Chapter Two #6
Arrogance normally irked her in a man, but despite the confidence—and cockiness—that radiated from Joe, there was something good-natured in his demeanor that didn’t annoy her as so many other men did.
He clearly knew how good he was at what he did, but she didn’t get the impression that he used it to make others feel small as too many were prone to do.
Joe looked away from her, the moment between them broken.
“Have you met my friend Vivian?” Joe asked Graham, introducing her to the famed journalist. “She’s in the news business as well. In fact, do you two work for the same television station?”
Joe delivered the question with casual aplomb, his words seemingly putting them on equal footing, as though she and Graham were colleagues, as opposed to the enormous gulf between them, and Vivian felt a spark of gratitude for the way he neatly inserted her into their conversation, for his kindness in making the introduction in the first place.
Vivian had realized early on that much of life came down to a measure of luck, to an alignment in the stars, to fate, to whatever or whoever you believed ordered the universe.
She thanked whatever sequence of events had strung together so that Polly would meet Joe, and Vivian would end up in this bar with him on the very night that her hero was here as well.
“No, I haven’t had the pleasure,” Graham returned, his voice booming in the crowded bar, his demeanor so like the one that greeted millions of people when he delivered the nightly evening news. “It’s lovely to meet you, Vivian.”
For a moment, words failed her. She kept a scrapbook filled with her favorite news articles, the ones she read repeatedly, trying to understand what it was about the words that brought the stories to life, trying to decipher what it took to be great.
These were the stories she admired, the profiles of people and issues that were transported to people’s dining room tables and living rooms—the ability to move and inform.
Most of the articles had been written by Graham Carlson.
When he’d moved from the newspaper to television, she’d followed him faithfully, and on the nights in college when she’d dined alone, she’d often curled up in front of his broadcasts of the evening news, dinner in hand.
Even though this was her first time meeting him in person, in a way she felt like she’d known him for a long time.
It was strange to think that he had been a part of her daily life, that he had delivered some of the world’s most tumultuous moments to her in that even-tempered, soothing voice of his that had made her feel slightly less afraid, slightly less alone.
“What do you do at the station?” Graham asked her.
“I just started in the newsroom,” she answered. “The morning news.”
Although, eventually, one day she hoped to reach the evening news, to write the stories that would greet people after a hard day as they settled into their homes, as the weight of the world rested on their shoulders, and they needed some hope or understanding to hold on to.
“And how do you like it?” Graham asked her. Before she could answer his question, he leaned in conspiratorially. “I remember those early years. Horrible. But there’s something about it, isn’t there? A magic to the newsroom?”
She smiled. “Yes. Exactly. There’s this energy in the room when a story breaks. It’s infectious.”
“Addictive,” Graham added, a knowing gleam in his eyes.
The crowd around them shifted, and Vivian realized that while she and Graham had started talking, Joe had been drawn into a circle of politicians, the senator from Armed Services particularly interested in what he was saying.
At some point Joe had set his drink down, and now his hands gestured in the air again, sling-clad arm rising and falling, as though he were making the motions of two planes involved in an intricate dance, and by the words drifting toward her, he was telling a story of one of his flying exploits that had the men riveted.
She hadn’t realized she and Graham had drifted so far away from the rest of the group, but now looking at Joe’s animated discussion, she couldn’t help but wonder if he had intentionally drawn the others away to give her a chance to speak with her idol.
Joe paused his story and glanced over at her.
It wasn’t difficult to see what had attracted Polly in the first place.
A bit harder to understand what had caused Polly to set him aside for Frank, but no matter.
He couldn’t have been further from Vivian’s type, but there was something about Joe Mitchell that drew people to him like the pull of a magnet.
A charisma that filled the space around him.
She had a feeling he was one of the good ones.
“Thank you,” she mouthed to him when Graham wasn’t looking.
He didn’t mouth anything back, but instead he smiled at her, and that feeling came back, like a drop in her stomach.
Their gazes held for a moment, and then Graham said something about getting her another drink, gesturing to her now-empty one, and Vivian turned away, leaving Joe Mitchell behind her.