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  “You’re getting out? I thought you said you had something to do.”

  “I didn’t say what exactly, now did I?” she said, giggling.

  She pushed open the door and before stepping out to the sidewalk to wait, she flirtatiously looked back over her shoulder.

  “Didn’t you just say that you don’t need a man?”

  “There’s what I need and what I want.”

  Jamie reached into his pocket, pulled out his keys and a mass of bills, mostly singles. He searched for the ten he believed and prayed he still had. He felt a tremor in his hand as he pushed the bill at the driver and told him to keep the change. Jamie unlocked the door and with one foot out of the car flushed the wrinkled singles in his pocket. He stood up and promptly dropped the keys in front of the rear wheel. He began to reach down but Carla tugged at his arm.

  “Let him pull out first,” she shrieked. She rapped on the window, motioning for the driver to go.

  “How many times are you going to save me?” Jamie said.

  “I’m just being selfish,” Carla said. She bent to retrieve the keys before he could and dangled them in his face. “I wanted to make sure when we get upstairs that you have full use of both hands.”

  She turned to walk up the steps to the front door, once again leaving Jamie with no choice but to follow.

  Day Five: Friday, November 11, 1994

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Jamie lay flat on his stomach, head barely touching the pillow. When his eyes opened to the day, he was groggy, dry-mouthed and disoriented. But also as content as he’d ever felt.

  What time was it? What day was it? Something very nice had happened but Jamie couldn’t quite recall what. Then it struck him. He had slept. He had fallen into a deep, peaceful slumber sometime during the night and it had gone gloriously uninterrupted. He dreamed about playing in a basketball game. The crowd was cheering. Cheerleaders lined one side of the court, wearing short skirts and Converse sneakers. They chanted his name as he dribbled around hapless defenders. One of them was his cousin, in a dark pinstriped suit instead of a basketball uniform. Steven’s eyes widened as Jamie dribbled and dribbled, a one-man Globetrotting show.

  Nobody could take the ball from him. He couldn’t be stopped.

  And she was watching.

  He remembered now that Carla had been alongside him in bed—but not anymore. Where had she gone? Had it all been a dream?

  Jamie lifted his head. He looked over to the far side of the rectangular room and there she was. Carla was sitting hunched and cross-legged on the uncovered wood floor, facing the far wall. She had taken the telephone from Jamie’s desk and set it down next to her. She cupped a hand over her mouth and whispered into the receiver.

  The band knotting her dark neck-length hair into a kinky ponytail stub had disappeared, surrendered to the sheets after they’d stepped into the apartment, and she’d pulled him to her by the strings of his sweatshirt. She informed him with the formality of a pre-recorded message, even as she worked the zipper of his jeans: “When the strike is over, this didn’t happen.”

  Jamie compliantly nodded. They began to undress each other, the removal of each succeeding garment precipitating another urgent kiss that neither seemed capable of attaching time limits to. Her hands were fastened to the sides of his head like bookends, her back arched to allow him leverage in their embrace.

  It took the better part of half an hour to navigate the hall connecting the studio’s front to the bed in the living space. Carla was stripped to her panties and Converse. Jamie was shirtless and moving his feet like they were manacled, trying not to stumble over the jeans that were bunched around his ankles.

  He had never considered her glamorous yet there was something about Carla, an aura of desirability that couldn’t easily be described, defended or denied. In the office Jamie many times had trained an eye on her—discreetly, he hoped—as she made her rounds, dispensing memos from high command. She wore fruity colored knit sweaters and dark skirts that didn’t quite hide the stoutness of her thighs.

  They had taken a walk and wound up in bed, Jamie not quite fathoming this reversal of fortune, Carla’s ambiguous terms notwithstanding. Had she committed herself to an affair for the duration of the strike? Declared their encounter a one-afternoon-night stand? Whatever her rules, whatever her game, he was playing. He was determined to waste not a single moment, to draw his serendipitous lottery payment in one lump sum and leave no part of her unexplored or untouched.

  They took an extended timeout for an evening pizza delivery and a rewound viewing of Midnight Cowboy. The leisurely pace allowed him to climax three times—once pre pizza and twice post pizza—before they shut down not long after midnight. Exhausted, emotionally spent, Jamie surrendered to unconsciousness as if it had been medically induced.

  He was so happy to have slept—almost as much as he had been able to have done so with Carla—that he wanted to let out a yelp. He suppressed it though when he saw her, swathed in sun, further illuminated by the bright yellow bath towel draped from her shoulders like a cape.

  He was aroused in no particular order by the mere sight of her, by the unshakable memory of her unabashed willfulness, her throaty moans. He thought about reaching for his glasses on the night table—just recalling how Carla had gently removed them and placed them there was a turn-on.

  Stay quiet, he told himself. Do not interrupt this rare moment of absolute serenity.

  But Carla soon delicately replaced the receiver onto the telephone and Jamie was forced to deliver a rehearsed “Good morning.” He knew he’d startled her by the spasm of her shoulder.

  “Oh, God, I didn’t know you were up,” she said.

  She half-turned but pulled the towel around to cover her breasts. Jamie found this sweetly innocent but paradoxically amusing considering her obvious keenness to the attention he had paid them.

  “You’re an early riser,” he said. A glance at the digital clock on his night table indicated it was already past nine.

  Carla stood and knotted one end of the towel inside the other, her preoccupation producing a rather inelegant walk to the sofa. She sat on the edge of the cushion. Her decorum and distance seemed to preclude the possibility of a morning reprise.

  “I’ve got to get going soon,” she confirmed. “Remember yesterday when I said that I had something to do?”

  “This wasn’t it?”

  “Well, actually, no,” she said, giggling, but in a distracted, almost anxious way. “I kind of got sidetracked here.”

  “I’d be happy to distract you again,” Jamie said, feeling sanguinely and strangely bold. “It’s not like you’d be missing work.”

  “That’s the whole point. We’re still out but the paper got out again and with more copies than yesterday, based on what Cal just told me.”

  “That was Willis?” Jamie sat up.

  “I told you, we talk all the time. Probably not a day goes by where we don’t, even when I’m not working.”

  “At least one of you takes an occasional day off,” Jamie said.

  “Cal takes days off,” Carla said, rolling her eyes. “The first day they open the racetracks, Belmont and Aqueduct. And then there’s Christmas, definitely Christmas. That’s when he usually has dinner with us.”

  “You’re that close?”

  “He’s like family, maybe me to him even more than him to me because the man is just about alone in the world. Only child, no close relatives, at least none he’s ever spoken to me about. But I bet you don’t know that Cal was married once.”

  “Wow, no, I didn’t. What happened?”

  “What usually happens in the newspaper business with people who become obsessed with it?” Carla said. She pursed her lips and widened her eyes, the way she habitually did to emphasize the rhetorical nature of her question.

  “Well, you said he doesn’t have any kids so he couldn’t have missed their births,” Jamie said.

  She pretended to be exasperated by his contin
uing guilt about Aaron.

  “I told you yesterday, what you did, that was nothing.”

  She was standing now, surveying the room. Jamie correctly guessed it was in search of her clothes. She zeroed in on the corridor leading to the front door and remembered where most of the disrobing had occurred.

  “You missed out on an event,” Carla said. “Cal missed out on a marriage.”

  “She left him?”

  “The way he tells it, he got tired of explaining why he had to work late every night. He told me once he decided to leave as a favor because he didn’t want her to spend the rest of her life waiting for him to come home. He said he sacrificed the relationship out of love.”

  “Strange way of showing it,” Jamie said.

  “I guess what he was saying was that he loved his job and the people he worked with more.”

  Jamie laughed. “He has a strange way of showing that too.”

  Her eyes narrowed in mock disapproval.

  Jamie held both palms up. “Joking,” he said. “You know Cal, the original grouch. But I know, more than most—he’s got a huge heart.” He chuckled and shook his head. “You should have seen his face when I showed up there the other day.”

  “He told me about that,” Carla said. “He said he thought you might have a stroke when you realized what was actually going on. He felt bad for you. He likes you, Jamie, always has. He told me once that your housing story took a lot of guts.”

  She said it so matter-of-factly, yet so sincerely, that Jamie was moved to accept the compliment at face value. He experienced none of the usual dishonor that surged through him like a fever at the recollection of the experience.

  “And you were right,” she continued. “It was Brady who ordered Cal to make the thing with your father the wood. He felt horrible about it, but there was nothing he could do. He called me that night and said he was concerned about how you would take it.”

  “You can tell him not so well,” Jamie said. He wondered if he should wait until she left the room to get out of bed, if nudity was permissible on the morning after considering the stated terms of their tryst.

  “Anyway, when Cal told me about what Brady made him do and about how NY1 had gotten the whole thing on tape, I figured you could use some cheering up.”

  Jamie slowly lowered his head back onto the pillow. Implicit was the invitation for Carla to rejoin him, lift his spirits once more in the most dependable way known.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’d say you succeeded.”

  She blushed, which surprised and delighted him, made him feel momentarily in control of the conversation.

  “This,” she said, quickly recovering, with a nod toward the bed, “wasn’t actually part of my plan. It just happened. What I was hoping to do was talk you into coming back to the picket line.”

  “You’re kidding,” Jamie said.

  Now he was caught off guard.

  Advantage: Carla.

  “No, actually, I’m not,” she said. “And I’ll tell you something else, from what I just heard from Cal, things could get pretty interesting out there real soon.”

  “I hope you’re talking about a settlement.”

  “Well, not quite that,” she said. “But, well, I’d better not say anything more. Cal would kill me.”

  Jamie’s interest was piqued but the mere thought of facing the strikers made him want to sink back under the blanket and stay there. Carla’s forgiveness, amorous as it was, was one thing. Absolution from the picket line in general and his father in particular was not something he was inclined to seek or bound to receive.

  “Carla, I wish I could go back and change everything, even if it would be just to prevent the spectacle it turned into,” he said. “But it happened. I did what I did. I can’t go back.”

  “I don’t see why not,” she said, defiantly. “It’s not like you’re going to show up for work again, at least from what Cal told me. And if you’re not in, then you’re out. The one thing I know about a strike is that there is no in between.”

  “I think I may have invented my own private purgatory,” Jamie said.

  “Okay, so you made a mistake. You overreacted. Your father overreacted. You think he doesn’t feel terrible about it and wouldn’t want you to come back?”

  “No comment.”

  “Bullshit, Jamie. Really, he’d shake your hand if you walked out there today. Everybody would and the whole thing would be forgotten. You know why? Because this is not about you and your father and what that asshole Brady put on his front page or what they showed on some stupid television channel. It’s about the people who put their livelihoods on the line when they walked out on Monday, who have families and kids to feed and Catholic school tuitions to pay. And if they miss more than one paycheck, they’re in deep, deep shit—you know what I’m saying?”

  “I do, Carla, I do,” Jamie said, sighing. “I made that same argument to my father and uncle the night before I crossed because I’m one of those people who can’t afford to miss more than one paycheck, especially now. But all they could talk about was how good Steven looked in a suit and how he preached about moral responsibility at the rally. And I said, you know what, it was easy for him to do that. Most of us don’t make his salary. And I’m at the point where I don’t care if I sound jealous of him either. I know he’s been doing a lot for the union, just like you have, and I respect that. But I also think this has been some kind of ego thing for him, a game he’s been playing without any real risk. Because in his gut, he knows he can miss a few weeks and not blink an eye. He stood up there with Robbins, sounding so righteous and committed. But he pushed us into this, knowing he could afford it. And if things got really bad he could get another job in a heartbeat.”

  Carla started to reply, but her face darkened. She looked away and then stood up and marched abruptly from the room, down the hall. She went into the bathroom and shut the door.

  “Nice going, asshole,” Jamie mumbled. “You had to drag him into it. They’ve only been working together fifteen hours a day.”

  Jamie was exasperated with himself. He fell back onto the pillow but in an instant bolted from the bed and pulled open the bottom drawer of the nearby chest. He found a pair of sweatpants. He slipped them on and chased after her. He knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Carla?”

  “One second.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  Jamie projected his voice in a deferential way. “I shouldn’t have said those things about my cousin. It’s not his fault.”

  The bathroom door opened. Carla appeared, teary eyed.

  “You know what? Maybe it is in some ways Steven’s fault,” she said. “Maybe it’s my fault and Robbins’ fault too. Maybe the drivers overreacted and we all shouldn’t have been so quick to follow them out. But that doesn’t matter now. Because people can only make decisions based on what they think is right at that moment. We went out because we thought we needed to stick together. Working people have each other. That’s all we’ll ever have. We’re no different at the Trib than the people in my neighborhood. No one wants to give us a damn thing if they don’t have to. Yeah, I know the big shots get the attention and they make all the speeches. They’re useful in that way to make noise for us. But we don’t kid ourselves, Jamie. We really don’t. We know who they are. We know they’re not part of us, especially Steven.”

  “Why him…especially?”

  Carla took a deep breath. She was back in her skirt but had only popped her head through the sweater without pulling it down over her bra. She reached up and clasped her hands around the back of his neck and held him in place, like a solemn parent about to break sad news to a child.

  “You probably should hear this from Steven. But what the hell: Cal just told me that he quit.”

  Jamie stared at her, blankly.

  “Cal quit?” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Your cousin, Steven. He called Brady yesterday morning and told him to go fuck himself. Cal said that
from what he’d heard, pretty much in those words.”

  “I don’t get it, to go where?”

  “The Sun,” Carla said. “Steven told Cal a couple of months ago that he had a standing offer, more money and a contract. Cal told me but didn’t think Steven would really go. But I guess he thought it over and decided that it was better than being on strike.”

  “But he…we’re only out a few days…how could he just pick up…?

  A complete, grammatical sentence apparently beyond him for the moment, Jamie waited for more information that Carla didn’t have.

  “All I know is what Cal told me, Jamie. I’m sorry. I really don’t know what else to tell you. Except that I’ve got to get going because when people on the line hear that the guy who champions union workers didn’t bother to stick it out with us, they’ll start thinking the whole thing is about to collapse. And if I know Sandy Robbins, he’s not going to make it his business to show up and calm everyone down.”

  She pulled the sweater below her waist, knelt to tie her sneaker laces. Jamie stood over her. Their nocturnal passion suddenly felt yesterday’s news, microfilmed for their personal posterity.

  Carla swept her jacket off the floor and carried it, crumpled, like a football.

  “You okay?”

  He nodded, unconvincingly.

  “You look a little washed out, sort of like yesterday when I found you,” she said, maternal Carla again.

  “I just can’t believe he would quit after he stood up there and helped them run us out into the street. It’s just…it’s just…you know?”

  “I know,” Carla whispered.

  She kissed his cheek. “Come to the picket line. People—your father—will be happy to see you. Like I said, it could get really interesting in the next day or two.”

  Before he could reply, she was closing the door behind her and was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Jamie worked the telephone keypad so furiously that he dialed a wrong number.

  “Hey people, this is Megan, I’m not home, please leave a message. Buh-bye.”