The Last Manly Man

1914

PROLOGUE

For weeks after my reported death, I made light of it with friends, asking them, Where were you when you heard I died?

My mother didn’t hear about it, thank God, but the news traveled like wildfire over the Internet to my far-flung friends. My ex-husband Burke was hanging around the state department, looking for a story, when he heard the news from a producer who worked at ANN, the All News Network.

Immediately, Burke E-mailed my old friend Claire Thibodeaux, a White House correspondent, who was on the phone with a spokesman for the Saudi embassy when she read Burke’s E-mail: Just heard. Robin killed in explosion.

Holy shit, Claire said out loud.

Pardon me? said the Saudi spokesman.

I’ll have to call you back, Claire said, and she got to work forwarding Burke’s E-mail to various friends, former colleagues, and ex-lovers of mine around the world.

My former colleague Susan Brave-Druper was in L.A., nursing her infant daughter, when she heard.

Tamayo Scheinman, an anarchic Japanese comedienne, was asleep in Tokyo after attending a relative’s wedding when Susan called her.

My ex-boyfriend Eric joked that when he heard, he was in a hotel room in Budapest whacking off—and thinking of me. He was always saying sweet things like that.

None of them, not even the best journalists among them, thought to check out the story before spreading it. Why? Even though I was stunned by the news, Claire explained to me later, I wasn’t surprised. Do you understand?

Yeah, I understood. Most everyone said the same thing. Because of my history of getting into jams, my premature death was all too easy to believe, kind of like the Clinton intern story.

It would have been fine if the story had merely spread among my friends, but unfortunately, the story made our air, and things went horribly wrong. If you were watching the 3:00 P.M. (EDST) news on ANN that particular July day, you, too, heard anchorman Sawyer Lash announce that ANN executive and reporter Robin Jean Hudson had died in an explosion at an abandoned warehouse in Long Island City, just a few weeks shy of her fortieth birthday.

Correspondent George Jerome looks at Hudson’s all-too-brief life, was the last thing Lash said before the tape rolled on what was supposed to be my prepackaged video obituary.

But instead of seeing and hearing a report on the life of a TV newswoman, our viewers got something else, and the shit really hit the fan.

A bit of background: Obits of famous people and ANN television personalities are kept on file to be run quickly to air when required. A few years ago, my friend and producer Louis Levin and I put together a fake obit for me, which shows me Gump-like in a number of different historical scenes. For example, it has me leading an infantry charge at the Battle of the Bulge, jetting off to Scandinavia to pick up my Nobel prizes for literature and peace with Sam Shepard on my arm, floating outside Mir with a big wrench and a hammer, and so forth, all while dressed in a minidress and high heels, my red hair coiffed 1940s-style to enhance my already remarkable resemblance to Rita Hayworth in her scene-stealing, glove-peeling performance in Gilda. This is followed by testimonials from folks like Joe, the retired autoworker who, when asked what Robin Hudson did for him, says, Cured my male itch.

The idea was, when I die, this tape would be on the obit shelf instead of my real obit, and would run on ANN worldwide, and I’d get the last laugh.

But that isn’t what ANN viewers saw.

Louis Levin was one of the few people at ANN who did not hear of my death. Every now and then, Louis would update the tape, which is what he was doing when news came through that I had died.

He was hiding out in a back edit room, adding an improved version of the scene where millions of grief-stricken North Koreans in Pyongyang are prostrate before gigantic pictures of me.

So when the playback assistant went to the shelf to retrieve my obit, it wasn’t there. Louis had it.

Stunned by the news and in a hurry, the playback kid mistakenly grabbed the wrong tape, and though Sawyer Lash announced my death in the intro, what the world saw was the obit of Robert Huddon, a deputy secretary of state and a close personal friend of the president. If you’re up on the news, you may recall that Huddon was involved in delicate Mideast peace negotiations at the time, and that word of his death sent shock waves throughout the world and beyond, all the way to the White House. The oil markets went nuts. Huddon himself had to appear in public on live TV to put the rumors to rest. Even the president had a comment, which we have since added to my fake obit.

Robert Huddon is not dead, the president says with visible relief. A reporter by the name of Robin Hudson is dead.

That’s the only real moment in the whole obit, but it’s my favorite. I just get a kick out of that, the leader of the free world saying my name on national television. I’m kind of starstruck that way. It’s the small-town girl in me, I guess. Sometimes, late at night, when I’m feeling lonely and insignificant, I pop a dub of that sound bite into my VCR and play it over and over.

Before the day was done, ANN would retract the story of Huddon’s death, and of mine, and report that I wasn’t dead, I’d been revived and heavily sedated and was in critical condition, albeit heavily bandaged.

I’m the girl behind the Robert Huddon mistaken death story, which shook the world for a moment. Ten years from now, someone may ask you that in a trivia game. I’m also the girl who broke the Last Manly Man case wide open, but as is too often the case, I didn’t get my due credit for that. No biggie. All I did was save the world, sort of. But I’m not too bitter about not getting full credit, since I haven’t had to take my due blame for a lot of bad things in this lifetime.

My name, as I said, is Robin Jean Hudson. Born after Sputnik and before color TV transmission, I am divorced and I live on Manhattan’s Lower East Side with my cat, Louise Bryant, who is now retired from a lucrative career in cat food ads. Until recently, I was the boss, and a reporter, in the Special Reports Unit at the All News Network, not to be confused with the new Investigative Reports Unit, which does 60 Minutes—style pieces for its weekly newsmagazine show.

Special Reports does three- to five-minute rating grabbers that run repeatedly during regular news programming. Our content tended toward the sensational and absurd, e.g., evangelical Christian preachers who claim to have been abducted by UFOs; and low-grade consumer fraud, e.g., the shady side of the hairpiece industry. But we tried to do these pieces intelligently and with wit and we tried to do a few serious-minded pieces too. That had been harder to do once Investigative Reports, headed by former foreign correspondent Reb Rambo Ryan and his shrewd and sneaky Cardinal Richelieu, Solange Stevenson, came on the scene and stole every good hard news story out from under us, leaving us with the fillers and the features. All this at a time when I was trying this new thing, Taking the High Road.

But back to reports of my death, which, as Mark Twain once said of his own, were exaggerated.

The whole mess began in late spring, when I went barhopping with Jack Jackson, the CEO and fearless leader of Jackson Broadcasting and its subsidiary networks.

Every once in a blue moon, Jack comes down from his penthouse to Keggers, the bar in the basement of the Jackson Broadcasting Building, to mix with his employees. After hanging out for a while, he picks one employee to go barhopping with, and that fateful spring night it was me. We got really drunk, hit some of his favorite joints, then some of mine, all the while talking about two things: men and women.

We both had a lot to say and ask on the subject. Jack was one of the sponsors of a big women’s festival being held in the city that summer and was to give an important speech at the end of it. He was trying to figger out wimmen, he said, and though he didn’t say it, he meant one woman specifically—actress Shonny Cobbs, who had recently dumped him after a two-year relationship. The man was a canny visionary who slew dragons daily in the business world, but he couldn’t figure out how to keep his woman happy.

As for me, some primal urge was pushing me to figure out men and work it out so I wouldn’t end up spending my dotage alone, except for the male nurse I’d pay to change my diapers and listen to my life story. Did I mention I was about to turn forty? I figured if I couldn’t make this man thing work for me now, when I was still young and energetic, it was only going to get harder down the road as my various internal organs started to shut down.

But I had another agenda: impress Jack and save my Special Reports Unit from the budget ax, as its fate at that time was iffy.

For hours and hours that spring night, Jack and I asked questions about each other’s gender, exchanged loopy theories, admitted sexist notions, and drank a lot.

Sometime around 6:00 A.M., at a gritty, unlicensed waterfront bar on West Street that caters to men coming off the night shift, I suggested a series on the Man of the Future, looking at how far men had come and where they might evolve to in the future. In this context, I was sure, I could pinpoint exactly what it was that made a man a man, beyond anatomy, through all times and all fashions. I would pinpoint that mysterious quality good men have that makes them so attractive, despite how annoying they sometimes are. Whenever I try to give this mysterious thing a name—call it courage, strength, whatever—I think of a bunch of women with the same quality. This thing is something I find only in men, and not in all men.

It was a crazy fool idea, fueled by vodka and the attention of a famous man. Crazier still, Jack believed in me. The next day, he gave me his personal go-ahead for the series and a more important-sounding title: senior executive producer.

That booze-filled night with Jack started the ball rolling that led to my prematurely announced death and all the trouble in the worlds of fossil fuels and international diplomacy, among other things.

Between the booze-filled night and all the trouble came a man in a hat, a pack of Doublemint gum, and a bunch of crazy people.

CHAPTER ONE

It was a hot July evening in New York, the steamy post–rush hour, and in addition to the harried office workers streaming away from their offices toward subways, midtown was crawling with feminists and bees.

The feminists were arriving to set up for a corporate-sponsored conference on women’s rights, ten days of symposiums, films, art shows, and rock bands, culminating with a big bash the last day.

Why the bees came here was still a mystery. The local media made a big deal out of the fact that the bees flocking to New York City were country bees seeking flowers, as opposed to our native New York City bees, who are lazy and tend to congregate around doughnut shop Dumpsters.

Why would so many tens of thousands of bees suddenly, spontaneously, decide to make a—forgive me—beeline for Manhattan? Not that New York doesn’t have a great deal of greenery for enterprising bees to feast upon, tucked away in a million window boxes and rooftop gardens as well as in a couple of parks. But it takes a lot more work to find pollen sources here than it would in a rural field of clover, and the hazards of city life—pollution, taxicab windshields, and marauding youth gangs—meant there was also a great deal more risk involved for these greenhorn bees.

But as one newspaper pointed out, bees follow their queen, and evidently some queens had a taste more for the risky city than for the bucolic country life.

A couple of confused bees evidently had a taste more for me, or maybe just for the floral notes in my scent, L’Heure Bleue, which I had sprayed on a little too heavily as I was leaving my office. In addition to dodging large groups of women pulling wheeled suitcases and walking abreast, I was dodging two bees as I crossed Third Avenue, heading toward Wingate’s restaurant. Once people saw the bees, they gave me a wide berth. Couldn’t help thinking how handy these bees would come in during management meetings, salary negotiations, and Saturday night movie lines.

Because of the bees, and because, as usual, I was completely self-involved, I didn’t notice right away that there was a man in a hat following me until I heard him say, haltingly, Ex … cuse …

I turned and gave him a quick glance, decided from his rolling eyes that he wasn’t talking to me and tuned him out, though I put my hand in my jacket pocket and grabbed onto my pepper spray because I’ve been stalked before and learned the hard way that—duh—it’s better to be safe than sorry. I was in a hurry. I had places to go, people to meet, a butt to kiss.

Kissing butt with grace is one of those adult skills, like telling believable lies, that are almost essential to success. There’s an art to it. As the old line goes, when you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made, but it’s not an area of expertise for me. In fact, I was pretty lousy at it and normally I’d rather hammer a railroad spike up my nose than kiss ass. But in one of those compromises grown-ups are required to make every now and then, I was on my way to meet with a flack for the anthropologist Wallace Mandervan and lay a big wet one on his rosy behind. This was especially humiliating—I wasn’t going to kiss Mandervan’s ass, but the ass of a snotty proxy who would then report back to the man himself.

At the end of another hard day, all I wanted to do was go home, take off my clothes, and kiss the ass of a mad Irishman I’d been neglecting lately. It was Wednesday, and Mike, the mad Irishman, was leaving the next day. I’d been all set to leave my office at the stroke of five, and then Benny Winter, Power Publicist, called and said he could meet me for dinner tonight, and tonight only, to discuss getting Mandervan for my Man of the Future series.

Just as I was about to go into Wingate’s, I heard, Miss … miss, behind me.

That’s when I really noticed the man, an older guy, maybe in his sixties, wearing a dark brown suit with a matching hat, walking erratically. Before I could get into the restaurant, the man had moved in front of me and stopped, barring my way, while the bees buzzed above me. A strange look crossed his face. He walked a few steps one way, stopped and turned around, walked a few steps the other way, and stopped again. He looked around himself, scared, as if he was trying to recognize his surroundings and couldn’t. It was almost like he was drunk, but he didn’t smell of liquor. Then he looked down at his feet and took a few more tentative steps away from me, still looking down, as if his feet might remember the way home and all he had to do was follow them.

If it wasn’t for the feet thing, I would have thought he was just your garden-variety loony toon and abandoned him right there. Call it coincidence, whatever you like. My witchy neighbor Sally calls it my Alzheimer’s-finder karma. Three times in as many years, I’d happened upon someone who had Alzheimer’s and helped them find their way home. Two of them did the same thing with their feet. (The third kept smelling his hands, one after the other, as if they smelled bad. They did not. He had worked for many years in the Fulton Fish Market.)

The other times this happened, I was free and able to help the lost people, do my bit for my fellow man and feel like a big hero afterward. But I was in a hurry now—Benny Winter was a notorious stickler for punctuality—and I resented this stranger’s intrusion upon my time. How I wished I could just look away, move past the lost man, and put him out of my mind. How well I know that no good deed goes unpunished, that stopping to help a disoriented stranger can cost you your life. It’s a heartless city sometimes, but you have to look out for yourself. Since I’d started this new thing, Taking the High Road, one of the central questions of life—my life, at least—had been: How do you walk out the door and be a good person without getting the shit kicked out of you?

On the other hand, if I didn’t help this poor slob, something terrible might happen. Even if it didn’t, I’d worry later and feel guilty—and construct terrible fantasies about what had happened to him—all because I would not take the time to help in my hurry to kiss up to some jerk in order to further my career.

Do you have a wallet? I said, sighing, as I danced about to avoid the bees, which he was completely oblivious to.

He felt his pockets, but turned up nothing except a half package of Doublemint gum. His eyes rolled back and then rolled forward again. He took off his hat and handed it to me.

This was the second hat-wearing lost man I’d encountered in my life. The last one, Dr. Seymour Gold, a retired thoracic surgeon with Alzheimer’s, had his name and address written into the inside of his hat by his wife.

Before I had a chance to look inside this man’s hat, a thin trickle of blood dripped down the side of his head.

Did you fall? I asked, as I wiped the wound with a tissue from my pocket. The cut was about a half inch long and not very deep.

The man gurgled a bit but said nothing.

Want me to get you to a doctor? I asked.

P-p-p-pa-p-per … he stammered, clumsily patting his pockets.

I handed him my notebook and a pen and he feebly wrote. The handwriting was very shaky but it looked like 7 Mill Street.

It’s an address, I said. Is this where you live? Do you want to go to a hospital …

A limo with smoked windows had pulled up beside us, and I was distracted for a moment, hoping maybe it was Benny Winter, and I wasn’t late at all, and then hoping it wasn’t, because I wasn’t sure what he’d make of this tableau, me doing my bee-dodging Saint Vitus’s dance in front of a man with a head wound. But nobody got out of the car.

Ahhhhh, the lost man said, and then he gurgled again.

I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re trying to say, or what to do. Let me call someone. I dug in my purse for my cell phone.

Dumb, he said.

You’re dumb? Are you a mute? Or practically a mute? You want to write some more? I asked, holding out the reporter’s notebook.

He didn’t take it. Instead, some realization dawned on him and he suddenly turned, walking quickly away, the limo following him down the block.

I was about to follow also when two men got out of the limo. They wrapped the lost guy in an embrace and put him into the car. Before I could call out, Wait! Your hat, they all drove off, to my great relief.

I used the hat to wave the bees away as I opened the door to Wingate’s, ducked in, and closed it. One of the bees managed to follow me inside, causing a few moments of arm-flailing panic among a group of stout, well-suited men who had been exchanging business cards in the foyer. Big, strong men, probably captains of industry, reduced to a Jerry Lewis dance number by a little bee, until the maître d’ and I were able to maneuver the bee to the door and wave it outside with the hat and a menu.

Needless to say, this did not endear me to the maître d’, who gave me a dirty look, as if I had brought the bee in on purpose. Like it was my pet bee and I was walking it.

While the maître d’ escorted me to Benny Winter’s table, I checked the hat to see if the guy’s name was inside it so I could return it to him, but there was just a store name, Harben Hats, Fifth Avenue, New York.

I specifically asked you not to be late, Benny Winter said, not rising from his chair.

Sorry, I said, sitting down. This lost man stopped me and I was trying to help him. I think he had Alzheimer’s …

Did you get his name? Perhaps you can return the hat, Winter said, as though the whole thing bored him. He was completely deadpan all the time, which is weird but effective. He was very pale too. Though I could not get past seeing him as a flunky, he was one of the best publicists money could buy. In addition to working for some of the world’s biggest corporations, he had worked effectively for various nasty countries with nasty agendas who wanted to hang on to American foreign aid or obtain American weapons (often used against Americans later).

I got an address … or something. It’s hard to read, I said.

Let me see. He took it from my hand, glanced at it quickly, and handed it back.

So you can return the hat. So why are you telling me this? I don’t have much time, Ms. Hudson. Let’s order, Benny Winter said impatiently. Do you know what you want?

Quickly, I scanned the menu. Wingate’s is a venerable and very pricey old steak house, a serious Male Power place, which is why I had chosen it. It was possible to have meat for almost every course, a meat soup, steak salad, and beef carpaccio as appetizers, and steak for the main course. If they’d had meat cake for dessert, it would have been the perfect carnivorous menu. I ordered a small filet, while Winter ordered the only nonmeat entrée, broiled red snapper.

After the waiter left, Winter said, Let’s hear it. Make your case.

The bottom line is, I really want Wallace Mandervan for this series. I’m a great admirer of his work and …

What do you know of his work?

I took a deep breath. Wallace Mandervan is the man who pioneered commercial anthropology. Oh sure, almost every corporation has its own anthropologist now, I said. But that’s because, back in the 1960s, Mandervan blazed the trail—he predicted the antiwar movement, the breakup of the Beatles, designer jeans—he predicted disco! He was ahead of the demand for Cabbage Patch Kids … and aromatherapy! And all his predictions have a sound anthropological basis—he’s pop culture meets the Royal Academy of Sciences. An original. His last article on how politics and sociology can force physical evolution was brilliant …

On and on I went in this vein, listing the man’s many achievements, demonstrating my scholarship in all things Mandervan, reciting Mandervan quotes and nakedly gushing. This, I’d been told by others who had dealt with him, was what Benny Winter responded to. Don’t be real, I was told, don’t be funny, don’t be warm, and don’t be late. Kiss up.

While I delivered a first-class kissing, Benny Winter ate his dinner and betrayed no emotions at all.

You’re quite right about Mandervan, Winter finally said, nodding, maybe not with approval, but with a lack of the earlier subsumed malice. Who else are you talking to? Dr. Mandervan has to be careful about the company he keeps.

We’ve got a biochemist who believes by the middle of the next century, men will live to be a hundred and forty. We’ve got Gill Morton, CEO of Morton Industries … you know him, of course. He’s the one who referred me to you. We have Jose Blanca, the fashion designer, an automotive engineer, feminist scholar Alana DeWitt, some preschool kids, and that scientist who grows human hair in a test tube …

People pay Dr. Mandervan millions of dollars for his analysis. Why should he give it to you and your network for free? Winter asked, seeming almost receptive.

My hopes rose and I blazed forward with renewed confidence.

"ANN has prestige and respectability—it means free publicity for whatever Dr. Mandervan is working on now. Rumor has it that he’s working on a book about the New Man, so there’s a strong thematic link with my report on the Man of the Future.