Being a celebrity-relationship reporter is a repellent way to make a living. I never touched it when I worked at People in the mid to late ’90s, but there was something faintly odorous wafting out of the offices back then (and this was years before the celeb-chasing magazines turned uniformly icky and vapid in the Bonnie Fuller mode). Nonetheless the willingness of Life & Style to stick its neck out over the “Imminent Death of TomKat” story has a certain head-turning quality. My immediate response was “Already?” If this story is even half-true (and I’m not saying or presuming that it is), somebody in this relationship is in a highly frustrated, unstable, erratic state of mind. There’s what everybody presumes or believes to be true (the highly questionable raison d’etre of TomKat, the horrid implications of those Scientology minders tagging along behind Katie Holmes when she goes anywhere, etc.), and then there’s the what’s-the-hurry? factor. If you have a partnership that you’ve invested yourself in (for whatever reason, and whatever the likelihood that normal run-of-the-mill hetero coupling is part of the deal) and a baby is on the way, you need to calm down, start planning, dig in and take life seriously. You don’t quit the thing eight or nine months later…unless you’re insane. The Life & Style story was heatedly denied by reps for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, and its veracity was even challenged by Gawker. The mag quotes “insiders” saying the couple’s relationship has come to an end but that Tom and Katie “plan to keep up the charade of a romance until after their baby’s birth this spring.” Another source says Tom and Katie “both agreed that the marriage wouldn’t work and they wanted to end it before they learned to hate each other.” Furthermore, a representative for Life & Style magazine has said, “We stand 100 percent behind our story.” Good God.