by Jonathan Dee
“My God!” Doucette yelled. “What is the meaning of this?”
“The most fundamental, most positive, most optimistic of human messages,” Osbourne went on calmly, “and yet the one—”
“There are women in this room!” Doucette shouted, and he began to get to his feet. “Are you insane?”
Gracey jumped up and put his hands on his boss’s shoulders. “Let’s be calm, please,” he said. “Mr Osbourne, if I could just return this conversation to the planet Earth for one moment, surely you know that no ad-sales department anywhere in the world would ever accept a photo like that for publication.”
Osbourne smiled. “Well, I have to disagree with you a little bit on that. For one thing, this particular image has appeared in at least one magazine already – just not as an advertisement. For another, I can tell you that it’s always possible to find two or three prominent print outlets who are willing to test the envelope a little bit. Because transgression – though it’s getting harder and harder – transgression is still the engine of culture.” He paused to let that sink in. “But your point, Jerry, is well taken. Most print outlets will indeed turn this piece down. That refusal, in itself, is news. And news is publicity. Of the free variety, I need hardly remind anyone. Again, I come back to the uncomfortable point that the best, in fact the only, way to associate a familiar product with the fashionable, the avant-garde, is for its advertising to establish that avant-garde.”
“So let me get this straight,” Gracey said. He still had one hand on his boss’s shoulder. He himself was perfectly cool; perhaps he had reckoned that his own job would not survive this fiasco. “Your media buying plan for Doucette incorporates censorship?”
“In a culture of excess, censorship is an achievement in itself, a measure of success. And as for any negative publicity that might also be generated, from right-wing watchdog groups or what have you, I think that one of the self-evident truths in a competitive business like ours is that airtime is airtime.”
John had forgotten his problems; he had forgotten that his own deception of his friends regarding his acquaintance with Osbourne had been exposed; he had forgotten whatever might have been going on outside that conference room. Doucette’s face was so red that John wondered if he might be in any sort of dangerous distress. It was all so rarefied and silly: and yet, in a sealed room in a neutral city, where competing ideas seemed ready to bring men to blows, John was in the grip of a feeling that seldom came over him, which he couldn’t have called anything more specific than an awareness that he was alive.
“Are there any other questions?” Osbourne asked amiably.
“Yes,” Mr Doucette said, and immediately the other murmurings in the room hushed. “I have a question.” His voice still shook a little; slowly he reached up and knocked Gracey’s hand off his shoulder. “These … images, as you call them, they contain no picture or drawing of our product, no reference to our product. They don’t mention the name of our product. So my question is, what, other than the fact that I pay you for them, makes these things advertisements at all?”
Osbourne nodded approvingly. “That’s a very sophisticated question, sir,” he said. “And I could go on about how those sorts of categories no longer exist: how economic and technological history has bequeathed us this network for the distribution of visual messages, a network so self-sustaining and efficient and culturally vital that it’s frankly overwhelmed the whole idea of praising commodities that brought it into being in the first place. But I expect that’s not what you’re really asking. So all I can tell you is this. Your aim in launching an advertising campaign is to sell millions more pants, shirts, and sweaters. The campaign I’ve shown you today will result in the sale of millions more pants, shirts, and sweaters. I guarantee that. I guarantee it. If that’s all our two ideas have in common, then that’s all they need to have in common.”
Doucette nodded, drumming his fingers on his leg. It was clear from his demeanor under stress that he had not been born into the class he now exemplified. He leaned forward and put his forearms on the table.
“You think I’m an idiot,” he said quietly. “Don’t you?”
“No, sir. I don’t think that. And I understand your hesitation. The way I look at it, our relationship, yours and mine, is an ancient one. It’s at least as old as the Renaissance. I am coming to you, in effect, to ask you to be my patron. As my patron, what glory accrues from my work will both reflect on you and, in indirect but very real ways, reward you. And you, of course, have something that I need, in order to do the work that I want to do. Which is why I thought it necessary that you and I meet here today. In order to obtain the opportunity to educate the public, it’s first necessary to educate the patron.”
The meeting broke up quickly after that. The junior people on each side of the table stared dumbly at one another for a few seconds before the Doucettes abruptly left as a group; Gracey said only that he would be in touch very soon. Osbourne seemed tired but well pleased; earnestly, he thanked his own eight staffers for their support, and without waiting for any reply, he gathered up the four boards, folded the easels, and left.
On the train back to New York, the stunned silence held for the first few minutes, before people began arguing tentatively about the exact nature of what they had just seen.
“He had to know what he was doing,” Dale said. “I mean, he had to know that no client in the world would ever go for that. So why would he go all the way through with it?”
“As a joke,” Andrea said. “As a kind of parting fuck-you. I mean, including CLO in the review process was a joke anyway. Does an incumbent agency ever win out in a review? No. Never. So he was just being vindictive, trying to make a fool out of old man Doucette instead of performing for him.”
“I don’t know about that,” Mick said. “I just never got any kind of a sarcastic hit off his presentation today. Nobody’s that deadpan. I think he was serious. And what he said was actually kind of brilliant in its way, I mean deranged, but brilliant.”
“Or,” Andrea said, excitedly. “Or. I mean let’s remember that Osbourne doesn’t even come into the office anymore. Hasn’t produced an ad in years. He does no work at all, that I know about. And suddenly he decides to take over a major account pitch and then totally sabotages it?” She looked around the gently rocking compartment. “I think we just watched a guy self-destructing. Maybe he deludes himself that he’s some kind of ad visionary, maybe not, but in fact he’s just setting fire to himself, finishing up the ruin of what was once a really brilliant career.”
“Good,” Dale said. “That’s what I was waiting to hear. Okay, any other votes for the guy’s being clinically insane?”
There was a silence, in which John noticed Roman, across the aisle, studying him in discreet perplexity, as if to say, The others may have forgotten for a moment what happened in the minutes before the meeting, but I haven’t. John felt himself reddening and turned his head.
“I mean, the fucking Renaissance,” Dale said. “What’s up with that?”
John went straight home to Brooklyn from Penn Station. He called in sick the next day. Wednesday afternoon, a staff meeting was called, at which Canning announced that, by mutual agreement, the agency’s contractual relationship with Mal Osbourne had been terminated. Canning called the parting amicable, but he also apologized to the eight creatives whose hard work on the Doucette pitch had, he said, gone to waste. As for Doucette, they had signed that morning with Chiat/Day.
Osbourne’s office email account had of course been closed; but it was just as well that his next message to John, months later, came to his home, in the form of a cramped but curiously formal handwritten note. “I am in the process of conceiving an exciting new venture,” it read. “I’ll be in touch with you about it in due course. In the meantime, I sincerely hope that you and your wife are well.”
FIRST PERIOD MATH, second period US history, third period French, fifty minutes spent trying to find the facial expression that
would discourage the teacher from asking you if you had a cat or if it was raining outside, and expecting you to answer. Lunch, the same long table in the corner farthest from the door with the same girls, Annika and Tia, Justine and Lucy, acting the way they thought people unaware of being looked at might act; the cafeteria tables seated eight and so they were always joined by two or three bold aspirants who did not join in the conversation but listened and laughed with great animation for the benefit of anyone at other tables who might be noticing them there. Fourth period free, fifth period bio; sixth period was AP English, where they were reading One Hundred Years of Solitude; it worked out well that this one interesting class was the last one, because it kept Molly from looking too frequently at the clock on the wall behind the teacher’s head. Then straight into the parking lot, with everyone else, to get on the idling bus for home.
You never understood how diligently, in the common course of things, you were watched – how your absence from any of those places you were in every day, places in which you might have felt yourself thoroughly anonymous, could never go unnoticed – until you tried to get out from under it. Cutting classes was one thing, obviously possible only on an occasional basis before teachers and then parents got involved. But if for instance you weren’t on the bus in the afternoon, people asked you about it the first time they saw you the next morning, and they had no doubt been speculating with each other about you before that – people with nothing more substantial to think about than what passed in front of their eyes. You couldn’t have that kind of talk in the air. Miss a warm Saturday night at the playground behind the elementary school and Sunday your friends all phoned to find out what had happened to you. If you weren’t at the dinner table, never mind the breakfast table, there were questions.
So what Molly did was to get off the bus at a stop before her own, near the center of town usually, telling anyone who raised an eyebrow that she had an errand to run or a babysitting job or that her mother was sick and had asked her to pick something up. Then, when the bus was gone, she would walk around the windowless back of the IGA, through a thin half acre of woods, and out the other side on to Route 2, where she would wait discreetly behind a tree, looking at the sky, until Dennis Vincent’s car pulled up and she saw a smile flickering on his pained face through the window.
There was experience and there was learning, and Molly knew that the last several weeks had consisted much more of the former than the latter; still, one of the things she could say she had learned about herself in that time was that she was a marvelously gifted liar. She took this in without self-satisfaction, nor with a bad conscience – more in the spirit that any knowledge about one’s self is a constructive thing. No one ever questioned her; no face showed any skepticism, no one ever caught her in a contradiction. She could only guess that Dennis was not nearly as persuasive with whatever lies he had to tell to get away from the bank at three-thirty in the afternoon, since he did such a poor job trying to convince her, when they were in the car together, that he was courageous, unconflicted, that his thoughts were only with her. It was touching, if also slightly condescending, that he should think she needed to be convinced of that.
The car trips, thirty minutes each way, were hard on Dennis. He tried to make conversation but it always tapered off into silence, and sometimes he looked through the windshield in such a way that Molly worried he didn’t see the road in front of him at all. It would have made more sense for Molly to drive herself to Oneonta and meet him there, since she had her license now; but Roger and Kay, who thought little about it if they didn’t see Molly over the course of an afternoon, were far more likely to notice if the car was gone for a few hours.
Sometimes she talked to him about trivial things, to try to cheer him up. Sometimes she too said nothing and they made the trip in a kind of considerate silence. And sometimes a very different feeling overtook her, and she would reach across and stroke his leg as he drove, unzip his pants and let him grow hard under her hand, watching as his face turned red, or undo a button or two on her own shirt and guide his hand inside the fabric under her breast. She’d see how far she could push him. This impulse was hard to describe, except to say that it felt closer to abandon than to excitement, less like lust than capitulation.
The motel in Oneonta was a long prefab rectangle, with an office at one end, and a brackish swimming pool behind a locked gate in the front. It was across the road from a strip mall. Parking and room entrances were in the back. Dennis always made her wait in the car while he went inside and paid. She looked around to see if there were any other cars in the lot; sometimes there were none. The best thing about those minutes in the car was the chance to savor the idea that no one in the world could have known where she was just then.
Inside, there was always some initial awkwardness, though some of that was dispelled by the fact that they needed to hurry, they were always so pressed for time. Dennis began by insulting himself, so reliably that Molly started to wonder if he wasn’t getting some sort of erotic charge out of it; but that didn’t seem to be the case.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here. If anyone sees us, I’ll be destroyed. How did I let this happen? Where will it all end?”
“It’ll end when we end it,” Molly said frankly, soothingly. “What, are you afraid I’m going to ask you to marry me or something?”
He seemed hurt by this; he wanted everything both ways. He would sit on the bed, looking lost, until Molly started to take her shirt off, or his. Then he would forget everything.
That October in Ulster the thing that had seemed to be happening so slowly happened all at once: the official announcement made its way from somewhere within the most rarefied precincts of IBM that the central New York regional sales office would be closed down entirely in twelve months’ time. As it was, nearly half of all those who had moved to Ulster in the last twenty years to work for IBM were already unemployed; and most of those people were stuck in the town until they could find a buyer for their house or at least until their children’s school year was over. There was no comparable work for them anywhere nearby. Much of what had been the town’s new professional class now found themselves virtual deadbeats, late with the mortgage, having their credit cards rejected at the IGA. First the dry cleaner and then the Baskin-Robbins went out of business. Twelve months was considered a merciful notice, but nevertheless, life in Ulster had begun to take on a mournful, irritable, last-days quality.
The Howes, at least, were exempt from the harshest effects. Roger had achieved a position of such seniority within the doomed enterprise that he was promised that he could stay on at work until the very last day – he would be turning the lights off behind him, he joked. And he had also been offered a transfer to the office in Armonk, though there was at least a temporary hitch in that plan: Kay was refusing to go. She said she liked it here, Ulster was her home, the thought of organizing a move to another strange place was too stressful for her. It was the purest perversity – she would go to her grave in that town to punish him for bringing her there. No one in the family took her refusal seriously.
Sometimes Dennis was passive, sometimes he was forceful: he was trying to figure out what Molly liked, but what she liked, really, was to see him trying everything. The passive role certainly seemed most true to himself. He lay on his back, with his head to one side, while she straddled him with her knees up, her feet flat on the bed, so that she sometimes had to grab his shoulders for balance.
He had things that he liked. He liked her on her stomach, the wrong way across the bed, so that her arms hung down. He loved blowjobs, and Molly found them a lot less complicated than she had expected; but she discovered that she didn’t really like it when he went down on her – it felt wrong, too intimate somehow, though she wouldn’t say that aloud – and he was reluctant to let her do it to him if he couldn’t reciprocate.
His body was small with just a few hairs on his calves and a sprouting right aroun
d his nipples that she found comically unattractive. He always took a shower afterward. While she waited for him, Molly peeked out behind the moldy curtain into the parking lot, or looked through the drawers to see if anyone else had left anything behind. Sometimes there were condoms, or pennies; once, a pair of black lace underwear.
He dropped her off a half mile from Bull’s Head, on a stretch of road across from a cow pasture; before they parted they would schedule their next meeting, because it was not always possible to speak to each other on the phone. Like a child he looked both ways before kissing her goodbye, something she only let him do because he insisted on it – such were the ways in which he worked off, through a sporadic and self-devised romantic etiquette, the guilt he felt over treating Molly like a mistress. The car moved off, and Molly walked back home in the twilight, happy deep within herself like a spy, feeling the weakness in her legs. Her mother, in the chair by the TV, smiled with frail disapproval and got up to fix Molly a plate. With Richard away at college, and Molly keeping such unpredictable hours, the family had stopped dining together; Roger and Kay ate early, in front of the television, which did away with the silence between them. So Molly sat alone at the table, eating slowly, listening to the faint music and occasional laughter coming from the TV in the next room. And it was those moments – not the moments in bed with Dennis inside her, not the walks through the woods or the lies themselves – which were happiest for her, because she had escaped the world, it had lost her scent, she knew that she was not who anyone thought she was. The only way to stay pure in the world was to live inside a lie.
Richard didn’t call much from Berkeley; he had moved off campus into a house with eight other people, none of whom, evidently, owned an answering machine. But he sent a letter with a copy of his grades in it, and from that it was possible to infer that he was doing fine. Molly now had a taste of what it might have been like to be an only child; her parents wanted to give her all the benefit of their attentions, but she made that difficult without really trying. She wasn’t rebellious or unkind – merely self-sufficient. When she was thirteen, this independence, this casual unconcern with their opinion, had been worrisome to the point where Roger and Kay argued with each other about who was more to blame for it; four years later, Molly was in that respect basically unchanged, yet her mother and father now congratulated themselves, seeing in her comradely disregard of them evidence that they had succeeded as parents.
