AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

  She disliked him increasingly; his vanity, his conceit, his self-absorption. He had virtues: he was easy-tempered, genuinely kind, and could be thoughtful. But they were greatly outweighed by the faults. Well, not that she was immune from faults. As always on these occasions, these nights, and however hard she tried not to, she thought suddenly, sharply of Reuben, his sweetness, his gentleness, his trust; how hideously he would be hurt if he knew what she was doing (no matter what the end might be), how unlikely and how unsatisfactory her explanation. She found it quite unsatisfactory herself, at times; she was supposed to love someone, really love them – well, she wasn’t supposed to, she did, she did – she had a wonderful sexual relationship with him, and then when it suited her, for some rather dubious end of her own, she just went to bed with someone else. She must stop it, Fleur decided, stop it very soon, before any real harm was done, before she broke Reuben’s heart and lost her self-respect. She wasn’t gaining anything, getting anywhere; it was a pointless exercise. Interesting, initially, but pointless. And disappointing. Very disappointing. No need to say anything, make a big deal out of it; she would just say she couldn’t see him next time he called. Easy. She felt more cheerful suddenly, less remorseful about herself; she might even manage to go to sleep.

  God, it had been a long night. She looked at her watch: Nigel’s watch. Only three. She had a really big day ahead: she was going for an interview; she’d been headhunted by Browne Phillips Ivy, one of the most prestigious, medium-size, blue-chip agencies in Manhattan. It was only a would-you-be-interested-in-a-chat call, but she knew what it meant: we want you. Every time she thought about that, ever since the phone had rung, she had been high, high on exhilaration and a huge shot of self-esteem. Fleur was low on self-esteem; her last encounter with Joe had brought it even lower.

  Sometimes she realized, thinking idly about leaving Silk diMaggio, what it would mean, and she felt quite a sense of regret over Nigel. Especially when she was with Piers. At least he had been honest with her. Well, almost. She would miss him, if she left. And Mick. She would really miss Mick. Apart from adoring him, he was her Svengali, he’d taught her everything. She couldn’t actually imagine how she was going to get along without him, without his funny, brilliant, tough guidance, his originality, his ferocious perfectionism. Maybe she could take him with her. That’d be fun. Maybe – she realized her mind was finally hazing over, drifting into irrelevancies, that she was going to sleep. She turned over, pulled the pillow over her ears against Piers’s snores, and fell into a complicated dream about Mick and Nigel and Poppy all making a film of Romeo and Juliet.

  When she woke up, it was still dark: thank God, she was always afraid they’d forget the Wake Up call. She looked at the clock: five thirty. What had woken her? She turned cautiously: Piers was no longer in the bed. She heard him moving in the bathroom, then heard the phone gently picked up; Fleur half sat up, listening, totally awake.

  She couldn’t hear all the conversation, and she didn’t dare pick up the extension; but what she did hear was so extremely interesting, she felt all her patience, all her endeavours had been worthwhile. She said goodbye to him at eight thirty, and went off to her interview at Browne Phillips Ivy with her heart flying. This was clearly going to be altogether a good day.

  ‘This is a very nice portfolio, Miss FitzPatrick. Very nice indeed. Impressive for someone of your age and – what – five years’ work.’ Chuck Laurence sat back in his chair and smiled at her. He was one of the creative group heads at Browne Phillips Ivy and he did not look too much like Mick diMaggio. More from the Nigel Silk mould, very WASP, very old money, but less sleek, less smooth, tall and slightly gangly, with neat brown hair and piercing blue eyes. ‘Very nice indeed. I specially like the work on T. & J. Stores. We have a relevant account here, as you know. And the cosmetic work is interesting too. Now, then, tell me why you’re thinking of leaving Silk diMaggio. You obviously have a very successful relationship with them.’

  ‘Well, one has to move around,’ said Fleur. ‘I think six years is quite a long time really in this business. I love it there, but I’ve got itchy feet. And I want some new challenges. I got your call, or rather the call from Macphersons, and it was a kind of a nudge. In absolutely the right direction. So – here I am.’

  ‘Well, I’m pleased you are. Look, I have to talk to some other people here, and then I’ll get back to you. I’m very glad you came in.’

  ‘Fine. Thank you for seeing me.’

  He called her later that day, asked her to go back to meet Baz Browne. She had to tell Poppy, it was so exciting.

  ‘My,’ said Poppy, ‘Baz Browne, eh? You really are on your way, Fleur.’

  ‘I really think I am,’ said Fleur.

  ‘I have some news too,’ said Poppy. ‘I’m getting married.’

  Poppy’s man did not seem nearly good enough for her; his name was Gill Hillman, and he was very good looking, tall, Jewish, he could be extremely funny, and was an excellent dancer, but that was where his virtues ended, as far as Fleur could see. He was moody, often morose and occasionally extremely bad tempered; he was a lawyer, with a medium-size firm in Manhattan, and was not doing terribly well. Fleur could see why. If she was paying someone a fortune to sort out her problems, she’d want encounters with him to be pleasant, not an assault course. Maybe he made more effort with his clients than he did with her, but whenever she had a conversation with Gill Hillman she came away feeling intellectually incompetent. The phrase most often on his lips was, ‘I’m afraid you’ve missed the point.’ He clearly didn’t like Fleur, seeing her, no doubt, she thought, as a rival in his affections for Poppy, and he made no attempt to disguise the fact that he thought Reuben was little better than a buffoon. When Fleur discussed this with Reuben, he shrugged and said in his even-tempered way that Gill was a bit of a superior bastard, but Poppy liked him, so he must be OK.

  ‘He’s not marrying me,’ he said with his sweetest smile.

  Mrs Blake was also clearly not entirely happy about the relationship; Gill made an effort to be nice to her, but she confided in Fleur that she found him a little hard to talk to. For someone who was Reuben’s mother, Fleur felt this was quite an observation. ‘But Poppy adores him, so I’m sure things will be fine. She’s very sensible.’

  Poppy did adore Gill; she came right out and confronted Fleur’s anxieties one evening over a great many glasses of wine. ‘I know you all think he’s a little difficult, and he is. That’s exactly what I love about him. He needs me. He’s awkward because he’s shy and unconfident, and he knows he isn’t charming, and when he’s relaxed and we’re alone together he is just the sweetest guy in the world.’

  Fleur thought of Gill telling her she had entirely missed the point about Midnight Cowboy which they had all seen together the previous night, and the progress of the Vietnam War, and tried to believe her.

  ‘That’s great,’ she said, slightly uncertainly.

  ‘And he adores me. I’ll tell you something else, Fleur, when it comes to bed, he is just fantastic. I never had such sex. Ever.’

  ‘Now that I can relate to,’ said Fleur.

  She didn’t quite know what to do with the information she had acquired that day, listening to Piers on the telephone, but she felt it was important and valuable. Only little threads, really, half of them obscured, muffled, through the wall; a person-to-person call to a somebody Zwirn (there couldn’t be that many) on some exchange she hadn’t been able to identify (but within the United States). A tender enquiry about someone else, a hope expressed to be ‘over soon’ (over? over where?) and, most important, a promise to ‘increase the allowance’. She stored it away in her brain, and returned to it two or three times a day, checking it over, feeling pleased with herself for acquiring it.

  Browne Phillips Ivy made her an offer of senior copywriter on a group of three accounts, at a salary of thirty-five thousand dollars a year. Fleur t
ook a deep breath and said she couldn’t think of moving for less than forty thousand dollars and felt sick for a whole morning until they came back and said OK, but she’d certainly be earning it. Fleur said she certainly hoped she would, and went to tell Mick. She knew it was slightly rash before BPI confirmed in writing, but she trusted them, and she wanted to get the nasty part over. It was very nasty, because Mick was so nice; he was clearly upset, and told her they’d miss her terribly, and he really didn’t know what Julian Morell would have to say about it. He also said he thought the whole idea was for her to be FitzPatrick Advertising, not part of some other lousy set-up, and she had said it was, but she needed a little wider experience first. Nigel was less upset, and more put out, but he and Mick took her out to a wonderful lunch at the Four Seasons on her last day, and they all returned extremely drunk and got a lot drunker on the champagne Fleur had blued her entire first month’s raise on. She was planning to spend most of the other month’s raises on a new apartment: ‘I adore it here,’ she said sadly to Mary, ‘but it is a little uncomfortable a lot of the time, like when it’s very hot and very cold. And I’ve seen these lofts on Central Park West and they just blew me away.’

  Mary hugged her as closely as her latest pregnancy allowed and said she hoped Fleur wouldn’t be too grand to visit sometimes.

  ‘Mary,’ said Fleur, and there was a touch of pain in her voice, ‘you’re the nearest to family I’ve got. Just try and keep me away.’

  She put in a call to Rose Sharon in Los Angeles. The maid told her she was away filming for another three months, but she would certainly have her call her when she got back.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Fleur and put the phone down, feeling rather bleak. Rose had been a bit of a disappointment. Nothing more from her about the starlet, Lindsay Lancaster, nothing about anything. Well, she obviously had a great many claims on her time. And it must all seem very unimportant to her.

  Sometimes Fleur felt faintly, just faintly tempted to give the whole thing up. She was busy, she was happy, she was successful; and it was all such an old, cold trail. It was all so slow, so painfully slow; hardly surprising, when it was just her, pitted against the whole world. What did she think she was going to achieve, except a lot of newly awakened grief for herself? Then she would remember, as sharply as ever, the feeling of outrage when she had heard about her father’s death and the way it had come about; she would get out the cutting from Inside Story, and read it, and look at her father’s handsome, smiling face, and remember how he was, and how different from the way Inside Story had presented him, and how much she had loved him; and she knew she couldn’t betray him by simply leaving things, leaving him the sad sordid subject of a sad sordid story. He deserved better than that. And no one else was going to give it to him.

  Browne Phillips Ivy was a very different place from Silk diMaggio: larger, older, more formal, less fun. Senior management was very senior, distanced from the other departments: the thought of any of them wandering into an office and peering over a shoulder, as Nigel did, was laughable. They were known by their second names only, and when Fleur was introduced to Baz Browne, and Col Ivy, they both called her Miss FitzPatrick, and she knew they would continue to do so for some time. It was not one of the giants, not a JWT or an Ogilvy’s, but it was a large and seriously rated agency, and both Browne and, even more, Matthew Phillips, were both originally creative men who had been brought in in the late fifties by Col Ivy: Browne from JWT, Phillips from Bates. The triumvirate had quadrupled its growth in five years; all three were considered gurus in the business. The agency was based on Madison, a couple of blocks down from Silk diMaggio, in rather more sober offices; the accounts people presented an extremely conservative front, wore dark suits, didn’t lark around in office hours and had individual offices, rather than open plan, and the creative people were certainly not encouraged to think they had carte blanche to behave in any way irresponsibly. Indeed, it was one of the tenets of the agency that the creative departments were forced to give very serious consideration to such sober and grown-up matters as budgets, spend, research, and media. Fleur liked that; she had always considered the rift between account management and creative far too wide; it was one of her personal credos.

  Browne Phillips Ivy were not currently considered so creatively brilliant as Silk diMaggio, but they had a solid history of famous campaigns, two of which – for Mayer’s Whisky and Holden’s Airlines – were part of advertising history. Life there was less like a party and more like hard work, and although Fleur had some misgivings about the culture shock, she welcomed the insistence that was placed on what she thought of as account experience, and knew that working in a large, blue-chip agency was not only crucial to her career pattern, but would introduce her to entirely new aspects of the advertising business.

  Her accounts were Morton’s, a cheap clothes chain, Stobbs, a small publishing house specializing in glossy heavily illustrated books, and Pettit’s, who fought a fierce ongoing battle with Petfoods for the number one slot in the pet food war.

  She worked with two art directors, neither of whom she considered especially talented, Ricky Pentry on Morton’s and Pettit’s, and Julia Miller on Stobbs, but both of whom liked her and seemed enormously grateful to have her in their team. They took her out to lunch on her first day, and told her that Sol Morton was a nightmare ‘in and out of the office’ said Julia darkly, that Dick Rankin, marketing director of Pettit’s, used the agency in general and the group in particular as his own personal New York office, and Bernard Stobbs was the sweetest man in Manhattan, but ‘as much use as a client as a steeplejack with vertigo’.

  ‘The group head won’t hear a word against any of them,’ said Julia. ‘So be warned.’

  ‘I’m warned,’ said Fleur.

  Her first tough meeting was with Sol Morton. He was Jewish, short, thickset (although not fat), dark-haired, wore an enormous amount of gold jewellery, and smoked huge cigars whatever the time of day. He was aggressive, rude, defensive about his shops – and could be extremely funny. Fleur liked him.

  ‘Well,’ he said, looking her up and down after their initial introduction. ‘I can see you’ve never been into Morton’s in your life.’

  ‘I certainly have,’ said Fleur with dignity. ‘I go in all the time.’

  ‘Since you were put on to this account.’

  ‘No, long before I knew about this account.’

  ‘Really? What did you buy there?’ His darting little black eyes were sharp, cynical.

  ‘Bags.’

  ‘What sort of bags?’

  ‘Those gorgeous little leather shoulder bags. The quilted ones, that look a bit like Chanel. And about ten silk shirts.’

  ‘How did you hear about it? Through the ads?’

  ‘No,’ said Fleur, taking a deep breath, and looking nervously at Chuck Laurence as she spoke. ‘I heard about it through a friend.’

  ‘Mmm. Says a lot for your ads, Chuck. I want to tell you I think this new lot stinks. Stinks. Pictures of women in plastic bags: puhl–lease! I want a reason for going into Morton’s, not some fucking arty-farty rubbish. Let’s see what Fleur here thinks of them.’

  Fleur met his gaze steadily. ‘I couldn’t possibly begin to comment.’

  ‘Don’t give me that shit. You’re new to this account. You’re still a consumer, near as dammit. Tell me how you react to plastic bags. Come on. I’m waiting.’

  ‘You’ll have to wait,’ said Fleur. ‘You can’t expect me to comment, you know you can’t. This is my first week, Mr Morton, it’s totally unfair. You’re out of line.’

  ‘Sol, darling, Sol.’ He laughed suddenly, blew a cloud of cigar smoke out. ‘OK, I’ll ask you in your second week. Let’s talk media, Chuck. No sense discussing creative. That campaign has to go straight down the toilet, I’m telling you. Let’s see what Fleur here can come up with.’

  It was a long morni
ng; he rejected everything, every newspaper, every magazine, except Cosmopolitan, every TV slot. He told them they were fart-arses, that they knew less about advertising the retail trade than his great-grandmother, that they shouldn’t feel remotely comfortable about retaining the account.

  ‘I’m looking around, Chuck, I warn you. I want advertising, not Thoughts for the Day.’

  They took him out to lunch inevitably; to the Roosevelt Hotel, which was just around the corner from the agency. It was a great haunt for advertising people at the time: not a smart hotel, but a good restaurant and in the heart of adland. Sol Morton ate his way through the card, drank two large martinis, more than a bottle of claret, and finished with two double brandies. He appeared marginally more sober at the end than when they began. He sat next to Fleur and spent most of the meal rubbing his leg against hers. She endured it good-naturedly, reckoning that she could find a way to handle it when she knew him a little better.

  When they got back to the office, Ricky collapsed into his chair, threw his arms above his head. ‘Jesus wept,’ he said.

  ‘We all will if we lose that account,’ said Chuck. ‘Fleur, what do you make of friend Sol? You handled that rubbish about what you thought of the roughs very well. I felt for you.’

  ‘So did Mr Morton,’ said Fleur tartly. ‘Right through lunch.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Chuck. ‘I’m sorry. Maybe –’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Fleur. ‘It’s my problem. For now. Can I take a look at the research tonight and talk tomorrow?’

  ‘Sure. That’d be good. You’ll see there’s something about the English market in there, Fleur; he has some fantasy about opening there.’

  Her new apartment was gorgeous; it was exactly what she had promised herself, a loft conversion on the Upper West Side: a huge studio room, a small bedroom, and a kitchen and bathroom. She even had someone to clean it and do her laundry once a week. ‘I work such terrible hours now, worse than ever,’ she said to Poppy, slightly embarrassed, ‘and I can afford it, it’s my present to myself.’