Dog Bites Man by James Duffy Page A

much of the world) and in his dotage—he was 82—decided that he wanted to own a newspaper, and a muckraking, scandalmongering one at that.
    Most people who followed the rise of
The Surveyor
were mystified by the muffler king's motive. He copiously bankrolled the paper, a weekly, set it up in lavish uptown quarters and permitted the payment of salaries and freelance fees at the very least competitive with those at the most established publications. He had done this not, as some thought, as a sounding board for his political views (he really had none). Nor was it a matter of inflating his ego. It was, at bottom, a bridge-and-tunneler's revenge.
    Meyner and his wife, Lola, had both been born in New Jersey and had lived there all their lives, most recently in a stupendous penthouse in Jersey City overlooking the Hudson River and Manhattan. Their experience of New York had been as infrequent visitors until Lola, deciding that she was becoming bored as a senior citizen, persuaded her husband to support a variety of New York City institutions, with an eye to becoming part of the New York cultural scene.
    They had not received a warm welcome. While they had money, they did not have the youth, the good looks (Ethan, unfortunately, resembled a desiccated cross between John D. Rockefeller and John Paul Getty) or the witty small talk that appealed to Gotham's beautiful people. Despite large donations to the New York City Opera—thought to be more receptive than the more established Metropolitan—no invitations to join its board, or even the committees for its benefits, were forthcoming. Nor did the Whitney Museum of American Art prove any more accessible, thoughEthan and Lola were significant, and intelligent, collectors of modern and contemporary work.
    After enduring jokes about the bridge-and-tunnel crowd from Manhattanites who did not realize where the Meyners came from, and overhearing a prominent socialite remark that a particular benefit seemed to be "overrun with dentists from New Jersey," they retreated back to the Garden State, deciding to spend their charity dollars on the new Newark Arts Center and to bequeath their art collection to the Newark Museum.
    The unhappy attempt to break into the New York whirl had left Ethan embittered. It was out of these negative feelings that the idea for
The Surveyor
grew. It was to be a journal exposing the pretensions and corruptions of New York's movers and shakers.
    Ethan himself had no journalistic experience and had no desire either to direct the editorial process or even to influence it. His only directive to Justin Boyd, whom he had recruited after being assured by London friends of the editor's scrappy bona fides, was to expose mercilessly scandal and perfidy wherever he found it, preferably in the precincts of Manhattan that had shunned him. Causing as much embarrassment and discomfort as possible were Boyd's marching orders.
    Justin was delighted for the chance to leave London; unhorsing the prime minister's cabinet had become something of a bore. The timing was right. Boyd had recently gone through a bitter divorce with his wife, a powerful and successful literary agent. And the personal salary and budget Meyner offered, plus the free editorial hand, were too tempting to refuse.
    In the two years he had edited
The Surveyor,
Boyd had engaged in a delicate balancing act. On the one hand he needed to printenough scandal and dirt to keep his publisher-owner happy. On the other, there was his desire to be loved and accepted by the very people he was supposed to be trashing. So far, he had served up enough red meat to satisfy Meyner's appetite, without slaughtering too many sacred cows in the process. His specialty was weekly lists, always catnip for the prurient and curious: the 50 most charming dinner guests, the 50 most boring dinner guests, the 50 richest widows and widowers, the 50 largest personal bankruptcies in the Southern District of New York and so on. (The