When The Lights Go Out...

“Thor, Sven, who cares? Male meat. Problem was that he was so full of steroids he couldn’t—”

“Candy!” Blythe vengefully deleted cataclysmic and typed in major. It reduced the verve of Candy’s story nicely. Candy could use a bit of verve reduction.

“So what you have to do,” Candy said, “is sleep with somebody. Anybody. Break through the frigging barrier. Then you’ll be okay. Are you about finished with that?”

Candy and Blythe had both landed jobs with the New York Telegraph right out of college. A mere three years later, Candy was a hotshot crime reporter with high hopes of getting a job with the venerable Times. Blythe was still a proofreader. Bart Klemp, the city desk editor, had declared that “Blythe Padgett’s a darned good writer, but she wouldn’t know news if she woke up in bed with it.”

Everybody seemed determined for her to wake up in bed with…something.

Rewrites were currently the biggest thing going on in her life. This one was Candy’s report of a shocking drug bust on a sedate street of town houses in Greenwich Village. As fed up as Blythe felt with the entire world, it was going to read like a story from the Obituaries editor in the cubicle next door when Blythe was finished with it.

“And I’ve got just the guy for you.”

She’d tuned Candy out for a moment, but this statement made her tune swiftly back in. “You what? Who?”

“He grew up next door to me,” Candy said, “so we know he’s not a strangler or an axe murderer.”

“Oh! Wonderful! Those are my top qualifications. Have I ever met him?” One of Candy’s many kindnesses was to take the orphaned Blythe home for holidays. Candy’s family had become her family. In spite of enjoying every privilege money could buy, the Jacobsens were as broken as any family could be and fell just short of being certifiably insane, but any kind of family was better than none. “Oh, no. His parents moved ages ago,” Candy said, “but I kept in touch with him. He’s living in Boston now. I don’t know…he was always sort of special to me, I guess, like the big brother I never had. He’s attractive. And sensitive—for a guy, anyway. I mean, he’s a shrink and a shrink has to be sensitive. He was educated to be sensitive. He gets paid big bucks to be sensitive. I know I can trust him to be nice to you. You could have a few dates and let nature take its course.”

“What’s his—”

“But I have a feeling nature will take its course the second you lay eyes on each other, and he sees what a sexy little hotpot you are.”

Candy was pacing in circles now, and gave Blythe’s curly red hair an affectionate ruffle on her way around the desk, but Blythe still felt irritated. A hotpot was a menu item in a Mongolian restaurant. How could a hotpot be sexy? Candy was really very careless in her use of language. “Candy, come on!” Blythe said, deleting a string of flamboyant adjectives from the news story. “I don’t know anything about this old friend of yours. I might not like him at all.”

“You don’t have to like him. You just have to have sex with him.” Candy fanned herself with a galley proof from the stack on Blythe’s desk. Midafternoon, mid-August, New York—these three factors were more than the air-conditioning in the prewar building that housed the Telegraph offices could handle.

“No way I’d go to bed with a total stranger,” Blythe said firmly. “Certainly not with a man I didn’t like.”

But Candy’s face had taken on a dangerously dreamy expression. “That’s how I lost my virginity,” she said. “I kept saving it and saving it, because my mother said I should save myself for the right man.”

It sounded comfortably motherly, but Candy’s mother still seemed to be looking for the right man—and having gone through three husbands in the search, the evidence pointed strongly toward the likelihood that she hadn’t been saving herself.

“But there never was the right man,” Candy went on like a voice-over to Blythe’s thoughts, “and I saw myself getting older and older without finding him. One day I said, ‘You’ve got to start somewhere.’ So I went straight for the quarterback, not a total stranger, but let’s just say we’d never talked. I’m not sure he knew how to.”

Wellesley, where the two of them had gone to college, Blythe on a National Merit scholarship, was still a women’s college and didn’t have a football team. “How old were you?” Blythe asked, changing “biggest haul of the decade” to “confiscation of a large amount of product.”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen! No wonder you panicked!” Blythe removed one last random comma from Candy’s story and sent the file to the printer. “I bet you’re sorry now that you settled for the high school quarterback.”

“Sorry? Honey, it made me what I am today, as sexually healthy as the horse that man was hung like. Whoo. I still get wet just thinking about him.” She licked her lips.

Blythe tried not to pinch her lips together. “Well, thanks for telling me about your friend. What did you say his name—”

“I told him about you, too.”

“Candy, you can’t do that!”

“I can and did.” Candy looked too smug.

“What exactly did you do?” Thinking of the myriad possibilities, the limitless nature of Candy’s imagination, made Blythe intensely nervous.

“Told him you and he should get together. And guess what? He’s coming to New York for a conference.”

“When?”

“Today.”

“How nice. I’m sure the conference will keep him very busy. But maybe sometime in the distant future…”

“Tonight,” Candy said.

“What?”

“Tonight. You have a date with him tonight. Seven o’clock. I’m going to tell my date to meet me here, give you two some frigging—”

Blythe levitated out of her chair and ripped the last page out of the printer so fast the ink trailed down into the margin. “That’s it,” she said. “Now you’ve gone too far.”

“Thanks,” Candy said, grabbing the pages out of Blythe’s hands. “Face it, Blythe, you needed a push.”

“A push, maybe! Not my sad story laid before a total stranger! Not a date with a man who assumes I’m desperate to jump in the sack with him!” She held out her hands in supplication. “We should meet for lunch first, no, coffee first, then lunch. No, talk on the phone first, then coffee, then lunch. We should have e-mailed before he even called me on the phone.”

“Blythe, Blythe…” Candy shook her head. “You’re too frigging conservative.”

“I must have been born that way. It sure wasn’t parental influence,” Blythe said stubbornly, plunking herself back down in her chair. Her parents had died in an automobile accident before they’d had a chance to influence her one way or the other. Although losing them had had a profound influence on what she wanted out of her own life.

“I know, I know,” Candy said, heaving a dramatic sigh of resignation. “Okay, we’ll do it your way. I’ll call him and tell him to ask you out for coffee tomorrow instead. Hope I can reach him.” She glanced at her watch, and her inch-long nails glittered as she moved them around in the fluorescent light of the newsroom. “God a’mighty. I gotta get outta here and cover a takedown in the Bronx.”

As Candy took off at warp speed, Blythe took note of her working clothes—a shrunken-looking cream T-shirt, a natural linen skirt too short to bend over in and a pair of bone-colored, spike-heeled pumps that came to a sharp point well beyond her toes. She resembled a rope of taffy. Blythe chased her to the door of the newsroom. “You sure you want to take the subway up to the Bronx in that outfit?”

Candy paused long enough to look down at herself. “Think I should take a cab? Nope, takes too long.”

She took off again. Blythe gazed after her for a moment, then went slowly back to her desk. As sexually healthy as the horse that man was hung like. As sexually healthy as the horse like which that man was hung.

She blew a nasty-sounding raspberry at the computer. Candy interfered because she cared about her. Blythe knew this, would never forget how Candy had become her champion the moment Blythe entered the freshman class at Wellesley with absolutely nothing going for her but her brains. She didn’t know why she’d awakened Candy’s sympathy, but under Candy’s wing Blythe had blossomed—at least, as much as she was ever going to blossom. She’d made friends, joined clubs, learned to girl-talk, learned to laugh. Still, at times she wished Candy would back off and let her be miserable. This was one of those times.

Resigned, she picked up a stack of galleys and focused her gaze on them. Suddenly, with a flash of monitors going black as computers shut down and the grinding sound of air-conditioning coming to a halt, the world dimmed.

From her cubicle Blythe could hear the newsroom catapulting into chaos. “What the hell?” somebody shouted.

“I’ve lost my story!” came from the Obituaries editor next door.

Blythe got up and darted around the corner to comfort him. “In a minute the generator will kick in,” she assured the hysterical young man who was still staring at his screen and jabbing at the enter key as if that would bring back his golden prose. “You won’t lose the whole story.”

Everyone else in the newsroom seemed to have gotten up at once. Reporters and editors were milling around like a herd of sheep, consulting each other, wringing hands or trying to act blasé. Someone began raising the blinds they’d closed earlier against the searing sunshine, and the omnipresent dust of Manhattan swirled in the harsh rays.

One by one the staffers picked up their phones to find them dead, then stabbed at the keys of their cell phones, only to slam them down in frustration.