The Henderson Equation Read online

  “I like the man,” McCarthy said, his lips like those of an elephant’s trunk squirming toward the edge of the shot glass. The phrase seemed a hurled curse at his own frailty, as if his own humanness was something to be endured. Nick remembered that they had sat at the table for a long time saying nothing, until McCarthy’s head, sodden with drink, finally dropped forward on the table.

  4

  Nick felt the rolled paper in his fingers. He had stripped the shattered cigarette in the ashtray and balled the paper into a dry spitball, as they had been taught to do in basic training. Flinging the little ball into his wastebasket, he mentally swung back into the habit of his day. A news aide put a pile of wire copy on his desk, the first trickle of dispatches from overseas, early stuff coming in from topsy-turvy time zones. He nodded toward the young man, neat and slim in a white starched shirt. He looked over Foster Tompkins’ copy filed from India, Calcutta, the ultimate chaos of urbia, a city choking on its own human sewage.

  India was back in the news again: a hot spot, inner restlessness increasing, guerrilla activity in embryo, turmoil with Pakistan. He read the dispatch with special care. It told of an interview with the guerrilla commander in a tiny, fly-infested restaurant, in the anonymous teem of the Calcutta netherworld. A picture focused in his mind as he read. The man, Tompkins, was a fine writer, the imagery accurate, the sentences workmanlike and cadenced. If only the writing throughout the paper were consistently good. A misplaced metaphor, after all these years, still jabbed him a painful blow. A dangling participle made his belly positively acidic. Words! Sometimes he felt he was being pounded by their avalanche, trapped in a dark comer with rocks of words clunking around him, imprisoning him like the man from “The Cask of Amontillado.” Sometimes he felt helpless, impotent, a carpenter with a toothless saw, a clawless hammer.

  Oddly, it was only when he read the good writing, subtle rhythms that controlled the flow like canal locks, that the pedestrian sentences of the others revealed their pallor. He read the Tompkins piece and punched the extension for Phillips, the World editor. The response was hoarse, indifferent. Busy editors hated telephones intruding on concentration.

  “I thought Tompkins in fine form,” Nick said.

  “Class tells,” Phillips replied. “I just read the piece.”

  Nick began to think about tomorrow’s paper, the beginning. Conception!

  At three they would all bring in the budget line, the assistant managing editors, one for each department, World, Metro, Sports, Business, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Photo. It was then that they thrashed out the priorities, budgets in hand, with the day’s allocation of news, feeding on each other, ladling out the soup of the day, to be poured into the Chronicle vat.

  It was the moment of his day when suspense began, absorbing his thoughts. He was already beginning to cast about for news priorities, building the front page in his mind from the grab bag of hard possibilities. It came to him almost by instinct, a built-in sensor embedded in his journalist brain. He had long ago ceased to bend with the weight of the responsibility. Years of trusting his judgment had made a friend of it, a confidant, and when it was activated, it cast aside all extraneous elements.

  As he worked he was conscious of the impending impact of his product. Millions of eyes were watching, waiting, all over the world. In foreign, as well as domestic minds, friends and adversaries alike, the Chronicle’s words were weighed, the sentences dissected, the subtleties and nuances pondered, little cells of intelligence microscopically analyzed. The Chronicle, along with the Times, revealed the cutting edge of America’s direction in that one pinpoint of time. The idea of it no longer left him humbled, awestruck. Somehow his mind had merged with the ink, a private knowledge. He wouldn’t have dared to express it but he had often thought of it as a measure of immortality, his stamp on future generations, the yet unborn who would see it as enlarged pieces of microfilm in the world’s archives. Often he would rail against his own flaws, the hodgepodge of personal emotions that threatened his judgment, the frailties that could be corrosive, perhaps the very same concerns that had ultimately destroyed Charlie. The telephone rang, recalling him.

  “Lunchtime,” Miss Baumgartner’s cheery voice said, intruding.

  Remembering, he wondered what Myra had in mind, his curiosity whetted again, a tug of uncertainty strained for attention. He got up, straightened his tie, and smoothed down his hair. He looked at a reflection of himself in the glass wall. Then, putting on his jacket, he passed through the door into the city room clamor which the glass room had partially deflected. As he walked toward the elevators, he caught a glimpse of of Gunderstein, his head pressed against the telephone, a gangling, ear-flapping bloodhound absorbed in the scent. Had he been fair with Gunderstein? Annoyed at his own questioning, he waited briefly for the elevator, nodding to others who waited, conscious of the nervousness his presence created.

  As he waited, he was tempted to push off to the Life-style section, tucked away down a long corridor in what was once the old building. If Margaret weren’t the editor, he reasoned, a simple excuse might cloud the transparency: the yearning for Jennie, a brief look at her. Even though Margaret carefully concealed the ex-wife relationship with an attitude of tough professionalism, well deserved, he would see her accusing contempt, a brief flicker in the eyes, an arched brow, an uncommon movement of the head. They had lived together for nearly ten years, an eternity, which sometimes seemed so brief. Some mornings he would awake and sense her sleeping beside him in that curled way, buried beneath the covers. It was not a longing, he conceded, just a brief memory of an old habit. She had, after all, shared the years of his youth and their union had produced Charmagne, troubled Chums, misplaced in the generations.

  “Don’t call me a hippie, Dad, that’s absurd, a decade old,” Chums had said to both of them.

  “Well, what do you call it? You’ve left school. You’re rootless, unmotivated. God knows what garbage you’re putting into your system and, not that it matters, you’re worrying your mother and me to death.” She was lying on a bare mattress in a room in a big old San Francisco house, a commune. “Even this whole scene is passé.”

  “Not to me,” she said.

  “There’s no logic in it,” he argued.

  “There is to me. I see no logic in your life.”

  “I’m not being self-righteous, Chums,” he said, softening. There was a twinge of guilt. I was a lousy father, he thought. I loved a newspaper and old Charlie. But hadn’t he once loved her mother? Even when they had told her she was a child of love it was too late to matter. Chums knew she was a victim. That was two years ago, the last time he had seen her. He missed her. They still accused themselves over it, if silently. It lay over them like a cloud every time their eyes touched. And he saw Margaret daily; at the three o’clock budget meeting, other places in the office, around town.

  Was it poetic justice for Jennie to have fallen from the sky into the Lifestyle section? It was ludicrous for a mistress to be working for an ex-wife. Margaret had changed her name back to Domier, proud of the French heritage, which “Gold” had obscured.

  “Shit you say,” Jennie had said, showing a stunned look by the revelation. “Your ex-wife?”

  “None other.” They were sitting at Sans Souci having a quiet dinner. He had put his glass down as if he had been overcareful to choose the right moment.

  “You dumb bunny,” she said, laughing. “That’s the first thing they tell you. You think it’s a secret?”

  He didn’t really, but he wanted her to hear it directly from him.

  “Am I in for revenge, mental torture? She’s bound to find out about us.”

  “If I know Margaret she already knows. It was too long ago to matter. We’re actually almost friends again. She’ll judge you professionally, though.” He hesitated. He had, after all, been rewriting her copy before Margaret saw it.

  “I’ll get better, Nick, you’ll see.”

  “Sure you will.”

  She p
outed. He sensed that she was feeling uneasy about her dependence on him.

  “I don’t know what happens to me when I sit down at the typewriter.”

  “You’ll loosen up. It comes with experience.” But he knew better. Talent could not be taught.

  “Teach me,” she said, stroking his thigh under the table.

  It was a fair trade. She gave him her youth and he rewrote her copy.

  Now he was holding down temptation, keeping his legs from moving down the corridor for a brief glimpse of her oval face, a trifle small, with deep-set dark eyes. Up close, he could see the tiny flecks of yellow in them. Margaret had not mentioned it once, although he was certain it was the chief gossip at the Chronicle, the old pen in the inkwell routine.

  In the elevator, he smiled at the memory of the morning. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he was pulling on his socks, feeling her watchful eyes, then her fingers groping at the band of his shorts.

  “I never have enough of you,” she had said, blatantly groping inward and downward, gently forcing him to erect. His eyes had turned to the bedside clock.

  “There’s time,” she said. He had stood up, socks tight to his knees, playfully escaping as she snapped the band. She had slid her legs over the side and held him in the vise of her naked thighs. Then he had not wanted to escape as she reached for the hem of his shorts and pulled them downward, gentle hands caressing him, the sense of time fading as he let her feel him, kiss the small of his back. Finally, he had turned toward her, swelling as her lips soft and greedy gave him pleasure, teased him with sensation. He had looked down at her dark hair, the face turned slightly upward, pale in the white early morning light. She groaned lightly, the sound titillating, goading the passion. His hands tightened on her head, as he moved her away and, bending, kissed her moist lips deeply, tongues joining.

  He had remained standing as she had angled her pelvis toward him, positioning her lissome body to receive his manhood, which plunged into her as he shifted his weight, watching as the hard organ plunged into her lightly haired softness, exquisitely tender and wanton. The chronology of their lives narrowed, youth returning like a rose blooming in Indian summer. He had wanted to show gratitude for this gift of joy. Consciously, he prolonged the joining, watching her eyelids flutter with pleasure, as her body squirmed joyfully, spitted on his hard flesh. Was it the knowledge of his age that made it so exquisite, made each time with her better than before? He had lived for three decades before she was born and she was three years older than Chums. Had it ever been this good with Margaret?

  When he finally came, it seemed deeper, a thunder inside him, an aliveness that made all the spendings of his youth seem wasteful, casual. It was as if each time would be his last, a hint of death in the air, assailing him with its unescapable promise of mortality.

  “My God, if only I could express what it means to me,” he had told her.

  “Believe me, my darling. I got the message.”

  It was new to him, the lingering over brief pleasures in the middle of the newspapering day, the conscious mulling over of relationships beyond the orbit of the Chronicle. Rarely had other passions competed with his involvement with the paper. Was his power of concentration corroding under the joy of it?

  The elevator door slid smoothly open on the eighth floor, the act drawing him swiftly back to his concern over just what, if anything, Myra was up to with her list of candidates. He was certain it would emerge sooner or later. He moved into the heavily carpeted floor, a cliché of executive imperialism. There were constellations of chromium—lamps, trims, desk legs—primary color abstractions which hung on carpeted walls like clear, sure-sighted eyes. Even the model of the new building, now built, still displayed in a glass case and shown so proudly by Myra, had prompted a kind of mental nausea. It was purely a difference of taste, although even the Chronicle’s resident architectural tastemaker had laid in some tender knocks. He had called the corridor leading to Myra’s office the Appian Way, and her office itself “subtly intimidating, suffering perhaps from a slight, ever so slight, case of sanctum sanctorumitis.” She had been outwardly amused, or so it had seemed to him at the time.

  He winked at the two tall female secretaries who framed the double-doored entrance to Myra’s office suite. Bookends, he thought, as he brushed past them, their coolness and efficiency bristling in the air.

  It was strictly an illusion, a decorator’s fantasy, inspired by Myra’s own effort to show the authority of ownership. It was he, Nick, who ran the Chronicle while Myra played at the abstraction of running it, knowing that her real power was only by veto, which, so far, she had dared not exercise. She sensed, it seemed, that her ability had been stunted by her father’s stubborn belief that the art of newspapering was better left to the male mind.

  Myra was sitting at the round table near the window, slats of sun spearing the yellow napkins planted stiffly in sparkling glasses. He seemed to have walked into the middle of a private amusement, catching the end of a girlish laugh. Myra, still smiling, turned to him as he came toward the table. In a corner near the bookcases a tall man effortlessly posed in a vested pinstripe grey suit, a rounded glass in his hand, the large sky-blue dots in his deep olive tie an obvious clue to his conscious sartorial image since the color was a perfect match to the eyes. It was a faintly familiar tableau, like a Vermeer with the people in modern dress. It was Senator Burt Henderson.

  Nick dreaded the inevitable small talk that would mask the essence of the intercourse to come, a kind of ritual fencing, so finely honed in the Washington ether. There is a growing effluvia in this place, Nick thought, consciously holding the lid on the jack-in-the-box anger that had plagued him all morning. It was the discovery of the guest that galled him most, the irregularity of Myra’s not having announced him in advance.

  “Nick,” Henderson said, holding out his politician’s hand, the flesh firm with ingratiation. Nick felt its strong, tightening grip. They had met on numerous occasions, especially in the days when Nick circulated more freely in the years after Margaret, the time before Jennie.

  “Where the hell have you been hiding?”

  “In my glass cage, where else?” He watched Myra exhibit a tiny frown. He should make an effort to hide his pique, he cautioned himself.

  “Burt called this morning. He had something he wanted to discuss,” Myra said. Henderson lifted his glass, skimming off a sliver of the surface. A maid came quietly into the room with practiced unobtrusiveness and placed a martini over rocks in front of Nick. As he looked into its glistening viscosity, his caution heightened. Not that placing the accustomed drink was unusual. Was it the absence of an eye signal from Myra, the flicker of a lid, or, perhaps, the trifle too swift delivery? His fingers closed around the coolness of the glass.

  “Always willing to hear from Burt,” he said. He could feel Henderson gathering his force, the assimilating of all he knew about Nick. It was the traditional way the powerful approached the more powerful, measuring the thickness of the ice before each cautious step. With men like Henderson, who exuded practiced media charm, Nick imagined he could see the gears mesh, the mask reassemble like electronic markings on a computer console.

  “He was telling me the joke about the one-eyed man,” Myra said, her grey hair a trifle bluish in the brightness, or was it the blue dominance of Henderson’s eyes, which peered out, flaunting this gift of genetic mutation?

  “As the fellow said to the one-eyed man”—Henderson lifted a finger—“Eye . . .” Nick granted him a small laugh, he hoped politely. Henderson stepped out of the shadow to the sun-washed table and sat down before the iced silver fruit cup.

  “This thing with India is getting ominous,” he said, switching easily to a more serious note. “Christ, if India begins to blow it will be an absolute horror.”

  “All those people,” Myra mused, her voice trailing off.

  “We’ll be assailed by our usual helplessness and our sense of guilt about it. If anything was inevitable in this world, it
was an Indian eruption. The pressure cooker was taking too much pressure,” Henderson said in his most impressive senatorial invocation.

  “What would you do?” Nick said, his journalist’s mind prodding the question. Henderson raised his blue eyes, aggressively secure.

  “Not one damned thing,” he said. “For once, just once, I would embark on a program of belligerent non-involvement. India is a quagmire to beat all quagmires, a self-righteous leadership fostering a policy, a deliberate policy, of impoverishment as a form of population control.”

  “Everything else seems to have failed,” Myra said. “Fertility is choking them to death.” Nick watched Henderson’s mask assemble into deep concentration as Myra spoke. Surely he was fawning, using the weapons of his male arsenal. Couldn’t Myra see the transparency? He wondered vaguely if he was the only one in the city, in the world, who could really see the sham, the bare bones beneath the transparent skin.

  They picked at their fruit cup. He imagined Myra’s eyes had locked briefly into Henderson’s. Nick’s antenna bristled with reception. There is a conspiratorial stink here, he told himself.

  “Burt has alluded to something we’re working on,” Myra began, patting her lips with the yellow napkin. It seemed a signal to begin.

  “Oh?” Nick said innocently. He was determined to remain close-lipped. It was not unusual for him to receive appeals. Hell, it was a way of life in this business. Over the years he had developed stock answers, such as “Facts are immutable.”

  “Nick calls the shots,” had always been Myra’s stock response when confronted by appeals. “We have an agreement.” But this was different. And Nick felt it.

  “It’s this CIA thing, Nick,” Henderson began, hurling himself over the gulf of small talk. He paused. Nick caught his flash of panic, quickly doused. The expected response not forthcoming, Henderson was forced to continue.

  “Gunderstein is on my back like a leech. He calls. I deny the implication. He calls again. He calls everybody. This has been going on for weeks. At the receiving end it’s like a persecution, a terrible harassment, like a fellow sitting under the guillotine, waiting for the blade to fall.”