Read Online A Little Trouble with the Facts by Nina Siegal - Free Book Online

had a good reason to smoke it yet. I thought I’d save it to celebrate something, and now seems like the right moment.”
    I took the cigar from him and twirled it between my thumb and forefinger, sizing it up. “What are we celebrating?”
    “It seems to me,” he said, looking from one end of my loft to the other, “you’ve got plenty to celebrate.”
    “And what about you?”
    He took the cigar back, cut the tip with a silver cigar razor, and considered. “My good luck in meeting you. I’ve been reading your column,” he said. “You’ve managed to skewer all my favorite people. And boy, did they deserve it.” He laughed at his own joke for a minute, but I didn’t join him. “You don’t just feed the beast,” he added, “you really draw a picture of the city, you give a sense of the whole scene. I bet you’re a native. Am I right?”
    My cynicism was so thick I could’ve cut it like a cake. This was the same exchange we’d had so long ago, only in reverse.
    “Native?”
    “Native New Yorker. Am I right?”
    “What makes you think so?”
    “Ha,” he laughed one note. “Only a native New Yorker would take offense. And, of course, the column. You know everyone in town.”
    “I’m not on the column anymore,” I said. “They’ve got me on features now.”
    “They had to!” he declared, his voice cracking oddly. “With what you know, you could be filling that entire magazine. Am I right? The gossip stuff is good, but you’ve got real insight.”
    I put the cigar to my lips and wondered if I’d really been quite so blind to flattery in the past.
    “Light it,” he said. “Go on. I think you’ll like it. It’s actually sweet.” He moved next to me and pressed a hand to my thigh. It was as familiar as an old song you played over and over for a month until you got sick of it and tossed the whole CD. He flipped open a Zippo and I inched toward its blue flame.
    “You know how to do that? You’ve got to puff it a few times and don’t inhale. Just go slow, sweetheart. There you go.”
    A plume of smoke enveloped me. The taste was tart and strong and it nipped my tongue. Not exactly sweet. I knew I’d be coughing something awful in the morning. I politely passed it back to Jeremiah, and then I moved a little away. He was a charmer; that was a fact. But he no longer looked like a Larrabee. He didn’t hold that sway over me, because now I could hold my own. He no longer had his Astor. And I wasn’t about to let him get close enough to let me down again.
    “It’s been a long evening,” I said, yawning.
    “Of course, of course,” he said, standing fast. “I’ve overstayed my welcome.”
    “Not at all,” I said. “But it is getting late.”
    “Of course,” he said again, pulling on his jacket and nervously patting the pockets. “I’d love to take you out to dinner some evening. Could I? Might I take you somewhere nice?”
    Well, wasn’t that touching? Suddenly he had time for dinner dates. “I don’t really do dinner very often these days,” I said. “I’m so busy.”
    “I guess that’s a no, then?” he said, turning it over like a foreign currency he’d never used. “You don’t hear that very often.”
    “You don’t?” I led him to the door. “It was lovely to meet you,” I added, suppressing, the “again.” I let him kiss my hand.
    After I heard his footsteps make the ground floor, I went back to the settee. I surveyed my new loft. Everything was in its place. I picked up Jeremiah’s Cohiba where he’d left it burning and put it between my teeth. Maybe it did taste a little sweet.
     
    The next morning, The Paper came calling. I was padding around my loft in socks picking up empties when the phone rang. Burton Phipps introduced himself and said he’d been following my work in Gotham’s Gate . He wanted to know if I had any interest in newspaper work “of the slightly more urbane sort.
    He said, “Why don’t you come over and have lunch? There aren’t any