by Jonathan Dee
At the office Monday he found himself looking furtively into the faces of his colleagues, watching for some reflection of his own absentmindedness that might indicate someone else there had received a “Dear Colleague” letter too. But they looked as they always looked, poorly rested and unsurprisable. It might have meant that Osbourne had written to no one at the agency but him, or else that others simply had a better poker face than John did, which was certainly the case. Roman asked him once, when they were batting around ideas about the upcoming campaign for the Beef Council, if something was bothering him. He lied and said no.
He said nothing to anyone. It was easy to think of good reasons for his circumspection. For one, it might sound like he was lording it over his coworkers if he brought up the letter from Osbourne and no one else had received it: no one wants to be among the non-elect, even if the venture was one they would probably regard as insane. And there was no point in openly discussing another job opportunity, no matter how farfetched, in your own office – it could only lead to repercussions, subtle or otherwise. Most of all, though, he had to admit, he was just reluctant to expose this whole idea to the kind of scorching cynicism he knew Roman and the others would unleash upon it. John knew they would react with jokes and insults, and would expect him to join in the mockery session, which he would eventually cave in and do.
A few days later they were still trying to find a way to help the beef sellers sell more beef. “Here’s the thing,” Roman said. “At this point everybody knows beef is bad for you. It makes you fat, it clogs your arteries, it gives you cancer. It eats up the rain forest, cows fart and kill the ozone layer, blah blah blah. So you can’t—”
“Everybody knows this?” John said.
“Well, maybe there are people in the Midwest who don’t know it.” The Midwest, for Roman, was more a psychic space than a geographic one, filled with conservative farm families who were virtual zombies of sincerity. “But those people are eating meat three meals a day already; they’re not who the campaign’s targeted at. They couldn’t eat any more beef. We’re aiming at the people who are trying to cut down on beef. They’re doing it because it makes them feel smart. Stupid ads that show happy families barbecuing just reinforce their position. We have to beat them to the punch.”
“By telling them that beef gives you heart attacks and causes global warming? That’ ll—”
“By not pretending we don’t know it. We know it and we’re trying to get them to eat more meat anyway. We let them know we know it. That’s the joke.” He stood up and paced around the cramped office; as always when he was excited by an idea, he looked almost angry. “‘Six burgers a week. That’s all we ask.’ Just be up-front about it, and maybe give it that little extra sarcastic tweak, to let them know that we know. People really respond to that.”
“Let them know that we know what?” John said.
Roman held out his hands. “That they know,” he said.
John smiled uneasily, but he didn’t say any more, intimidated by the force of Roman’s confidence. He hadn’t gotten into advertising in the first place to make any sort of statement, but rather to exercise, at something close to full capacity, his skills as an artist. If there were ideals in the service of which he wanted those skills employed, he might have become a painter, started a magazine, something in that line. But he had no specifically individual creative impulse. Nor did he care to spend the one life he was given in a state of righteous poverty – he didn’t care about getting rich, but he also saw no reason to do without comforts that were easily within his grasp. So did his work then put forth the values, the beliefs, of whoever happened to hire him? On the contrary – in his experience, he and Roman were hired to do exactly as they pleased. The clients might be unhappy with the results, even to the point of withdrawing their business; but while he was working, John was left alone.
So what was behind the work they did? John knew that most people would have assumed that he himself was behind it, he and Roman and their other colleagues; yet he put nothing of what he believed into it. He felt much more like an instrument – an instrument of what seemed, especially after his we-know-that-they-know conversation with Roman, like a vast and powerful blankness, an opacity. Of course, maybe this was just a lie he was telling himself in order to displace his own responsibility (not for beef consumption, about which he couldn’t have cared less, but for the blankness itself). Or maybe there was something substantive behind that opacity and he just wasn’t astute enough to make out what it was.
He didn’t say anything about all this, to anyone. He let Roman take the six-burgers-a-week idea to Canning, who loved it, and told them to come up with five more spots in time for the trip out to Omaha at the end of the month.
One Wednesday evening John got home before Rebecca and picked up the mail downstairs. Out fell a postcard of Monticello; it was addressed to him but had no other salutation. On it was written, “Cynicism is not useless – only we’re conditioned to be cynical about the wrong things. Before it’s too late let us try to reconnect with the better angels of our nature.” It was unsigned. John felt his heart quicken as he stared at the Virginia postmark. He stuck the postcard under a magnet on the refrigerator door; but after looking at it for a few seconds he took it down again and hid it beneath some magazines on his bedside table, where Rebecca wouldn’t see it.
He didn’t know why he should be afraid to tell anyone what he was thinking. Still, he couldn’t figure out an angle from which to approach the subject with his girlfriend. Then one night, as they were riding the subway home from the multiplex across from Lincoln Center, she brought up, for the first time in at least a year, the subject of marriage.
“I just would feel better,” she said, holding his arm, “if there were some kind of plan about it, if we knew what we were doing.”
“Feel better?” he said. “You mean you don’t feel good right now?”
“I feel okay,” she said. “Just, I don’t know, a little sad. From time to time, not always. And not because I feel unfulfilled because I don’t have a baby or any crap like that. It’s just … time is passing, you know? Time is passing. And I don’t even notice it. We’re so busy that it’s very easy not to notice.”
They were in the front car, and as they rocketed through the darkness John could see each station, grimy white, floodlit, bracketed by thin pillars, turning into view a few seconds before the brakes’ drawn-out screech.
“I think it’s time,” John said. Rebecca kept staring straight ahead. “I’ve been feeling sad, too, since you mention it. Sad about being stuck, you know? That’s the sense I have, when I get a chance to look up from what I’m doing. Being stuck.”
“Well, we shouldn’t get married just to cheer ourselves up.”
“Of course not. But I think our moods are trying to tell us something. It’s time for … it’s time for Act Two. Do you know what I mean?”
The train stopped at Chambers Street, and when it did she kissed him lightly.
“But when I think about it,” he said, trying to keep his tone light, “I think about other things, too. Other changes I want to make.”
“Like?”
“Like I don’t think I want to raise a family in New York. I know that’s one of the reasons we moved out to Brooklyn, but I’ve just changed my mind about it, what can I say. It doesn’t seem sufficiently different, to me. Brooklyn, I mean.”
“Well then where would you want to go?” she said softly. “Out to the suburbs, or what?”
“Oh there’s no way—”
“Thank God, me neither.”
“I was thinking of something more radically different. I mean it has to be a city, or near a city, because otherwise you and I couldn’t keep doing what we do. Not a lot of ad agencies in small towns. But I wouldn’t mind, to be totally honest with you, moving back down South.”
His heart had begun racing.
“Back down South?” Rebecca said. “You mean like nearer your family?”
&
nbsp; “That’s not what I was thinking of, though there wouldn’t be anything wrong with being a little closer to them than we are now, particularly if we have children.”
“What are you thinking of, then?”
Suddenly they were there, and John hesitated, trying not to lose his nerve. “Actually,” he said, “and I know you’ll laugh, or have some reaction, but I’ve been thinking pretty seriously about—”
“Oh God,” Rebecca said. “Not Virginia? Not the Mal Osbourne thing?”
His fear of crossing that threshold went beyond the fear of disagreement. Rebecca had a strong temper and a sharp style and thus won most of their arguments, arguments which John had little stomach for anyway: but the timidity he felt in those few seconds was more like a fear of sincerity, a reluctance to show himself even to the person closest to him in the world, and it infuriated him. “Yes,” he said, feeling himself blush, “all right, god damn it, I’m thinking about the Mal Osbourne thing. I want to do it. I don’t know why I should be embarrassed about what I want.”
He had raised his voice to the point where others on the subway car turned to look, which was extraordinary for him; and Rebecca, seeing that he was upset, responded more gently. “You’d really just pick up and move to Virginia, just like that? Sell the apartment? I didn’t realize you were that unhappy here.”
“Well, first of all, it depends what you want to do. I mean I’m not just telling you what I want like what I want is the only important thing. I know you have a chance to make partner, you’ve put in a lot of work toward that, and it would be hard to leave all that behind and start over.”
They pulled into the Wall Street station. The doors opened on to the pale, water-stained mosaics and the dark vaulted ceilings. No one got on or off. When the train was moving noisily again, John resumed, his mouth close to her ear.
“But what I’m asking myself, the last few weeks, is why are we here? Why did we come here? It’s the most expensive place to live in the country; we had to scrimp to buy a place we couldn’t even raise children in, really. And would we want to raise kids here? Most of the children I meet here, teenagers, sons and daughters of my bosses or clients – they scare me. They’re perfect and they know too much. Why did we come to this place? I think it’s only because we were led here when we were too young to question it. If you want to work in advertising, this is where most of the famous agencies are. If you want to be a lawyer, this is where most of the famous law firms are. Well, now we know we’re good enough to get those jobs. So is this still what we want?”
Rebecca was looking at him so intently she almost gave the impression of not listening to what he was saying. She was curious but not frightened. “Every couple over the age of twenty-five in New York has this same conversation,” she said, “about why are we living here. I’m not so much interested in that. I’m more worried that you’re not happy doing what you’re doing. I was under a different impression all this time.”
“Lately. Lately I’m not so happy with it. I’m asking myself questions about it. Not about selling out or serving big corporations or anything like that. More … aesthetic questions. About content.”
“There are other businesses you could get into.”
John shook his head. “It’s not a bad business. It doesn’t have to be. The stuff that Osbourne says about getting rid of the smirk, about saying something instead of finding new ways to say nothing – it touches some chord in me. I’m sorry if that seems silly. Trying to break that conspiracy between us and the audience, where everyone’s scared to death to get caught taking anything seriously.”
“Well,” Rebecca said, still cautiously, “if you want to talk about having children: a certain desire for security goes along with that, you know? A certain anti-whimsy. Osbourne has no clients, no staff, no partners. You’ve only met the guy two or three times in your life. God knows how much money he has or what sort of facilities he’s found down there.”
John nodded. “Maybe it’ll fail,” he said. “Probably it will fail. But I’d like to be part of it. I’d hate to get to the end of my life and have to say that I did what I did because I never found out if there was any other way of doing it.”
Rebecca nodded and sat back; she gazed at nothing, at their warped reflection in the window, for the rest of the trip. She was stricken by this conversation, as John had hoped she would be, yet he still felt guilty for unsettling her. “Just tell me you’ll think about it,” he said as they waited for the light to cross Atlantic. “If you don’t want to do it, we won’t, and everything will be fine. I’m really not unhappy with the life we have now.”
Saturday another postcard arrived from Charlottesville, this one picturing the quadrangle at the University of Virginia. “What is a movie?” it said. “A work of art which owes its existence to men and women who are only interested in increasing the amount of money they make. And yet movies sometimes achieve true greatness, artistic greatness; and when they do, no one is shocked and amazed, no one declares that greatness and movies are incompatible. Why can’t advertising, which comes into being via the same principle, occupy the same position in American culture?”
Weeks went by and John kept an eye on his girlfriend, who seemed to be keeping an eye on him as well. She was less talkative than usual – not angry or depressed, just preoccupied. He felt the same way. He didn’t bring up Charlottesville again because he knew it was on her mind anyway. The fact that they weren’t married, a fact which had seemed negligible to both of them for so long (when the time came for children, they had agreed long ago, they’d make it all official then), seemed suddenly to be gathering real weight. But John did his best not to think too much about contingencies. Instead he daydreamed a lot, though for some reason he caught himself reimagining his past much more often than his future. Other paths his life might have taken, other areas of study, other places he had lived. His old girlfriend in Berkeley, who had left their apartment one day and never returned. His thoughts about what might lie ahead were often short-circuited by the fear that Osbourne had forgotten about him or changed his mind about the whole project or was disappointed that he had heard no expression of support from John, even though he had left no way to get in touch. They were well into the spring by now, and there was no telling what, if anything, Osbourne might want from him.
Then one day Roman, John, and a few others were sitting on the sofas in Canning’s empty office. Their boss had left early to go to a Knicks–Pacers playoff game at Madison Square Garden.
“I don’t think he even likes basketball,” Dale said. “I think he just goes because you have to be so rich and plugged-in these days to get playoff tickets at all. He’s displaying for the people in the other corporate boxes.”
Mick, staring into the rain through Canning’s glass wall, said, “And the weird thing is, you can always see it better on TV anyway. It’s like going to the taping of a TV show.”
“That’s all pro sports is now,” John said, “is television programming.”
“Oh, I’d go further than that,” Roman said. “Pro sports is nothing but an advertising delivery system. He” – gesturing to Canning’s empty chair – “took me to the Virginia Slims tennis tournament last year, and I have no idea who played who but I remember that sitting in my seat, without turning my head, I could see thirty-two different ads. And that’s not counting what the players had sewn on to their shirts. Thirty-two.”
“What do you mean, ads?”
“Well, you know. Placements. Logos. Fila, Chase, Rolex.”
“Brute ads,” Dale said. “Chinese water torture ads.”
“Exactly. More negotiations than ads. Man, imagine if that was your job? Haggling over the size of the X in Ex-Lax on some sign behind a tennis court?”
“Talk about your mental static. Talk about your—”
“Oh my God!” Andrea yelled. “That reminds me!”
They all looked at her, taken aback by this show of genuine excitement.
“All that tal
k about ugly advertising gave me this sudden Mal Osbourne flashback—”
Everyone in the room who had been on the Philadelphia trip winced and laughed.
“—and I can’t believe I forgot to tell you guys this awesome bit of gossip I heard! You know Elaine Sizemore, at DDB Needham?”
Roman nodded. “Nice girl,” he said. “Did those Jerry Brown spots.”
“Well, apparently out of nowhere she gets a letter, at her home, from none other than Osbourne, inviting her to quit her job and join this new agency he’s starting in Charlottesville fucking Virginia.”
The silence in the room was uncertain and polite, the way people are silent when they hear of a misfortune that has a comic element to it which no one wants to confess to seeing.
“Osbourne is starting his own agency?” Mick said.
“Yup.”
“Partners, or just himself?”
“Apparently just him.”
“Where does the money come from?”
“Who knows? He could have it himself, I guess. It’s not impossible.”
“Does he know this Elaine Sizemore?”
“Not from Eve. He just said he’d been following her career and admired her work. I guess he’s just headhunting. No one here got a letter?”
Everyone shrugged. John could feel his face coloring; he considered leaving the room but thought that might be even more conspicuous. And when Roman looked directly at him, he shook his head no.
“Man,” Dale said. “I can’t believe I didn’t hear from him.” Those who had witnessed Dale’s humiliation at the Doucette pitch smiled appreciatively at the joke.
“Why Charlottesville?” Roman said. “Does he think he’s Jefferson or something?”
