, and running shoes. His feet were on his desk. He smiled at her when she walked in, and kept talking on the phone. “Quote, He’ll be right with you, end quote,” the secretary said, and turned and left.
Myra had seen him before but she couldn’t think where. He was too handsome for her to be mistaking him for someone else. She felt herself stiffening, going on guard against someone who exuded such confidence. She found out his background: an only child from a middle-class family who went to prep school and to Yale, dodged the draft, was admitted to law school at the University of Virginia and dropped out. A year as a reporter himself, for the Detroit Free Press. Married, no children. Got tired of city life, moved to the country, turned a profit selling real estate and decided to start a magazine. According to Hildon, he had just been in the right place at the right time; instead of the Let’s-Open-a-Restaurant dream, he had started a magazine and put a lot of his friends to work. He saw the magazine as an extended family, a continuation of the life he and his friends had led in college. Obviously they were beating the system, and while he didn’t think he or this bunch was representative, he was sure that they all felt very lucky and grateful. The staff had been expanded — no, no one had left, except for one reporter who was going to leave, but that was because he had decided he wanted to be on the West Coast; it had nothing to do with dissatisfaction with the magazine. Social satire was perhaps too vague a description of what they did, really; some of it was satirical, but much of it he simply thought of as eclectic. The magazine, then, was really what he was inclined to publish — something that had to do with his own concerns and the things that amused him? Yes, but he didn’t think that he was unrepresentative either, and in a way the success of the magazine proved that: he wasn’t the only one who cared about social issues and who also had a sense of humor. While he didn’t want to seem to wave the flag, he didn’t think that a lot of stereotypes about Americans pertained anymore; most Baby Boomers were well-educated, united by their opposition to the Vietnam war, people who had had their consciousness raised about nutrition and ecology … he really thought that there was a large thinking population out there, and he was pleased that they were pleased with Country Daze. Could he characterize his audience? Well — he did not think that many farmers wanting advice about what fertilizer to use took the magazine home after flipping through it on the stands. Something for coffee-table flipping in New York? Well, they got a lot of mail and it wasn’t all from New York. Look at what a cross section of the population tuned in to the Prairie Home Companion. Snob appeal? He hoped that it was promoting a sense of mutual amusement, a sense of camaraderie, rather than being something taken up by an elitist minority. The mail suggested …