Right Livelihoods

  According to Ellie Knight-Cameron’s K&K psychological profiling, it was extremely unlikely that Duane Kolodny, who was seventy years old and couldn’t bring himself to retire, had written the petulant suggestion about the lane closures on the Merritt Parkway. Duane kept to himself. For example, no one had known about the problems between Duane and his wife, not until that rash of days when his office door was very firmly closed. Duane had emerged one afternoon complaining of allergies and gone home early. Not long after, he was a bachelor.

  It wasn’t clear that Duane even knew there was a suggestion box. The aforementioned Dolly Halloran, Duane’s executive assistant, knew there was one. She’d lobbied for it in the first place. Ellie herself knew about it, of course. She checked it every day or so. As for the rest of the staff, they knew of the suggestion box because it was sitting right there, enfolded in pink wrapping paper, by the coffee machine. It had originally served as a box of bathroom tissues and would have been recycled as such had Ellie not plucked it from obscurity and festooned it.

  She looked closer at the offending suggestion. There was the goddamned part of it: If they’re going to close lanes on the parkway, they ought to actually repair the goddamned road. The word goddamned, more forceful than its rather dainty abbreviation damn, was kind of antique when you thought about it, a little bit like something you’d say if you were an older person. But there just weren’t that many older people at K&K, not counting Duane. Goddamned. Women didn’t say it that much, or maybe they only said it in the 1950s, when it was arguably the curse of choice, or so Ellie believed. Her mother used to say it to her when she was a girl. Ellie’s teenage attempts to wear exactly what everyone else was wearing to school were something her mother swore about with muscular decisiveness. One time Ellie just put her foot down, so to speak, saying she had to have leg warmers, whereupon her mother told her she was just like some rich bitch from the goddamned suburbs.

  K&K employed nine eager, self-motivated professionals, in addition to Ellie. Of the nine employees, seven were women. One was Duane Kolodny and one was Neil Rubinstein, who couldn’t possibly be a heterosexual type of man, because there was no sexual wattage coming off him, no romantic chemistry, no nothing. How did the women of the office come up with these sorts of hypotheses? How did they have the time? Neil was responsible for bookkeeping and payroll, and he kept to himself, and when you looked deeply into Neil’s eyes, you saw they were like the molded plastic eyes of a stuffed animal.

  Neil was interested in weather patterns. If you had to pass Neil Rubinstein on the way to the bathroom three times a day, which you probably did, because his cubicle was right by the bathroom, then you wanted to have something to offer him. Neil followed the Weather Channel through the regional forecast two or three times before bed, this was assured. He could discourse about airport closings. If a freak storm in Detroit had grounded much of the Northwest Airlines fleet, Neil would know, and he was always excited when the weather news was particularly bad, even if in his case excitement was hard to gauge. If three inches of rain were promised, and maximum sustained winds topping fifty miles an hour, it would be a very good day for Neil Rubinstein.

  What’s more, Neil dressed as though he had never yet been allowed to change clothes after Hebrew lessons, and his shirts always had French cuffs, and the payroll checks were always on time, and there was never a problem with accounts payable or receivable. Neil Rubinstein was a knot that resisted untangling. Ellie Knight-Cameron believed, therefore, that Neil was very likely the person who’d typed out the suggestion about the lane closures, at least because goddamned seemed more masculine, and Neil seemed as if he was maybe a tyrant secreted away in the outfit of an inoffensive accountant. Maybe there was a body bricked up in his cellar, or a series of bodies, or maybe he’d had an unfortunate episode of frottage with an elementary school teacher.

  There was just one problem with her theory: Neil Rubinstein didn’t drive.

  Recently, Ellie had been in a Greek diner in Riverside, a couple of towns over. Above her booth, above her duct-taped vinyl banquette, hung a reproduction of a painting of Athens, Greece. Forget the rest of the interior. Don’t even worry about the circumstances. A coincidence is when two clients can be sourced to the same finder, or when two brokers woo the same institutional prospect. This time the coincidence was as follows: she’d seen the same artistic reproduction of Athens on the night of her college graduation! What an eventful night that had been! A boy kissed her and told her that no woman was ever as beautiful. And the same picture hung nearby, a depiction of some rubble in Athens or Rome. Ellie Knight-Cameron had definitely kissed a boy, no one could dispute it, and the boy was called Eric Banks, and Eric Banks was a little bit hirsute, and he sported a chronically strained expression. He believed the worst about people and events. Most nights, Eric Banks was hunched over a viola that he couldn’t bow properly.

  Yet when Eric spoke to Ellie about all the strange music that he liked—a guitar played with chopsticks, a piano plucked from the inside—it was like he was shedding his papery exterior. She enjoyed listening to him. When he felt better she felt better. It went back and forth like that for a couple of weeks, until the night of graduation. They were together when they shed their graduation gowns, when they threw their tasseled hats into a big pile by the coatrack. Together they were sitting in the reception hall where the party was in full swing. The music was incredibly loud, and Eric was worried about his hearing. He wore earplugs on the train into the city; he wore them on planes, at rock shows, at amusement parks. Ellie shouted in one of Eric’s temporarily deaf ears that she thought something great was going to happen to him.

  And Ellie Knight-Cameron wasn’t just believing in Eric in order to believe. They looked away, oppositely, and while she pretended to be deep in metaphysical speculation, watching dancers flail in the center of the room, she happened to glance at a painting on the wall. It was a painting of the Acropolis in Athens, or some kind of ruin from early western civilization, which made sense, right? This was graduation. Ancient Greece, higher education, Athens. When she faced Eric again, he was reaching out to her, he was fitting his callused hand around her chin, pressing his mouth against hers. The taste was of hummus, Dr Pepper, and green olives. Later, she wished she had made love with him, because you should take advantage of the chances you get. They kissed and then they held each other. The dancers flailed. Eric told her that she was a beautiful woman. They made oaths. She went back to Arizona for the summer. Eric went to music school in Boston.

  And then, depressingly, they didn’t really stay in touch.

  So: it was a melancholy night at the diner. In fact, Ellie had been trying to talk with her mother by cell phone about her luck with the male of the species. Her mother was the wrong person to ask. “Why don’t you buy some sexy outfits and go out to a bar or something?” This from the self-described feminist who’d borne three out-of-wedlock children by three different self-employed men. Ellie’s brother, Len, was doing a short stay in the Big House for selling marijuana to high school students. Her older sister was living in Taos, tattooing.

  What she was meant to be doing at the Greek diner in Riverside was writing a want ad. There was a vacancy among the brokers at K&K. There was always a vacancy. K&K could carry four brokers but had trouble keeping four on board. People had priorities that did not include loyalty to their small-business employers. So Ellie Knight-Cameron was taken up with the process of advertising, of interviewing applicants, of making hiring recommendations. In a company like K&K there wasn’t a genuine director of personnel. Ellie was certified in computer networking and telephone routing. She had opinions about desk chairs. When Ellie had the applicants narrowed down to two, she’d send them along to Duane.

  She was impressed, at first, with a guy from Greenwich. His name was Chris Grady. He hadn’t managed to go to a great college like a lot of young men from Greenwich, not even a midlevel college, really, but she believed on the basis of their telephone conversation
that Chris had the selling gene. Duane had told her to look out for this. It was about energy, it was about enthusiasm, it was about hunger, it was about patriotism, it was about vision, it was about the big picture, the wide spectrum, it was about refusing to say no.

  Not long after, Chris visited the office. Chris wore light blue socks that matched his handkerchief. This may have been a strike against him. Excessive matching. There was a shy way that Chris folded and refolded his hands in his lap, even as he was displaying his thousand-watt smile. He was a beautiful young man from Greenwich and he wore a suit from Brooks Brothers or from some other preppy haberdasher. Chris probably had a brother who was better than he was at everything. This older brother tortured Chris and never let him win at any game.

  During the first interview, Ellie Knight-Cameron asked Chris if he had suggestions for her about how K&K might improve its business. Chris didn’t hesitate.

  “Acquisition,” Chris said. And then, emboldened, “Economies of scale. Insurance is a good business, and it’s, uh. There’s always going to be, everyone needs insurance, but you could really, uh, go head-to-head with some of your competitors, you know, and you could, then you squeeze them out of market share, and then you’d, uh, you know, you’d have more market share. Here in the . . . the . . . Connecticut area. Because then you wouldn’t, uh, you wouldn’t have as many competitors. Here.”

  “Great!” Ellie said.

  She introduced Chris around. She introduced him to Angie Roehmer, Astrid Lang, and Bonnie Stevenson, these being the brokers who remained; she introduced him to Maureen Jones, the mail room worker, and Christina Niccoli, the filing clerk just out of high school who harbored dreams of becoming a buyer at one of the big department stores. Ellie passed right by Neil Rubinstein. Then there was the enigma, Annie Goldberg, who was supposed to be a part-time researcher for K&K but who was also, everybody knew, a compulsive gambler. She was often missing on one of her sprees at the Indian casinos.

  The women in the office would prefer to have another man around. Gender equity was a motivator in the workplace. This was what Duane always said. Ellie believed him. When she was young, she’d thought she would be a psychologist. Not the kind where you did experiments on rats but the kind where you got to interact with people and hear about their lives. Though she hadn’t followed through on her dream, her psychological studies were excellent preparation for interacting with her crazy family and the people in her workplace.

  A strange thing happened. With Chris from Greenwich. During the office tour, she showed him the new wall-to-wall that they’d laid down in the lounge–conference room. (Dusty rose, because suggestions in the suggestion box had indicated that this color would make happy the majority of K&K employees.) Then, after she showed him the carpet, she showed him the suggestion box. This caused her, of course, to remember what she’d mostly forgotten, that bizarre suggestion, the one about the Merritt Parkway. She never had figured out who could possibly have written it. All she had done was rule out Duane and then cast some suspicion on Neil Rubinstein before moving on to her daily tasks, which were more important. But as she was explaining the suggestion box to Chris from Greenwich—“This is where people in the office are free to come up with suggestions about how to streamline the office in order to make it more efficient and responsive”—Chris snickered a little bit. There was no other word. He sounded like a cicada, and his shoulders trembled in a masculine, self-satisfied way. That was when she really looked at his, what do you call those, those little beard things. Just on the bottom part of his chin. The beard thing proved that Chris would be exactly the type to put something dreadful in the K&K suggestion box.

  Chris couldn’t have written the suggestion about the cones and the lane closures, of course, because she had never heard of him nor even seen his name on a résumé until just three days before, and this was his first visit to the office. Yet she was certain, somehow, that he’d done it. And that meant, to Ellie Knight-Cameron, that there was something amiss with this applicant. He wasn’t telling her the whole truth about himself. In fact, at that very moment she became passionate about the other applicant, a disabled girl called Lisa Weltz. One of Lisa’s arms was a little withered thing, like Bob Dole’s arm. Still, Lisa was ambitious, presentable, and smart.

  It wasn’t that Ellie Knight-Cameron never listened to her mother, counselor on all things romantic, when her mother told her to dress herself up and go to the bars. She had done so, just as advised, in certain desperate moods. She would go to the bars and strike up a perfectly nice conversation with a bartender. One time she met a sweet paralegal called Rhonda, with whom she stayed in touch. The two of them, in outfits so tight that breathing was out of the question, sat at one end of the bar, gabbing about everything there was to gab about. Later Rhonda came to K&K for her personal insurance needs. And Angie Roehmer split the commission with Ellie, which was really generous.

  The complicated allure of singles bars gave Ellie acid indigestion. She found herself wearing things she would never wear and thinking about cleavage. She put up her hair, she used a lot of eyeliner, she thought, There are so many things that indicate that this is the night: the moon is bright, the air is crisp, and lost causes are not lost on nights like this one. She tried to convince herself. It was spring, after all. She had recently won the office pool on the Oscars. The Red Sox were in first, even if it was just the beginning of the season. She went to the bars in a state of hopefulness. Later she felt crushed. When the morning came around she still had the pillow over her head and she was convinced that there were bugs crawling on her and the room was painted with fungi. There was no good reason that she should go outside.

  The night after Chris Grady’s interview, she was fed up enough to go barhopping. She went to one of the watering holes downtown, a block from the homely modernist train station, a bar where the SUVs rolled up, and professional men and women from the offices tumbled out in search of drinks with parasols in them. She’d called Rhonda and told her that she might go barhopping, but the plan never developed the crust of genuine intention. Sometimes two smart girls together just embarrassed each other.

  Ellie stood at the bar, breathing shallowly, in a skirt that looked as if it had been sprayed directly onto her from a vat of petrochemicals. She ordered a screwdriver, though she almost never drank anything strong. Then another. Then the evening slowed. Olives were being placed in the mouths of lipsticked women by their opposite numbers, and it was as if asteroids were rolling imperceptibly through space. Glasses that were plunked down on the bar sounded like kettle drums. Hoarse laughter rang out from the interior of a canyon. Ellie imagined a peacock striding toward the bar and screeching its mating call. Eventually, this bird would display its ridiculous plumage.

  Out of the crowd, a man. A sideburned sort of a man. He shouted something in her ear, but she couldn’t hear. She could tell, though, just from his style what he wasn’t saying: he wasn’t saying could he have her number, please, or would it be possible to get to know her better? Ellie nodded vacantly. Then he gently tugged at her elbow, and she followed him toward the booths in the crypt beyond the bar, where the light from the overhead bulbs glowed with the dim blue of industrial subbasements. She found herself, against her better judgment, jammed into a booth with three or four football enthusiasts and two or three ditzy girls who had half the inhibitions she had. Among the predatory individuals assembled was none other than Chris Grady.

  She said, “What a surprise!”

  “How about that!”

  “Well, um, do you come here often?” How long would she have to formulate this inoffensive banter? “My friend Rhonda—” She pointed toward the bar, though Rhonda was not actually present.

  “Right,” Chris said.

  One of Chris’s pals inquired, “You work at the—?”

  “Insurance,” Ellie said. “Chris was—”

  “Yeah,” Chris Grady said. There was a lot of nodding. A conversation followed about which was the best kind of
bar, the dingy kind or the really dingy kind. Ellie had no opinion. She could imagine bulldozing all of the bars in the Stamford area. Civilization would continue. The best kind of bar was one where you didn’t get attacked before, during, or after your appearance there. The best kind of bar was one where you didn’t go home feeling you’d been emptied of everything that was substantial about you. The best kind of bar was one where you didn’t feel like a yearbook summary of yourself or like a bunch of measurements. There was no such bar. Even though the conversation was not, you know, particularly malevolent, Ellie felt again that there was something she didn’t trust about Chris Grady. He talked about cars a lot. And sale prices of things.

  Not two days later, she got to work early, like she almost always did, opened the suggestion box, having neglected it for a number of weeks, and found: You ought to throw this fucking coffee machine out the window and run over it with a car.

  She reread it a couple of times to be sure she was seeing what she believed she was seeing. This fucking machine. Fucking machine. Fucking. Fucking. Fucking. The decorum that had been characterized by goddamned in the earlier suggestion had now given way to the vulgar word fucking. Of course, it was also true that in this case the suggestion did fall under Ellie Knight-Cameron’s professional jurisdiction. She was responsible for the coffee machine. Bad coffee, in her view, was almost a public service, because it gave people a problem to solve. If weather, traffic, baseball, and coffee were universally agreed upon, if everyone decided these things had been made perfect and harmonious, then there would be no reason to use human language at all. People would walk around like monks, saying nothing.