Where a Man Plays There Will His Heart Be Also

By Merle Harton, Jr.

Between Tuesday and Thursday, the day I was to go to Ellen's house to look over Robert's computer system, I was occupied with work, intermingled with trying again to straighten up my office. I had three networking jobs to take up my time. The first was to string together twelve PCs into a working connection of computing power for an insurance firm. The second was to tie three older PC systems into a new large server with a 180-gigabyte hard drive for a furniture store. And the third, which was taking more time than it deserved, required that I wander around a busy surgical practice and somehow plug four totally different kinds of computer systems into a new one—and then stretch this across two parishes by way of broadband access, to connect this practice with two other satellite offices.

Was I happy? In a sense, yes, I was happy. But only because I was working for myself. I didn't have a job, nor did I have a career: I was a lone wolf eye-of-the-tiger metaphor-mixing maverick guy who was working for no one but myself. I also wasn't making the kind of money I made as a hospital administrator, but I hated that job. More specifically, I hated having to get up in the morning in accordance with someone else's agenda and having to work according to someone else's schedule and getting home knowing that I'd have to do the same thing all over again tomorrow, because I worked for someone else, which is what a job is all about. In my new situation, I set my own hours (within reason, of course) and have no one to answer to but myself. Admittedly, the hours are long but the rewards are many, the chief one being that I get to see the fruits of my labors as my own. The downside to all of this do-what-you-love-the-money-will-follow, however, is that I have to work doubly as hard to get the same dollars I got when I worked for someone else. The reason—which is not always the same for all other entrepreneurial businesses—is that I alone have to be drone, schlepper, marketing/development strategist, bookkeeper and file clerk, gofer, accounts receivable, accounts payable, collections department, go-make-coffee secretary, receptionist, salesperson, and also chairman of the board of directors, composed of me and a mirror.

I wouldn't have it any other way. So I tackled each of my tasks with the same energy equally, and with more energy than I would expend if I were working for someone else.

At some point in time, Thursday arrived. I drove over to Ellen's house, in a subdivision about two miles from ours. It was a smallish, Cajun-style cottage, like a hundred others in the area. They are popular with the changing population on the Northshore. This is a population that demands to look like everybody else. The Cajun-style cottage is a two-story house, but not really two stories. The second story is really the attic, outfitted for living and sleeping. They are actually pretty houses and give a functionality that could only have been inspired by life in Louisiana. We have no basements here, because a foot below the mud is water; so, when your foundation is on a mud bottom, the only place left to go is up—and that's exactly what a Cajun-style cottage does. As a small house with a big attic, the house is increased in living size by setting up the attic for living quarters. The overall impression of size is embellished by the use of double dormer windows, which also effectively completes the attic's disguise as a second story, and by raising the house up, either on a slap or on pilings. You are of course left with a house without an attic and without a basement, which is why it's called a cottage, I suppose. They used to be affordable, and considering their size you would think that they would remain a low-priced home, but the demand for them is so great that their price has risen appreciably and remains high.

Like most such cottages, Ellen's house had a tin roof laid out in sheets that overlapped in long rectangular sections. The sheeted tin roof is shinier and during rainfall noisier than the corrugated tin roofs to be found on some cottages, but it is more attractive, and in the case of the Joullisaint house it was a nice complement to the slate-colored wood siding that covered the exterior.

I pulled into the driveway. A two-car garage, with a tin roof that matched the house, stood ahead of me at the end of the drive, situated at a short distance beyond the house. I parked beside the house. I pulled my black tool bag from the back seat of the car and started up the brick walkway to the front porch, where Ellen was waiting for me.

Ellen Joullisaint is a slim, attractive blond, a little over 5-and-a-half feet tall, coming about to the middle of my chest. She keeps her hair cut shoulder length, with bangs that hang an inch from aqua eyes that had a hard time looking at the same thing more than a few seconds. She has a sense humor, but you have to hunt for it and are never sure if what you think is funny will get one of her short, husky laughs, out of a small mouth that never opens wide, or whether you will get just a quizzical glance.

"Hi, Ellen." I said on my way up the walk.

"I heard your car," she said as I started up the steps. "Thanks for coming."

"Hey, it's my pleasure," I answered. Once I reached the porch, Ellen gave me a searching look, with such disciplined determination that I almost stepped backward. The look was one of both pain and longing, perhaps an attempt to discover whether I was really friend or foe, whether I would hurt her by something I would say or bring her a little joy by helping her recall some event from her past with Robert. My response to her serious gaze was a smile, and after that she invited me inside.

"How is the new house?" she asked. "Are you enjoying it over here?"

"Ah, we love it." I followed her into the house. "We're just about settled in. Kim and Marshall have their own rooms, finally. Marshall is happy in his new school and Kim, well, she's had to make some adjustments in the change of schools, and to high school, and to an all-girls' Catholic school, but she's resilient."

"Robert loved his computer," she said matter-of-factly, leading me down the hall toward the study." He would sit for hours in front of that thing. Especially late at night. He had games—which he really didn't play—and some programs he did pictures and sounds with—multimedia, isn't that what it's called? Anyway, his biggest thing was his modem and dialing up bulletin boards around the country. He ended up spending most of his time on the Internet, but I think he liked bulletin boards more. He had a couple of special interest groups—those are called SIGs, you know—that he liked to join in on, things such as cats, model airplanes, and books, I think. Here's his desk. He spent a lot of time here. Too much, I think."

All the while she spoke, she kept looking around, very subtly, as though she expected someone to appear. Still, she was telling me things I knew already; perhaps she knew that, but then a lot had happened to make her forget. I looked at the desk. I was familiar with his system. He and I would chat about it and tinker with it during social visits: the last one was a barbeque about two months ago. Refreshing my memory, I started a mental inventory of the hardware he had on the desk, following cables that snaked outward to various other boxes, some familiar, some not, beside the system itself, on the floor, and above it on shelves. Anyone could tell right away that Robert loved telecommunications. He had two unplugged older modems sitting on the shelf above his unit; next to them was an external high-speed modem with trailing connections to his tower unit sitting below the desk, on the right. His monitor was a 21-inch color screen. Very little else was evident about his system without pulling it apart and inspecting the insides. I knew that it was a fast Pentium, but the whole thing was an off-brand, available at some local computer shops and at a big discount through mail-order. Robert's interest in multimedia, the mix of sight and sounds in applications and documents, just about required that he have a sound board and a video accelerator inside the box. Two large bookshelf speakers with connections to the back of the system said immediately that his computer was equipped for stereo sound. Headphones, still tethered to the computer, were perched on a shelf above. I did another quick inspection. One good indicator of an intelligent man's interests (if not an insight into his character) is what he reads. On the shelf above his system was a small bookshelf of basic computer reference books, including some manuals on sound and graphics. From that I inferred that one should expect to see much of that sort of software, along with the hardware that it needed, inside the box on his desk.

"Now, what exactly do you want me to do?" I asked Ellen. "Do you want to sell it? Do you want it organized for your children's use—perhaps you want to use it yourself?"

"Well, yes."

"Yes—which."

"I'm not sure. I really don't know anything about computers. I'd like you to tell me what I should do with all this."

"First of all, is this painful to have around? This equipment, I mean."

"No. Not really."

"Would you use it if you kept it?"

"I could take a course on it, couldn't I?"

"Yes, you could." "And the children could use it for school. They have a computer lab now, and they'll need to know how to use it. Okay, you've convinced me—we'll keep it."

"That's a wise choice. Selling it, well, you never get back what you paid for it. That's just the way it is with this technology. In many ways it's like cars. Now, if you'll give me a few minutes, I'll just hack around here and see what Robert added since the last time he and I fooled around with this. It shouldn't take me long. I'll just do some minor reorganizing, if necessary, so it's easier for you to use what's here."

"Oh," Ellen said. "Sure, go ahead. Would you like some coffee, or a soft drink? I'm forgetting my manners."

"No, I'm fine," I said, sitting in Robert's desk chair and pulling the keyboard toward me.

"I'll be puttering around. Holler if you need anything."

"Great," I answered. I reached for the control panel's master switch and flipped it and all the lights on the console lit up and the computer started its whir as it started its booting process. The monitor flickered on and the hard drive completed its chirping as the final boot process finished.

The desktop came up. With mouse and keyboard I went to work making an inventory of what Robert had stored here, what might be used by a widow and her three children, what reorganization I might be able to do on Robert's behalf, in his absence. As I did this, Ellen returned and stood directly behind me. Sipping a cup of coffee, she watched everything I did.

"I hope you don't mind," she said after a loud sip of coffee.

"No, that's all right. I'm just rooting around here, trying to find out what Robert's got that might be useful for you all. Computing is fun, but it can be productive, too, but only if you know where everything is and what you've got to work with. He's added a lot of stuff; some of it I've never seen before."

"I can tell you," said Ellen, "that's where our time together went. He used to tell me how he'd get just loads and loads of free stuff over that modem of his—from all over the country—in addition to all the chatting he'd do. He'd just clack and clack away at that keyboard. Other times, he'd mouse around with some new graphics program or put his headphones on and enjoy some new music program."

"That was polite of him."

"What was?"

"Using headphones with a music program. I would've plugged in twenty inch speakers and let 'em rip. I know—I've done it. Used to drive Christine crazy with deep bass, rhythm, European and techno-pop tunes."

"I'm pretty sure he's got all that on this system. Marc, do you think Billy might find a use for it with his music interests? He's taking piano lessons and this just might keep his interest going. What do you think?"

"I think that's a great idea. If Robert doesn't, I've got a great music tutorial program. I've never used it, but it's gotten rave reviews. We'll need to add a MIDI interface and a keyboard—"

"—Now, don't let me interrupt you," she said, interrupting me. "You just keep doing what you're doing and let me know what you think. I'll just be around the house here. Let me know if you need anything." With that she wandered back to the kitchen, leaving me to putter around with Robert's system.

Hey, what's this? It was a folder full of graphics and sound programs and files. I didn't spot it before because it was just labeled with an "X." After a second, it was obvious what was in the file and why it was labeled as it was. It was full of GIFs, JPEGs, and binary files, some very large, with titles such as: FIST.GIF, WITHCOW1.GIF, COLEGE16.JPG, GAGGED.GIF, JANINE2.GIF, MADONA1.GIF, ANA07.JPG, PIERCE.GIF.PET4.GIF, SARANWRAP.GIF. TIEDBIKE.GIF, BIZARRE1.GIF, DOGHAIR.JPG, PIERCED3.GIF, TOPLESS.ZIP. Being a man in his prime, and with a detached scientific interest, of course, I browsed through a few of the files.

No man will ever admit this, but somewhere hidden well in his house is something that he considers especially erotic. Now, whether this was Robert's hidden cache or not, I don't know, but it was definitely a collection of pornographic pictures, animation, video clips, and some with sound files attached. The larger multimedia files were in their own subdirectory folder. There about ten of them, all very large, and each with a frank title suggestive of what was contained in the file. One of these, entitled MEDITERRANEAN DELICACIES seemed tame enough in title. It was also a recent addition to his collection, judging by the date of installation. I decided to view this one, too. It was a self-running program that did not require any utility to view it. Since it contained sound, I pulled Robert's headphones from the shelf above and held one to my ear as I clicked the program to start.

Mediterranean Delicacies, said a soft sultry woman's voice as scenes of European fruits began appearing on the screen. The fruits were nice. I mean just the basic fruit groups from Europe, neatly arranged in the traditional wooden bowel, each with a cluster of grapes spilling over the side. The first bowel contained dates, figs, oranges, and apples; other bowels contained fruit of the less than decorative variety, such as potatoes, rice, sugar beets, olives, sprigs of wheat and rye, corn, peas, a couple giant mottled tobacco leaves, a wide array of nuts, and some fruit-stuffs I had never seen before. Behind each bowel, setting the scene for this festival of natural foods, were different scenes of Mediterranean cities and resorts: The Spanish Barcelona, Valencia, and Majorca; Marseilles, Nice, Monte Carlo, St. Tropez and the Riviera in France; the island of Malta; Naples, Rome, and Venice; Palermo on Sicily; Algiers, Tripoli, Tobruk, Tunis, and Alexandria on the North African coast; Tel-Aviv; the island of Rhodes; the ruins at Knossos on Crete and at Mycenae and Athens. But I'm not a geographical whiz and I know these places only because each picture named the place in a box centered at the bottom of the screen. And all of this was straigthforwardly boring—until the girls came on.

Suddenly there was a beach scene with twenty girls standing together in a group, representing every natural hair color, each one wearing bikinis as skimpy as could be without being considered nude. They were then each introduced by name and vital statistics, and then the hard drive started whirring and the introduction began again, this time with video. The first girl—an alluring, smiling blond named Barbie—began removing her bikini, little piece by little piece, and started moving slowly in an erotic posturing; then with slow and careful movements of her legs she began showing me every part of her naked female body.

A small creak of hallway wood shook me. I heard the small patter of Ellen's footsteps. In a panic I reached over to the power console and flipped the main switch, shutting down the entire system. The headphones flew out of my hand.

Hot coffee in hand, sipping loudly from the cup, Ellen walked up and stood close, behind me. My hands were shaking. I twisted quickly in the chair. I caught the smell of her perfume, a delicate odor of flowers and musk—

"—Did I startle you?" she asked. She smiled. She was holding her coffee cup with both hands.

"Yes � you did," I stammered. "I was just testing the endurance of the hardware here."

"Is there anything I should see?"

"No, really, I don't think so," I said.

"Are you all right, Marc? You looked flushed."

"Oh, I'm fine—believe me. I shouldn't be much longer."

"Take your time," she said. "It's nice to have a man around the house again." With that she walked back to the kitchen, with a delicate sway to her hips.

I powered up the system again. While it booted, I reached down beside me, opened my tool bag, and rooted around for a blank CD. Finding one, I placed it in Robert's CD-ROM drive and burned a copy of Mediterranean Delicacies and a few other files whose titles caught my interest and stowed the CD back in my bag. I then spent the next few minutes on some simple reorganization, intent on making the system useful for Ellen and family, and especially eager to hide Robert's cache of eroticism from those whom it was not intended. I threw them all into a new directory and used my encryption software to create an encrypted virtual drive with a password, shielding this from anyone's eyes but my own.

I shut the system down again and went into the kitchen. Ellen was sitting at the kitchen table with a folder before her and papers in piles and strewn loosely in front of her.

"I'm finished with the computer," I said. "I did a little reorganization, but for the most part it's a well put-together system, with lots of software for you and the kids to use. If you'd like, I'll come back and spend some time with you all, showing you what's what, and how to get started. As for using the software, well, you can just jump right in, or enroll in some courses at the community college—"

"—That's a good idea," she said with a distracted look. "Can I call you?"

"You can call me any time—you know that."

"There's a void inside me, you know, and I need it filled, and I'm not sure how to do it." Her eyes bespoke a deep sadness and longing, and I became increasingly uncomfortable as she continued to stare up at me. "But I have these papers and lots of other things to get out of the way. Robert's death left a lot to do. But I'll get it done."

"I know you will," I said. "I'm going to let myself out. Call me when you want me to come back."

"Okay." She smiled wanly. "Thanks again, Marc." Her voice was sultry, and sad in a beckoning way.

I left her at the kitchen table. I picked up my bag by Robert's desk and walked out to the car. I sat with my hands on the steering wheel for a minute or two, and then took a deep breath and drove home.