“I don’t think anything is wrong with it, Jason. I can’t tell them to hire you. I only got here myself and there isn’t an opening right now. Not now.”
“Maybe I should fly out there and look for a job.”
“Give it some time,” she suggested. “Give it a few months.”
“You’d be crazy, man,” Frank Kowalski told him.
“Don’t go following some bitch anywhere,” Jack Benton said.
“Whatever,” said Steve Kramer.
Ashley used to say, “We make magic together.” Back then he thought she was right, Now, he wondered. Who had done most of the work? He had. He worked hard on her stories and series, fighting to edit them. He showed her how she could tighten her writing to let his video tell the story. He worked with her in the audio booth. And who gets the big job? Not him. Had he been used? Could be.
He told Debbie about her. If he didn’t, somebody else in the station would.
“Right now I am damn glad I didn’t get a job in D.C.,” he told her.
Yeah, he liked this one, this big girl, right there to be grabbed. Right there for him.
He hinted to George that he liked working with her. Couldn’t hurt. That didn’t mean George would schedule them together. It might mean when there was a problem with another crew, some other photographer or reporter yelling that they wanted to work with anyone but the bastard assigned, George would remember that Jason and Debbie never gave him trouble. He might send them out together more often.
Everyone in the newsroom knew they were sleeping together, or thought they knew. Jason told Charles Adkins he was seeing Debbie. Adkins passed it on, not thinking much more abut it. Ellen told no one but when the story got back to her she said, “Yeah, I know.”
Nobody cared. What Debbie and Jason were doing didn’t affect their jobs or their stories. Still, they filed it away. You never knew when something like this might come in handy. Now it was worth only a few words, a nod, but later it could be important, grown to something that could affect someone. They might need it someday. Everything was worth knowing.
*
“So what do you think about this Debbie and Jason thing?” Clifford asked Ellen as they sat in the noonday traffic.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s not my favorite.”
“He’s a good photographer.”
“Sure, if you don’t want to actually hear your story.”
Clifford chuckled. Things had been going well for him, real well. He was doing less and less of the grunt shooting and more medical shooting with Richard Ferguson.
“Specializing is where it’s at,” he told Ellen. “Ferguson says I’m a natural.”
Even when they warned him to look away at the first incision during the kidney transplant, that thin red slice when first timers hit the floor, he held steady. He pointed that camera right down at the place where the knife was going and he held steady.
“Good work,” Ferguson told him later. “You’re a natural. I threw up at my first operation.”
“Ferguson is going to tell George to keep putting me on the medical stories,” he told Ellen.
She could hear the pride in his voice.
“You’re right,” she said. “If you get to be a pro in one area, you can write your own ticket in the big markets.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. But, I don’t know if there’s a big call for medical stories.”
“Medical stories? Are you crazy? Everybody is doing it. You’ll be able to go anywhere you want. You’ll have the expertise plus the balance. You can do sports, spot news, anything, plus the medical.”
“Yeah,” he agreed happily. “You are right. Hey, look at that.”
He pointed to her window. A man stood on the sidewalk babbling to himself. He wore a long, tattered, gray coat. His eyes and arms moved wildly as his lips kept up their constant, one-sided conversation.
“Now, that is something nasty,” Clifford moaned and shook his head.
The man’s trousers stopped well short of his ankles. On his feet he wore high-topped black sneakers without laces, the tongues hanging out, flapping as he shuffled and gossiped with the air.
“That’s what happens to old assignment editors,” Ellen said.
“Hell no, baby,” Clifford said. “That’s what happens to old photographers.”
They both gave snorts of laugher mixed with pity for the man and for themselves.
22
The diaphragm turned into a fiasco.
“You’ll like this lady,” Paige Allen told her. “She’s not a doctor but some sort of nurse or midwife. She fits you and shows you how to use it.”
She hadn’t used anything the first few times with Jason but she had been at the beginning of her cycle so she considered herself safe. She wouldn’t use birth control pills. She used them with Michael and they made her gain weight. She also believed, half-believed, they might have had something to do with her breakdown.
The woman who measured Debbie chatted as she worked.
“You see, most doctors, most male doctors anyway, don’t take the time to measure correctly. That’s why there are so many pregnancies with diaphragms, but if they are fitted correctly …” Her voice trailed off as her fingers poked and probed Debbie’s vagina.
“I haven’t had one unplanned pregnancy and I have been fitting diaphragms for three years.
“Here, you want to look?” she asked, her fingers still inside Debbie.
“No, not really,” Debbie said. She was sweating with embarrassment.
“You should, you know,” the woman said. “And remember to examine the diaphragm for thin spots or breaks before you use it.”
Arranged by size, a line of diaphragms was displayed on the counter. Debbie giggled at the largest one.
“No, it has nothing to do with that,” the woman said with annoyance. She picked up the diaphragm from the middle of the line.
“Now, this is the way you put it in. You pinch it together and insert. Many women do it while sitting on the toilet or with one leg up on the toilet seat. See this?”
She led Debbie to the large clear plastic model of the vagina and uterus. She
