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"Two years, same salary, occasional reporting from the field--per my approval of the field assignment, of course. I accept."
"You do?"
"Have a nice day, Mary," Patrick told her.
Just let them try to find a field assignment he'd accept! Wallingford not only intended to make them fire him; he fully expected to have a new job lined up and waiting for him when they pulled the fucking trigger. (And to think he'd once had no capacity for long-range scheming.)
They didn't wait long to suggest the next field assignment. You could just see them thinking: How could the lion guy resist this one? They wanted Wallingford to go to Jerusalem. Talk about disaster-man territory! Journalists love Jerusalem--no shortage of the bizarre-as-commonplace there.
There'd been a double car bombing. At around 5:30 P.M. Israeli time on Sunday, September 5, two coordinated car bombs exploded in different cities, killing the terrorists who were transporting the bombs to their designated targets. The bombs exploded because the terrorists had set them on daylight-saving time; three weeks before, Israel had prematurely switched to standard time. The terrorists, who must have assembled the bombs in a Palestinian-controlled area, were the victims of the Palestinians refusing to accept what they called "Zionist time." The drivers of the cars carrying the bombs had changed their watches, but not the bombs, to Israeli time.
While the all-news network found it funny that such self-serious madmen had been detonated by their own dumb mistake, Wallingford did not. The madmen may have deserved to die, but terrorism in Israel was no joke; it trivialized the gravity of the tensions in that country to call this klutzy accident news. More people would die in other car bombings, which wouldn't be funny. And once again the context of the story was missing--that is, why the Israelis had switched from daylight-saving to standard time prematurely.
The change had been intended to accommodate the period of penitential prayers. The Selihoth (literally, pardons) are prayers for forgiveness; the prayer-poems of repentance are a continuation of the Psalms. (The suffering of Israel in the various lands of the Dispersion is their principal theme.) These prayers have been i
ncorporated into the liturgy to be recited on special occasions, and on the days preceding Rosh Hashanah; they give utterance to the feelings of the worshiper who has repented and now pleads for mercy.
While in Israel the time of day had been changed to accommodate these prayers of atonement, the enemies of the Jews had nonetheless conspired to kill them. That was the context, which made the double car bombing more than a comedy of errors; it was not a comedy at all. In Jerusalem, this was an almost ordinary vignette, both recalling and foreshadowing a tableau of bombings. But to Mary and the all-news network, it was a tale of terrorists getting their just deserts--nothing more.
"You must want me to turn this down. Is that it, Mary?" Patrick asked. "And if I turn down enough items like these, then you can fire me with impunity."
"We thought it was an interesting story. Right up your alley," was all Mary would say.
He was burning bridges faster than they could build new ones; it was an exciting but unresolved time. When he wasn't actively engaged in trying to lose his job, he was reading The English Patient and dreaming of Doris Clausen.
Surely she would have been enchanted, as he was, by Almasy's inquiring of Madox about "the name of that hollow at the base of a woman's neck." Almasy asks: "What is it, does it have an official name?" To which Madox mutters, "Pull yourself together." Later, pointing his finger at a spot near his own Adam's apple, Madox tells Almasy that it's called "the vascular sizood."
Wallingford called Mrs. Clausen with the heartfelt conviction that she would have liked the incident as much as he did, but she had her doubts about it.
"It was called something different in the movie," Doris told him.
"It was?"
He hadn't seen the film in how long? He rented the video and watched it immediately. But when he got to that scene, he couldn't quite catch what that part of a woman's neck was called. Mrs. Clausen had been right, however; it was not called "the vascular sizood."
Wallingford rewound the video and watched the scene again. Almasy and Madox are saying good-bye. (Madox is going home, to kill himself.) Almasy says, "There is no God." Adding: "But I hope someone looks after you."
Madox seems to remember something and points to his own throat. "In case you're still wondering--this is called the suprasternal notch." Patrick caught the line the second time. Did that part of a woman's neck have two names?
And when he'd watched the film again, and after he'd finished reading the novel, Wallingford would declare to Mrs. Clausen how much he loved the part where Katharine says to Almasy, "I want you to ravish me."
"In the book, you mean," Mrs. Clausen said.
"In the book and in the movie," Patrick replied.
"It wasn't in the movie," Doris told him. (He'd just watched it--he felt certain that the line was there!) "You just thought you heard that line because of how much you liked it."
"You didn't like it?"
"It's a guy thing to like," she said. "I never believed she would say it to him."
Had Patrick believed so wholeheartedly in Katharine saying "I want you to ravish me" that, in his easily manipulated memory, he'd simply inserted the line into the film? Or had Doris found the line so unbelievable that she'd blanked it out of the movie? And what did it matter whether the line was or wasn't in the film? The point was that Patrick liked it and Mrs. Clausen did not.
Once again Wallingford felt like a fool. He'd tried to invade a book Doris Clausen had loved, and a movie that had (at least for her) some painful memories attached to it. But books, and sometimes movies, are more personal than that; they can be mutually appreciated, but the specific reasons for loving them cannot satisfactorily be shared.
Good novels and films are not like the news, or what passes for the news--they are more than items. They are comprised of the whole range of moods you are in when you read them or see them. You can never exactly imitate someone else's love of a movie or a book, Patrick now believed.
But Doris Clausen must have sensed his disheartenment and taken pity on him. She sent him two more photographs from their time together at the cottage on the lake. He'd been hoping that she would send him the one of their bathing suits side-by-side on the clothesline. How happy he was to have that picture! He taped it to the mirror in his office dressing room. (Let Mary Shanahan make some catty remark about that! Just let her try.)
