They’d paid for classes, for paints and canvas; they’d attended all my student shows and even sent me to art camp for two summers, where I had a chance to blow glass and try printmaking and animation, but they let me know, explicitly and in more subtle ways, that most artists couldn’t make a living at art, and that they had no intention of supporting me once I was an adult.
Graphic design was a way to indulge my love of color and proportion, my desire to make something beautiful, or at least functional, to see a project through from start to finish, and still have a more or less guaranteed paycheck.
So I’d gone to Franklin & Marshall and studied art and art history, supplementing my courses in drawing and sculpture with summer courses in video and layout and graphic design. The Examiner had come to a recruiting session on campus; I’d dropped off my résumé, then gone to the city for an interview, then gotten hired, at a salary that was higher than anything I had the right to expect. At twenty-two, with an apartment in Old City, I’d been the pretty young thing, with a wardrobe from H&M and the French Connection and a few good pieces from Saks, a gym membership, a freezer full of Lean Cuisine, and a panini press that I used to make eggs in the morning and sandwiches at night.
After almost six years on the job, I’d met Dave. He had graduated summa from Rutgers and started his career at a small paper in a New York City suburb in New Jersey, where he’d covered five local school districts. After his second year there,he’d exposed how a school superintendent and the head of the school board were colluding to raise the superintendent’s salary. By his third year, he’d won a statewide prize for his stories about how the Democratic Party was paying homeless men and women to fill out absentee ballots. Then, at the Examiner , I’d been tapped to design graphics for his series about the mayor’s race, fitting together the text elements with pictures and, online, with video.
“Hey, thanks,” he’d said, bending over in front of my oversized screen as I’d shown him my first draft. “That’s really great.” Unlike most of the other, dressed-down reporters, he wore a crisp, ironed shirt and a tie. He smelled good, when I was close enough to notice, and I’d already appreciated his slender-hipped, broad-shouldered body and imagined myself folded against the solidity of his chest. He’d smiled at me—white teeth, beard-shadowed cheeks. “Can I buy you a snack item?” He’d walked me out into the hall to the vending machine, where I’d selected a bag of pretzels and he’d bought himself a bottled water, and we sat in the empty stairwell, exchanging first names, then work histories. The conversation flowed naturally into an invitation to meet at a bar the next night. Drinks became dinner at Percy Street Barbecue, where we sat over plates of ribs and Mason jars of spiked lemonade, talking about our parents, our schools, which bones we’d broken (his leg, my wrist), and our shared love of Dire Straits and Warren Zevon. We’d both been startled when our waiter had cruised by our table to announce that it was last call. We’d talked from six o’clock that night until two in the morning.
Within a week, we were a couple. I imagined he’d only get more successful as time went by. Neither of us believed that newspapers were going anywhere or that, eventually, my funny,dashed-off blog posts would be more valuable than his ability to wrest a great (or damning) quote out of a politician or a criminal, to write fast on deadline, to think of witty headlines and slyly funny photo captions, or to bide his time for months, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, gathering documents, hunting down sources, doing the kind of reporting the Examiner ended up not being able to afford anymore. He would be the breadwinner, I would be the homemaker . . . only now, as I looked at him, with his eyes the same shade as
Graphic design was a way to indulge my love of color and proportion, my desire to make something beautiful, or at least functional, to see a project through from start to finish, and still have a more or less guaranteed paycheck.
So I’d gone to Franklin & Marshall and studied art and art history, supplementing my courses in drawing and sculpture with summer courses in video and layout and graphic design. The Examiner had come to a recruiting session on campus; I’d dropped off my résumé, then gone to the city for an interview, then gotten hired, at a salary that was higher than anything I had the right to expect. At twenty-two, with an apartment in Old City, I’d been the pretty young thing, with a wardrobe from H&M and the French Connection and a few good pieces from Saks, a gym membership, a freezer full of Lean Cuisine, and a panini press that I used to make eggs in the morning and sandwiches at night.
After almost six years on the job, I’d met Dave. He had graduated summa from Rutgers and started his career at a small paper in a New York City suburb in New Jersey, where he’d covered five local school districts. After his second year there,he’d exposed how a school superintendent and the head of the school board were colluding to raise the superintendent’s salary. By his third year, he’d won a statewide prize for his stories about how the Democratic Party was paying homeless men and women to fill out absentee ballots. Then, at the Examiner , I’d been tapped to design graphics for his series about the mayor’s race, fitting together the text elements with pictures and, online, with video.
“Hey, thanks,” he’d said, bending over in front of my oversized screen as I’d shown him my first draft. “That’s really great.” Unlike most of the other, dressed-down reporters, he wore a crisp, ironed shirt and a tie. He smelled good, when I was close enough to notice, and I’d already appreciated his slender-hipped, broad-shouldered body and imagined myself folded against the solidity of his chest. He’d smiled at me—white teeth, beard-shadowed cheeks. “Can I buy you a snack item?” He’d walked me out into the hall to the vending machine, where I’d selected a bag of pretzels and he’d bought himself a bottled water, and we sat in the empty stairwell, exchanging first names, then work histories. The conversation flowed naturally into an invitation to meet at a bar the next night. Drinks became dinner at Percy Street Barbecue, where we sat over plates of ribs and Mason jars of spiked lemonade, talking about our parents, our schools, which bones we’d broken (his leg, my wrist), and our shared love of Dire Straits and Warren Zevon. We’d both been startled when our waiter had cruised by our table to announce that it was last call. We’d talked from six o’clock that night until two in the morning.
Within a week, we were a couple. I imagined he’d only get more successful as time went by. Neither of us believed that newspapers were going anywhere or that, eventually, my funny,dashed-off blog posts would be more valuable than his ability to wrest a great (or damning) quote out of a politician or a criminal, to write fast on deadline, to think of witty headlines and slyly funny photo captions, or to bide his time for months, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, gathering documents, hunting down sources, doing the kind of reporting the Examiner ended up not being able to afford anymore. He would be the breadwinner, I would be the homemaker . . . only now, as I looked at him, with his eyes the same shade as
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