by Jonathan Dee
The Courtyard Marriott was a long two-story corridor by the highway; beyond the windows, a neatly kept grass embankment and then nothing. John dropped his bag in his room, locked the door again, and headed down the hall to Osbourne’s suite. Candy machines, ice machines, the Rube Goldberg-esque maid’s cart, the antiseptic, shadowless light. Osbourne had been living and working in these rooms for months, not to save money but because he didn’t care where he lived, beyond the idea that he didn’t have to waste minutes thinking about emptying his own trash or changing his sheets. When the door opened it was clear from the mess that he was indeed in Osbourne’s bedroom, this despite the fact that the table, dresser, and even the walls had huge sheets of drawing paper taped to them. A laptop sat in the middle of the unmade bed.
He acted as if John had just come from the other wing of the Marriott rather than across the Mason-Dixon Line. “You’re here,” he said, and turned to walk back into the room. “Good. Let me just find some shoes. We’ll go take a quick tour of the house and we’ll head over to join the others.”
“Others?” John said. Osbourne didn’t answer. He kicked gently with his stockinged feet through the piles of carefully executed architectural drawings on the floor until he uncovered a pair of black suede shoes.
Osbourne owned a loud little Triumph; John followed in his own car as they drove well out of the city center, into the older districts far from the highway. John couldn’t help smiling with pleasure just at the sight of the sprawling, colonnaded antebellum houses, with the great chandeliers hanging above the portico. Some had small historical markers, too small to read from the road, mounted on the wall beside their oversize front doors. John was lost in admiring the sheer arrogant beauty of them, barely paying attention to where he was going, when he noticed Osbourne’s turn signal was on. He followed, amazed, as the Triumph turned left on to a long driveway which led to one of the mansions.
They passed beneath a porte-cochere to a parking area in the back. Tarpaulins covered some construction debris, and a stack of windows leaned against the steps to the kitchen door.
“This is it?” John said, in a higher voice than he would have liked.
Osbourne was already out of the car, his eye roving critically, but smiling all the same.
“Built before the war,” he said. “But the previous owner messed with some of the original interior about sixty years ago, which is a break for us actually, because it’s usually impossible now to get permission to touch anything in the really genuine antebellum homes.” He opened the back door with a key, and they walked into the empty kitchen. Osbourne must have noticed the look on John’s face. “You know the story of Motown Records?” Osbourne said. “They operated out of a row house in a residential neighborhood in Detroit. On a typical day you had people recording backing vocals in the bathroom, people in the living room typing press releases, people working out bridges on the porch. That’s the feel that I want here. Not to make us all feel like we’re a family or any corporate bullshit like that. But work that you do in a place that doesn’t really look like a workplace always has that improvisatory feeling. You know?”
They went through all four stories, room by room; John stopped counting after twenty. Most of the rooms were still empty except for paint cans or stacks of wallboard. A few drafting tables were already set up, and a walk-in closet whose door had been removed was packed with unopened boxes of video equipment. But despite what Mal had said, it seemed that little of the house’s interior structure had been touched, and even unfurnished it was easy to recognize in each room what must have been its old incarnation: a child’s bedroom, a den or study, a servant’s quarters, a pantry. Apart from the profligate size of it, it looked, in a ghostly way, as if it were the result of a careful excavation, like any number of rich people’s homes John had been in as a child; and he briefly entertained the feeling – absurdly paranoid, yet at the same time not altogether unwelcome – that Osbourne had known all this somehow, that he had had John researched in some way. No one else was in the mansion. The sun poured through the uncurtained windows.
John felt simultaneously excited and jilted by the news that there would be others at dinner; the likelihood of this had never occurred to him, just as he hadn’t imagined, though of course it made perfect sense, that Osbourne would be lunching other prospective employees on that brief trip to Manhattan last week. But in order to think about any of it – or about the five strangers and potential colleagues who met them at the restaurant, on the pedestrian mall downtown – he had to fight his way through a haze of much more elemental and blissful associations. Ham with gravy, sweet tea, cheese grits, fried chicken served as a side dish: it was exotic to everyone there but him, and while they all made jokes about diminishing their life expectancy if they moved down here, John tried to be discreet about lowering his head nearer to the table and just smelling it all.
Around the small table it was easy for Osbourne to rule the conversation. No one was inclined to interrupt him in any case. They had all come down here to consider their futures, but for now Osbourne seemed much more at home talking about the past. He told them the story of the creation of Apple’s “1984,” the spot that revolutionized their form. He talked about a weekend spent in Woody Creek with Hunter Thompson, trying unsuccessfully to get him to write some copy for them; in the end they all got high instead and test-fired automatic weapons in the meadow behind the ranch. And of course he had a great many stories about the artists of the 80s boom, Schnabel and Fischl and Borofsky and Jim Dine, whose reputations, he implied in a modest way, he had done much to create. Only through these art-world anecdotes did John learn, to his amusement, that the moody young man on Osbourne’s immediate left, wearing black denim in the ninety-degree heat, was Jean-Claude Milo, the artist who had stood them up at his Manhattan loft on that first Saturday morning, almost a year ago now.
Osbourne wasn’t drinking, and so no one else dared have more than one; still, it was late – past ten o’clock – and their spirits high when the hostess appeared and told Osbourne he had a phone call. Acting as if nothing were amiss about this, he excused himself; and the six of them whom he was courting began to ask shyly about one another.
Four were from New York (including John and the artist Milo); one was from Minneapolis and one had met Osbourne, she said, in the San Francisco gallery where she worked part-time as a receptionist. One was a published novelist, though John had never heard of him. A former copywriter from Ted Bates said he had quit that job a year ago to write speeches for Al Gore; he was the one who pointed out to the group the self-evident fact that they were all white.
“The provocateur,” whispered the woman sitting next to John, at the end of the table. “Stirring up trouble on the shop floor, when we don’t even have a shop floor yet.”
“Have you seen the place?” John asked her quietly. She looked at him in surprise, and he realized it was because of his accent.
“Yesterday,” she said. “It’s gorgeous. Nice to work in a place you’re not appalled by, I guess, but I’m a little worried I’ll be too afraid to leave a McDonald’s wrapper lying around. Or even leave it in the garbage, for that matter.”
“So you’ve already agreed, then? I mean to come down and work here?” The others were engaged in a different conversation.
She blushed. She wore circular glasses, with plumb-straight blond hair and the strong, slightly bottom-heavy build, as John thought, of someone who’d excelled at field hockey as a girl. “Last night,” she said. “About six hours after I got down here from New York, actually. It’s kind of embarrassing how quickly I caved. I hope I know what I’m doing. What about you?”
John shrugged. “I’ve been here about six hours myself now, I guess,” he said, laughing.
“Where’d you come from? You sound like you came from across the street.”
“Manhattan, same as you. I’m John Wheelwright, by the way. I work at what used to be Canning Leigh & Osbourne.”
She wiped
her fingers on her napkin before holding her hand out to him.
“Elaine Sizemore,” she said.
He wouldn’t realize until much later that that was the moment that decided it for him. In fact, by the next morning, when Osbourne stood with his hands on the doorframe of John’s rented car, he still hadn’t given his answer yet. Osbourne didn’t push.
“You go on home and talk things over with your wife,” he said. John didn’t correct him. “I know you want your future to include her. Anyone would understand that. It was a pleasure to spend some time with you down here.”
John walked back into his apartment and dropped his bag. It was eight-thirty on a Sunday night; Rebecca wasn’t there. He had told her, he was sure, what time he was returning.
When she came back some two hours later, she smiled weakly at him. “How was your trip?”
“Fine. Where have you been?”
Their voices weren’t angry; they were cautious, simulated voices, to ward off silence.
“The movies. I went to Film Forum to see Mr Death. You said you weren’t interested, so.”
She hung her jacket in the closet. The silence was like a buzzing. “How was it?” John asked.
“Great,” she said tonelessly. “You should see it.”
She went into the bathroom, and he waited for her to come out; but when she did she went directly to their bedroom. After a minute he followed her in. She was already under the blankets, reading.
“Do you not want to talk about this now?” he said, standing over her.
“I’m scared to talk about it,” she said. But then, when he didn’t leave, she said without looking up, “So are you going down there? I mean to take the job?”
“I want to go. Yes. I’m not making any demands here.”
“Oh, come off it,” she said.
In five days he and Roman were off to Omaha. Their work was already done. Canning must have discussed it with some of the others, because that week Dale, then Mick, then a few more of the creatives stopped by John’s desk and asked to see a preview.
“Is it true?” Dale said.
Roman jumped up and lifted gingerly from a wooden crate a board with a huge, soft-focus beauty shot of a hamburger behind the words “Come on. It’s in your genes.”
“Oh my God,” Dale said, grinning. “You know what it’s like? It’s like you’re trying to out-Osbourne Osbourne.”
Roman stuck a pen between his teeth, cigar-style. “Honesty, baby,” he said. “That’s the play.”
John didn’t force the conversation with Rebecca; in fact, they were barely speaking. He had made up his mind he was going to Charlottesville, somehow, without making up his mind that he was willing to go without her. On Thursday evening Rebecca walked out of the bedroom, eyes red, and told John he had a phone call.
It was Osbourne. “My,” he said. “Is it a bad time?
“No, Mal, not at all.” Rebecca, in her nightgown, was out of the room again.
“If you’re sure. Your wife sounded somewhat … cold. Were you fighting?”
“Avoiding fighting, I suppose.” He had a thought, and with everything so fraught it seemed an appropriate time for boldness. “Have you ever been married, Mal?”
“Me? Yes, once. So look, I’m anxious to hear your decision. I’m willing to go as far as I can to accommodate you, but on the other hand we’re approaching our start-up date and if you’re not with us I need to make other plans.”
John stared down the empty hallway.
“If it affects your decision at all, the others you met this weekend have all signed on, with one exception, the speechwriter for Gore.”
The hard part wasn’t deciding; he had already decided. The hard part was saying it, letting that decision start to ramify. Turning his back on everything.
Hurting her.
“So what do you think, my boy?”
“All right,” John said. “Yes.”
Osbourne moved immediately into a plan of action, urging him to fly down again as soon as possible to find a home, offering to cover half his moving expenses. The venture, as John had seen, wasn’t up and running yet, and wouldn’t be for another two or three months; since John would of course get no severance for quitting, Mal suggested that he not mention anything at Canning & Leigh about his plans for at least another month.
In the bed, reading a magazine in the half-light of the lamp, her face set, Rebecca looked startlingly old.
“That was Osbourne,” John said. She let the magazine fall and started crying. He stood beside the bed in silence.
“You won’t do it, will you?” she said angrily. He wasn’t sure what she was talking about. “You won’t break through it. You’ll make me do everything. Right up until the time you leave me you’ll be talking like fucking Ozzie and Harriet, trying to make everything seem like it’s someone else’s fault, someone else’s decision.”
“Who said anything about leaving you?” He hated himself now.
“Come on! You just took that job with him. I heard you! What, do you think there’s two of you or something, is that it?”
John knelt beside the bed. “Please come with me. I want to stay with you. I’m in love with you. I want to start a family with you. You act like Mal Osbourne is some lover or something, some third party that’s come between us. It isn’t like that. It’s in me. I love you and I can’t be happy here anymore. Maybe that sounds like two people to you, but it isn’t, it’s one.”
Rebecca pulled him into bed beside her, weeping; he took her in his arms, kissed her lips and her face, stroked her hair; then, to his surprise, she was pushing his pants down and pulling at him furiously, hungrily – in tears but with desperate speed she came loudly and then so did he. It was probably the best sex they had had in years. John had no idea what to make of it.
Canning accompanied John and Roman to Omaha, the most featureless, depressing city John had ever spent a night in. Nothing in it looked like it could have been more than fifteen years old. Only the cowboyish attire of some of the men and women they saw in the lobby of their hotel made them feel the influence of a past, even an ersatz past. Roman – who was acting more and more unpredictably lately, on a kind of creative high which seemed ready to collapse at any moment – all but refused to leave his hotel room. He was in the alien Midwest of his imaginings, and he couldn’t imagine that they wouldn’t know him and hate him on sight.
Roman ran the pitch. The men from the Beef Council wore expensive suits with boots and enormous belt buckles. They were ludicrous; Roman spoke to them in a voice that was almost belligerent. He was not about to explain his work to them. John was worried that these industry giants weren’t used to being talked to that way; but Canning seemed calm, even pleased.
They gave the agency their business on the spot. The campaign was the best they’d ever seen; cutting-edge, they said, avant-garde, just what they were hoping for to change their image. Eighteen million dollars in billings a year.
Three weeks later John took Roman out to lunch and told him he was quitting Canning & Leigh to move to Virginia and join Osbourne’s new agency. When he had finished the whole story – the letter, the postcards, the trip to Charlottesville – Roman nodded thoughtfully; but he kept on nodding for too long. He tapped his fork on the tablecloth.
“It’ll fail,” he said finally. “It’ll go belly up, and everyone will have a good laugh. And you’ll deserve that. Fuck you. Fuck you for lying to me.”
And at that point John would have expected him to get up and storm out: but he didn’t, he went on sitting there, staring at John with a hostility that was really unexpected. John could think of nothing to say. He signaled for the check.
He was shaken enough by this that he put off giving Canning his notice until the next morning. Canning took it gratifyingly hard, though much less personally: he asked John to reconsider, told him how much his work there was valued, even offered him a raise of seven and then ten thousand dollars on the spot. John wouldn’t be moved. The b
oss was surprised but didn’t seem to take the position, as John had half expected, that he was insane. Canning said he had heard of one or two other defections from within agencies in the city.
Around the office, John was of course subjected to a few sarcastic remarks, but in the end there were no hard feelings, and no one – except for his partner, who wouldn’t stay for long in the same room with him – treated him any differently in his final weeks at work. After his last day they even threw a little bon voyage party for him at the Landmark Tavern. Only Roman didn’t attend. John got drunk enough to forget about that for the evening. In fact, by the time they had to relinquish the banquet room and move downstairs to the bar, they were all as drunk as John could ever remember seeing them.
Rebecca had moved out two days earlier. Her anger had mostly passed. They talked about staying in touch, but it was hard to see how their involvement could survive the discovery that there were attachments in their lives more important to them than their attachment to one another. As for John, the one thing he couldn’t admit to her was that he was glad, in the end, that they had never married. Because a divorced man would always have that failure on his record; whereas for them it would presumably be easier to move on, to forget the past, to start again as if starting at zero.
Dale came up with two double scotches, and handed one to John with an air of great ceremony.
“I propose,” he said, “that since this may be the last time we ever see each other, we get drunk enough to say what we really think.”
