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"That's okay. What is it?"
"It's a passage in The English Patient, but I can tell you what it is another time. You can call me in the morning, as early as you want. Please wake me up!" he begged her.
"Read me the passage."
"It's just something Almasy says about Katharine--"
"Go on. Read it."
He read: "'She was hungrier to change than I expected.'" Out of context, the passage suddenly struck Wallingford as pornographic, but he trusted Mrs. Clausen to remember the context.
"Yes, I know that part," she said, without emotion. Maybe she was still half asleep.
"Well ..." Wallingford started to say.
"I suppose I was hungrier than you expected. Is that it?" Doris asked. (The way she said it, she might as well have asked, "Is that all?")
"Yes," Patrick answered. He could hear her sigh.
"Well ..." Mrs. Clausen began. Then she seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. "It really is too late to call," was her only comment.
Which left Wallingford with nothing to say but "I'm sorry." He would have to keep reading and hoping.
Meanwhile, Mary Shanahan summoned him to her office--not for the purpose, Patrick soon realized, of telling him that she was or wasn't pregnant. Mary had something else on her mind. While Wallingford's idea of a renegotiated contract of at least three years' duration was not to the all-news network's liking--not even if Wallingford was willing to give up the anchor chair and return to reporting from the field--the twenty-four-hour international channel was interested to know if Wallingford would accept "occasional" field assignments.
"Do you mean that they want me to begin the process of phasing myself out of the anchor job?" Patrick asked.
"Were you to accept, we would renegotiate your contract," Mary went on, without answering his question. "Naturally you'd get to keep your present salary." She made the issue of not offering him a raise sound like a positive thing. "I believe we're talking about a two-year contract." She wasn't exactly committing herself to it, and a two-year contract was superior to his present agreement by a scant six months.
What a piece of work she is! Wallingford was thinking, but what he said was, "If the intention is to replace me as the anchor, why not bring me into the discussion? Why not ask me how I'd like to be replaced? Maybe gradually would be best, but maybe not. I'd at least like to know the long-range plan."
Mary Shanahan just smiled. Patrick had to marvel at how quickly she'd adjusted to her new and undefined power. Surely she was not authorized to make decisions of this kind on her own, and she probably hadn't yet learned just how many other people were part of the decision-making process, but of course she conveyed none of this to Wallingford. At the same time, she was smart enough not to lie directly; she would never claim that there was no long-range plan, nor would she ever admit that there was one and that not even she knew what it was.
"I know you've always wanted to do something about Germany, Pat," was what she told him, seemingly out of the blue--but nothing with Mary was out of the blue.
Wallingford had asked to do a piece about German reunification--nine years after the fact. Among other things, he'd suggested exploring how the language for reunification--now "unification" in most of the official press--had changed. Even The New York Times had subscribed to "unification." Yet Germany, which had been one country, had been divided; then it was made one again. Why wasn't that reunification? Most Americans thought of Germany as reunified, surely.
What were the politics of that not-so-little change in the language? And what differences of opinion among Germans remained about reunification or unification?
But the all-news network hadn't been interested. "Who cares about Germans?" Dick had asked. Fred had felt the same way. (In the New York newsroom, they were always saying they were "sick of" something--sick of religion, sick of the arts, sick of children, sick of Germans.)
Now here was Mary, the new news editor, holding out Germany as the dubious carrot before the reluctant donkey.
"What about Germany?" Wallingford asked suspiciously. Naturally Mary wouldn't have raised the issue of him accepting "occasional" field assignments if the network hadn't had one such assignment already in mind. What was it?
"Actually there are two items," Mary answered, making it sound as if two were a plus.
But she'd called the stories "items," which forewarned Patrick. German reunification was no item--that subject was too big to be called an item. "Items" in the newsroom were trivial stories, freakish amusements of the kind Wallingford knew all too well. Otto senior blowing his brains out in a beer truck after the Super Bowl--that was an item. The lion guy himself was an item. If the network had two "items" for Patrick Wallingford to cover, Wallingford knew they would be sensationally stupid stories, or trivial in the extreme--or both.
"What are they, Mary?" Patrick asked. He was trying not to lose his temper, because he sensed that these field assignments were not of Mary's choosing; something about her hesitancy told him that she already knew how he would respond to the proposals.
"You'll probably think they're just silly," she said. "But they are in Germany."
"What are they, Mary?"
The channel had already aired a minute and a half of the first item--everyone had seen it. A forty-two-year-old American serviceman stationed in Germany had managed to kill himself while watching the solar eclipse that August. He'd been driving his car near Kaiserslautern when a witness observed him weaving from one side of the road to the other; then his car had accelerated and struck a bridge abutment, or some kind of pier. It was discovered that he'd been wearing his solar viewers--he didn't want to miss the eclipse. The lenses had been sufficiently dark to obscure everything but the partially occluded sun.
"We already ran that item," was Wallingford's only response.
