Television Room

1. Out of the Past The day it began was an autumn day, a Saturday afternoon in October. I was sitting in a cushioned chair on the brick patio at the edge of my backyard. The air was clear and warm with a hint of chill in it. There was a wind off the lake across the waythunderstorms coming, though they weren't yet visible over the water. I was looking down half an acre of grassy slope to where my two boys, Chad, ten, and Nathan, seven, were organizing some kind of Frisbee game around the swing set with some of their friends from the neighborhood. The boys were letting their three-year-old sister, Terry, tag along with them. I found this very heartwarming. I was forty-five years old. The reedy figure of my youth was growing thicker at the chest and waist, but I was still trim enough. My once-sandy hair was thinner and darker, with a sprinkling of gray. My once-boyish face was not so boyish anymore, though I think it was what they used to call an honest face, smooth, clean, and open, the blue eyes bright. My wife was in the kitchen making us some lemonade. My wife was named Cathy and I can't say how much I loved her, not without sounding like a sentimental idiot, anyway. We had been together twelve years then, and I still sat up sometimes at night and watched her sleeping. Sometimes I woke her because I felt so grateful for her and so passionate I couldn't help but trace her features with my fingertips. If this bugged the hell out of her, she never let on. But then, she was a cheerful and generous creature who would melt into lovemaking at a look or a touch. We had a deal between us, Cathy and I. Our deal was simple. It was agreed to at the start in no uncertain terms. When I first came to this town from New York seventeen years ago, I edited the local paper. I started out as city editor and was promoted to managing editor pretty quickly. The city had an insanely left-wing government at the time, and so, of course, it was spiraling into bankruptcy and chaos. There were high taxes supporting lavish payoffs to the unions, high crime because of lenient judges and tight restrictions on the police, and strangulation by regulation for any businessman stupid enough to hang around. It was a government like a garrulous fat man moralizing over a dinner for which he would never pick up the bill. I helped run them out of town. My paper printed story after story showing why every one of their policies would fail and proving it by showing where they had failed in the past. Plus we exposed the corrupt political machine churning away as usual under all the welfare. Within three years, the voters threw the bums out. The unions were crushed in the next round of contract negotiations. Taxes and useless programs were cut. Bad guys started going to prison. New businesses started popping up, people started making money again, andsurprise, surprise!the government's share of the profits brought it back from the brink despite the lower taxes. In short, the streets grew clean and the city grew rich, and my newspaper and I had a hand in it. For this, I can proudly say, I was roundly despised by some of the best-educated and wealthiest people in town. Something about my uncaring, insensitive editorial policy. Elites hate to be proved wrong by the common man. My boss, however, liked me. The man who owned the paper was a billionaire land developer named Lawrence Tyner. He convinced me to leave the paper and come into his real-estate business. He taught me the ropes and helped me to invest in the city itself and the surrounding countryside. Ultimately, I made my fortune with him. And I met Cathy, who was one of his lawyers. I didn't think much of Cathy at first. I didn't think she was all that pretty, for one thing. "Efficient-looking," I would've called her. She was short and full-figuredKlavan, Andrew is the author of 'Television Room ', published 2008 under ISBN 9780151012237 and ISBN 0151012237.