Baltimore Blues

'Because you're so goddamn lazy!' He banged his mug down on the table, so hard the silverware jumped. 'You could be one of the best female rowers in Baltimore, but you won't work at it. You could be a good-looking woman, but you run around in baggy clothes with that stupid braid hanging out of your head. You're smart enough to find a new career, but you'd rather moon over your lost reporting job.

'So I finally accepted you as you are. I told you: Don't extend yourself, don't take any initiative, do only what you're told-and you do the exact opposite. You expend all your energy on foolish causes. You're a mule, Tess. A stubborn, cantankerous young woman wrapped up in herself. I could kick you, if I could kick at all.'

Tess felt a strange, almost masochistic thrill at Tyner's harsh words. It was at once awful and fascinating to hear her flaws enumerated so well.

'Does this means I'm fired?'

'It means you've fulfilled your contractual obligation to Rock.' Tyner's voice was almost sad. 'I don't think I'll need you anymore, Tess.'

'Don't worry. I'll find a way to fill my days.' Tess pushed away from the table and ran upstairs. His words hadn't hurt her-her own parents had said much worse many times-but they had hit home in a way her parents' criticism never could.

Before-and-after mode. That's how she had been living for two years, since the paper folded. No, not quite. She had been stuck on the fence, longing for 'before,' refusing to let 'after' begin.

She sat on her bed, looking in the mirror over the bureau, the same mirror in which Jonathan had examined his face last night, so worried about his nose. The memory did not sting as much as she thought it would. She was still a little numb. Eventually, she knew, she would have a thousand memories to confront, tucked away in every corner of her small apartment. It would hurt more before it hurt less.

She unlocked her desk drawer, fished out Abramowitz's disk, and loaded it into her computer. Her Mac, an older model, almost seemed to shudder as the floppy went in. ABRAMOWITZ: A LIFE, was the floppy's label, but it contained only one document. It had last been changed on September 12, the day Abramowitz died. Eagerly she called it up, noting the number of characters in the lower lefthand corner. It was a huge file, perhaps 1,000 pages, she calculated.

Yet the screen she faced was nothing more than electronic wallpaper in a narrow font, single spaced. Nada. Nada, nada, nada. Nada, nada, nada-it filled the first page, and the second, and the third, and the fourth. She told the computer to jump to the end of the file. Still solid nada. Upper case, lower case. Sometimes separated by commas, sometimes set off by semicolons, sometimes underlined, but all nada, always nada. And it wasn't a program, she was sure of that. Michael Abramowitz had sat at his desk, drawing a partner's salary at the city's biggest law firm, and written 'nada' word by word, over and over again, playing with formats and fonts and point size. It was strange, it was crazy. It made perfect sense, for she felt like doing it herself right now.

Nada, nada, nada.

Chapter 23

Tess had known Jonathan was Jewish. But it was only when he was dead, and she was staring at heads covered with yarmulkes, that she really believed it. Sitting in the back of a suburban Washington funeral home, trying to be inconspicuous among the journalists who had gravitated toward the final rows of white folding chairs, she found herself wondering if his parents had left the diamond earring in his left ear, or trimmed his unruly hair. She had met them a couple of times, back when she and Jonathan really dated, and they had wasted little time letting her know they disapproved of journalists, Baltimore, and the lowlifes Jonathan chronicled for the newspaper. Oddly they had approved of her, although Tess suspected it was because of Weinstein Drugs and their mistaken belief she would come into money one day.

Obit-wise, the Blight had done well by Jonathan, assigning one of its best writers and placing the story at the bottom of the front page, all editions. Most accidental deaths don't merit p-i, newsroom jargon for the front page, but Jonathan's stories had always gone there, so his death did, too. 'Sheer force of habit,' Feeney observed. Tess knew it was also one of the unacknowledged fringe benefits of working for a newspaper: One's death is treated very seriously.

Of course, the Blight hadn't taken Jonathan's death seriously enough to go beyond the police report. No one had called Tess to ask for her eyewitness account. Too bad; she could have told the writer how Jonathan saved her life, breathing some much-needed action into a story almost as moribund as its subject. The prose had been too flowery and portentous for her taste, more suitable to the treatment The New York Times gave some onetime ambassador or an inventor of something one had never heard of. Then again, giving interviews would have necessitated confronting once more the tricky questions about why she was with Jonathan at 6 A.M. Tess had never realized how suggestive a time of day could be, but now she saw there was a large space of time, from midnight to almost nine, in which there was no decency.

'I never thought I'd grow up to be Megan Marshak,' she whispered to Whitney, who smiled, one of the few people who would instantly recognize the name of the woman with Nelson Rockefeller at the time of his untimely death.

Even without the hero angle, Jonathan would have loved his obit. Good play, a serious, hushed tone, a few good anecdotes. He had outlived one of his oldest fears. When he started in the business, before coming to the Star, he had put in a year on a medium-size newspaper in Peoria, Illinois. Jonathan spent every day he was there- 467 in all, he once told her-writing about labor problems at Caterpillar and trying to get out. He had worried he would be linked to the town for posterity, that he would be on a plane when it crashed outside of Chicago, the only local angle on board. He saw the headline-Peoria Man Dies in Crash-and he knew he had to leave before he became Peoria Man.

And he had, had escaped it altogether. In his obituary there was no mention of his humble beginnings, just his Baltimore resume, and the prizes won, and the belief shared by everyone that great things waited for him. Jonathan did not die as Peoria Man, or City Man, or Local Man, or under any of those generic rubrics newspapers are so quick to bestow. He was, in the headline, for posterity, a 'Beacon-Light reporter, prizewinner, dead at twenty-eight.' Tess had never thought about the fact he was younger than she.

Whitney was on her left and Feeney on her right, goyishe spies in the temple. Many of those attending had never been at a Jewish service before, but Whitney, shiksa incarnate, was the one who drew the most skeptical looks. Jonathan's relatives seemed to regard her presence as a kind of sacrilege. Perhaps they, privy to details the newspaper had not printed, thought she was the mystery woman of the morning. Dignified and stern looking, Whitney paid no attention. At one point she handed Tess a handkerchief smelling of Shalimar. Taken with the fact she knew someone who carried a perfume-scented handkerchief, Tess stopped crying immediately.

Bruised and dazed, feeling more Jewish than usual, she saw a certain wisdom in the custom of burying the dead as quickly as possible. As a child she had always thought the practice was dictated by a practical fear of germs, much like the ancient bans on pork and shellfish. To be Jewish, she learned from her mother's family, was to embark on a never-ending campaign against germs and bacteria. But it was nice, she realized, to still be numb. It seemed a little surreal. Jonathan would be long buried before she really felt his absence.

He had saved her life. Or had he? More importantly had he intended to save her life? Less than thirty-six hours later, all she could remember was dropping his hand in the damp, sultry morning, unwilling to have any contact. The last touch of his she had to remember was a hard shove. Because of it she was alive and Jonathan was not.

She suspected he had intended to live. If he had sensed it was an either-or situation, he might have handled it differently. His heroism had been reflexive, his desire to survive instinctive. He was avid to live, sure of the accolades and successes so close at hand. Greedy Jonathan, he had assumed he could save Tess and himself, much as he had assumed he could have his girlfriend and Tess.

The rabbi, a young man who had actually known Jonathan, was trying gamely to bring him back to life. But the hot spell had not broken, the funeral home's central air-conditioning was inadequate, and the sweaty mourners