by Jonathan Dee
The IGA was one of the few stores still unshuttered. It was only a matter of time before Molly saw someone she knew; three of them, in fact, her former girlfriends from Ulster High School. One of them was Annika. They passed her on the sidewalk as she loaded bags of food into the trunk of her mother’s car. It was plain from the looks on their faces that they had had no warning Molly was back in town. They looked right at her, as if she couldn’t see them too, as if her misfortunes had made her into some sort of figure on a TV screen whom you could stare at unobserved; they had all been something resembling good friends little more than a year before. Molly didn’t have the time or the mental energy to make sense of it. She had another stop to make – at the drugstore, a sensitive errand, at which she was relieved to go unrecognized – before returning to Bull’s Head. Being away from the house, leaving her mother there alone, filled her with a vague dread now, a dread which grew geometrically as she got closer to home.
When she walked through the door, her mother was awake, doing laundry, wearing pearls. “There was a phone message for you,” Kay said. “John someone. He didn’t leave a number. It’s on the machine if you want to hear it.” She didn’t say why she hadn’t picked up the phone when it rang.
“Thanks,” Molly said impassively. She went upstairs to her mother’s bedroom, played the message back, and let it erase itself.
For the next week, in fact, the phone never rang at all in the Howe household unless it was John calling. All their old friends, or those still left in town, were apparently scared off by the family’s new level of misfortune. Kay let the machine record every call, and so did Molly. The pitch of John’s voice rose incrementally with each unanswered message; he begged for some confirmation that Molly was all right, that she had arrived there at all. Molly played back and erased the messages on the machine in her parents’ bedroom when she was sure Kay was out of earshot. She could hear, in John’s voice, the strong suspicion that she was there, standing by the phone, that she was fine, and was thus not speaking to him by choice, a choice which was a complete mystery to him. But he would not accuse her out loud.
In the dayroom, her father made small talk as his fellow mental patients muttered grievously against the shadowed walls all around them. In fact, it was the normality of his own demeanor, compared to theirs, that made the dayroom a comfortable place for him. He wanted to know about Molly’s year in Berkeley, all about how her brother was doing; drawn into some vortex of dishonesty, Molly revealed to him only the most salutary aspects of her and Richard’s lives, such as her attendance of classes on art and literature. He admired her pluck without once broaching the matter of why she didn’t, or couldn’t, just enroll in the college in the first place. Most days she was engrossed in keeping him happy; but one morning, more out of curiosity than antagonism, she couldn’t resist asking him, “Dad, do you know why we’re here?”
He laughed, an embarrassed laugh, and then, holding together the lapels of the robe Molly had brought from his closet at home – the nurses had taken the belt away – he blushed.
“I feel so foolish,” he said.
Molly waited.
“I just didn’t read the label,” he said, holding up his hands. “How stupid is that? I was having trouble sleeping, so I got some of your mother’s medicine out of the bathroom cabinet. It was late, and I was too lazy to go downstairs and get my glasses, so I just took a couple. I got the dosage wrong.”
Molly started crying, silently. Roger didn’t seem to notice.
“And now all this,” he said. “So much trouble for everyone. You had to interrupt your studies and fly all the way across the country. I just feel so stupid. Can you ever forgive me?”
That evening Molly sat with her mother in the living room. The TV was on; they were watching Cheers. It was dull, thought Molly, but it served its purpose, which was to spare them from having to talk to one another. Then Kay said, “That John Wheelwright called again. I saved the message for you.”
“Thanks,” Molly said.
At the next commercial break, Kay said, “So who is he, anyway?”
“Sorry?”
“This John. He likes you?”
Molly ran her hand through her hair. “I guess so, yeah,” she said.
“Nice boy?”
“Yes,” Molly said.
There was a silence. “Well,” Kay said, “if you’re not interested in him, he’s obviously not getting the picture. Why not just call him back and tell him to leave you alone?”
The first time she had left Ulster, it was understood that, in however characteristically passive a fashion, her parents were throwing her out. Leaving a second time, Molly knew, was going to mean abandoning them, giving them up to the monstrosity of their marriage. Without a third person there, as a kind of emotional groundwire, the general air of psychopathology was going to thicken until at least one of them wound up dead. The transparently phony aspect of normality that her father had always maintained – and which, in his absence, her mother now seemed committed to – was now, even with one of them in the mental ward and the other at home watching Cheers, all that stood between them and a wholly genuine life of terror and hatred; Molly, for one, wished only that that false front might somehow still be preserved. She understood how smart her brother was not to come back here, never mind how elaborate and confining the mindset he needed to construct in order to permit himself to stay away. She also understood that she had never had any real idea, as a child in this house, of the true range of self-deception – the role of lying in survival.
Upstairs, in Kay’s bedroom, the laugh track still audible below, Molly played back John’s message.
“It’s me again. Mrs Howe, if you’re picking up these messages, please, maybe you don’t know who I am, but I’m begging you, let Molly hear them, or let her know I called. Molly, I can’t sleep, I won’t leave the apartment in case you call. What is happening? I don’t understand it but I can let it all go if I just could hear that you’re all right. Please. Please. If there’s something I’ve done to make you angry with me … I’ve thought and thought and I can’t think what it could be. I’m just at a loss, I’m at a loss. Please get in touch with me somehow. I don’t have your address out there but I’m thinking of coming anyway. Have pity on me. I’m so in love with you, and until I can figure out what’s happened to you I’m in agony. I love you. Please call. Please call home.”
Still on the bureau in Molly’s room was the bag from the drugstore. She took it into the bathroom the next morning, and when she came out again she had a simple, symbolic confirmation of what she already knew, which was that she was pregnant.
IN THE BASEMENT pool room, or waiting for lunch on the stools beside the pantry, or walking together on the brick path through the orchard – as if afraid of being overheard – some of Osbourne’s employees stalled for time by trying to guess the nature of the client whose identity he was withholding from them. Elaine said an eight-page print insert could only mean a fashion concern of some kind; I mean, she said, can you ever remember seeing anything like that that wasn’t about fashion? Daniel, though, insisted there had to be more to it than that, there had to be something objectionable or controversial about the mystery client, or else where was the benefit in keeping the name from them? The agency wasn’t thriving, and Osbourne felt forced to make some sort of compromise in order to bring in some money – it was easy enough to understand. But John, though he was feeling sure about less and less, knew Daniel was wrong; he himself accepted with no skepticism at all Osbourne’s definition of his motives as purely on the level of aesthetic experiment. He wanted the issue of influence taken off the table, so to speak; he wanted their next efforts shaped by no sensibility other than their own. John defended this idea – or not the idea, exactly, but the transparency of the motives behind it – with such unconscious vigor that by the time he finished they were all nodding sagely at him, as if he were only confirming what they already knew.
But the more clearly
John understood what was wanted of him, the less equipped he felt to produce anything. With his pads and his pens, a drafting table wedged under the window in the west-wing bedroom where he had begun spending more and more of his nights, he looked out at the cherry trees, at the delivery trucks as they spun through the gravel in the driveway at the back of the house, and he came up with nothing.
It was a great relief to him the day Milo tracked him down in his bedroom. Life in a Southern college town had only made Milo more eccentric, even though, so far as John knew, he seldom left the mansion these days at all. Gaunt, his face and arms ridden with beauty spots, his peroxided hair making him look less like a fashionista than like his own father, he wandered the halls distractedly at all hours; John knew for a fact that he had not yet learned everyone else’s name. Milo knocked on John’s door and walked in without waiting for an answer. He had some questions about materials, he said, just audibly. He hadn’t had a lot of experience with the world of print, and he wasn’t sure if what he had in mind was possible.
John heard him out, and told him that what he wanted was probably doable, technically; he added, reflexively, that it would at least double the cost of the client’s buy.
Milo nodded and looked somber at this news, though it clearly meant nothing to him.
“But you know what,” John said. “I’d take it to Mal anyway.”
Two weeks later, they did. Milo’s idea was to bind into each magazine one double-sided sheet of a kind of Mylar derivative that John, a couple of years earlier, had been shown in conditions of great secrecy by a printer acquaintance in New Jersey, a guy who wanted to know if John’s girlfriend, Rebecca, had any expertise in patent law. Now John got in touch with him again. The stuff still could not hold any kind of type, which was the one bug the printer had been trying to get out of it. It was, however, perfectly reflective, almost without distortion – which was all they were now interested in. In other words, the advertisement Milo had in mind was a mirror.
Osbourne sat looking into this mirror, holding it before him at his antique desk as John and Milo stood nervously to one side, for two minutes or more. His face grew redder and redder. Then he asked the two of them to leave his office, and to close the door behind them; which they did. A short while later the door opened and their boss brushed past them; they trailed behind as he blew through the main rooms of the mansion, tapping everyone he found on the shoulder and summoning them to the dining room. When they were gathered there, he thanked them all for their hard work, told them the search was over, and gave them all the rest of the week off.
The client, it came out in the end, was an Internet search engine. They did not balk at the increased costs, nor at the notion that the name of their company would appear nowhere in or near the ad. It ran in Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Details, and five other periodicals, all within the same ten days. Osbourne himself took to hanging out in the ballroom at all hours, staring at a computer screen, trolling the Internet for rumors as to the identity of the advertiser – even, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, entering various chat rooms anonymously.
That was the beginning of everything. The mirror ad was a sensation, denounced in newspaper editorials, clucked over on the evening news, the subject of jeremiads not just in advertising trade publications but in art journals as well. Artforum even ran a special section about it, a kind of roundtable collection of short essays by art historians and museum curators. Then it was selected for the Biennial at the Whitney Museum. Osbourne, though he professed to hate awards, personally entered the mirror in every competition, in the ad industry and outside of it, he could think of. By the time those awards were given out, the search-engine company’s stock had split twice, and Osbourne had so much new business that it became necessary, against his wishes, to expand the staff.
And the bright future of the agency – Palladio, as Osbourne had named it months ago, though his own staffers were too superstitious about pretension at that stage to use it – seemed increasingly to belong to the artists, like Milo, whose own ascendancy after the mirror campaign was unquestioned. There was not an ounce of ambition in him. He smoked and wore white T-shirts and appeared – though the others were too embarrassed to ask him about it – to cut his own hair; and if he spent more nights in the west-wing bedrooms than the others, it was not out of a desire to put in (or be seen putting in) long hours, but because he lived in his work, his life did not seem quite real to him outside of it, and thus the apartment he rented in town did not serve as any sort of escape from anything. Osbourne had once mentioned to them – in an early, starry-eyed bull session back when they had very little work to do – that he was torn between wanting to break the practice of not crediting individual artists for their work in ads and wanting to uphold the concept that widely disseminated images, particularly if they were successful, mooted questions of authorship in the first place. But Milo said he didn’t want any credit for the mirror anyway. In fact, his suggestion was that it be credited “from the studio of Malcolm Osbourne,” as with Brueghel or Rembrandt. Osbourne rejected that idea, but John could see how pleased he was with it.
In house, Milo got full credit for the mirror idea anyway – John saw to that. He made no effort to play up his own role, which was merely technical. In general, though he had never received any signal that the boss was displeased with his failure to produce any actual, usable work, John found it impossible – even in the wake of good feeling generated by the agency’s booming success – not to worry. Osbourne seemed more and more to covet art produced from a strictly personal wellspring; one of John’s new colleagues, for instance, a New York performance artist named Tara, had had great success with a spoken-word television spot about the death of her father. John had lived as long as any of his colleagues – indeed, he had lived through the death of his own father – but he couldn’t seem to dredge up anything on that level. Or, if he could, then he couldn’t hit on some way to transform the personal into his particular art. He thought, for instance, about Molly; all that had been painful enough, to be sure, but it was also ten years ago, and what remained of the private intensity of those memories was no help at all to him as he sat on the end of the bed, with a marker in his hand, in his staked-out west-wing bedroom.
So when he received a message – on his home phone, no less – telling him that Osbourne had scheduled a meeting with him, alone, the following Monday morning, John’s first thought was that he was going to be fired. Osbourne’s secretary sent him up to the fourth floor, where he was surprised to see his employer eating a cinnamon bun in the muted glow of a skylight, alone at a small table with a silver coffee pitcher at its center. He waved John into the seat across from him.
Osbourne smiled apologetically as he finished chewing; then he said, “How have you enjoyed your time here?”
“Very much. It’s exciting to be around this, to see it take off like it’s doing.” He cursed his own choice of words – it sounded like he was more of a spectator here than a vital part of it.
Osbourne wiped his sticky fingers on a linen napkin. “I see two things happening,” he said. “One is that you don’t seem heavily involved in the actual creative work that’s being done downstairs. Perhaps I misjudged you in that respect. Not that there’s any shame in that, of course. The sources of inspiration are always mysterious. The second thing is that the type of work, the range of work, we do here is about to change. I’ve had contacts with other types of enterprises which are very much interested in harnessing our methods here. Not just commodity-sellers, you understand?”
John nodded, though he didn’t understand.
“Municipalities,” Osbourne said cagily. “Coffee?” John shook his head no. “Universities. Charitable organizations. Political campaigns. Jury consultants – I had a jury consultant call me the other day; frankly I’m not totally sure what they even do. Governmental agencies. So that where I find myself needing help just now is more in the area of long-term planning, and also in the area of people
skills. Meeting people, potential clients, charming them, learning from them, heading off their complaints, forming relationships. This is an area where I think you’d excel. So, John, I’d like to offer you a promotion. I don’t know what to call it, vice president, senior executive vice president, rear admiral, we can call it whatever the hell you like. The point is I want you working more closely with me. I have a vision, and I think you share that vision. I want you by my right hand, so to speak: my liaison to the outside world.”
John collected himself and accepted the offer with all the gratitude he could display. When he went down to the pool room, and told the others the news about how he had just been kicked upstairs, there was no resentment at all – the happiness was unanimous. Everyone liked John, for one thing; and ever since the first partnership benefits had kicked in, two months earlier, everyone was getting so rich that there was no inclination to care if one of them might suddenly start getting a little richer than the others.
ON MONDAY, ROGER Howe’s doctor – who spoke only to Molly now, since Kay never came to the hospital or returned phone messages, and who had begun to look at Molly, even as he diagnosed her father’s mental state, with a father’s furrowed brow and posture of concern – told her that there was no longer any compelling reason to keep Roger in the hospital, a fact his insurance company had called to the hospital’s attention. Roger’s physical recovery was complete; his emotional status was shaky but not so unstable that he could be held against his will, and he had lately been expressing his desire to return home to his family. Dr Kotlovitz thought he could be released as early as the weekend.
On Tuesday, Molly stood beside the phone in her parents’ bedroom and listened impassively as John left this message: “I’m coming out there. I don’t know if you’re still there. I don’t know your address, but I know what town, it’s a small town, everyone’s bound to know where you are. I don’t know whether to be angry or worried or what, but I can’t stand not knowing anymore. I’ll be there this weekend.”