Noah's Turn (4 page)

“I think it could be a lot of fun,” she said with her throaty secret-smoker's rasp. “The starting money isn't great but who knows—you could become a Web star and we would work out a deal where you make more as the hits go up, where you are actually sharing in the profits.”

Noah looked down into his wine glass, giving the impression that he was thinking about the offer when in fact he was thinking how he wouldn't want to wake up beside this woman every morning. This was the first time he had actually felt sorry for McEwen, until it occurred to him that like minds attract. Then he couldn't imagine how either of them could wake up in that bed.

“Any thoughts?”

“Well it's very … I mean … I'd never imagined myself a TV critic. You and Patrick are too good to me.”

Why the fuck did I say
that?
he thought. These were the last two people on earth he would want to be indebted to, and now he was digging himself a real hole. He was still waiting for Patrick to let him know if there was any interest in his novel at the publishing house and now here was a possibility that Janice Hogan might be
his boss. He knew himself well enough to know that none of this would end well.

“It's not a TV critic as much as an outspoken opinion. If you can write one thing about a show that the critics miss, like ‘How could they put her in that dress with those tits?'—something like that—and a reader says to herself, ‘I was thinking exactly the same thing,' that's the connection we want to make out there. It's not criticism or editorializing, it's no-bullshit point-of-view journalism. It's intuitive and thoughtful at the same time. What do you think?”

“It sounds interesting.”

“Well?”

“You want an answer now?”

“If you have one.”

Noah knew he was at his literary best when on the attack, and a blog like this could be interesting. It could give him a profile. “Let's see what happens,” he said.

Noah worked with the magazine's art department to design his blog page. He suggested a short animated intro that would show him building an “Acme” bomb,
placing it under a TV set, and then quoting his favourite TV character of all time: “Wile E. Coyote, genius!” The bomb explodes, blowing the cartoon Noah to smithereens. The art department wanted something more affordable—a drawing of him smashing a TV set with an axe. They settled on the latter.

After two blogs, Noah received an email from Janice suggesting a meeting at her office. “Subject: blog. XOXO Janice.”

“We've all read the first two blogs and everyone agrees that they're incredibly funny and well written, but they're finding it a little toxic. It's all funny, very funny, but if the reader senses your anger—and let's not fool ourselves, there's a very dark streak in Noah Douglas—they write you off as a crank. You're certainly not a fucking crank. We all want it to be tough-minded but we're still journalists and we need that balance.
Fairness
is not a dirty word. No one wants you to pull any punches—that's not why we hired you—but it's a hair too edgy for the brand. This is a work in progress. No one expects Frank Rich or Christopher Hitchens after day two. We just want this thing to be a home run.”

Noah went to the pub across the street from her office and had two pints and a double vodka. When
he got home he had another vodka and sat down to send McEwen an email. He knew it was a mistake to go on the attack while drinking but convinced himself that the booze would, at worst, edit his potential for obsequious bullshit.

“Your wife just censored my blog. Maybe this little adventure was a mistake for both of us. Also, it's been six weeks since I gave you the outline for my novel. Have you heard anything? Noah.”

He sat back and stared at his note. He liked its directness and his restraint. He wanted to call McEwen's wife “a cunt,” because that's what she was, but he wouldn't play their game. He hit Send.

Within a minute McEwen answered. “My wife doesn't censor her writers; she edits them and she does it very well. I read your blog and agree with her one hundred per cent. On the novel, I didn't get a chance to read your outline myself—I've been swamped with work this month—but from what I hear around the office, there doesn't seem to be an appetite for science fiction right now. Good luck with it. Patrick.”

This quick, hard left jab and solid right hook to the head momentarily stunned Noah. He sucked in another vodka, which, on its way down, surely passed, on its way
up, the gush of bile that contained his response. “What did you two do, crawl into your sexless bed and discuss how you could fuck me rather than each other? I guess every cunt needs a prick. Noah.”

He backed away from his laptop without hitting Send. Some free-floating scrap of reason must have jammed the roaring turbine of vengeance that drove much of Noah's thinking. He hit Delete, picked up his drink and dropped down into the mothering hold of his beat-up couch. He turned on CNN and watched bodies being dragged out of an earthquake's rubble somewhere in northern China. He drank more vodka. He checked the lower right-hand corner of the screen for the Dow. Down 312. That's good, he thought. Let the fuckers lose it all. Let ‘em die broke. He drank some more and waited for the body count out of China—fifty-six. “Only fifty-six! Hey, Wolf, you sure are scraping the bottom of the disaster barrel tonight!” he yelled at the TV. But the Silver Fox had that trademark apoplectic fire in his eyes—“This is big! This is death on a massive scale!”

“Calm down, Wolfie. You and I both know there are a billion and a half of ‘em still left.”

Noah finished his drink and returned to his laptop. The alcohol had pushed him right through rage and
beyond to a state of maudlin neediness. He started to type. “Patrick. I appreciate your distributing the book idea internally. Those are the breaks. I still believe in the story and would take any suggestions from you if you do get time to read the outline. Re. my crazy assault on Janice. That's so like me. She's the authority figure. I'm the bad boy. I've been doing it all my life. Can't control myself sometimes. Reflecting, I think her notes were right on. It's my nature to get defensive and go on the attack. But we're all adults and everything will work out. Tell her I think she's smart and tough-minded. Noah.”

He hit Send and went to sleep on the couch, curled up with his hands clasped between his knees.

As he slept, McEwen's response popped up silently in Noah's inbox. “Reply received.” This imperious dismissal would not be forgiven.

After only two weeks, Noah's daily TV blog was out of control. Email and counter-email between him and Janice flew like crossfire in an Afghan village. One day his blog raged against “the fascism of cultural mediocrity” that all TV represented. The next day he
apologized to readers for his “flourishes of excess,” confessing that “some TV was clearly brilliant.” The following day he wrote that his confession of the day before was “provoked by the desperation of a sentient mind gasping for air in an atmosphere so intellectually rarified that mass suicide seemed like the population's only escape.” Janice Hogan's offer to give him free rein to write about TV had now become more like an existential challenge. Was he a journalist or an attack dog? Did he even watch the shows he wrote about? Who was his audience? What was his voice? Was he someone who had failed in the business and now engaged in self-indulgent payback? So many questions about such an inconsequential gig about such an overworked and irrelevant subject. Noah sensed that even Janice Hogan had lost her energy for the fight by the nature of her final email: “Noah. It's over. It was not nice working with you. Fuck off and die. Janice.” He could imagine her hitting Send as if she was sending toxic waste into outer space.

N
oah had sex one more time with Jeanne at his aunt's house. When she suggested they see each other on one of her days off, he said he would have to check his book when he got home. He left and never returned. A month passed and his guilt began to wear him down. Guilt for not seeing his aunt. Guilt for not seeing his aunt because he was afraid of being drawn into a social situation with a black, working-class woman and her world. Guilt for his racism. He tried to mitigate some responsibility for the latter by defining it as a hereditary disease. Guilt for walking away from this decent woman without so much as an explanation. Even a well-told lie, one with a little heart behind it, would have shown some character, he thought. He felt ashamed because he
suspected Jeanne knew his thinking. He hated how he allowed himself to be exposed like this. And he resented her very existence for the stupid and unnecessary torment it caused him. He wanted to be free from all of it.

Noah stepped out of the office-tower elevator and made his way through the lunch-hour business crowd and to the street, where he felt out of place amid the downtown activity. Not only was he feeling the humiliation of pitching an idea titled “Down but Not Out on $100 a Day in Paris and London” to an airline travel magazine, but also it was rejected. He pitched to Sandy, a twenty-three-year-old features editor, who, the whole time, he thought of as “the cute little piece of ass across from me.” Sandy had never heard of
Down and Out in Paris and London
, nor had she heard of George Orwell. She had, however, for some reason, made it known that she had heard of Orson Welles. Her ignorance made him horny, but on balance he concluded it wasn't worth the effort.

On the street, Noah looked at men in suits and women in skirts and blouses and heels and wondered why this was all so far out of his reach. None of them
seemed to be crazy. They all, in fact, seemed to walk with a sense of purpose. What was their secret? He was trying to figure it out when one of the women in a skirt and a blouse and heels with a short blonde pageboy and rectangular horn-rimmed glasses stopped him. “Noah?”

He looked at her, cocking his head to one side, realizing he must resemble a dog faced with an intellectual problem. Noah could remember many times walking home from private school along the other side of the street from his house and seeing his dog lying on the front porch waiting for him, its chin hanging over the first step. As he got closer, his dog would stand up and start wriggling and wagging its tail, and Noah, with normal teenage sadistic pleasure, wouldn't cross but would keep walking like a complete stranger right on by on the other side of the street without even a glance at his house. His dog would stop wriggling and wagging and tilt its head to one side, completely confused, and look at him in the same way that Noah was now looking at this woman.

“Andrea Scott. Not Scott anymore, Andrea Wharton now. From St. Andrew's Church.”

“Andrea Scott, from the St. A's choir?”

“Oh, God, the choir. That's me.”

Noah had his own memory of St. Andrew's choir and the hypocritical moralistic crap that Reverend Newsome preached on Sundays when Noah was a kid. He remembered how the Reverend's tiny feline eyes cut into his fat, round, clean-shaven head and made him look like the Cheshire cat on chemo as he coughed up his weekly hairballs of wisdom. He was probably blowing me when I was thirteen, Noah thought. A memory he suspected was compressed into a tight little packet and jammed deep into one of those weird areas of the brain far from the conscious lobes. A memory which, he imagined, over the years could have leached its toxins into his id.

“I remember the last time I saw you,” Andrea said. “We were fifteen and it was at a church dance. You went off to some boarding school after that.”

“That's what they called it. It was actually a maximum security prison for children of the well-to-do who were no longer that well-to-do.”

Andrea laughed and they agreed to meet for a drink the following week.

Noah had always wanted to get his hands on those two little breasts that sat up under fifteen-year-old Andrea Scott's sweater like two halves of an orange.