Author’s Note

Some real people appear here under their own names, but this is fiction.

3

While you were out a producer for the Oprah Winfrey show had called to ask if Nick would go on the show in Chicago on Monday afternoon. The SG's call for an outright ad ban was getting a lot of play, and Oprah wanted a show on smoking right away. Nick called back immediately to say that, yes, he'd be available. This was face time, major face time. Millions and millions of women — tobacco's most important customers — watched Oprah. He was tempted to pick up the phone and tell BR, but decided to play it cool and conduct a little experiment. He called Jeannette and, in the course of asking her about some routine stuff, slipped it in. "Oh, I almost forgot, I have to do the Oprah show on Monday, so can you get me everything we have on the ineffectiveness of advertising?"

He set the timer on his watch. Four minutes later BR was on the line wanting to know what the deal with the Oprah show was. Nick laid it on a bit about how he'd been "cultivating" one of the producers for a long time and it had finally paid off.

"I was thinking maybe we should send Jeannette," BR said.

Nick ground his jaw muscles. "It's going to be a pretty splashy show. Top people. They made it pretty clear that they want the chief spokesman for the tobacco industry." Not your office squeeze.

BR said with an edge, "All right," and hung up.

His mother called to remind him that he and Joey had not been by for Sunday supper in over a month. Nick reminded her that the last time he had, his father had called him a "prostitute" at the table.

"I think it says how much he respects you that he feels he can speak to you so frankly," she said. "Oh, by the way, Betsy Edgeworth called this morning to say she saw you on C-SPAN talking about some Turkish sultan. She said, 'Nick's so attractive. It's such a shame he didn't stay in journalism. He might have had his own show by now.'"

"I've got to go," Nick said.

"I want you to bring Joey for supper on Sunday."

"Can't. Sunday's bad."

"How can Sunday be bad, Nick?"

"I have to cram for the Oprah show on Monday afternoon."

Pause. "You're doing the Oprah Winfrey show?"

"Yes."

"Well. You'd better get her autograph for Sarah. Sarah loves Oprah Winfrey." Sarah was the housekeeper, the reason Nick was incapable of standing up to his own secretary. "Does Oprah smoke?"

"I doubt it."

"Maybe you'd better get her autograph before the show. Just in case everyone gets angry, the way they did when you were on with Regis and Kathy Lee."

He was late. He hurried down to the basement garage and drove aggressively through the Friday afternoon traffic, and pulled up in front of Saint Euthanasius a good half hour late. Joey, in his uniform, was sitting on the curb outside the main building looking miserable. Nick screeched to a stop and bolted out of the car as if he were part of a SWAT team operation. "I'm late!" he shouted, loudly belaboring the obvious. Joey cast him a withering glance.

"Ah, Mr. Naylor." Uh-oh. Griggs, the headmaster.

"Reverend," Nick said with what forced delight he could muster. Griggs had never quite forgiven him for putting down under "Father's Occupation" on Joey's school application form, "Vice President of Major Manufacturers' Trade Association." Little had he realized that Nick was a senior vice president of Genocide, Inc., until one night when he caught Nick on Nightline duking it out with the head of the flight attendants' union over the effects of secondhand smoke in airplanes. But by then Joey was safely enrolled at this, the most prestigious boys' school in Washington. Griggs glanced at his watch to indicate that it was not lost on him that Nick was half an hour late.

"How are you," Nick said, thrusting out his hand. He decided to dispense with mendacious banter about the congestion of Friday afternoon traffic in D.C. "Good to see you," he said mendaciously. He didn't especially enjoy being singled out for silent contempt by the headmaster of a school whose parents included Persian Gulf emirs and members of Congress. For $11,742 a year, the Reverend Josiah Griggs could park his attitude in his narthex.

"The traffic was awful," Nick said.

"Yes." Griggs nodded slowly and ponderously, as though Nick had just proposed major changes in the Book of Common Prayer. "Fridays… of course."

"We're going fishing this weekend," Nick said, changing the subject. "Aren't we, Joe?"

Joey said nothing.

"I wonder if you might stop by sometime next week," Griggs said in that assured, headmasterly way. Nick was seized with alarm. He looked over at Joey, who provided no clue as to this summons.

"Of course," Nick said. "I'm away on business the beginning of the week." It crossed Nick's mind: did Griggs watch Oprah? Surely not.

"End of the week, then? Friday? You could come by to pick up Joseph a little… early?" A thin smile played over his narrow face.

.

"Fine," Nick said.

"Splendid," Griggs said, brightening. "What are you fishing for?"

"Catfish."

"Ah!" Griggs nodded. "Ellie, our housekeeper, loves catfish. Of course, I can't get past their looks. Those fearsome whiskers." He walked off to the deanery with his hands clasped behind his back.

Safely inside the car, Nick said, "What did you do?"

"Nothing," Joey said.

"How come he wants to see me?"

"I don't know," said Joey. Twelve was not the most communicative age. Conversations consisted of games of Twenty Questions.

Great, Nick thought, I get to go into a principal conference totally blind.

"I'm offering total and unconditional amnesty. Whatever you did, it's all right. Just tell me: why does Griggs want to see me?"

"I said I don't know."

"Okay." Nick drove. "How'd the game go?"

"Sucked."

"Well, you know what Yogi Berra said. 'Ninety percent of baseball is half-mental.' "

Joey thought about this. "That's forty-five percent."

"It's a joke." And, having nothing to do with revolting bodily functions, not likely to split the sides of a twelve-year-old. He extracted from Joey the score of the game: 9–1.

"The important thing is," he ventured consolingly, "is… " What was the important thing? Having himself been brought up in the Vince Lombardi School of Child-Raising, where his father shoutingly questioned his manhood from the stands every time he missed a grounder, Nick had resolved on a more tolerant approach for his own son's education, "… is to feel tired at the end of the day." Aristotle might not have constructed an entire philosophy on it, but it would do. True, Hitler and Stalin had probably felt tired at the end of their days. But theirs would not have been a good tired.

Joey registered no opinion of this Grand Unified Theory of Being, except to point out that Nick had just driven past Blockbuster Video and would now have to try a U-turn in busy traffic.

They went through their usual ritual, Joey proposing one unsuitable video after another, usually ones with covers showing a half-naked blond actress with ice picks, or the various steroid-swollen European bodybuilders-turned-actors in the act of decapitating people with chainsaws. Nick countering with Doris Day and Cary Grant movies from the fifties, Joey sticking his finger down his throat to indicate where he stood on the Grant-Day oeuvre. Nick was generally able to reach a compromise with World War II movies. Violent, yes, but tasteful by modern standards, without the super-slow-mo exit wounds pioneered by Peckinpah. "Here's one we haven't seen," he enthused, "The Sands of Iwo Jima. John Wayne. Cool." Joey showed no great zeal for the exploits of the Duke, John Agar, and Forrest Tucker as they fought their way up Mount Suribachi, but said he'd go along if they could also rent Animal House for the seventeenth time.

Nick lived in a one-bedroom off Dupont Circle that looked out onto a street where there had been eight muggings so far this year, though only two of them had been fatal. Most of his one-oh-five went to servicing the mortgage on the house a few miles up Connecticut Avenue in the leafy neighborhood of Cleveland Park, where Joey lived with his mother. On alternate weekends, Joey got to go get down and urban with Dad.

Together they ate a nourishing dinner of triple pepperoni pizza and cookie dough ice cream. Cookie dough ice cream. And society fretted about cigarettes?

The Sands of Iwo Jima was a little dated, but it was a good, big-hearted movie. And there was this… transfiguring moment where Wayne, having brought his men through hell to victory, exults, "I never felt so good in my life. How about a cigarette?" And just as he's offering the pack around to his men, a Jap sniper drills him, dead. Without realizing it, Nick took out a cigarette and lit up.

"Da-ad," Joey said.

Obediently, Nick went outside on the balcony.