Chapter 2
Chapter Two
"You're offering me a job?"
I knew I said it too loud because Bruce Coleman blinked, laughed, and then I had to physically grip the armrests of my chair to keep from launching out of it like a bottle rocket.
My brain — the part of it that still remembered how a professional was supposed to behave in an interview — was screaming at the rest of me to sit still and act like I'd been here before.
I had not been here before. I was twenty-two years old, three weeks out of Columbia with a journalism degree and a GPA that wouldn't embarrass me at Thanksgiving dinner, and I was sitting in an office on the fortieth floor of the Beacon Broadcasting Company building in Midtown Manhattan, being offered a job by the Vice President of Programming.
A job. At Beacon. An actual, salaried, entry-level reporting position at a major network. Not an internship. Not a we'll keep your reel on file. A job.
Bruce leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach.
He was a wiry man, all nervous energy, and he kept reaching up to adjust a tie that didn't need adjusting.
Behind him, framed photographs lined the wall: Bruce shaking hands with presidents, Bruce on set with anchors whose faces I'd grown up watching, Bruce accepting some award I couldn't read from this distance.
The Beacon logo — that lighthouse beam I'd been watching sweep across my television screen since I was twelve years old — hung above all of it like a crown.
"I'm offering you a job," he confirmed, and something about my excitement seemed to settle his nerves for a second.
"Nelson, we get four, five hundred reels a quarter from kids fresh out of J-school.
Most of them are—" He waved his hand. "Forget most of them.
But yours?" He tapped my résumé against the edge of his desk. "Yours stopped me cold."
I pressed my lips together to keep from grinning so hard my face split open. "Really?"
Oh my God. Did my voice just crack?
"That piece you did on homeless vets." He shook his head slowly, the way people do when they're genuinely impressed and not just being polite.
"That wasn't student work, Nelson. That was reporting.
Real reporting. The kind that makes people sit up on their couches and actually pay attention.
You've got presence, instincts, and frankly, you've got something most people in this business spend ten years trying to learn. "
"What's that?"
"You make people trust you." He said it simply, like it was an obvious fact. "The camera loves you, sure. But more than that — when you're on screen, people believe what you're telling them. You can't teach that. Either you've got it or you don't, and kid, you've got it."
My mother would've told me to play it cool. To thank him graciously and say I'd need a few days to think it over. Consult with my people, as if I had people. But I was twenty-two, and I didn't have a single poker face to my name.
"Mr. Coleman, I would love that," I said, and the words came out stacked on top of each other, breathless and graceless and completely honest. "I mean — yes. Absolutely yes. I'll take it."
He laughed — a quick, surprised bark of a thing — and tugged his tie again. "I like the enthusiasm. Don't ever lose it." He stood and extended his hand across the desk. "We'll start you in four weeks."
I shook his hand with both of mine, which was probably too much, but I didn't care. "Thank you. Seriously, Mr. Coleman. You won't regret this."
"Call me Bruce." He walked me to the door and opened it. "And I know I won't. Welcome to Beacon, Nelson."
I floated out of that building. There is no other word for it. My shoes barely touched the marble lobby floor. The security guard who'd checked my ID on the way in gave me a nod, and I beamed at him like he'd just told me I'd won the lottery, which, in a way, I had.
The July heat hit me like a wall when I pushed through the revolving doors onto Sixth Avenue — thick and shimmering off the pavement, smelling of hot asphalt and roasting nuts from the cart on the corner — and I didn't care.
I stood on the sidewalk in the middle of Manhattan, with sweat already beading on my upper lip and the sun hammering down on my good interview blazer, and I thought:
This is where my life begins.
I wanted to grab the nearest stranger by the shoulders and say, Do you understand what just happened to me? But this was New York, and the nearest stranger was already gone, swallowed into the river of people moving up the avenue, none of them slowing for a kid having the best day of his life.
But the person I wanted to tell most was waiting for me uptown.
* * *
The 1 train rocked and shuddered as it climbed up the West Side, and I pressed my shoulder against the cool metal of the door and watched my own stupid grin reflected back at me in the dark glass.
Jimmy.
I could already picture his face when I told him. Those green eyes going wide, the way his mouth would fall open for just a second before that slow, devastating grin took over. He'd grab me and press his forehead against mine and say something like, I knew you'd get it. I knew it.
Except.
Two nights ago, we'd had a fight. Not a bickering-over-the-dishes fight or a you-forgot-to-call-me fight. A real one. The kind where voices climb octaves and someone ends up sleeping on the loveseat that was four inches too short for either of us.
Jimmy didn't want me to interview with Beacon. He'd made that clear, standing in our tiny kitchen with his arms folded across his chest, his jaw set in that way that meant he'd already made up his mind and was just waiting for me to catch up.
"PBS, Nelson. That's where real journalists work.
" He'd said it like he was handing down a verdict from on high.
"Beacon is a machine. They don't make journalists, they make talking heads.
They'll chew you up and spit out some polished version of you reading a teleprompter, and you won't even notice it happening. "
"It's not like that," I'd told him. "They do real reporting, Jimmy. Hard-hitting stuff. And this isn't an internship — it's an actual entry-level position."
He'd looked at me the way he did when I disappointed him, which was worse than anger. I could handle angry Jimmy. Angry Jimmy was loud and sharp and burned out fast. Disappointed Jimmy was quiet, and quiet Jimmy burrowed under my skin and stayed there for days.
But now, watching the tunnel lights strobe past the window, I was sure the news would fix things.
How could it not? I'd gotten the job. Not a maybe, not a callback.
Bruce Coleman, the Vice President of Programming at Beacon Broadcasting, had looked me in the eye and said I made people trust me. That had to count for something.
He'd come around. Jimmy always did. That was the thing about us — we fought like two people who cared too much, and we always found our way back to each other.
We'd been together since sophomore year.
Two years of late nights in the campus newsroom, of stolen kisses in the editing bay when we were supposed to be cutting packages, of whispering plans to each other about the famous journalists we'd become.
We'd moved in together junior year, into that fourth-floor walk-up off Morningside with the radiator that clanked like a ghost was trapped inside it.
Two years of sharing a bed, a bathroom, a life.
He knew how I took my coffee. I knew the exact pitch of his laugh when something genuinely surprised him.
And the best part? We didn't have to go anywhere.
Beacon was here. Every major outlet in the country had its home in this city — PBS included, which Jimmy would appreciate.
He could find work in a heartbeat. We'd finally start building the life we'd been talking about since we were twenty, stupid, and so in love it hurt to breathe.
The train surfaced into the last of the daylight as it pulled into my stop, and I closed my eyes and smiled.
Everything was going to be fine.
* * *
I came up out of the station just as the last of the daylight was bleeding out of the sky over the Hudson, and I half-ran the two blocks home, my bag bouncing against my hip.
The front door of the building was propped open with a brick, the way it always was when old Mrs. Lewis on the first floor had her windows open and wanted the cross-breeze. I took the stairs two at a time.
When I reached our door on the fourth floor I fumbled with my keys. Dropped them. They clattered against the hallway tile, and I laughed at myself as I scooped them up, because my hands were shaking.
I got the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open.
The joy drained out of me so fast it left me dizzy.
The apartment was half empty. Surgically, deliberately empty.
The bookshelf against the far wall, the one we'd hauled up four flights of stairs together, cursing and laughing the whole way — stripped bare on Jimmy's side.
His records, gone. The vintage turntable he'd found at that flea market in Hell's Kitchen, gone.
The kitchen, visible through the open pass-through, was missing his cast iron skillet, his French coffee press, the mismatched mugs he collected from every city he'd ever visited.
The coat hooks by the door held only my jacket.
The space where his boots usually sat was now just empty floor.
"Jimmy?"
My voice hit the bare walls and came back to me sounding thin and foreign, like it belonged to someone else. The apartment had never echoed before. There had always been too much life in it for echoes.
"Jimmy!" Louder this time.
Nothing.
I set my bag down slowly, carefully, the way you set things down when you're trying to convince yourself that everything is normal and you are not about to fall apart.
That's when I saw it. A single sheet of paper on the coffee table, folded once, with my name written across the front in Jimmy's slanted handwriting.
My hands weren't shaking in the good way anymore.
I picked up the note and unfolded it.
Nelson,
For an hour I've been trying to figure out how to write this. I've started over four times, and every version sounds wrong, so I'm just going to say it the ugly way and hope you understand.
I'm leaving. I packed while you were downtown interviewing for a job I begged you not to consider, and the fact that you went anyway — that you smiled at me this morning, kissed me goodbye, and went anyway — tells me everything I've been too afraid to admit for months.
I don't recognize you anymore, Nelson. And I've tried.
God, I have tried. I have lain awake in our bed listening to you breathe and tried to find the guy I fell in love with sophomore year — the one who cried over that story about the abandoned man found dead in his house after three months.
You were the one who said journalism was supposed to be a service, not a spotlight.
That guy would never have looked at Beacon Broadcasting and seen a dream. He would have seen a machine.
But this version of you? He sees a stage.
And I can't stand next to you on it and pretend that's okay, because it's not.
It's not okay. You don't want to report the news, Nelson.
You want to BE the news. And that terrifies me, because I still love you so much it makes my chest ache, and loving you isn't enough to make me stay and watch you become someone we both used to laugh at.
I only took the things that are mine. I left the things that are ours. I don't want them. Every time I'd look at that stupid desk we sanded down on the sidewalk, I'd think of you with sawdust in your hair, laughing so hard you couldn't breathe, and I'd fall apart. So keep all of it.
Please don't call me. I mean it. If you call, I'll answer, and if I answer, I'll come back, and if I come back, I'll lose myself trying to hold on to someone who's already gone.
I hope you get everything you want. I just can't be here when you do.
Jimmy
I read it twice, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something that made sense, something that didn't reach into my chest and tear out my heart. I sank onto the couch — my couch now, just mine — and pressed the note against my chest.
Somewhere outside, a car horn blared. A dog barked. Four stories down, the city kept moving, completely indifferent to the fact that mine had just split down the middle.
This morning, I'd left this apartment as one man. I'd walked out of Beacon Broadcasting as another one entirely. And now I was sitting in the wreckage of a life I'd thought was unbreakable, holding a goodbye note from the only person I'd ever loved.
"How am I going to move on without you, Jimmy?"