The New Republic

“Mr.—Kellogg!” Wallasek exclaimed, with the same sense of discovery with which he’d looked up to find that a stranger had been sitting in his office for the last fifteen minutes. “No trouble finding the place?”

“The Equitable Building is bigger than a breadbox.” Edgar chafed at pre-interview chitchat and its artifice of relax-we-haven’t-started-yet, when empty schmooze was really one more test to pass. He had to stop himself from fast-forwarding, this summer has sure been a hot one and that’s a mighty fine wife in your desk photo there and you don’t have to ask where I live since the address is on my résumé and no I don’t want a cup of coffee.

“Can I get you—?”

“Nothing, thanks.” To encourage a cut to the chase, Edgar shot a pointed glance at his chunky gold-plated diving watch. In the context of Edgar’s current average income of $300/month, its gratuitous dials spun with a dizzying exorbitance that until this spring he’d taken for granted.

“Second in your class,” Wallasek muttered, running a finger down the CV. “Vice president … Honorable mention … Salutatorian … Second prize … Second-chair … Say, you’ve almost snagged a lot of things.”

“I’m one of life’s runners-up.” Having failed to keep the edge from his voice, Edgar moderated pleasantly, “We try harder.”

Wallasek pulled back the arm on a pair of nail clippers and stuck the end in his ear, digging for wax. “A book review for Newsday,” he ruminated, spreading the photocopies. “The Village Voice—that’s a freebie now, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” Edgar said stonily.

“Washington Times … The Moonie paper.”

Since the early eighties the Washington Times had been owned by a fat Korean evangelist. “The staff does maintain independent editorial control.”

“Yes—or so they claim. Still, it’s not the Post, is it?”

“No, sirree,” Edgar agreed, clicking his eyeteeth, “it ain’t the Washington Post.”

“Columbia Alumni Magazine, Amtrak Express.” Examining his nail clipper arm, the editor removed a sulfurous chunk from its tip before returning to Edgar’s fledgling journalism, none of which seemed to generate the intense fascination of the gunk from Wallasek’s ear.

“And the New Republic,” Edgar pointed out.

“The rest of these seem to be law review. How much do you know about the National Record?”

“I’m a regular reader,” Edgar lied; once he’d scanned for Falconer’s byline he generally tossed the rag, since its sports section sucked. “I appreciate that the Record filled a void. For this country’s only national newspaper to have remained USA Today would have been a scandal.”

Wallasek still looked expectant; Edgar hadn’t yet laid it on thick enough. “The Record also embraces America’s post–Cold War global leadership. Your international coverage is at least as thorough as the New York Times. In assuming that readers care about the rest of the world, you don’t condescend to your subscribers.” Edgar had to stop; his inflection had developed the lilt of implausible enthusiasm employed to retail panty shields.

“Of course we condescend to our subscribers,” Wallasek dismissed with a wave. “International coverage is a sop to their vanity. Only a handful read that stuff. With one exception: when our American everyman tucks the Record under one arm and trundles into a seven-forty-seven and one of those filthy little foreigners blows it up. Those articles get read, my friend. Every column inch.”

Edgar found railing against terrorists the height of tedium. The issue invited over-obvious moralizing, since who’s going to contend that wasting those two kids with a trashcan bomb in a D.C. shopping mall in April was a profound political statement? Presumably Edgar was now obliged to chime in with hearty indignation over the Soldatsies Oozhatsies, or whatever those sorry-ass crackpots called themselves, clenching his fist in we-shall-not-be-moved solidarity with his fellow Americans, who will never capitulate to terrorism. Or maybe he should small-talk about how amazing it was that the FBI hadn’t collared a single one of these dirtbags, to demonstrate that he was on top of the story. But this interview wasn’t going well, the application had been a long shot to begin with, and Edgar passed.

“You aware of how the Record managed to establish a reputation for quality journalism in so few years?” asked Wallasek.

“Astute editing, a clearly defined remit—”

“Balls,” Wallasek cut him off. “By paying better than any paper in the country.”

Edgar smiled despite himself. “I know.”

“What I’m getting at here is that, well, you’ve got a few nice clips—”

“Those are only samples, of course.”

They both knew that Edgar had furnished every semicolon he’d ever published.

“Still, Mr. Kellogg, aren’t you aiming a little high?”

“I explained in my cover letter—”

“Yes—you ‘quit the law to become a freelance journalist.’ That caught my eye.”

“I left a top Wall Street firm where I was about to make partner,” said Edgar. “Until a few months ago I was making two hundred grand a year and rising. The Record may pay well, but that well? Seems to me that, however you slice it, I’m not ‘aiming high,’ but asking for a whopping cut in salary.”

“So I should hire you because you’re nuts?”

Edgar laughed. “Or what’s the latest prissy buzz phrase? Learning-delayed.”

Wallasek squinted. “What possessed you?”

Edgar paused. He’d rehearsed his explanation in the taxi on the way here, the cab itself an extravagance left over from the Lee & Thole days—a habit he’d have to break. Despite his designer slouch, Edgar must have been nervous; the glib rationale fled. Only overwrought snippets from college D. H. Lawrence classes flitted back to him, like “inchoate yearning.” He could not emote to some bovine newspaperman about “inchoate yearning” any more than he could assert to Toby’s own boss that he was driven to become “a Falconer.”

Lately he’d had to wonder, was he crazy? Papaya King again for lunch, when six months ago he might have dined on a client’s tab at The Cub Room. Had he been asked to go to Syracuse on short notice, he could have charged the firm for a new shirt and sent a messenger to pick it up. If he stayed past 7:30 p.m. (like, until 7:31), a Dial-car would drive him home. How could he ever explain to Guy Wallasek that privilege might have enticed an overworked paralegal, but that when Edgar was finally able to overbill clients himself the practice had seemed abruptly low-rent? Or that for no self-evident reason Edgar was meant for something finer than drafting turgid briefs? Or that he wanted to “say something,” when the very ache to say “something” and not something in particular must have put Edgar in the same boat as every other flailing schmuck in the country?

“I got bored,” Edgar telescoped lamely.

“Writing for Amtrak Express amuses you more?”

“Gotta start somewhere. And the law felt, I don’t know, passive. We’re parasites.”

“Journalists are parasites,” Wallasek countered, “on everyone else’s events. Plenty of scribblers spend their workdays merely recording what you just walked away from: mergers and acquisitions, transfers of money and power. The worst thing that can happen to a correspondent is to start thinking of himself as a player. The hack who fancies himself a mover-and-shaker gets slipshod—thinks he’s covering his own story. Reporting is a humble profession, Mr. Kellogg. Journalists—” Wallasek shrugged—“are History’s secretaries.”

“Better History’s secretary than Philip Morris’s lawyer,” Edgar ventured. “At least hacks get bylines. Law’s an anonymous profession, behind the scenes. Attorneys are paid so much because the work is drab and thankless. A predictable calling for runners-up. But I don’t want honorable mentions anymore, Mr. Wallasek. I’d like to distinguish myself.”

“You want to see your name in print,” said Wallasek skeptically.

“I want to see anything in print that isn’t solely composed to help some suit who already has more money than he knows what to do with make a little more.” Edgar pressed on with a willful geekiness refreshingly unlike him, “I want to get at the truth.”

“The ‘truth’ most reporters get at is pretty pedestrian: the secretary of state left the White House at five forty p.m. and not at six o’clock. As for the big-picture sort …” Wallasek seemed to take a moment to reflect, and ran a dirty nail along the stitching of his jacket. “I didn’t used to camp behind a desk, Mr. Kellogg. Funny, I don’t miss pounding the pavement much as I might have expected. I cut my teeth in Vietnam, hung up my hat after Grenada. I can’t say for sure if I’ve a better understanding, of anything, than the folks who stayed in bed. Damnedest thing, but you can be right there in the middle, two armies tearing each other apart, and afterwards have not one thing to say about it. Not one thing. Way it should be. A reporter’s not supposed to chip in his two cents. But this—failure to achieve perspective. It can be personally discouraging. There’s no overarching ‘truth’ out there. Only a bunch of menial, dissociated little facts. And the facts don’t often add up to much. Lotta trees; not much forest. Oh, once in a rare while you trip over an All the President’s Men, and get to play the hero. But for the most part you just find out what happened, and what happened is depressing.”

“No more depressing than Lee & Thole.”

“I only wonder if your expectations aren’t a mite steep. Not only of getting a staff job at this newspaper, but of what the job would entail if I were rash enough to offer a post to an inexperienced, middle-aged cub.”

Edgar could skip the fatherly advice, as well as being classed at only thirty-seven as “middle-aged.” Before he could stop it, his hand was tracing his forehead, as if his hairline might have receded another half-inch since he checked it this morning. On the way back to his lap, Edgar’s fingertips traced the deep V-shaped runnels of a scowl so habitual that Angela claimed he frowned in his sleep.

“You’re the one who asked me for an interview,” Edgar grunted. “You could’ve flipped my CV in the trash.” Edgar reached for his briefcase.

Wallasek raised his palm. “Hold your horses. Toby Falconer recommended you, and he’s the most solid, levelheaded staffer here. Toby said you were ‘persevering, thorough, and single-minded’ once you’d set your sights on something.”

Edgar was quietly embarrassed. Making last month’s tremulous phone call to Falconer (to whom the adjectives “solid” and “levelheaded” would never have been applied at Yardley) had been so difficult that it made him physically ill. Although Falconer had been dumbfoundingly decent, Edgar had a queasy feeling that on his end the call hadn’t gone well. He’d felt ashamed of himself—tapping Toby for connections, after all those years without so much as a how-do-you-do. Chagrin had made him resentful, maybe even truculent. This was hardly the circumstance in which he’d fantasized about contacting the guy, and he’d never have pushed his luck like that if his level of desperation hadn’t gone through the roof. But by then, the night sweats had begun. In his dreams, Edgar implored Richard Stokes Thole to take him back without health coverage while wearing nothing but lime-green socks; the imposing senior partner scolded that the firm had gone casual on Fridays but it was Thursday and his socks ought really to be brown or black.

As for that “single-minded” jazz? Edgar’s shedding a hundred pounds in his junior year at Yardley must have left a lasting impression.