Clean Sweep

by Jane Heller

  Just send that photographer over, Janet baby, and let’s get this house sold. I want off this Titanic before it sinks.

  Chapter 4

  “Coming,” I called as I ran to answer the front door. It was a bright and sunny late-November morning. Janet Claiborne had finally arranged for a photographer to take pictures of Maplebark Manor, and he was a few minutes early.

  “Morning,” said the man standing outside. “I’m Cullie Harrington, the photographer for Prestige Properties. Is it all right to come in?”

  “Not through here,” I said, observing his snowy boots and dusty cases of equipment. “You’ll have to use the service entrance. And please remove your shoes before coming into the house.” Now that I was cleaning the place myself, I couldn’t bear to have anyone traipse dirt and grime onto my floors.

  Cullie Harrington shot me a scowl before lugging himself and his equipment back down my front steps and around the driveway to the service entrance. He’s probably got some kind of attitude, I thought, hoping his photographic skills were better than his manners.

  I met him at the kitchen door and let him in. “Don’t forget to take off those boots,” I cautioned him.

  “How about my hat and coat? Would you mind if I took them off?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Oh, sorry. You can put your things in there,” I said, pointing to the recently vacated maid’s room.

  Cullie flashed me another fuck-you face and disappeared into the maid’s room. A few minutes later he emerged, carrying two black bags and a tripod. I had a good look at him for the first time. He was a lanky six feet tall, with a perfect swimmer’s physique—broad shoulders tapering to slim hips and long, muscular legs. He wore a navy-blue-and-white ski sweater and faded blue jeans with holes at the knees. He had hair the color of wheat—wispy, soft, and worn medium-long, curling up the middle of his neck. His beard and his mustache, though, were dark brown, flecked with gray. His eyes were pale blue, framed by tortoise-shell glasses. His face was etched with little lines that made him look slightly older than the mid-forties I assumed he was. He had the look of an Ivy League professor, the demeanor of a craggy sea captain, and the body of a sinewy athlete. The whole package was not unappealing, but the man was hardly my type.

  “Now I’d like to show you the rooms I think should be showcased in the brochure,” I said, motioning for Cullie to follow me through the house.

  I went into the living room and began to describe the renovations Sandy and I had done and point out what I thought were noteworthy decorating details—the matching carpet and window treatments, the antique brass sconces and the original Picasso sketch that hung over the marble fireplace mantel. “I’d like you to include all of these things in the shot,” I said, turning around to face Cullie, who was nowhere to be found. Apparently, I’d made my little speech to an empty room. “Hello?” I called out, wondering if he had made off with what was left of my valuables.

  “In here,” he said.

  I followed the voice and found Cullie at the other end of the first floor, in the dining room, where he had set up his equipment and was now rearranging my flowers.

  “May I ask what you’re doing?” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “Getting ready to take the shot,” he said, not looking up.

  “But I thought we’d start in the living room.”

  “Light’s better in here at this time of day,” he said, walking over to his camera and sticking his head under a black cloth.

  “But in the living room the carpet matches the curtains, and the Picasso is perfect over the marble mantel,” I sputtered. The dining room was lovely, of course, but I was particularly proud of the living room. Sandy and I had spent a fortune on it.

  “Look, Mrs.…”

  “Koff.”

  “Look, Mrs. Koff. I’ll be shooting the interior of your house for a brochure, a brochure that’s supposed to give prospective buyers an idea of the size and layout of the rooms, the feel of the property, that sort of thing. It’s not supposed to be a monument to your decorator.”

  “If you really think so,” I conceded. I figured this Cullie Harrington must know his business. Janet said he photographed all the important houses in town. “Are you planning to shoot every room in the house?” I asked.

  “Look, lady. Mrs. Koff. This is for a brochure, not a book. I’ll be shooting four to six of your primary rooms. Not your closets. Not your bathrooms. Just your main rooms—probably the dining room, living room, kitchen, master bedroom, and family room.”

  The man’s manners were appalling. “Maplebark Manor doesn’t have a family room,” I snapped. “That’s why you’re here—to do a brochure showing people that a house doesn’t necessarily have to have a family room to work. Sort of the way a photographer doesn’t necessarily have to have manners to get work.”

  “Hey, that’s pretty good,” Cullie said, then smiled at me for the first time. “I didn’t know you people had a sense of humor.”

  What was this “you people” stuff? Did Cullie Harrington have a major-league attitude or what? I thought it best to say what I had to say and get out of his way. “Since you’ll only be photographing my primary rooms, can you manage to do your work, clean up after yourself, and be out of here in an hour?”

  “Why? Got to rush off to a manicure?” he snickered before ducking back under his black cloth and refocusing his attention on the shot of my dining room. Then, his voice muffled by the cloth, he said, “Yeah, it’ll take me an hour all right—to do this one room. I plan on being here all day. That okay with you?”

  God, no, I thought, but nodded that it would be all right. I needed to sell my house, and if this pain-in-the-ass’s pictures were going to bring me a buyer, I could hardly kick him out. “I’ll be upstairs in my office if you need me,” I said. Bethany had actually given me a new assignment for the newspaper. I was to interview Bill Medley, the tall half of the sixties’ singing duo the Righteous Brothers, who had recently bought a house in Layton. The story was only going to run a half-page (Bethany wasn’t sure if the readers of the Community Times knew the Righteous Brothers from the Ringling Brothers), but I was thrilled to have the work.

  “Your office? You have a job?” Cullie pulled his head out from underneath the black cloth and smirked at me.

  Oh, spare me. “Yes, I have a job.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a journalist.” I rarely had the nerve to call myself that. I mean, I wasn’t exactly Bob Woodward. But Cullie Harrington’s infuriating manner made me want to inflate my job description just a tad.

  “A journalist? I’m surprised,” he said with new respect for me.

  “Why are you surprised?”

  “I just didn’t take you for a woman who did anything except look down on the little guy.”

  This person was unbelievable. I turned on my heel and walked out of the room.

  I didn’t see much of Cullie that day. I stayed away from him and he stayed away from me. And thank God. The more I thought about the gargantuan chip on his shoulder, the angrier and more resentful I became. How dare he come into my house and treat me with disrespect, like I was some superficial rich bitch from a Judith Krantz novel? Who was he to look down his nose at me, especially since he had accused me of looking down my nose at him?

  A few days later, Janet Claiborne had called to tell me Cullie had stopped by her office to drop off several transparencies of Maplebark Manor. “They look absolutely divine,” she said.

  “I’d love to see them,” I said, dying to know if this guy who’d gotten under my skin like a case of ringworm had any talent.

  “The brochure will be ready in a couple of weeks, just in time for the holidays,” Janet said.

  Oh, great, I thought. Nobody’s out buying houses during the holidays.

  Since I couldn’t do anything to control the real estate market, I decided to concentrate on something I thought I could control: my job situation. It was time to dust off my résumé, pick
out my best interviews, and send them to editors at the big-time magazines.

  I chose a cold, snowy Saturday night to get down to business, because I had nothing better to do on Saturday nights these days. Julia had been busy with her mystery man, and the only other option would have been to spend the evening with my mother, who kept inviting me for dinner so she could lecture me about my inability to hold on to a man. Anyone for root canal?

  I ate some scrambled eggs, drank some Almaden (I really was trying to economize), and wrote letters to magazine editors—thirty-five of them.

  The next morning I mailed the letters. A few days later I followed up with phone calls, not one of which was returned. If I was lucky, I’d make contact with some editor’s assistant, only to get the brush-off. Oh, they’d admit they received my mailing all right, but when I’d ask if I could come in and discuss a possible position, they’d act as if I had a contagious disease. I did: it was called desperation. “We’ll keep your material on file and let you know if anything opens up” was the stock response.

  “Koff, what you need is a reference, a recommendation from someone with clout when it comes to the media,” Julia suggested when I stopped in at the newspaper and reported my lack of progress on the job front.

  “Yeah, and who do I know with clout when it comes to the media? Bethany Downs?”

  Julia laughed. “Have you noticed her mustache?”

  “Her what?”

  “Her mustache. I’m not kidding. She’s always got this white stuff stuck on her upper lip.”

  “It’s powdered sugar.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. She has a thing for jelly donuts. She eats them by the dozen.”

  “You see, Koff? You’d be great at People magazine. Nobody knows all that intimate stuff like you do.”

  When I got home, I thought about what Julia had said. Maybe the magazine editors would return my calls if I had a reference. But who?

  I was flipping through the latest issue of the Community Times when it came to me: Alistair Downs knew everybody in the media. Maybe he’d call one of his cronies and say, “Ho ho. This gal Alison does a splendid job at my paper. Splendid. How about doing your old pal Alistair a favor and giving her a job?”

  The idea didn’t seem that farfetched. No idea seemed that farfetched, now that I was poor and desperate.

  The next morning, I summoned up my nerve and called Alistair’s secretary at the newspaper. Although he only came into the office once a week, he checked in with his secretary several times a day from his home, a twenty-room stone manor on Layton Harbor called Evermore. I explained to his secretary, a thin-lipped, blue-haired woman named Martha Hives, that I wanted to speak with Senator Downs about a personal matter. She called me back later in the day to say that the Senator would see me two days later at four o’clock at Evermore. I was thrilled to get an audience with Sir Alistair before he left for his annual trip to Lyford Cay in the Bahamas, where he and Bethany had been spending the Christmas and New Year’s holidays for twenty years. Maybe my luck was changing. Just maybe.

  At three forty-five on the appointed day, I pulled myself and my portfolio together and drove over to Layton Harbor, taking a little time to marvel at the number of sailboats anchored there, despite the time of year. Settled in the seventeenth century, the snug harbor on the Long Island Sound was once a major shipping port. Now it was one of the most prestigious addresses in the state.

  Overlooking Layton Harbor, midway between Layton’s historic village district and the Sachem Point Yacht Club, Evermore, Alistair Downs’s six-acre estate, was sequestered behind a fortress of mature evergreens. Stone pillars with wrought-iron gates flanked the entrance to the property, which consisted of a 15,000-square-foot, 65-year-old manor house, two stone carriage houses, and a swimming pool and cabana. Approached by a long banked driveway, the estate was surrounded by park-like grounds with specimen plantings, rock and rose gardens, and a pool and tennis court. Everything about Evermore suggested substance, influence, permanence. I suddenly thought of Cullie Harrington and wondered if he had ever photographed Evermore. Then I wondered why I bothered thinking about Cullie Harrington. I was sure he wasn’t thinking about me.

  I navigated my Porsche up Evermore’s winding driveway and parked in the motor court to the right of the arched front door. My palms got clammy as I was hit with a wave of insecurity. What was I doing here? I was Miss Middle Class, Alison Waxman, daughter of the late Sy “The Mattress King” Waxman and his wife Doris who, despite her pretensions, was just a nice Jewish girl from Queens. What right did I have calling on a bona fide American icon?

  I was shown inside the house by a butler, who said Senator Downs would be detained for a few minutes and I should wait in the library, a dark green room with bookcases, plaid carpeting, a desk, several leather chairs, and a stone fireplace over which hung an oil painting of The Great One himself. I deposited myself in one of the chairs and studied the room: it was a shrine to the master of the house. Everywhere I looked there were clusters of sterling silver frames showcasing Alistair Downs in all his glory. There were photos of him making his screen debut as a gladiator in the 1950 Victor Mature movie The Defiant Warriors…playing a boxing champ in the 1952 film Kid O’Reilly…starring opposite Virginia Mayo in the 1953 World War II adventure The Bold Battalion…romancing Susan Hayward in the 1957 frontier drama The Plains of Passion…and rescuing Doris Day in the 1959 detective thriller Around Any Corner. There were photos of his post-Hollywood years, when he became a powerful presence within the Republican party, ran for the United States Senate, won by a landslide, and served two terms in Washington. There were photos of him linking arms with Barry Goldwater…shaking hands with Richard Nixon…playing golf with Gerry Ford…and praying next to Billy Graham. There were photos documenting his charity work and public service accomplishments, photos of him standing outside the new Alistair P. Downs Hip Replacement Center at the county hospital…visiting a school for handicapped children…congratulating local servicemen who had defended our country in Grenada…and signing the papers that bought him ownership in The Layton Community Times, his retirement toy. And finally, there were photos showing the personal side of Alistair Downs, photos of him embracing his late wife, the former showgirl Annette Dowling, who died tragically while still in her early forties…sailing in the Bahamas with Bethany aboard his 65-foot yacht Aristocrat…wrestling on the grounds of Evermore with Murphy, his prize-winning Irish setter…and blowing out the candles at his recent seventy-fifth birthday party at the Sachem Point Yacht Club.

  Such a rich life, I sighed enviously. My own life seemed barren by comparison. I mean, what were my biggest achievements? Marrying men with money? Being dumped by men with money? Buying a house I couldn’t afford? Watching the house I couldn’t afford be taken over by a bank?

  I wondered how my mother would react to my visit to Alistair’s house. She’d croak, that’s how she’d react. Her daughter at Evermore? Getting an audience with a legend—and a rich bachelor yet?

  “The Senator is on his way,” the butler heralded, interrupting my little reverie.

  “Thank you,” I replied.

  “Not at all, miss,” he said before turning to leave. I loved him. Nobody had called me “Miss” since high school.

  A few minutes later I was standing in front of Alistair’s bookcases, about to pull out a leather-bound edition of War and Peace, when I caught a whiff of Old Spice and heard a voice bellow, “Hello, dear. Ho ho. Delightful to see you.” I turned around and saw Alistair P. Downs striding toward me. He looked every bit the retired movie star in his navy blue velvet smoking jacket, white shirt, navy blue and red striped silk ascot, gray flannel slacks, and brown Bally loafers. Six feet tall, with broad shoulders and only a hint of a paunch, he had a remarkable head of hair for his age—thick, wavy, and reddish brown. His green eyes held the mischief of a teenager, and his face was relatively free of sun marks and broken capillaries. Only the skin on his neck, whi
ch was badly wrinkled and hung lifelessly over his ascot, and his hands, which were dotted with liver spots, suggested he was no longer the Don Juan of the Arthur Murray dance studios, the ambitious young buck who had charmed the ladies to distraction while he taught them how to cha cha cha. In every other way, he was the very image of a handsome Hollywood movie star who had parlayed his screen popularity into a career in politics and, though retired from public life for the past several years, was still in there parlaying.

  “It’s nice to see you again too, Senator Downs,” I said as Alistair shook both my hands.

  “What brings you here, dear?” he said as he sat back in a leather wing chair and crossed his legs. He didn’t invite me to sit down, but I did anyway.

  “Well,” I began, “I’m thinking of making a job change, and I thought you might be able to help me with it.”

  “What is it you do now, dear?”

  “You mean, what do I do at the newspaper?” How could he have forgotten? He’d always acted as if he knew me.

  “The newspaper. Yes, of course.”

  “I interview celebrities such as yourself. Well, not celebrities of your caliber, of course, but famous people who—”

  “That’s all right. I understand what you mean.”

  “You see, Mr. Downs. Sorry. Senator Downs. While I truly enjoy my work at the Community Times, I feel it’s time for me to move on. I’ve had some financial problems lately and my marriage has recently broken up, and I find myself needing to look for a full-time and, frankly, better-paying job. Since you seemed to be so supportive of my work—”