“That is private.”
“And it’s good,” he replied.
As one who never minced words or freely handed out compliments, if Raul Smothers said it was good, that meant something.
Having escalated the ranks to top reporter at the New York Times, and not because of a rich daddy or university connection, Raul knew a ripe scoop when he smelled one. And he possessed a unique gift for delivering it. He could massage every pertinent detail from a story and navigate the most sensitive ethical landmines with ease. In a word—or two—Raul Smothers was a media marvel.
Within one year he was promoted from telegraph messenger to mailroom clerk, and by his second year he had stolen the sought-after position of journalist, skipping the line of ivy-league college-educated applicants who looked better on paper and had paid their dues. But talent like Raul’s couldn’t be taught or bought. The first time he tossed a hastily-typed draft of a news report on the staff editor’s desk, with the simple statement, “You should print this instead,” his boss laughed Raul right out of the office. Then he read it and called Raul right back in. He knew he had found a gem in the rough.
Unfortunately, Raul was also quite aware that he was a gem in the rough. This made him arrogant, and arrogance made him intolerable.
Like most arrogant people gifted with charm, his overinflated ego smothered everyone else’s opinion of him, both spoken and unspoken. Which made Raul’s last name—Smothers—a perfect fit. Combine the qualities of egotistical and extroverted, throw in charisma, and you had a journalist with the confidence to pursue the biggest features, the unreservedness to chase the most evasive connections, and the magnetism to win everyone over… until they hated you again for that darn arrogance.
This circled back to what also made him intolerable: he always had to win.
Win the National Journalism Award. Win the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. But for some reason Raul couldn’t quite understand, he could never win the girl. The only girl that mattered, at least. Or any girl, if truth be told.
As a self-aware non-winner might secretly admit if plied with enough inhibition-reducing agent like valerian root, there was a love-hate relationship with any successful, intelligent charmer like Raul Smothers. You couldn’t resist grabbing for the attention he doled out sparingly, but you’d walk away hating yourself for wanting it.
After one conversation you’d learn never to ask, “What story are you working on now?” unless you were prepared to hear about everything from the hot topic of the “Great Society” to the cold war in the Soviet Union; from the awful details of Charles Manson to the amusing toy soldier uniforms President Nixon appointed to the White House guards (which two decades later would be worn by a high school marching band).
At some point he would inevitably throw in a mention of the journalism award he earned for his ironic article on medical malpractice after reporting on a man who was pronounced dead, only for said dead man to wake up in his half-submerged coffin in front of grief-stricken relatives, pull the cotton swabs from his nose, and instantly die from a heart attack upon realizing he had been buried alive.
Despite establishing his professional credibility, Raul had never quite established his personal credibility. He wasn’t ugly enough to scare women away, but not handsome enough to guarantee a date. This meant he had to work for that “yes,” but after all that hard work wooing, and all that money spent impressing, he hoped to at least end the night with a kiss. Which rarely, if ever, culminated. To his dismay, women never seemed to find the gory details about Helter Skelter a turn-on.
There is a common misconception that arrogant men tend to be good-looking. Raul was one of many to prove this untrue. He was neither attractive nor unattractive. He simply… was. What he lacked in a hideous, villainous facial scar he made up for in brown-eyed, brown-haired forgettability. People didn’t give him a second look, which made it easy for him to slip into the darkest corners of the city to observe the crime that he would later report on.
Unfortunately for him, what wasn’t forgettable was his personality. His friends could only handle small doses of him at a time, and no woman on earth wanted to date a man who looked for a newsworthy story under every nook and cranny. During one memorable lunch date—for he was too “economic” to splurge on dinner for a woman he barely knew—it started off bad when he took her to a hole-in-the-wall diner, and it ended even worse when the conversation took an unusually dark turn.
“There’s a new disco club that opened. I hear it’s out of sight. Wanna go tonight?” the girl whose name Raul couldn’t remember had asked. Not only was he terrible with numbers, he was bad at remembering names too. Unless they were newsworthy.
“Actually, I would love to. I heard Carlo Gambino was laundering money through clubs now. I could talk to some of the employees and gather intel while you get your groove on,” he had replied.
“If you don’t like to dance, we can do something else. How about we go see The Love Bug film that just came out?” she offered, thinking light comedy could do this date some good.
“You want to support an hour-and-a-half-long Volkswagen commercial after knowing Germany’s history of genocide, which led to World War II?” he countered, oblivious to her scorching glare.
By this point the nameless girl had tired of trying to meet him halfway, because Raul was not a meet-you-halfway kind of guy, and his forced smile could only take him so far. Needless to say, there was no discotheque or Love Bug or second date over a higher price-tag dinner.
One time Raul made the mistake of recounting the sour experience to his mother.
“What is wrong with you? I don’t even know where to begin! A disappointment, that’s what you are,” Lilith Smothers would yell through the phone line at him one Sunday night a month, at 10:00 p.m., during the cheapest time to call. “It’s probably your posture,” she surmised. “You hunch over.” Which he didn’t. “Or maybe it’s your hair. You’re getting a little thin on top.” Which he wasn’t.
He learned during those once-a-month phone calls home never to bring up women, or work, or anything, for that matter. No number of dates he went on or prestigious awards he won would ever be good enough. His mother had been the only person blunt enough to confirm his worst fear over and over and over, in every phone call and letter and Western Union telegram: He was a failure and a disappointment, and probably the reason his father left them.
After the one and only time Sam endured Raul’s mother in person, she knew exactly what his feigned arrogance stemmed from—feigned because Sam knew it was all an act, but she would never call him out on it. Everyone had their own breed of coping mechanisms, so who was Sam to judge? Thus Sam became the girl who endured Raul Smothers and all his idiosyncrasies, partly out of kindness but mostly out of pity. Despite all this, Raul was a good man who knew good writing. And he had just concluded that Sam’s advice column draft was good.
“You really think so?” Sam asked, the cold anger gone and replaced with warm hope.
“Sure.” Raul’s practical approach to compliments left much to be desired.
“You’re not just saying that?”
Not that Raul was saying much more than that it was passable. But Sam needed to know she hadn’t fought for a chance at this advice column for nothing.
“I wouldn’t lie to you. You’ve got talent, kid. I always knew you did, and this proves it.”
Then Sam remembered she was in the Women’s House Magazine bullpen with her ex-not-quite-friend-not-quite-lover, and she still had yet to find out why he was here.
“So we’ve established that you’re not here to apologize about missing the sit-in. Why are you here then—in Pittsburgh, in particular my workplace?”
“Oh yeah. That. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Chapter 8
