The Essential Ellison Part 37

"How do you know?"

"I've been me a long time. I know."

"That's a pretty negative att.i.tude."

"I don't mean it to be. I mean it to be positive. I a.s.sure you, nothing would please me more than to meet you; if nothing else, you are an absolutely dynamite looking woman."

"And smart, too," she said. I chuckled. Yeah, smart, too.

"Nonetheless. It wouldn't be a good thing. See, I'm doing this article on Great Expectations and-" I laid out the background. And by so doing intimated that I was afraid to date her because I might actually get involved, which wasn't anywhere in the ground rules.

"Why don't you give me a chance?" she said.

Now let us pause for a hot second, folks. Examine that sentence, in the light of the situation. Give me a chance.

Jeezus, that's all any of us want! A shot at the Holy Grail. Just let me get near the b.l.o.o.d.y thing, let me know it exists, let me make my best move. And that is the big secret of why Great Expectations works like a Swiss watch. Remember I said there was a response I give to those who ask me why I'm so high on Great Expectations, an artificial system of meeting possible mates? Here is that response: When you need a job...when you're so G.o.ddam desperate to pay those bills, to bring a little food into the house, to be employed and not an out-of-work b.u.m that you can taste it...employers smell it on you. We are, remember, close to the veldt and the jungle. We can smell desperation on each other. We can smell the loser. And the more desperate you get, the harder it is to get that job. Employers don't want those who stink of failure. It s.h.i.+nes out of the eyes, it permeates our sweat, it reveals itself subliminally in the body language we employ all-unknowing.

And the more rejections we get, the worse gets the desperation. And the cycle continues.

The same in love. Have you ever noticed: when you're in love, or getting laid regularly, or content with your current situation, potential lovers come out of the woodwork? You can't beat them off with sticks. But when you're dumped fresh and pink and squalling out of a scene with someone, and you go back into the dating pool, you can't get anyone to respond to you no matter how hard you try. And you do try. Desperately. Frantically.

Here's the philosophy, folks: we spend most of our lives in pursuit of two ephemeral wraiths. The first is security. I promise you: there is no genuine security this side of the grave. And that's okay. If we get secure, we get stagnant. We stop reaching, we stop creating, we stop growing.

The second utterly worthless goal we grope toward is looking good.

Got to look good. Got to look sharp. Got to prevent rejection. Got to keep up that feeling of worthiness. G.o.d forbid our clothes are a little shabby, G.o.d forbid our nose leaks in public, G.o.d forbid the haircut came out lousy and we don't feel beautiful. In a society maddened by youth and looking good, to be less than scintillant is to get the dregs of life, to swim alone and unloved in the dating pool.

And so, when we cruise those parties, those singles bars, those blind dates set up by our friends, we have to wear the mask of I'm not really looking. We have to play at being all booked up, at being so popular it's only an amus.e.m.e.nt for Us to be receptive to the offers of a stranger. G.o.d forbid he or she thinks we're available. We're phonies of the worst sort. We lie with everything in us, but our bodies and our desperation give us away.

But at Great Expectations that's stricken from the record. By the single act of putting yourself on tape, you say, "I'm looking." You say, "I'm here, for good or bad; and I want something meaningful in my life. I don't want to die unloved and alone." Everyone on those tapes, popular and unpopular, attractive and plain, male and female, is stating by his or her presence: I'm open and receptive. That is personal bravery. And by destroying that barricade, the videotape dating program uses software technology to establish human relations.h.i.+ps. That's what I found out about Great Expectations and that's why I think it's sensational.

It is a direct and open way of saying Give me a chance.

Which is what D. said to me.

And so, I said we might get together for a cup of coffee and discuss it. The vulnerability everyone on those tapes willingly demonstrates is an unstated social contract that only a viper would violate. Give me a chance.

I think I dated eleven women in all. K. and I spent several evenings together and we talked. It never went any deeper physically, though I rather thought K. wanted a more permanent relations.h.i.+p. We talk occasionally, and I feel she is a friend. If Great Expectations provides nothing greater, friends.h.i.+p is no measly treasure. G. and I had a berserk weekend that ended badly. Tantrums, name-calling, hysterical scenes straight out of a bad novel. I don't see her any longer. She has problems that don't mesh with my problems at all. She's pure poison for me, and I for her. I understand she has gotten into a strong relations.h.i.+p now, and I wish her well. But stay away from my door, lady.

D. and I still date once in a while. We were compatible, and knowing her has been a delight. But I was right that she needed someone less volatile. She has two young children, she has an understandable and laudable need for order in her life and, as Steve Martin says, "I'm just sort of a rambling kind of guy." But what a terrific lady!

Of the other eight I'll only anecdote briefly.

You ask why, after the length of this historical treatise, I don't give you all the b.l.o.o.d.y and scungy details, particularly about G.? Because I find, as I come down to the crunch point, that I cannot belittle the a.s.sociations I've had with these women. They were pure in their search for the Holy Grail; I was writing an article. Only a viper violates the contract, and I'm smiling softly now as I discover I'm not as ruthless as Itold D. Iwas.

Of the other eight, my luck was no better or worse than that which would have obtained had I met these women at a party or had I been fixed up by my Aunt Sophie. One was a righteous flake who (like guys I've heard about from some of my women friends) professed undying love for me on the first date and showed up the next day with her suitcases. One was so defensive over the phone, so ready to pick a fight with me, that I backed off, saying, "Lady, you're too mean even for me!" One wanted a daddy. I ain't n.o.body's daddy. One was in her early twenties and, though I made the error of once marrying a teenage m.u.f.fin, I have tasted the fire and no longer wish to smell the smell of burning psyche, especially my own. One was smarter than I and stopped seeing me. One was dumber than your faithful correspondent and I stopped seeing her. Also, she was a McDonald's freak and if I hadn't had a vasectomy some years ago and if we'd had children, all those toadburgers would have produced brain damaged children, I'm sure of it. One was this. One was that. I was a lot of other things.

And that's my story.

Let me clean up a few last points.

The price structure of Great Expectations is somewhat fluid. The reason for that is simply that Jeff and his mother Estelle are dealing with people, and sometimes there are accommodations that have to be made.

Members.h.i.+p is two hundred dollars a year. For that sum, and for twelve months, a member has unlimited access to the tapes. Reel out as few or as many as one needs.

For the first three months you get five active choices a month. That is, you can request dates with fifteen different people. You can accept as many dates as you get requests in the pa.s.sive mode. After the first three months, to stay in the active mode, you must renew for twenty-five dollars a month. Jeff Ullman says the average number of renewals is between one and two. Actually, there isn't anything between one and two, but...particularly for women under the age of thirty-five, experience shows hardly any renewals at all.

He also says he'll discourage too many renewals, because it means the service simply isn't right for that person.

And just stop to consider: where else can you have access to so many potential companions without spending every waking hour hustling and having to go out on dates that may turn out to be nightmares, considering how little data we have when we accept a date with a stranger? And if you can't find someone suitable out of fifteen-plus possibilities in just a ninety day period, then you'd better start checking out the face you turn toward the world.

Great Expectations is now an authorized franchise dealer. They've spent over nine thousand dollars getting themselves checked out by the authorities, to establish themselves as a responsible service. A "relations.h.i.+p store" has been opened in Newport Beach by Kersh Waiters and Susan Iannitti; another will soon open in San Diego. Such services, in less sophisticated form, already exist in New York and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

And despite media vultures like John Ettinger, whose will was so weak that he dated extensively in " gathering background" for his Channel 7 doc.u.mentary (remember, I said I'd tell you about Mr. Ettinger?) and had positive experiences, nothing but positive experiences, but still had to seek out one disgruntled little lady who would whip out some bad vibes for the minicam...I see operations like Great Expectations as a breakthrough in human relations.

Mr. Ettinger understood that a rave notice like this article would not be nearly as t.i.tillating as a report that included a shadowy undercurrent of duplicity and weirdness. So he found a young woman who had been offered a cut rate members.h.i.+p-apparently because she couldn't afford the going price structure-don't forget, this is a business, not a charity-and she revealed herself on the TV screen by saying she had saved the two hundred bucks to buy new drapes, so for the money she found a man and decorated the apartment. Well, that's nice, too.

Great Expectations will not be right for everyone.

It takes some courage to sit there and say Give me a chance.

Maybe some day again, I'll have the courage to say it.

Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Lat.i.tude 38 54' N, Longitude 77 00' 13" W When Moby d.i.c.k awoke one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed of kelp into a monstrous Ahab.

Crawling in stages from the soggy womb of sheets, he stumbled into the kitchen and ran water into the teapot. There was lye in the corner of each eye. He put his head under the spigot and let the cold water rush around his cheeks.

Dead bottles littered the living room. One hundred and eleven empty bottles that had contained Robitussin and Romilar-CF. He padded through the debris to the front door and opened it a crack. Daylight a.s.saulted him. "Oh, G.o.d," he murmured, and closed his eyes to pick up the folded newspaper from the stoop.

Once more in dusk, he opened the paper. The headline read: BOLIVIAN AMBa.s.sADOR FOUND MURDERED, and the feature story heading column one detailed the discovery of the amba.s.sador's body, badly decomposed, in an abandoned refrigerator in an empty lot in Secaucus, New Jersey.

The teapot whistled.

Naked, he padded toward the kitchen; as he pa.s.sed the aquarium he saw that terrible fish was still alive, and this morning whistling like a bluejay, making tiny streams of bubbles that rose to burst on the sc.u.mmy surface of the water. He paused beside the tank, turned on the light and looked in through the drifting eddies of stringered algae. The fish simply would not die. It had killed off every other fish in the tank-prettier fish, friendlier fish, livelier fish, even larger and more dangerous fish-had killed them all, one by one, and eaten out the eyes. Now it swam the tank alone, ruler of its worthless domain.

He had tried to let the fish kill itself, trying every form of neglect short of outright murder by not feeding it; but the pale, worm-pink devil even thrived in the dark and filth-laden waters.

Now it sang like a bluejay. He hated the fish with a pa.s.sion he could barely contain.

He sprinkled flakes from a plastic container, grinding them between thumb and forefinger as experts had advised him to do it, and watched the multi-colored granules of fish meal, roe, milt, brine shrimp, day-fly eggs, oatflour and egg yolk ride on the surface for a moment before the detestable fish-face came snapping to the top to suck them down. He turned away, cursing and hating the fish. It would not die. Like him, it would not die.

In the kitchen, bent over the boiling water, he understood for the first time the true status of his situation. Though he was probably nowhere near the rotting outer edge of sanity, he could smell its foulness on the wind, coming in from the horizon; and like some wild animal rolling its eyes at the scent of carrion and the feeders thereon, he was being driven closer to lunacy every day, just from the smell.

He carried the teapot, a cup and two tea bags to the kitchen table and sat down. Propped open in a plastic stand used for keeping cookbooks handy while mixing ingredients, the Mayan Codex translations remained unread from the evening before. He poured the water, dangled the tea bags in the cup and tried to focus his attention. The references to Itzamna, the chief divinity of the Maya pantheon, and medicine, his chief sphere of influence, blurred. Ixtab, the G.o.ddess of suicide, seemed more apropos for this morning, this deadly terrible morning. He tried reading, but the words only went in, nothing happened to them, they didn't sing. He sipped tea and found himself thinking of the chill, full circle of the Moon. He glanced over his shoulder at the kitchen clock. Seven forty-four.

He shoved away from the table, taking the half-full cup of tea, and went into the bedroom. The impression of his body, where it had lain in tortured sleep, still dented the bed. There were clumps of blood-matted hair clinging to the manacles that he had riveted to metal plates in the headboard. He rubbed his wrists where they had been scored raw, slopping a little tea on his left forearm. He wondered if the Bolivian amba.s.sador had been a piece of work he had tended to the month before.

His wrist.w.a.tch lay on the bureau. He checked it. Seven forty-six. Slightly less than an hour and a quarter to make the meeting with the consultation service. He went into the bathroom, reached inside the shower stall and turned the handle till a fine needle-spray of icy water smashed the tiled wall of the stall. Letting the water run, he turned to the medicine cabinet for his shampoo. Taped to the mirror was an Ouchless Telfa finger bandage on which two lines had been neatly typed, in capitals: THE WAY YOU WALK IS Th.o.r.n.y, MY SON,THROUGH NO FAULT OF YOUR OWN.

Then, opening the cabinet, removing a plastic bottle of herbal shampoo that smelled like friendly, deep forests, Lawrence Talbot resigned himself to the situation, turned and stepped into the shower, the merciless ice-laden waters of the Arctic pounding against his tortured flesh.

Suite 1544 of the Tishman Airport Center Building was a men's toilet. He stood against the wall opposite the door labeled MEN and drew the envelope from the inner breast pocket of his jacket. The paper was of good quality, the envelope crackled as he thumbed up the flap and withdrew the single-sheet letter inside. It was the correct address, the correct floor, the correct suite. Suite 1544 was a men's toilet, nonetheless. Talbot started to turn away. It was a vicious joke; he found no humor in the situation; not in his present circ.u.mstances.

He took one step toward the elevators.

The door to the men's room s.h.i.+mmered, fogged over like a winds.h.i.+eld in winter, and re-formed. The legend on the door had changed. It now read: INFORMATION a.s.sOCIATES.

Suite 1544 was the consultation service that had written the invitational letter on paper of good quality in response to Talbot's mail inquiry responding to a noncommittal but judiciously-phrased advertis.e.m.e.nt in Forbes.

He opened the door and stepped inside. The woman behind the teak reception desk smiled at him, and his glance was split between the dimples that formed, and her legs, very nice, smooth legs, crossed and framed by the kneehole of the desk. "Mr. Talbot?"

He nodded. "Lawrence Talbot."

She smiled again. "Mr. Demeter will see you at once, sir. Would you like something to drink? Coffee? A soft drink?"

Talbot found himself touching his jacket where the envelope lay in an inner pocket. "No. Thank you."

She stood up, moving toward an inner office door, as Talbot said, "What do you do when someone tries to flush your desk?" He was not trying to be cute. He was annoyed. She turned and stared at him. There was silence in her appraisal, nothing more.

"Mr. Demeter is right through here, sir."

She opened the door and stood aside. Talbot walked past her, catching a scent of mimosa.

The inner office was furnished like the reading room of an exclusive men's club. Old money. Deep quiet. Dark, heavy woods. A lowered ceiling of acoustical tile on tracks, concealing a crawl s.p.a.ce and probably electrical conduits. The pile rug of oranges and burnt umbers swallowed his feet to the ankles. Through a wall-sized window could be seen not the city that lay outside the building but a panoramic view of Hanauma Bay, on the Koko Head side of Oahu. The pure aquamarine waves came in like undulant snakes, rose like cobras, crested out white, tunneled and struck like asps at the blazing yellow beach. It was not a window; there were no windows in the office. It was a photograph. A deep, real photograph that was neither a projection nor a hologram. It was a wall looking out on another place entirely. Talbot knew nothing about exotic flora, but he was certain that the tall, razor-edge-leafed trees growing right down to beach's boundary were identical to those pictured in books depicting the Carboniferous period of the Earth before even the saurians had walked the land. What he was seeing had been gone for a very long time.

"Mr. Talbot. Good of you to come. John Demeter."

He came up from a wingback chair, extended his hand. Talbot took it. The grip was firm and cool. "Won't you sit down," Demeter said. "Something to drink? Coffee, perhaps, or a soft drink?" Talbot shook his head; Demeter nodded dismissal to the receptionist; she closed the door behind her, firmly, smoothly, silently.

Talbot studied Demeter in one long appraisal as he took the chair opposite the wingback. Demeter was in his early fifties, had retained a full and rich mop of hair that fell across his forehead in gray waves that clearly had not been touched up. His eyes were clear and blue, his features regular and jovial, his mouth wide and sincere. He was trim. The dark-brown business suit was hand-tailored and hung well. He sat easily and crossed his legs, revealing black hose that went above the s.h.i.+ns. His shoes were highly polished.

"That's a fascinating door, the one to your outer office," Talbot said.

"Do we talk about my door?" Demeter asked.

"Not if you don't want to. That isn't why I came here."

"I don't want to. So let's discuss your particular problem."

"Your advertis.e.m.e.nt. I was intrigued."

Demeter smiled rea.s.suringly. "Four copywriters worked very diligently at the proper phraseology. "

"It brings in business."

"The right kind of business. "

"You slanted it toward smart money. Very reserved. Conservative portfolios, few glamours, steady climbers. Wise old owls."

Demeter steepled his fingers and nodded, an understanding uncle. "Directly to the core, Mr. Talbot: wise old owls."

"I need some information. Some special, certain information. How confidential is your service, Mr. Demeter?"

The friendly uncle, the wise old owl, the rea.s.suring businessman understood all the edited s.p.a.ces behind the question. He nodded several times. Then he smiled and said, "That is a clever door I have, isn't it? You're absolutely right, Mr. Talbot."

"A certain understated eloquence."

"One hopes it answers more questions for our clients than it poses."

Talbot sat back in the chair for the first time since he had entered Demeter's office. "I think I can accept that."

"Fine. Then why don't we get to specifics. Mr. Talbot, you're having some difficulty dying. Am I stating the situation succinctly?"

"Gently, Mr. Demeter."

"Always. "

"Yes. You're on the target."

"But you have some problems, some rather unusual problems."

"Inner ring. "

Demeter stood up and walked around the room, touching an astrolabe on a bookshelf, a cut-gla.s.s decanter on a sideboard, a sheaf of the London Times' held together by a wooden pole. "We are only information specialists, Mr. Talbot. We can put you on to what you need, but the effectation is your problem."

"If I have the modus operandi, I'll have no trouble taking care of getting it done."

"You've put a little aside."

" A little."

"Conservative portfolio? A few glamours, mostly steady climbers?"

"Bull's eye, Mr. Demeter."

Demeter came back and sat down again. " All right, then. If you'll take the time very carefully to write out precisely what you want-I know generally, from your letter, but I want this precise, for the contract-I think I can undertake to supply the data necessary to solving your problem. "

"At what cost?"

"Let's decide what it is you want, first, shall we?"

Talbot nodded. Demeter reached over and pressed a call b.u.t.ton on the smoking stand beside the wingback. The door opened. "Susan, would you show Mr. Talbot to the sanctum and provide him with writing materials." She smiled and stood aside, waiting for Talbot to follow her. "And bring Mr. Talbot something to drink if he'd like it...some coffee? A soft drink, perhaps?" Talbot did not respond to the offer.

"I might need some time to get the phraseology down just right. I might have to work as diligently as your copywriters. It might take me a while. I'll go home and bring it in tomorrow."