At First Sight

by Stephen J. Cannell

  “The Blue Course is a little easy, though,” I continued through my psychic pain. “I’m thinking of trying the Gold tomorrow.” The Gold Course was acknowledged as the toughest of the three.

  He turned and smiled at me. The guy had a killer smile—perfect ivory—a fucking box of Chicklets. “I played the Gold two days ago,” he said. “The Gold’s the best course, but the fairways are narrow. My wife shanks every other shot, so she prefers the Blue. Otherwise I’d spend all my time in the brush looking for her ball.”

  “That was her you were playing with yesterday?” I asked, desperately hoping that they weren’t married … that my goddess was just a friend. His wife’s sister … anything.

  “Yeah, that was her,” he said, crushing that slim hope like a bug on a windshield. “She’s just learning. I’m trying to give her lessons but I think tomorrow we’ll sign her up with a pro.”

  So it was true. They were hitched. I remember my body feeling numb with this confirmation, my mind pinwheeling with disappointment and distress. But I held on, dangling from a psychic rope stretched over an emotional cavern of deep despair.

  “My wife is a great golfer,” I finally managed. “She played on her college golf team. I can’t come close to beating her.”

  “Sounds like we’re at opposite ends of the wife-golfconundrum,” he smiled. “Well, gotta get these back before they melt.”

  “I’m Chick,” I blurted.

  “Chandler,” he said, holding out a pinky finger for me to shake. The rest of his fingers were engaged in holding the two drinks: the Mai Tai for my goddess, and some sort of white foamy calorie-busting gunk for him—a Piña Colada or something.

  So we shook pinkies and off he went. I followed him until I could see that they were sunning down by the beach. Then I went back to the power cabana. We had retaken Pork Chop Hill. We were back on top. I’d been contemplating setting up better fortifications. A machine-gun nest and some razor wire. But now I didn’t care and just flopped down next to Evelyn.

  “I wish we could go topless here,” Evelyn said unexpectedly. She has protruding nipples that look like pencil erasers. She knows they drive men wild, and she loves to show them. She’s always pestering me to go to nude beaches, an activity that doesn’t suit my new executive spread. Of course, if she took off her top at this hotel, the staff would swoop down on her and run her off the grounds in a towel trolley. But still, the idea of stripping down to her thong appealed to her, and she was still thinking about it as I brooded in my chair. How she got this way is still a mystery to me. When we first got married, she didn’t act like this. Of course, that was before Mickey D and the Buns of Steel cassette. But still …

  “We should go to the beach,” I said.

  “I’m not going to the fucking beach. The beach is Skid Row. All those morons who get stuck in the hotel’s back rooms use the beach. We’re in the best cabana. We’re fine where we are.”

  “I’d like to do some body surfing.” I think I was whining. I hope I wasn’t, but lately I’ve been turning into such a wuss, it’s hard for me to tell. I hate myself for some of this stuff, but let’s not go into that now … let’s get past it.

  “I don’t see why we can’t try the beach just once.”

  “I don’t want to be seen down there. Besides, it’s all sandy. I don’t want to ruin my tan. The sand sticks to my suntan oil. I hate the fucking beach.”

  So for the moment, I was trapped in our power cabana, frustrated as the towel boy in a room full of virgins.

  “I think I’ll go give it a shot anyway,” I finally said ten minutes later.

  “Do what you want.” She seemed disinterested in whatever I was going to do because she was checking out another woman with a pretty good body. Competition. This woman had abs almost as good as hers. “That bitch is on steroids. She’s way too muscular. Looks like shit,” Evelyn said, as I stood and looked down at my own wife’s super-enhanced pecs and abs, all oiled and rippling.

  Sometimes, I just don’t get it. Sometimes, I’m completely at a loss about what’s going on in her head. More and more, I find myself thinking about divorce.

  The beach was beautiful. A light breeze rippled the water. Up by the pool the air was as still as Texas hair. I had one of the beach boys get me a chair and I dragged it to a spot where I could watch my goddess and Chandler, who I knew had to be using some kind of lightener to get that color on his copper curls.

  Then one of those fortuitous things occurred that you pray for but in real life almost never seem to happen. It started when Chandler went up to get the two of them another drink, and my goddess decided to go swimming. She was out past the rocks, snorkeling, so I decided to go in and get as close as I could. I was treading water, my abs and shoulders still stiff from my workout with Brian, and then, when I was about ten to fifteen yards away from her, somebody on the beach yelled, “Shark!”

  Okay, I’ve been coming to this hotel for years and have never seen a shark fin in the water, not once. Some dolphins two years ago, gray whales occasionally, but not one damn shark. But, somebody on the shore yelled it, and everybody in the water went totally nuts, including my goddess.

  “Oh, no! Where?” I heard her shriek.

  Normally if I heard somebody yell “Shark” I’d be climbing over little kids to get out of the water. But this was an opportunity sent by God. This was destiny. So I made my way closer to her. “It’s okay,” I panted.

  “Shark,” she said in desperation, her eyeballs white with fear. “Somebody yelled ‘Shark.’” She started to swim to shore, but was panicking, beating the water with her arms and legs … thrashing, getting nowhere fast.

  Time for Chick Cousteau, the old shark expert, to take over. By the way, just so there is no misunderstanding here, I know next to nothing about sharks. “Don’t thrash. You’ll look like a wounded seal. Slow, even strokes.” I’d heard that on the Discovery Channel and those three sentences maxed out my knowledge of water predators.

  “I’m … I’m scared to death of …”

  “It’s okay. You go first. I’ll stay back. I’ll watch out for him.” What bullshit.

  Of course, if I’d seen the damn thing, I probably would have coronaried and there would be no need for him to kill me, because I’d already be dead, floating in the surf—bloated shark chow. But I was deep into it now, doing my “Wild Kingdom” thing. I took up rear guard, swimming behind her.

  “He’s not here. I’m right behind you. It’s okay,” I shouted, trying to reassure her with hollow encouragements.

  She was still panicked but was finally drawing closer to shore. “It’s okay, you’re safe. Nothing’s behind us,” I said bravely, thinking that at any moment, a Tiger or a Great White was going to tear off my leg, or worse still, my whole reproductive package.

  And then we were onshore, dragging ourselves out of the surf and back to safety. All along the strand, terrified swimmers were now standing on the beach, shading their eyes, looking for a shark fin. Nobody could see one—but let’s not get stuck on whether or not there was a shark. It’s not important. As far as she was concerned, I had saved her.

  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 like just 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 minute
s 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 bad 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 didn’t know that, silly,” she persisted, laughing, showing even, perfect teeth. “At the time, we both thought it was there.”

  “I agree,” Chandler said. “To do that for a complete stranger—to risk 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 were all 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 plasticflower-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 they needed 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-com 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, or talk 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 eighth floor 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 room where Melissa bitched and moaned because she had to sleep on the pullout 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 du
mb.

  “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 rehung 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.