“Probably,” May said.
“My friend Lily’s parents are divorced,” Olivia said, sounding almost proud to know something about the topic at hand. “And also Joe and Sarah on our street, but I don’t really like them. But not because their parents are divorced, just because I don’t.”
Kate and May were part of the first big wave of children with divorced parents. By the time she got to college, Kate knew more people whose parents had split up than stayed together. They all had awful stories—her freshman-year roommate, Taylor, had put on seven pounds the year her parents separated, because they exchanged her on Monday and Thursday nights, and on those nights they both fed her dinner. She didn’t have the heart to tell them. Another girl on their hall had come home sick from a slumber party in eighth grade to find her mother having sex with a neighbor while her father was out of town on business. She had told her father right away, and then proceeded to blame herself for the divorce for the next ten years. The strangest story came from a kid named Ed, who claimed his parents were the envy of all their friends, with a beautiful home, three children, and a lake house in New Hampshire. Every night his dad came home from work at six on the nose, cheery and kind. He kissed his wife, brought the trash barrels out to the curb, and carried the toys in from the yard. Then one evening he sat down to dinner as usual. When his wife placed the food on the table, out of nowhere, he yelled, “I hate chicken.” He walked out, never to return.
For Kate, it was a matter of getting dragged into every argument, of realizing at a certain point that her own mother was using her. Mona would casually ask her how much her dad had spent on his new car, or whether he was seeing anyone. Then she’d use it all against him in court.
“Where’s Mom?” Kate asked now.
“She went for a walk,” May said. “I think she’s nervous about this reading she has to give.”
“I’m not nervous,” Ava said.
“Good girl!” May said.
Kate twinged at this response. There was nothing wrong with being nervous, nor was there anything inherently good about not being nervous. She wondered if her sister had the ability to undo three years of careful parenting in just two days.
“I’m not that excited, because there’s no bride,” Olivia said. “I want to see a princess!”
May patted her on the shoulder. “Last April, we woke up at four a.m. to watch the royal wedding on TV. I made scones and clotted cream, and we both wore fascinators. Olivia loved it. It ruined her for all other weddings.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Kate said.
“It was a huge day. A once-in-a-lifetime. Don’t you remember when we got up early to watch Diana walk down the aisle? How excited we were?”
“I was five. And anyway, look how that turned out.”
May went on, “Olivia’s obsessed with Kate Middleton.”
As if to illustrate her mother’s point, Olivia said, “She has a puppy named Lupo,” without taking her eyes off the television.
May beamed, like these were the most precious words ever uttered by a child. “She draws pictures of her at school when the other kids are drawing bears or whatever.”
Kate frowned. “That seems unhealthy.”
“Kate, I am just trying to make conversation with you. Why do you have to make every interaction so unpleasant?”
“Sorry. You’re right.”
May had an uncanny way of remembering dates by whatever happened to be going on in pop culture at the moment. It was no surprise that the previous April put Kate in mind of Arab Spring while May thought of a princess in a wedding gown. Her sister wasn’t a bad person, and she wasn’t dumb. She just believed, like a lot of people did, that life was hard enough and there was no reason to trouble yourself with the plight of strangers. Their views of success were fundamentally different. May thought it was measured by what one could amass over a lifetime, instead of how many people one could help.
When Kate saw the news footage of Prince William’s wedding to Kate Middleton, she observed the way they drove the car through the streets of London unaccompanied and made a point of letting the world know they’d invited the local pub owner and the postman. It seemed tailor-made to placate the masses, who didn’t have jobs or enough food to eat but felt pleased all the same. When people were suffering, their governments would give them weddings or war as a distraction, and sometimes both.
Kate had read that same-sex weddings would generate three hundred million dollars for the State of New York in the next three years. It made her wonder if the timing of the decision didn’t have something to do with money. She had run this idea by her father, and he thought it sounded a bit extreme, as he did most of her ideas. Still, he said he admired her tendency to question things. May took everything at face value, and he saw this as a failing. It was important to seek the truth, he told them, even if you only rarely came across it.
For years, he had edited the Star-Ledger’s letters column. Although it was entirely unethical, from time to time when he felt strongly about something he wrote letters under a fake name and published them. He had wanted to be an op-ed columnist, and at some point he realized this was as close as he would probably ever get.
Last year, after more than three decades at the paper, he was unceremoniously let go—or “offered a buyout,” as they put it to soften the blow. His wife lost her job outright, since the birth of the Internet meant the death of the newsroom library she ran, which, ironically, had always been referred to as “the Morgue.” Now they spent their days at home, doing crosswords and halfheartedly looking for jobs, knowing they were unlikely to find work in a dying field at their age, but still too young to retire.
“Have you talked to Dad lately?” Kate asked now.
“Yeah, we saw him and Jean last weekend,” May said.
“How did he seem?”
May shrugged. “He seemed like Dad.”
Kate lingered a few minutes longer, then went upstairs. She felt a guilty fluttering in her stomach as she walked into Ava’s bedroom. Her niece’s pink duffel bag lay open on the floor. Kate glanced over her shoulder once before going through it—she dug her fingers into every tiny satin pocket, but the ring wasn’t there.
Diagnostic research revealed that the women viewed engagement as “only the beginning” of the wedding process, with the DER as “part” of that process. As a result, DER price competed against all other marriage and household preparation expenses. Women, therefore, often exerted downward pressure on the DER price.
By contrast, for men, engagement was seen as a momentous occasion, signaling a major life change. To them, the DER was viewed as the true mark of adulthood and all the responsibility that goes with it—family, home, a steady job, a lifestyle of permanence. Because men invested the DER with so much importance and meaning, it was also a source of pride that had to be sufficiently expressive of the occasion. Men were willing to spend more/make financial sacrifices to show the importance of their intent in this, the first public affirmation of their obligation to the relationship. They were, however, lacking in confidence about purchasing a diamond since they had no reference for price expectations or diamond quality.
Two months’ salary is a price guideline which both respects income differences and sets an aspirational price goal.
—Internal Memo, Case History, N. W. Ayer, 1990
1988
Frances was up late, stewing. She held a cup of coffee in her hand. Most women her age avoided caffeine after noon, but she had been an insomniac all her life, and she found that it didn’t make a bit of difference whether she drank coffee or not. Either way, she wouldn’t sleep.
The television droned in the background. Her black Lab, Blazer, lay on the rug at her feet, his head on Frances’s toes. She was working on her Christmas cards, which she had just gotten back from the printer’s. They featured a photograph of the dog wearing a pair of reindeer antlers. One by one, she signed them, even though the printer said no one bothered to do that anymo
re. They had a typeface that looked like handwriting now, he said. The thought of this depressed her enormously.
She was thinking about Howard Davis and his very surprising proposal. Weighing whether she ought to accept.
A few days earlier, when good old Howard called to say that he and his wife were driving from Manhattan all the way to the Main Line to take her to lunch, Frances knew it must be something important. She hadn’t seen Howard in eighteen years, not since her last day at Ayer. She hated to think about that day, even now. There had been no fanfare, no farewell party. She walked out alone, with a box under each arm, somehow unable to make herself switch off the lamp, as if leaving it on meant she would come back tomorrow and do it all again.
The world had changed by leaps and bounds since then; even the Philadelphia office, which had seemed somehow eternal, was gone. The first building ever constructed to house an advertising agency in America, the building she had walked into and out of five days a week for twenty-seven years, now stood empty.
Ultimately, Ayer had joined all the others in Manhattan. But the agency came to the party too late, and was now a shadow of the powerhouse it had once been. No one cared that they started it all. Advertising was about the here and now, and sometimes the future, but never the past.
When Howard and his wife, Hana, arrived in Wayne that afternoon, Frances saw that they too had aged, though they were her juniors by a decade or more. They told her their eldest son was now a writer of forty, with children of his own, and Frances felt a jolt go through her. It shouldn’t be a surprise, of course, but it did shock her to remember that getting older was so inevitable. Sometimes it seemed it was only happening to her.
Frances had imagined that they would compliment her on her house, maybe spy the baby deer who had been snacking at the bird feeder all morning. She had moved in soon after she retired. The three-bedroom stone rambler stood on a hill at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, tucked away behind a cluster of residential streets, full of pretty houses, and flowers and trees. It had dark green shutters and white trim on the garage. Towering pines stood in the front yard. She thought it was an impressive place, especially for a woman on her own.
But when she opened the door, the first thing Howard said was, “Is that gas?”
Hana pinched her nose. “It smells something awful in here, Frances!”
Apparently the damn pilot light had gone out. Somehow she hadn’t noticed. It didn’t seem like much to her, but they appeared deeply concerned.
“You could have been killed!” Hana said, running around, opening all the windows.
Poor Howard dropped to his stomach and started fiddling with the stove.
They reminded Frances of her younger cousins in Canada, always telling her she ought to think about selling the house and going to one of those awful retirement homes. Her glaucoma had worsened in recent years, but other than that she felt fine. She had agreed to hire a helper woman, who came in three days a week to do the bills and make sure she hadn’t dropped dead.
“I’ve got it lit,” Howard said, triumphant. He climbed to his feet. “Well now, Frances. How the hell are you?”
She was wildly embarrassed, and took them to a nice restaurant in town, where she hoped the food would make them forget about the gas. She ordered a steak and the first of the two martinis she always had with lunch.
“So what’s this all about, Howard?” she asked as they handed the waiter their menus.
He laughed. “You don’t beat around the bush. I forgot that about you.”
“I’m seventy-three years old. There’s no longer time for beating around the bush.”
“Well, Lou Hagopian’s the chairman at Ayer now,” he started.
“Yes, I know.”
“He’s decided that Ayer ought to commemorate the agency’s fiftieth anniversary with De Beers in a big way.”
“Oh?”
She had a vivid recollection of herself snapping at Gerry Lauck after the twenty-fifth. Where’s my gold watch? Frances felt a rush of guilt, even though Gerry had died ages ago.
“They’re planning something very grand,” Howard said. “A full week of celebrations in London, where the company is headquartered. There will be lunches every day, and dinners and parties each night.”
“My. That does sound grand.”
“The whole thing will culminate in a big, fancy dinner and a recognition of your contributions. They’ll want you to give a few remarks. Talk about how you came up with the famous line.”
Frances was stunned. “They want me there?”
“Yes!” Howard said. “All expenses paid. You’ll be the star of the show.”
There were so many things she ought to be thinking: That this was a tremendous honor. That finally she was getting her due. But the only thought she could focus on was the fact that she had nothing to wear. Her heart seized. Seven lunches and seven dinners with the Oppenheimers? She assumed they would not be impressed by the brown skirt suit she wore to Mass on Sundays.
“Do you feel up to it?” Howard asked.
“They’ll send someone along to be your companion,” his wife added. “She can help you get dressed and all. Keep an eye on you.”
Now Frances realized why they had come in person. Hagopian had probably sent them to assess whether she was too old, too frail, too likely to let her cocktails go to her head and say something outlandish. She herself wasn’t sure of the answer. She hadn’t gone anywhere for the longest, except to church, and bridge three times a week. She hadn’t been on an airplane since her aunt died twelve years earlier.
“Can I sleep on it?” she asked. “It’s such a generous offer, but there’s a lot to consider.”
“Of course,” Howard said.
Now, here she was, sleeping on it, or not sleeping, as the case may be.
Though it had been nearly twenty years since she left Ayer, Frances still felt connected to the place. She kept up with quite a few of her old colleagues and their wives, mostly on the East Course at Merion. From what she heard, the new Ayer New York bore no resemblance to Ayer Philadelphia.
She followed what they did with De Beers. Ten years ago, she had read a story in the magazine Ad Art Techniques that said De Beers had become a ten-million-dollar-a-year account. And the cartel was making two billion annually.
But that was the late seventies. More recently, there had been murmurings of trouble. A few years ago, Frances clipped an article from the newspaper about a major controversy De Beers had kicked up in Australia when diamonds were discovered there—the Oppenheimers had made the move to buy them up, wanting always to control the whole world’s supply. In the past, they had gotten whatever they wanted with ease, but certain people in the Australian government were pushing back, claiming that De Beers wouldn’t pay fairly and that they were somehow personally responsible for apartheid.
She wondered if all three of them—Ayer, De Beers, and she herself—had simply seen their prime come and go. Perhaps that’s what this week in London was supposed to be for. To remind them of better times.
Frances could say with certainty that she had completely lost touch with what the diamond-buying public was like nowadays, if the ads Ayer was running were any indication.
For the royal wedding of Princess Diana and Prince Charles a few years back, she had heard through the grapevine that De Beers paid something like half a million dollars for just a couple minutes’ worth of television advertising. This baffled her, but then again, by the time television came along, it was almost too late for Frances. She was a print writer, through and through.
Even the print ads seemed awful lately. It all got so casual for a while. In Life, she had seen a photograph of two adults sipping a milkshake like teenyboppers, with the line: With this diamond, we promise to always be friends.
Could anything be less romantic? Well, yes! How about the photo of a man and woman riding a motorcycle in black leather jackets, over the following: I know she loves rock-n-roll. So I rolled out a magnificent
rock.
They still ended every ad with her line. Sometimes she wished they wouldn’t.
Just a month earlier, she had nearly thrown her TV Guide across the living room when she came upon a glossy page asking, Isn’t Two Months’ Salary a Small Price to Pay for Something That Lasts Forever?
The ad went on, You have a love that money can’t buy. And you’d like a diamond engagement ring that’s as special as that love. But what’s a realistic price for him to spend? These days, two months’ salary is a good place to start. (And there, in the bottom right corner of the page, A Diamond Is Forever.)
“What on earth?” she said out loud.
A week or two later, she ran into one of the creative directors, Teddy Regan, in the dining room at Merion.
“Ted!” she called out. “What’s the meaning of those two-months’-salary ads?”
He laughed, coming over to her table. “You don’t like them?”
“They’re tacky as hell,” she said.
“Tell me what you really think, Frances.”
“Well, they are. You know it as well as I do. At least I hope you know it.”
“It’s not my account,” he said. “I think the team realized that young men buying diamonds were asking their fathers how much they paid for Mom’s ring and going off of that. The cost perception just wasn’t keeping up with the economy. We needed something that was attainable for every man. Two months’ salary provides a guideline. And also, say the salary is on the small side. Well, the ring will reflect that. So this will encourage them to really stretch, to go as big as they can afford. Maybe even a bit bigger. Because what she’s wearing on that ring finger says a lot about him.”
“I still think it’s unseemly,” she said.
He shrugged. “I agree, but it’s working.”
From there, she began to notice ads along the same lines that seemed like something she might have written in the fifties.
Show her she’s the reason it’s never been lonely at the top.
A carat or more. When a man’s achievement becomes a woman’s good fortune.
The Engagements Page 30
