Neatness, which the house displays on every coffee table and bathroom countertop, is not a characteristic of Ray Porter. Neatness is a quality that he admires, however, and therefore buys, by hiring an obsessive maid.
In the garage are two cars. One is a gray Mercedes, the other a gray Mercedes. The second gray Mercedes is used for hauling his sports equipment, so he won’t have to load and unload every time he feels like a bike ride. A rack hangs incongruously on the back, and in the trunk are rollerblades and a tennis racquet. When Mr. Ray Porter tempts fate by exercising in traffic, he wears a twenty-first-century version of armor, which offers similar protection but not the romance: a beaked plastic bicycle helmet, elbow pads, and knee pads. He dons this getup whether it is winter or summer, meaning for three months out of the year he wears large black knee pads while wearing shorts. When he is astride his bicycle, tooling down a Seattle main street and sporting this outfit, the only visible difference between Ray Porter and an insect is his size.
The kitchen is the most unused part of the house. Since his divorce, the kitchen has become like a middle-American living room: for display only. Usually he eats out, alone, or tries to fill the evening with friends or a date. These dinner dates, which function mainly to fill a vacuum of loneliness between the hours of 8 P.M. and 11 P.M., cause him more grief than a year of solitary confinement. For even though they look like dates and sound like dates, and sometimes result in a liaison, to him they aren’t exactly dates. They are friendly evenings that sometimes end in bed. He incorrectly assumes that whatever is his understanding of the nature of one of these evenings, his date is thinking it, too, and he is deeply shocked and surprised when one or another of these women, whom he has seen over the past several months and with whom he has had several sexual encounters, actually believes they are a couple.
These experiences have caused him to think very hard about what he is doing and where he is going. And the result of all this thinking is that he now understands that he doesn’t know what he is doing or where he is going. His professional life is fine, but romantically he is an adolescent, and he has begun an education in the subject that is thirty years overdue.
His interest in Mirabelle comes from the part of him that still believes he can have her without obligation. He believes he can exist with her from eight to eleven and enter a private and personal world that they will create that will cease to exist in the off hours or off days. He believes that this world will be independent of other worlds he might create on another night, in another place, and he has no intention of allowing it to affect his true quest for a mate. He believes that in this affair, what is given back and forth will be exactly even, and that they will both see the benefits they are receiving. But because he picked Mirabelle out by sight alone, he fails to see that her fragility, which he smelled and sensed and is lured by, runs deep in her heart and is part of her nature, and cannot be separated out for him to fuck.
Ray and Mirabelle have similar ideas about wardrobe. He likes a stylish look, though modified for his age. He has lots of suits in striking fabrics, and his money enables him to make mistakes and get rid of them. His closet has his L.A. clothes, which means he can travel to and from Seattle with no suitcase. The drawback to this arrangement is that he will arrive at his home, see a shirt he hasn’t worn for three months because he has been out of town, and feel like he is slipping into a new look. His L.A. friends have an entirely different view. They see that he is wearing exactly the same shirt he wore last time.
His aversion to carrying luggage, eventually causing him to buy a house in L.A. so he could stock it with clothes, comes from a mildly obsessive belief in the management of his time. Standing at a baggage carousel, being jostled by passengers while scanning a hundred similar bags for a number to match his claim check, which is always misplaced, does not sit well with his logic. He has no time to be exasperated, especially if he can solve it by buying a house. This need for efficiency dictates many of his daily movements. In setting out his breakfast, he will accomplish all the tasks that occur on one side of the kitchen before starting the tasks that originate on the other side of the kitchen. He will never cross to the refrigerator for orange juice, cross back to the cabinet to get cereal, and cross back again to the refrigerator for milk. This behavior is rooted in a subterranean logic a robot programmed for efficiency might display.
Luckily, this behavior is not entirely fixed in him. It escalates during busy times and wanes during evenings and vacations. However, it translates itself into other forms so removed from the original impulse as to be unrecognizable. His attraction to Mirabelle is an abstraction of this behavior: her cleanliness and simplicity represent an economy that other women do not have.
Ray Porter parks the car and enters the house in his most efficient way. The garage door is closed by remote control while he is still in the car gathering his papers. This saves him pausing at the kitchen door to press the indoor remote. This little abbreviation is second nature to him. Once inside, he sets his papers down in the kitchen, even though they need to be in his office. He will take them later when he has to go to the office via the kitchen. There is no point taking them to the office now, as he needs to beeline to the living room to make reservations for Sunday.
He sits on the sofa, turns on the TV news, starts reading the newspaper, and simultaneously starts dialing the restaurant. He makes reservations at a small but sweet place in Beverly Hills that is on his speed dial. La Ronde, an Italian restaurant with a French name (the culinary complement to Rodeo Drive ’s French chateaus with Italian porticos tacked on), offers quiet and privacy to an older man who walks in with a twenty-eight-year-old who looks twenty-four. Then, after attending to the TV and browsing the newspaper until he is absolutely bored, he begins to do what he does best. He raises his head toward the view, which by now has transformed into sparkling white dots of light set in black velvet, and begins to think. What goes through his head are streams of logical chains, computer code, if-then situations, complicated mathematical structures, words, non sequiturs. Usually, these chains will unravel into loose ends or pointless conclusions; sometimes they will form something concrete, which he can sell. This ability to focus absolutely has brought him millions of dollars, and why this is so can never be explained to normal people, except to say that the source of his money is embedded deeply in a software string so fundamental that to change it now would be to reorganize the entire world. He is not filthy rich; his contribution is just a tiny line of early code that he had copyrighted, and that they had needed.
Tonight, these mental excursions get him nowhere and finally he gets on the phone to a Seattle girlfriend, or as he really thinks of it, a woman in Seattle who is a friend he is having sex with who is fully informed that they are never going to be a couple. “Hey.” “Hey,” she says back. “What’re you doin’?” she says. “Staring at my knees. Nothing much. You okay?” She replies, “Yeah.” He senses she’s upset over something and digs deeper. She responds by spilling out her woes – mostly work related – and he listens attentively, like John Gray in a nest of divorcées. The conversation finally runs out of gas. “Well, this is good, this is a good talk. So I’ll see you when I get back. By the way, I think I should tell you I have a date on Sunday. Thought I should let you know.” “All right, all right,” she counters, “you don’t have to tell me everything, you just don’t, just keep it to yourself.” “Shouldn’t I tell you, though?” he replies. “Shouldn’t I?”