The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall Page B

these people are capable of.”
    He didn’t sound like himself. Joan took the approach she took with emotionally disturbed patients at work: clear questions, empathy, calm.
    “Have you been having headaches? Blurred vision?” she asked. “George?” She said his name a few more times, couldn’t quite believe that he’d already hung up.
    Joan turned on the small TV that lived on the wall above the microwave. Normally it was only on when the housekeeper was over, or when something big was happening on the news during dinner prep. She clicked from channel to channel, past layers of footage of her husband being walked in handcuffs from the police car into the station.
    She heard the beeping of the intercom from the front gate, something so rare that it confused her for a moment. She muted the TV and pressed Talk , trying to adjust the video screen so she could see who was at the gate. She saw a close-up of a middle-aged man, just one eye at first, then he pulled his face back. Probably a journalist.
    “I’m not talking to journalists,” she said, pressing Talk again. “You’re trespassing.”
    He held up his hands, spreading his fingers. He spoke too loudly into the intercom, as though he was yelling across the front yard. “I’m not the enemy, don’t worry. I’m here in support,” he said, as though she should applaud him. “See? Look at my T-shirt,” he said, stepping back for the camera.
    She peered a little closer. His T-shirt read, Justice for Men and Boys .
    “I’m not going to open the gate,” she said loudly.
    “I understand, you think every man is a predator. But it’s the feminists who are going to ruin your husband’s life, you know,” he said.
    “What?”
    “No one in the media ever wants to discuss the very real fact that women lie to get attention, to excuse behaviour they regret. It’s way more common than anyone wants to admit.”
    She didn’t know what to say, so she just stared at him on the screen. Then she pulled back the living room curtains and pressed one finger to the glass, as though pointing at him.
    He reached into his bag and pulled out a stack of papers. She saw him waving them in the air. He looked like one of those unkempt socialist newspaper sellers.
    “I’ll put these under the gate,” he shouted. “We just want to help your husband.”
    Joan watched him walk away. She waited twenty minutes before she walked up the laneway and grabbed the flyers he’d slipped under the gate. Some were starting to blow away in the wind, others had stayed beneath the rock he’d placed on top. On the front of the flyer was a photo of George. Above, the headline read:
    RAMPANT MISANDRY TAKES A HERO DOWN IN WOODBURY LAKE .
    Oh, brother.
    JOAN’S AFFABLE HUSBAND, who would have called the man at the gate a crazy misogynist, was being defended by him. Had she woken up in an opposite world?
    Back in the kitchen, starting over again with another two pieces of toast, she scanned the headlines on Sadie’s iPad and noted that George’s likeability turned out to work against him in the press. She kept the news station on, and read each article. Most of them said the exact same thing, but some editorialized. The local newspaper, as well as all the big-city affiliates, were really keen on exploiting George’s status as a man of distinction in a town they said was “corrupt with old money” and “entrenched in the antiquated ways of archetypal New England WASP s.” The reality — that Joan worked as a nurse, that George collected a teacher’s salary, that the house was paid off when George was still in diapers — the complexity of that reality didn’t fit into column inches. Joan knew, from her one and a half years in journalism school, that once there was a simple narrative to attach to a story, that was the one they ran with. Nuance is too complicated for the daily news. One station replayed the archival footage from when George stopped the gunman. “It was instinct,” he said