Ellis had the thing New Yorkers prize above all else--he was as good as invisible. It hadn't been easy, but it had, had indeed, been worth it. Now, however, his phone started to ring with calls from people, people he didn't know, who thought he must know just the person they needed to meet. To his misfortune, he had been named the winner of a contest, citywide, regarding whose name was on the most rolodexes of a certain select group of New Yorkers from a cross section of occupations and backgrounds. He had been surprised, but on second thought flattered. The third thought was coming around, which was about all these people, who called at any time of the night or day, and who deluged him, as he listened politely while doing other things, with their catalogs of plans and enthusiasms and their eagerness to involve him.
But Ellis's idea was to be in business for himself--to put his ingenuity, and his ability to calculate quickly and accurately, to work for his own ends. He was polite--he could deny his existence during a cold call from a bank, insurance rep or broker as well as anyone, but he found it hard to just dismiss people. After all, his helpful side was what had gotten him to where he was to begin with. Enabling, keeping in the background.
Contests, to begin with. He had written the beginning of a story concerning two friends walking down the cobbled streets of some old world port town. It measured three short paragraphs. Then he ran an ad in several magazines announcing that the task--to finish the story--would provide $1,000 for the winner while the two top runners up would get $250 each.
There was a $20 entry fee which, if you sent an envelope with return postage that covered your entry and included a dollar, would entitle you to a copy of the winner's story. It had to be less than 5,000 words.
The money showed up in buckets--the ads had not been cheap but the return was phenomenal--every tenth person in America wanted to be recognized as a writer and had twenty bucks to buy his or her way in. A story mill, like the old writers' school up in Connecticut, but he even developed a tax exempt thing dimension by becoming an educational foundation. The government paid for the top half of every decaf cappuccino he drank for some number of years.
It was like a poker game, he said to a good friend, only in this case you simply collected the antes from around the table and cashed out the occasional lucky and deserving soul, whose story you had already found a buyer for, because there is still, always, someone around who will pay cash for lies of a certain elegance and structure. But you never had to deal a card--you had the high hand. It was a matter of good faith, more or less, and much more more than less.
He made a ton after that on similar ventures. The people on the other side of the mailbox got some education too, but it wasn't clear how much of it stuck to them. He felt a little bad about that. When Internet came he saw the potential but he also saw the risk, which by then was more of his focus. He kicked himself among his friends on the subject, it was almost but not quite his schtick, every day until it came time to sleep, and then he slept soundly, as if on soft bags of fine gold.
One of those who had called was Carol Llewellyn, 35, a tall leggy type with short blond hair. She had been teaching economics and political science at some college in the UCal system and now she was in town for a conference to give a presentation. They saw each other first at a Natural History Museum opening for a Peruvian archeological exhibit. She sounded about the most interesting and energetic of the lot that was keeping his phone ringing and his friend had canceled. He wasn't sure about Carol--a little bit of the needful or the predatory sounded in her voice, unless he was mistaken, but he deferred judgment. First impressions are always right, but what you do with what you find will vary. That had been his experience.
They ran into other Californian, Fred Graham, a tall athletic man with thinning hair who wore Italian loafers and brightly patterned socks along with the usual blazer and slacks outfit. He had worked on the dig and Ellis liked him immediately. Open, energetic, humorous in a low key way that didn't call attention to the speaker, not unlike Ellis in a number of good ways.
Standing under the great blue whale in the middle of the parquet dance floor at the Museum, surrounded by fledgling actors and actresses in white tie and tails pretending to be waiters at a cocktail party, they agreed on dinner the next night. Ellis needed nothing new in his life. His life was fine. So he spent the ride home thinking whether Fred might be the right person to help put a project of Carol's into action. Solve three problems with one stroke.
Carol Llewellyn was somewhat other than even Ellis took her to be. A childhood in the forests and slopes north of Marin in the late 50's and early 60's had provided her with perspectives on life that didn't reveal themselves to the eye that wasn't looking at precisely the right moments. There was much more of the survivalist, constantly calculating how to use what was around you, than you could see from the way she seemed to go about things.
"The air out there is almost greasy!" she said as she walked into the lounge of Ellis's club on East 66th. "Like something they serve in jail." Ellis and Fred had been people-watching and talking about certain souls in New York apartment buildings who could look at you from inside their elevators as you approached, trying to get on. "They look at you like a chair, a dead and out-of-style chair at that," Fred had claimed, laughing, "and then they let the doors close and make their escape, just as you almost reach the button."
"Well, don't you look beautiful, my dear," Ellis said as the two men rose. "Why don't we head right down to the tap room? It's really the place if you haven't seen it."
The two newcomers were dead quiet as they entered the famous room, all red leather and brass and oil paintings of young lissome nudes of every shape, color and description, fastidiously lit. She sat down first, with the men on either side of her. She slid her sandal across the brick floor, feeling the sticky gloss of the wax and the unevenness of the brick.
"See anyone you know?" Ellis said with a smile.
"Maybe your mother when she was much younger," she said after a moment's survey, responding with a smile of her own. "Just out of college, ‘The Painter's Mistress,' over there." She gestured with a tilt of her head at a laughing buxom blonde, wearing only a harlequin mask and an open blue silk robe, stretched out across a Recamier couch done in a Chinese print. There was a general mood of laughter in the room. They gave themselves over to it, hands patting and touching casually, on shoulders and the backs of other hands around the table, like a sense of fun you could almost bottle and sell, one that seemed to be as relaxed and open as the gazes that looked down on them from the canvases.
The conversation about her project was only an element of a wide-ranging discussion that covered anthropology, the arts, and whether film was still better than digital for still photography. Before they knew it, the clock was showing half past ten. "You are such adorable men, both of you," she said as they rose from their seats. "Prize specimens. What a privilege to be with you. What a treat."
Ellis suggested they grab a taxi down to her hotel. He would drop her off on his way home. As they waited for the light to change at Sixth Avenue, Ellis took Carol's hands and kissed them. Then he pressed the back of one of them against her cheek and softly touched his mouth to hers, holding back for a moment that seemed to stretch and freeze at the same time as their lips finally met. When they were inside her room he kissed her again, leaning her against the wall next to the bed, a queen-size with the covers turned down and two foil-wrapped chocolates on the pillow. "God you are delightful, aren't you. You really are." He buried his chin in the hollow of her neck, inhaling and feeling her body against his. They were both breathing hard and reaching for each other's buttons, undoing each other's belts and snaps, random and confused but perfectly purposeful. "Do you have something for us to use?" he said and she nodded, sliding the shoulder strap of her bra down from her shoulder, tilting her breast for him to admire, running her hand along his arm.
They made love again a half hour later and then again. She was asleep when he finally slipped out. Dozing a little, he took a taxi to Bay Ridge, out by the Verrazano, and had breakfast at a diner where you could watch the sun come up out of the Atlantic. Then he walked on the beach for half an hour or so and made his way home.
Around ten he woke up on the couch and smiled at the memory of the previous night, a little symphony in itself that might or might not be repeated. The least of my worries, he thought as he sorted the mail and made coffee, filling out a deposit slip for the monthly checks from the syndicators of "Legends of Bowling" and two jazz combos he helped manage. These he dropped off at his bank on the way to his morning swim.
"Maximo, maximo," Jorge the locker room steward murmured, his head bobbing as he sat at his station and watched Ellis enter.
"Como esta," Ellis said, and took the towel Jorge offered. In the whirlpool he reflected further, wondering what the score was with Carol. She said she wanted to do a project on dioxins in the food supply, focusing on ocean dumping and the dredging of harbors near chemical plants which had done manufacturing for the Defense Department. Dioxins stored themselves in your body fat and never left. Cancer potential. A time bomb building toward a critical mass across the population. During his swim he tried to think of nothing but counting the strokes and the laps, tuning into the feelings of his muscles and joints and bones, lungs and heartbeat, until he was satisfied with his readings.
Things hadn't worked out for Carol in California. The budget cuts in the college system had driven her out of teaching into a need to connect with the world of money. What was clear to her from the rolodex contest was that Ellis was a guy with great connections and what looked like first class cash flow. She felt at home in the presence of men. Why not, they're all we have to work with, was her attitude. Ellis looked like a Gold Coast guy, plain and simple, she thought to herself. A trophy buck. Was she about to get lucky? She knew our mirror image selves always accompany us, assembled out of all the choices you don't make or pursue--all the things you say "no" to at one time or another. She knew they live with you in a counterpoint universe, and occasionally even open a door you thought was locked, as you loop back into your intended life in the course of actually living. Last night had been a case of letting things happen and trusting your instincts instead of pulling out the rulebook, and she had no regrets. Rather the opposite. He was cool and hot at the same time. He was fixed but apparently available. She had already worked it out that he wasn't married. Whether or not he was completely unattached was more vague, but her hunter's instincts were sending her a strong positive signal.
Nobody's life is all home runs and touchdown passes. In this, Ellis was like everybody else. He wasn't completely out of the stock market on Black Monday in 1987. He advised the manager of the Chiffons to take a pass on "Where Did Our Love Go," helping to open the door for the Supremes and slide it permanently shut on the Chiffons. If you listened to him, he had never made a good investment, yet he was clearly at ease about money.
She had asked about his personal life, about growing up, family, college and the like. There were no really troublesome questions, nothing that probed too deeply or seemed to seek out hidden pain, and it taken him a while to work out how she was assembling her mosaic of him. He preferred to screen out the verbal and study her body--what she did with her hands, how much she played with her hair, the extent to which she covered her breasts when she was talking to him. But most of all he watched the match, or lack of it, between her smiling mouth and her unsmiling eyes as she went about her slow prowl over and around him. He had ghostwritten a book of "tells", a photo-illustrated guide to the body language of poker players, frequently used by lawyers to help break down witnesses through their unconscious behavior and now in its sixteenth printing, and he thought it was good to practice what you preached. She had a very even, matter of fact way of conducting herself, not unlike his own. He was eighty per cent convinced the dioxin project was bogus, a cover story to open doors to people who had what she wanted. It should have come up, if she cared about it, when they were in her room. Somehow it never had.
Back at home he sent flowers for the anniversary of a college buddy whose best man he'd been, then dispatched two Knicks tickets to a producer friend in from Rome and sat down to soak himself in the morning paper. "Contractor Kills LA Horror Film Producer" he read. "Cemented Under Jacuzzi in Hancock Park Abode." He wondered if the contractor would end up putting in jacuzzis as part of a comunity service sentence. Obviously he did good work. Ellis cut up some melon, poured a mug of decaf, and clicked the CD carousel into action before he went to look at his plants and tend them. Fred Graham called to say he had to go back to California ahead of schedule. He had cancelled lunch with Carol and would have to do the same as to dinner with Ellis, so they rescheduled for the next time Ellis was in LA, or vice versa. Carol called twenty minutes later.
A call came to Carol's room about five that afternoon. She wanted to ignore it, but Ellis motioned for her to pick up the phone. When he emerged from the bathroom she was listening and making furious notes. Years later when she was rich and famous she would laugh to think with what exuberance she had accepted the magazine publisher's offer, hardly suspecting the handsome stipend and first class travel, or reflecting on how often such a combination of things might or might not happen in a life like hers. They said they wanted her to cover the summit conference on trade and the environment in Santiago de Chile over the next two weeks. The magazine's reporter had been hit with food poisoning and was in the hospital, and her presentation at the New York session had come to their attention, the man said. They thought she might bring a suspicious and knowledgeable eye, to cut through the fog and mist that were certain to engulf the event. They wanted something fresh and with as much pop as she could provide. She promised not to disappoint.
Her written and photographed account of how a certain prominent minister had tried to "green" his way into her own personal Southern Hemisphere during a sunrise trip to the beach after a reception and night of partying, and her transcribed conversation on the way back with his driver, a man far more insightful than the prurient bureaucrat snoring in the back behind them, set her off on a rocket ride that took her to all seven continents and put her name on covers of magazines around the world. The bureaucrat lost his job, one of many trophies she would take over time. Ellis sent her flowers and a handwritten note of congratulations. Fred tracked her down and ultimately they were married, remaining together either despite or because of her travels and Fred's archeological activities.
They kept up with each other through Christmas cards every year. When she understood, some considerable time later, how he had escaped her, how he had orchestrated and financed that South American assignment of hers, she sent him a check whose memo line said "Repayment, with interest and gratitude." She also sent him a snapshot of herself and Fred in the lobby of a hotel in the Canadian Rockies next to a stuffed Bighorn sheep, with a note on the back that said "One that didn't get away." It made him smile and he framed it and put it on a shelf among his other trophies. He invested the money and earmarked it for her in his will. Under his management and attention it came to almost $300,000 by the time he died, asleep in his bed at the age of 77. When the check arrived from his estate she and Fred put it into a scholarship fund for ecological studies in all their names, matching that contribution with one of their own. So by the time all was said and done, everybody had behaved well and done the right thing, which may seem unlikely these days, and more than a little old fashioned, but it's also why this story is one you can trust and believe in, if you can believe in anything these days, that is.
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Page created: November 1, 2009