Deaths Excellent Vacation

Worlds series. As I understood the exercise, I was expected to take several bulky packets of material from the research department and turn them into a smooth, lulling sort of prose, in much the same way that blocks of cheddar are emulsified into Cheez Whiz. The tough part was writing transitions, which often marked huge shifts of time or geography. Despite such intriguing glimpses from prehistory, students of archeology seem time and again drawn to a later period, to the sweep of centuries from about the thirteenth century B.C. up to the Christian era. This stuff is harder than it looks. According to office legend, one writer had his contract terminated over the phrase: “Meanwhile, far across the Caspian Sea . . .”
    Apparently my sample essay on the marriage of Hatshepsut met with general approval. By the end of the week I had signed on as a junior editor on the Civil War series. If all went according to plan, I would serve an apprentice period on the research staff, then ease into some small-scale writing assignments, like captions and sidebars, and finally ascend to the Valhalla where chapters were written.
    There are some who would tell you that LifeSpan Books was no place for an ambitious young journalist. I would respectfully disagree. At that time LifeSpan was part of a vast empire of magazines, including Styles and NewsBeat . The books division was where they sent the career correspondents who needed a tune-up or a drying-out period. I learned a lot from those guys. I remember one afternoon—the day of the Challenger shuttle disaster—when I tagged along with a group of them to watch the coverage at the corner saloon. They sat around talking about the ledes they had written nineteen years earlier on the day of Apollo 1 . It was a three-martini master class. You don’t get that in J-school.
    At that time there were only two other people in the building who were under age thirty, a pair of photo editors named Brian Frost and Kate Macintyre. They scooped me up on my first day and taught me the rules of the road—the location of the supply closet, the proper operation of the balky Xerox, the kabuki ritual of the time sheets. After work they took me out for beer and nachos, insisting that it was a company tradition. “When you pass your research apprenticeship, you start making real money,” Brian explained. “Then the nachos are on you.”
    “And on that day,” Kate added, “an angel gets his wings.”
    It soon became understood that the three of us would spend our lunch hours together. In good weather, we picked up sandwiches from the cart in the lobby and took them down to a park bench overlooking the Potomac. Kate, a proto-Goth who spent her evenings creating “media collages,” felt that it was her duty to bring me up to speed on five years’ worth of office gossip. Brian, who played keyboard in a punk-jazz fusion band, did his best to inject a note of moderation.
    “You’re giving the new guy the wrong idea about this place,” Brian said, toward the end of my second week. “You’re making it sound like some sort of French bedroom farce. You know, with slamming doors and people running around in their knickers. It’s not like that.”
    “It’s not? Hey, New Guy? Am I giving you the wrong impression?”
    “I find your candor refreshing,” I said.
    “I know, I’m adorable. And did you notice that guy we passed in the elevator? With his glasses on a green cord? That’s Allan Stracker. He’s been having a sidebar with Eve Taunton for three years. She still thinks he’s going to leave his wife.”
    “Allan writes a column for the Alexandria Gazette ,” Brian added, judiciously. “On public zoning concerns.”
    “Having a sidebar?” I asked.
    Brian raised his eyebrows at me. “In office parlance, it refers to the enjoyment of certain intimacies outside the confines of marriage. The derivation is obscure, but it appears to date to an incident in which a certain managing editor’s passionate addresses were interrupted by the sudden arrival of his wife. His explanation, we’re told, was that he was merely researching a sidebar for Healthy Lifestyles . His wife’s response is not recorded.”
    This is how people talked at LifeSpan. If you asked someone where the coffee filters were kept, the answer was likely to touch on the role of the coffee cherry in Ethiopian religious ceremonies.
    “What about you, New Guy?” said Kate, crumpling up an empty bag of potato chips. “Any