Right Livelihoods Read online

  “Uh, actually, the viola is under the bed.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad.”

  “Well . . . ”

  “But you’re still trying to write music?”

  “Not really. I guess I’m—”

  “What are you doing, then?”

  “I’m in pharmaceutical sales.”

  It hadn’t occurred to her before that he could be some kind of Eric impostor. His voice was similar but maybe a little huskier and flatter, with fewer nasal resonances. The voice of Eric if he’d put on forty pounds. The thought disturbed her.

  “Have you been smoking?”

  “Not that I know of, Ellie.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I haven’t been smoking at all. But why do you ask?”

  “Your voice sounds different.”

  “Maybe when you haven’t talked to someone in eleven or twelve years—”

  “I’m going to ask you some questions that only Eric could answer, okay?”

  “Ellie, are you—”

  “What color was the sweater I bought you?”

  “I don’t remember any sweater that you bought me.”

  “That’s correct. And what was my favorite brand of cigarettes?”

  “Ellie, we’re not going to do this.”

  “Eric, if we don’t I’ll start worrying.”

  “You’re sounding a little distraught to me, Ellie.”

  “Cigarettes, Eric. Or I’m going to have to—”

  If she were to remember the conversation in its best light, she would remember it ending with an effectively deployed feminine ultimatum. But in fact it didn’t end as shown. What happened next was that her boyfriend from college, who no longer resembled the romantic violist of her recollection, interrupted her, began to lecture her—“Ellie, I’m a little concerned about the way you’re talking right now”—commencing to give a long, not entirely related motivational speech about pharmaceutical sales, and how in pharmaceutical sales, when you were about to “close the deal” with the “mark,” you had to read the client “just the right way.” You had to look deep into her eyes, Eric said, to see the layers of frailty everywhere in her. This moist expression of frailty was where she was “unfinished,” Eric observed, where she still needed something, where she still had some residual bit of longing that hadn’t been wiped out. This was the point at which pharmaceutical sales became important, Eric said. “Ellie, I know I’m not doing what I thought I was going to do back then, and I know I’m not doing anything very memorable, but one thing I have learned how to do is read the client. I can tell you the truth about a person from twenty yards away. I can see the little things that are hidden.” There was only this dollar-store world, with its petroleum-based geegaws, awaiting the flood, and in this world there was just Eric and his mark, the doctor or druggist who was going to realize that he really needed to prescribe or stockpile a virility drug or a treatment for male-pattern baldness, and he needed to do it now.

  Ellie Knight-Cameron had now been awake many hours. This was the essence of being alive. She intended to investigate one last person, namely Maureen Jones, who was in charge of the mail room at K&K. The impartial observer might have imagined that the mail room was not an important division of the K&K organization. He or she might infer from Ellie’s investigation that the mail room was somehow an afterthought in the important day-to-day activities of Kolodny & Kolodny. But this was incorrect. The mail room, which was not a room but a mail alcove, was where the contracts were sent out and where they were received, later to be signed and notarized by relevant parties. It also dispatched holiday cards and gifts.

  Ellie catalogued the facts she knew about Maureen.

  Maureen was the one and only African American employee of Kolodny & Kolodny.

  Naturally, Ellie had been loath to conclude that Maureen was guilty of crimes relating to the suggestion box. She had avoided this supposition. Ellie had always imagined herself sensitive to the needs and wishes of people regardless of race, creed, or sexual orientation. In her elementary school, for example. There were some Native American children. She had this one friend, Deanna, a Native American girl. Her folks were poor, even by the standards of a hippie girl whose own parents barely worked. Ellie liked Deanna a lot. She was gentle. Deanna wore braids and big homely glasses. The one unusual thing about Deanna was that she never talked. Her parents rarely did either. Still, their friendship lasted for a time. Then, suddenly, it was the middle school years, and you know what happens then. A big wave comes and washes over the sun-dappled beach where all the kids are standing, and the kids are sucked into the sea, flung down into the murky backwash, upended, cast upon the rocks, battered, concussed. Some never emerge from the rip. Some are so badly shaken that they will never go near the water again. Some are proud, some are brought low, some forget everything that befell them. Of the vast majority of kids you know or love, you suddenly realize you know nothing at all. Now that these individuals have the ocean of hormones calling to them, lighting up their neglected circuitry so that their bodies look like the pink physiognomic overlays from old encyclopedias, all is different. Through the actions of this middle school tidal wave, completely different kids have been washed down to your section of the beach, with different needs and desperations, and you’re stuck with them, at least until college.

  To put it another way: Deanna, the Native American kid, developed other interests. Her interests no longer included Ellie Knight-Cameron, or Ellie Knight-Cameron’s collection of paper dolls, or Ellie’s 45 rpm vinyl records of soft rock favorites. This all became apparent one night with her at a convenience store. At this store, which was more inconvenient than convenient, there were older boys and convertibles. There was strategic shoplifting of slushies and pornography, and some use of the word pussy.

  Therefore, Maureen Jones needed to be dealt with thoughtfully. Maureen was stuck in an office full of older, bitchy white ladies. Maureen had to drive all the way over from the other side of town, from an area now ringed entirely by corporate headquarters in foul glass boxes, companies that had abandoned New York City for the advantageous tax policies of Connecticut. Maureen drove across this color barrier into the suburban part of Stamford, where the white people were. It was a trip Ellie now had to make in the reverse. And this was how she came to be camped out in front of a modest town house tucked in beside the projects. A stone’s throw from the homely Amtrak station, five minutes from the backwash of Long Island Sound.

  Having made it all the way here, having parked across from the residence in question, Ellie found, however, that she was unable to knock on the door. She was afraid to knock; she was even afraid to get out of the car. She’d locked all the doors. It was after midnight now, and tomorrow was another workday. It would not be the right thing to do, to wake Maureen Jones in order to make a citizen’s arrest. Well, maybe it was the right thing to do. Maybe the right thing to do was to call the police and barge into the building, wake Maureen Jones, and then quickly get on a plane back to Arizona, where her mother was to enter a halfway house.

  Ellie had been staked out for a couple of hours, trying to vanish into her contoured driver’s seat with meager lower-back support, when a sinister-looking man who probably wasn’t sinister at all came walking along the avenue toward Maureen Jones’s house. He was wearing clothes of astonishing bagginess. Everything about the bagginess of his outfit was meant to facilitate the concealment of contraband items. Or not. Ellie Knight-Cameron watched the man look both ways before crossing the street. He strode to the door of Jones’s house, knocked, was admitted, and disappeared inside.

  Ellie would grant that one man, even at this particularly late hour, was not a conspiracy. But this man was followed by another—a younger, shorter man who, when he was cascaded with the glare of streetlight, appeared to be sporting ornamental braids. This second man, whose garb was an athletic warm-up outfit, he too was admitted into Maureen Jones’s residence. Not fifteen minutes passed befor
e a third appeared, a grizzled older fellow with a mane of impressive dreadlocks. This man must have been an elder statesman of the movement. Although Ellie Knight-Cameron did not have night-vision goggles or any other sophisticated surveillance items, she believed nonetheless that she saw this third man make some kind of eccentric hand gesture that proved him worthy of admittance.

  Finally, a woman was allowed into Jones’s house. The situation was no different from those described above except that now a woman was involved. In no single case could Ellie see who was opening the door and admitting these strangers. Yet she could see that people were in fact entering the Jones residence. They would sidle up to the front door, knock once, perform the jazz hands gesture, the door would swing back, and the stranger would then slip into the house.

  What exactly did Maureen Jones’s organization believe in? Ellie reviewed. She paged through the suggestions in order. She had saved them, of course, and here they were, in her lap, like artifacts of antiquity:

  (A) If they’re going to close lanes on the parkway, they ought to actually repair the goddamned road. (B) You ought to throw this fucking coffee machine out the window and run over it with a car. (C) Worldwide revolution now. Throw off your chains. (D) All of you should be lined up and shot.

  Considered in this way, there was a menacing progression to the Kolodny & Kolodny suggestions. In the first suggestion, the government was being called into question, the ability of the government to govern, to make decisions for the public good. In the second, the office itself was being castigated, as well as its daily diet of events: coffee breaks, luncheons, and so forth. In the third suggestion, Ellie thought, the conspiracy was calling upon the disgruntled populace to overthrow the existing order. And in the fourth, armed struggle began.

  In the last moment before the necessity for action propelled her, Ellie had a disturbing thought. Wasn’t it possible that a person or persons in the office was colluding with Maureen Jones? Why hadn’t she considered it before? Any number of alliances could figure in this conspiratorial model, alliances comprised of employees present and past: Maureen and Angie, Maureen and Dolly, Maureen and Bonnie, Maureen and Astrid, Maureen and Neil Rubinstein, or even Maureen and Duane himself. Wasn’t Duane’s surname uncomfortably close to the world collude? And if two of the K&K family, why not three of them? What about Maureen and Angie and Dolly? Were there occasions when the three of them had appeared to be whispering conspiratorially? And if three, why not four? With four people, you know, they’d have a lock on office communications.

  In the stillness of the street, Ellie felt flushed, confused, ashamed, abandoned by the commonplaces of the day. The reliable items of her adopted landscape, the material things before her—the sickly ginkgo trees of the block, stray cats, a rumbling garbage truck—were not as they appeared. There was a menace to objects and situations that were anything but menacing. She knew at once the likelihood of calamity, as would any good employee of K&K: great vengeful floods, tornadoes, explosions, acts of God. In the desert landscape of this Knight-Cameron fever, men and women lurched thirstily, disaffiliated from their inamoratas. She had never been as alone as this, as condemned. Maybe Eric was right, and she had not learned to read the client, the him or her who was not trying to take from Ellie what little she had, what modicum of serenity she had carved out for herself, thousands of miles from home. Maybe everyone was not trying to take her few possessions and run her out into the street; maybe every man she encountered was not trying to insult her person; maybe the bulk of those she encountered in the dark years of the war on terror were also innocents, people who were just trying to make an honest living and put by a little cash in case of dire accident. She blamed Duane and she blamed Chris Grady. Someone had to be blamed. Because injustice persisted well after the avengers of injustice were rendered impotent by exhaustion, scandal, prescription abuse, and appearances on the talk-show circuit.

  In the end, it was this notion of injustice that enabled her to climb from her Dodge Omni. Injustice, and impatience, and a self-destructive need to finish a project even if it was a bad idea. She reeled onto the streets of Stamford, blushing horribly, knees weak, to charge with malicious crimes those persons who would threaten her peaceable office life. Those who would oppress the wage-earners of the new world order. Into the light weaved Ellie Knight-Cameron, lover of minor league baseball and the tango, delusional thinker, energetic misreader of signs and symbols, bound to collide, if not collude, with the mystery of all mysteries, which is the total absence of mystery in a market economy.

  In due course, despite misgivings, she reached the front door of the Jones residence. And having girded herself, she was ready to knock. It was some kind of cheap hollow-core door, the sort you expect from a bankrupt home renovation chain, or from a stage set. Ellie Knight-Cameron knocked on it with the force of a patriot.

  Merriment was taking place inside. She could hear merriment within. Was it possible that people could find pleasure in causing others hurt and dismay? Because Ellie was hurt and dismayed, and she intended to get satisfaction. It was as if they were laughing about it all. Ellie knocked again, and she heard the giddy excitement in the room diminish for a moment.

  Would she be able to go through with it? Would she be able to face with equanimity the perils of revelation? Would there be guns? Should she call the authorities? Before she could change her mind, which she was dying to do, the door swung back, and there was a cry, an éclat, and the cry was enormous, enough to trouble the curtains nearby, up and down the block. And the cry was the word SURPRISE! “Surprise!” they called. “Surprise! Surprise!”

  The inside of the Jones residence, she saw, was modest, as modest as the exterior, and it was neatly appointed, and there were streamers leading from the tops of the lamp shades to the curtain rods above, and then again from one of the chairs all the way over to the windowsill, and there was a little dog, a yapper, and even the dog had a ribbon around its neck, and there were some children, toddlers, wearing conical hats, and there were a lot of black faces, African American faces, and all of these faces had evidently been enjoying themselves or at least they were enjoying themselves until they got a good look at Ellie Knight-Cameron. Then something imperceptible vanished from their expressions. Because Ellie Knight-Cameron was not who they thought would be coming through the door when they shouted surprise.

  “Can we help you?” said the woman holding open the door.

  “I’m looking for Maureen Jones,” Ellie said.

  “She’s not here.”

  “I’m betting she is there.” Only slowly did the horrible truth dawn in Ellie Knight-Cameron. It worked its way up her esophagus. The revelation.

  “Who are you?” the woman said.

  “I work with Maureen.”

  “Well, if you work with her, then you know she’s still at work.”

  “I don’t know any such thing, because I saw her leave work this afternoon, early, along with everyone else.”

  “She’s still at work.”

  “I don’t think I believe you!”

  This argument might have continued escalating, had not Maureen herself happened upon the scene. Yes, Maureen Jones was soon present. As the above exchange was taking place, Maureen was in the midst of yanking her purse out of the passenger seat, locking the car door, and taking her sweet time. Maureen was coming up the street. What she was coming up the street in was a uniform, and the uniform was of her second job, her night shift, where two nights a week she worked as a cashier at a certain fast-food enterprise. And the color of the uniform was teal, and the function of the uniform was to render Maureen Jones selfless, indistinguishable, objectified. Before the situation between Ellie and the woman at the door of Maureen’s house had been resolved, Maureen herself did have the opportunity to mediate, just as the cry of Surprise was altered and became instead the cry of Happy birthday! Happy birthday, Maureen!

  Maureen began laughing in an easygoing and careless way that was impossible not to see as
beautiful, even moving, because Maureen, despite the fact that she didn’t smile easily, had a sweet smile, at least until Maureen realized that Ellie Knight-Cameron from K&K, her grim day job, was standing on her doorstep at some forbidding hour of the morning. Ellie Knight-Cameron was meanwhile apprehending the facts, namely that she, Maureen Jones, mother of two, was working two jobs, and Maureen was somewhat unhappy that this bit of information was now in wider distribution. But before Ellie could say anything, before she could defend herself about turning up on the doorstep of Maureen Jones’s residence, before Ellie could say anything about it, Maureen was inviting her inside. And so the conclusion was delayed.

  Which conclusion? The one in which Ellie was herself the only possible author of the suggestions? And if she was the only person who could have failed to see this, if it was evident to even the most casual observer that she was both protagonist and antagonist, what did this tell us about the way we lived in those days?

  III

  The Albertine Notes

  The first time I got high all I did was make sure these notes came out all right. I mean, I wanted the girl at the magazine to offer me work again, and that was going to happen only if the story sparkled. There wasn’t much work then because of the explosion. The girl at the magazine was saying, “Look, you don’t have to like the assignment, just do the assignment. If you don’t want it, there are people lined up behind you.” And she wasn’t kidding. There really were people lined up. Out in reception. An AI receptionist, in a makeshift lobby, in a building on Staten Island, the least affected precinct of the beleaguered City of New York. Writers spilling into the foyer, shouting at the robot receptionist. All eager to show off their clips.

  The editor was called Tara. She had turquoise hair. She looked like a girl I knew when I was younger. Where was that girl now? Back in the go-go days you could yell a name at the TV and it would run a search on the identities associated with that name. For a price. Credit card records, toll plaza visits, loan statements, you set the parameters. My particular Web video receiver, in fact, had a little pop-up window in the corner of the image that said, Want to see what your wife is doing right now? Was I a likely customer for this kind of snooping based on past purchases? Anyway, recreational detection and character assassination, that was all before Albertine.