The Last Manly Man

by Sparkle Hayter

  “How’s your wife’s mumble mumble?” one of the men said to another, and the other replied, “She has to have it drained again. Her sister’s coming down this weekend. You know her, the one who sells tires.”

  When the waitress came to take my order, I asked if she knew Gina, the waitress identified in the newspaper story about the John Doe.

  “Hon, I am Gina. You know what you want?”

  “Coffee and a bran muffin and can I ask you some questions about the John Doe?” I said, and gave her my card.

  “You want your coffee first? Let me get your coffee,” she said, and buzzed off without waiting for me to answer. It was the breakfast rush and she was busy. She was a petite, wiry woman in her fifties with a modest black beehive hairdo. When she came back I noticed most of her few wrinkles pointed upward, which was rather amazing, considering she had worked her butt off as a waitress in Erin’s Coffee House for thirty years, raised four kids, and divorced one husband before marrying Ari, the proprietor of this establishment. All of which I learned from her banter with regulars at the lunch counter, before she actually spoke to me.

  “Yeah, I knew him,” Gina said, pouring me more coffee. “Frenchie came in here once, twice a week. Every Friday, and sometimes on Saturday. It’s a shame what happened to him. Life is short.”

  “Frenchie? What was his real name?”

  “I don’t know. We just called him Frenchie,” she said, and smiled, before excusing herself to take an order. Every few minutes Gina had to run off to take an order, drop off food, and refill coffee cups.

  She came back and sat down across from me in the two-person booth.

  “Did Frenchie ever tell you what he did here in America?” I asked her.

  “He said he was a pensioned teacher.”

  “What had he taught? Where?”

  “He taught somewhere in France. I don’t remember him saying where in France. He said he taught all subjects.”

  “He knew a lot about science,” one of the guys at the nearby counter said.

  “Yes, he did,” Gina said. “And agriculture.”

  “What specifically did he know about science and agriculture?”

  “Specifically? We talked about the Mars rover. And cloning. And bees. How bees could pick up the scent of their queens from miles away sometimes.”

  “Was he married, divorced? Did he have kids?”

  “He said no.”

  “Did you ever see him with anyone?”

  “No. He seemed lonely too. It’s a shame,” Gina said. “Excuse me.”

  When she hopped up to pick up an order, a guy at the counter leaned over toward me and said, “With this girl, Charlotte, I saw him. He came in with her sometimes.”

  “Who is Charlotte?” I asked.

  “A girl who comes in here sometimes,” the guy at the counter said. “Brown hair, big blue eyes, about five foot, big …” He cupped his hands in front of his chest to indicate breasts.

  “Do you know her last name?”

  “No. Hey! Anyone here know Charlotte’s last name?” he hollered.

  “Starts with a V,” Gina said, sitting back down across from me. “She lives around here somewhere. Come to think of it, I did see her here with Frenchie.”

  “How can I get in touch with her?”

  “I’ll keep your card, and next time she comes in I’ll ask her to call you,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome. You’re the second person from ANN to stop by. I feel quite special. Under sad circumstances, of course.…”

  “Who else was here from ANN?”

  “Solange Stevenson, came by about an hour ago. I’m a big fan of hers. Her books and show got me through my divorce,” Gina said. “Is she a friend of yours?”

  “A colleague,” I said.

  “Is she as nice as she seems?”

  How I would love to tell her the truth, that a TV persona is like a whalebone corset—take it off and everything goes flying. Not that I didn’t have a certain amount of respect for Solange. It’s tough to have to go out there in a public way, day in and day out, no matter how shitty you’re feeling, and put a smiley face on things, keep that whalebone corset on.

  “She’s an incredible professional,” I said. “Thank you for your help. Please call me if you think of anything else.”

  “I will,” she chirped, and ran off to a waving customer in a booth near the back.

  When I went to pay my bill, the guy at the cash register said, in a low voice, “Charlotte, she’s an escort, know what I mean?”

  “Yes. Who does she work for?”

  “I’m not sure. If I see her, I’ll ask, and call you,” he said.

  Were the dead Frenchman and the hooker somehow connected to the missing man in the hat and the paranoid animal rights activist? I wondered. All I had was the Doublemint connection. Or was I drawing connections between things where there weren’t any, like I did in the dead dry cleaner case?

  In the case of the dead dry cleaner, there was more to go on. One weekend, about a year ago, a man showed up dead during a dry cleaner convention here in New York City, his jacket pockets full of brochures about advanced dry cleaning technology, but his wallet and ID were missing. In the newspaper photos, the dead dry cleaner looked like my dry cleaner, if I squinted a little and imagined my dry cleaner with dark hair instead of gray hair. On a hunch, I pulled my last laundry bill, looked it over, and sure enough, there was something amiss. I’d been charged for a pale orange jacket I did not own. Sure that this was a clue, that finding the orange jacket would lead to the killer or killers, I called June Fairchild at home, asked to see the body, and offered to turn over the laundry receipt.

  It turned out my dry cleaner was twenty years older than the victim and alive, well, and safe at church with his wife and grandchildren while I was wasting June Fairchild’s day off. The charge for the orange jacket was a mistake.

  It wasn’t like I didn’t have more important things to deal with.

  We had an interview that day with a Danish researcher who reported that men had four billion more brain cells than women, though she was mystified as to why, since men didn’t use them. If you think about it though, it makes sense, since men have bigger heads and they need something to fill the space, the equivalent of Styrofoam packing peanuts, otherwise their brains would just rattle around inside their skulls. On camera, the Danish lady said it would be interesting to see how men evolved, and whether they put these extra brain cells to some good use. This we could cut with an admittedly sexist female stand-up comic we taped who suggested what this idle part of men’s brains might be used for, i.e., controlling the penis, keeping promises, helping with housework, and remembering to put the toilet seat down.

  Afterward, we spoke to a group of grade school boys, most of whom thought the man of the future would be some kind of cyborg or superhero, although one little boy very brightly said the man of the future would be “Me!” We also spoke to a scientist who said the man of the future would be Deep Blue, the computer, and an “anthrofuturist” who predicted women and men would evolve beyond the physical to pure intellect. He seemed to think this would be a good thing. A downtown designer gave us his vision of men’s fashion in the future. Like most visual artists we’d looked at, his vision was sleek, minimalist, and black with gray and silver accents. Apparently, in the future, we will have no need for color. The clingy clothes had a late beatnik feel to them. Made me wish we could find a designer who predicted a return to something really retro, rococo, men in gold doublets, ornately embroidered velvet capes, powdered wigs, and codpieces, just to jazz things up a bit.

  Of course, according to an environmental scientist, whatever we wore, we’d wear it under some sort of transparent, full-body UV-ray-and-air-filtering bubble anyway, which was going to mean the end of kissing under lampposts, or any physical contact in the outdoors.

  On the plus side, a scientist who was able to grow human hair in a test tube foresaw the
end of toupees.

  When the crew went to meet up with the interns to do AOA about the Man of the Future, I went back to the office. AOA stands for Any Old Asshole, known in more polite circles as MOS, or Man on the Street.

  “Jack Jackson called for you. He wants you to call him immediately,” Liz said as soon as I got in. “And Alana DeWitt called. Or rather, her attorney called. They want to withdraw her interview from the series and they want the raw tapes.”

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t like the way the interview went.”

  “Too damn bad,” I said. “She signed a release. Not only that, she approached us about doing the interview after she read about the series in the ‘TV Ticker’ column of the Post. Call her attorney back and tell her so. Did Benny Winter call?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Will you call his office and see if Mandervan has made a decision?”

  “Oh, okay,” Liz said, as if I was asking her to do something extraordinarily beyond her job description.

  “It’s very important, Liz,” I said. “Help me out, will you?”

  “Will you give me a shot at reporting?”

  “There are a lot of issues to be considered in this. But I promise you, I will do what I can to give you every feasible opportunity to pursue your goals,” I said, very Clintonesque. “But it’s a two-way street.”

  She softened a little. “Want me to somehow mention that I’m blind? That often helps get answers,” she said.

  “I’ll leave it up to you,” I said. That was one of the things I liked about Liz, her ability to use her handicap and other people’s prejudices about it to her full advantage. Take her two successful lawsuits, which made her wealthy enough to support her mother and three unmarried sisters. Though ANN gossips thought she was only working to find opportunities to sue, the truth was that Liz had a big dream—to be the first blind reporter on a major network. A girl after my own heart, that Liz, if only she wasn’t such a bitch and so litigious that I lived in constant fear of her hurting herself and suing the company and me.

  “What other calls came in?”

  “The only other call was a guy named Gus at the Plaza,” she said. “Here’s your mail. Only one letter from Balandapur today.”

  As she turned and felt her way out of my office, I dialed Jack Jackson.

  Jack Jackson never bothered with hellos or good-byes.

  “Robin, did you see the evening paper yesterday?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Jack laughed. “Pretty funny, isn’t it? Did you see the paper today? Some of those feminists are planning to picket my speech! And some of the nutty anti-feminists are threatening to picket the feminists.”

  Jack sounded oddly excited about this.

  “Listen, Gill Morton really, really liked you, and wanted me to bring you out to his estate on Sunday for golf and lunch. I’m planning to warm him up to the idea of advertising on our networks. You free Sunday?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Good. Don’t forget my cocktail party tonight, up in the penthouse,” he said, and hung up.

  Before I did anything else, I called Gus.

  “Hi, Lola,” he said. It was a quirky voice, not particularly deep or well-modulated, but with something rough and sweet that sent the blood rushing from my brain. “How’s the Think Tank?”

  “Wonderful. We were just about to take our daily champagne break,” I said. “How is the jack-of-all-trades biz? What are you this week?”

  “A doctor. But I’m thinking of giving it up and going back to the family salmon cannery,” he said, sighed deeply, and paused before saying, “Mia Cara at nine tonight.”

  “Yeah. I’ll be there.”

  “Good,” he said.

  He sighed again.

  “See you then,” I said.

  “Yeah. I can’t wait to see you,” he said.

  Men were great. Now, why would Alana DeWitt want to get rid of great guys like him, I wondered, or Mike, who despite his admitted Fidocides and occasional bottle-hugging broods—and bottle-hugging broads—was basically a good guy. Or … I could go on and on, but I didn’t have time. Jack’s cocktail party started at five, I had to hang around for minimum an hour, then go home, shower, and change for my date.

  While I was on the phone with Gus, another call had come in.

  “Was that Benny Winter?” I asked Liz.

  “No, but I did speak to his office. Mandervan is still ‘considering the proposal.’”

  “Good. There’s still a chance then. Who called?”

  “DeWitt called back. She wants to know if you can meet her at her country place on Sunday to discuss this.”

  “Can’t. I’m going out to Gill Morton’s estate with Jack Jackson. Who else called?”

  “That loony Jason,” Liz said. “He said to tell you, the answer is yes.”

  “Yes? What was the question?”

  “I don’t know. He wouldn’t say, because of the dubious security of our phone system.”

  “He’s either a paranoid loony or a manipulative scam artist,” I said.

  Nevertheless, I bit. I called the number he gave me for “beeper central.” It rang, it clicked, and then I heard a different ring. An answering machine picked up.

  “If you would like to leave a message, please enter your numeric code now,” it said. “If you do not have a code, press zero and await further instructions.”

  I pressed zero and heard another phone ringing, clicking into a different ring, and another, more distant-sounding machine that said, “Please leave your first name, date, and time you called, and a short message.”

  “Robin calling for Jason. The answer is yes? To what?”

  Against my better judgment, I left my beeper number.

  The penthouse elevator was the last manned elevator in the building, scheduled to be fully automated when Ruben, the longtime operator, retired, at age seventy-five. The code, “clover,” was simply stated to Ruben, who had received confirming instructions that I was to be taken up to the top floors. Ruben took his job very seriously, had pride in it, and a touch of snootiness toward anyone who did not pilot Jack Jackson’s private elevator.

  “How many miles you think you’ve traveled in this thing?” I asked.

  “Quite a few,” he said, not looking at me. There was not a speck of lint on his beige-and-scarlet elevator operator uniform, complete with gold braid on the shoulders.

  “You like your job?” I guessed.

  “Yes I do, ma’am.”

  “What do you like about it?” I asked him.

  This seemed to rattle him, but finally he said, “It’s a good job and … my father did it before me.”

  “All his life?” I asked.

  “All his life,” he said.

  Then he clammed up.

  There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask him. Like, how does one go up and down in a little closed room for forty or fifty years without going stark raving mad? What did you want to grow up to be when you were a little boy? What is that mysterious quality men have that makes women put up with all sorts of crap from them? But I sensed my questions weren’t welcome. It was possible this was what he wanted to be when he was a little boy because his father did it. When his father got into the elevator business, it would have been early in the century, when the Otis elevator was the cutting edge of high technology. It had certainly been the hit of the 1893 World’s Exposition (that, plus the amazing lightbulb and the first long-distance phone call, from Chicago to New York). It must have been very exciting to go whooshing up the inside of a building in those early days.

  He did not speak to me again until we got to the penthouse and he said, “Here we are. Good evening.”

  “Thank you. Enjoyed that,” I said, not knowing what to say. “See you on the ride down.”

  The elevator opened up into a lobby with a reception desk, surrounded by what I assumed was bulletproof glass. After checking my ID, the security guards buzzed me through a thick steel d
oor.

  I’d never been up here before, though the penthouse was legendary, the place where Jack kept a duplex apartment/office. He lived here between marriages and shack-ups, as he was now. He’d recently been ditched by his longtime girlfriend, actress Shonny Cobbs.

  We were fifty-some stories above Manhattan, in a huge space with wraparound windows overlooking the steaming, jewel box city—except for one window, which was a transparent map of the world, with little green lights in countries where Jack had holdings, and little red lights where he did not. Suspended from the ceiling was a line of monitors, one for each of Jack’s many networks and a few for those of his competitors.

  It was a little after five and already the room was full. Jack was over near the bar. The place was crawling with ANN executives, women’s conference honchos, moguls, sponsors of the women’s conference, and on-air talent from Jack’s various networks, stars all of them, except for me and Norma, a cafeteria lady who looked like a younger, toothier Moms Mabley. Jack, surrounded by a bunch of guys in suits, was talking to her, and waved me over.

  “This is Norma, Robin,” he said. “She’s the one who told me about the Flintstones thing. This is Joseph, my head lawyer; Cal, my speechwriter; Larry, my ethicist. Dr. Larry, I should say, guy’s got a Ph.D. in philosophy. This here is Robin, the girl I told you about, knows how to urinate standing up.”

  Norma said hello to me, before she excused herself to go back to work in the cafeteria, or as newsroom wags knew it, the Bad News Café. As she was leaving, their Royal Minuses Reb and Solange came in and headed our way.