The New Republic

“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.”

To Edgar’s undying relief the gamble had paid off in spades, but the odds had been a hundred-to-one that Falconer would put in a good word for him. Most hacks would see Edgar as a wet-nosed neophyte, his designs on their vocation impertinent. The uncanny cordiality should have been a red flag: this was not the Toby Falconer of yore.

“Didn’t beat around the bush, either,” Falconer recalled wryly. “No small-talk.”

Edgar squirmed. “I hate that how’re-the-kids shit. No offense, but why should I care if your youngest is in the choir? You’d figure out that I was hitting you up for a contact soon enough.”

“Since Yardley, I haven’t even been on your Christmas card list. Weren’t you worried I’d brush you off?”

“Worried? I expected it. But I figured, what’s to lose? A little pride. Maybe when I was still raking in the bucks at Lee & Thole, losing face would have seemed like a big deal. In my newly influential career as a commentator on world affairs, I’ve sold my car, let my health-club membership lapse, and forgone the firm’s box at Yankee Stadium. What’s next? Among a host of other luxuries, dignity is expendable.”

Falconer shot a wry glance at Edgar’s wrist. “I see you’ll sell off your dignity before you’ll pawn your watch.”

Parting with the $1,500 diving watch would have amounted to the ultimate admission of defeat. “A present for passing the bar, from my mother. Call me a sap.”

“Sentimentality from you, Kellogg, is a relief.”

Pushing himself, Edgar opened his mouth, and it gaped before the words came out—if strangely difficult to say, wildly important, and he was mortified that he’d almost skipped them altogether: “Anyway, um. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“I’d never have given you the thumbs-up with Wallasek if I didn’t expect you were capable,” Falconer said good-naturedly. “The one thing I never doubted at Yardley was that you were smart, even if I wasn’t always too thrilled about what you applied your intelligence to—like, to locating people’s weak spots. Besides, I admit I had an agenda. I’ve got some rusty curiosity to satisfy. If I snagged you an interview with my editor, even the surly Edgar Kellogg might feel beholden enough to have this drink.”

Edgar sat up in surprise. “I wasn’t sure you’d remember me.”

“How could I forget? Some of the things you said about me senior year. They got back. Maybe they were meant to.”

Edgar had contempt for New Age confessionalism, and wasn’t going to enjoy this. He shrugged. “Kids can be mean.”

“You’re not a kid. You’re still—”

“You think I’m mean? That’s rich.”

They looked at one another squarely for a beat. “I don’t get it,” said Falconer.

“How do you think I was treated, as a two-hundred-forty-pound punching bag?”

“You ever going to let that go? I thought junior year at least we treated you all right.”

“Like with Wallasek. I’m supposed to be grateful.”

Falconer threw up his hands. “It’s just—what happened? One minute you were hanging out with us twenty-four-seven, and the next, bang, opposite side of the dining room. You passed me in the hall like a parking sign. And then all this stuff starts filtering back, that I’m on a ‘power-trip,’ that I’m a fag, that I get other guys to write my papers—”

“You did—”

“We all did! And that I dyed my hair.”

“I never said that.”

“You might as well have! What got into you?”

“I liked you,” Edgar said with difficulty. “I was disappointed.”

“I don’t—”

“I overheard you, okay?” Edgar’s raised voice carried over the dead bar and drew a glance from the sniffling Miss Loneliheart, who looked relieved that other people had troubles, too. “I overheard you,” he continued quietly. “In the locker room, you and that crowd, you didn’t realize I was in the shower. I turned off the water and stayed behind the wall. I hadn’t been aware that my nickname was ‘Special K’—”

“Come on, we were always razzing somebody—”

“This was different! You mimicked me, like, ‘Oh, no, I can’t have that chocolate chip, it has a whole eleven calories! A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips!’” Edgar twisted in his seat. “And you made fun of my stretch marks.”

“Edgar, if anything, a little teasing only meant you were included. It was the zeros we didn’t talk about you should have felt sorry for.”

Edgar looked up sharply; this was the Toby Falconer he remembered. “It got worse. You said I was always hanging around you with goo-goo eyes. That it was like having some girl on your hands, or a lost puppy. That every time you turned around I was yapping at your heels—wanting to know where you were going so I could go, too, or what club you were joining so I could join, too, and what albums you liked so I could go out and buy them. You all cackled at how I’d started wearing a red baseball jacket just like yours, and how I’d applied to switch into your English section. Clingy. You used the word clingy. So I let go.”

Thumbs pressed into his temples, Falconer kneaded his forehead with his fingertips, eyes closed. “God, Kellogg, I’m so sorry. I promise, it wasn’t you, or only you. It was all of them. I was tired. I was only seventeen years old, and I was already tired.”

Having held in that story for two decades like a breath, now that he’d exhaled it Edgar relaxed, looking on his companion with uncharacteristic tenderness. “Hey, water under the bridge. Anyway, you’ve changed. I mean, you’ve grown up and all, and you seem a lot more—forgiving.” Edgar thought that was a nicer way of putting the fact that Falconer had no edge anymore and had turned into a soft touch for the likes of Wallasek. “But there’s something else. Something, I don’t know—missing.”

Falconer didn’t take offense, but smiled wanly and smoothed his palms down his face to rest them flat on the table. “You mean I’m not surrounded by adoring fans? I’m not tap-dancing on the ceiling with a hat rack?”

Edgar tore a wet shred slowly off his Amstel label. “Whatever.”

“Senior year—you heard my father died?”

“Secondhand.”

“You weren’t speaking to me at the time. Anyway, it hit me hard. All the gang were consoling, for about five minutes. Maybe that made me lucky. Maybe less, well, less prominent kids whose parents died got consoled for only two or three minutes. But after my five minutes were over I was supposed to go back to thinking up pranks to play on our Spanish teacher, leading sneaks off campus after curfew, and inventing new ways to propel our pineapple upside-down cake at lunch. I couldn’t do it. I had more ‘friends’ than anyone at Yardley and I was so lonely I could scream. They all wanted their emcee back, but meanwhile, who was going to lighten things up for me?

“So my mom was a mess without my dad, and I felt bad for being away at school. My sister had started sleeping around at the age of twelve. You were spreading rumors that I led circle-jerks, and I was badgered by volunteers who wanted to join in. I was depressed and couldn’t concentrate on exams. All I got from my buddies was snap out of it. I was sick of the phone ringing in my hall and it was always for me. I was sick of people whispering and all their little theories about what made me tick. I was sick of brown-nosers who liked me a lot more than I liked them.

“This is going to sound a little out there, so cut me some slack. That ‘something missing’ you mentioned: it was all that crew wanted and it had nothing to do with me. It was some weird power that wasn’t to my credit because I didn’t invent it, and it was totally beyond my comprehension. I had no idea why if I said jump in the lake, you guys would jump in the lake. If you told me to jump, I wouldn’t do it. And I looked at myself, I saw a regular high school senior with problems, and you people saw, what—truth is, I have no idea what you saw. This gift, it was like a magic lantern. But it was also a curse.

“So I tossed it. I didn’t apply to Yale or Harvard, but Haverford. And at college I wore pastel button-downs and plain slacks. I didn’t talk in class and I didn’t go to keg parties. I stayed in my dorm room and studied. I was a bore and nobody ever talked about me behind my back any more than they’d mention the wallpaper.”

“And then you lost your hair.” Edgar was being undiplomatic again, but he almost wondered if Toby’s metallic locks had been yanked as punishment. The notion of willingly giving up whatever it was that Falconer had in high school was reprehensible.

“Like Samson.” Toby grinned. “I wonder if it’s just as well. Maybe it all came down to my hair to begin with, huh? My sister has the same coloring, and I swear that half her admirers only wanted to sink their fingers into that waist-long corn silk. Deborah got so pissed off with one guy that she cut it off and gave it to him in a box.”

“It wasn’t the hair.”

“I don’t even care. Whatever you guys were so hot for, I couldn’t see it myself. I’m sorry I called you ‘clingy.’ I don’t remember saying it, but I’m not surprised I did. Honestly, Kellogg, you did get to be a pain. You were always dogging me, but never wanted to really talk. That part of you that I was drawn to, that lost a hundred pounds in six months? That part never seemed to speak up. And on the one hand you acted so hard-ass, but on the other, you, I don’t know, seemed to idolize me or something. Made me feel creepy, like a fake. I’d no idea what you saw in me, what about me was so great.”

“I guess I did try to impress you,” Edgar admitted. “Maybe I tried too hard. But you had such style, Falconer.” Edgar couldn’t help the past tense. “It’s rare.”

“I may be kidding myself that I gave it up,” Toby mused. “It could have just got away from me.”

“I’ve watched out for your byline for years: from Belfast, Somalia, the Gulf War. I always pictured your life as exotic, edgy. One reason I quit law. Thought I’d join you.”

The confidence got out before Edgar realized that it sounded like more of the same: searching a dozen vintage clothing shops for a fifties baseball jacket, and the one that fit the best and had the coolest logo on the back just happened to be the same cardinal-red as Toby Falconer’s. Edgar’s biggest concern about his own character was that he wasn’t original. He didn’t know how to become original except by imitating other people who were.

“I do my job, and pretty well,” said Falconer. “It’s more ordinary than it seems, though. Like you said, to do with sentences—plodding, workaday. I am, anyway. I’m quiet. I’ve got to the point I don’t much like being on the road, and I’ve encouraged Guy to give the firefighting assignments to younger reporters who’re still hot to trot. I like going home to Linda, sourdough pretzels, and the Mets on TV. You put your finger on it: I’m sincere. I don’t have a lot of friends, but they’re real.”

Edgar raised his empty Amstel and clinked it against Falconer’s mug. “Just got yourself one more, then.” Edgar’s inability to complete the toast with a swig seemed apt. If idolatry made a poor basis for a friendship, pity wasn’t much of an improvement. Falconer seemed like a dead nice guy, and Edgar felt robbed.

“When you off to Barba?”

“Soon as I can pack.”

“Good luck with Saddler, anyway.”

“I don’t expect to have good or bad luck with Saddler,” Edgar protested. “He disappeared, remember? Abracadabra. Hell, the guy probably just fell in a ditch.”

“The likes of Saddler don’t just fall in ditches. Or if they do, there’s plenty more to the story, and nine times out of ten they crawl out again. I got a gut sense says the legendary Barrington belongs in your life.”

Edgar found himself obscurely cheered up. Much as he might resist the prospect of some bombastic and unaccountably fawned-over scoundrel bursting unannounced through his front door, suddenly he felt he had a future, and its vista widened into the big, big, big—big as life; bigger, even. As Falconer settled the bill at the bar, having waved off a half-heartedly proffered ten-spot, Edgar studied the plain, kindly face, searching its prematurely haggard lines scored by “three hyperactive kids and a depressive wife,” too many red-eyes out of Addis and tight connections in Rome. Though he thought he was scanning for some flicker of the sly, playful Adonis at whom he’d marveled at Yardley, Edgar recognized in his failure to see any resemblance at all that he didn’t want to see a resemblance.

Out on the street, they shook hands. Edgar clapped Toby’s shoulder for good measure. Neither made a feint toward meeting again. “Take care of yourself, Falconer.”

“You know, there didn’t used to be an airport in Cinzeiro, only a bus from Lisbon. Now there are two planes a day. Presumably to make it that much easier for the SOB to blow them up. Watch your back, Kellogg.”

Instead Edgar watched Toby Falconer’s. In no time the beige knit shirt and gray slacks blended with the bland attire of other pedestrians, helping to form the backdrop against which strange or striking New Yorkers would stand out.

chapter 4

Inversion 101

Hanging on the subway strap, Edgar considered Toby Falconer, Joe Average. Certainly senior year at Yardley Edgar had caught a harried look in Falconer’s eyes, the submerged panic of a boy who couldn’t swim sinking below the surface. Edgar had worked hard at the time at foreshortening his former icon into another small-pond egotist.

From a distance, Edgar had discovered everything that had captivated him about Falconer could be slyly inverted: confidence transposed to arrogance, grace to effeminacy, popularity to shallowness. That famous sense of humor upended into flippancy, powers of persuasion into slimier powers of manipulation. Apparently the most sterling quality could be turned upside-down, like a reversible placemat. Courage flipped to irresponsibility, passion to mawkishness. The self-sacrificial were dupes, and the loyal? Were clingy. Now Falconer had gone and inverted himself. It should have been satisfying.

Childhood obesity having put his own flaws on such flagrant display, in self-defense Edgar had developed an eagle eye for the faults of other people. Though the facility gave him a deadliness it didn’t make him happy and it probably didn’t make him attractive. Nor did it save him from practicing the craft of inversion on himself. Resigning from Lee & Thole, for instance: heads, the move was bold. Tails? It was retarded.

Fearing a failure of nerve, Edgar had rung the Portuguese airline TAP from a pay phone in front of The Red Shoe to make a reservation for Barba via Lisbon three days hence. That would give him just enough time to wrap up loose ends—like Angela—and not enough time to back out.

The process of inverting Angela was almost complete. He had yet to get over wanting to fuck her, but everything else that had first drawn him to her had capsized. Her far-flung general knowledge, for instance, translated neatly into superficiality: she could discuss anything for five minutes and nothing for half an hour. When she professed strong views about new Freud biographies at parties, she’d only read the reviews. She subscribed to all the right magazines but only skimmed the pull-quotes, and in movies concentrated primarily on the credits. That she remembered names, exact addresses, and which restaurants had changed hands had once made her repartee seem zippy, but nowadays when Edgar pictured her mind all he saw was the Yellow Pages.

More to the heart of the matter, that enigmatic quality of hers had revealed itself in time as garden-variety duplicity. For everything Angela said there was something else she omitted. At first the gaps had been scintillating. But after living with her for two years Edgar put his gift of inversion to proper use for once and concluded that Angela wasn’t elusive. She was a liar. She wasn’t mysterious or complicated. She was, and always had been, in love with someone else.