Baby, Would I Lie?

11

Jack Ingersoll stood on the sidewalk outside Sara’s hotel and watched the families ooze by in their station wagons, campers, vans, pickup trucks. I’m going to get the Weekly Galaxy, he thought as he watched his onetime readers seep past. This time, I’m gonna get em.

Jack Ingersoll at thirty-three had already lived too many lives. A counterculture journalist to begin with, he’d gone straight from college to the St. Louis Massacre, an anti-establishment weekly newspaper fawningly modeled on New York City’s Village Voice. Though it was great fun at first, the fact had eventually become clear, even to the dewiest-eyed among the Massacrees, that they were accomplishing nothing. They were preaching to the (very few) converted, and it didn’t matter what wonderful exposes their industrious digging produced. Human beings know only what they want to know, and if they don’t want to know the facts, the data, the truth, this wonderful truth you have just unearthed for them at great risk and with uncommon brilliance, they just won’t listen. Won’t listen.

Jack’s contemporaries didn’t sell out, exactly. They just moved on to better-paying jobs (after all, they had families now) with more careful publications. Jack stayed longer, until in fact the Massacre was shot out from under him; that is, bought by a conglomerate that turned it into a youth-oriented music and movie paper. Before the Massacre’s massacre was complete. Jack underwent a sea change, a total conversion of all the atoms of his body and brain into their opposites. He didn’t sell out a little; he sold out a lot. The biggest salary bucks in the world of journalism were to be collected at the Weekly Galaxy and its supermarket sisters, and that was because, of pride and prestige and self-esteem and the knowledge of a good job well done there was fuck-all at the Galaxy. They made up for the lack, quite handsomely, with money.

This second Jack was as skeptical and faithless as the first had been engage. While his co-Galaxians squandered their lavish incomes as fast as the bucks rolled in. Jack spent as little as possible, hoarding it all away in expectation of the winter ahead. “Sooner or later,” he would say in those days, “they fire everybody.”

And it is true that they would have fired Jack as well, eventually, if it hadn’t been for the arrival at the Galaxy of Sara Joslyn, girl reporter. Not cynical and burnt-out like himself, she was still fresh from journalism school, with just a touch of employment on an old-fashioned New England local paper to give her a false sense of professionalism.

There’s something seductive about life at the Galaxy; it’s The Front Page without redeeming social significance. Always nosing after a scoop, always a fire engine to chase. Sara had taken to it like a buzzard to entrails. Though Jack had been unable to drag himself out of his mire of unbelief, he had nevertheless staggered at last into action to save Sara. In the nick of time, they’d managed their escape from that particular Pleasure Island, before the donkey ears became too noticeable.

And now Trend. “The Magazine For The Way We Live This Instant.” It’s true the magazine devoted too much of its space and attention to listing the fourteen best real estate agents in Manhattan and the seven best shortcuts to the Hamptons, but in with the service slop for the trendoids and wannabes there was also good investigative journalism, of politics both local and national, of crime both financial and melodramatic, and of chicanery both public and private.

All of which made Trend the perfect place for a Weekly Galaxy exposé, if Jack — and Sara, bless her, wherever she was at the moment while Jack paced the sidewalk out here in front of the hotel — if the two of them could nail down the particulars. The new owners, the old scams. The old felonies: bribery, theft, false representation. Oh, get them.

Not get them for those people out there in the slower-than-molasses traffic. Those were the Galaxy readers, and they would not want to know the truth about their favorite reading matter, and therefore would not listen.

No, the better way to put it to the Galaxians was to make them figures of scorn and obloquy in the eyes of the movers and shakers of their own world, the communications business, combiz: press people, TV people, ad agency people, music biz people, all that vast ebb and flow of ideasmiths who among them create the Zeitgeist, the view of reality in which we all swim. Most of them live at least some of the time in New York, and most of them read Trend.

A car came slashing along the verboten center lane, flashing its lights and blasting its horn at those tremulous souls who might be thinking of making a left turn in any direction. This car and this driver stood out like a panther among sheep; who could it be but the awaited Sara?

No one. The rental radiated so much menace that a camper full of kiddies actually backed up to let the bandit slice rightward back across its own lane of traffic and slew to a juddering halt at the Lodge. Already smiling, already knowing the identity of that driver, Jack crossed the sloping asphalt as Sara sprang from the car, slammed its door, spun around, and said, “What the hell are you doing here?”

Still driving. Jack grinned at her. “I love you, too.”

“Fax it to me,” she suggested, and started around him toward the building, then stopped, turned back, gave him a look of deep mistrust, and said, “You are not taking over this assignment.”

“Of course not,” Jack said.

“You are an editor; I am a reporter.”

“Exactly.”

Skepticism still darkened her features. She said, “So what are you here for?”

“Your body.”

“Oh, that’s all right, then,” she said. “Come on.”

As they walked toward the hotel, he said, “I couldn’t get connecting rooms.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “We’ll connect.”

In the afterglow, she said, “It was my fax, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he admitted, and nuzzled her throat. “Your throat smells wonderful after sex,” he murmured. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

She laughed, hugging him, twining their legs together, wrinkling and roiling the damp sheet even more. “Once an investigative reporter,” she said, “always an investigative reporter.”

Reluctantly, he removed his nose from the side of her neck and the butterfly of her pulse. Leaning up on one elbow, he said, “I wasn’t going to ask who.”

“Not this conversation,” she agreed. “Next conversation.”

With her hair messily around her smiling face, spreading over the pillow beneath her head, she was so beautiful, he couldn’t stand it. “I don’t want there to be anything in the universe,” he said, “except you and me and this room, floating through space and time. Eternity, right here.”

She gave him a look of amused disbelief. “What did they feed you on that plane?”

“Except,” he went on, looking around the room, “one electrician, to put a dimmer on the lights.”

“I think the phrase is ‘to put the lights on a dimmer.’ ”

“I believe I’ll shower now,” Jack said, crawling backward off her and off the bed.

“Some editor,” she commented, and pulled up the top sheet. Curling shrimp-like beneath it, she said, “Wake me when you’re done.”

“Maybe.”

They sat in the little chairs by the small table under the hanging lamp in front of the view of Mickey Gilley’s parking lot, and Sara said, “Okay, the approach was wrong.”

“Agreed,” Jack said.

“I shouldn’t have just sent that one page of fax.”

Jack cocked an eyebrow at her. “That’s what was wrong with the approach?”

“Now listen,” she said. “I’m not turning my back on the Galaxy.”

“Good. No one should ever turn his back on the Galaxy.”

“I’m just saying,” she just said, “there’s something in this singer, too, what he represents.”

“The proles,” Jack told her. “The mouth-breathers. The underclass.” He pointed. “Those people in those used cars out there.”

“Don’t be so condescending,” she said.

“Why not? I’m smarter than they are, faster, funnier, richer and probably better-looking.”

She reared back, the better to study him withal. “Are you being provocative?”

“That, too,” he agreed. “I’m more provocative than they are. Sara, honeybun, our readers don’t care—”

“I hate it when you call me honeybun.”

“That’s the first time I ever did.”

“And I hated it.”

Casually, he said, “Who else called you honeybun?”

She gave him a look. “All those guys that nuzzled my neck,” she said.

“Oh, those guys.”

“You were saying something about our readers.”

“I was. I was saying they don’t care about the shitkickers, is what I was saying. Our readers care about wealth and prestige. They care about power and fame. They care about success and excess. Bottom-feeders are not a matter of deep interest to the readers of Trend. That is why I am going from here to the center of journalistic misuse of money and power, the Galaxy hospitality suite.”

“Two-two-two.”

“And very very.”

“Will you do me a favor?” she asked.

“Anything.”

“After the Galaxy, go to the show. The Ray Jones show.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, honeybun—”

“That’s twice.”

Heavily, he shrugged and nodded his acceptance of the inevitable. “All right,” he said, “all right, all right, I’ll go—”

The phone rang.

“—see the Ray Jones show,” he finished, as Sara got up and went over to the bedside phone. “And you concentrate on the Galaxy.”

“Sure. Hello? Oh, hi, Cal.” Sara listened, then smiled all over her face. “That’s great! Cal, I really appreciate this. I’ll be there. Absolutely. Oh, Gil? Listen, my editor’s in town... from the magazine? Could you put him in the Elvis seat tonight? Thanks, Cal. I’ll tell him. His name is Jack Ingersoll. Right. See you tomorrow, nine A.M. Bye.”

Sara hung up and smiled at Jack. “You are looking at a genius,” she announced.

“The Elvis seat?”

“Don’t worry about it. You just present yourself at the Ray Jones Theater a little before eight tonight. Go to the guy at the door and tell him who you are. He’ll explain all about the Elvis seat. The thing is,” she went on, “Ray Jones sells out, every show, over eight hundred seats. And there’re no house comp seats.”

“I’m looking forward to this,” Jack said insincerely. “What was he calling about? Cal, was it?”

“He wanted to tell me how my neck smelled after sex.”

“Sara, you are beginning to annoy.”

“I don’t really care,” she told him, flashing her sunniest smile. “His name is Cal Denny; he’s rather sweet—”

“Unlike some.”

“He’s Ray Jones’s best friend, and they’re all going over to Forsyth tomorrow for jury selection. Ray Jones and his whole band and Cal Denny and everybody, showing solidarity.”

“And?”

“And I,” Sara said, “have been invited along.” She pirouetted in front of him, arms and hands at a graceful angle. “Just call me supergroupie,” she suggested. “I’m going on the team bus.”