Night Moves

by Thea Devine

“They’ll pay the full three months’ rent in the residential hotel across the street. That encompasses the deadline, the due date and the end of round one. They’ve rented three floors in the Casa Suites. They want minimal outside contact. You’ll get breakfast, lunch and dinner here. We’re talking here about being totally sequestered until we come up with concept and campaign. Like sitting on a major trial. So?” He paused, and stared straight at her.

  “Okay. You’ve got me.”

  “Great. This is really great. Guess what, you’re going to work right now.”

  He grabbed the container of coffee from Roxanne’s hand as they passed her out the door.

  The war room was on the next floor. She had to be processed through a personnel office to get a badge, a key and ID. She had to sign papers that said she would forfeit her salary, her perks, and maybe even be prosecuted if she ever revealed the nature of the work going on behind those huge high walls.

  What am I doing here?

  “Oh good,” Elliott said. “Breakfast is on.”

  Elliott brought her into the war room and introduced her around. She knew some of the faces, and some of the names, big names that had been brought in for recognition value and creative juice.

  After that, she got the debriefing and pounds of corporate papers to study.

  The floor had been sectioned off into offices surrounding an open space. Each writer-and-artist team was assigned one room in which they were set up with everything they would need from computers to fax machine, and of course, a coffeemaker. There was a common supply room, a library and three large conference rooms.

  “And,” Elliott said as he showed her around after breakfast, “I’m going to be your partner.”

  Carrie wondered why she wasn’t surprised, and she found she was liking him less and less and she hadn’t even been here three hours. What was it about him? He was running on nerves, she could tell that because she knew him so well, and he thought he was still trading on an affection that didn’t exist anymore. She didn’t care about him at all, and he thought, he hoped, she did.

  No, she understood she was here for the recognition and the money, and it was clear to her that she was going to do hand-to-hand battle with the other heavyweights to get her due.

  What the hell had she gotten herself into?

  Still, the excitement of being back in New York was a heady sensation. And the adrenaline rush of beginning something new left no room for anything else. She had to focus every resource she had on the project.

  That was good. That meant there was no time to think about Truck, to miss him, yearn for him or have regrets about might-have-beens.

  IT REALLY WAS a full-immersion project. Every morning the hotel desk awakened her at six-thirty, as she’d instructed. She showered, she dressed, she was across the street at the office at eight for breakfast, at which point they were already working, and she usually was not back in the hotel until ten.

  It was a ferociously difficult campaign for a client that was notoriously jittery about making the wrong move, a client that had the reputation of never taking its agency’s advice. A client that was mired in its own inability to be decisive and was losing some major market share.

  I’m tilting at windmills.

  And Carrie didn’t even feel like she was really in New York. The war room could have been in any building anywhere in the country. All she got of the city every day was the rush of traffic on 52nd Street on her way back to the hotel.

  No Bloomingdale’s. No theater. No concerts. No museums.

  But then, those were intertwined with memories of Elliott: corporate seats at Madison Square Garden for the Knicks, the Rangers, the hottest Broadway shows, the best restaurants.

  Elliott was the kind of guy who couldn’t sit still and who always had to be seen.

  There’d never been time for the small moments. A walk in the park. A steamy pretzel from a street vendor on a brisk fall day. A street fair in Brooklyn. The city on a Sunday—quiet, serene, and still full of an energy found nowhere else on earth.

  Truck would like walking in the city, she thought, despite its size. He’d love the park, the dogs—they would have a dog, she thought—and sitting for hours with the Times on a Sunday...

  They would have a what?

  Dear Lord, was she so stir-crazy already that she was planning a life she never wanted?

  But there was no time to analyze those too-frequent moments when Truck crept into her thoughts.

  There was just time for pure, concentrated creative development. And time passing, rushing, fast.

  CARRIE HAD BEEN GONE a month, Truck thought, and it felt like a lifetime. She’d written him short notes every few days which had devolved into E-mails, brief and frustratingly impersonal. Client is difficult. Working round the clock. Off to try a new concept. Got to work up a new campaign.

  Truck couldn’t understand work like that. Too nerve-racking. He liked things he could touch, things he could put together, he liked problems he could solve and immediately see the result.

  And he couldn’t for the life of him solve the puzzle of why Carrie had gone.

  Maybe it was one of those things: the past doomed to repeat itself. Maybe he would never understand.

  “Go get her,” Old Man kept telling him. “Maybe you shouldn’t have let her go.”

  But how did you keep an independent spirit like Carrie when all the desire in the world was not enough?

  And if he’d ever mentioned love, she would’ve left the first day back in town.

  Love... He’d fallen faster than a summer storm the minute he saw her. But love wasn’t in the vocabulary of the high flying, big-city woman Carrie had become.

  And Elliott, who was just a deep raspy voice on a piece of tape still had had the power to move Carrie four hundred miles south while he, Truck, with all the intimacy they’d shared, didn’t have the magic words to keep her in Paradise.

  That said something potent about love and desire... and the foolishness of dreams.

  Or had he just been hanging on until Carrie finally understood what she was fighting so hard.

  He knew, but now wasn’t the time to console himself with the words. Right now he had to find a way to just keep going.

  So he worked on her house in the mindless numbing hours after work when there was nothing else to do. He retiled her bathroom, he rewired the electrical system. He thought about the winter, and how the heating system that Old Man had rigged for her mother wouldn’t be even adequate after the previous year’s storms, and how he could fix that problem.

  “Come on, Truck,” Jeannie egged him on, urging him to go out with her and Tom. Whenever he ran into Jeannie she looked proud, pretty and together, and Truck supposed that while she might never come to terms with her broken marriage, she had learned to be reasonably content with the outcome.

  Jeannie was back in her house on the Pond, she was studying for her real estate license, and she was almost ready to jump-start her own business from the ruins of Eddie’s real estate firm.

  And Tom was definitely in the picture.

  Sometimes a person’s life did turn around, Truck thought. And then sometimes it just got turned upside down.

  And it made a man understand: he’d been waiting for Carrie all these years, waiting for love.

  And all for nothing. Carrie was gone, and with her, he’d lost another piece of himself.

  ANOTHER FRUITFUL and fruitless day. Elliott caught up with Carrie as she exited the building. “How about we get a drink? There’s a bar right in the hotel.”

  “Sure.” Carrie let him guide her because she felt so weary.

  The bar was right inside the door, and was crowded and noisy. They found a secluded corner, and Carrie sagged into the booth.

  She didn’t even know what she wanted. They were provided all day long with unlimited coffee, tea and soft drinks. Anything more potent was dangerous. She could sleep for a year.

  She ordered juice and Elliott gave her a damping look. S
he knew what his objection was: a small glassful in this posh bar cost as much as a half gallon in the store.

  Well, he ought to be made to pay. He hadn’t half paid for all the anguish he’d caused her, and all the misery he was putting her through. She hated working with him. A partnership that had been so charged up six or eight months before was now a battle of wills that left her wrung out and angry every day.

  So that was probably the reason for this little off-the-cuff meeting, where bosses couldn’t eavesdrop, and everything they said would be between themselves.

  “So...tell me,” he began, “what have you been doing these past months you’ve been out of circulation?”

  Spin time, she thought. You never told the truth. And you never quite lied. “Well, I went back home, I straightened out a few things, and then I started my own business. You know, you find those niches, and you grab the opportunities when they present themselves.”

  “No kidding. Clients?”

  “I’m building slowly. Local stuff mainly. The arts council and the Trilakes Chamber of Commerce. About a dozen area businesses. Not million-dollar clients by any means, but enough to build a dream on.” That was poetic, she thought. Did she mean it? And if she did, why was she here?

  “Yet you accepted the offer to come back here.”

  Yes, he was getting at something. “It was short term enough so I could delegate my ongoing projects. And I wanted to get some seed money, and maybe a credit for my résumé. Big-name campaigns always help when you want to move up, don’t they, Elliott?”

  He smiled sourly. “We did work well together.”

  Did.

  “But something’s missing now, isn’t it?”

  She didn’t know quite which way to play it. He was either going to fire her or assign her to someone else. And maybe better heads had prevailed on that decision.

  Which did she want, in her heart of hearts?

  “We do seem to have different ideas about the direction things should be going,” she said carefully.

  “We do. I’m glad you’re thinking that way, and that we both want what’s best for the client. I wonder whether you’d want to give it a shot with Andrea Lopez.”

  Her heart leaped. “Sure. I know Andrea”

  “Good.” He took a gulp of his drink. “I guess we weren’t meant to be that dream team.”

  “I guess not,” Carrie murmured. I know not.

  And it was only the end of September.

  Dear God.

  Why am I here?

  CARRIE SENT Truck a flurry of E-mails: Things are heating up. I changed partners and now I can dance. Concept finalized. Prints and story on the boards. Competition cutthroat. Secrecy imperative. Cannot talk.

  It was as if she was working for some counterintelligence organization. You couldn’t get hold of her, she was as formless as air.

  And by the time Truck responded to her last message, her E-mail address had been encrypted and eliminated. It was as if she had vanished into a maw.

  He didn’t even try to figure out what she meant by those messages.

  He just made sure the leaves were cleaned off of her roof and porch. He started to install an electric baseboard heating system. He worked on her computer, and slept at home.

  October came. Passed. Weather got chillier and chillier. The tourists left, the woodpiles grew. Winter was coming on.

  He tended to think like that now, in short, effortless phrases that required no energy and barely any communication.

  “Go after her, son,” Old Man kept telling him.

  He had work to do, and no time at all to waste on chasing after a teenager’s dream. But the dreams were still there, fueled by the blinking cursor of an E-mail message, a tenuous link at best, that brought New York that close to Paradise.

  A man could always hope.

  He took on a helper, and more installations than he could handle. Things always got real busy toward winter and it meant he didn’t have to think too hard about the fact she was E-mailing him less and less. Because if he did, he didn’t know what he would do, and it was all he could do to keep his feelings suppressed and his desire in check.

  “Go after her,” Jeannie kept telling him. “You don’t understand. Carrie’s really changed. She liked what was happening here. I think she loved you.”

  Go after her, after her, after her...

  ...actually, I thought it was love—

  DECEMBER 15. Client meeting. Deadline. Panic.

  Every agency pitching the account received a schedule of presentation. The end was almost near, and Carrie sat at her drawing board with Andrea Lopez over her shoulder, and studied her presentation.

  This was the end. This was it. Whether they won or lost, she was gone. And she couldn’t wait to be gone.

  She had forgotten about the protocols and the layers of bureaucracy. She had forgotten about how fingers meddled in your pie so that when the idea and the concept were finally realized, there was nothing of your contribution left except the dot on the i.

  Granted, she was working on a much larger scale with this account. And the stakes were high: millions of dollars, all costs told. But the aggravation, the secrecy, the constant humiliations were just not worth it for something so pie-in-the-sky.

  And Global Vision was only one of ten agencies going through this first round. The client would then choose two campaigns it liked, and the face-off between the finalists would be continuing after that until the client made its choice. It was a six-month-to-a-year process, a merry-go-round that never ended; and then there was always another client, always another campaign.

  She had her own work to do, and Carrie found herself sometimes wishing so hard that she could just have some time to think. There was no time for anything now but the client’s concerns, the client’s concept, the client’s campaign.

  No time, no time, no time.

  She and the whole team were so sleep deprived, they barely walked through the succeeding intense days. This wasn’t creativity as she loved it. This was creation by committee, with every politically correct comma in place.

  And she wished, in her heart of hearts, that she had never come to New York, because anybody with her experience could have sat in her place.

  PORTLAND WAS about as big a city as Truck ever wanted to visit nowadays. New York was daunting. Huge. Enveloping, with those towering buildings everywhere you looked.

  He liked a smaller scale, where a man could see where he was in relation to things. And in fact, he didn’t know where he was in relation to Carrie, but enough was enough.

  Truck intended to find out.

  He didn’t know the exact moment he decided to take Old Man’s and Jeannie’s advice and come to New York.

  It might have been that he was damn tired of wrestling with his memories of the feel and heat of her that could not be exorcised by work and ruthless determination.

  Or he might have decided that night he couldn’t sleep, with every inch of his skin aching for just the touch of her hand.

  Or it might have been that Old Man was right, and it was time to go after the warrior princess, capture her and bring her back to the castle.

  A man lost patience sometimes waiting for results.

  He had no particular plan. He just drove his van four hundred miles south one morning, with her motorcycle in the back. He hadn’t even made a reservation anywhere; he arrived just about in time to check in for the night And he found a hotel with valet parking, which was good because he knew nothing about the cutthroat parking rules in the city.

  He was thinking straight, he thought as he checked in. He’d brought the cycle, surely an easier way to maneuver through the streets than trying to drive the van, and he was confronting his rival—the city and all it had to offer someone like Carrie.

  And he had the name of the infernal agency: Jeannie had remembered it, and that night, he found the address in the phone book.

  It wasn’t going to be easy. Just from his first phone call to Global,
asking for Carrie, and that cautious voice of the operator telling him she wasn’t reachable, Truck knew he was going to need the strategy of an army general.

  They made everything more important than it was and more difficult than it had to be.

  He checked out the building. An innocuous white marble tower at the corner of Third Avenue and 52nd Street. People streaming in and out all day who all looked the same: slick and suited, with briefcases and laptop cases and perfect hair.

  But he didn’t see Carrie.

  There was no phone listing for her, either so she hadn’t rented an apartment or gotten a phone.

  That made things harder.

  That made him more determined.

  And maybe it was as simple as storming the barricades, whatever they were. For some reason, her agency was hiding Carrie and everyone else working on the project that had brought her to New York.

  He wondered what could be so all-damn important about it.

  Well, it was time for a frontal assault.

  He’d come on a Wednesday, reconnoitered on Thursday, and the following morning, he hitched himself onto the Harley and roared out into traffic.

  He’d forgotten about the traffic, the jam-packed streets, the way you could only go a mile in about thirty minutes. But the nice thing about the Harley was you could zip down the avenues in between the lanes and avoid all that endless stopping and starting.

  At nine o’clock precisely, he pulled the beast up onto the sidewalk in front of the Global Vision building, and rolled it into the lobby.

  “But you can’t,” the guard protested.

  “I’m going to,” Truck said, and he must have looked so fierce, so wild and so menacing, the guard let him park there. “Where’s Global?”

  “Ten through fifteen.”

  Truck opted for floor fifteen, and when the elevator doors slid smoothly open, he stepped out into the bustle of the creative floor.

  There were people streaming across the reception area in an endless do-si-do—in one door, cross the floor and out the other. There were sofas you could sink into and maybe disappear forever. Modern art on the walls, all slashes and bright colors.