It’s a helluva trick, but it’s been done to death. Wanting things we don’t need--that’s practically the national motto. The real trick is getting the consumer to need something he doesn’t want. Skinny jeans, for example. No self-respecting male wants to wear skinny jeans. They’re uncomfortable. They flatter almost no one, but every urban-outfitted boy of the fifteen to thirty-five vintage struts a pair. You can psychologize it all you want--it’s not the jeans, it’s the cult of cool--but at the end of the day he’s in the jeans. He’s made a very deliberate choice to change what he wants to have them. Bottom line is, he wants to want them.
My GAP skinny jeans aside, I like to think I use my powers for good, not evil. Day one of freshman advertising, I learned that there are thousands of ways to sell a product, but before you even think about dressing out a campaign, you have to imagine yourself as the consumer. You have to ask yourself why should I want this thing and not that other (practically identical) thing?
Stuart hands me a product sheet and the first thought that crops into my head, before the sample polls and the placement figures, is what I want more than anything--to have my parents back. My practical, business-suited brain has had to let them go. It’s kept my heart from feeling that pang it feels on missed birthdays and Christmases. I’ve begun, in small ways, to feel like home to myself, but my heart is still very much the heart of a lost child. It’s never stopped calling out for Mum and Dad and the home we had together. Now, I’m not sure what home means. I mean, I am home. I’m a well-adjusted creature of the global NOW. Home is where I plug in my iPhone.
When Stuart entrusted me with the spec for the Down Home campaign, I wasn’t sure if it was a stroke of really good or really bad luck. DH’s entire schtick is packaging the all-over zen feeling of ‘home’--sounds, smells, even tastes. The company’s Georgia born CEO, W. Parker, started spitballing the idea after two ‘Gawd awful’ weeks in Manhattan with no Atlanta Journal or deep fried pickles or grits.
What began as a regional telecom firm is now a multi-national media giant, and Parker wants to take the leap, via M&A, into tangibles. Say you work between three continents but want to wake up to your hometown paper, stream your kid’s football game, and crack open your favorite micro brew? Down Home delivers anytime, anywhere, hence my campaign tagline: ‘Home wherever you are’.
How a box of Oreos and a bottle of fabric softener equals home, I have no idea, but then my conception of home is aggressively anti-nostalgic. If I let myself get caught up in the stuff of what home used to be--the Luke Kelly tunes, the crackling smell of rashers and the soft upward lilt of Mum’s Aran accent--then I wouldn’t be able to give my everything to what’s happening now. I’ll be home when I’m sitting in the inner orbit of the marketing universe with Brad snapping sexy black and whites of me for Time.
I duck into the bathroom to pin back my hair and smooth on a bold coral lipstick that Kate had strong armed me into buying. I nearly died when the clerk rang it up. Thirty dollars for lipstick? Really?
‘It’s Chanel, you pleb!’ Kate had said as she’d turned me toward a mirror. ‘Think of it as a statement maker. Every woman needs a statement maker.’ She’d batted her eyes over my shoulder and purred ‘How you doin’?’
In the soft vanity light, I purse my lips and eye myself up, turning my head slowly from side to side. The nerves are kicking in, sending cold pulses of nausea down the length of my back. ‘You look fine,’ I tell myself and suck in another deep breath, then push the semi-circle of creams and bottles flush against the vanity. Deep breaths. ‘You’ve got everything under control.’
Out of the corner of my eye, Brad’s gunky razor glares up at me from a nest of soured hand towels. Would it kill him to hang them up? I lean over and, with an elbow, push the lot into a drawer. There! All sorted. Just need to grab my shoes and I’m out of here.
I tiptoe into the bedroom for my favorite pair of spike heels and, as I crane into the closet, my free hand shoots subconsciously to my throat. Where is Mum’s necklace?! I yank open the dresser drawer and riffle about. Where is it?! I swear I put it just here! God, today of all days! I’d feel completely lost without it.
‘Oh, thank Christ,’ I breathe when I catch a glint of gold. I clasp the chain around my neck and carefully center the pendant, a thumb-sized whorl of three interlocking swans, against the neckline of my dress.
A trumpet snore erupts from the bed, and I yelp. I hate it when he does that! I pad softly to his side of the bed, and he snorts into the pillow, mutters something--‘geisha pants’ or ‘Lisa’s plants’--and burrows deeper beneath the duvet.
‘Bye, mister,’ I whisper into his ear.
Dead to the world. How does he do that? I kiss what I think must be his head and slide into the hall. When was the last time I’d had a proper lie-in? One of those pull down the blackout curtain, amp up the AC, and have your coffee with a massive one o’clock fry-up kind of lie-ins. New Years? No, I’d pulled an all nighter to make doubly sure we held onto the GAP account.
‘I had to kiss some blonde one when the ball dropped,’ Brad had joked. At least, I think he was joking. He doesn’t remember what it’s like, clinging to the second to bottom rung in the mobility game, sacrificing now for a shot at being a somebody later. Ever since his work became a bimonthly feature in Esquire and In Style, Brad’s worldview has been decidedly top down.
I toss my phone into my bag and fumble around in the backlit hall for my keys. They aren’t in the stainless Tiffany bowl I got expressly for keys. How many times do I have to tell Brad--keys in the bowl? The wall clock pongs quarter to nine.
‘Shit,’ I huff and whirl round to the door. Where are the damned keys?! There’s a dull crack and my heart wrenches. I side step, and there’s the key ring, hanging right in front of me in the shadow of the deadbolt.
A gilt-framed Polaroid winks up at me from the floor, a spider-veined crack running down my father’s face into Mum’s chest and then jigging off sharply to a corner. It’s a shot from their honeymoon in the city, the only one, snapped by some kid in the park. The two of them look impossibly young, Mum in beads and a peasant skirt, her face lit up in laughter as she holds a wisp of long, black hair back from her face. Dad is bending down to her, beaming, eyes closed, the spark of contact suspended there forever.
I place the frame back on the hall table and step back. It’s been more than ten years since the crash, and I can still only just bear living without them.
‘Wish me luck,’ I say and touch a kiss to the glass.
CHAPTER TWO
Montague Street courses on both sides with moving sound, the sidewalks mobbed with commuters en route to the metro and the street grid locking to the turn off for the Brooklyn Bridge. I step out of the apartment block as if into a deep running stream and let myself be carried along with clacking heels and cell phone chatter and barking horns into the underground. I can always count on the city to bring me back to myself or, at the very least, to fill my head with so many incoming sensations that it’s impossible to think of anything but what’s right in front of me.
The #7 express clatters into the station. I lean forward into the wash of just cooler air that it pulls up through the stale tunnel and watch the knot of people jostle into the already full cars. I hop over the gap, loop an arm around the rail, and cast a soft gaze toward the back of the car. A pair of elderly sisters, the same blue rinse in their tight curls, nod into their seats as the train jolts forward, eyes softly closed. A circle of boys yammer in a fast Caribbean Spanish, punting a basketball from foot to foot across the floor. A girl in a neon top sends a text that makes her laugh out loud and then flush.
You can have the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty; my New York is right here in the underground. Here everyone is in constant, buzzing exchange. I watch them and imagine where it is they’re coming from, which stop they’re counting up to, and if there’s someone waiting there for them.
The train rumbles to a stop, and I take the steps two
at time to Broadway. The cross streets slide by, one after the other, and the taillights of the city bound cars blur in the fine, slantways rain. The constant stream of movement, of light and life across the city, surges through me like a bright, beating tide. Alone doesn’t happen in New York, and for me that’s just about as good as it gets.
At the corner of 5th and West 42nd, I pick up the two tall lattes that the ever faithful Mr. Henshaw has waiting for me at his lunch counter.
‘You’re my hero,’ I smile to him.
‘I know,’ he says.
I round the corner to Madison just as Kate comes rocketing up the stairs of the subway terminal in three inch heels and a lacy fuchsia dress. Her lipstick is smudged.
‘Perfect timing, as always,’ I say and hand her a latte.
‘I was this close to missing the train!’ she huffs, taking quick little swigs of her coffee every few steps.
‘Late one last night?’ I wink.
‘Let’s just say my bicuspids aren’t the only thing Karl knows his way around.’
‘Your dentist!’ I squeal. ‘What happened to Jake the pharmaceuticals guy?’
‘Booooring,’ Kate says and fakes a yawn.
‘I thought he was nice!’
‘You think all of the boring ones are nice.’
‘That’s not true!’ She smirks at me. ‘What, you think Brad’s boring?’
Kate fishes the last of a cheese Danish out of her bag and crams it into her mouth.
‘God no,’ she says, eyes fluttering. ‘Did you see his latest spread in Vanity Fair?’ I nod. ‘And his hair! And that tight little ass of his.’ Kate shivers.
‘Hey, that’s my boyfriend you’re perving on!’
‘Jules, I’m telling ya, he is the complete package,’ she laughs and nudges me in the ribs. ‘You are so going to be the power couple.’
‘As in Mr. and Mrs. Scholer?’ I squirm. ‘I don’t know.’ Brad is miles into the best-I-ever-had territory, but marriage? I’d always thought he was too avant-garde for marriage.
‘Are you mental?’ Kate reels.
‘No!’ I laugh. ‘I’m just not an all cards on the table sort of girl.’ If I breathed one word about Brad’s secret birthday box, Kate would have a heyday!
She frowns at me and takes another pull on her coffee. ‘Right, so, “bag Manhattan’s most eligible bachelor” is number two on the list? Seriously, Jules. You’re close to planning yourself out of an actual life.’
I heave a sigh. I am so sick of Kate making out like I’m this overwrought control freak! Dream job, dream man, happily ever after in a rent-controlled brownstone--how is that not living?! Of course, I know what she’d say: ‘Life doesn’t stick to straight lines and little boxes.’ I should know that better than anyone.
‘I’ve planned for that,’ I smirk at her.
‘Oh HO,’ she laughs. ‘Neurotic much?’
I jab at her with an elbow. It’s not like I try to micromanage every little thing that may or may not happen to me--that’s impossible. My planning penchant is all about damage control. I want something to happen, so I make it happen; if I don’t, I stay well of clear of it. For example, I don’t want to see my cleavage on the Internet, so those ‘bad girl’ snaps Brad keeps trying to take are just not happening. And I don’t ride in cars (for obvious reasons). I do want to be the best adwoman in Manhattan, so yeah, I take a hit on living up the now so I can have the life I want later.
‘Just remember,’ Kate says. ‘There are good things that happen unexpectedly.’
‘Like?’
‘UH,’ Kate claps a hand to her chest. ‘Me.’
‘Touché,’ I smile.
My brain shutters back to the Kate I knew in college. There I was, first day of my freshman year, weaving my box addled way through a gauntlet of iron-clad cliques. Who’s the new girl? I was sure they were saying under their breath.
Two weeks after the accident, I’d made the trip up town with every intention of enrolling, but it’d been too soon. I could barely eat, let alone study. Six months later it was still too soon, but I packed my things and tripped up to the city anyway. I’d kneed open the dorm room door, and there was Kate sprawled on her bed, phone in one hand, dog-eared Vogue in the other. She’d looked up at me, then said into the phone in a flip, So-Cal trill, ‘Gotta go, babes--she’s here,’ and tossed the phone and her beachy peroxide do in one fluid motion.
My first thought was, Great. I’m rooming with Drew Barrymore. I could tell by the way Kate looked at me, an unabashed up and down job that lingered on my knock-off Converse and baggy sweater, and settled on my (I realized then) tragically out-dated center parting, that she’d rather have kept the phantom roommate.
I’d wrangled my suitcase past a headless mannequin, a ridiculously oversized TV, and a wall of tatted magazines to the spare bed. It was covered over entirely by a tangle of clothes. I’d started to open my suitcase and then stopped short. There wasn’t a square inch in this place that wasn’t already crammed to overflowing, and I was going to unpack?
Kate pulled herself upright and unceremoniously pushed the pile of clothes into a heap on the floor.
‘Sorry,’ she’d said.
‘It’s alright,’ I’d replied and heaved my suitcase onto the bed. I hefted it open while Kate two thumb texted from the foot of her bed. I’ll be damned, I thought, if I’m spending the next year living out of a box.
‘Kate, right?’
‘Yep,’ she’d said without looking up.
‘Right. This isn’t going to work.’
She’d paused, gave a cursory look around the room, then shrugged.
‘Okay,’ she’d said and crammed the pile of clothes, the stack of magazines, and a shelf load of makeup under her bed. I must have made an OMG face, because Kate had smiled, not the practiced half smirk she’d flashed from the doorway, but an unguarded, girlish grin.
‘Thank GAWD!’ she’d breathed. ‘I thought you were one of those mousy, takes shit off everybody, types! The last girl they stuck me with--’ She’d sighed melodramatically as if there were no words to describe how lame the previous occupant had been. ‘Anyway… You like sushi? I know this ah-mazing place in Soho.’ Before I could think of a hipper excuse than, ‘I’ve got to register for sophomore English,’ Kate had pulled me after her to the door. ‘Come on! You’ll have loads of time to dork out this semester, trust me.’
The crowd had broken seamlessly for her as she trailed me down the stairwell to the red line station at 116th. Necks craned. Kate hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared. She’d kept right on yammering about her personal horde of underground blues clubs and secret cinemas and this ‘fab’ little designer consignment shop in Brooklyn, eyes full on me as we hurtled past the midtown stops.
‘Man, I took one look at you and thought, there goes my street cred for the year,’ she’d laughed as we hurtled through the underground. ‘No offense.’
‘Yeah, well,’ I’d smiled back at her. ‘I had you pegged as a credit card orphan.’
‘Or an aspiring actress,’ she’d joked.
‘In horror films.’
‘Nice.’
By the time we’d reached Soho, I’d learned the two things Kate Foster had a ‘major hard-on’ for: tabloid media and Elvis (Presley, not Costello).
‘The man was a marketing genius,’ she’d said. ‘I mean, he had good ole boy and sex machine wrapped up in the one package.’ She’d made an expansive gesture as we climbed up the stairs and onto a leafy avenue downtown. ‘You want a leg up in the image game, this is where you do your homework.’
I’d blinked at the teeming bistro fronts and the elegant, iron wrought balconies. This was New York? I thought I’d seen every last street downtown, but this--this was different. There was something vaguely old world about it that made me want suddenly to wear a fedora and drink sherry. The city, in Kate’s wake, had taken on a bright, almost benevolent sheen. My life wasn’t over after all. I felt like I had a real chance to be something in this place, may
be even happy.
Out of nowhere, I had felt the warm blooming of a very small but actual smile on my lips, the first one I hadn’t faked in the four achingly long months following the crash. I had let the sudden feeling of lightness branch out and down into my chest and took a deep, hopeful breath.
Kate, it turned out, was from Florida (I’d had the latitude right). Straight out of middle school, she’d bussed out to San Francisco.
‘At sixteen?!’ I’d howled.
‘Well, I looked eighteen. And my step-dad was a major A-hole. Little too liberal with the hands,’ she’d said and hugged a knee to her chest. ‘Anyway, I had this insane crush on Jack Kerouac. Used to hang around the City Lights bookshop with a sleeping bag and my Dad’s old army rucksack. All ready to go. Finally, someone told me he was dead. So I got a bus to New York, started over. Again.’
‘Jesus,’ I’d said.
Kate had waved a hand dismissively. ‘Shit happens, right?’
Made With Love: I Love You Forever Page 2