Absent Friends

Harry Randall's explosive piece on the real James McCaffery—the third story, following by two weeks the one Leo had assigned as a soft feature on the Fallen Hero, a heartstring-tugger (and assigning it to Harry, the newsroom knew, was further proof of how far Harry himself had fallen)—had been brilliant, and Laura had told him so.

But Harry had not been so easily bought.

It was the trailing edge of an afternoon in late October. Harry had discreetly absented himself as she sifted through his copy. She ran through it once, then again, was on it for a third time when he brought his worry and his gin back with him into the bedroom.

“Terrific,” Laura told him, scooting over to make room. “Jesus, Harry, this'll light the fuse. It's fabulous.”

Neither of them was on that day, and they had not left Harry's apartment. While Harry hunched over his desk, the clicking of keys stopping only when he was rifling through papers, flipping notebooks open and shut, or shifting folders from pile to pile, Laura kept herself mostly to the bedroom. Once or twice, pulling her robe around her, she slipped into the kitchen to make coffee. Each time she left him his without a word and carried hers back to bed, where she was working her way through a stack of yesterday's newspapers.

This was Laura's habit from journalism school days, to scan rags from all over, every week. Harry had groused when she'd first brought her habit to bed on a Sunday afternoon: “Hey, Stone, you're smearing ink all over my sheets.” Laura reminded him he was supposed to be an ink-stained wretch and went on reading. She needed to know: Someone might have thought of an angle she hadn't. Someone's prose might be making readers sit up and take notice. And some young reporter—younger even than she—someone still in the sticks, might be breaking out, a star rising. She needed to know.

Though, if truth be told, the bedroom was a little chilly, the view from its windows dull, a neighbor's brick wall. Laura might have been happier out where Harry was, in the living room, wrapped in a blanket in Harry's reading chair, where she could glance up from an op-ed piece to see the river roll by and to watch Harry work. She would have preferred some conversation, maybe even a kiss and a cuddle, between the Sacramento Bee and the Chicago Sun-Times.

But the muttering Harry Randall in the other room, tossing papers, dropping folders, banging the keys nonstop as the sun slid in orange squares across the wall—this was the Harry Randall of legend. The man the newsroom, with Laura the sole exception, said was gone for good, drowned in gin and futility.

He was not gone; he was right here; and it was thrilling. Once or twice, as the afternoon lengthened, Laura slipped out of bed and stood silent in the doorway. She watched as, with a hunter's taut smile, Harry searched his notes for this quote, that date, letting out a sharp “Ha!” when he found what he'd wanted; and Laura's heart sped, and she had to wipe her eyes because they'd suddenly gone misty.

So Laura made Harry coffee, and sipped her own, and stayed out of his way. And if she did not precisely smear ink on her own shoulder patting herself on the back, still she was certain that if an exiled afternoon was the price of getting that Harry Randall back, it was a hell of a terrific deal.

And when he'd stopped, hit the keys for the printer, brought her the pages, and wandered off to find his gin, she shoved to the floor all the newspapers floating around her, read his copy through, and told him it was brilliant, because it was.

“Ummm.” Standing the gin bottle on the side table, holding on to the glass, he flapped the sheet up and slipped into bed. With his empty hand he tugged the covers up again.

Laura rolled onto her hip to look at him. “You're still not sure?”

“That it's great? No, that brilliant young reporter, the up-and-coming Laura Stone, says it's great. It must be true.”

Harry nestled closer to her. She giggled. “I'm not the only thing around here that's up-and-coming, am I?”

“Behave yourself, Stone. I'm an old man.”

“I know.” Laura traced a slow finger on the rim of Harry's ear, continued down the side of his neck. “And the one and only thing that interests you at this point—in the twilight of your life—is the pitiful and corrupted state of American journalism.”

“You're right.”

“You're lying.”

He had been, and it was some time before they returned to story, coffee, and gin.

By then the sun had gone, striping the sky across the river with the colors of fire. Harry picked up his drink, Laura the pages he'd given her. It was too dark to read, but she did not reach for the light. She offered the pages to Harry, almost as though for the first time, almost as though they weren't his. “This is great, Harry.”

He shrugged: yes, okay, maybe.

She said, “But you don't think it should run.”

Harry, looking at the pages in Laura's hand but not touching them, said, “What's the point?”