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A Reflection of Reality

Billie Louise Jones

    “It is contemporary journalism that holds the mirror up to life. It used to be the novel that brought the news about the way we live. Not any more. Current fiction holds the mirror up to the writer. It’s masturbatory. Journalism turns outward to the individual in society, the big themes—everything from the national sweep of Presidential elections to true crime to life on mean streets or in suburbia. Its power is that the image is not imagined truth—it’s really real.”
    “Apart from truth and reality, how can you be sure the facts are accurate? You can create a character and know every thought he thinks, you can know things about him even he doesn’t know; but when you are writing about a real person—more or less real people like politicians and performers—you come to a place you can’t go past. I’m not referring to libel, just to how much you can know about anyone. Can you go through the looking glass?”
    “Not through it. Hold it up. The mirror image is factual.”
    “So much about a mirror image depends on the lighting. A change in lighting even changes your reflected skin
    tone. Tonal quality is part of truth.”
    “To keep this going till we kill it, a mirror is two things - matter and reflected matter. It is glass with a silver backing. It is all the ideas associated with a looking glass.”
    “And journalism, not literature, is now the looking glass?”
    “Yes. If you want to see the world, you find it held up to you in the journalist’s mirror. It’s also a looking glass you can go through. You can read people’s thoughts, even someone you don’t know, through the facts of life and action. The mirror shows the inner life, too.”
    “There are all kinds of mirrors. Plain, functional ones. Ornate, decorative ones. Long oval mirrors in cherrywood frames. Unframed sheet mirrors across bathrooms. Triple dresser mirrors where you linger in communication with yourself. Compact mirrors where you check if you are still there. There is the mirror as Platonic idea, the pure form giving the pure reflection. There is the mirror in the world, the reflection flawed by the flaws of the reflector.”
    “Now you are being...playful.”
    “Why not?”
    Joe Hunter and Belle Brammer sat on the distressed
    leather sofa in his D.C. apartment. A manuscript lay on the glass and ebony coffee table. The first thing on her arrival, she took it out of her olive canvas briefcase. She dropped her suitcase at her feet, and she did not even take off her battered trenchcoat before she started on the manuscript. She looked at him straight, level eyes fixed on his. Her objections to the manuscript were phrased as forcefully as demands.
    He shifted uneasily. He was not used anymore to young women who were not deferential, nor to having his basic premise challenged, could hardly remember when he needed to justify himself.
    Joe was a man who grew into himself as he aged. Cameras took the lines around his eyes for signs that all the things he had seen in his time had weathered him. With graying hair trimmed in a rumpled style, he wore faded jeans and a turtleneck with the confidence of money and fame.
    Belle was intense, the thing about her that registered even before her looks. She had a pale, pointed face; big, thick glasses; minimal makeup; a mass of center-parted dark hair: not as attractive as she could be if she made the most of herself. Planets and stars swung on chains from moonstones in her ears.
    His voice had school of journalism neutrality and hers English major precision, but underneath both there was still Texas.
    The manuscript was his biography of a Senator who was
    much in the news, for good and for bad. A considerable advance had been paid; and a book club deal was already done on the strength of an outline and Joe’s name, even beside the fact that anything about the Senator generally sold well. Joe’s book should sell very well, even though the Senator had not granted an interview.
    “What I had in mind to do was not a straight ‘life’ of the Senator,” he said. “He’s a rich and famous dumbo. So why is he a perennial Presidential possibility? I used the Senator as the exemplar of everything superficial in American life today. Do you think it’s too judgemental?”
    “Judgemental is fine. Just base the judgement on the known facts. You go beyond interpretation in all these parts I marked. That upsets me—you should not get into the tabloid realm. All through it, you are giving thoughts he never said he thought and dialogue no one ever documented. Some conversations here are the opposite of what witnesses have recorded.”
    “Writers—which you know very well—detail the thoughts of their subjects. You can tell a person’s thoughts in a situation from the circumstances and his action. If something did not happen exactly the way I described it, it happened very much in that way. I feel a responsibility to show the Senator’s thought processes as well as his actions, to show his character and inner motivations.”
    “it’s called fiction. That is what literature does. You have a responsibility to label it.”
    “Lighten up.” A knowing smile, detached amusement. He brushed off her concerns and took charge. “D.C. journalists know all there is to know about our great leaders. They always did. It’s only now that we can publish it.”
    The subject came up obliquely the next day during brunch at the Shoreham. She described the Western novel she was writing.
    “Billy the Kid was not really left-handed,” he objected. “The photographic image was reversed in print, and that’s how the left-handed gunslinger legend started.”
    “The Billy the Kid who lived and breathed and performed his natural functions may not have been left-handed,” she shot back. “But the Billy the Kid in my novel is the Billy the Kid of legend—the true Billy the Kid.” She mused several moments. “This is the eerie quality of the mirror—the image is the same, yet opposite.”
    Joe Hunter came up during the rebellious days. A boy
    from the rough side of Dallas, he grew up rough-edged, knowing he wanted out, full of ambition and resentment and intelligence. A graduate of North Texas State, still rough-edged, he was out of the loop for a major television station job; but at a small town station, he got to do much more than read copy. A local atrocity flamed into a major cause in the civil rights movement. He was there, he got the story, and he did not let go of it. The networks picked up his first report; and he came over strong, unsparing, idealistic. His intense investigation led him to high places in the small town and got him fired from the local station just as the networks were making overtures.
    The firing did not hurt him any. He got a book out of the atrocity. He was on his way as a sort of alternate journalist within the system—too rough for an anchorman, the coals hardly banked yet, but compelling when he led the cameras to places they had never been yet. It was not his ideology, for he had none to speak of; it was the questions he asked, where he went, his follow-up—above all, his follow-up on the picture that emerged after the big headlines were over with. He did a frontline tour of Vietnam, as far forward as they would let him go, and then sent the war to the living rooms back home. He got two books out of Vietnam, and he figured in others’ books. A great war photographer took a famous picture that defined him: the image of him flat to the ground and rockets the Vietnamese called “Stalin’s organ” overhead and talking it all into his recorder.
    He did not break Watergate; but he followed his own leads tenaciously, once even being warned about his rough questions by a nervous network before the whole story blew. He got his book. After that, he did special reports on the world’s hot spots, blending television journalism and dramatically organized books. He followed his instinct back to D.C. to cover national politics, knowing something would come of it. Issues of powerful incompetence and manipulated images were hard to get a handle on. Finally, he saw how to use the Senator as the way into his theme.
    The New School, in Greenwich Village, invited him to give a special course on the interplay between reporters and public figures. “You know you have made it,” Schlesinger told him, “when you are asked to give a special course at the New School.”
    Belle Brammer took his course. He was recently divorced, for the second time. Her ratio of looks to brains interested him. In the Lion’s Head after his last lecture, she explained why she had taken his course.
    “I don’t want to be a reporter. It’s just that you all get a look into so many aspects of society. Most of us lead such homogenized lives. I think so often of the Victorian writers, Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac, how they captured all of their society, from top to bottom....”
    She was a Texan in New York City, at that time trying to write a novel that brought all the aspects of the big city together, but piling stacks of Westerns against the wall of her East Village apartment.
    He was a Texan in D.C.—but now a citizen of the world within the Beltline. Texas was only where he came from. He knew that people responded to him about as much out of their perception of “Joe Hunter” as they did from their own knowledge of him. It was a cloudy mirror, a slightly out of focus set: a true image, just a little askew. Since he was blunt, focused, still rough in spots, Joe was satisfied that the image of him was as close to the substance as such could be; nothing to bother about.
    After putting Belle into a taxi to Amtrak, Joe went to Georgetown to collect two of his children for the Sunday visit.
    The next morning, he made sure to catch an early talk
    show. The Senator’s daughter was scheduled to talk about her pet cause, dyslexia. There might be something he could use in polishing the biography of her father. The hostess was high gloss enamel, and the girl seemed just as professional. She was practiced from childhood in how to behave on television, even how to pause, lean forward, confide spontaneously.
    She said, “I’ve got dyslexia.” She lived her cause. She had trouble in school, felt dumb and hopeless, finally was diagnosed. Her father was very supportive. She said, “He’s dyslexic, too—but they didn’t know about it, back then.” Dyslexia was the cause of his well-known failures in school and difficulty with words. He worked around it with extensive tutoring and verbal briefings, first from friends, later from aides. He would rather send for a writer and ask questions than read the book. He memorized everything. She said, “He’s very stubborn, you know.” They worked together to overcome their handicap. She said, “It even makes a whole difference in your IQ. I used to be so ashamed. Now I’m more in control.” She listed the symptoms concerned parents should look for and pitched her cause.
    Joe was stunned. Nowhere in his notes, nowhere in the
    Senator’s extensive publicity, nowhere in the books and articles Joe had found especially useful was the word “dyslexia.” Yet it was all there. The Senator’s long trouble with words, dislike for reading and writing, was well-documented. His scholastic failures and the tutoring and pressure needed to get him through college and a state law school were documented as stupidity by foes and glossed over as a rich boy’s playboy days by friends. Even his supporters felt comfortably superior to the Senator on the intellectual plane. The pattern of behavior was there, though the one word was not; and no one ever got it.
    Joe leafed through his manuscript. The same old story read differently. The plodding and memorizing, the things the Senator did to get by, were things he did; there had been no therapy for an unrecognized condition. He fastened on what worked for him. She had said, he was stubborn. How did it feel to be, or think you were, the dummy in a bright family? And find out something different so much later?
    He went to the Press Club for lunch. Everyone there was talking about the Senator and dyslexia, and that was what he went there to talk about.
    Joe would have to revise.
    The Jefferson Memorial had a muted glow through a scrim of snow. The flecks did not stick; but the sky was grey, the wind was up. Joe turned the collar of his trench coat up and appreciated the simple beauty of the dome and columns in that stern light. Round, symmetrical, ordered, the Memorial was a Neoclassical temple to republican virtue.
    In his early days in D.C., propelled from obscurity to national prominence, so far so fast, Joe used to go there—to remind himself, he said, of what it was all about: to meditate. In the circle of columns, framed by immortal words, under the clear-sighted gaze of the great man, he could feel out what mattered and what did not. Later on, it was his place to walk and think and work out book ideas. It was something he just did. Joe Hunter was known for it.
    Some off-season tourists recognized him. His peripheral vision picked up their reaction, and he acknowledged them, and this he did without a blip on his stream of thought. It was much as he had once described a politician walking down a street, engrossed in talk, the peripheral vision scanning like radar.
    He broke stride a moment as the thought struck him.
    He was part of the establishment now. Of course. It was not just that he had lunch in the best places. It was that his voice was respected. The hurlyburly when he was coming up had carried him to the top. Not only him; his generation. It had to happen. Change could be handled with, or without, grace.
    He needed to talk to Tom for awhile.
    When he left, it was sleeting. He turned back to see how the Memorial looked through diagonal lashings of sleet: the harmonious lines remained an emblem of polished strength no matter how the storm roiled around it. He wished Monet could have painted the Jefferson Memorial instead of those everlasting haystacks.
    He went to his office and placed calls to the Senator’s office and to Belle.



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