A cheating wife drives a man to extremes

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“I know,” I said, but it was hard to stop thinking about him and all he’d been through.

When I sat down to write my article about Alex, I found it extremely difficult to get started. On the one hand, recounting the experiences Alex had shared with me would be easy, and what I’d observed in the park and at the bar would definitely make for great copy. But I found myself struggling to capture what was really going on inside Alex. The one question every reader would want answered was why a seemingly normal guy would do such a seemingly irrational thing.

I started over several times before coming up with a lede that I liked. “Superhero with a broken heart” seemed to capture the contradictions best for me, and once I’d gotten that down the rest seemed to flow easily.

When I’d originally gotten the assignment, I was sure that it would all be a waste of time and my work would get killed. But after my wild day and night with Alex, and after spending another day struggling to describe what was really going on inside of him, I began to feel very protective of my article. I didn’t want it to wind up on the spike, and I was really apprehensive when I finally turned it in to my editor.

An hour later she called me. “Have you got any more?” she asked brusquely.

“What do you mean?” I asked irritatedly. “It’s already the right length.” I’d carefully edited the article down to standard length for the City section. I consider myself a serious writer, and I’ve learned that if I don’t edit my own work, somebody else will start hacking at it and ruin what I’ve done.

“It’s not the right length for the Sunday Magazine,” she said, and I gasped. An article in the Sunday Magazine can run much longer. More importantly, the pieces that appear there tend to get a lot of attention, and, unlike daily articles, they stay up on the online Times for the whole week. I was in shock – admittedly, a pleasant shock, but still . . .

I went back to my computer and started pulling up all the material I’d cut. With the luxury of all those beautiful extra column inches, I quickly started revising what I had, changing it from a news item to a feature article. I kept my lede but let the story flow much more organically now that I was freed from inverted pyramid style.

By the end of the day I had it done and my editor was quite pleased. “This is really good, Elle,” she told me, “and you’ve submitted it in time for this Sunday’s edition.” I felt like I’d hit a grand slam home run.

That evening I did something I shouldn’t have: I called Alex and told him to check the Sunday Times Magazine this weekend. “So it’s not going to be in the daily news?” he said uncertainly. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Oh, it’s definitely a good thing,” I said. “You’ll see.”

After I hung up, though, I began to have second thoughts. What I’d turned in to my editor was a positive, honest, human interest story, and I thought it captured Alex pretty well. But that didn’t mean that the finished product would turn out that way. What if some editor higher up decided to turn the story into a humor piece poking fun at Alex or, worse, holding him up to ridicule? I’d seen things like that happen before and the result could be pretty cruel. If that happened, he’d think I’d written it that way. The more I thought about it, the more I wished I hadn’t called him.

Reporters are supposed to keep a distance from their subjects, to be dispassionate. If they don’t, they lose their objectivity and then they aren’t reporting any more. But, dammit, I found I couldn’t help liking Alex, and if my article got turned into a slash-and-burn piece, I’d feel terrible. Plus, I admitted to myself, I’d likely never see the guy again. While that wasn’t likely anyway, it would be nice to think it could be a possibility.

I deliberately avoided taking an advance look at the magazine, but when my own copy of the Times hit my doorstep, I quickly pulled out the magazine section. There on the cover, staring back at me with smiling eyes and a steely expression on his face, was the picture of Alex standing on the boulder in Central Park. Below it was the headline: “The Brokenhearted Superhero from Queens.”

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