Fire in the Firefly

by Scott Gardiner

  He stops in town to buy the promised Chelsea buns and a dozen butter tarts. All the handy parking spots are taken; he has a fair walk down to the landing. He should have called Anne from the bakery.

  “I’m here,” he says. “So are the bugs.”

  “Yes.”

  He contemplates retreating up the hill to wait in the car, but decides to tough it out. By the time he spots them rounding the mouth of the bay, Roebuck is wishing he’d stayed in the car. Zach is standing next to Anne on the passenger seat, gripping the windshield like a maniac.

  Roebuck hands his son the bakery boxes and tosses his carry-on into the stern. “Where are the girls?”

  “Making pancakes.” Anne’s tone makes it clear they should be getting back as rapidly as possible.

  “I bought Chelsea buns,” he says, slapping his hundredth mosquito.

  “Get in.”

  It’s a short ride to the island. The bugs are blown away once the boat is up to plane. Anne’s cottage is perched on the highest point of land; almost always there’s a breeze. Mosquitoes this time of year are not normally much of a concern. Roebuck wonders about global warming.

  “Did you get the wine?”

  “I did.”

  The kitchen is a disaster; the stove is cherry-red, though nothing is actually aflame. Katie greets her father passionately. “Morgan broke all the eggs!”

  “I have Chelsea buns!” says Roebuck.

  Anne begins to sweep away the flour he has tracked across the floorboards. “I was going to have you barbecue a rack of lamb,” she says, “but I think the bugs are going to be a problem.” She considers. “Maybe I’ll upgrade the kids’ spaghetti into something more Bolognese, and we’ll all have that. Yes,” she says, deciding. “That still goes with the wine.”

  “It’s just bugs,” Roebuck tells her. “The smoke will keep them off.”

  He will have cause, come evening, to regret this bravado.

  Meanwhile, the day passes normally for a weekend at this juncture of the season. The lake is still warm enough for swimming, but the mosquitoes, though fairly mild until the sun goes down, remain a presence. A few chores need seeing to down around the dock, some leaves need raking, but for the most part it’s an indoors stay. The kids watch videos until the television is shut off, forbidden, and replaced with board games, after which the acrimony rises sharply. Morgan and her violin are sent off to practice in the sleeping cabin. Anne and Roebuck monitor their emails. “Yasmin thinks we’ll get the Silverstein contract,” Anne says, busy at her keyboard. “She ran into Belinda Silverstein yesterday on Cumberland.”

  “Getting her nails done?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “You’re right. Sorry. Excellent news,” he says, “about the Silverstein job.”

  Sure enough, when the sun begins to sink, the mosquitoes rise in humming waves. Roebuck is committed to the lamb. He bundles up, tucks his pants into his socks, rolls down his shirtsleeves and methodically buttons cuffs. He has doused himself in bug repellent, but they find a way in anyway. Each time he tries escaping back indoors, a cloud of insects follows. Roebuck is told either stay in or stay out, but not to let the bugs into the house.

  Notwithstanding, the lamb makes it to the table in a perfect state of doneness. The Ripasso is a flawless match; Roebuck in his wisdom has produced a second bottle. The kids are quietly content with their spaghetti. It’s a relief to all of them that Morgan has packed her instrument back into its case.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Anne says.

  “Me too.” Roebuck fingers the swelling on his neck.

  He endures a new attack at bedtime while lighting the children’s way to the bunkie, flashlight in one hand, a jug of drinking water in the other. It’s ridiculously uncomfortable having no hands free to swat. They spend the next ten minutes sowing bloody vengeance on every last mosquito trapped inside.

  Unlike Anne, Roebuck has never acquired an immunity. As far as he’s concerned it’s because the bugs target him and leave her be—and maybe there’s some truth to that—but even when she does get bitten, Anne never swells or itches. Roebuck does. Fortunately, this time, there’s nothing too serious on the visible parts of his face, but his fingers comes away with smears of pink when he probes the back of his neck.

  “Don’t scratch,” Anne says. “I’ll get the lotion. Kids okay?”

  “I told them they had to have the lights out by nine-thirty or I’d cut the power. The good news, though, is that the bugs will keep them penned in until morning. I’ll go check on them later,” he says dabbing his neck.

  “You’re a good dad. Don’t scratch.”

  Anne has put on a bathrobe and got herself ready for bed before administering his ointment. “Take your shirt off.”

  Roebuck examines himself in the mirror. The parts he can see don’t seem so bad.

  “Your back looks sore. Lie down.”

  He stretches out face down as instructed. “A couple of bad ones here,” Anne says, tracing a finger down the cleft between his shoulders. “You’ll live.” He hears the sound of the bottle being shaken, then the coolness of the lotion on his skin. The bed moves as Anne shifts position. “Hold still. I’m getting some Kleenex.” The mattress bumps, and then bumps again when she returns. She has climbed on top, her legs on either side of him.

  “You did say the kids were asleep?”

  It takes him a few seconds to understand that his wife is no longer in her robe.

  “Turn over,” Anne says.

  It has been so long, between them, that it feels for Roebuck almost like being with another woman. On the other hand it is extraordinarily, inherently familiar; that grace that comes with years. “Mmm,” she says a little later. “Why did we stop doing that?”

  Roebuck has no answer. “Camomile lotion: aphrodisiac.”

  “Who knew?”

  “What’s got into you?”

  “You, evidently.” Anne has slid over to her side of the bed and closed her eyes. “You can go to sleep now.”

  But first he needs to check the kids. The bunkie is promisingly dark. Dressed in much less than is wise, Roebuck scurries through the undergrowth and cautiously puts his nose against the window. He doesn’t want to breach the seal and let the bugs inside, but there is just enough moonlight to see his children through the glass, snugly and safely asleep. Eyes adjusted to the darkness, he now discerns the rhythmic flash of fireflies pulsing in the trees; he has read somewhere that lightning bugs are often active at the same time as mosquitoes. Roebuck stands beneath the moonlight, blinking. In the process he collects a whole new crop of punctures and wonders if he should initiate a second round of treatment, but his wife is snoring gently, too, when he returns.

  23

  Women are work. Period.

  The Collected Sayings of Julius Roebuck

  People will tell you that branding is new; that it was invented by marketers at the end of the twentieth century. Bullshit. Branding is ancient. Branding is biology; it’s life itself. It is reproduction.

  A frog doesn’t croak to announce it’s a frog; he does it to say he’s the frog. A peacock grows his tail-feathers to convince the peahen that he’s not just a mate, he’s the mate. The one for her.

  I know you are all familiar with the concept of brand fidelity: it goes back to this ancient principle. I am not a peacock—I am the peacock. I am the gift you give yourself. I am your destiny.

  That’s the meaning we aim to instil. That’s the value-added in the process of selection—beyond that value of the thing selected: this thing is meant for you because you were meant to have it. It is yours by design.

  Would you be surprised if I told you that the prime mover in the marketplace is reproduction?

  Reproduce is just another way to say restock.

  For a product to be viable it has to move, it has to
be selected from the shelf in order to be restocked with one that replaces it, which in turn has to move. That’s the path of evolution. From time to time it happens that a product is replaced with one that is not identical—one that is altered in some way.

  If that new product has been chosen in preference to the old one, it’s for one reason and one reason only: Because it has found a better way of saying choose me.

  Now begins a busy phase in Roebuck’s life. Professionally, things have heated up. The ethnographic research he’s commissioned on Ripreeler’s new pheromone bait has been unexpectedly insightful. Teams of anthropologists that fanned out to fishing camps and derbies all across the continent have now returned with their reports. Certain aspects of their findings have taken the marketers by storm.

  By far the most frequently reported observation was the subjects’ strong reaction to the product’s smell. Roebuck had predicted this, of course; also that most respondents were clearly willing to associate the odour with enhanced attractiveness to fish. All to the good.

  He picks up his marker and writes:

  STINKS

  Better still was respondents’ willingness to state that they believed the bait was genuinely helpful in catching more fish. The Ripreelers were over the moon about this finding, though Roebuck himself remains cautious; he is forever warning clients not to get too carried away with ethnographics. Even so, a claim like PROVEN RESULTS! is every marketer’s wet dream. Roebuck adds a second bullet:

  WORKS

  But what has really turned his crank is a little gem of startling perception—one the client was not nearly so happy about. And that, says Roebuck, is what separates the sharks from the flounders in this business, the muskies from the perch, the advertisers from the shoals of mere minnow marketers. In one-on-one interviews, several participants—a clear, directional cohort—admitted to a feeling that surprised them, too: a vague reaction variously described as something resembling guilt. The bait had worked so well, in fact—had in fact been such a magnet to its quarry—that some reported oddly moral qualms. “It’s almost like cheating” was the way one angler phrased it.

  Roebuck returns to his whiteboard:

  CHEATS

  “That’s the part that makes the client nervous. But you and I know better.” Roebuck erases the board and changes up the order:

  STINKS

  CHEATS

  WORKS

  There’s something beautiful in there just waiting to break out. He knows it. The problem is that he hasn’t yet identified exactly what.

  He is frustrated, too, with the lack of progress on his still-too-hypothetical footwear account. There’s been a lot of effort sunk into that one by him and Greenwood both, and every bit of it on spec. Roebuck loathes pro bono. And he will cash in, eventually; it’s just that, so far, something seems to be holding up the process, some kind of delay, according to his sources; some snag in procurement that still needs finalizing before anything can move ahead. Whatever the cause, there’s no formal request for proposals and until that happens Roebuck’s hands are tied. Greenwood, too, appears discouraged. And of course he’s pissed off, still, that he hasn’t been informed exactly who this client is supposed to be. What he needs is patience. Roebuck is fairly certain anyway that Daniel’s been doing some digging on his own behalf.

  But there is no denying Greenwood has been busy. One of the smarter things he’s done, in retrospect, was assigning so much of the Artemis account to Daniel’s sphere of influence. On the whole, that piece of business has turned out to be the cash cow he had hoped, though a mean-spirited and unconscionably bad-tempered beast inclined to use its horns. As ever in the natural order of things, it’s the suits who take worst of it when some sphincter-mouthed product manager fresh out of Wharton decides she hates the colour of that border or the sizing of that font. But in the end, it’s Daniel who’s responsible for inputting all their endless changes. He’s been writing a fair amount of copy, too, in recent weeks. Ah well, he’s young.

  Roebuck has been fighting back a growing feeling that he himself is not so young. It’s painful to admit—physically, some mornings—but sleeping with three women is wearing him down. The question (and Roebuck is honest enough to recognize he will never give himself an honest answer) is whether he would have launched his campaign for Yasmin if he’d still been having sex with Anne. Some days it’s yes; others definitely no. Today would be a yes. But that’s only because it’s beforehand and Roebuck is still riding that tight-chested, hollow-groined ache of expectation rather than the bruised and jaded aftermath he has learned also to anticipate.

  “Going somewhere?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.” Roebuck is checking his watch. “Sorry, Daniel. Time to wrap this up.”

  They turn, side by side, and study the whiteboard. Greenwood shrugs. Roebuck, shrugging too, picks up the marker and adds some pronouns and a set of exclamation points.

  IT STINKS!

  IT CHEATS!

  IT WORKS!

  “Let me know when you’ve decided.” Greenwood pauses at the door. “Any word on drag and clop? Just asking.”

  Roebuck is shaking out his jacket. Katie is due at taekwondo in forty minutes. “You’ll be in the loop, Daniel, just as soon as there’s a loop to be in. Honestly.”

  “Dad, what’s a labia … plasty?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “La-bi-a-plasty.” Zach spells out the syllables, enunciating. “What’s a labia-plasty?”

  “Um …”

  “I get breast aug-men-tation. That’s a boob job. But what’s a labiaplasty …?”

  Roebuck has taught his children—from the moment they moved up from picture books—that whenever they’re stuck on a word they should look at the surrounding sentence. “Read the words around it,” he tells them. “That’s where you’ll find your clues.”

  “Um …” He says again.

  “Augmentation means the same as enhancement. Right? That means making something bigger. And buttocks is bum. So buttock enhancement must mean making a bum bigger. But why would anybody want a bigger bum?”

  “Jennifer Lopez,” chimes Katie from the back seat.

  Zach ignores his sister. “I see why you’d want bigger boobs. But a bigger bum?”

  “Booty!” Katie says a little louder.

  “Shut up.” Zach repeats this phrase so often that no one even listens anymore.

  Roebuck has by now figured out that Zach is reading words off a sign on the back of a bus. He steps on the gas and moves the car a little closer. It’s a transit ad for an uptown plastic surgeon.

  Exceptional Service for Exceptional Clients:

  The Dr. Aspara Body-Sculpting Clinic offers the latest in breast augmentation, tummy-tucks, and buttock enhancement technology …

  Then, below, in bullets: “Labiaplasty … Perineoplasty …Hymeno­­plasty …” followed by several terms Roebuck himself can’t define. The text is superimposed across a very female torso in a purple thong.

  So-so in terms of presentation, he decides, though the ratio of waist to hips is definitely arresting.

  “Labiaplasty is a plastic surgery procedure for altering the labia minora and the labia majora,” Kate intones.

  “Where did …?”

  “I Googled it.” His daughter reads on. “A study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine reports that 32 percent of patients undergo the surgery for corrective and functional impairment while 37 percent for aesthetic reasons alone.”

  “Can I have my phone back, please?

  “You’re driving.”

  This is true.

  The three of them are on the way to taekwondo. Kate has possession of his smartphone. It drives Roebuck crazy seeing people talking on their cellphones while operating motor vehicles—he’s been known to yell—so Kate gets his for the duration of the trip. Zach dislikes being forced t
o come along, but there’s nowhere else to leave him at this time of day so in compensation for being here he gets to ride up front. In exchange for accepting the back seat, Kate has full access to Roebuck’s BlackBerry, though she’s forever telling him he should have got an iPhone. “Piece of crap,” she says, navigating back to Brick Breaker.

  “What’s labia?”

  “Shut up, Zach!” It’s like performance art, the two of them.

  “Labia,” says Roebuck, pedantic from habit where his kids are concerned, “is the Latin word for lips …”

  “Dad! Ewww. You’re disgusting!”

  “I was just …” But Roebuck has spotted salvation, straight ahead. “Hey!” he says, a Dairy Queen standard has loomed into view. “Anybody up for a milkshake?”

  Understanding need requires first advancing it from want.

  A want is merely something you would like to have. A need is a thing whose absence causes harm. Our aim as marketers is the promotion of want into need.

  Remember Maslow? Do people still study Maslow?

  Abraham Maslow was a psychologist in the 1950s who described a hierarchy of human needs, starting with the bedrock priorities of food and shelter. Next in order came physical security and, after that, social security: the love and the esteem of fellow humans. Ranked at the very bottom of things we truly need is self-actualization.

  Everything below that, Maslow figured, was just want.

  Our objective as marketers is to elevate our product from something wanted to something needed. We achieve this transformation by means of advertising. I said a little while ago that branding is not a new thing. But here is a new thing: