Deceit

TWENTY

Kara Bernstein.

Kara Betland.

Kara Bolinsky.

Kara Brill.

I used the half hour I had between showering and shaving and combing and recombing my hair and spritzing on some ancient Stetson for Men then washing it off because it smelt like old leather-the half hour between that and actually needing to leave the house-to look up Kara Bolka in the online phone directories.

No luck.

Not that there weren’t a generous number of Karas in California; I pictured legions of OC girls still wearing their braces, chilling at the mall or flaunting their hard bodies at the beach and in the waiting rooms of San Fernando’s porn industry. Kara Bolka sounded like a name Eastern European immigrants might give their American-born daughter. It whispered half woman and half nymph.

Of course, it might’ve been my libido doing the whispering.

The night hadn’t actually begun, but I was wondering how it would end. I was counting down from my last intimate encounter and contemplating whether it really was like riding a bicycle, and if we were talking ten-gear or mountain bike.

I hadn’t completely been a sexual hermit since my arrival in Littleton. No. I’d cohabited at the Days Inn with a certain married woman who’d ventured into Muhammed Alley pretty much for the same reason I had-as a retreat. In her case, from an unfaithful husband who tended to knock her around when his golf game was off or a business deal went sour. He was in real estate, where business deals tended to unravel on a regular basis-especially in Littleton, which still boasted two half-finished resorts.

I won’t tell you her name. It doesn’t matter. We went to the Days Inn instead of my rented home because I didn’t want her husband showing up at my front door. We went there three times, and it was satisfying only in the most rudimentary definition of the term. Like eating cooked-to-death food when you’re hungry.

When she called my cell after our third liaison, I didn’t call her back. I discovered a message on my phone from her a week later.

So this is it, huh? Have a nice life.

If you were going to end an affair, those words were as good as any.

Now I was awash in Karas, which is to say pretty much at sea.

I left them there to meet Anna.

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN SALAD AND ENTRÉE, BETWEEN TALKING AND FLIRTING, between 8 o’clock and 9 o’clock, Anna mentioned John Wren.

That she knew him.

We’d somehow ended up on the subject of journalism again. Not just talking, either. I was pretty much proselytizing, though it might’ve been the Chianti doing most of the self-righteous babbling. I sounded the way I used to, when I was first starting out and consumed with the fever. A divinity student discussing his faith. Hadn’t I worked for the acknowledged bible of the industry?

Slowly, sin by sin, I’d managed to subvert the very reason for a newspaper’s existence, to turn truth inside out. Like one of those Soviet moles from the thirties who burrowed their way into the heart of the British democracy. And just like Philby and company had spilled innocent blood-so did I.

I have skirted the particulars with you; I have played coy.

The resulting carnage from my exposure and dismissal included one brilliant, dedicated, and generally worshiped editor who did nothing much but believe in me.

He went down with the ship.

Or with the rat.

I’d be pecking away at a story and I’d feel him just behind me, like a divine presence keeping tabs. He had that kind of status, had earned a special kind of reputation, even at a newspaper where journalistic luminaries were the norm.

For some reason, he took an interest in me, saw something there worth cultivating. Maybe he simply knew a fatherless boy when he saw one. He invited me for drinks one night, and when it went okay, when I didn’t bore him with a fusillade of mostly fawning questions, he invited me again. After a while we began having midnight heart-to-hearts over smelly bratwurst sandwiches in his office. We took ambling walks in Bryant Park when he felt like stretching his legs. When he’d do the rounds, I’d sense him there over my shoulder and find myself flushing, trying to will the keys to conjure up something sharp, incisive, and brilliant. Sometimes they even obliged.

It didn’t matter.

He had a habit of holding back enough praise to make you thirsty for more. What you wrote was mostly not bad, okay, or simply workmanlike. You were supposed to write for your readers-that great mass of news-hungry souls thirsting for truth.

I wrote for him.

I had a readership of one. I needed to turn okay into great.

It was irony itself that creating a story about a dead National Guardsman named Lowell Beaumont finally did the trick.

Of course, there’s a problem with finally getting what you’ve been thirsting for. Once praised, you need to feel it again, to have all that love and approval poured over you like champagne in the championship-starved 2004 Red Sox clubhouse.

I kept it up for longer than should’ve been possible.

I kept it up until it wasn’t possible.

Until I accompanied a certain reporter for drinks, and it all blew up.

During the course of one week, this editor, this friend, went from glorified ombudsman to vilified incompetent. It was followed weeks later by his sudden retirement.

He should’ve known, they claimed-they mostly being all the lesser lights he’d eclipsed on the way up. He should’ve been on top of things. He should’ve been doing his job.

His public desecration was only mildly less brutal than mine, his fall ten times greater.

Of everything I managed to ruin-and I was pretty much a one-man wrecking crew, trashing my career, my marriage, my reputation-destroying him is the thing I’m most shamed by, the worm that continually gnaws at me, that I occasionally try to drown through serial shots of tequila.

Sometimes it makes me dial the number of a faded country house in Putnam County and recite soundless words of contrition.

Hello, I say, it’s me. I’m sorry.

I can picture him there, holding that old-style black receiver in his hand, his bifocals sloped down over his prodigious nose, and I swallow the words down, ingest them whole, and they slide back into my gut and make me sick.

But not tonight.

No.

Tonight I was Carl Woodward, a hybrid between journalistic fervor and rampant horniness. Wine had loosened my tongue, all right; I was up on a soapbox with no intention of coming down. I was showing off.

“We may be in the democracy-exporting business-I mean that seems to be our only foreign policy these days, our crusade-but who protects democracy in a democracy? Those nine geriatrics on the Supreme Court? What protects the USA today is USA Today. Scary, huh? I’m not kidding. Like it or not, democracy’s in the sweaty little hands of the working press. Even if we don’t really know it. Even if we don’t really want it. I’m using we loosely here. Because truth always gets the first bullet.”

Truth-blithely using the one word in the English language I was least familiar with.

I was half-listening to myself, wondering if I sounded like a dangerous madman or, just as bad, a bore. But Anna seemed to be listening with semirapt attention. She seemed to like this me, this superhero of truth, justice, and the American way.

Then she said: “Why did you need a break?”

“Huh?”

“You said you came out here because you needed a break. What from? It sounds like you loved it-your work. Being on important stories. Why did you bury yourself out here? I don’t mean bury-I mean…”

I should’ve been more careful.

I’d started the night talking about things unrelated to journalism, hadn’t I? The New York Yankees, rattlesnakes, Caddyshack. Somehow, without quite realizing it, I’d navigated My Dinner with Anna back into dangerous waters.

“I had a problem at my last job.”

“Oh? What kind of problem?”

“Ethics, sort of.”

“Ethics, sort of,” she repeated. “Something you want to talk about or something you want to pretend I didn’t ask you about?”

“Something I want to pretend you didn’t ask me about.” It’s possible to become suddenly and shockingly sober-my purple haze had disappeared like protective netting blown off by an ill wind.

“Fine. Ethics sounds kind of interesting, though. Even a little dirty.”

“It was. But not in the way you mean it,” I said.

“Oh. Well, whatever it was, I’m sorry. I mean, you obviously adored being a reporter-you’re still a reporter, you know what I mean…”

“I made things up.”

There.

Sooner or later it was bound to come out. Sooner or later, she’d mention my name to one of her friends or acquaintances and they’d tell her how familiar that name sounded-that if they didn’t know any better they’d say it sounded like that reporter guy who nearly took down a newspaper. The one who wrote about things that never happened.

The liar.

“Tom Valle,” she said, as if sounding out a foreign language. “Oh shit.”

I tried to glean what I could from her expression-those few seconds when pure shock left her unguarded. Was it simple embarrassment I saw there? Disgust? Pity?

“Wow,” she said, lifting the wine glass to her lips, then placing it back down on the table with an awkward deliberateness, like someone relearning to use their extremities after a stroke. “When you said you needed a break, you weren’t kidding. Do you mind me asking… why you did what you did? I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

I didn’t respond right away. I could’ve said yeah, I’d rather you didn’t, and changed the subject. I could’ve trotted out something tried-and-true and meant for public consumption only. I was wrong. I didn’t mean it. I was going through a lot of stuff at the time. I could’ve editorialized.

I told the truth.

How it began. The morning I woke up late. The little exercise in creative writing.

“How many times?” she asked me softly. “After that?”

“I don’t know. They ended up auditing every story I’d ever written. They said there were fifty-six of them. Where I’d either partially or totally fabricated a story. I didn’t think it was that much. Maybe it was.”

“Why? You were a good reporter, right? I mean, you had a respected career. You worked at a great newspaper. You didn’t have to.”

You didn’t have to. The great mystery of Tom Valle’s criminal life.

“Ever walk into a reporter bar?” I asked her. “There’s a hierarchy in those places-you’re either holding court or bowing down. Maybe it was nice being bowed down to for a change. Besides, when you’re a mediocre student, being teacher’s pet feels pretty good. Being on page 1 instead of section 2 feels even better. It was nice making the B-list of talking heads, too. I even did Larry King Live. Once-Ben Bradlee was on the panel. Interns from the Columbia School of Journalism sought me out for pearls of journalistic wisdom. Other reporters stuck pins into Tom Valle dolls, when they weren’t falling all over themselves to buy me a drink. Which turned out to be my downfall, actually-one of those reporters bought me several drinks. It’s hard to keep your facts straight on four margaritas.”

She asked me how I ended up here.

“Here’s pretty much the only place that would have me,” I said. “The week I knew the jig was up, that it was all going to come crashing down around my head-the editors were already circling the wagons, beginning to sift through the wreckage; they had forensic accountants checking my expense accounts against my bylines. I mean, if I had eggs and coffee in a diner in New York on the third, I couldn’t have been at a DNC conference in Washington, right? Anyway, I got wicked drunk and went up there at 3 in the morning. I must’ve had the vague intention of stealing anything incriminating, which in retrospect means I would’ve needed a forklift. I don’t really know what I thought I was going to do. I broke into the national editor’s office and tried to find his computer files; I ended up passed out on the floor. It gave them the excuse they needed to press criminal charges, as opposed to just a nice public firing. I got probation instead of jail time-they weren’t going to throw me in jail for that. For one year I did nothing much but hibernate. My PO is related to Hinch Edwards-he owns the Littleton Journal. Hinch took pity. End of story.”

“Yeah, he’s a nice guy.”

That’s when it suddenly occurred to me that Anna maybe knew things I wasn’t aware she knew.

“You know Hinch?”

“I knew someone who worked for him,” she said.

“Who?”

“John.”

“John who? John Wren? You knew John Wren?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why? We’ve had one dinner. I haven’t told you my middle name, either. By the way, it’s Alicia.”

“So you were friends or something?”

“Kind of. What’s so remarkable about that?”

“Nothing. Just kind of funny that you know two reporters who lived in the same house.”

“He lived in your house, huh? Of course, it’s a small town. Not that many houses.”

“Right.” I gulped down some wine, desperately trying to recapture a suddenly elusive high. “Do you keep in touch with him?” I asked.

“I’m not sure he keeps in touch with anyone. I came to visit my dad one time, and he was just gone. That’s where we’d met. At the home. He was interviewing people about that… flood… the one back in the fifties. You know about that, right? Horrible-a whole town went under. I think he went to the retirement home to try to scare up some memories.”

Scare. Good word, I thought.

“I don’t think he was very successful at it,” I said. “The story never ran.”

“Really?” Anna said. “He seemed pretty excited about it. He e-mailed me once after he left Littleton-my impression was he’d holed himself up somewhere to work on it.”

“That’s strange, considering he was no longer employed,” I said. “Anyway, word was he was pretty excitable in general around then. He went a little bonkers.”

“Bonkers? Is that a psychiatric term?”

“He locked himself in the newspaper offices one night and had to be forcibly removed. I think that constitutes bonkers. I ought to know.”

“Was that what they said you were? Bonkers?”

“Only the nice ones. Everyone else said I was the devil.”

“You don’t look like the devil.”

“Thanks.” I blushed, took another sip of wine. “Was your father living here? Back when the flood happened?”

“Yes. He wouldn’t be able to tell you much about it, of course. Not now.”

Silence.

“I just tried to call him,” I said. “Wren.”

“Oh? What for?”

“I want to ask him about something I’m working on.”

“I thought you said he’d lost his mind?”

“Maybe he got it back.”

I was tempted to tell Anna that the something I was working on was the same thing Wren had been working on. The aforementioned nut job Wren.

It might sound paranoid to her. It might sound like a desperate reporter trying to get his mojo back.

Not that it really mattered.

Dinner had become uncomfortably awkward. It was as if the stopper had been pulled out of the bottle labeled Anna and Tom’s Dinner Conversation; the contents had poured out onto the floor, leaving nothing but a few paltry drops.

I felt less than whole in her eyes, an ethical cripple. The whole mood had soured. She made a halfhearted effort to resuscitate things, but she seemed to be going through the motions.

When I paid the bill, when we walked outside and I escorted her to her car, I didn’t know whether to say good night or good-bye.

We lingered in front of her red Beetle-more maroon in the moonlight-and it was like that moment in front of a girl’s apartment door when you’re either going to get shot down or rescued and you don’t for the life of you know which.

She leaned forward and kissed me.

On the cheek.

“I’ll call you sometime,” she said. “Thank you for dinner.”

I wanted to say that’s it?

I wanted to take that butterfly that had begun flitting about my chest the day she fixed my car and never really stopped-I wanted to pin it down. To display it somewhere where I could hold it up to the light and stare at it.

She’d call me sometime. Then what? She’d call me as a friend or an acquaintance or something more? She’d call me because she wanted to, or because she had to, or she was never going to call at all?

“Don’t mention it,” I said.