Read Online The Devil You Know: A Novel by Elisabeth de Mariaffi - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Elisabeth de Mariaffi
Ads: Link
cap and refused to give it back until he kissed her. It was 9:00 a.m. A good time had by all.
I’d been inside the same after-hours club a few times in the past year. Once to report on a shooting and a couple of other times as a patron. There’s an inherent drinking culture that the Free Press has in common with all other news sources on the planet. That’s another loyalty and/or hostage thing and it’s easy to get caught up, especially when you’re all on deadline and it’s been a long week. Or even just a long day. It’s after midnight and you’re jacked on cheap coffee and hours of closely examining the worst that humanity has to offer. The impulse is to break out of the bunker. With your compatriots, of course. By now they’re the only ones who could possibly understand you anyway. Which is fine and good if you’re a 180-pound guy who can hold his liquor, but some of us lady journalists need to take it easy. It’s possible to forget that part. All of this tightens the knot. Less like a job and more like the best, most secret club you could belong to. You think you’re a grown-up but life turns out to be high school with money.
There’s another way into journalism, which is to take a better reporting job at a smaller paper. David and I have talked about this, and that’s why he thinks it’s a good idea to dangle Labrador in frontof my nose. Where I’m “with files from” in Toronto, I could jump to writing editorials and features in an outport town.
Except features on what? I said. Bears versus campers? Moose collisions?
I’ll have you know that moose are a really serious problem, David said. He cited several instances of moose-related drama from his tree-planting experience. And don’t even get me started on bears. A good bear attack? That’s worth at least three street corner drug busts. Take a look at the inside of a bear’s jaws. Have you ever seen a bear chase something down? Those fuckers are fast.
Part of his vehemence had to do with saving me from myself, working this job that pushed trauma up under my nose every day. Saving my heart, he called it. The other part had to do with the fact that David knew me well enough to wonder where the work might take me. Geographically, I mean. So that part was really about saving his own heart, and we didn’t talk about it.
We’ve spent a lot of energy being friends. I’ve baked cupcakes on David’s birthday every year since he turned fifteen. I’m lousy at it but there’s a secret. You put marshmallow fluff in the frosting. The frosting is basically fluff, with chocolate or cherry syrup added in for color and whatnot. That’s the whole key right there: not the kind of ingredient you’d ever expect, but it makes all the difference in the world.
I make the cupcakes because David’s mother melts down every year on his birthday. I don’t know if this is a thing she also did when he was small and his father was still in the picture, or if it has something to do with the fission of his nuclear family. One time we walked in after school and found his mother wearing the same aerobics outfit she’d put on first thing in the morning, maniacally doing jumping jacks and sobbing in front of the television in the basement. She’d spent an entire day doing exercise videos, one after another after another. I was in the tenth grade, David was in eighth, and Graham Patton had been gone for six months. That’s why I relate her craziness to the family breakdown, although it’s possibleI’d just grown old enough to pay attention. Who knows how many other days she’d driven herself into the ground?
David knows the blast is coming. He’s helpless to stop it. This is because it comes in the form of a perfection explosion and any insinuation that her efforts do not, in fact, equal perfection feeds right back into the cycle. How do you ask someone to stop being so damn nice to you? The explosions aren’t limited to birthdays, but it’s the special times
I’d been inside the same after-hours club a few times in the past year. Once to report on a shooting and a couple of other times as a patron. There’s an inherent drinking culture that the Free Press has in common with all other news sources on the planet. That’s another loyalty and/or hostage thing and it’s easy to get caught up, especially when you’re all on deadline and it’s been a long week. Or even just a long day. It’s after midnight and you’re jacked on cheap coffee and hours of closely examining the worst that humanity has to offer. The impulse is to break out of the bunker. With your compatriots, of course. By now they’re the only ones who could possibly understand you anyway. Which is fine and good if you’re a 180-pound guy who can hold his liquor, but some of us lady journalists need to take it easy. It’s possible to forget that part. All of this tightens the knot. Less like a job and more like the best, most secret club you could belong to. You think you’re a grown-up but life turns out to be high school with money.
There’s another way into journalism, which is to take a better reporting job at a smaller paper. David and I have talked about this, and that’s why he thinks it’s a good idea to dangle Labrador in frontof my nose. Where I’m “with files from” in Toronto, I could jump to writing editorials and features in an outport town.
Except features on what? I said. Bears versus campers? Moose collisions?
I’ll have you know that moose are a really serious problem, David said. He cited several instances of moose-related drama from his tree-planting experience. And don’t even get me started on bears. A good bear attack? That’s worth at least three street corner drug busts. Take a look at the inside of a bear’s jaws. Have you ever seen a bear chase something down? Those fuckers are fast.
Part of his vehemence had to do with saving me from myself, working this job that pushed trauma up under my nose every day. Saving my heart, he called it. The other part had to do with the fact that David knew me well enough to wonder where the work might take me. Geographically, I mean. So that part was really about saving his own heart, and we didn’t talk about it.
We’ve spent a lot of energy being friends. I’ve baked cupcakes on David’s birthday every year since he turned fifteen. I’m lousy at it but there’s a secret. You put marshmallow fluff in the frosting. The frosting is basically fluff, with chocolate or cherry syrup added in for color and whatnot. That’s the whole key right there: not the kind of ingredient you’d ever expect, but it makes all the difference in the world.
I make the cupcakes because David’s mother melts down every year on his birthday. I don’t know if this is a thing she also did when he was small and his father was still in the picture, or if it has something to do with the fission of his nuclear family. One time we walked in after school and found his mother wearing the same aerobics outfit she’d put on first thing in the morning, maniacally doing jumping jacks and sobbing in front of the television in the basement. She’d spent an entire day doing exercise videos, one after another after another. I was in the tenth grade, David was in eighth, and Graham Patton had been gone for six months. That’s why I relate her craziness to the family breakdown, although it’s possibleI’d just grown old enough to pay attention. Who knows how many other days she’d driven herself into the ground?
David knows the blast is coming. He’s helpless to stop it. This is because it comes in the form of a perfection explosion and any insinuation that her efforts do not, in fact, equal perfection feeds right back into the cycle. How do you ask someone to stop being so damn nice to you? The explosions aren’t limited to birthdays, but it’s the special times
Similar Books
