Chapter 20

Back in Her Room

 

Back in her room the next day at the Continental, Angela mulled over Nick’s fears for her as she brushed her teeth at the pedestal sink in the big old-fashioned, oversized bathroom. She felt fairly certain that Curtis couldn’t hurt her all that much, because he moved in a different stratosphere. The ambassador wasn't having her over for cocktails or feeding her news tips with dinner. She must develop her own stories, stories of hardship and frailty from the rice paddies and villages; second-day stories that skipped over the body counts and zeroed in on the human wreckage.

But she was running into a stumbling block that none of the other reporters had figured on, either for her or for themselves: credibility with their stateside editors. She had worked her butt off on two pieces that she knew were damn good, “exceptionally good,” both Nick and John Simenson had pronounced when they'd seen them. But no paper would touch them – war orphans and over-worked, understaffed field hospitals were considered too tough for American readers to take. She finally had scrapped the war orphans altogether and was able to sell the hospital story to an obscure radical journal. Nothing, so far, from John Simenson’s contacts.

As she stepped out of her beige silk slacks and her hand-tailored satin panties and into a steaming bath, she could feel herself getting angry again. It made her furious to think about those stories and the goddamned long hours she'd put into them. And even more furious to think about the hellish life of Betty Lou, the 22-year-old scrub nurse from Kansas who had inspired the MASH piece.

Too strong for American readers, editors said. Not too strong for Betty Lou, or Angela, or the kid with the melting, napalmed face, but too strong for readers.

She slipped out of the bath and wrapped herself in one of the enormous near-blanket-sized towels that were a Continental Hotel trademark.

“That's no place for a lady,” the foreign editor at the AP in New York had said as he'd handed her the Leica and the credential letter. Everyone had said it, in one way or another. Everyone except her mother, who hadn't minced words: “A low-life profession. But if you must, then get good at it. Go where the important story is.”

The steam had dripped off, leaving only a watery glaze as she peered harder in the mirror, running her fingertips lightly over the delicate red-head’s complexion that she soaked daily with every imaginable kind of oil fighting the sun. Her poor skin would never recover.

She laughed to herself. Ah, phooey. What difference does it make? I’m not going to get hung up on missing what people back home think of as ordinary, everyday comforts. I’ve got a new life, a job to learn, mountains to climb.

She padded out of the bathroom, her wet feet leaving their size nine imprints on the faded, once-elegant carpet. She looked around and calmed down. She loved the tropical Sadie Thompson feeling of this huge, old-fashioned French colonial room – her own private cool place, even in the heat of the day. She knew she should be trying to find a cheaper hotel, but a place to call home was very important to her. A quirky trait in someone who had no discernible domestic skills, nor any interest in developing them. That’s why she had been so drawn to Peter, he was her nest maker.

The quiet whirring of the fan on the high ceiling made the filmy white curtains suck gently against the louvered shutters. The filtered sun formed a lacy filigree along the creamy walls. As it always did, the circulating air evaporated the moisture from her body, a luxury she indulged in whenever she wasn't in the field and could get back to her room for a quick dip to float away the sticky paste of dirt and sweat that regenerated itself nearly as fast as she could wash it off. Sometimes it required all her grit to dispel the feeling that lice and creepy little animals were running across her spine, or sloshing back and forth under the arcs of her breasts, or perching on her nipples. The stolen baths marked the only time she felt really fresh and comfortable. The icy air-conditioning in most of the U.S. buildings in the city made her skin feel so clammy that she found the refrigerated air almost as uncomfortable as the oppressive heat.

It’s a strange life, she thought, and found it instructive that the few women whom she’d met over here – nurses and an occasional reporter – seemed to have gotten their hearts broken before they had been here a month. Living at a fast pace and high intensity, forget it. Guys are lonely, they want some companionship, until they board the plane and go back home to wives or girlfriends. She couldn’t risk it. She’d get too involved, be a mess. Someone like Curtis? Catastrophe. She and Peter had left Chicago because Peter got a good job offer. What happened to Angela’s career was of no consequence to anyone but her mother.

She lay down on her high antique bed with its brass and ironwork headboard and stared at the whirring fan. The ceilings were wonderfully high, perhaps 15 feet. With the intricate set-in moldings and detailed plaster circles radiating around the fan, it reminded her of her grandfather's house in Cambridge. Curtis was from Cambridge, Harvard. Her father was a Harvard man; Southern, but Harvard. Everyone was: both her grandfathers, her mother's uncle Arthur. That's who Curtis reminded her of – Uncle Arthur. Same hearty, but distant, stuffed front, chewed-on pipe to hide … what? A sweet sort of vulnerability, some fear that the secret of their humanity might leak out and leave them flat, with no pomposity on which to fly. Why did he draw her so? Probably because he felt like home. Most of the girls she’d been in school with in North Carolina were now married to men like that – solid, good providers. That’s what women are supposed to want, isn’t it?

She knew she wasn’t alone in her problem of getting stories past editors. All the reporters were running into the same situation in one form or another, with the big difference being that those on staff got paid regardless. If a story of hers didn’t run, she got zilch. The hawk/dove split on the war raging back home had editors chary about putting anything in the papers they deemed to be “open to interpretation.” Students were rioting, anti-war protesters were marching in the streets, while veterans’ organizations and pro-war groups were calling the demonstrators Commies and Pinkos. And both sides accused the press of being on the other side. With the line coming out of Washington often 180 degrees from what correspondents were reporting from the field, editors moving copy didn't know whom to believe. In fact, the Army was putting out information at the Follies on such things as who won what battle and what the casualties were that quite frequently was in direct contrast to what the correspondents were seeing on their own.

But the politics of the situation aside, reporters who had NEVER in their careers had a story spiked because their editor doubted its factual basis, were routinely having stories killed or rewritten or watered down because New York or their hometown city desk felt the story went too far, or wasn't verifiable, or didn't jibe with the official line. The divisions over the war had people nuts back home. Up until this war, it had always been a given in the news business that you go with your own reporter, which means if your reporter has it one way and the wires or another reporter have it another, you double check with your own guy, then you stick with what he says. That's why you have your own – you know his work and you trust him. So when an editor suddenly finds himself in this volatile climate where he’s killing his own guy’s copy because he doesn’t want to be too far out on any limbs, Angela wasn’t surprised that they weren’t going to get on any limbs with her, a freelancer, whom they didn’t know, much less trust.

She padded back to the bathroom where olive drab undershirts and skivvies coupled with pale satin panties and silk bras floated in the bidet with a bar of Ivory her father had sent from home. The steam from her bath had cleared, and as she bent to the task of her hand laundry she had a vision of herself washing white bobby socks one entire summer in the “footbaths” she found in cheap hotels the length and breadth of France. It wasn't until she got back to the States and was recounting her backpacking adventures and hardships that she found out that “the handy little French toilets without seats,” as she had described them, were intended for a toiletry other than linens. Here she was again, on the outside looking in, trying to hold her own but losing ground in foreign territory.

She giggled, remembering her comment to Nick about satin underwear. When she first got in-country, she decided that the luxurious feel of satin was the one thing that could make living in those godawful fatigues bearable. But it wasn’t long before she had to admit to herself that survival and comfort were the only luxuries she could afford. Silk and satin stuck to the skin like heated cellophane, and the panties crept up the leg at the damndest times! A bra was impossible, just a holding pool for rivers of sweat. Nothing at all was the worst – no place for the sweat to go except pour down your body and cause the coarse fatigues to take some peculiar folds as they got soaked. Cotton was cool and absorbent, and GI T-shirts protected the neck from sunburn. Besides, if she ever was wounded and they had to cut off her fatigues, she wanted plain OD skivvies to stir as little titillation as possible.

Funny what a double-edged word naked is. She always felt exposed without her clothes on, or without proper underwear, except when she was with a man. Or maybe not any man, maybe just Peter. Why had the husband who ultimately didn’t want her been the only man she’d ever felt safe with? She had happily thought that she would spend the rest of her life with the nest builder, the homebody, the one her mother referred to as “Angela’s ethnic.” When she and Peter were first married, he'd taught her how to garden; they'd planted a baby cherry tree in the yard outside their first rented apartment. She hadn't known that you could just go buy a tree, and dig a hole and put it in the ground and it would grow. She was fluent in Latin, a dead language, but not fluent in things living. After she and Peter moved, they’d gone back to see their first offspring, but someone had cut the little tree down. When they had days off together, their outings were to the supermarket and the hardware store. Peter loved the hardware store with all its gadgets to fix up his home. She’d trail along beside him, just watching, her hand stuck in the patch pocket of his lumber jacket feeling connected to someone for the first time in her life. But love, somehow, seemed too hard to hold on to.

“He mothers you, Valentine,” Jackson had said to Angela at her wedding party. “You're confused between being loved and smothered. You want a person to be your home. But you're the house you live in.”

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