by Ali Benjamin
Next to him, Zo’s fingers are wrapped so tightly around the steering wheel that Ethan can see her tendons bulge.
Guess this is your life, he thinks grimly. I guess this is your goddamned life.
* * *
—
When they finally get to Corbury, scrappy yards give way to sweeping lawns, most of them bordered by stone walls so exquisitely built they appear to have sprung from the earth just-so. Ethan had priced out one such wall as a part of their renovation; the price was laughable, solidly in the six figures, nearly as much as he and Zo paid for their whole house.
The Rainbow Seed School occupies forty-six rolling acres, a former dairy farm that had been in the same family for five generations, until the entire New England dairy industry went bust a couple of decades back. Today, the barn that once housed 120 Holsteins and Jersey cows features a fake cupola, a $20,000 copper weather vane in the shape of a rooster, and more godawful kid murals in neon paint than anyone should have to look at.
Zo, who hasn’t spoken since Starkfield, follows the school’s curved driveway up the hill, into the drop-off zone. A hanging banner reminds everyone that tonight is Parents’ Night, although it’s spelled Parent’s Night on the banner, which means either the world is post-apostrophe, or the whole evening exists for exactly one parent only.
Not it, Ethan thinks.
“Parents’ Night, yay!” Alex shouts. She’s putting her sneakers on, as if she hasn’t had nearly half an hour to do exactly this. “That means I have Kids’ Night at Persimmon’s house! She’s having all the girls over. We’re gonna watch movies, and make pizzas, and eat ice cream and—” She’s still talking as Ethan shoos her out of the car. He watches as his daughter spring-trips toward the front door, laces untied.
Once she’s gone, Zo doesn’t roll forward, doesn’t clear the way for the next car to drop off their own Rainbow Seedling. She simply stares outward.
“Zo?”
“I mean,” Zo says vaguely, as if picking up on a conversation neither of them actually started, “you wouldn’t do what he did, right?”
Ethan glances behind them; a line of luxury SUVs waits. Any second, the passive-aggressive parking monitor will appear, knock on their window with a smile that’s far too huge for the circumstance, and remind them that other Rainbow Seedlings are waiting, my friends! “What wouldn’t I do?” he asks.
“Hold a girl down. Cover her mouth. Laugh while she tries to scream.”
It takes a second before he understands: the Supreme Court thing. She’s talking about the nominee, the things the man’s been accused of doing. “No,” Ethan says. “Obviously I wouldn’t. Jesus, Zo. You know I wouldn’t.”
Behind their car, a horn blares. When Ethan turns around, a mom in aviator glasses, behind the wheel of a Range Rover, lifts her hands, palms up, as if asking whether they’re ever going to get out of the way. Zo, though, seems oblivious to their ongoing drop-off-zone infraction. “See?” Zo says, as much to herself as to Ethan. “They can find someone else. It doesn’t have to be this guy.”
Aviator Mom lays on her horn a second time—this time for five whole seconds. Zo snaps out of it, glances in the rearview mirror. “Yeah, namaste to you, too,” she snaps. She rolls forward, swings the car around to the visitor parking lot, where, presumably, they’ll wait for a few minutes, until it’s time for the conference.
It’s almost a relief when Ethan’s phone comes to life. NEED TO TALK TO YOU. NOW!!!!!!!!!!
It’s, what, five-something in the morning in L.A.? What the hell is Randy even doing awake?
* * *
—
Randy had been the first person Ethan met at Kenyon. He’d breezed into their freshman dorm room in seersucker shorts and a paint-splattered tee, his skin golden from a summer by the sea. Randy tossed a monogrammed bag on a bed, and gave Ethan a firm, fist-pumping handshake. “Let the mayhem begin!” he’d announced, a mischievous grin on his face.
Randy was a prep-school kid—he’d attended three of them, actually—from one of those old New England families that tossed off mysterious phrases like in the Blue Book and third form, and on Chappy. Ethan, by contrast, was a steel-country kid, the first in his family to attend college, able to do so thanks only to a near-full merit scholarship for which he’d worked himself to exhaustion in high school. Somehow, though, from that first instant, Randy never doubted that he and Ethan were two of a kind, that they’d be buddies for life.
His confidence about that had been enough to make it true.
Their life at Kenyon had been a string of adventures and misadventures: disco balls and beer Olympics, thrift-store costumes and late-night victory laps up and down Middle Path, Randy bellowing, “Behold the new kings!” as they ran. Everyone on campus knew and loved Randy, and Ethan’s proximity to him became a kind of currency in itself. Their whole shared experience was so wonderfully bewildering; Ethan had been a loner in his high school, the studious, skipped-a-grade oddball always with his nose in a book. Thanks to a single twist of fate from the Kenyon housing-lottery gods, he’d become, almost overnight, the center of the action on a rarefied campus filled with spires and glass.
After Kenyon, Ethan had planned to go to journalism school, but Randy had a different idea. “Move to New York with me,” Randy suggested, late in their senior spring. “Let’s start a company together.” The company, as Randy explained it, was to be a marketing firm—but different from any that the world had yet seen.
It would be smarter. Stealthier. Way more fun.
“Guerrilla marketing,” Randy said. This was the first time Ethan had heard the phrase. “I’m talking about marketing that’s so sly people don’t even recognize it as marketing. Marketing that’s so clever people actually welcome it into their lives. Marketing that tells people not what they want to have, but who they want to be.”
Ethan shook his head. No. He’d been accepted to the Medill School, at Northwestern. He’d worked his ass off for that spot, and he’d already applied for his student loans. Maybe they could work together in a few years, once he finished grad school.
“We don’t have a few years, E,” Randy insisted. “The time to do this is right now.” As Randy saw it, the entire relationship between brands and consumers was about three nanoseconds from revolution. That change would happen so fast that nobody—especially not the big boys, the Young & Rubicams, the J. Walter Thompsons—would understand what hit them. “You and I have the miraculous fortune of entering the world at a once-in-human-history moment. This Internet thing is the next big bang, it’s gonna remake everything. Mark my words, E: if we play our cards right, we’ll land million-dollar accounts within a couple of years. Three, tops.”
Three years? To go from being college kids tossing a frisbee to overseeing million-dollar campaigns? Even for Randy, the timeline seemed audacious, absurd.
“Three years,” Randy insisted. “But only if we go balls-out—do something that really makes people take notice—and only if we act now.”
Randy’s plan was simple: they’d take whatever clients they could get, using whatever contacts they had. Of course they’d do that. They’d help these companies figure out how to navigate this new cyberspace thing—get them online, drive traffic to their sites. But since those clients were likely to be smaller, with tepid budgets, Randy and Ethan would simultaneously invest in a handful of major campaigns for which they had no clients at all—Three Great Leaps of Faith, as Randy called them.
Each Leap of Faith would create a branding campaign for something so unlikely, so totally out-there, the company would generate instant industry-wide buzz.
“We’ll use that buzz to catapult ourselves into the major leagues,” Randy finished. “I’m talking the best brands out there, E: Absolut. Philip Morris, Rolex. I’m talking Hollywood.”
Already, Randy had arranged everything: the rent-free two-bedroom at the
northeast corner of Washington Square Park—owned by a family friend with apartments all over the world, who claimed to be glad to see the place get some use for a change. The U-Haul that would take them from Gambier to Manhattan the day after graduation. Randy had even picked out a company name: Bränd, with that gratuitous, nonlinguistic umlaut.
Most important, Randy said: he had access to start-up funds. A lot of start-up funds.
Apparently, Randy had approached an uncle, some hedge-fund manager with more money than sense. He’d convinced the man that what the world most needed as the millennium hurtled toward its completion was a couple of Gen-Xers with fresh ideas and no experience whatsoever.
Randy leaned in to Ethan then, eyes glinting. “Come on, E. Let’s go get rich.”
It was a tale as old as America: use someone else’s wealth to make your own. Generations of Fromes had watched from the sidelines as other, more fortunate, types did exactly this. Now, here it was, in front of Ethan: the good life for the taking.
And so Bränd was born.
* * *
—
“Christ on a cracker,” Randy barks into the phone now. “It’s about time you picked up my calls.”
Ethan’s standing at the edge of the Rainbow Seed parking lot, far enough away from the Subaru that Zo won’t hear, even with the window down. “Listen, Randy, I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes, so make it quick. What’s going on, and when can I get my money?”
“Relax, you’ll get your money. But first I need your help.”
Randy explains: There have been some accusations—harassment charges. Against Randy. A slew of them, actually. “At first there was just one,” Randy says. “Some no-name actress, hoping to cash out after she failed to become famous. Suing me is her Plan B, apparently. My lawyers weren’t worried. It was a nuisance suit, that’s all; they figure we’ll settle, cases like that come cheap. But her lawyer smells money, won’t let this thing drop.”
She’s been calling around, this attorney. Talking to former employees, some models and actresses Randy’s worked with through the years. Trying to establish some sort of pattern on Randy’s part. And somehow, she’s managed to get a bunch of others to sign on to the lawsuit. “Mind you, this attorney’s a nobody, she’s a Michigan State grad in a polyester suit, has no clue how things work out here. Do you know how many careers Bränd helped make? Think about all those girls who walked through our door as nobodies, and who walked out as legit actresses, or sought-after models, or publicists and agents themselves. We did that, E. You and me. We gave them work, or we connected them with other people who did, or at least we fucking tried.”
Ethan glances toward Zo’s car. He lowers his voice. “Seriously, Randy. Not much time here. Get to the point.”
“So far, the suit includes Jennifer Philpott and Amy Judson and Hazel Patterson and—”
Ethan tries to attach faces to these names. In his mind, the women who came through the Bränd offices blend together. They’re a long parade of flat bellies and $300 jeans, hair in conspicuously messy buns, and ruby lipstick—beautiful, bright-eyed women who always made Ethan feel both bumbling and forgiven, as if his awkwardness in their presence had been its own kind of charm.
“But here’s the kicker, E. Here’s the goddamn punch line. You ready for this? This lawyer reeled in a fish, all right. She got a big name to sign on. One helluva big name.” Ethan says nothing. He’s probably supposed to ask Randy who the big name is, but he also knows that if he waits, Randy will just blurt it out.
“E, it’s bad.” Randy’s voice is uncharacteristically serious. “They’ve got Evie Emerling.”
Light flickers on stone. Some sort of silent film, sepia-toned, forty feet in height, dances on the Beaux-Arts marble exterior of the New York Public Library’s main branch. A woman moves across the frame, draped in fabric so sheer she might as well be naked. She’s gorgeous, this woman. Darn near ethereal.
A pause. The woman glances toward the camera, surprised, as if caught off guard by the Fifth Avenue pedestrians, some of whom have literally stopped in their tracks at the sight of her. Then she smiles.
Playful. Coy. Bewitching.
“Lust sells, E,” Randy had insisted as they brainstormed this, Bränd’s Second Leap of Faith. “To be worth anything in marketing, we’ve got to show we can tap into people’s desire. We need to deal head-on with hard-ons.”
A campaign about desire? Sure, okay. But how might such a campaign stand out? It’s the 1990s, for heaven’s sake: a person can’t throw a stone without hitting one of those Calvin Klein ads—all those monochromatic, barely clad postcoital waifs. Abercrombie, also, has gotten into the softcore game, with endless images of prepsters in playful near-orgies. Meanwhile, news kiosks and flea markets are filled with stacks of back-issue magazines for every predilection: Big Butt. Asian Dolls. Black Tail. Barely Legal. And now there’s this whole cyber thing! Must be a million pornographic images online by now, more uploaded by the minute. There’s something for everyone in this new space, all of it just a couple of finger clicks away. Where, Ethan wonders, can Bränd possibly go from here?
Backward. That’s where. Ethan and Randy will make the old new again, reinterpret some bygone longing to suit these modern times.
As they brainstormed, Ethan proposed—and Randy in turn rejected—numerous possibilities: La Madeleine cave paintings, with their fifteen-thousand-year-old images of reclining nudes (“Cave paintings? Who cares about cave paintings?”). The Kama Sutra (“Ugh, come on, E, that book’s been done to death.”). The Marquis de Sade (“Too French. Americans hate the French.”). But when Ethan stumbled upon a short article in a back issue of Smithsonian—about Audrey Munson, America’s first supermodel—he knew he’d struck gold.
Born at the end of the nineteenth century, Munson had lived a life of scandals. She was the first actress to appear nude on film! A prominent doctor had murdered his own wife just for the chance to be with Munson! There had been a nationwide game show–like contest to find Munson a husband! But Munson was no mere scandal-maker. She also happened to be the muse and model for such major artists as Daniel Chester French and Alexander Stirling Calder. All these years later, New York City was filled with glorious works of art for which Munson had been the model.
The grand, gilded figure atop the USS Maine monument at the Columbus Circle entrance to Central Park? Munson modeled for that. The twenty-five-foot copper sculpture towering above Manhattan’s Municipal Courthouse? Munson posed for that too. Munson was immortalized in the bronze fountain at Grand Army Plaza; the seated sculpture at the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge; the granite porte cochère relief at the entrance of the Frick, multiple pieces at the Metropolitan Museum. She’s even right here, at the New York Public Library, just south of the main entrance, in the form of a statue: Beauty, personified.
Audrey Munson, in other words, is at once tawdry and highbrow—an object not only of ordinary lust but also of the grandest human aspirations. And until now, the woman’s been hidden in plain sight.
Not anymore. Over the next few weeks, Bränd arranges a series of these film projections, each telling a piece of the Audrey Munson story. These films will mysteriously appear and disappear from buildings all over the city. Each will feature the same stunning silent film star and end with the same yesteryear-sounding tagline: Heaven Is a Gal Named Audrey.
It won’t take long before Bränd starts fielding calls from journalists, including reporters from both business and cultural desks. The company will get calls from talent scouts, too—from Hollywood agents and modeling firms. All will ask a few perfunctory questions about Bränd, about their intention for this campaign. But invariably, each comes around to the same question: who is the actress playing Munson in these silent films?
She’s got something, this woman. Some kind of star power.
They’re not wrong. Within a few short years, the act
ress playing Munson will appear on the screens of multiplexes around the world. Before long, hers will be a household name. For the moment, though, as the Second Leap of Faith becomes a reality in front of their eyes, Ethan and Randy are the only ones who know it: Evie Emerling.
EVIE EMERLING. GOD.
Ethan stares up at the Rainbow Seed murals, pressing the phone to his ear. He turns the name over in his head. Just hearing those five syllables out loud is enough to make Ethan’s stomach lurch.
When Evie had responded to Bränd’s casting call for the “Heaven Is a Gal Named Audrey” campaign, she was one of a thousand aspiring actresses and models who pinned their hopes on a mysterious project being put together by a marketing firm no one had ever heard of. Randy had sorted through stacks of head shots and résumés, narrowing the talent pool down to a dozen or so finalists. Each had followed Randy, one at a time, into the closet that he’d converted into Bränd’s “audition room.”
The audition room was Randy’s domain. Ethan was the serious, silent partner, busy with contracts and schedules and spreadsheets, with building anodyne websites for their handful of paying clients. He was too busy, or perhaps too shy, to pay attention to these women, as gorgeous as they were.
But when Evie walked in, it was different. Ethan felt Evie’s presence before he even laid eyes on her. Some shift in the air, an electric crackle, something he still can’t quite explain all these years later. Maybe it was chemical—some blast of pheromones. But when he looked up, he was thunderstruck.