“Why don’t you tell her, Mr. Walker.”
I cleared my throat. “I was out to Oakwood for lunch—well, actually, I never had any lunch, come to think of it, only a coffee. Which probably explains why I’m feeling a little light-headed all of a sudden. Edgy. I could use a bite to eat.”
“Zack.”
“I had lunch with Martin Benson, who writes a column for the Suburban. I think he may have been left with the impression that I was trying to get him to scrap doing a story on Trixie, which is not at all the case.”
Sarah was speechless. Magnuson was good enough to fill the silence.
“Blair says this Benson fellow told him that you wanted him to surrender his camera phone so he wouldn’t take a picture of this, this woman known as Trixie, who, I understand, has a rather unorthodox line of work.”
“She was, yes, that’s sort of true, but she was very frightened that he was going to take her picture and run it in the paper.”
“That’s what journalists do,” Magnuson said. “We take pictures of people we want to do stories on, and we put them in the paper, whether they like it much or not. I’ll bet you Sarah could explain the whole concept to you if you’re not all that familiar with it.”
“That’s who called you, isn’t it?” Sarah said. “There was no call about a Star Trek convention.”
Magnuson’s bushy eyebrows went up a notch.
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no, there was no call about a Star Trek convention.” I was starting to feel that I’d be lucky to cover anything as newsworthy as a Star Trek convention in the future.
“It’s one thing to try to outsmart the competition when we’re trying to get a story that we want just as much as they do,” Magnuson said. “One time, when I was based in Washington, there was this little runt-nosed jackass from the paper out on the coast, doesn’t matter which one, kept shadowing me, figuring he had a better chance snooping on me and my sources than trying to cultivate any of his own. So I’m on a pay phone, and I know he’s just around the corner, but he doesn’t know that I know, and I ask for Rewrite, tell them I got a hell of a story about a particular congressman who was found dressed in women’s clothes in a whorehouse, and off he dashed. Then I told Rewrite we had to start again. Our paper didn’t have a story about a congressman found dressed in women’s clothes in a whorehouse, but his did.” He sniffed. “Never followed me around again after that.”
I laughed.
“Shut up,” Magnuson said. “You’ve got nothing to laugh about. What you did isn’t the same as what I did. You tried to steer Benson off a story to protect a friend.”
“I didn’t—”
“I can’t fire you outright,” Magnuson said. “That would involve the newspaper guild, and hearings, and back and forth and who needs that shit anyway. So instead, you can remain a reporter.”
I knew it was too soon to think I’d dodged a bullet.
“But not for city. Tomorrow, you start in the homes section.”
I was dumbstruck. Surely, firing would have been more humane.
Sarah, as well, could find no words. She looked back and forth between me and the managing editor.
“I’ll see what I can do about getting someone else for you,” Magnuson told her. “I don’t want you to have to run that department shorthanded, because, I can tell you right now, you’re going to be running that department for the foreseeable future.”
He turned back to look at something on his computer, and it was clear that we were being dismissed.
I’d been busted down to the homes section.
Sarah wasn’t going to become the foreign editor.
It didn’t matter anymore what Myanmar used to be.
8
“ACTUALLY, we’re not the ‘homes’ section,” the “not-the-homes” section editor told me. “We’re ‘Home!’ That’s the way we did the masthead when the paper had its redesign a few years ago.”
The Home! editor was a short woman named Frieda, and as she stood next to me while I sat at my new desk, we were almost at eye level. She wore a bright orange dress that seemed to be humming, like a transformer. She was pointing to the masthead on a copy of the Home! section spread out on my desk. The letters H-O-M-E, in brilliant blue, followed by an equally bold exclamation mark.
“I came up with that,” she said proudly. “You know how, when someone comes into your house, a member of your family, they shout ‘I’m home!’ Well, my thinking was, we take the last part of that sentence and turn it into the name of the section. It’s the punctuation at the end, that dramatic exclamation mark, that makes it, I think. It’s what separates our home section from home sections in other papers. It’s what gives this section its punch, its vitality. I think we have the best home section anywhere, and it sure is nice you’re going to be able to work for it.”
She smiled.