To mark The Times’s 175th birthday, Times editors asked writers to reflect on — and imagine a little bit about — the newspaper’s front page on the day they were born. This is the first in a series. Look up your own birthday page here.
It was a mild Tuesday in Manhattan. On May 13, 1986, the trains spit out throngs onto Wall Street, and while their suits were gray and rumpled, the men had a spring in their step: that fresh itch that accompanies skirts getting shorter, women revealing the dimpled flesh of their thighs as they arrange themselves on the subway seats. Many of the gentlemen, stopping for their daily newspapers, smiled and said, “Keep the change” — pennies, really, but it felt like largess to them. A spirit of generosity had overtaken essentially ungenerous people.
Somewhere in Barnes, England, that day, Robert Pattinson had been born. His mother gazed at him misty-eyed, full of hope for what he would be: a scientist who finds the cure for a rare (or even common) cancer? A professor of classics? A traveling instructor of water sports, spending winters in Fiji and summers in Aspen? She went over so many options it made her laugh, but never considered that he might become an actor and play an alluring and pure-hearted vampire, inciting lust in tweens, then switching to more independent fare and doing gangbusters there, too.
But on Wall Street, nobody yet knew about Robert Pattinson — and some of them never would, either dying before his reign or missing it altogether, since they were the types who skipped right to the finance section. Had they bothered to take a moment to extend their interests, they might have learned from the front page of The New York Times that France had reported “a captive Arab” admitting to attacks, while at Yeshiva University the refuseniks Anatoly Shcharansky and Yelena Bonner reunited after Mr. Shcharansky’s release from a Soviet labor camp, greeting each other with such joy, you’d have thought they were lovers. The General Accounting Office’s investigation of Michael Deaver, a member of President Ronald Reagan’s staff, found several potential violations in his handling of efforts to move the United States toward an agreement with Canada on acid rain. (What exactly acid rain is, and what it could do, were questions few people bothered to ask in either country.) NASA had been warned of cold weather risks to the Challenger space shuttle, but sent it up anyway. The death toll from Chernobyl radiation and burns had reached six (according to Moscow). The only headline that piqued the men’s interest was about the Wall Street “merger specialist” charged with insider trading, a reminder to stay on the up and up, or at least appear to.
In the stairwell, a secretary from the float pool — a recent Smith College graduate — smoked a cigarette, ate a bagel and read every word of the front page, promising herself after each article that she would go back to her temporary desk very soon. As happened with the drinks she’d had last night, she was breaking her own rules. The world has never been bleaker, she thought, although maybe that was the hangover talking, and she tried to remember her history professor — the squarely handsome one with the sandy hair — reminding his students that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Uptown at Roosevelt Hospital, two 36-year-olds, who had arrived dressed like teens on summer break, were in an icy operating room. She was awake on the table, though numb from the waist down, and he wore blue scrubs over his ripped, paint-stained khakis and tennis shoes with the backs crunched down. He was trying his hardest not to avert his eyes as a doctor cut his wife’s lower abdomen horizontally. If she has to go through it, he thought, then I should have to watch it.
He’d slept horribly the night before. All the joy and fizz of the past nine months had given way to a sense of profound dread, as if he had agreed to turn himself in at the police station come morning on a federal charge. He was considering this — Why now? What did he think he was losing? — when all at once the doctor pulled an infant, slack and blue but eyes wide, from his wife’s stomach and slapped its back with dramatic flair. The baby sputtered, then let out a cry so ferocious and oddly pitched that one of the nurses began to back out of the room.
Another nurse rubbed the screaming infant with a towel and wrapped her expertly, and one of them grinned at the man: “You want to hold her, Daddy?” Daddy — he knew instantly he would not like this to be his new name.
He looked at his wife, but she was staring up, at the light or seemingly something beyond it. And as they handed him the baby, his body was flooded with a sense of purpose that had previously eluded him. Like an EpiPen chased with a shot of Jack. Like your high school crush saying, “I don’t just like you; I need you.” Like knowing what you’d be doing every day for the next 40 years.
“Hello, Lena,” he said. He was staring into her eyes, trying to understand if she looked like his father or if he just felt like his father.
The doctor began to stitch up the incision. “Wait a second — I can feel that,” the new mother said. “Please, stop — I feel it.”
But everyone had moved on, and no one was really listening.
Lena Dunham is the creator of the TV series “Girls” and the author, most recently, of “Famesick.”
Source image by CSA Images/Getty Images
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