by Jonathan Dee
Kay lay on the bedcovers in a blue sweatsuit. Molly had never seen her dressed this way before: she must have decided that this was the garment of the woman who had been brought too low to care how she looked anymore.
“How could you do this to me?” Kay said wearily.
“I didn’t mean to do anything to you, Mom. You can’t take it all so personally. It’s something I did, not something I did to you. I’m sorry if it hurt you.”
“We’re ruined in this town! Our reputation is destroyed!”
“But why do you care? I’ve never heard you say a good word about this town or the people in it my whole life. Why does their opinion mean anything?”
“Don’t get smart with me! This is my home, that’s why!”
“All my life all you’ve told me—”
“Don’t tell me what I’ve told you!” she said, raising herself on her elbows. “All the hard work I put into raising you right, just so I could be the mother of the town slut?”
“Mom,” Molly said, trying not to cry, “can’t we forget everyone else just for a few minutes? If this is the last time you and I ever talk, can’t we at least find a way to say what we mean?”
But Kay went on talking about how she had been victimized until Molly realized her mother wasn’t even speaking to her anymore – she was speaking more to posterity. She never got it all talked out. She did not understand her judges.
On 17 April the mail brought Molly’s acceptances to Bennington, Reed, and Tulane; she was rejected by Columbia and Stanford. A few more rejections came in over the next few days. Molly had no one to share the news with; she no longer knew what connection these letters had to her future anyway.
She passed all her exams, taking them unproctored on her dining-room table. No one cared if she cheated or not. She skipped graduation, getting her diploma in the mail. All they had taken from her was something she had never really valued anyway; still, it wore on her, and she didn’t like the feeling of having nowhere to go.
In the middle of the night, in the darkened house, Molly came downstairs to the kitchen with a blanket around her shoulders and called Richard in Berkeley. He was home for once; it was after midnight there as well. Some sort of Indian music droned quietly in the background. She told him the whole story.
“I’m sorry to dump this on you,” Molly said quietly, afraid of waking her parents, “but I don’t have anyone else I can talk to. I’m stuck in my room in the middle of nowhere with these two lunatics who keep telling me I’ve brought a plague on our house. Okay, yes, I had an affair with a married man and maybe I shouldn’t have done it, maybe I should have foreseen all this somehow, but still, I don’t understand what they want from me. I don’t know what to do. I know they want me out of here. I’m supposed to go to college in four months. Dad’s out of work in another eight and they haven’t even bothered to put the house on the market yet. I can just imagine going up to him right now anyway and asking him for twenty grand so I can go to Bennington or wherever.”
“Do you want to go to Bennington?” Richard’s voice was a lot slower and more soothing than she remembered it, like a voice on the radio. He didn’t sound high, though. She knew she should take the opportunity to ask him more about how he’d been doing; but it was just such a relief to find someone who could talk calmly with her about the whole thing.
“No. I mean, no more there than anywhere else. I don’t know. The most appealing thing about it is getting the hell out of here.”
“So don’t go. Take a year off. Take five years off. What’s the law that says you have to finish learning things when you’re twenty-two?”
“And do what in the meantime?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Come out here and live with me for a while. Something different. Til you get everything else figured out.”
At that, Molly started sobbing. One act of kindness was all it took now. Richard said nothing to try to quiet or comfort her; he waited patiently for her to get control of herself.
“Oh, right, that’ll go over real big,” she said, when she had settled down a bit. “I’d have to ask Dad for the money for that, too. A little vacation for me, I’m sure that’s just what he’s thinking about, a little gift he can give me.”
“Ask him. I think I know him better than you do. Ask him.”
When she asked him, his expression never changed. He waited until he was sure she had finished talking, and then he said, “How much do you need?”
A few weeks later, near the end of a hot June day, Molly walked aimlessly through the quiet, cool rooms of her house. Her parents were out. A cab was coming in the morning to take her to the airport in Albany. She was all packed. The narcissus and the daffodils Kay had planted years ago were browning in the sun; the paint was cracking on the vacant houses in the development; Molly went out on to the porch barefoot to listen to the sounds of the valley and to see if it all looked any less familiar to her now that she was relatively sure she would never lay eyes on it again.
On the road in front of the house a young girl was riding her bike. She rode in a lazy figure-eight right by the Howes, pedaling slowly, not looking where she was going unless she had to. She was overweight, and wore a big loose Little Mermaid T-shirt over pink bicycle shorts. She turned around to pass the house again and Molly saw that it was Bethany Vincent. When she noticed that Molly had seen her, she stopped circling and slid forward off the seat so her feet were flat on the road. Molly stood waiting for a minute or more, but Bethany’s expression never clarified; the sun was right in the girl’s face, and she held up one hand as a visor over her eyes. When Molly started down the porch steps Bethany hopped back up on to the seat of her bike and rode away.
JOHN WOULD HAVE felt at home in a world governed by an unspoken compact ordaining that anytime anything awkward or unpleasant happened, everyone involved would agree to forget about it and to go forward as if it had never happened at all. This may have been less a fantasy than a kind of vestigial memory of his childhood in Asheville, North Carolina, in particular of the houses of some of his older relatives, whose genuinely terrible secrets were held aloft by a magical understanding that any break in the chain of pleasantry would result in those secrets’ crashing noisily to the floor in plain view of everyone. But John lived in New York now; and somehow he had surrounded himself with people who had no capacity for ignoring things that were difficult to explain – most conspicuously at work, where Roman spent the days immediately following the Doucette debacle glowering at him from across their office, ostentatiously awaiting some explanation for John’s failure to mention his friendship with Mal Osbourne. John soldiered on as best he could, cordial and red-faced. On the subsequent Monday Roman didn’t come in at all. Only by checking with the receptionist did John learn that his partner had decided to take a week’s vacation.
Rebecca, too, tried hard to be supportive when he told her of the strain on his relationship with Roman; but she had trouble getting past the fact that he had never even said anything to his partner about that bizarre Saturday with Osbourne. It was kind of a funny story, she thought; certainly there was nothing embarrassing or shameful about it. Why keep it a secret?
“Don’t you feel you guys are friends?” she asked gently. “I know we don’t see them much outside of work—”
“We’re friends,” John said glumly.
“You trust him, right? Wouldn’t he trust you as well? I mean, why wouldn’t he?”
“You’re probably right.” He wanted to bring the conversation to a close by making every concession.
But she was too perplexed. “Aren’t you assuming that he would think the worst of you? That he’d think you were lying, you were ambitious, you scheduled the whole thing because you somehow knew the Doucette review was coming up and then you lied about it?”
“I see your point,” John said.
“Well, have you ever given him any reason to think that way about you?”
He sighed.
“Of course y
ou haven’t,” she answered herself. “You should just have told him. Now you’ve turned nothing into something.”
John didn’t welcome being analyzed and so he agreed with her. There was a part of him, though, that held a more self-justifying view: We live in the age of directness, he thought; circumspection, the art of leaving things unsaid, is a lost one.
Still, he knew that no such formulation could answer the charge that his silence had been pointless, and he was desperate for things to go back to the way they had been. When Roman came back from his petulant vacation, John took him out to the Tenth Avenue Grill for drinks and told him the complete story of his dealings with Mal Osbourne, all its unlikelihoods intact, laced with apologies but pointing out also, in his own defense, how unbelievable it all seemed. He could tell that in Roman’s mind, miffed though he was, the whole Doucette episode was already just about consecrated to the past, to the war-story pantheon, even though they were still less than three weeks removed from the trip to Philadelphia (which meant that John had not yet received his handwritten letter from Osbourne about his “exciting new venture,” so he didn’t need to worry about whether to throw in that detail as well).
Roman, though he struggled not to show it, gradually began to find the whole thing funny. He shook his head. “Chocolate sculpture,” he said. “Well, as furious as I was the day of the pitch, I sure would have been sorry to miss it. It was one of the most demented things I’ve ever seen.”
John, relieved, ordered two more drinks.
“I guess I can see why you didn’t tell anyone,” Roman said. “Still, I wish you’d told me a week ago, at least.”
“Why?”
Roman smiled into his scotch glass. “’Cause I went to Canning and said I wanted somebody else to work with, that’s why.”
Next morning they went together to Canning’s office; with a viselike contraption balanced on his knees, the boss was trying to tie his own flies. “We kissed and made up,” Roman said.
“Thank God,” Canning said. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”
“So who were you going to partner me with?” Roman asked.
“I hadn’t even thought about it. Things like this happen all the time around here. It’s like a fucking junior high school. Now go and sin no more.”
Everything became as it had been. The two of them came up with some spots for a fruit juice that won the account for the agency (now called Canning & Leigh) and led to Dale and Andrea – laid off in the wake of the Doucette disaster – being rehired. John and Roman even got to go to Malibu to oversee the production of the first two spots. It was a different world. Their director was about seventy-five years old, with a deep tan and long, chalk-white hair; he showed up on the set the first day scowling and waving a rolled-up copy of the script.
“Where’s the cum shot?” he barked at them. “You left it out.”
“Sorry?” said John.
“Fucking New York,” the director said. “They think they invented everything. Do you know how many commercials I’ve directed?”
“Excuse me,” Roman said, before the director could supply the number, “‘cum shot,’ is that what you said?”
He looked at them murderously. An assistant was walking by with a tray full of unrefrigerated bottles of the fruit juice, to be used as props in one of the shots; the director grabbed one off the tray, unscrewed the top, tilted his head back, and poured the juice into his mouth from a height of about eight inches, so that some of it splashed off his perfect false teeth. He then lowered his gaze to Roman and John again, juice dripping off his chin.
“Idiots!” he said.
When they returned from the coast it was winter, just like that. The sun bounced off the roofs and the store windows. The plows came by after each snowfall to expose the streets, and the parked cars, up to their door handles in the resultant gray drifts, stayed half-hidden like cats in a meadow for weeks at a time. John wore his sunglasses on the walk to the subway in the morning, his breath steaming in front of him. The months that passed so quietly included his thirtieth birthday. He was less worried about growing old than he was consternated by the idea that thirty years – an enormous wedge of time – had now amassed behind him, without any correspondingly enormous sense of having lived.
He had never really stopped waiting for the promised communication from Mal Osbourne, though he wasn’t certain of the tone of his anticipation: amusement, or genuine excitement at the prospect of a career change, or simple curiosity as to whether the “exciting new venture” his erstwhile boss was planning had any existence at all outside the broad boundaries of Osbourne’s ego. Then one Saturday afternoon in April, John and Rebecca came home from the Twenty-third Street flea market with an oval mirror and a wall clock; by the time Rebecca had finished holding the mirror up in a couple of different places, hanging up her coat, and checking for phone messages, John had gone through the mail and had read the letter from Osbourne twice through. He held it out to her without a word and went to the kitchen, laughing soundlessly and shaking his head, to make them both some tea.
Dear Colleague:
In 1973 I entered the advertising business as an intern at Doyle Dane Bernbach in New York. The Creative Revolution, so-called, had carried the day – I remember there was a great big blowup beside the elevator of Bill Bernbach’s great “Lemon” ad for Volkswagen, the ad that started it all – and a revolution seemed to be taking place outside the tiny confines of our office as well. In music, in literature, in radical politics, it seemed to me that what was happening was less a political movement than a movement to restore the idea of truth in language, of plain speaking – a kind of democratic speech to set against the totalitarian language of the times. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” – I wonder how many of you reading this will even be old enough to remember that one. Anyway, advertising seemed like a part of this process. After a hundred years of the hard sell, honesty and plain speech was making its way into the unlikeliest place of all, the language of commerce. It was an exciting time.
Recently I turned on my television and saw another spot for Volkswagen – I don’t even know who has the account now – which ended with the tag “Perfect for your life. Or your complete lack thereof.” And it came to me at that moment that, thirty years after the “revolution” I thought I was a part of, our world seems to me to be held together right now by irony alone. Our culture propagates no values outside of the peculiar sort of self-negation implied in the wry smile of irony, the way we remove ourselves from ourselves in order to be insulated from the terrible emptiness of the way we live now. That wry smile mocks self-knowledge, mocks the idea of right and wrong, mocks the notion that art is worth making at all.
I want to wipe that smile off the face of our age.
As most of you know by now, I have severed my ties with the agency which formerly bore my name. I have decided to devote the remainder of my working life to a new venture: I hesitate to call it an ad agency because that implies that it will be like other ad agencies for which you have worked, or are working. It will not. True, we will create advertising, and that advertising will be paid for by clients: but the advertising will be unlike anything the world has ever seen.
I am writing to you to ask you to join me in this venture. My letter will be postmarked from Charlottesville, Virginia, where I am overseeing renovation of the building which will house our activities. In other words, in order to join me it would be necessary to leave your current homes and relocate to this town, whose beauty and whose intellectual heritage (for those of you who have not visited before) are an integral part of the history of the United States.
By accepting this offer you will be on an automatic partnership track. In the meantime, though, I will do my best to make your salaries commensurate with the salaries you draw now. I don’t want the sacrifice you’re making to be any greater than it has to be. Besides, if our mission is to fail, then the fact that fair salaries may hasten that failure by a few months is b
y no means a negative prospect.
I will contact you upon my return from Virginia. Please take advantage of these weeks to talk over with your loved ones both the exigencies of this decision and the potential rewards of putting your unmatched talents toward a noble and original, uncorrupted, ambitious purpose. The language of advertising is the language of American life: American art, American politics, American media, American law, American business. By changing that language, we will, perforce, change the world.
Yours truly,
Malcolm Osbourne
“Dear Colleague?” Rebecca said, as John returned with the tea.
John smiled indulgently.
“He wants you to quit your job and move to Virginia, and he sends a form letter?”
“He doesn’t seem to be one for the social graces,” John said. “Anyhow, I can see it. He’s busy down there overseeing all the construction, can’t sleep one night, he hammers out this letter in one draft, takes it to—”
“Where does he get all the money, I wonder?” Rebecca said.
“The money?”
“To build this little Xanadu down there. It sounds like a big undertaking.”
“Maybe he has clients already,” John said.
“Maybe he went to the bank,” Rebecca said, deadpan. “Maybe he went to the bank and said he needed a small-business loan to wipe the smile off the face of our age.”
Her sarcasm closed off any further conversation about it. John was less cynical by nature. While Osbourne’s plan might be a crazy one, it never occurred to him that it was anything less than sincere – that Osbourne was not set to try to do exactly what he said he would do. You had to admire a man’s sincerity, John said (silently, to Rebecca who slept beside him), a man’s courage, even if he was doomed to failure. He lay awake and watched the shadow of the ceiling fan in their bedroom for what seemed like hours.