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“You’re hired.”

“Am I now?”

“Seventy-five thousand a year. That’s good pay and it’s a final offer. I’m a legendary negotiator.”

“Do I get to think about it?”

“Sure. While you do, let me tell you that once a tie-in is set up and continues, we get our fee year after year. So in bonuses—”

“I’d make plenty of money.”

Had
he taken sportswriting as far as he could go? He had been doing it a long time. The job he just held paid more than he could earn elsewhere. He was now going to take a pay cut if he worked for a newspaper. Seventy-five thousand plus bonuses for a man out of work and about to be 50—

“It’s better than a pie in your face,” Bob Kleinman said when he discussed it with him.

“There is the moral consideration,” Doug said.

“Moral consideration?”

“Are tie-ins an overcommercialization of the sports world?”

“What is this, a talk show on PBS? You’re out of work and somebody’s offering you more money than you’ve ever earned before.”

“There is a question here.”

“The question is, Can I get you more money and what about employee benefits? I’ll negotiate with Macklin and get back to you.”

Doug was concerned about the morality, though, and needed to discuss it with someone. He felt isolated. John McCarthy was not the person, he merchandised people’s lives for profit. Jeannie, perhaps, but her field, publicity, thrived on exaggeration. With Bob Kleinman, issues of this kind sailed over his head like passing birds. Nancy. She had integrity, she understood balancing A against B. She would be able to help. He hesitated about contacting her and after several days of indecision about the job, he called her at home.

“Hello?”

“It’s Doug. How have you been?”

“What is it, Doug?”

“Are you all right?”

“Why are you calling?”

“Well, I’m not at
Sports Day
anymore. I reached the limit.”

“Really? I noticed there was no column. I assumed you were on vacation.”

“Nancy, I’ve been offered a job by Steve Macklin.”

“Doing what?”

“Creating sports tie-ins. Bob is negotiating the money, but there’s a moral question.”

“I see. And you call me?”

“You’re my person on morality.”

“Is that what I am?”

“I trust you.”

“You trust me.” She sighed. “What do you want to know?”

“I’m concerned about the morality of tie-ins.”

“And you want my opinion?”

“Please.”

“They’re a fact of life. I have clients who play in sponsored tournaments all the time. If it’s a legitimate sports event, it’s fine. If it’s a false event, we can do without it.”

“That was my sense. I just have to watch it carefully.”

“Doug, you can’t call me up and make me think about you.

“There was no one I could ask.”

“Please don’t do this again. This call is very painful for me. I can’t be out of your life and in it.”

Calling her was not wonderful for him, either—to know he was still connected to her and that he couldn’t be. But it was finished. He would not do that again.

The next day Bob Kleinman reported the results of his discussion with Macklin.

“I always considered myself tough. This guy is something. I got you a few things. The salary stays. Bonuses will be paid as the business dictates.”

“I could have told you that.”

“Hospitalization comes out of his company plan.”

“Bob—”

“You have to pin these things down. One serious debilitating problem and you can get wiped out, a slip in the bathtub, a heart attack—”

“I’m thinking of a new career and you have me under oxygen.”

“I did get you something. And from him it’s a major victory. Five suits at Brooks Brothers.”

“What?”

“I told him you couldn’t go out there in last year’s suits, that an image was required, and we made it part of the deal.”

“What is this, hit the sign and win a suit? This is so embarrassing and ridiculous.” Doug burst into laughter.

“It’s the perks of the business world. And I figured you should look nice.”

Doug was given a carpeted office with expensive oak furniture, a secretary, a lawyer in Macklin’s office assigned to take care of the legal details of the tie-ins, an Edward Hopper watercolor on loan from Macklin’s art collection, a name for his activity marked by a brass sign on his door, “Corporate Sports Promotions.” And he started to work on his first project, the junior tennis tournament. Andy was in the city for a weekend and he visited Doug’s new office with Karen. They were impressed by the surroundings. He took them to dinner at Arcadia, an East Side restaurant, for a fancier meal than they would normally have had together.

“The work has similarities to what I did before,” he said to them. “Thinking of an idea is like thinking of a column. And you have to keep up with what’s going on in sports. Except I go into that nice office every day.” He did not add, although it was apparent in the new suit and the elegance of the meal, that another difference was the money.

Doug contacted tennis officials about promising junior players, secured open dates from the Byrne Arena in the Meadowlands, noticed the president of Jersey National Bank was appearing in a television advertising campaign, and approached him with the tie-in idea. After two meetings, an agreement was reached. Doug turned the details over to the lawyer, and he had his first tie-in. Macklin was a good cheerleader; he brought out champagne and toasted Doug in the office. Doug wanted to do better than champagne. He arranged for Andy to clear the time, and when Karen was scheduled to be with him, he booked a trip to the Caribbean for a weekend. They went to the Dorado Beach Hotel in Puerto Rico, he sipped piña coladas while watching his children play tennis, they all swam together. This was the most extravagant gesture Andy and Karen had ever seen from their father. A Broeden kind of move, isn’t it?

“I have such exciting news, Dad,” Karen told him when she arrived at his apartment for the next two-week period. “I’m going on a safari.”

“A safari?”

“Kenya. Washington’s Birthday break. Jerry always wanted to do it and this year it works out best with his schedule.”

“Andy, too?” he asked.

“He can’t. He’s not off then. Mom, Jerry, and I.”

“It’s supposed to be spectacular.”

“Jerry says we should go now before it’s all gone and gets asphalted over.”

Doug had thought the situation had become stabilized, Karen hadn’t talked much about Broeden of late, nothing about the clothes designing—he presumed that was dormant—but suddenly she was back with Broeden-induced excitement. Does he sit there with a strategy map and pins? Puerto Rico for the weekend. We can top that. Try matching a safari.

Doug had the idea to expand the Stars of Tomorrow tennis event. His secretary, Laura Viona, an efficient woman in her 40s, was able to track down the names of key bank officials in other cities, and with the first tie-in as an example, by phone, and with a few trips to other cities, Doug was forming a new junior tennis circuit for tie-ins. There was not a question in his mind that he could do this work, he was doing it. After a few weeks of good results for Doug in the job, Macklin invited him to a dinner party at his home, a large apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Eighties. Among the art pieces were another Picasso, a Miró, a Johns, a Rosenquist.

“Beautiful,” he said to Macklin. “I’m trying to think what I collect. I had marbles once.”

“Keep going like this and you’ll be collecting money.”

People were guided from the cocktail area to the dining area by Macklin’s wife, Jane. A slender woman in her 50s, her hair streaked with gray, she was a silvery shadow to Macklin’s hulking presence. She circled him gracefully seeing to the needs of their guests. Among the people present were lawyers, Wall Street executives and a poised, striking woman in her 40s, next to whom Doug was seated at dinner. A slim five feet seven, with pale blue eyes, she wore a black silk dress, pearls, her straight blond hair in a pageboy, not a hair out of place. Her name was Ann Townsend. They talked about their connections to the Macklins. Ann did charity work with Jane Macklin.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“Divorced.”

“Good. If you meet an attractive man, mature, who’s never been married, you have to wonder about his general desirability.”

She said “mature.” I’ve heard that as a code word for Golden Agers. “Garden apartments for the mature.”

“I’ve had my obligatory marriage,” he said.

“I’ve been married twice.”

“Then by these standards you’re twice as healthy as I am.

Ann told him she was a fund-raiser for United Way. She had a grown son who lived in Switzerland where he worked in banking with his father, her first husband. She asked about his work and when he described Corporate Sports Promotions she said assuredly, “It will be very successful. Corporate executives are enthralled by sports.” Ann was as culturally informed as anyone he had ever met, she had been to virtually every play, gallery, museum show in New York.

“You could do listings for magazines,” he said.

“Why live here otherwise?” And he had the sense she could afford to live anywhere. She told him her family had newspapers in New England. “Old money,” she said. “Something I like about the Macklins is that they take new money and make it look like old money.”

“I’m not up to that part yet where you make the distinctions. Tell me, are you extremely rich?”

She laughed and said, “Yes.”

“That’s great.”

“It is, actually. Tell
me,
are you a fortune hunter?”

“I’m not up to that part, either.”

The general dinner discussion centered on the Middle East. One of the lawyers represented oil interests there, and, based on his reading of periodicals, Doug was able to offer a few passably intelligent comments. At the conclusion of the evening, he and Ann exchanged business cards. She called him a few days later and invited him to a New York Philharmonic concert, old money seats. They went for a late dinner to Arcadia and took a cab to her apartment on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street. With its antiques, her living room looked to him like a model room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ann dismissed her employees, a husband and wife team in their 60s, chef and housekeeper. Two people in help to take care of her needs. I’ve been a bit understaffed myself. She served wine, he came close to her on the plush sofa, kissed her, and she responded. They went into the bedroom and he thought—designer sheets and perfumed soap. The bedroom was decorated in sensual fabrics and shades of pink. On an end table was a copy of
House Beautiful
with that very bedroom on the cover. They made love in a room that was “an embodiment of romance in the 1980s.” The romantic decor aside, she was crisp and efficient in bed. She left the bed quickly to take a bath, asking him if he wouldn’t mind leaving, since she had to be up early in the morning.

They began seeing each other about two nights a week, concerts, the opera, catered dinner parties at the homes of her friends. In the second week of the relationship he bought a tuxedo. By the fourth week he had amortized it against the cost of renting. Ann preferred that he spend the night with her only on weekends and this was always at her apartment. Once, out of curiosity, she came to his place and they made love there. Afterward she said it was “very Bohemian.” My middle-class apartment? Doug was well informed, they could speak on issues and relate on that level, but she belonged to a level of New York society he had never been near. She did not drop names, she
knew
people he had only read about. In sports, it wouldn’t have been the ballplayers she knew, but the owners. Her moral purpose was the surprise to him. What she had chosen to do with her time was not shopping, which would have been his clichéd thought about the wealthy, but work for a charitable organization full time, raising money.

“You’re really a good person,” he said to her one night.

“Some of us are,” she teased.

Ann held a black-tie dinner at her apartment, sixteen guests, not a Blarney crowd. Ann was at one end of the table, Doug at the other, placed tactically next to the chairman of Trandex, a rapidly expanding computer-manufacturing company. A former college baseball player for Williams, he was interested in Doug’s latest idea for a corporate tie-in, a World Series of Softball, a nationwide competition for the best American amateur teams. They made a deal on the spot. The ease with which business could be conducted in these circles was startling to him. From what he could overhear, his was not the only deal being transacted at the dinner. Now
this
is networking.

After he made the arrangement with the Trandex man he shook his head slightly in wonderment and Ann saw this and smiled knowingly. Behind her was a floor-to-ceiling mirror, and he could see his reflection as he sat in his privately owned tuxedo, rich people in formal wear to his left and right. He imagined someone might come running into the room in umpire’s clothes, Harpo Marx would be about right, honking on his horn, a mad umpire arrived to throw him out. It seems I get to stay. All these years, such a roundabout route, and I finally fulfilled a dream my parents had for me. I look like a Republican.

C
ORRECTNESS WAS THE OVERRIDING
quality of his affair with Ann Townsend. She held herself slightly apart from him sexually. She was not an unwilling partner. She was correct and did what was “expected.” If they were at a social function during the week and sex would create a late evening, at these times he could feel her growing tense as they neared her apartment. He would kiss her, correctly, and arrange to see her on the weekend. They talked about events in the news, about people in New York, about their respective work, they did not spend much time in talking about themselves. He did not reveal truths about himself, nor did she. Somewhere behind the
House Beautiful
bedroom and the staff in service had to be fears, demons. When he tried to enter these corridors because he felt this was required for passage to another level in the relationship, she made it clear that she was not eager to be in that place. One time they were talking about marriage in general, and he offered, “It took me a long time to get over my marriage, longer than I ever thought it would. And you?” “Not long,” she said. “I was over it while we were still married. Both times—” and she changed the subject, leaving no doubt that she considered such conversation incorrect. Her deepest personal revelation was when she said one night, “I know my skills. They’re limited. What I’m best at is being poised. Since I don’t give a hoot about making money, that’s always been men’s work in my background, and since I have all the money I need, I try to use my poise to do some good.” Then she quickly moved the subject to a general discussion about jobs for women in the business world, as if she had risked losing that poise by becoming too personal.