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.