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.