“Yeah? For out front?”
Emma says nothing. She knows where the Jimmy Stoma obit is being played, but she won’t give me the satisfaction.
“Talk to Metro,” she says, now pretending to edit a story by young Evan Richards, our college intern. Upon my approach Evan warily has drifted away from Emma’s desk; he has witnessed too many of our dustups.
“What about you?” I say to Emma. “You got enough to fill the page?”
“I’ll find something on the wires.”
She won’t look directly at me; her slender hands appear bolted to the keypad of her computer, her nose poised six inches from the screen. The worst part is, the screen is blank. I can see its bright blue reflection in Emma’s reading glasses.
Unaccountably, I am overtaken by pity.
“Rabbi Levine won’t be on the wire services, Emma. You want me to make a few calls?”
Her eyes flicker. I notice the ivory tip of a tooth, pinching a corner of her lip. “No, Jack. There isn’t time.”
Back at my desk, I dial three phone numbers: the rabbi’s wife, the rabbi’s brother and the synagogue. I bat out twelve inches in twenty minutes flat, shipping it to Emma with the following note:
“You were right. The hang-gliding stuff makes the whole piece.”
On the way out of the newsroom, I hear her call my name. Walking back to her desk, I see the rabbi’s obituary up on her computer screen. It’s easy to guess what’s coming.
“Jack, I like the brother’s quote better than the wife’s.”
“Then move it up,” I say, agreeably. Emma needs this one more than I do. “See you tomorrow.”
Out of the blue she says, “Nice kicker on Jimmy Stoma.” Not exactly oozing sincerity, but at least she’s making eye contact.
“Thanks. Was it Abkazion who bumped it to Metro?”
Emma nods. “Just like you said. Our new boss is a Slut Puppies fan.”
“Naw,” I say, “a true fan would have put it on Page One.”
Emma almost smiles.
Dinner is a lightning stop at a burger joint. Then I go home, open a beer and ransack the apartment in search of my copy of Reptiles and Amphibians of North America. Finally I unearth it from a loose pile of Dylan and Pink Floyd CDs. At the touch of a button, Jimmy Stoma is alive and well, shaking the rafters of my living room. I flop on the couch. Maybe he’s no Roger Waters, but James Bradley Stomarti is not without talent.
Correction: Was.
I close my eyes and listen.
One night I fell through a hole in my soul,
And you followed me down, followed me down.
I fell till the blackness broke low into dawn
And you followed me down till you drowned…
Smiling, I drain the beer. Irony abounds! Poor Jimmy.
Again I close my eyes.
When I awake, it’s daybreak. The phone is ringing and with chagrin I realize I’ve forgotten to turn off the call-forwarding from my newsroom number. It can only be a reader on the other end of the line, and no possible good can come from speaking to a reader at such an ungodly hour. Yet the interruption of sleep has made me so bilious that I lunge for the receiver as if it were a cocked revolver.
“Yeah, what?” I say gruffly, to put the caller on the defensive.
“Is this Mr. Tagger?” Woman’s voice.
“Yeah.”
“This is Janet. Janet Thrush. I read what all you wrote about my brother in the paper.”
Idiotically, I find myself anticipating a compliment. Instead I hear a scornful snort.
“Holy shit,” says Jimmy Stoma’s sister, “did you get scammed, or what!”
4
When I went to work for this newspaper I was forty years old, the same age as Jack London when he died. I’m now forty-six. Elvis Presley died at forty-six. So did President Kennedy. George Orwell, too.
It’s an occupational hazard for obituary writers—memorizing the ages at which famous people have expired, and compulsively employing such trivia to track the arc of one’s own life. I can’t seem to stop myself.
Not being a rotund pillhead with clogged valves, I am statistically unlikely to expire on the toilet, as Elvis did. As for succumbing to a political assassination, I’m too obscure to attract a competent sniper. Nonetheless, my forty-sixth birthday brought a torrent of irrational anxieties that have not abated in eleven months. If death could snatch such heavy hitters as Elvis and JFK, a nobody like me is easy pickings.