Stepdog (4 page)

Then I met Jim.

9/11: Taking Stock

J
im and I said good-bye in Phoenix and I didn't hear from him again. I didn't really expect to, since we were just colleagues who had run into each other by chance. But L.A. now beckoned like never before. I had welcomed my temporary assignment in Los Angeles as a chance to report on new subjects in an area of the country I didn't really know. San Francisco and Los Angeles were so different in geography and zeitgeist that their two populations were notoriously oblivious to each other. In my many years in the Bay Area, I had been to L.A. twice at the most. If you lived in San Francisco, there was no reason to go to Los Angeles, and vice versa. Now I had two good reasons to brave the spread of what I used to know as la-la land. Jim awaited, or so I thought.

On my first day in the
Times
's L.A. bureau, my dreamboat greeted me warmly. He offered me a tour of the office and introduced me to the eight other colleagues who worked there.

“Over here, the fax machine,” Jim said as I followed like a giddy puppy. With the flair of a magician, he opened an upper cabinet in the kitchen. Ta-da! The shelves were stuffed with snacks. “Here's where we keep our stash of Oreos.” He grinned. “In the morning, the office manager buys doughnuts from Bob's in the farmers' market. Do you like glazed or jelly?”

Talk about sweet!

All correspondents had the luxury of their own private offices, but Todd had not moved out yet, so I staked out a corner of the common area near the office manager's desk by the front door. I soon got started on a couple stories, befriended the manager, Catherine, and forgot about my surroundings. I cared more about the apartment I had found just blocks from the ocean and the shopping promenade in Santa Monica. The sight of water felt like home. I woke up every day to impossibly perfect weather. Every single day. Driving against traffic (to my surprise, the bulk of commuters headed away from downtown Los Angeles toward the Pacific Coast Highway), I had a short commute to the
Times
bureau in the mid–Wilshire Boulevard area. No one came in before nine a.m. except for Andy, the biotech reporter, who typically was the first one in and the last one out no matter how bright the sun shone outside. I knew this because I was in the perfect spot to see the comings and goings of my colleagues. Jim and I saw each other every day, trading hellos, smiles, and stolen glances. I bode my time, waiting for my handsome office guide to ask me out to lunch. Then I waited some more. Then—nothing. The invitations never came. Camping? I wished.

Jim spent the days out on the street reporting or holed up in his office, and soon there was not even casual conversation. Even when we sat next to each other at Todd's send-off over lunch at Morton's, roasting our colleague and joking about a celebrity two tables over we couldn't place (Judith Light)—nothing.

Much later Jim would explain that he was involved with someone at the time and didn't want to complicate things. But, he asked, hadn't I noticed that he had carved a path on the carpet from the many trips he took to the office pantry just so that he could walk by my desk and catch a glimpse of me? Frankly, I had not, distracted as I was by disappointment and desire.

I was crestfallen. My L.A. fantasy failed to materialize. I moved on. I spent some quality time with my friends Rose, a news editor with the
Press-Telegram
in Long Beach, and Gabriel, a Hollywood publicist who let me tag along for some fun red-carpet events. And I was busy at work. One story took me to the famous border fence between Mexico and the United States that ends in the ocean off the California shore. Driving there, I passed billboards showing the silhouettes of a man, a woman, and a little girl with pigtails clinging to her mother's hand as they ran. It was a disconcerting warning: watch out for illegal immigrants attempting to cross the freeway. That certainly put my little personal disappointments in perspective.

Still, I flew back to New York deflated. A month—a whole month!—could have been used so productively. We could have had romantic dinners at Inn of the Seventh Ray in Topanga Canyon. We could have strolled around the Getty Museum and hiked the Santa Monica Mountains. We could have driven along the coast to the Santa Barbara wine country and stopped at the Hitching Post on the way back for a dinner of steak and grilled artichokes, downed with the restaurant's own pinot noir. We could have fallen in love and planned a future together. I tried to shrug it off. His loss.

I was still moping two weeks later when, on a clear, picture-perfect Tuesday morning in New York, the phone woke me up.

“Are you okay?” It was my sister, calling from Puerto Rico.

“Yes, why?”

“Turn on the TV and call me back.”

I made it to the living room in time to watch the World Trade Center being swallowed up by dust. God help us. I sat frozen, weirdly fixated on how the towers fell. I don't know how long it took me to come to and realize that on clear days I could see the buildings from my roof. I lived by the Hudson River on the top floor of a thirteen-floor co-op in Washington Heights. I raced one flight up the stairs. A few neighbors were already gathered on the southern side of the roof, watching the spectacle in silence.

After I don't know how long, I suddenly remembered. “Shit. The
Times
!” The newsroom must have been going nuts, and here I was, one of their metropolitan news reporters, watching the tragedy unfold in my bathrobe. I rushed down the stairs and got a strangely calm Metro deputy editor on the line.

“Just find your way there,” he said, Zenlike.

I dressed quickly and headed out on foot. With no car or bike to my name, and no yellow cabs or town cars in sight and all public transportation shut down, I would have to walk twelve miles south to get to what would soon become known as Ground Zero. I started walking but I never made it to the disaster site. Half a block from my apartment I saw small huddles of people on street corners talking, some of them crying. I opened my notebook and started taking notes. A few blocks south, a crowd of hundreds had gathered at the foot of the George Washington Bridge, many of them men and women in work clothes and holding briefcases.

These commuters from New Jersey were not going to wait around for the city to shake itself back to normal. They had walked uptown and now wanted to walk some more, over the Hudson, to go back home to safety and hug a loved one tight. It all felt dreamlike. There was the bar with overhead TV sets packed with people drinking hard liquor at ten in the morning. There was the Arab convenience store owner in tense conversation with a customer about who had done it. Lines of residents crowded grocery stores and ATMs as if they were preparing for a hurricane. And I heard the name Osama bin Laden more than a few times out of New Yorkers' lips from day one.

I had not advanced even a mile when I called the newsroom again. “I'm still uptown, but there's so much going on I think I should stay here.”

“Start filing,” an editor said.

Which I did, along with hundreds of my colleagues. Nothing went to waste. We put in the paper everything we heard and saw. Our vignettes ran under the headline: “A Day of Terror: The Voices; Personal Accounts of a Morning Rush That Became the Unthinkable.” After that day, we stayed on overdrive for months and months, in my case covering funerals and reporting and writing short profiles of the missing and the dead. Known as Portraits of Grief, these mini-profiles were solely based on the remembrances of relatives, friends, and coworkers. These mini-eulogies were not traditional journalism. We didn't do much digging. But 9/11 was not a traditional story. We were acknowledging each and every victim among the thousands of lives lost.

I wrote two or three profiles a day. These interviews put me in the midst of the horror as it unfolded. Some stories were more horrible than others. A young husband who worked in one of the towers along with his wife told me that when the first plane hit, his wife had panicked and wanted to leave the building. As they stood by the elevators trying to decide what to do, the voice from a loudspeaker said that everybody should return to their offices. She still wanted to go, but he convinced her to stay. The young husband cried his tale into the phone as I told him how sorry I was and took notes and wondered how this widower in his twenties could ever be happy again.

And since traditional journalism was out the window, I said yes when a widow from Stamford, Connecticut, asked me if we could please run the portrait of her husband, a broker-dealer named Randolph Scott, on the day of what would have been their wedding anniversary, which was coming up shortly. I remember going to Stamford one weekend to visit my friend Celia and how I froze at the scene at the train station: the parking lot was filled with unclaimed cars belonging to commuters who never returned home. I wrote the portrait of Randolph Scott and arranged for it to run on the specified day. Except, that Saturday, when I opened the paper, the name of the wife had been changed from Denise to Nancy. What the hell?!!!

I called the office in a panic, but no one could explain what had happened. All I could do was call Denise Scott and self-flagellate. She was extremely nice about it. In fact, she said, she had been hearing jokes about her husband's “other wife” all day long and the laughter helped her get through her painful anniversary. I sent her flowers on behalf of the
Times
and the paper republished the portrait with the correct name. I chalked up these strange mistakes to the fact that although journalists are supposed to behave like detached, objective automatons in the face of unspeakable acts, we sometimes crack. We were all deeply affected, not always in obvious ways, in the newsroom, just like everybody else. From the relative safety of our office many blocks away, near Times Square (I now worried the
Times
could be a likely target for another terrorist attack), I wrote portrait after portrait through the end of 2001.

As reporters, we often don't know how our stories land, what impact they may have on individual readers. One late night, as I absentmindedly flipped TV channels, I stumbled upon a local talk show where a father was talking about his son, another 9/11 casualty. The name sounded familiar, and then I realized I had written about the son. The father mentioned the portrait and the interviewer asked how he had liked it.

“It was beautiful,” he said, bursting into tears.

I burst into tears too.

That day left New Yorkers nervous wrecks, always jumpy and on the alert, suspicious of the solitary paper bag left on a subway train, of a backpack with no owner beside it. And others who suffered personal losses lived through a never-ending tragedy. A friend waited for her mother's remains and possessions to be found bit by bit. Another friend, my colleague Dana, lost her love and the father of her only child in the wars that followed, left to raise her baby son alone. That baby would grow up beautiful and healthy and experiencing his father's absence to the core. The rest of us could only learn to appreciate our loved ones even more. I also took stock of what a bitch I had been to some people. I thought about a boyfriend I had loved very much in my twenties and almost married, but had discarded in a manner I now regretted. I looked him up on Facebook and found him, happily married with kids. I called him not to apologize but to tell him that I remembered him, that I was grateful for having had him in my life, and that his happiness made me happy. I don't know if the words came out right, but from then on I was conscientious about nurturing relationships and never taking those who mattered to me for granted. At least I'd try.

Mired in the aftermath of terrorism, I hardly paid attention when I heard through the grapevine that the new executive editor of the
Times
had decided to clean house and replace a bunch of national reporters with his own picks.

Sparks and Fireworks (And No Crazy Dog)

I
ran into Jim one morning in the newsroom. He looked beaten.

“What are you doing here?” I asked cheerfully, genuinely glad to see him.

We had not been in touch since my stint in the L.A. bureau, and he had been out of my mind. But when I saw him I blushed.

He mumbled something and looked even more miserable. He told me he had just been told he could not stay in Los Angeles and had to transfer back to New York.

“Do you want to have a drink after work?” I suggested out of pity and curiosity.

Jim living in New York? My pride was dissolving fast.

“A drink sounds great. I'm staying at the Millennium. We can meet at the bar in the lobby,” he said, still sounding like a zombie.

A few hours later, there I was again, at a hotel bar with this dashing but enigmatic man I kept stumbling upon.

The meeting with Executive Editor Howell Raines and company had not gone well. Every foreign and national correspondent knows the assignment comes with an expiration date of three to five years unless the powers-that-be bend the rules for you. These plum jobs—whether Los Angeles or Miami, Paris or Nairobi—are immensely coveted and rotational so that deserving writers all get their turn and the beats get fresh sets of eyes. But Jim's time to move on came up sooner than he'd expected when he got caught in the crosscurrents of the passing of the torch from
Times
executive editor Joe Lelyveld to Raines. As it turned out, Raines didn't last long. His tenure came crashing down twenty-one months after it began because of his autocratic style and a powerful trigger for the staff to push back against him—the scandal of deceit and plagiarism starring “the Fabricator.”

•   •   •

B
efore he was booted out, Raines recalled many well-respected national bureau correspondents back to New York. Jim was among the correspondents who couldn't just pick up and return to New York as he had been ordered. Families can't be uprooted at a moment's notice and Jim, a devoted father, had two kids in California over whom he had joint custody. He had no recourse but to beg for his job. Jim was hoping that the new regime would appreciate that he had performed terrifically as a business reporter, a foreign correspondent in Asia, and a national correspondent in Los Angeles—most recently on high-profile stories such as the Wen Ho Lee spying case and the California energy crisis. He had won multiple Publisher's awards, an honor given to
Times
reporters who produced the best work of the month. Raines's predecessor had understood Jim's family situation and allowed him to remain longer than usual in Los Angeles. Jim thought he might be able to persuade Raines to do the same. But it was not to be. Jim would have to resign if he wanted to remain in L.A. After eighteen years with the paper, he was about to lose the job he loved.

He was devastated but had no time to wallow. He needed to find another job in the couple months the
Times
gave him to return to New York.

“It sucks that you have to find another job in a hurry,” I told him as we sat in lounge chairs by the bar over glasses of wine. “Couldn't you move to New York for a while and take your time looking?”

I thought he was about to make a huge mistake. You can use the
Times
as a springboard to another great job probably only once. He could squander that chance as he rushed to line up new work.

“No. I really couldn't leave L.A., even for a few months.”

I changed the subject. “Who hired you?”

The recollection of those early years cheered him up. Jim's ascent as a business writer was quick. In barely five years, he was sent to Tokyo to cover business and economics. He then went to Los Angeles as a business correspondent five and a half years later, before moving to the culture section, covering Hollywood, television, and the arts, and later national news as a West Coast correspondent.

For the next hour, we told tales back and forth about
Times
editors and laughed and gossiped. After a few drinks and two bowls of peanuts, we got hungry and Jim suggested Virgil's, a great BBQ place across the street. I wasn't about to eat messy ribs on our first “date.”

“How about Orso?”

We walked to that staple of the theater district, and once there we found ourselves seated only a few tables away from the singer Lou Rawls, one of Jim's favorites. We talked and laughed some more, the mood and the feelings warm and relaxed. By the time we walked out of the restaurant, Jim was singing a Rawls standard, “Willow Weep for Me.”

~./'~./'~Willoooooooow~./'~Weeeeep~./'~ for~./'~Meeeeeeeeeee~./'~/'

He sang off-key on the sidewalk as I and passersby giggled. We strolled, very slowly, the two blocks to my subway station. We extended our good-byes until we had nothing else to do but look at each other awkwardly as people brushed past us into the subway entrance. Neither one of us invited the other to come home. That would have been too soon, at least for this lapsed Catholic. Then I remembered. “I'm going to be in Las Vegas in two weeks to run a relay race,” I said as we shook hands.

It seemed my fate to always be headed his way. My friend in Long Beach, Rose, had roped me into joining her media team for the annual Baker to Vegas run through the desert between California and Nevada. And Vegas was just a one-hour hop from Los Angeles by plane. There I was again, serving myself up on a platter.

“I think I can find a story to do in Vegas while you're there,” Jim said with a wicked look.

I smiled and said good-bye, but this time there was no fantasizing on my way home. My mother had raised no fool. I cautiously looked forward to our next meeting with no expectations whatsoever other than a nice dinner.

Over the next few days I pretended not to care that I had not heard from Jim, but, as the date for the Vegas trip approached, I couldn't help being annoyed. Here we go again. Jesus! What's wrong with this guy? The Monday before the trip, I finally shot him an e-mail.

“Hi, Jim. Hope you're well. My trip to Vegas is fast approaching and I need some suggestions. My needs, in order of importance: shops, swimming pool, blackjack, and anything else I can become addicted to in four days. Any help will be much appreciated.”

Jerk.

He made me wait all of five minutes.

“We'll have to see what we can do about adding to the list of addictions, and the order,” he replied. “Would you have dinner with me?”

Loved packing, loved flying, loved running in ninety-degree weather in a demented race involving more cars than runners, loved finally getting ready for our first official honest-to-goodness date. I was so nervous that nothing was getting done. With only fifteen minutes to spare before Jim was to show up, I still had to do my nails and iron my blouse. I was staying at the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino on the Strip. The room, shared with Rose and two other runners, came with an impressive view of the Eiffel Tower. My exhausted roommates planned to crash for the night, ordering in and watching videos while I was out on my hot date. They were so amused at my frantic preparations that one of them pushed me aside to finish ironing my see-through top while another one pointed the blow-dryer at my hands as I finished my manicure. When we heard the knock on the door my three roommates rushed to take their seats. Showtime! And there he was, showered and crisply dressed in a white cotton shirt and jeans, just off a plane and completely unfazed. He wore a big (sexy) smile and confidently (and sexily) walked into the room, saying hello to everyone while I blurted out introductions and apologized for not shaking his hand.

“I just did my nails,” I said lamely.

He just kept looking at me, oblivious to my roommates and their winked approvals. That night, we dined in Santa Fe, strolled on the Brooklyn Bridge, and had pineapple vodkas in Red Square. Despite our fake world travels, everything between us felt natural and real. We spent hours talking about our lives. Jim and I shared a common background. We were both semireligious—not pious, but observant of traditions. We were both extremely close to our families. His mother, Levona, had died a few years earlier of lung cancer, but he still had his father, an engineer, and two brothers and a sister. He even grew up in hot and humid weather like I did, in his case in Florida, in one of the few Jewish families then living in Fort Lauderdale.

Jim had come to journalism in a roundabout way. As a restless teenager, he moved to Vermont for college and then spent a year in Europe, with his best buddy, Ken. They picked grapes in Provence, moved boxes in a wine cellar in Germany, and worked in a ski shop in the French Alps. After all that excitement he returned to the States to complete a bachelor's degree in philosophy and cultural anthropology at Middlebury College. He was foggy about what he wanted to do, until he got into the literature program at Middlebury's Bread Loaf campus and later the Bread Loaf program at Oxford University in England. He got the confidence to consider writing for a living and enrolled at Columbia's journalism school. Upon getting his master's, he lucked out. He landed an overnight-shift job writing and editing for the international wire service at AP/Dow Jones. Six months later, he was asked to open their Hong Kong bureau.

Jim had a girlfriend, whom he married, and they moved to Asia. The
Times
hired him less than four years later and brought him back to New York to cover Wall Street in the wild 1980s. He wrote a book about the collapse of E. F. Hutton, the venerable brokerage house, and went back to Asia to work for the
Times
's Tokyo bureau. During his five and a half years in Japan, he and his wife adopted a girl, Arielle, and then a boy, Henry. Jim said he had always wanted to be a father. He was a natural. When I came along, he had already been divorced six years and was a self-sufficient single father who cooked, did laundry, coached softball, helped with homework, and worked as a national correspondent for the
Times
bureau in Los Angeles.

He had it all, almost. Like me, he was in a good place professionally but was missing a steady relationship. His dating record didn't seem to be any better than mine. While I dated insurance scammers, he went out with porn stars. Okay, one porn star. They attended a screening of
Boogie Nights
. For “research,” he said, just to get an expert's opinion on the movie's accuracy in depicting the skin trade. The porn star—surprise!—showed up three-quarters naked, so, naturally, he took her to an outdoor restaurant on Sunset Boulevard where his date could stop traffic.

I laughed as he told the story over our pineapple vodkas at the Mandalay hotel in Vegas and felt completely at ease and happy. He said nothing about a crazy dog. We were having such a great time that when we tried to say good night we couldn't. I decided to live for the moment. But the next day, Jim had to work. We were up and running early in the morning, trying to make it to the Hoover Dam in time for Jim to report a news story about increased security at the dam, a popular tourist attraction, in the post-9/11 world. I wandered around as Jim interviewed visitors, some of them still visibly drunk from their gambling all-nighters, others killing time before their flights home. As I watched Jim taking notes, I was on a buzz of excitement and possibility. I wanted this man who looked and felt so right. It'd be tricky to get to know each other long-distance, but dating is never effortless. We could make it work if we wanted to pursue a relationship badly enough. And we did. We both realized that Vegas, hookup heaven, was the start of something more serious. We were so ready.

From then on, we sustained a bicoastal courtship. Phone calls every day. E-mails every few hours. Some were no more than symbols for kisses, deep as we were in lovey-doveydom. A few weeks after our Vegas reunion, Jim arrived at my apartment late one Friday night with a bottle of California chardonnay. I had a checkered past in the kitchen but welcomed him with a supper culled from recipes from
Gourmet
magazine. Prosciutto-wrapped asparagus with mint dressing. Grilled tuna salade Niçoise. Smoked salmon and egg salad sandwiches with capers. As we nibbled, we made plans for the two romantic days that lay ahead. He would take the red-eye back to L.A. Sunday night. My turn to visit would be up next in a few weeks. Arielle and Henry awaited.

It was all going to be perfect.