The New Republic

Edgar twisted at the finger on his arm, and experienced one of those blank moments induced by headlines about Barba or Montenegro. It was the balding nondescript. His eyes were mild and dilute, their lids puffy; his face was broad and bland, his figure padded. The man’s skin was pallid, in contrast to the lustrous walnut glow of a thrill-seeker who hot-dogged the winter slopes and sailed at the head of his regatta. But between the gray straggles across his scalp gleamed a few nostalgic streaks of platinum.

“Falconer!” Edgar pumped the stranger’s hand.

“I don’t know what football team you’re expecting. Let’s sit over here. Listen, I’m sorry about The Red Shoe. Last time I was here it was hopping, but I don’t get out much. Christ, you look the same! A little more pissed off, maybe … If that’s possible. But you sure kept that weight off.”

“You, too, you look—terrific!”

Falconer guffawed, a more muffled version of the old clarion bray, recognizable but rounder, less piercing. “Never thought I’d see the day Edgar Kellogg was polite. I look like dog shit! Dog shit with three hyperactive kids and a depressive wife. What’ll you have?”

Edgar liked to think of himself as a Wild Turkey man. “Amstel Light.”

“Never lose the fear, do you?” Falconer smiled, his teeth no longer blinding, though that was unfair; everybody’s teeth yellowed a bit with age. But the smile also seemed physically smaller, and that was impossible.

“Not quite,” Edgar admitted, telling himself not to stare. “Inside this runt there’s always a fat slob struggling to get out.”

“A lot of Yardley’s a blur now, but one thing I remember clear as a Dialing for Dollars rerun is our very own Incredible Shrinking Man: Edgar Kellogg, dropping a size a week. I could track the calendar by the notches cinched on your belt. Night after night in the dining hall, chomping through a barricade of celery sticks. Amazing.”

“I’d read somewhere that you burn more energy eating celery than you ingest. Still, I don’t remember inspiring much amazement. More like hilarity.”

“Only for the first fifty pounds.”

“Fifty pounds’ worth of ridicule could last a lifetime.”

“Seems so. Look at you. You’re still mad!”

Edgar emitted a derisive puh and looked away, signaling once more, fruitlessly, for the waiter. He cracked a half-smile, and tore at a cuticle. “Maybe.”

Toby biffed him softly on the arm. “You knocked my socks off. Never seen such determination, before or since.”

“Yeah, I did get the feeling at the time that’s what earned me—”

“Earned you what?”

“Admission. To your—” it was hard to put this tactfully—“demanding circle.”

“I don’t remember admitting you to anything,” Toby dismissed. “You just stopped keeping to yourself for a while. A short while, come to think of it. Hey, service stinks here. Better get us drinks from the bar.”

Edgar welcomed the interruption, since Falconer’s rewrite of history was outlandish.

Accepting the Amstel, he tried to restore an easy humor. “I order this cow piss compulsively. But I’ve no idea how I’ll ever get to be a larger-than-life character drinking candy-ass beer.”

“You’re a character.” Falconer reared back in the booth with some of his Yardley authority and took a slug of his microbrew draft. “That’s enough. No such thing as larger-than-life, Kellogg. There’s only life-size, and any magnification is just other people’s bullshit. So how’d the interview go?”

Dazed by his good fortune, Edgar was only beginning to apprehend that the interview had gone staggeringly well. Much as he might have liked to conclude that he’d cut an impressive figure, chances were that Falconer had given him a recommendation far more enthusiastic than Edgar’s virtual-stranger status merited, and that Falconer had stroke.

“Swell, I guess. Wallasek gave me a super-string. In Barba.”

Toby made a face. “I should have warned you that’s what he had in mind. Better than nothing, I hope. But I’ve done a couple of features out of there. It ain’t Club Med.”

“You think it’s dangerous?” asked Edgar hopefully.

“Well, as you know the Sobs have never set off anything in their own territory. I guess the logic runs, don’t shit in your own bed. But that could change. And what makes for a dangerous place is dangerous people. Or that’s the line Saddler used to squeeze a hardship allowance out of Wallasek. I don’t know why his lordship bothered to be so creative. Wallasek would have handed Saddler his firstborn son swaddled in C-notes, no questions asked.”

Already any reference to Barrington Saddler threw Edgar lurching nauseously between opposing inclinations, as if he were careering up switchbacks in a bus. He both longed to discuss this preposterous fellow and to avoid all mention of the man with the same degree of urgency. When he gave in and pursued the subject, he instantly regretted it, the way you curse yourself for having picked a scab. “What is so wonderful about the little prick?”

“Saddler’s not little. I’ve only met him a handful of times. Bit scary, frankly.”

Even in this bewilderingly modest an incarnation, Edgar couldn’t fathom Tobias Falconer being frightened by anybody. “That name for starters. What kind of a blowhard goes by ‘Barrington’?”

“You obviously haven’t met the guy. Weird, but it suits him. He’s English, you know. And large. He almost requires three syllables.”

“So he’s fat,” Edgar pounced upon victoriously.

Falconer frowned. “Nnno-o. Just big. Big, big, big. In every sense.”

“Why’s he scary? I get the impression you don’t like the guy much.”

“That’s just it: I shouldn’t. He’s got my own editor wrapped around his pinky. He gets away with murder—like, for .01 percent of the shit he’s pulled any mere mortal would have been canned. He has this tut-tut, frightfully-frightfully accent that makes Americans feel crass and Coca-Cola by comparison. So whenever I’ve thought about it—and I’ve thought about it, which is one thing that’s scary—everything about the man grates. But Saddler only gets on my nerves when he’s not there. He never rubs me the wrong way in person. Face-to-face Barrington Saddler is inexpressibly charming, and I spend the entire time frantically trying to get him to like me.”

“That is scary,” said Edgar, thinking: money down, no one had ever described Edgar Kellogg behind his back as “inexpressibly charming.”

“How’d you find Wallasek?” Falconer asked.

“Paternalistic for my taste.” Absent any encouragement in Toby’s expression, Edgar exercised his proclivity for putting his foot in it. “And awfully in the know. Wallasek thinks he has a window into the mind of the SOB because of Saddler—when what are the chances that both of them know dick?

“Also,” Edgar plunged recklessly on, “Wallasek talks a humble line, about ‘history’s secretaries,’ but you can tell he thinks journalism is a lofty calling fraught with daunting tests of fire. As opposed to being mostly about the ability to write a sentence. Which I can, but I don’t think he was impressed by my clips. I’ve only been at this a few months, and Wallasek didn’t care what the articles said—typical name-brand mentality. I didn’t walk in with the New York Times and The Atlantic plastered to my forehead … What’s so funny?”

“You really haven’t changed, have you?”

“How’s that?” asked Edgar warily.

“Guy Wallasek gave you an interview on the basis of a pretty slight clip file, and what’s more gave you a job. Which, though Barba’s not Hawaii, I assume you want. Doesn’t that make you grateful?”

Edgar folded his arms and bunched into the corner, scowling to beat the band. It was a hatches-battened position he’d often assumed when he was fat. “Wallasek offered me a temporary post that could be ripped out from under me by your big, big, big friend any time he cares to show his face, an arrangement that would be intolerable to staffers. A string will pay squat. I was a sharp lawyer and I can write. I’ll do an ace job, and he’s getting a bargain. Why should I be grateful?”

Falconer shook his head. “So hard on people, Kellogg. You that hard on yourself?”

An honest answer was too complicated: that he hacked on other people as a substitute for hacking on himself, and it didn’t work. That he rushed to dislike others before they could dislike him; that Edgar’s hasty dislike veritably ensured they would indeed dislike him; that, alas, beating acquaintances to the antagonistic punch had never protected him from the ensuing sense of injury that he had apparently brought on himself. A simpler answer—that Edgar perceived himself as an island of underrated promise in a sea of undeserving incompetence—would sound iffy in the open air. “I call them as I see them. You said yourself that Wallasek’s relationship to this Barrington guy is fucked up.”

“I didn’t say that. Wallasek’s a good editor, and a decent man. He claims he doesn’t, but he misses the fray—being so smack in the middle when some corner of the world goes up in flames that the hairs singe off your arm. So he has a weakness for the inside track; any journalist does. As for Saddler? Wallasek nine-to-fives it, he’s bored, feels left out. Saddler blasts into town and they go out until all hours and get slammed and meet kooky people and get kicked out of bars and Wallasek feels plugged in again. A minor failing, if it’s a failing at all. Why not give him a chance? It’s not a bad policy. You’re a smart guy, Kellogg, but you can be so—savage.”

Edgar felt chastened. He didn’t like feeling chastened. “Good God, Falconer. You’ve gone and got sincere on me.”

Toby was rolling the bottom of his empty beer mug in contemplative circles. “I was actually surprised to hear from you. Not sorry, mind you. But surprised.”

Edgar wasn’t about to admit that he rang Falconer over his own dead body. “It had been a long time,” he submitted neutrally.

Falconer laughed. “It’s been nineteen years! And when I finally hear from you, it’s not because you want to invite me to your wedding, or talk about old times. You want a favor! That takes balls, boyo.”