by Jonathan Dee
She didn’t know what she was doing either but he was so clearly looking to her the whole way. When he lifted first one knee and then the other so that his legs were finally between hers, he was so scared, so in thrall, that she thought she had never seen anything more worth looking at in her life. He couldn’t pretend, he couldn’t hide anything from her, nor from himself, there was nothing interposing itself between the two of them and what was real. It had nothing to do with any feeling that she might have had for him.
“I love you,” he said.
Of course he didn’t love her. He was just looking for something to borrow that would approximate what he felt. It was as if, having stripped away all the outer layers of his self – the ingratiation, the fear of ridicule, the sense of his misfortune, the layers which were himself, the rest of the time – in order to discover what was essential in him, it had turned out that there was nothing there: he still said what he thought he was expected to say. Nothing at the core of him – at least not yet. That was okay. He was sixteen years old.
She didn’t have to do anything, really, not in the physical sense nor in any other. Just by fucking him she could get him to agree to show her everything about himself while she showed him nothing. The private space within her was maintained, it was defined, by this act of withholding it from him. Here he is, inside me, she thought, and I couldn’t be more of a mystery to him. The whole game, as everyone else she knew seemed to understand it, was the boy’s endeavor to solve the puzzle of the girl, to unlock the riddle, to find the trick that would make her vulnerable enough to him that she would agree to have sex with him. And often that was the end of it; once the riddle was solved, the boy’s interest evaporated. But that’s not how it is with me, she thought – triumphantly; that’s not how it is right now. She could see it in his face. It was the fucking that provided the riddle.
It was all over, at least from his perspective, in less than a minute. In his face, at the moment which was supposed to define pure sensual thoughtlessness, was shame, weakness, loss of control. He turned away from her to take the condom off. She sat up, her legs still framing him, and ran her fingertips gently, proprietarily along the tight scar tissue on his back. Belatedly she thought that the pain really wasn’t as bad as she’d been led to expect.
She had to ask him to leave pretty shortly after that, but he was obviously glad to. His face was still burning. He didn’t appear exultant or relieved or any of the things he might have expected to feel. No part of him was invisible. Molly knew it wouldn’t last long. It would last just as long as he could keep from telling his friends about it, for in the telling it would change, and soon the public version would harden over the real one and he would forget the way he felt right now. He would sacrifice her in the telling and go back to life as part of the group, go back to his popular identity. She didn’t care. So much the worse for him. Or maybe it was better, the way it was sometimes said to be for the better when a dog was put to sleep.
IN SEPTEMBER, THE phone call came to announce officially that the Doucette casual wear account was going into review. Five agencies had been selected by a search committee and granted the opportunity to pitch the account; Canning Leigh + Osbourne was one of those five, a courtesy not always extended to a dissatisfied client’s incumbent agency, but generally and pessimistically viewed as a courtesy nonetheless. The account, which CLO had held for five years, was worth thirty-five million dollars in billings each year.
The call came on a Wednesday. On Thursday morning, Canning walked into John and Roman’s office and told them the same thing he had told the other three teams previously assigned to Doucette: to take the work they had heretofore done on the new TV spots and shred it. Everyone was to come in first thing Monday morning and start all over again with, Canning said unhumorously, a new vision and a new attitude.
John did indeed have a new attitude: dread. “Doucette has had problems for years,” he told Rebecca, who sat sideways on the couch, her legs folded beneath her, and ran her finger along the hairline at his temple. “And I’ve only been on it since spring. Still, if they lose it, that’s got to mean cutting some jobs, at least in the short run. And the first people to go are going to be the people with that stench coming off them, the people who got lazy and let Doucette out the door. You know it.”
Rebecca looked at the side of his face – the thin Waspy nose, the strong chin. “Well, I know that won’t happen,” she said soothingly. “But just to try to dispel your fears, let’s say it did. How long would it take you to find another job at an agency in this city, with a book like yours? Four minutes? Five minutes? A better-paying job, too, probably.”
John shook his head gloomily. “The point is, I want to stay,” he said. “You have no idea what some of those bigger Madison Avenue agencies are like. No idea. Guys in suits with pipes, guys telling you how they learned everything they need to know about advertising doing point-of-purchase ads for P&G in 1958. Bosses who will tell you in all seriousness that there are only two angles you’re allowed to shoot a car from, or there are only three different typefaces you’re allowed to use, because those are the three the dead founder said he liked in his memoirs. I can’t go back there. It would be like grave-digging, compared to the work I get to do now.”
The sun had gone behind the townhouses across the street. From the apartment upstairs they heard the sound of the neighbor’s boy riding a tricycle across the wooden floor.
“I want to stay,” John said simply. “I’m too used to the freedom of it. And if I want to stay, then I just have to come up with something. It’s my fault as much as anybody’s. It’s my fault for not being creative enough. I have to come up with something new.”
Rebecca said nothing more. But the next day she called John at his dead-calm office and told him she had rented a car, and made ferry reservations, and found an inn that was still open, and they were going to Martha’s Vineyard for the weekend. She had just decided, she said, that this was something he needed and deserved. She had taken care of everything – even packed for him after he had left for work. He agreed to meet her downstairs at five on the dot, and hung up, smiling bashfully. It was the form their love always took, in the moments when love needed to reassert itself: she would act for him, and he would put his pride in her rather than in any thought of resisting.
When the ferry came in sight of Vineyard Haven, they went up on deck and watched, hands jammed in their pockets, chins tucked down into their collars, as the low lights approached. They weren’t alone, in spite of the wind and nocturnal cold; a half-dozen other passengers braved the open air as well. The late September days still held the warmth of summer, then the nights stole back with frost: the lure of the off-season.
Their hotel in Oak Bluffs was a Victorian-looking gingerbread affair, with tight staircases and low ceilings. It was closing up for the winter the day after John and Rebecca were scheduled to leave. When they came downstairs Saturday morning to search for some breakfast, they saw the owner, a robust woman in her fifties or sixties with a long gray braid, atop a stepladder outside, looking in at them through the windows; she was putting up the storm panes. They drove out to the cliffs at Gay Head, and descended to the hidden beach where people of all ages went naked and covered themselves with the thick, comic, unguentous mud. John stood in the clay and looked out to sea and quite managed to forget himself for a while. He thought about how some beautiful women looked better clothed than naked and how Rebecca was not one of those women. The others must have seen that too. But something about the envelope of mud desexed what might otherwise have been a lusty atmosphere – they were all more like children, like statues, purely bodies, for that interlude when the sun was high.
When they came back to their inn the owner had left a space heater with a note outside the door to their room. John showered while Rebecca used the lobby phone to check which restaurants were still open for dinner this time of year. They drove on the beach road in the twilight out to Edgartown. By the time t
hey had had a drink and ordered dinner, all John’s worries had retaken possession of him, but out of consideration for Rebecca he kept it inside. She ordered a second bottle of wine.
“You know,” she said, “in another few years, we’ll probably have a baby, and we won’t be able to do this kind of thing anymore.” She said this neither excitedly nor with regret; but she seemed happy enough now.
John had to drive back much more slowly than he had come on the beach road, because he was drunk. There were stretches where the road dropped off to water on both sides. In their cold room, they took off each other’s clothes quickly, laughing, and jumped into the noisy old bed. Soon she was holding his hair tightly between her fingers. Her eyes had a way of seeming to blur, and, seeing this, he stopped for a moment and moved his hands so that her legs bent over his shoulders. He tried to transmit to her some of the passionate honesty, the defenselessness, with which his fear inspired him.
When the work week began, the atmosphere at the agency was one of forced carelessness, a mask of cheerful fatalism gradually swallowed up, as each day progressed, in a fog of lost revenue, lost jobs. It didn’t take long for the tension to inform each close working relationship. That was no problem – creativity learned to thrive on such pressure. The problem was that Roman, a born and bred New Yorker, wanted to resolve that tension by arguing in loud voices, while John was too thin-skinned, even with a good friend, for that kind of approach to be fruitful.
Roman had a theory as to why the previous year’s Doucette campaign had failed: in fact, it was the same overarching theory he offered to explain the failure of any ad campaign, anywhere. People, he said sternly, hated advertising. They hated being spoken to like idiots, they saw five hundred ads a day in some form or other, they knew all the tricks that had been refined in order to sell them things they needed and things they didn’t. The more you smiled at them, complimented them, sang to them, the wiser they were to what you really thought about them. And yet, he said. And yet they had not let go of their innate compulsion to be amused – not to consume or to have their self-image stroked, but purely and simply to be amused – and they would still agree in effect to subsidize that amusement by purchasing the product associated with it. So the answer, according to Roman – a burly, sloppy man in his mid thirties, with two unpublished novels in his desk at home, a man whose imagination was powered by a deep conflation of passion and irony – was anti-advertising, advertising that looked nothing like it was supposed to, that looked – if you were willing to go all the way with it – like it was trying to subvert its own purpose. His idea, which he defended with gusto, was this: find the ugliest, most misshapen, unintelligent, comic-looking faces and bodies imaginable (he even brought in videos of Amarcord and Stardust Memories to show what he was talking about), put them in the Doucette khakis, bathing suits, lambswool sweaters, pocket T’s, and photograph them. At the end of the TV spot, a title, or a voice-over, would deliver the tag: “Be honest. If we’d gotten Cindy Crawford, would you have noticed the clothes?”
“It’s brilliant,” Roman said. “With the right music for the dummy spot, it’ll save the motherfucking day. Right now I’m thinking either Sinead O’Connor singing ‘You Do Something to Me’ or Robert Palmer’s ‘Simply Irresistible.’”
John, though, found this whole proposal too theoretical, too self-referential, and anyway the more attention it garnered, the more of a link it would create in the public consciousness between wearing Doucette’s clothes and looking like a dateless outcast. He, too, had a pet theory, which ran like this: in a market glutted with products of every sort, where the selling itself was no longer a person-to-person transaction, the only way to make one product rise above its competitors was to find a way to link that product, however paradoxically, with the notion of individuality, nonconformity, the assertion of self. His idea was a black-tie wedding at which the groom emerges wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and black jeans, smiling coolly, while his future in-laws look on in horror. He thought Roman could come up with some line about how the truly well-dressed man is comfortable at any occasion.
“I know it’s kind of conservative,” John said, as Roman, eyes squeezed shut, held his head between his hands as if trying to keep it from exploding, “but let me just remind you that this is a pitch, that we have to sell this idea not to a bunch of your East Village film-studies-major friends sitting on a couch watching television but to the marketing director from Doucette, who lives in Wilkes-Barre for God’s sake, who’s a member of the Christian Coalition for all we know.”
Variations on this argument and on the ideas behind them took up a week. Then on Monday morning John arrived to find Roman holding a pink memo he had found pinned to the door of their office, signed by Canning. “To the Doucette teams,” it read. “Effective immediately, the upcoming account pitch is placed under the supervision of Mal Osbourne. All communications with the client go through him, all ideas are to be approved by him, including the final presentation. Mal will run the pitch in Philadelphia personally. He’ll be in touch with all of you directly. That is all.”
The four teams met for lunch at Zen Palate.
“What does this mean?” Roman said. “I wasn’t sure this guy was still alive. He hasn’t done any creative work I know about in three or four years. Is he coming out of retirement or what?”
“Maybe that’s it,” said Andrea, an artist. About to turn thirty, she was lately enamored of a kind of schoolgirl look she couldn’t quite bring off; she wore her hair that day in two pigtails tied with pieces of yarn. “I think it’s kind of exciting, actually. It sure jazzes up the idea of working on this account. Mal Osbourne is one of the big names in all of advertising – maybe not lately. He’s one of the reasons I came to this agency in the first place.”
“But why the note?” said her partner Dale, a copywriter, a pallid young man just two or three years out of college. “Isn’t this the kind of thing Canning might normally take the time to explain to us personally, instead of coming in on Sunday to leave us a note? I heard he wasn’t even in the office today.”
“He can’t be too happy about it,” Andrea said, “if he refuses to talk about it like this.” The way she began speaking before Dale was quite finished brought back to John the memory of his own brief and unhappy working partnership with her, when he first started at the agency almost four years ago. “It must have been forced on him somehow.”
“Jesus,” Dale said, “I feel like one of those – what did they call those people, back in the eighties, those people you’d see on like Nightline, talking about what it meant that they were playing funeral music on Radio Moscow, or who stood next to who at the May Day parade?”
Roman finished chewing hurriedly. “Kremlinologists,” he said. Everyone nodded.
John was the only one not saying much. He was embarrassed by a premonition he had that all this was related to him in some fateful way. He had never told anyone, not even Roman, about the morning he had spent looking at art with Osbourne last spring – the real genesis of their meeting was so unlikely that John felt certain no one would believe he hadn’t engineered it himself somehow, and he had decided to keep it a harmless secret rather than risk being doubted and gossiped about. Right after it happened, Vanessa had of course demanded to know everything: he began by swearing her to secrecy, but with no real faith in Vanessa’s word, he had then lied about it anyway, downplaying every interesting thing about it. Now he was newly nervous that it would get out. If the story circulated even in the most watered-down version that John had spent four clandestine hours one Saturday in the back seat of a car with Mal Osbourne, everyone on the Doucette account, everyone in the agency, would surely start assaulting him with questions about Osbourne’s tastes, Osbourne’s nature, and when he couldn’t answer, they would accuse him of protecting some mysterious access of his own.
Over the next three weeks, Osbourne never once appeared in the CLO offices. He left no procedural instructions for any of the creative teams and
no word on how anyone might get in touch with him. The portion of the staff charged with saving the Doucette account was near mutiny. Dale and Andrea were delegated to go to Canning’s office and demand that the pitch be handed over to someone else. Canning was a man of strong, ephemeral passions, and this year it was fishing; fly rods leaned against the glass wall behind his desk, through which the bend of the Hudson just beyond the George Washington Bridge was barely visible. Slumped at his desk, speaking with his eyes closed and his fingers massaging his forehead, Canning told them wearily that since Mal Osbourne was technically a full partner, he couldn’t be removed from a particular project if he didn’t want to go, any more than Osbourne could kick Canning off an account if he had a mind to. All Canning could do was to repeat Osbourne’s assurance that he would be responsible for the final presentation in Philadelphia – which did, yes, include his actually showing up for it. Canning had Mal’s email address, and he promised to send another desperate message, though if the response to his prior desperate messages was anything to go by, he said, he might as well put it in a bottle and drop it in the cyber-sea.
The teams were more dejected than ever when this conversation was relayed to them. Something in the tone of Canning’s promised message to his partner must have changed, though, for the next morning there were email messages for all of them, informing them of a specific date on which a messenger would appear at CLO to pick up all their final storyboards, artwork, magazine copy, videotapes, and market analyses, and would take these packages to Osbourne for his final selection.
John, who had gradually forgotten about pleasing the client in his pursuit of the enigma of what might please Osbourne, gave in at least in part to Roman’s vision of the anti-campaign: he hired a photographer (“Too bad we can’t get Diane Arbus,” Roman said), and asked bemused casting directors to send over glossies of the lumpiest, most unglamorous, least photogenic people they could find. “They don’t even have to be clients,” John said. “Maybe there’s someone who works in your office …” John and Roman picked eight photos and then staged and filmed a fashion show, laying in music and the sound of wild applause for the dummy TV spot to be used in the pitch, if their idea was the one Osbourne chose in the end. Osbourne sent no further word. On the appointed day, the four teams came out to the lobby one by one with their packaged materials, and waited there, staring at the elevator door, unconvinced that the promised messenger would actually arrive. At around four o’clock he came, a teenager with a hand truck: he gathered up the bulky packages and immediately got back into the elevator, looking nervously over his shoulder at the eight strangers glaring at him resentfully, jealously. As soon as the door closed again, Roman bolted to the receptionist’s desk and grabbed the receipt out of her hand. It had no destination address.
