at First Sight (2008) (4 page)

Big decision now: Should I hang around, accept her praise, make a pest of myself as I tried to weasel my way into her life, looking lik
e j
ust another horny asshole, or should I treat this magnificent water rescue as if it were just a minor part of my heroic existence? Option number two was obviously my best choice.

"God, I was so panicked," she said. "You risked your life to save me. How can I thank you?"

"No problem," I replied in my deepest voice. "Glad I was around to help out." Then I turned away and strode purposefully toward my beach chair. This was no easy feat in the deep sand, because Brian had trashed my abs. They were killing me and I was out of breath, attempting to hold in my aching gut while rolling my shoulders--the old jock walk from high school. I trudged my heroic, shark-fighter ass up the beach, sprawled on my lounge chair, closed my eyes, and waited.

Ten minutes passed.

"Hey, thanks." Chandler loomed over me. I looked up. He was holding out his whole hand this time. "Paige told me what you did . . . "

Paige . . . my goddess was named Paige. There was perfection in those five letters. I had saved somebody named Paige from a desperate shark attack, an atrocious mauling in the jaws of death.

It turned out later that nobody had actually seen a shark. The guy on the beach who had yelled admitted that he'd only thought he'd seen one. But, nonetheless, there could have been one, and I did offer myself as a human sacrifice to protect her, so come on, fair's fair.

"Will you join us? Can we buy you a drink?" Chandler asked.

"Yeah, sure, why not?" Forced casualness. But as I walked over to their sun chairs, my heart was pounding like a blown engine with
a b
ad cam.

"I'm Chandler Ellis. I think I mentioned, this is my wife, Paige." Paige Ellis. Her name was music. I shook her hand . . . It was cool and soft, delicate and perfect as a bird's wing.

Then it got very tricky.

My job was to try and focus on Chandler, not Paige. No mean accomplishment. I couldn't gawk at this guy's lovely wife as every fiber of my being longed to. Instead, I acted polite but indifferent as she retold the story of my water rescue, my heroic act of sacrifice. I did a relatively effective "Aw shucks"--even had a beach full of sand to dig my big toe into. As she told the story, she embellished it slightly. "Chick could have been killed," she gushed. "He swam directly behind me so the shark couldn't get to me."

"I don't think there was really a shark, Paige," I demurred, modestly.

"But we don't know that, silly," she persisted, laughing, showin
g e
ven, perfect teeth. "At the time, we both thought it was there."

"I agree," Chandler said. "To do that for a complete stranger--t
o r
isk yourself like that--was pretty damn heroic."

Of course I didn't tell him I was hopelessly in love with his wife. Instead, I engaged him in conversation, almost completely ignoring Paige, who sat with her gorgeous legs tucked under her, listening and sipping a second Mai Tai--two cherries, of course.

Chandler Ellis was named Chandler because he was the nephew of the late Otis Chandler. Otis was a big deal in L
. A
. The Chandler family owned the Los Angeles Times before they sold it to the Tribune for about a gazillion dollars. Chandler's aunt had founded the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the main theater in L
. A
. The Ellises wer
e a
ll involved in managing the family fortune, except, that is, for Chandler.

Chandler had left the corporation behind to live in Charlotte, North Carolina, on a fat trust fund. He had a master's degree in special ed and taught learning disabled children. The more I heard about this guy, the more I hated him. Among his growing list of uncommon assets: He was charming, handsome, filthy rich, and, now it appears, loaded with the milk of human kindness. The next thing was probably going to be an organ donation to a dying orphan. Some things are so saccharine they defy the palate. Chandler Ellis had me in glucose overload.

But I choked all this down. I learned that Paige was a marathon runner and had competed in Boston last year. She was also a developing artist--landscapes and still lifes. But for now, that was just a sideline until her paintings started selling. In the meantime, like Chandler, she also taught school. Kindergarten. Drawing with finger-paints, cut-out pictures from construction paper . . . the whole plastic-flower-frog-terrarium-hamster-cage curriculum.

Paige and Chandler were both devoted to teaching and to each other. They had only been married a year and were desperately in love. That much was obvious to anybody who looked, and I was most certainly looking. She held his hand when he talked and looked at him with something close to hero worship, even though, I remind you, I was the one who had dangled my balls for a shark's meal.

He explained to me how the learning disabled children he taught could lead normal lives if he could just give them the tools the
y n
eeded to survive. He said we had to support them and nourish their inner concept of well-being. Precious shit like that.

Then we finally got around to the old dot-corn wizard. Selling Bruckheimer movies and Britney Spears CDs over the Internet seemed like pretty shallow fare by comparison.

I worried my way through the afternoon, hoping Evelyn wouldn't become curious and wander down in her thong to see what had happened to me. But she was obviously way too involved in the Ab Wars up by the pool.

Chandler and I set up a golf game together for the next day--just him and me.

"I'm glad to finally get to play with somebody who can keep the ball on the fairway," he joked, grinning lovingly at his wife.

"Oh, Chandler, stop it, I'm not that bad," she said, slapping him playfully on the arm as she held his hand.

This was some steep mountain I was about to climb.

Chapter
5

DURING OUR GOLF GAME, I LEARNED THAT CHANDLER Ellis had been the walk-on quarterback for the Georgetown University football team in the late nineties. He'd set a passing record for Division I-AA colleges, which was still standing. Just one more on a growing list of things I despised about him.

Naturally, he creamed me at golf.

But one good thing came of it. He suggested we get the girls together and all go out to dinner. By "the girls," he meant Evelyn, Melissa, and Paige.

No fucking way Melissa was gonna get included. The last thing I needed was my angry sixteen-year-old sitting there, reflecting light from studs punched through every corner of her face. Melissa would go out of her way to humiliate us. She would use abusive language, o
r t
alk about Big Mac, tell everybody what a great lay he is. Believe me, I've been sucked into these things before. She's impossible.

She wouldn't want to go anyway. She was much happier sitting in the room, talking to McKenna on the hotel phone, eating up my shriveling bank reserves at four dollars a minute on a trans-Pac line.

Besides, it was going to be hard enough just to get Evelyn to agree. Evelyn had a very select group of friends, and they all came with rich older husbands and Gold's Gym memberships.

But I had a plan to make it happen. We had just come up from the pool when I told her about my golf game with Chandler and his invitation for us to all go to dinner.

"Why the fuck would I want to go out with them?" she said, starting this discussion with enough attitude to open at the Apollo Theater.

"It's okay with me," I said. "I didn't want to go, either."

That slowed her down. If I didn't want to go, then maybe she ought to. That was the dynamic our marriage had taken.

"Who are these people again?" she asked.

We were in our suite on the eighth floor of the hotel. The eight
h f
loor is the Club Floor. You need a special key to get up there in the elevator. Evelyn loved that, loved having that special key. It validated her.

The Club Floor cost a few hundred extra a day. Did I mention I
was on the verge of a fucking bankruptcy? Naturally, with bankers circling me like hungry coyotes, money should be of no consequence.

Our top-floor room was one of the best at the Four Seasons, up front
,
overlooking the ocean. Great views, great size, great sitting roo
m w
here Melissa bitched and moaned because she had to sleep on the pull-out sofa. I'd been told by my wife that the room was a bargain at twenty-seven hundred a night. Can you believe this?

Anyway, after I mentioned the dinner invitation, Evelyn started pacing and thinking. She was naked, just out of the shower. Her slick, still damp, sun-reddened body the picture of glowing health. My body still felt like it had gone through a meat tenderizer.

"Chandler and Paige Ellis . . . " she said reflectively. "They're not part of the Ellis family, are they? The Chandlers and Ellises? That bunch?"

I should pause here to tell you that Evelyn studied the society pages like a cloistered monk reading scripture.

I knew that the Ellis name probably wouldn't fly past unnoticed. "Ellises? Who are the Ellises?" Me, acting dumb.

"Who are the Ellises? Well, if they're the same Ellises, they're the other half of the Otis Chandler family, the cousins. If this guy's first name is Chandler, it's probably the same family." She was pacing around, then spun suddenly, walked out onto the balcony, and looked down at the grounds, chewing on her cuticle, thinking.

I probably don't need to remind you that she was absolutely buck-ass naked and was now in full view of everyone down by the pool. Seconds later, I heard somebody whistle and some guy started shouting at her.

Finally, after giving them a good show, she turned and walked slowly back into the room.

"I'm going to check with Lea in the Club Lounge and see if she knows who they are."

Well, of course they were the Ellises and so Evelyn went from hating the idea of going out to dinner with them to hating her entire hernia-busting closet full of clothes, which I'd lugged in and out of two airports all the way from L
. A
. She said she needed new gear for the dinner, so, armed with the Amex Black Card, she was off to the Wailea Center, where I probably don't have to tell you, the designer shops are a tad pricey.

That night, the four of us, sans Melissa, had dinner at Correlli's, an Italian restaurant up the coast from the hotel. The restaurant opened onto a beautiful beach. A light wind flickered candles in hurricane lamps. There were pictures of thirties-style gangsters on the walls, along with shots of every cheese-ball celebrity who had ever wandered in there by mistake.

Of course, because of their social clout, there was a picture of Chandler and Paige from last year--the honeymoon shot. The maitre d, a guy who looked like his name should have been Guido but turned out to be Max, asked them both to sign it. They did, and he re-hung it in a place of prominence, up front.

Then a strange thing happened. My wife and the Ellises seemed to hit it off. I'm always surprised when this occurs because, in my mind, Evelyn's flaws so outweigh her good points that I tend to focus exclusively on them.

But on a good day, when she's trying to be nice, Evelyn can be quite charming, and like I said, from the neck down, you can't find a more toney-looking woman. This evening, in preparation for our dinner with the Ellises, she had dressed way down. Gone was th
e p
ush-up water bra, the Lycra pantsuit, and crop-top, navel-baring ensemble. Her show-stopping cleavage was modestly out of view. In its place, new duds: a tasteful, silk Perry Ellis blouse; tailored Dior slacks; jeweled Manolo Blahnik sandals. Grand total: $1,793, plus tax. But at least the outfit wasn't one of her tit-baring, all-hanging-out-and-inyour-face specials like the ones she usually wears.

Evelyn and Paige chatted about Paige's art and the children she and Chandler were planning to eventually have. It came out that Paige's wedding and engagement rings were being resized because they had almost come off in the water two days ago, clearing up that mystery.

"It's amazing. She takes off her rings and all of a sudden, every unattached Romeo on the beach thinks it's his cue to turn into a complete ass," Chandler said, shaking his head.

"Unbelievable," I agreed, sheepishly.

Evelyn and I both told lies about Melissa . . . said she was planning on college in two years. But after looking at her last two report cards, the only way I could see her getting into a university was if the Devil's Disciples opened a pharmaceutical college to teach better chemistry to that bunch of stringy-haired crystal cookers who kept blowing up their mobile homes in the Angeles Crest mountains.

Chandler and I talked about L
. D
. kids, something I had to struggle to stay focused on. I was still trying to keep from gawking at Paige.

Of course she recounted the story of my heroic shark rescue. "You never told me about that," Evelyn smiled, acting amused and pleased, when I knew she was pissed to the core that I'd kept it from her.

"It was nothing, really." As this ridiculous cliche popped out of my mouth, Evelyn rolled her eyes, a look that said I was gonna catch hell over this later.