by Jonathan Dee
“You laugh,” Andrea said, even though Roman hadn’t laughed, “but wait’ll you hear this. The new agency has a mission. He wants to take the irony out of advertising. He wants it accepted as an art form. He wants to make it a force for social good.”
Again they sat dumbstruck for a few seconds, unsure whether to laugh – not because it wasn’t funny, but because the humor seemed at the expense of their former boss’s derangement.
“Kinky,” Roman said finally.
“So,” John said, and they all turned to look at him. “This Elaine Sizemore, then – she’s not taking him up on his offer?”
Andrea snorted. “She’s a god damn star at Needham, and she’s going to leave that and move to Virginia to work at the Osbourne Institute for the Painfully Sincere? What would you do?”
“You talked to her?”
“No, to another guy there. But if she was considering leaving I think she would have kept this letter to herself, don’t you?”
Within a week a copy of Osbourne’s “Dear Colleague” letter – not from Elaine Sizemore, but from some other unnamed source – had flown via fax to every agency in Manhattan. A cruelly annotated copy went up on the Canning & Leigh bulletin board for a day until Canning himself tore it down. The following week AdAge ran a small article about Osbourne’s quixotic reemergence, full of diplomatic quotes from other agency heads; Osbourne himself, the article said, could not be reached for comment.
In bed one night, in the minute after the lights were turned out and the shadows of the window frames angled across the ceiling, Rebecca said suddenly, “You do understand that if I left my job we’d be turning our backs, potentially, on a lot of money. I mean a lot.”
“I know that,” he said, as if they were in the middle of a conversation.
“There are things we could have, things we could do, that we wouldn’t be able to do. Because we couldn’t – at least I couldn’t – ever get back to the point I’m at right now, in terms of career prospects. We’d have to do without those things. We can’t have it all, is what I’m saying. We can’t pick up and move away from this life and still enjoy everything that happens to be good about this life.”
His heart leapt to hear Rebecca even discussing it, to know that she had gone to the length of imagining what she might sacrifice in order to stay with him; but he felt instinctively that the wise course here was emotional caution. He turned on his side and laid his forehead in the space between her shoulder blades. “I don’t care about money so much,” he said gently. “I care about doing work that satisfies us both, in a place we’re actually pleased about living in.”
She didn’t say anything more, and in a few minutes her legs jerked in the way they always did in the moment just before sleep.
That weekend, another postcard – this one picked out of the mailbox by Rebecca: “Lawyering and advertising: impartial advocacy. Of course, even in defending someone you hate, you’re really defending something you love. Or that’s the idea.”
Rebecca waved it at him. “Postmarked Charlottesville,” she said. “Have there been other cards like this?”
John nodded, his eyes stubbornly on the TV.
“Have you been in touch with him?”
“No. There’s literally no way to get in touch with him. Unsigned cards just keep showing up in the mail.”
Rebecca stood still for a moment, as if expecting him to say more. Then she laid the postcard on the arm of John’s chair and left the room.
As the trip to Omaha approached, Roman kept churning out spots for the Beef Council with a spiteful prolificacy. Every morning he smiled coldly as he transcribed on John’s sketch pad the ideas he’d had the night before: What are the chances you’ll ever visit the rain forest, anyway? Name one tough vegetarian. Cows are too stupid to live. You only go around once; might as well go around fat and glossy. Tofu is for girls. It’s the law of nature. With a week to go, they had nearly twenty ads dummied up when they only needed six; oddly, though, in spite of this, and in spite of the fact that some of his copy was clearly over the top, Roman angrily refused to edit any of it, and when John tried to get him to narrow it down to ten Roman accused him of censorship.
John came back from lunch one day to find “Who wants soft, squishy arteries?” written on his pad. He scowled.
“Do it,” Roman said.
“Come on. We have more than we need.”
“Do it.”
“It won’t work. It can’t work. Can you really picture yourself flipping through Newsweek and coming across this?”
“It’ll work, god damn it. All of it will work. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
They stayed late at the office, getting ready for the pitch; Rebecca was working long hours those days too. John more or less took it for granted that no one would be home in the evening when he returned. The apartment looked half-decorated and impersonal. John didn’t cook at all; sometimes he would order Chinese food and save some for her, but more often he would just have his dinner delivered at work. With a sense of romantic diligence they hadn’t felt since the early days of their relationship, they met each other for long lunches at elegant restaurants, L’Espinasse, Arcadia, and they never paid for a thing.
The answering machine blinked with unanswered calls, from their parents, from alumni associations, from investment firms, and then finally, one evening before John, untucking his shirt as he walked in the door, had even turned the lights on, from Osbourne.
He was in Manhattan; he was free for lunch the next day. He wondered if John had had time to consider his proposal. He was sorry to bother him at home like this, but considered that a call at the office might have caused some awkwardness.
John was already asleep by the time Rebecca came home; but struggling mightily he raised himself on his elbows and said, “Mal Osbourne called today. I said I’d meet him for lunch tomorrow.”
Rebecca, her back to him, made no hitch in her motions to betray that she had heard. In the urban half-darkness to which his eyes were accustomed, he watched while she stood in front of her closet and slowly undressed. She looked like someone else, like a stranger with whom he wanted to have an affair.
He told Roman the next morning that he had a dentist’s appointment.
Osbourne sat at a banquette at La Réserve, staring into space, his back to the mirrored wall. He looked rather put out – nostrils flared, fingers tapping – just as if John were late for this appointment, when in fact he was five minutes early. When he sat down, Osbourne brightened somewhat, but only for a few seconds. He wore an expensive-looking gray suit, and his hair was now cut very short, in the fashionable Caesar style.
The waiter poured John a glass of mineral water from the bottle that sat on the table. Osbourne rested his chin on his hands, stared at John in the fully intent yet charmless way a surgeon might have stared at him, and said nothing. John, who was nervous enough anyway – he could never seem to get the wardrobe right with Osbourne; he wore a simple black sweater today, with no jacket or tie – became flustered and forgot the whole script by which he had intended to steer this meeting.
“How have you been, sir?” he said finally.
“Busy.” He smiled perfunctorily. “So have you come here to accept my offer?”
John laughed. “Well, not exactly, sir, no.” Osbourne’s gaze did not waver. “There are … there are a lot of variables. I have to admit I’m intrigued by all you have to say about what you want to do. But it’s a risk. I have – I have commitments here.”
Osbourne sat back into the banquette and began nodding sagely, as if he had heard what he was listening for.
“And if I were on my own, if I were a younger man, with no one else’s wishes to consider—”
Osbourne held up his hand. “Listen, before I forget,” he said, “how much money do you make now?”
John reddened, but he saw no reason for squeamishness. “Seventy-five thousand,” he said.
“I can match that. If the
re’s a bonus involved, I don’t know about that, but I can keep paying you that salary.”
“For how long, though? I mean, forgive me for—”
“I have no idea for how long,” Osbourne said, in a friendly manner. “The point is, the risk is minimized in that sense. And if we should fail, I know you could come back to New York with your book and get another job in a day, if that’s what you wanted to happen.”
The waiter, who had been not there, was suddenly and discreetly there; but Osbourne waved him away. Only John’s menu was open.
“Have you ever been down to Charlottesville?” Osbourne went on.
“Several times. I had a cousin who went to UVA.”
“Then you know what a beautiful place it is. You might not know that the housing market is also very reasonable down there. I don’t have any idea what your wife earns or how much you might have saved but it might even prove feasible to hold on to your place in Brooklyn, as a kind of hedge, if that’s what you … So you didn’t want to go to UVA yourself then?”
John shook his head.
“You went all the way to California, as I recall? Wanted to get away, was that it?”
John swallowed. He couldn’t remember when he might have told Osbourne this about himself. “Yes, sir, I suppose so.”
Osbourne, this time, was doing nothing to discourage John’s addressing him as “sir”; possibly he just didn’t hear it. “And now you’d like to go back?”
“Well, Virginia isn’t really my home, but in a way yes, I suppose you’re right.”
“Fascinating.” Osbourne shook his head abruptly. “Anyway, the financial risk, to you at least, seems pretty minimal. What does your wife do?”
“Girlfriend. She’s a trusts and estates lawyer.”
“Well, they’ve got rich people down in Charlottesville, too, you know. Lawyers, too. Law firms even.”
John finished his water; he was starving, but didn’t want even to start in on the bread until Osbourne relaxed the pace of his interrogation a bit. “She has a job here she likes, and she feels she’s put a number of years into it, toward partnership, years that I guess she would feel were wasted if she quit.”
Osbourne nodded again. “She doesn’t want to start her life over again.”
“Well, maybe just not in Virginia,” John said, laughing.
“And what about you?”
“Sorry?”
“I mean, we’ve been here awhile and I haven’t heard anything about you, about what you might want. So how about it? Do you want to start over again?”
Osbourne’s back was to the mirrored wall, and, as if by some trick, John, sitting across from him, could see simultaneously both his face and the back of his head, like the barmaid in Manet’s Folies Bergère. The restaurant was full, and where silence might have been there was the gentle ring of silverware and the low burble of unfamiliar voices.
“Yes,” John said. He was surprising himself now. “I do want to start again.”
“Because I’ll tell you what it sounds like to me. If you don’t mind my interpreting your personal life. I’m not unmindful of the risks for you here. But it seems to me that, for your girlfriend, the real fear is not that our idea will fail. It’s that we’ll succeed.”
The waiter appeared again, his face betraying nothing that would indicate he had been there before.
“Actually, I’m starving,” Osbourne said. “John, do you like cassoulet? They do a fine one here.”
“I’ve never had it,” John said.
Osbourne raised his eyebrows. “Well, I can tell you you’re never going to get a decent one in Charlottesville, so I’d suggest you try it now.”
“All right,” John said.
While they were waiting for their lunch, Osbourne suddenly said, “Listen, while we’re in this territory, let me ask you another personal question: is that all right?”
John nodded.
“How long have you and – I’m sorry, what is her name?”
“Rebecca Sanders.”
“How long have you two been together?”
“Three and a half years,” John said.
“And you’ve been living together for …”
“About eighteen months.”
“I’m guessing,” Osbourne said, “there are no children then.”
“No, sir.”
“No, of course not. It’s not something you would have left unmentioned.”
John smiled.
“She’s not pregnant, then, is she?”
Blushing uncontrollably, John said that he was sure she was not.
“Okay,” Osbourne said. “Forgive me. I can see I’ve overstepped my bounds. Let’s change the subject then. What are you working on now?”
John told him about the Beef Council campaign. Osbourne’s expression did not change.
“And is it work you’re proud of?” he said simply.
John thought for a long time before answering, mostly because he was afraid to say no out loud. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “I mean, we’re doing basically the same thing we’ve been doing, for years, but lately I feel like I don’t get how it all works. Which would be fine if I was sitting at home watching it all on TV, but I’m the one making it, and I still don’t understand how it gets made. It’s a weird feeling.”
“Have you shared this feeling with your partner? What’s his name?”
“Roman Gagliardi.”
“Roman? Or with anyone else there?”
“No.”
“You feel you have to act a certain way, don’t you? In your work environment? You have to take a certain less-than-honest attitude, not just about colleagues’ work, but about your own?”
John nodded.
Osbourne winced sympathetically. “Don’t you get tired,” he said, “of all the lying?”
Back at the office, light-headed, lazy from the rich food, John stared without seeing for what remained of the day; then he took the subway to Brooklyn. The apartment didn’t seem comforting either. He sat by the window until Rebecca came home. He expected her to take a sarcastic tack in asking about his lunch; instead she was quite grim and serious, and he didn’t know whether to take that as a good sign or not.
“He’s invited us down to Charlottesville, not this coming weekend but the next,” John said in a breezy, high voice that didn’t sound right to him. “He has the offices about finished, and we can just, you know, tour the town, see if we like the feel of it or not.”
Rebecca was squatting in front of the open refrigerator, washed in the white light. Her heels came up out of her shoes.
“So is that a problem for you, next weekend?” John said.
She straightened up. “Is that a problem for me? In what respect?”
John swallowed. “Do we have anything that would conflict with that, I meant.”
“No. I’m sure we don’t.” She stooped and looked again through the empty shelves.
“So will you come?” John said.
“I don’t think so.” She shut the fridge and began opening the cupboards; she seemed not to want to look at him, and John, still in his chair, wondered if she was crying.
“Can you tell me,” she said, “why it is we never have anything to eat in this fucking place?”
THE PERPETUAL PRESENT tense of a college town. Always in the foreground, lively and faceless, the student body remains forever between eighteen and twenty-two; only those who accrue around their needs – the shopkeepers, the landlords, the tenured professors – are allowed to watch each other grow old. On the South Side, on Telegraph Avenue, the Bubble Man was out again, in his purple suit, playing the kazoo and banging cymbals strapped to the insides of his knees; Molly saw him through the window of the Soup Kitchen, a self-consciously down-and-out diner where she went most mornings for her coffee and toast with apple butter, a simple pleasure which, strictly speaking, she could no longer afford. Signs on the lampposts for a rally to protest the Gulf War, noon under the Campanile, three days ago. Th
e UC campus lay in a sort of natural bowl; around it, the terraced streets, the eclectic homes set close together, the enervated brown of the hillsides.
Fall in California. The money from her father had lasted a long time, but now it had run out, though Richard and his seven roommates in the house on Vine Street had recently told Molly she was welcome to stay on there rent-free until she found a job. They told her this collectively, the way they did everything, all eight of them in the living room, facing her and smiling. Their earnestness, their cheerful uniformity, was disquieting and easily mocked (or would have been, had she any friends outside the house to talk to about it): but over the weeks and months their genuine kindnesses to her had accumulated into a charity that was not so readily dismissed.
Molly had tried diligently to find some work; she had never held any sort of job before, other than babysitting, but her lack of experience wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she hadn’t started looking until the end of September, after ten thousand students in need of beer-and-pizza money had flocked back to Berkeley. Everywhere she tried – bookstores, restaurants, thrift shops, laundromats – the spots were all filled. Her only income at the moment came from an odd job in a fancy North Side home, reading the San Francisco Chronicle for an hour or so every weekday morning to an old man who wasn’t blind by any means but who claimed that small-print reading gave him migraines. Mr Whalen was eighty and rich and that meant he could be unembarrassed about self-indulgences. He paid her ten dollars an hour, which was generous, but it still came to only seventy or eighty dollars a week. Nor did he reimburse her for bus fare; he was a kind enough man, but his scattered thoughts never for a moment came to rest on the question of just how Molly arrived in his living room on a given morning, or where she went to afterwards. She was too embarrassed to ask for it.
Inadequate as it was, the job had come her way only through subterfuge. She had gone into the UC Student Employment Center on campus, where they posted jobs on a bulletin board. You were supposed to make an interview appointment through the center, but that was out of the question for Molly, since the first thing they would have asked her for was a student ID number. Instead, she memorized the information from the sheet on the bulletin board, walked across Sproul Plaza to the student lounge, and called from a pay phone. Mr Whalen didn’t seem to notice or care that she hadn’t been referred by anyone from the university. In fact, he hired her over the phone; he liked her voice, he said, not too loud, so many young people were so loud these days. She hung up, chanting the address to herself, and ran to borrow a pen from one of the students playing Donkey Kong in the din of the lounge.