by Nancy Mauro
“And the very honesty of the portrait will be social commentary.” He’s running and gunning here. Glances at his own hands, notices they’re engaged in some rolling form of persuasion, and is reminded of Skinner’s speech last week. How the old man’s inflamed left eye and vigilante politics seemed so at home in the Osterhagen Loaning Library.
“I don’t want satire, though.” Anne pushes herself to the edge of the sofa. “Too often honesty drifts toward its ribald cousin.”
Nice, Duncan says to himself, she’s taking it.
“I’m erring on the side of harsh commentary.”
“So, if Stand and Be Counted had a voice, what would it say?”
“Yes, your ass does look fat.”
She laughs. “Excellent. It’s the polar opposite of what Hawke did with this brand.”
“Well, when you’re stuck, pull a one-eighty.” Duncan leans against his desk.
“We’d have to be really brave to carry it off. But you’re right. No one in the market is doing this—‘History will repeat, but we’ll be here to see it through.’”
And we have liftoff. Up against the chest and sucking at the tit.
“Exactly,” Duncan says, nodding.
“Like a light at the end of the tunnel.”
“Sure.” He’s not sure what he’s agreeing to precisely, but it feels right, the soul is there, even if the concept itself needs to be fleshed out. Anne stands up.
“I might love it, Duncan. I really might.” But he can see that she already does. “The idea’s sick, but I expect nothing less from you.”
She walks to his window, trailing ash across the carpet. “Look, I won’t blow smoke up your ass on this one—it’s got to move merch or we’re all dead—but this is a big idea. Maybe too big given the current climate. I mean, no one wants to be reminded about mass blunders. People are going to hate you.”
“So I’ll take Veterans Day off.”
“You should get Leetower to art-direct this. Make sure he and Kooch work their asses off; they’re lazy shits who don’t know how good they have it. Don’t be afraid to punish them, Duncan. You’re the new Dutch uncle. With Hawke gone it’s the only way they’ll embrace your regime.”
He doesn’t respond but he knows Anne is right. He himself had flourished under the fear of disappointing the great man, felt Hawke’s criticism as sharply as the punch of a lawn dart. In a way, tyranny helped raise him from the crumb-size cubicles, taught him to take other people’s shit streaks and bat them out of the park.
Yes. He would show the boys how it was done.
CHAPTER 12
Muscles of the Face
“Me, I was born a peeper. Shot from the womb with nose against the glass, you could say. People are much more fascinating when they think they’re alone, Lily. Really. They shit, they piss, they cry; it’s life thrown into high relief.” Lloyd scratches the wattle under his chin.
“Voyeurism is not for the impatient,” he continues, sitting down beside her along the rim of the fountain. “You go through the trouble of pulling yourself up to a second-story window but your worries are just beginning. You’ve still got to sift through a lot of sock darning and flossing and putting away of the dishes before you get a nude. Although, for me, it’s not just about the naked flesh, you know? My tastes are more complex than that. There is something heartbreaking about the human condition. And the peeps, we’re the ones who’re privy to it.
“Once I was looking in on a house party—a Christmas party in the historic district by the mill? I was in the shrubs watching this woman in the kitchen. She was nice-looking, in her forties, but the lines around her face were starting to dig in. You know the age? She wasn’t wearing a ring. She had this blond hair that had been pinned up and she was wearing pearls. A classic beauty, but the lines, the face, the no-ring business, she was a tragic figure immediately. She was alone, standing still, stood a second too long and I had this feeling—call it intuition—that she was out of place here.
“I watched her reach across the counter to pour herself a drink, but by accident she knocked an empty wineglass to the floor. It shattered. Now there were all these festivities going on, a bunch of people in the living room and lots of noise. So no one came when the glass broke. I watched the woman bend and scoop up the broken pieces of glass. She unfolded a fancy napkin, it was the size of a bib, and scooped the shards right in. Then she twisted the corners of the napkin together, made a bundle of the broken glass, and put it in her purse. It was a small purse, beaded-like, and it was bulging by the time she stuffed the pieces in there. Then she picked up the bottle of wine and, easy as all shit, poured herself a glass.
“I found myself watching her hands. She had long sleeves but I could see something had slid down her wrist. It was a hospital bracelet; bright yellow and white, couldn’t miss it. These two little things, the glass and the bracelet—one leading to the other—happened in the span of maybe forty seconds. But they made a complete story. I knew who she was then. That day I’d read an article in the paper about a woman who’d escaped the long-term-care facility in Poughkeepsie. Acute schizophrenic. Burned down her co-op in a popcorn grease fire. I realized all this because she thought no one was watching. You can never know a person when they think you’re watching.”
“Did you do anything?”
“Who?” he asks, snapping from his monologue. “Did I go around and knock on the door or something?”
“Or call the hospital.”
“She was beyond help, Lily.”
“She was sick.”
“Sometimes they say popcorn grease in the paper, but they really mean meth lab. Besides, they fished her body out of the river near Saugerties the next day.”
Lily looks into his porcine eyes. “You are Satan.”
“Yes, but my duties are largely ceremonial.” He smiles his rummage sale of teeth. “Anyway, why must you judge me, Lily? Why must I either be good or bad, fit in one shoe box or the other?”
In a way, she can’t contest him on this point. It’s a mistake to believe that others have led the same life as her; one in which each word is panned through a fine-screen mesh.
“I’ll tell you something,” he continues. “I do love the peeping. Although lately—and this’ll help explain what I was doing yesterday behind the encyclopedias—I’ve developed an interest in frotteurism. You know what that is?”
“Enlighten me.”
“’Atta girl.” He shifts closer on the lip of the fountain.
Lily inches away.
“It’s the urge to touch or rub against a nonconsenter.”
Lily nods and looks at the dry fountain cherub. She wonders why the angel’s weak little stream of urine gets powered off at exactly five o’clock each day even though the library is open late most evenings. “I thought you were more of a dirty talker.”
“Well, that’s all a prelude to the frott stuff,” Lloyd says. “Like vocal exercises. The rubbing and touching stuff—you can only pull that shit off once per location. Maybe only once in Osterhagen, right? Afterwards I’m going to have to beat a path to Rhinebeck or Hudson. How many chances am I going to get to stick it to some schoolgirl? The townsfolk will be cutting new eyeholes in their cloaks.”
After absorbing the content of last week’s pig meeting, Lily knows he’s probably right. “You’re actually going to try this?”
“Sure, once I’m ready to split. But I haven’t even been to the botanical gardens yet.”
Lily shakes her head. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable someplace crowded? In the city? In subways?”
Lloyd blows a laser-fine line of smoke. “I know about subways,” he snaps. “Where’s your head? The city’s fucking overrun with perverts.”
“I’m just saying. It would be safer. Once you actually launch.”
He ignores her, gets up, paces the empty cloisters holding his cigarette like a ballpoint pen. “Okay, the dirty talk has got its own charm, for sure. The gig—as I like to call her—takes her swee
t time processing what’s happened to her. But when it finally registers, and this is the part I like best, she almost always attempts a recovery. Smooths on a neutral face like nothing’s happened. I love this. This is what’s so beautiful about society, Lily. All you ladies trained to be polite and kind. So when I tell a girl to squat so I can sniff her ass you wouldn’t believe how hard the face works to adjust. It’s like a flipped kayak trying to right itself. Reads like constipation on the face but is restorative to my soul. I fester on that wound.”
Lily pushes her glasses up her nose. “I was hoping for a less precise conversation.”
“See, Lily. That’s why I’d never gig on you. Not once has your expression cracked. You’re just sitting there watching me behind those librarian glasses and not once have you cracked. You’re a hard son of a bitch. Pardon my language. But all that energy to keep such a stoic expression, you could run a small city off it.”
“This isn’t energy,” she says. “This is how I look.”
“Always? When you’re working? When you’re fucking? Boy, I’ll bet you’re a barrel of laughs.”
The comment pinches, it does. And she finds herself wondering if Duncan shares this opinion. She bends one knee over the other and thinks, Am I boring? Or am I just a brilliant actor?
Lloyd stretches his arms above his head and walks back toward her. “Lily, why are you always here? Remind me.”
She sighs, checks her watch. Duncan should be home in a couple hours. It’s true that she’s been waiting all week to get back into the garden. Still, she’s surprised—and not unpleasantly so—to find herself anticipating his arrival.
“You’re going to be a doctor, but not a real doctor, right?”
She switches the crossing of her legs. “I’m trying to pinpoint a moment. If that’s what you want to call it.”
“Excellent.” He settles back down beside her. “Which one exactly?”
“I crawled through fifty feet of the Cu Chi tunnels,” Duncan says. “Although they’d been enlarged so fat-fuck tourists could get through. The Viet Cong managed to dig hundreds of miles of underground passage by hand. And the only evidence? These hidden entrances as small and inconceivable as foxholes.”
“What you’re telling me, there’s just so much material here.” Anne shakes her head and sifts through a few marker renderings that he had Leetower do up.
“Right. The crafty Viet Cong squatting in a tunnel full of their own shit waiting for nightfall, the quick burn of napalm.”
“I’m thinking we should get someone in on the strategy.”
“What?”
“To consult. Just to cover our ass.”
Duncan feels a tightening in his shoulders. “A consultant? You mean a planner?” He knows what comes next: a familiar winching sensation as the slack between him and Anne is taken up and they’re both pressed to stand loyal to their nameplate duties.
“Like a details guy. To go over scripts and make sure we’re socially compliant.”
“No.”
“Historically accurate.”
“Forget it.”
“Duncan—”
“Christ, it’s getting late.”
Anne gathers up the drawings for him. “Well, I’ll say it again, this is all good stuff, Duncan.” Apparently her animal sense has kicked in and she knows enough to back down. She trails him out of the office to the elevator. “Given our previous disaster with Stand and Be Counted, our strategy is to wallpaper that boardroom with ideas.”
“I’m going up the West Side,” he says, knowing there’s not enough time tonight to explain that wallpapering is not a strategy. “You want me to drop you off anywhere?”
“Thanks, but there’s a Quarter Pounder with bacon I’ve got to puke up.” Anne starts off down the hall and then stops. “One more thing. I’ll throw this in now because there will be no way around it later. The client wants you to work their skinny-fit jeans into the concept too. Tapered down to the ankle. Very mod. That’s not going to be a problem, is it?”
Duncan looks at her, reminds himself what he has forgotten: the true enemy is always embedded. “Anne, our entire strategy comes out of the flared cut of the product. I’d say it’s very problematic.”
“Well, you’ve got three long days to figure it out, Chief.”
Lily mashes her cigarette and holds the snip of smolder in her fingers. “I’m looking at the spatial conquests resulting from the Romanesque style giving way to the Gothic.”
“Goths,” Lloyd says nodding. “Okay, I’m with you.”
“The barrel vault—the Romanesque ceiling vault, for instance? In the early churches these round arches could only span a square space. Quite primitive, really.” She uses her toe to trace the shape of the archaic vault in the gravel. “So churches always had narrow naves and aisles that had to be supported by lithic piers and columns. Places were dark as hell. But in came the pointed arch and the ribbed vault—literally a stone ribbing along the seam of a vault, like a ceiling structure with a support mechanism built right in. Finally, man was using his brain.” Lily crouches, scratches the shape of a four-part rib vault alongside her gravel toe imprint. “Cathedral ceilings could soar now, the span of naves and aisles doubled.”
She stops, looks up. Lloyd yawns into the net of his fingers.
“Sorry, babe, you’re boring me to tears.”
She shakes her head and stands, turns away from him. It’s really time that she gets home.
“Tell me something dirty about your life, Lily.”
“Fuck off,” she says and scratches her cheek.
“See, you even say that without a muscle twitch.” Lloyd sighs and stands. “You and I should go on the road, sharking. You’re all poker face.”
“You’re all talk.”
He crushes his cigarette under his heel and walks around her. His head reaches just to her shoulder. “Jesus, you’re a tall drink of water. Okay, let’s do this: you give me the scoop and in exchange I’ll do something for you. That’s how this friendship thing works, correct?”
“We’re friends now?”
“Don’t get too attached. I’d sell you up the river in a heartbeat.”
Lily smirks. She believes him.
“There you go!” He juts his finger at her. “Quick, how would you describe your teenage years?”
“Religious.”
“Priests and confessionals?”
“Convent school.”
Lloyd opens his mouth, his finger drops. “Lily?” his voice nearly crumbles. “Do you—are you still in possession of kneesocks?”
“I don’t deal in the present tense.”
“Fair enough. The convent shit’s more titillating anyway. Let’s get back to that.”
“Hold on,” she says. “You never said. What do I get out of this?”
“Oh.” Lloyd puts his hands on his hips. “You’re in for a treat. You and I are going on a little field trip.”
At six-thirty that night, Duncan connects to the Saw Mill Parkway with an impaired sense of aerodynamics (due to the pug-nosed state of the Saab) but also with an overriding self-confidence that only a big idea can generate. Of course, leave it to Anne and her typical account-whore behavior to complicate a simple premise like History Repeating with a non sequitur like skinny-leg jeans. Well, he’ll find a way to work around it. Because unlike the Laundry Elves campaign, this is his chance to create compelling drama in the form of a TV commercial. It’s also a chance at another gold Pencil.
Good thing Lily isn’t the only one who can crack open a book. Because he’s going to have to do research. By the time he traveled to Vietnam, the country had grown a lush cover of foliage over its scars. By the time he toured the rooms of the Reunification Palace in Saigon, it had been converted into a museum. He has a picture of himself standing in front of the stormer tanks that took down the palace gates in ’75. There’s something wrong with the photo, though, that makes him stack it at the back of the pile. It’s his grin or his T-shirt logo; the
great white swoosh of one or the other, or both.
If anything, the forced inclusion of the skinny-fit jeans is a reminder that his nascent idea requires protection. He will not discuss it with any of the Brass traditionalists who roost and fuck in the upper reaches of the agency, refusing to acknowledge the malleable new borders of media. Who says a national denim campaign can’t provide commentary on the human condition under strife? Also, he will not discuss it with Lily. He looks at the clock in the dash. She’s probably waiting for him to excavate. It’s odd, but in the city he kept forgetting about the bones, the dead nanny in the loam. In fact, he’d considered lingering around the office tonight, getting in well after Lily had turned in. These are impulses he can’t explain. Not to Lily, not even to himself. What kind of man admits the keen sense of self he feels at work becomes all but obscured by the time he hits the deer-strewn Taconic?
CHAPTER 13
Sweat Glands
When he pulls up to the house he finds Lily sitting on a folding lawn chair in the driveway. She’s wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and is fogging her thighs with a can of insect repellent. Duncan gives the horn a weak squeeze in greeting. It produces a sound much like that of a stomach digesting. Lily jumps up, follows the car to the lean-to. Duncan winces; she’s going to nail him for being late. And it doesn’t help that he still hasn’t brought the Saab in for servicing.
He hardly has time to cut the engine and Lily’s there, pressed in the narrow strip between wall and car, spray can still in hand. “He got our number,” she says as he opens his door. “I don’t know how—it’s not even listed.”
“What?” Duncan edges out of the driver’s side, they are nose to nose. Lily pushes back her hair, flustered and impatient.
“He wanted to talk to you.” She backs up, allowing the door to close behind him. “I thought it was about the pig.”
“Lily, calm down. Who wants to talk to me?” Duncan has to guide her back out of the lean-to and into the yard.
“Skinner—the old man. We’ve been summoned. Well, you’ve been summoned. Tonight.” She tosses the insect repellent into the grass.
