Huh? "I do?"
"Yup. I think maybe you'd get it. There's a horrible beauty to it all that not everyone understands. A kind of freaky elegant crumbling quietude. A friend of mine, a prof over at Wayne State, calls it the 'verity of decay.'"
"What does that mean?"
"I can tell you, but I'm not going to. If you want to understand, you've got to see it. Believe me, I don't ask too many people to do a ride-along."
"I'm flattered."
"So you in?"
"Okay." Although Joe was perversely fascinated by the whole idea of exploring an abandoned building, he wasn't so sure he actually wanted to do it. There was something about it that sounded too real, too scary. This might have been a little more Detroit than even he was willing to experience. Maybe he was turning into a scared suburbanite. Anyway, it's not like he had the time to devote to a bizarre and dangerous-sounding new hobby. He was too busy writing articles about the new Coffee Beanery that had moved into town, working very hard to put Café Limbus out of business. Score one more for The Man.
Oh, wait. Right. That was him now.
14
The Mythos of the Broken Hipster
It had been different being around Joe during his first few months of gainful employment. It was certainly different in the mornings, with both of them rushing around trying to get ready for work at roughly the same time. If they were lucky, they just had enough time to sit down and have breakfast together. That part was nice. They had even started experimenting with healthy cereals from Trader Joe's, which tended to get new names after a couple of days.
"You want a bowl of Honey Clusterfucks?" Joe would call up to Ana while she was getting dressed. Their other favorites included Frosted Hemp Wads and Count Carobula.
Though lately she'd also been seeing more of Joe's curmudgeon-y side. He'd definitely become grouchier, prone to go off on a rant at any given moment. She'd noticed that his rants often had to do with some form of punctuation. The first one came after seeing a sign behind Rite Aid that said: It is illegal to dump "trash" in this dumpster.
"What the hell does that mean?" Joe said, shaking his head. "Why would anyone put quotes around trash? It makes no sense. Are they being ironic?" He curled his index and middle fingers into air quotes. "No 'trash,' please. I mean, who does this? It's the work of crazy people."
Yet it was nothing compared to his latest rant, which he referred to as "the overapostrophization of America." It had obviously been brewing for a while.
"Did you see that?" he said to her one night in the car, after they passed a billboard for some local slip-and-fall ambulance chaser. "There were like fifteen apostrophes on that billboard, not one of them used correctly. What is the fucking deal? Why is everyone apostrophizing so much now? Any time a word is plural, someone adds an apostrophe to it!" His voice got all stammery and sputtery, and both his hands left the steering wheel so he could beseech the syntax gods. "What the fuck! They're on signs, menus, newspapers, store windows—everyone's apostrophe crazy! It's like, I better put an apostrophe here just to be on the safe side. Unless it's a contraction—where you need an apostrophe—then there's nothing! Christ on a bike, what the fuck is wrong with everyone?" Then he turned to Ana. She was trying very hard not to laugh, so she didn't say anything. "What?"
"Nothing."
"Glad you find me so amusing," he said, glaring at her as if she were gratuitous punctuation.
Yes, it was different.
Then there was the matter of Bruce. She and Adrienne had been working even closer with him since LA. This was also different. She had known that creative directors were, well, special. She had figured that one out early in her advertising career. They were equal parts confidence, intelligence, imperial comportment, good looks, wit, perspicacity, attention deficit disorder, and neediness, mixed with an authoritatively low-pitched voice and a healthy dollop of bullshit. (And despite the awesome Mary Wells Lawrences, Jane Maases, and Caroline Joneses of the world, it was almost always a man, more proof of advertising's silent and subtle sexism promulgated by the patriarchy and executives too shrewd to expose their true selves to the world, and most certainly to human resources.)
What was a surprise to Ana was that one of these questionable creatures was, for the first time, interesting to her. Since she and Adrienne got promoted, she had noticed small things—glances, lean-ins with inhalations when he needed to look at Ana's work, laughing a bit too heartily at her jokes, even the occasional hand on the shoulder.
Ana attributed this minor fascination to the fact that she and Adrienne spent so much time at work. They were there every night, at least until eight, sometimes later, and usually one day of every weekend, often both. They had known it would be like this at the beginning while they were trying to establish the department and, most importantly, trying to win new business for it. So far, they'd participated in three new business pitches: one for a midsize shoe warehouse chain, the second for a P&G fabric softener, the last for a women's energy drink, a disgusting concoction called Grrlpowrr! (The label: Suppresses Appetite! Inhibits Fat! After chugging a can, Adrienne had shivered and said, "I feel so stabby.") They had ended up in the final two twice, but had won neither of them. The energy drink folks had loved their presentation, told them they were a shoo-in, but at the eleventh hour, the company president gave the advertising manager the mandate that they were going with the other shop. They had heard later that he didn't want to have to come to "that shit stain of a city" to meet with his ad agency. Lovely.
At least she and Adrienne were overseeing one account that the agency already had, a Michigan-based manufacturer of vacuums, spot cleaners, and deep-cleansing systems. (Client-suggested headline: Get Mom what she really wants for the holidays! Cut to Ana and Adrienne sighing deeply.) Despite the utter obviousness of it, they were still happy to have the account. Both Ana and Adrienne were starting to get the feeling that if they didn't acquire some new clients for W2W, they probably wouldn't be going back to work as a regular art director and copywriter team. They would instead just be canned, for they were now senior vice president associate creative directors (SVP ACDs) with accordingly inflated salaries. As Adrienne put it: "Our firm, shapely asses are now officially on the line."
Ana also couldn't help but think that perhaps her little infatuation with Bruce had something to do with her now being officially in her forties. Happily, her actual birthday had come and gone with zero fanfare—she had made sure of that. She and Joe had stayed in and made coq au vin and opened a really good bottle of wine. After that, they had sex for the first time in about three and a half months. It was semisuccessful. She didn't officially have an orgasm, but she was so happy to have broken the curse of no sex that she didn't actually care. Still, just the fact that they had gotten as far as they did meant it was one less thing she had to worry about. In the middle of it, feeling so good and feeling so close to each other, they said what they always said to each other these days:
Ana: Oh my god, we're actually having sex.
Joe: I know. It's like a Christmas miracle.
Ana: Why don't we do this more often?
Joe: I don't know. Why don't we? What's wrong with us?
Ana: We're too tightly wound. It's so much work for us to just get to this point.
Joe: Why is this so difficult? Why do we think so much? Why can't we just be like everyone else and just fuck? Would that be so wrong?
Ana: No it would not. I love you.
Joe: I love you too.
And they fucked until Joe came and she didn't. Normally, she would have asked for some manual assistance in that department, but it just didn't seem to matter to her that night. She was just happy to have had sex and to have the much-dreaded birthday behind her. Afterward, she tried to forget that the closest she came to coming was when an image of Bruce popped into her head. She let it stay for a moment or two, then banished it after deciding that it was a bad idea. After that, though, there wasn't much hope for an orgasm.
* * *
/> After eight and a half weeks of intense work for her and Joe (and, of course, no sex), he had his birthday as well. They were born roughly two months apart, both delivered at the same hospital. This fact had always made Ana strangely happy. On his birthday, they had a quiet evening of beers and burgers over at the Midlands, where they ran into Chick, who knew it was Joe's birthday.
"Well, well, well," said Chick, nodding and smirking, "if it isn't my favorite two forty-year-olds."
Joe sighed. "I really should never tell you anything."
Chick grinned at this. "No, you really shouldn't. Thankfully, you never seem to learn." He raised his hand. "Hi, Ana. How are you?"
"Hi, Chick. You just stop by to harass Joe on his birthday?" She quietly placed her hand on Joe's thigh and gave it a squeeze under the table.
"Actually, I'm supposed to meet a young woman at the bar."
Joe brightened at the mention of this. "Another one of your Match.com hussies?" He leaned back in his seat, placed his hand over Ana's on his leg. "Sure she's old enough to enter a bar? Probably good that you're meeting in public—wouldn't want to get caught up in some child-predator sting operation."
Ana chimed in: "We just saw a drag queen head into the men's room. Maybe that was her."
Chick suppressed a smile and lowered his head as if saddened by this exchange. "Oh, okay. That's the way it's going to be, huh? I come over to offer a friendly greeting and you both viciously attack me."
Joe shrugged. "You attacked first. Called us your forty-year-old friends."
"You are my forty-year-old friends. What am I supposed to say?"
"A simple hello would suffice."
"Ah, of course. A return to civility. Isn't that what all you oldsters want? Fine then," he said, doffing an imaginary chapeau. "I bid you both good day. You two enjoy your early-bird special." Chick started to head back toward the bar. "I'll see you broken hipsters later."
Broken hipsters. That was the part that got to Ana. She was used to Chick and Joe giving each other shit, but that expression caught her off guard. Was it the subtle reference to osteoporosis, which she was now officially starting to fret about? It certainly wasn't because she thought of herself as a hipster. She wasn't even sure what a hipster was these days, other than the poseurs who swanned around various neighborhoods of Brooklyn, with their tribal body modifications and trust funds, their oversize eyewear and undersize pantwear, who had turned the term into an insult. Even when she had been clearer on the concept, she'd rarely been called one. The last time was at her twenty-year high school reunion. Sarah Kettering, a former fellow band nerd turned roundish smug hockey mom, living far, far away from scary Detroit, with four kids and a sensible midsize husband. When Sarah called Ana a hipster, it too was used as an insult. ("How dare you not live a life exactly like mine?" was what Ana heard.) Compared to Sarah, Ana actually did feel like a hipster.
Then there were people who thought everyone who worked in the creative department was a hipster of some sort. Yes, sometimes it seemed as though Ana was constantly surrounded by good-looking young'uns with art-directed tattoos and ironic facial hair, who spent a lot of money on hair product and the aforementioned vintage hair metal T-shirts and meticulously shrunk, artfully wrinkled clothes from Urban Outfitters, designed to make the wearers look like they'd just crawled out of a multipartnered bed. (But was she any different, with her retro-yet-expensive versions of the thrift store frocks that she used to wear? Why did everyone want to look like a worn and rumpled version of themselves?) Of course, they weren't the only people in a Detroit creative department. There were also smelly record store loners who name-checked insanely obscure bands, former high school jocks who'd fervidly hid their artistic tendencies, compulsively complimenting bipolar tantrum queens, hallway-roving rumormongers, mechanic gays who loved cars as much as any GM retiree, Mensa-level cubicle hoarders, bookish roller derby girls, deer hunters whose fathers questioned their sissy profession, earth/soccer hybrid moms, as well as people who look so normal you're sure that they'll be the ones to come in and shoot up the place on the day they get laid off. There were all these and much, much more.
Because it's difficult to peg oneself as a workplace cultural stereotype, Ana had never really figured out her own category. (Passively competitive childfree quasi feminist?) At her advanced (for advertising) age, did it really even matter? Yet "broken hipster" sort of fit, at least for her and Joe. And maybe for a lot of the people they knew, who were getting older and still figuring out what to do with that information.
The people she worked with were now almost all younger than her. When she spoke to people in their twenties, they were always up on the latest music, games, videos, websites, social networking, etc. Ana kept up fairly well, but it was starting to feel like a lot of work. Everything changed so quickly and so often. And now the kids were suddenly antitechnology—cameras with film, monaural record players, gearless bicycles, typewriter parties. What was next? Return of the telegraph? Were the handlebar mustaches going to be tapping out Morse code while they waited the half hour for their pour-over coffees? And, damn it, why did it look like they were having so much fun doing it all?
Yes, these were exactly the sorts of things that a broken hipster would say.
Later, when she mentioned the expression to Adrienne over lunch in her office, her friend had just smiled. "It is kind of funny, but you're not that old. No one here thinks you're forty, so you're not."
Ana was leaning against the front of Adrienne's desk. She dipped a small chunk of romaine lettuce into low-fat ranch dressing and squinted quizzically at Adrienne, before shoving the piece into her mouth.
"Yeah, but . . . I am forty," she said after she finished chewing.
Adrienne stared at her like she was out of her mind. "Might I remind you that we are employed in advertising, where perception is reality? You don't look forty, thus you aren't forty."
"Except for the fact that I am actually forty years of age."
Adrienne set the turkey sandwich she was eating on top of the latest Lürzer's Archive. "Please stop saying that so loud. I don't want to have a forty-year-old partner. It doesn't reflect well on me."
Ana leveled her spork at Adrienne, a carrot shred on one of the tines. "Look, I'm not going to go around advertising my age, but I hope you're not suggesting that I lie about it. That is not cool."
Adrienne sighed. "Pushkin said that the illusion that exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths."
"Pushkin? Really? You're quoting Pushkin to me now?"
"What? I was an English major, you know. I've read books. I still occasionally read them when I'm not here exalting the grandeur of carpet steamers. And stop pointing that fucking spork like you're planning to shiv me in the yard."
Ana lowered the offending implement. "You really think youth matters that much around here?"
"Of course it does. You know this business—it's all about youth. The newest. The latest. It's always been that way."
"We're not the newest and the latest anymore, Adrienne."
"I'm aware of that, lady. We haven't been for quite some time. Still, you needn't go around reminding everyone of it. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object."
"Stop making things up."
"Tell that to Camus. He's the one who believes that lying is glorious, like a magic-hour sunset where you get all the best footage. Or tell Bruce, who just walked in and is currently standing right over your shoulder."
Ana rolled her eyes. "Fuck you."
"No, really. Hi, Bruce."
Ana turned around. Bruce was indeed standing there right behind her. He had on a fairly tight (but not too tight) black T-shirt, with jeans and laceless black Chuck Taylors, the expensive designer version of what the Ramones wore.
"What is it you need to tell me?"
Ana couldn't think of anything to say.
"Ana is late with layouts for Fanning," said Adrienne, rescuing
her.
Bruce looked disappointed. "Oh. Is that due? No one's talked to me about it. I think we got an extension anyway." He brushed behind Ana. She could smell that expensive spicy scent again. "Can I talk to you two about something?"
"Sure, Bruce. Of course," said Adrienne. "What's up?"
Bruce settled into the chair next to Ana. His knee touched hers at first, so she pulled back ever so slowly. It was one of the rare days that she was wearing a skirt and it wasn't a long one. She had noticed her tastes in clothes seemed to be running more along the shorter, tighter, sluttier lines of what the kids were wearing currently. The birthday, you know.
Bruce glanced briefly at Ana's legs. "We've got a new business pitch coming up."
Ana felt a tautness in her chest. This was never going to end. They were just going to be working nonstop for the rest of their lives. She would die one of those sad, cautionary deaths that teach others to live each day to the fullest, and that on your deathbed, you're not going to wish you had worked more.
"It's for an company that's got a lot of money and that wants to market to women. Only to women, actually."
Adrienne leaned forward, obviously much more interested in the possibility of yet another new business pitch than Ana. "What is it? Packaged goods? Health? Beauty? Come on, spill."
Bruce placed his hand on his chin, a couple of fingers twisting his lips. "It's actually more of an organization. It's called WomanLyfe."
Ana watched Adrienne bite her lip, then frown. "Sounds crunchy. Is it some sort of hairy-armpit, woman-spelled-with-a-y company?"
"Those people don't have any money," said Bruce. "No, woman is definitely spelled with an a. Actually, it's life that's spelled with a y."
"Weird."
"You know, copyright. They can own it better if it's misspelled."
The name WomanLyfe ticked some subtle recognition in Ana's head. She couldn't help a slight sneer. "Why do I think it's like an Avon or Mary Kay thing, where women pimp each other out to sell stuff to other women?"
"You mean like what we're doing?" said Adrienne.
The Narcissism of Small Differences Page 10