I still read newspapers. Let me know when they make a website you can kick back with and dangle over your breakfast, realign with a bullwhip crack, sop up runny yolk with. Till then, I'm sticking with print till death do us part.
This is how we'd split the sections: Front section: you, sports: me; arts: you, business: me. On Tuesdays, I got science; on Wednesday, conceded the food pages; on Thursday you had dibs on home and furnishings. On Sundays, always the magazine for you, the glossless book review for me.
"Hey," one of us would call out, "'Make Maki.' Hey, Neo-Expressionism at the Gug. An architect whose stairwells are tear ducts. The two-point conversion." The other would glance up, lips and brow in exquisite choreography of interest, eyes meeting over the tops of pages like lovers in a secret rooftop rendezvous. "Hey, hidden Italy, Turkey's identity crisis, Mobster Nostalgia."
In the early years we tussled over sections. You'd lived with Artie for the decade I'd bachelored around, and so we were territorial in divergent ways. You were so used to working around Artie's needs that you marveled at me, a butte of imperturbability so long as you didn't dock my toothbrush upside down in cup-scum or toss my protein powder the morning it expired. But our preferences, over time, congealed. A morning scene: you grind coffee while I skip barefoot through frost for the paper, shaking it from its yellow sheath and passing it to you, who divvy it up into two piles. As you breastfed Alex I took over pile-making and brought you-tender and red-eyed and collapsed in the rocker-your sections.
How readily that paper split. Like a flaring sawdust log, poker-jabbed, embers wanting release. Neutrinos flying off in fission. Boys and girls midcourt at an eighth-grade dance.
Before he could read, newspapers were boat and hat and the stuff of silly putty impression for Alex. Papier-mâche slathered onto a balloon Chihuahua at his fifth in anticipation of Reginald, who would soon pant into our lives. One by one Alex inherited our sections: I taught him how to read a baseball box score, you got him into the movie reviews; eventually he had these Current Events assignments where he had to clip out articles and write up a summary, and he'd ask us about words-"embargo," "insurgent."
Meanwhile, you'd begun getting your news online, and I stopped wanting to know. The papers piled up; there was a conversation about canceling but we agreed that it was more important than ever, in these times, to keep up. That it wasn't news that had you glued to the screen occurred to me more than once, but I was getting up earlier and in later and by now had adjusted to cups of burnt black crud a minute before the train doors slammed shut.
When you left, I went tabloid. I wanted to know what celebrity was skulking around incognito. I wanted to see the beautiful marred and stripped of blush and sheen, the mighty trodden under heels.
And Alex? He was adjusting handily to the new arrangements. Artie was already familiar to him from pictures and stories and some bottle of cologne left behind years ago, and our son grooved on the midweek change of scenery and the whole every-other-weekend thing. That's what we both thought. Then, in the guidance counselor's chair, he slid back the sleeve, and at first I had to force myself to look, then to look away. They looked like stitches, like some primitive math, the lines he'd chiseled up and down and across. A crossword without any clues. No, clueless: us. I had not known. Had not known boys did such things. I held myself responsible, of course. More sports stories, fewer Nine Inch Nails profiles, maybe.
Now when I bother reading the paper, only those with one section will do. Papers that don't ask for too much page-turning dexterity, that don't ask you to think too much, that you don't mind abandoning because there's nothing in them you'd go back to, ever.