A Stillness in Bethlehem(2)

Peter had left a cigarette burning in his only ashtray. He put it out—unsmoked; he had started smoking in India, out of polite necessity, and never really developed a taste for it, only a habit—and headed for the door that led to the stairs to the first floor. Those stairs ended in a landing fronted by two doors, one to the outside and one to the newsroom. Theoretically, this ensured his privacy. If he didn’t want his employees to know what he was doing, he could use the outside door and not have to pass through the newsroom at all. In practice, privacy was an illusion he didn’t waste his time worrying about. Everyone in town knew precisely everything he’d done since he’d first come back from God Only Knew Where.

He reached the landing, opened the door to the newsroom and stuck in his head. He had one or two truly local people working for him, but most of his employees were from Away. They were smart kids with rich parents, who’d been sent proudly through Groton and Harvard—only to decide that what they really wanted to do was to Go Back to the Land. They worked hard, demanded little money, and grew alfalfa sprouts in big white plastic tubs in the ladies’ room. Not a single one of them had the least idea of what it really meant to belong to a place like this.

Peter squinted across the piles of paper that never seemed to change position and found Amanda Ballard, his best, checking type sizes on a font chart. Amanda Ballard was not only his best: She was his prettiest. Thin, blond, even-featured, straight-haired and blue-eyed, Amanda was a vision of cultural perfection, circa 1968. She was a lot of other things circa 1968, too. She seemed to think and speak in staccato bursts of discarded clichés, apparently unconcerned that even the politics of her beloved New Left had passed her by. If it hadn’t been for the odd deformation of her right ear, with no earlobe at all and a stunted little nub at the bottom that looked like a pierced earring in the wrong place, she would have been indistinguishable from a doll. She was thirty-six years old and looked sixteen—and would look sixteen, Peter thought, when she was eighty. In that way, she was very different from Peter himself, who had weathered in body as well as in mind. His skin was creased into folds at the corners of his eyes and along the line of his jaw. Sand and wind and worry had marked him. His mind had tied itself into knots in its attempt to hold on to a belief in the essential goodness of human beings, and been defeated.

Amanda put down the font chart, picked up what seemed to be an Associated Press tear-off and frowned. Frowning, she looked very much the way she did in bed, after intercourse, when she tried to explain to him why his attitude was all wrong. Peter watched while Timmy Hall, their great overgrown copy boy, came up to ask Amanda a question. Seeing Timmy around Amanda always made Peter nervous, as if that great tub of lard might suddenly turn lean and mean and lunge with sharpened teeth. It was a ridiculous image. Timmy was strange, but not that kind of strange. His peculiarities ran to eating Marshmallow Fluff with his scrambled eggs. Amanda was fragile, but not that kind of fragile. Peter could never put a finger on what kind of fragile she was, but he was attracted to it. Besides, Amanda had known Timmy forever, as far as Peter could tell. She’d even gotten Timmy this job. Timmy was mentally retarded and had been brought up in the mental-health complex in Riverton. Amanda had met him there while she was doing something Peter had never been able to pin down, but that he secretly suspected was getting straight from drugs. That was the kind of trouble Amanda would have, heat prostration from an attempt to resurrect the Summer of Love.

Peter shifted on his feet, nodded to the two or three people who had noticed him standing in the doorway, and said, “Amanda?”

Amanda put the Associated Press tear-off down, shook her head at something Timmy was saying and came toward the door. “We can’t play tricks like that on our readers,” she said over her shoulder—to Timmy, Peter supposed. Then she came up to him and sighed. “If we’re going to deliver to the printers by three o’clock, we’re going to have to get a lot more done than we’ve been getting done. How are you?”

“I’m all right. I came to find out how you were. Everything quiet?”

“Absolutely,” Amanda said.

“Not a squawk out of our usual troublemakers? No hunters shooting game wardens? No Sarah Dubay marching up and down Main Street saying the end of the world is at hand?”

“Sarah doesn’t say the end of the world is at hand,” Amanda said, “she says Christ was really an alien.”

“Whatever.”

“You shouldn’t be so worried.” Amanda stretched her arms. “I’ve just been looking at the numbers. We’re going to print them on page five because everybody in town wants to know how well we’re doing, but you know how the tourists feel when they think we’re being mercenary. Anyway, the inns are booked solid for all three weeks, and the tickets are sold out for every performance, and there’s even some special arrangement with a school in New Hampshire where they’re going to bus the kids in every night. It’s going to be fine. The town’s going to make a pile of money.”