by Brian Hodge
And April wondered: What must it be like inside to see something you created on national TV, something for which everyone remotely connected has heaped lavish praise upon you … while you’ve gotten to the place where you can no longer stand it?
Her therapist was right: We’re all so adept at creating our own personal hells.
“How much do you want to get out of?” she asked. “The account … or the whole agency?”
His groan was weary, ancient. “I can’t even think straight about it anymore. It’s just too strange going back to that kind of life. I thought I could do it, play those same power games … and I do like it when it’s happening … but when it slows down, and it’s all I can see ahead for the next forty or so years … that’s when I think what the hell am I doing, back at this? April…? Didn’t I learn anything last year?”
“About what?”
“About myself.”
How would her therapist handle this? April had picked up a few tidbits on dealing with such moments of minicrisis, what to focus on, what to ignore. Strictly piker status, though the one thing giving her the edge was that she loved this man and knew him better than anybody else. As only one could, who had both seen and revealed his polar extremes.
“Maybe you learned more than you think. Maybe you learned you’ve got a conscience after all. What’s this about, Jus? You’ve worked there a year. So why now? Is it that commercial?”
She saw him nod in the moonlight, streetlight, across-street neon bleeding through the blinds. The commercial. Obviously. Innocuous in itself, like the world really needed another way to serve up coffee. Ah, but the way it was done. He really hadn’t been kidding earlier with that Burke and Hare remark.
“Two years ago, say, could you have written that commercial,” she said, “stripped away pieces of the movie, and not blinked?”
“In a heartbeat.”
“So maybe you’ve learned your limitations, but you haven’t yet learned how to live with all of them.” She squeezed his hand under the sheet, felt his fingers twitch, perfunctory response. “Do you want to quit?”
A small tight laugh. “Wouldn’t it surprise them? It’d be almost funny, you know?” Musing, a taste of bitter irony. “They’d think I had a better offer from somewhere else. I wonder how much extra salary they’d come up with.”
“Ah, the indispensable man.”
“It’s the way the game is played, you know that.”
“Mmm hmm.” It occurred to her that he hadn’t really answered the question.
“You know what else? There’s something almost romantic about failure as long as you do it gallantly enough. Turning your back on everything just when it all seems to come together. There’s something very appealing about that.”
“The old J.D. Salinger spirit.”
“I had it,” Justin said slowly, with great drama, great loss, “and I threw it all away.”
Quite the epitaph for a short but impressive career. Try as she might, she could think of no one to whom it might more appropriately apply.
Herself excepted, of course.
Chapter 8
Twin Oaks
New Orleans International Airport, his second arrival in a sliver over two months. Justin came through the gate beside Leonard Greenwald, first in line out of first class, their carry-on weekender bags in hand, eyes scanning the waiting crowd. Nothing like a flood of unfamiliar faces, as disinterested in seeing you as you were them.
“You can tell we’re important,” Justin said. “Have to find our ride by his sign.”
“Any price for a weekend off the treadmill is okay by me.” Happy reunions all around them, hugs and kisses, and lone travelers this Friday afternoon with no one at all to greet them, shouldering through the throng and carousel-bound in the foot race of the weekend commuter. Beat the baggage. They spun in lazy circles, overrun by the continued influx from behind, steerage and its caste of unwashed.
Mullavey’s money, though. If he wanted to burn it, there was no reason to stop him.
It was just over two weeks since their bogus Scarlett had swung onto the airwaves, and any way it was poured, the Magnolia Blossom campaign was an unqualified success. A tie-in print ad complementing the first commercial’s Scarlett-on-swing image had appeared in magazines, newspapers, and Sunday news supplements. A second TV spot in the series — this one documenting Scarlett’s refusal to vacate a burning Atlanta until her cup of coffee was finished — had just debuted, with two more in the can for the weeks to come.
And the coffee-buying public was taking notice. Magnolia Blossom Coffee Bags were disappearing from the shelves nearly as quickly as they could be stocked. All those caffeine kickstarters with Old South romance in their hearts, convenience on their prioritized agendas, and demographic profiles that corralled them into target markets.
In appreciation for performance above and beyond the call, and under the fire of brutal deadline constraints, Andrew Jackson Mullavey had sent invitations down to Tampa to the account’s two major Segal/Goldberg players. Copywriter Justin Gray and Account Exec Leonard Greenwald, their presence cordially requested at the near–New Orleans estate of Andrew Jackson Mullavey for the getaway weekend of September twentieth. Airline tickets included. Pack up your job-related stress in your attaché case and smile, smile, smile. Because you get to leave it behind.
The whole thing smelled like a forty-eight-hour session of ass-kissing. If I’m expected to go, what about spouses? Justin had asked Creative Director Katy Thurgood. Can’t I at least bring April? Sorry, that hadn’t been mentioned. He was given a lot of leeway in just what he could rewrite as pertaining to the account, but the invitation was off limits.
So here he was, New Orleans, his travel date a borderline overweight account exec with rising hairline and the beginnings of a duodenal ulcer. Leonard was already chomping on Tums. Were they having fun yet?
After another couple minutes of milling about the gate, Justin ventured a more resolute search up and down the terminal. There, two gates away … he could swear it was a civilian uniform of some sort. A lanky young black guy in charcoal gray, cap optional. Fidgeting one skinny leg while dutifully aiming a small placard at a gate door that wasn’t yet even in use.
Justin nudged Leonard, pointed. “Our ride, maybe?”
They threaded up to him, glanced at the hand-lettered sign, felt-tip marker on a nine-by-twelve piece of posterboard:
GREENWALD & GRAY
“Off by a few gates, weren’t you?” Leonard said.
The guy jumped, startled, as if they’d come out of nowhere. He couldn’t have been much over twenty. He tapped at the sign, then frowned at them. “This is you?”
They said it was.
He smiled broadly and popped the chauffeur’s cap onto his close-cropped head. “Yo, mon, I’m Napoleon Trintignant, I’m your driver. Mr. Andrew Mullavey’s personal chauffeur, that’s me.” And proud of it, if his ebullience was any indication. Or maybe it was the Caribbean accent. “He trusts you to nobody but me.”
Leonard grimaced in dismay, perhaps that duodenal flaring up again. He jabbed a finger toward the nearest bank of arrival and departure monitors. “You couldn’t even find the right gate!”
Napoleon folded his sign in half, waved Leonard off with a cheerful flip of one hand. “Numbers, what do they mean, hey, you found me, it’s destiny.” He started to turn, then pointed at the weekenders dangling from their fists. “Those are your only bags?”
“This is it,” Justin said.
Napoleon nodded, waved them forward. “Come on, then, we are rolling.”
Off in a near-sprint. Justin dogged his heels, then realized after a couple steps that he was alone. He glanced back over his shoulder, saw Leonard still standing there … plaintive, perplexed, one arm outstretched. Waiting for his bag to be carried.
“Come on, ya ugly American,” Justin called. And turned back around before Leonard could catch him laughing.
Andrew Jackson Mullavey’s estate lay
west of New Orleans. Since the airport was on the western fringe of the city, on this trip New Orleans was nothing more than its tallest buildings vanishing behind them on the eastern horizon. The scenery beyond those tinted side windows and windshield, out through the tunnel of the limo’s interior, quickly gave way to another world entirely.
Roadside underbrush was frequently engulfed beneath ragged hummocks of kudzu. And the trees. Not yet a year and a half spent living in Florida and already Justin had forgotten trees could grow this huge, this profuse. Magnificent old oaks, tall weeping willows with burdened limbs drooping groundward, and Spanish moss in abundance, like the grizzled beards of Civil War veterans. They passed small river towns and hamlets, and when Justin rolled down the window, air conditioning be damned, even the air smelled older than at home.
From behind the wheel, over a soundtrack of Bob Marley tapes, Napoleon Trintignant maintained a running travelogue of historical tidbits as they passed sites of interest. It was history that no book would ever record. Hideous tales with which their driver seemed endlessly equipped, about shameful births, and brotherly feuds, and murders committed in the secrecy of night or beneath the unrelenting heat of the sun.
“Yo, mon, see this water tower we’re passing now? Twenty years ago, they say, this pregnant girl, she hang herself because she don’t want to have no baby and she don’t want no husband, see? They say once a year, you can still hear the baby crying!” And as he did after each of these tales, Napoleon eyed them in the rearview mirror and cut loose with rich laughter. Captive audience, and he was loving it.
“Know what?” Justin called toward the front. “I thought for sure you were going to say something like she wasn’t found until a day later … and the baby was still alive.”
Napoleon whooped laughter. “Good one, that’s a good one, mon! Maybe next time that’s the way I’ll tell it.”
“Justin,” Leonard groaned. “Don’t encourage this, please…”
Justin leaned across their playpen of plush maroon seats and lightly elbowed Leonard in the side. Feeling pretty good by now, he really was. Mood elevation courtesy of the stocked backseat bar, most of a Scotch rocks downed since the airport.
“The Southland, Len,” Justin said. “Swamps and bayous? The land of ghosts? Just because you don’t want to talk about them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”
Leonard nodded, too quick, too curt. Voice low. In the corners of his mouth was a grainy white Tums residue. “If you want to spend the weekend trading ghost stories with the hired help, you go ahead and do it. Me, I will avail myself of whatever Mullavey feels like offering.”
Which might make for a more interesting weekend, so far as Justin was concerned. He wondered if maybe he shouldn’t find the button to slide the partition up into place, spare Napoleon’s ears as long as Len was doing his Great White Dope routine.
“Got a real bug up your butt this afternoon, don’t you?” said Justin. “I thought I was the one who didn’t want to make this trip.”
The telltale vein throbbed on Leonard’s head as he breathed heavily through his nostrils. Countdown to patience. Finally, “I just want to make a good impression this weekend.” Voice strained. “I’ve never seen Mullavey under social circumstances.”
Justin decided to shut up about it. Toasted him silently with the glass and faint cocked-eyebrow sarcasm, and leaned back into his seat. Leonard, worried about his job status even now, he should have guessed. They’d saved Mullavey Foods’ collective ass, helped them beat the competition to the shelves according to their own timetable, and still Leonard was afraid the man might find a reason to dump him as account exec. Probably asking himself, But what have I done for him lately?
Typical. It was everything about this profession Justin was rapidly coming to find intolerable.
The last road sign he noticed said that some town called Garyville lay a few miles ahead, and then Napoleon made one final turn with the announcement that they were nearly there. Mullavey land, it reeked of history and the brooding of long, sweltering decades. He knew nothing of the man outside Mullavey’s own power station. Old family money? It was tradition’s dictate, wasn’t it? Probably had some study lined with portraits of patriarchs, the more generations the better, here’s great-great-grandfather Jedediah Mullavey, who smuggled munitions upriver during the war.
The rolling river-bottom land leveled out as the limo glided into a gauntlet of trees flanking either side of the drive. Their branches had long ago reached across for their brethren, until what might once have been a canopy was now a vast tunnel of deep green, brown, gray. Daylight was an intruder. You could hide a body up there, let it rot into tatters alongside the ragged wisps of Spanish moss, and no one would ever know.
The tunnel ended, and the foregoing trees proved to have been mere prelude. Between the drive’s end and the house, the view was flanked by two more. Thick and gargantuan, they towered above the rest, great brutish oaks whose sprawling roots anchored into the ground like the feet of a god too terrible to behold in total.
“Welcome to Twin Oaks,” Napoleon said over his shoulder. Justin clutched his glass and stared. Had he seen a tree like this — much less two — when he was a kid after, say, something like The Wizard of Oz, he would have died of fright on the spot.
And then there was the house.
As Napoleon stopped on a brick-paved clearing just to its left and they emerged from the limo, the house dwarfed them with two oversized stories and then some of pure Greek Revival ostentatiousness. Princely white from smooth stone portico and its rose-lace iron railing to the cornices below the eaves, with black roof and shutters. Six white Corinthian columns marched across the front to support an ornate triangular tympanum. The grass from which this palace rose looked as green and smooth as a billiard table.
“Doesn’t look like he’s hurting, does he?” Leonard said. “Why didn’t we just film the first spot here?”
Napoleon led the way up the front walk, got the door for them and they stepped inside, into the grand hail. It had to be sixty feet long, at least, with arched portals, and a dark bronze glass-globed chandelier every twenty feet, and a stairway toward the back. Carved white frames surrounded every door, and every door looked to be mahogany. Corniced plaster moldings ran the length of the ceiling line, and the pale olive walls were hung with art whose subjects gazed out from more genteel days.
“Orvela! Yo!” Napoleon called out. “Our weekend guests, I have them here!”
Totally unfazed by the surroundings; you had to like this guy. There was no response to his shout.
“Just take it easy a moment, have a seat, and I’ll be finding Orvela. She’s the one to show you where you’ll be sleeping.” He whipped the cap from his head, went striding down the hall, and disappeared through a doorway.
Take a seat? The only thing close by was a walnut deacon’s bench lined against one wall. Justin pointed, questioning. Leonard shrugged, by now sweating a minor tributary.
“I’d feel like I was sitting on an exhibit in the Smithsonian,” Justin said.
Leonard mopped away with a handkerchief. “Let’s just stand.”
Napoleon returned a moment later, with a black woman of maybe fifty. Short, straight-backed, her hair a mottled salt-and-pepper. She carried a small tray, two glasses.
“Welcome to Twin Oaks,” she said, a slightly different accent than Napoleon’s. “I’m Orvela LaBonté, in charge of the house staff here—”
She was almost up to them when she stumbled. The tray she carried became a catastrophe waiting to happen. Two tall-stemmed glasses, equilibrium gone, and they happened right onto Leonard. A pale, tea-brown cascade caught him from chest to waist, and what didn’t soak in rained onto his shoes. Solids were no less abundant: cracked ice, mint sprigs, maraschino cherries, two orange-slice halves. Colorful, of that there was no doubt.
“What the fuck is your problem, lady, look at this!” he roared. Backpedaling, wiping down what he could, flailing arms akimbo. Gazing
down with rage at his shoes. “Leather, son of a bitch, leather! And my pants, my pants!”
Justin had to suppress an initial laugh at the moment of deluge, but quickly gave way to mortification. Standing dry as a bone, the sweat he’d broken on the walk from car to house notwithstanding, and watching the tightly wound Len blow like a volcano. Everything pouring out of him now that the final trigger had been pulled, this poor housekeeper catching it all. It was gender, it was racial, it was age, it was appalling. Orvela was apologizing with calm countenance, she would have his clothes laundered within the hour, but Leonard was hearing none of it.
“Len, come on, man, let’s chill out until we can get a couple more of those drinks, okay? We wanted to go swimming anyway, right?” Justin groping for a way out of this, smooth over the wounds and put this behind them — this was the kind of thing that had you praying for a natural disaster. Anything to undercut the mood.
A few more of the house staff poked their heads into the hallway to see what was happening. Five or six, gathering in the background. At last Leonard seemed to comprehend the spectacle he was creating and clammed up, the silence magnified all the more given the size of the house. And, just maybe, Leonard had realized that their host may very well have heard every word.
“Clarisse,” Orvela said to one of the young women in the background. “Show the gentleman to his room so he may change, and have his clothes cleaned, please.” Back to Leonard. “I do apologize, sir.”
Leonard nodded, brusque, as Justin watched. Oh come on, you asshole, tell her it’s okay, tell her it doesn’t matter, tell her you’re sorry. Leonard wouldn’t even meet his eyes. He followed the pretty young woman named Clarisse, with mocha skin and long feral hair. A moment later, just beyond the hallway, stairsteps began to sound.
