All Is Bright

by Sarah Pekkanen

  Later, of course, I’d realize it wasn’t Michael phoning but his personal assistant, Kate. By then my husband had stood up from the head of the table in his company’s boardroom, opened his mouth to speak, and crashed to the carpeted floor. All in the same amount of time it took me to walk across a ballroom floor just a few miles away.

  The assistant florist raced off and was instantly replaced by a white-haired, grandfatherly looking security guard from the Little Jewelry Box. “Miss?” he said politely.

  I silently thanked my oxygen facials and caramel highlights for his decision not to call me ma’am. I was about to turn thirty-five, which meant I wouldn’t be able to hide from the liver-spotted hands of ma’am-dom forever, but I’d valiantly dodge their bony grasp for as long as possible.

  “Where would you like these?” the guard asked, indicating the dozen or so rectangular boxes he was carrying on a tray draped in black velvet. The boxes were wrapped in a shade of silver that exactly matched the gun nestled against his ample hip.

  “On the display table just inside the front door, please,” I instructed him. “People need to see them as soon as they walk in.” People would bid tens of thousands of dollars to win a surprise bauble, if only to show everyone else that they could. The guard was probably a retired policeman, trying to earn money to supplement his pension, and I knew he’d been ordered to keep those boxes in his sight all night long.

  “Can I get you anything? Maybe some coffee?” I offered.

  “Better not,” he said with a wry smile. The poor guy probably wasn’t drinking anything because the jewelry store wouldn’t even let him take a bathroom break. I made a mental note to pack up a few dinners for him to bring home.

  My BlackBerry vibrated just as I began placing the cupcakes around the head table and mentally debating the sticky problem of the video game guru who looked and acted like a thirteen-year-old overdue for his next dose of Ritalin. I’d sandwich him between a female U.S. senator and a co-owner of the Washington Blazes professional basketball team, I decided. They were both tall; they could talk over the techie’s head.

  At that moment, a dozen executives were leaping up from their leather chairs to cluster around Michael’s limp body. They were all shouting at each other to call 911—this crowd was used to giving orders, not taking them—and demanding that someone perform CPR.

  As I stood in the middle of the ballroom, smoothing out a crease on a white linen napkin and inhaling the sweet scent of lilies, the worst news I could possibly imagine was being delivered by a baby-faced representative from the D.C. Opera Company.

  “Melanie has a sore throat,” he announced somberly. I sank into a chair with a sigh and wiggled my tired feet out of my shoes. Perfect. Melanie was the star soprano who was scheduled to sing a selection from Orfeo ed Euridicetonight. If those overflowing wineglasses didn’t get checkbooks whipped out of pockets, Melanie’s soaring, lyrical voice definitely would. I desperately needed Melanie tonight.

  “Where is she?” I demanded.

  “In a room at the Mayflower Hotel,” the opera rep said.

  “Oh, crap! Who booked her a room?”

  “Um . . . me,” he said. “Is that a prob—”

  “Get her a suite,” I interrupted. “The biggest one they have.”

  “Why?” he asked, his snub nose wrinkling in confusion. “How will that help her get better?”

  “What was your name again?” I asked.

  “Patrick Riley.” Figures; put a four-leaf clover in his lapel and he could’ve been the poster boy for Welcome to Ireland!

  “And Patrick, how long have you been working for the opera company?” I asked gently.

  “Three weeks,” he admitted.

  “Just trust me on this.” Melanie required drama the way the rest of us needed water. If I hydrated her with a big scene now, Melanie might miraculously rally and forgo a big scene tonight.

  “Send over a warm-mist humidifier,” I continued as Patrick whipped out a notebook and scribbled away, diligent as a cub reporter chasing his big break. “No, two! Get her lozenges, chamomile tea with honey, whatever you can think of. Buy out CVS. If Melanie wants a lymphatic massage, have the hotel concierge arrange it immediately. Here—” I pulled out my BlackBerry and scrolled down to the name of my private doctor. “Call Dr. Rushman. If he can’t make it over there, have him send someone who can.”

  Dr. Rushman would make it, I was sure. He’d drop whatever he was doing if he knew I needed him. He was the personal physician for the Washington Blazes basketball team.

  My husband, Michael, was another one of the team’s co-owners.

  “Got it,” Patrick said. He glanced down at my feet, turned bright red, and scampered away. Must’ve been my toe cleavage; it tends to have that effect on men.

  I finished placing the final cupcake before checking my messages. By the time I read the frantic e-mails from Kate, who was trying to find out if Michael had any recently diagnosed illnesses like epilepsy or diabetes that we’d been keeping secret, it was already over.

  While Armani-clad executives clustered around my husband, Bob the mailroom guy took one look at the scene and sped down the hallway, white envelopes scattering like confetti behind him. He sprinted to the receptionist’s desk and found the portable defibrillator my husband’s company had purchased just six months earlier. Then he raced back, ripped open Michael’s shirt, put his ear to Michael’s chest to confirm that my husband’s heart had stopped beating, and applied the sticky patches to Michael’s chest. “Analyzing . . . ,” said the machine’s electronic voice. “Shock advisable.”

  The Italian opera Orfeo ed Euridiceis a love story. In it, Euridice dies and her grieving husband travels to the Underworld to try to bring her back to life. Melanie the soprano was scheduled to sing the heartbreaking aria that comes as Euridice is suspended between the twin worlds of Death and Life.

  Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me that Euridice’s aria was playing in my head as Bob the mailroom guy bent over my husband’s body, shocking Michael’s heart until it finally began beating again. Because sometimes it seems to me as if all of the big moments in my life can be traced back to the gorgeous, timeworn stories of opera.

  Four minutes and eight seconds. That’s how long my husband, Michael Dunhill, was dead.

  Four minutes and eight seconds. That’s how long it took for my husband to become a complete stranger to me.

  Read an excerpt from Sarah Pekkanen’s The Opposite of Me.

  One

  AS I PULLED OPEN the heavy glass door of Richards, Dunne & Krantz and walked down the long hallway toward the executive offices, I noticed a light was on up ahead.

  Lights were never on this early. I quickened my step.

  The light was on in my office, I realized as I drew closer. I’d gone home around 4:00 A.M. to snatch a catnap and a shower, but I’d locked my office door. I’d checked it twice. Now someone was in there.

  I broke into a run, my mind spinning in panic: Had I left my storyboard out in plain view? Could someone be sabotaging the advertising campaign I’d spent weeks agonizing over, the campaign my entire future hinged on?

  I burst into my office just as the intruder reached for something on my desk.

  “Lindsey! You scared me half out of my wits!” my assistant, Donna, scolded as she paused in the act of putting a steaming container of coffee on my desk.

  “God, I’m sorry,” I said, mentally smacking myself. If I ever ended up computer dating—which, truth be told, it was probably going to come down to one of these days—I’d have to check the ever-popular “paranoid freak” box when I listed my personality traits. I’d better buy a barricade to hold back the bachelors of New York.

  “I didn’t expect anyone else in this early,” I told Donna as my breathing slowed to normal. Note to self: Must remember to join a gym if a twenty-yard dash leaves me winded. Best not to think about how often I’ll actually use the gym if I’ve been reminding myself to join one for the past two year
s.

  “It’s a big day,” Donna said, handing me the coffee.

  “You’re amazing.” I closed my gritty eyes as I took a sip and felt the liquid miracle flood my veins. “I really needed this. I didn’t get much sleep.”

  “You didn’t eat breakfast either, did you?” Donna asked, hands on her hips. She stood there, all of five feet tall, looking like a rosy-cheeked, doily-knitting grandma. One who wouldn’t hesitate to get up off her rocking chair and reach for her sawed-off shotgun if someone crossed her.

  “I’ll have a big lunch,” I hedged, avoiding Donna’s eyes.

  Even after five years, I still hadn’t gotten used to having an assistant, let alone one who was three decades older than me but earned a third of my salary. Donna and I both knew she wore the pants in our relationship, but the secret to our happiness was that we pretended otherwise. Kind of like my parents—Mom always deferred to Dad’s authority, after she mercilessly browbeat him into taking her point of view.

  “I’m going to check in with the caterers now,” Donna said. “Should I hold your calls this morning?”

  “Please,” I said. “Unless it’s an emergency. Or Walt from Creative—he’s freaking out about the font size on the dummy ad and I need to calm him down. Or Matt. I want to do another run-through with him this morning. And let’s see, who else, who else . . . Oh, anyone from Gloss Cosmetics, of course.

  “Oh, God, they’re going to be here in”—I looked at my watch and the breath froze in my lungs—“two hours.”

  “Hold on just a minute, missy,” Donna ordered in a voice that could only be described as trouser-wearing. She bustled to her desk and returned with a blueberry muffin in a little paper bag and two Advil.

  “I knew you wouldn’t eat, so I got extra. And you’re getting a headache again, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “It’s not so bad,” I lied, holding out my hand for the Advil and hoping Donna wouldn’t notice I’d bitten off all my fingernails. Again.

  When Donna finally shut my door, I sank into my big leather chair and took another long, grateful sip of coffee. The early-morning sunlight streamed in through the windows behind me, glinting off the golden Clio Award on my desk. I ran a finger over it for luck, just like I did on every presentation day.

  Then I stroked it a second time. Because this wasn’t an ordinary presentation day. So much more was riding on today than winning another multimillion-dollar account. If I nailed my pitch and added Gloss Cosmetics to our roster of clients . . . I squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t finish the thought; I didn’t want to jinx myself.

  I leapt up and walked across the room to look at my pictures of my babies, another one of my superstitious rituals on big days. One of my walls was covered with simple but expensive black frames, each showcasing a different magazine ad: a dad in a red apron barbecuing hot dogs; a preppy couple sinking their bare toes into their new carpet; a young executive reclining in her first-class airline seat. Blissfully reclining.

  I smiled, remembering that campaign. It had taken me two weeks and three focus groups to decide on the word blissful instead of peaceful. Yet my whole campaign was almost torpedoed at the last minute because the model I’d chosen had the exact same hairstyle as the airline owner’s ex-wife, who’d convinced him that true love didn’t require a prenup. If I hadn’t spotted a five-dollar tub of hair gel in the makeup artist’s case and begged the client for thirty more seconds, our agency would’ve lost a $2 million account on account of a chin-length bob. Clients were notoriously fickle, and the rule of thumb was, the richer the client, the crazier.

  The one I was meeting today owned half of Manhattan.

  I grabbed the mock-up of the magazine ad my creative team had put together for Gloss and scanned it for the millionth time, searching for nonexistent flaws. I’d spent three solid weeks

  agonizing over every detail of this campaign, which I’d get maybe ten minutes to present in our conference room in— I looked at my watch and my heart skipped a beat.

  Unlike other ad shops, it was the culture of my agency to blur the division between the creative work and the business side of our accounts. If you wanted to succeed at Richards, Dunne & Krantz, you had to be able to do both. Of course, that also meant all the responsibility for this presentation was mine alone.

  The worst part, the part that gnawed at my stomach and jolted me awake at 3:00 A.M. on nights when I managed to fall asleep, was that all my work, all those marathon stale-pizza weekend sessions and midnight conference calls, might be for nothing. If the owner of Gloss rejected my ads—if something as simple as the perfume I was wearing or a splashy adjective in my copy rubbed him the wrong way—hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission for our agency would slip through my fingers like smoke. Once a Japanese tycoon who owned a chain of luxury hotels sat through a brilliant, two-months-in-the-making campaign presentation our agency’s president had personally overseen—I’m talking about the kind of creative vision that would’ve won awards, the kinds of commercials everyone would’ve buzzed about—and dismissed it with a grunt, which his assistant cheerfully translated as “He doesn’t like blue.” That was it; no chance to tweak the color of the ad copy, just a group of stunned advertising execs with the now-useless skill of saying, “Konnichi-wa!” being herded like sheep to the exit.

  I gulped another Advil from the secret stash inside my desk drawer, the one Donna didn’t know about, and massaged the knot in my neck with one hand while I stared at the mock-up ad my team had created for Gloss.

  After Gloss Cosmetics had approached our agency last month, hinting that they might jump from their current agency, our agency’s president—a forty-two-year-old marketing genius named Mason, who always wore red Converse sneakers, even with his tuxedo—called our top five creative teams into his office.

  “Gloss wants to kick some Cover Girl ass,” Mason had said, swigging from a bottle of Lipton iced tea (they were a client) and tapping his Bic pen (ditto) against the top of his oak conference table. Mason was so loyal to our clients that he once walked out of a four-star restaurant because the chef wouldn’t substitute Kraft ranch for champagne-truffle dressing.

  “Gloss’s strategy is accessible glamour,” Mason had continued. “Forget the Park Avenue princesses; we’re going after schoolteachers and factory girls and receptionists.” His eyes had roved around the table so he could impale each of us with his stare, and I swear he hadn’t blinked for close to two minutes. Mason reminded me of an alien, with his bald, lightbulb-shaped head and hooded eyes, and when he went into his blinkless trances I was convinced he was downloading data from his mother ship. My assistant, Donna, was certain he just needed a little more vitamin C; she kept badgering him to go after the Minute Maid account.

  “What was the recall score of Gloss’s last commercial?” someone at the other end of the table had asked. It was Slutty Cheryl, boobs spilling out of her tight white shirt as she stretched to reach a Lipton from the stack in the middle of the conference table.

  “Can I get that for you?” Matt, our assistant art director, had offered in a voice that sounded innocent if you didn’t know him well.

  Matt was my best friend at the office. My only real friend, actually; this place made a sadists’ convention seem cozy and nurturing.

  “I can reach it,” Cheryl had said bravely, tossing back her long chestnut hair and straining away as Matt shot me a wink. You’d think that after a few hundred meetings she’d have figured out an easier way to wet her whistle, but there she was, week after week, doing her best imitation of a Hooters girl angling for a tip. By the purest of coincidences, she always got thirsty right when she asked a question, so all eyes were on her.

  “Cover Girl’s last commercial, the one with Queen Latifah, hit a thirty recall, and Gloss’s latest scored a twelve,” Mason had said without consulting any notes. He had a photographic memory, which was one reason why our clients put up with the sneakers.

  I could see why Gloss was testing the waters at othe
r agencies. Twelve wasn’t good.

  The recall score is one of the most effective tools in advertising’s arsenal. It basically tells what percentage of people who watched your commercial actually remembered it. Cheryl, who’s a creative director like me, once oversaw a dog food commercial that scored a forty-one. She ordered dozens of balloons emblazoned with “Forty-One” and blanketed the office with them. Subtlety, like loose-fitting turtlenecks, isn’t in her repertoire. And I swear I’m not just saying that because I’ve never scored higher than a forty (but just for the record, I’ve hit that number three times. It’s an agency record).

  “I want five creative teams on this,” Mason had said. “Have the campaigns ready for me three weeks from today. The best two will present to Gloss.”

  As everyone stood up to leave, Mason had walked over to me while Cheryl took her time gathering her things and pretended not to eavesdrop.

  “I need this account,” he’d said, his pale blue eyes latching onto mine.

  “Is the budget that big?” I’d asked.

  “No, they’re cheap fucks,” he’d said cheerfully. “Name the last three clients we signed.”

  “Home health care plans, orthopedic mattresses, and adult protection pads,” I’d rattled off.

  “Diapers,” he’d corrected. “Ugly trend. We’re becoming the incontinent old farts’ agency. We need the eighteen to thirty-five demographic. Get me this account, Lindsey.” His voice had dropped, and Cheryl had stopped shuffling papers. She and I had both leaned in closer to Mason.

  “I don’t have to tell you what it would do for you,” Mason had said. “Think about the timing. We’re presenting to Gloss right around the time of the vote. You bring in this one on top of everything else you’ve done . . .” His voice had trailed off.

  I knew what Mason was implying. It wasn’t a secret that our agency was about to decide on a new VP creative director. The VP title meant a salary hike and all the sweet side dishes that went along with it: a six-figure bonus, a fat 401(k) plan, and car service to the airport. It meant I’d be able to buy my sunny little one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, which was about to go co-op. It meant first-class flights and obscene expense accounts.