The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba - Chanel Cleeton Page 0,22
is a folded piece of paper. My fingers tremble as I unravel it, my heart pounding at the words there, the note with my next set of instructions.
There are several women who are sympathetic to our cause imprisoned in Recogidas. Can you get messages to them?
Six
Grace
I’m going to die.
As I stare down at the New York City street far below me, the rickety ledge that I’m standing on barely wide enough for me to put one foot in front of the other, there’s no question about it.
I can hear my mother’s voice ringing clearly in my head, lamenting the fact that I couldn’t just marry some rich man like her friends’ daughters, and questioning why I had the temerity and utter foolishness to pursue a career in journalism. At the moment, I can’t disagree with her.
“Isn’t she a beauty?” the man shouts at me—at least, that’s what I think he says as the wind rushes around me, death a step away.
I nod quickly, trying not to upend my balance and topple to the ground several stories below.
Oh, there’s a rope, and they tell you it’s perfectly safe, but regardless, standing on the scaffolding of a construction site hardly feels wise.
“It’s a beautiful building, Mr. James,” I lie, because I’ve spent half the time up here with my eyes closed. It isn’t as much that I am afraid of heights as it is that I’m unsettled by them and would prefer to keep my feet planted firmly on solid ground. But Hearst said to get him a story, and considering this particular building has been plagued by setbacks, and problems, and whispers of more bribery than usual, there’s certainly a story to be had here.
It isn’t the sort of story I’d normally be drawn to, but if I had to guess, Hearst envisioned an illustration of a girl in a ridiculous dress standing atop a beam overlooking the city to accompany this piece to grab the public’s attention, so here I am. A stunt girl reporter’s work puts her in all sorts of unusual situations.
“Perhaps we can go down to the ground floor and conduct our interview, Mr. James,” I suggest, struggling to keep the utter panic from my voice. A stunt girl never—fine, rarely—loses her composure.
“What did you say?” Mr. James, the site’s foreman, yells over the noise of the building below.
“Let’s get down,” I shout back.
The journey back to the street is infinitely easier than the trip up. Only when my feet are firmly planted on the dirt do I feel the color returning to my cheeks, the panic that imbued my veins lessening.
I reflexively reach for my notepad, but since I’ve been at the Journal, I’ve learned it’s a rookie mistake to jot notes during an interview. It takes away from your overall impression of the event, so instead I work to commit everything to memory until I am alone and can transcribe both the things he said and also my impressions of his mannerisms. There are two parts to an interview: what they say and what they don’t.
“This building has seen its share of setbacks, Mr. James, but it’s clear from talking to you that you run a tight crew. What do you think keeps holding the construction back?”
He scratches his head for a moment, folds his arms over his chest, and then says—
“Well, I suppose it started with the ghost.”
Oh my.
Hearst is going to like this even better now.
I smile.
“Tell me more, Mr. James.”
* * *
—
I’ve been typing up my construction site interview for hours now, trying to separate the facts from the specter of the supernatural, which readers will glom on to even if it’s far more likely that the crew bribed the wrong people rather than that an angry ghost is haunting their job site. Some days the words come easily, the story pouring out of me, and others it is a struggle to wrangle every single word into a workable sentence.
Despite this morning’s excitement, this afternoon is the latter journalistic experience, and I’d do anything to get away from the newsroom for a moment and clear my head.
I’d envisioned a job at a major New York newspaper as a chance to write about the kind of stories I wanted to highlight, to focus on meaningful women’s issues. And even as I knew how difficult it would be, I can’t lie that I dreamed of reading my byline on a front-page story.
The reality is, as so often is true, far from the fantasy.