Fast Start, Fast Finish

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Well,” Genny said, “it seems that Jane and Edgar have found out about your father.”

  “My father!” Nancy said. “What about my father?” My father was going to call me, wasn’t he, she remembered; I wonder why he never did? And she threw another fierce, bared-teeth look at Charlie, whose hand was on her breast again, his fingers very gently pinching the nipple, the breast cupped in his palm. She tried to wriggle away from him again, but he only held her harder, winked at her, and then kissed her deep in the curve of her throat.

  “Well, they’ve found out who your father is, and all that, and how wealthy he is,” Genny said. “And so that makes them even madder—that you won’t put up the measly fifteen hundred for the Lane.”

  “How ridiculous,” Nancy said, and she tried to move away from him again, for his hand was stroking her belly now, kneading it between his fingers, but from behind her he held her with both arms now and she couldn’t move.

  “I agree,” Genny McCarthy said.

  “What did you say to her?”

  “Oh, I didn’t want to get involved in it,” Genny said. “This is between you and the Double-yous. I just kept mum and listened to all the things she was telling me about your father. I mean they’ve got book, chapter, and verse on him—right down to the black Angus herd.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a silly thing,” she said, and then covering the phone again, she said, “Oh, please stop this!” Now his hand was stroking her where she loved him the most, but she had managed to get her legs tightly crossed.

  “I agree,” Genny’s voice said. “Just because your dad is rich doesn’t mean you’re rich.”

  “Yes …” She gave Charlie one last despairing look, and then, because his hand was so poignantly there, she let herself relax a little bit and felt him enter her with his finger. She let out a little gasp.

  “I knew you’d be horrified,” Genny said. “But the fascinating thing to me was how she got all this information.…”

  Now she could feel him, that marvelous part of him she loved the most, urgently pressing behind her, but she didn’t want him that way—or did she? She felt that marvelous urgent muscle between her legs from behind, and that warm hand in front, the other on her breast, and he was kissing her throat and shoulder. In this complicated landscape of sensations she let the phone roll away from her across the pillow, where it lay—somehow out of her reach, though she kept clutching for it—emitting words: “Who’s Who … the Social Register … Grosse Pointe.…”

  She finally had the phone again and said, “Look, Genny, can I—”

  But the words were unstoppable: “Two William Aylesburys … both named Nancy.…” And the real-life Nancy, the only Nancy that mattered to her now, rolled gently on her back, removing herself from him, but only briefly, and then arranged her night gown just a little to make it easier for him. His body lifted over her, and his hands spooned her toward him.

  “Genny, please, can I—”

  “Why don’t you come on over and have a cup of coffee?”

  Smiling down on her in that lovely way he had, his body arched above her like a bridge, like a leaning statue, a leaning statue of a naked god. Then the statue’s body descended and proved cool and firm and achingly human, and covered her body with its own. She felt him enter her, felt herself enclose him, and said “Oh!”

  “I know you’d be shocked. I was too,” Genny’s voice said.

  “Genny, I—”

  “Well, that’s my story, morning glory. And meanwhile, is the lord and master in, no pun intended?”

  It was too much. She was going to scream or burst out laughing, or do both at once. “He can’t come to the phone right now,” she said, feeling screams and laughter and perhaps even wild tears bursting out of her, “and I’ve got to hang up.”

  “Ask him to call me, will you? The McCarthy Service has a message for him too.”

  “I will. Good-bye.” She managed to get the receiver back in its cradle.

  She could feel tears in her eyes. They ran freely from between her closed eyelids. “You mean bastard,” she whispered to him between kisses. “What a mean thing to do to me … mean bastard … mean man … oh, beautiful man! Beautiful man.…” She let herself encompass him, engulf him, swallow him, suck him whole into her own being, this beautiful man, until he disappeared within her, and they had both vanished, swallowed in one of those timeless places which, from the first moment she had known him, had been the most beautiful places of all her life.

  In his most restive dreams, he was a boy again, of about fifteen, swimming at a beach at Nahant. That was before his father and mother had broken up, before his father had gone off—“Just wandered off,” his mother always said—in search of faraway places and even farther-away desires, and they had all been together. They had been a group. But, more important, he and his twin sister, Cathy, had been a group—they, these two, and the small little circle of summer friends around them. But he and Cathy had been the double center of that circle, and so very few outside the circle really understood it, or wanted to. Which helped, because it was a very exclusive party—these two and the summer friends—to which very few others were invited and to which most of those who were arrived too late.

  They had felt very lucky then. They had owned the ocean and the shore, but more important, they had owned each other and they had owned themselves. When one has such ownership one is willing to be lucky, for, as they used to say, to agree to be lucky took nerve, and that was half the game. They had their own language, and their own laughter, and their own jokes, for they knew that they were special people. On good days they would meet at their special strip of beach. They would perch there wearily like birds after a long flight, and they would balefully eye all strangers who passed by. Then they would retreat into their private laughter and their private universe, which contained everything as far as the eye could see, and the eye could see as far as Spain and farther.

  The reality of that fifteenth summer had been dreamlike as it was. But in his dream of it now the reality shifted sharply, and became brutal and frightening. In the now-dream, all these years later, they were swimming, the group, not too far out from shore, and Cathy was swimming near him. She suddenly called out, said something to him, reached out her hand to him. But he couldn’t hear the words, and when he looked again she had disappeared beneath the water, and the queer paired eggs that had borne them were separated forever. And when he shouted for them, all the rest of the summer friends were gone.

  Of course, that wasn’t how Cathy had died. She had not died until many years after that particular summer, long after he had married Nancy, after the army, after they had moved to California, after Cathy herself had married, and the way she had died had been much more dreadful. But still, whenever he had this dream, he wondered if it weren’t some kind of signal, some kind of message from the other of the two paired eggs, the shattered one. And he had begun to believe that he had been having that dream since long before Cathy died and that the dream was a prelude to her death and to those strange words she repeated to him that night in California, just before she died: “You know, of course, that I never wanted to be born.”

  He was in that dream now and was trying to struggle out of it. In the struggle that dream turned course and became another dream, in which he was playing a terrible game of tennis with a leaden racket, unable to move or hit the ball. And by the time he got himself fully awake and could see where he was—in a bedroom in his new house in Westmount, where he had just made love to his wife, who was sleeping now with little rhythmic gulps of breath—he could not remember what he had been dreaming at all, except that it had something to do with California. He kissed her once and eased his weight gently away from her. He looked at the clock. He had slept only for a few minutes.

  He lay there, sleepless, looking at the bright day outside. From where he lay he could see only the green tops of trees. It was a California-looking day from that angle, and he thought about California.
And about his sister too, because Cathy and California had been initially connected. No, as Carla had said, the circumstances of their leaving California had not been particularly happy ones. But he hadn’t realized that Carla had been aware of the unhappiness of those circumstances. He and Nancy had always been very good, he thought, at keeping the children unaware of it whenever there was trouble. But somehow, obviously, Carla had picked it up, or at least bits and pieces of it. She couldn’t have picked up the whole story, not possibly.

  Charlie and Nancy had always blamed what happened on a man named Bill Ryerson. Bill had been out to get Charlie—gunning for him, there was no other term for it—for a long time. He had, in fact, as much as said so toward the end. Charlie had known Bill Ryerson from another advertising agency where they had both worked several years before. He had known, when he took his last job, that it would mean encountering Bill Ryerson again, for Bill had preceded him to Barry & Kohler. But the Barry & Kohler offer had been such a good one that Charlie had decided to overlook the fact that he would be working—and closely, too—with Ryerson, with whom he had never seen eye to eye. It had been wishful thinking, of course, but when he first took the job Charlie had thought perhaps he could patch together a working truce with Ryerson, come to some sort of artistic compromise with him, since Ryerson was to be his co-art director.

  Bill Ryerson was one of those smart, slick advertising men who wore fuscous slubbed-silk suits and matching neckties, who was always doing isometric exercises in his office, and whose eye was always on the main chance. He had no taste whatever and made no bones about it. In fact he belittled Charlie whenever Charlie mentioned taste. “To hell with taste. Screw taste,” he used to say. “The job of an ad is to sell the soap!” He was willing to resort to all sorts of travesties of taste, and even, at times, to outright deceptions, in order to “sell the soap.” Bill Ryerson was famous in the business for his ability to design a layout so as to make the product—a package of frozen peas, for instance—look much larger than it actually was. It “sold the soap.” And there was his celebrated ad for a certain brand of corn syrup, where the headline—which had come from no copywriter’s pen but right out of Bill Ryerson’s head onto his drawing board—said, “19¢ LESS!” Nineteen cents less than what? The ad never said; it didn’t need to. The ad had been a tremendous success. It had “sold the soap.”

  Their final disagreement—the last of many—had been over an advertisement, Charlie smiled to remember, for frozen orange juice. Funny the silly things you fought over, but that was the way it was in that crazy business. Another of Bill Ryerson’s favorite expressions was “Beef it up! Put some muscle in it!” When he had seen Charlie’s layout for the orange-juice ad Bill had said, “Look, you’ve got to beef it up! Put some muscle in it! Sell the soap! You can’t sell frozen orange juice like you’d sell champagne.” And that, of course, had been Charlie’s idea—orange juice looking fresh and frothy in a hollow-stemmed champagne glass. Very simple, striking, and tasteful. Ryerson, of course, dashed off a layout of his own (he was extremely fast), another of his over-sized depictions of the can. And the office became a divided camp—but with most of the staff, Charlie was pleased to notice, and with the most intelligent members of the staff at that, on Charlie’s side. At last Charlie was called into the office of the president, Tom Barry. And Charlie was glad, because he liked and respected Tom Barry and this meant that now, at last a decision would be made. During the dispute the orange-juice account had come to a standstill.

  Tom Barry was a big, friendly-looking Irishman and he shook Charlie’s hand warmly and said, “Charlie, I’ve been meaning to congratulate you on that prize one of your paintings got out at that show in Pacific Palisades. I’m real proud of you. That kind of publicity is good for us too, you know—lets our clients know what kind of talent we’ve got in this shop. Sit down and let’s talk a minute.”

  Charlie had brought his layout with him, but when he started to offer it, Tom Barry waved it away. “Never mind that,” he said; “I don’t want to talk about that. If you want my opinion, I don’t like either of them, but I don’t want to talk about that.”

  Charlie sat down.

  Tom Barry was a doodler, and as he talked he began drawing fat sausages on a pad of yellow paper in front of him. “I’ve just had Bill Ryerson in here,” he said, “and he and I have had a little talk and what I’d like to find out is why you and Bill are always at loggerheads.”

  Charlie tried to be as charitable about Ryerson as he could, and so he considered his answer carefully before giving it. “Bill and I,” he said finally, “just have totally different concepts about what makes good advertising.”

  “Well, that’s not so surprising,” Tom said. “There are as many different concepts about advertising as there are people, I suppose. Does that mean you always have to be at loggerheads with Bill? Isn’t there room for more than one concept in this office? Personally, I’ve always tried to encourage as many concepts as possible from my people.”

  Charlie weighed his next answer carefully as well. “Tom,” he said, “if you ask me, part of the trouble—the whole trouble, in fact—is this double-headed structure of your art department. Bill and I have equal authority. There’s no one to make a final decision.”

  Tom Barry frowned and drew larger sausages. “It’s always worked well before. With shared responsibilities.”

  “But, Tom, don’t you see—” Charlie began.

  But Tom interrupted him. “How long have you been with us, Charlie?”

  “Fourteen—no, fifteen months,” Charlie said.

  “Almost a year and a half. And you came to us with a lot of good experience, I know that. Let’s talk about you for a minute. I know you’re a bright fellow, but I’ve always wanted to get to know you better. So let’s talk about you. You started out working for your father-in-law, I believe.”

  “No,” Charlie said. “I never worked for my father-in-law. He’s a banker. Where’d you get that idea, Tom?”

  “I thought Ryerson said—”

  “Oh, I get it,” Charlie said. “Ryerson’s been in here complaining about me, of course. He’s told you that I have a rich wife and that I’m a dilettante art director who can afford to talk about good taste. Isn’t that it? He’s talked that way to me, in fact, dozens of times.”

  Tom Barry smiled and began filling in the sausages with heavy lines. “Well, he said something like that,” he said. “But you know how Bill is, Charlie, when he gets excited—running around, flapping like a chicken with its head cut off.”

  “Well, if he’s been running around flapping about my personal life, Tom, I might as well give you the correct version. My wife is not rich. Maybe she will be someday, when her father dies. But her father is one of those men who doesn’t think he’s mortal, and at this point I’m beginning to think he’s right.”

  “What was your first job, then?”

  “After the army I went into business for myself—right here in Los Angeles. I was in partnership with my sister—a twin sister. She was a marvelous copywriter, and I handled the art end. It was a great team. We were Lord and Lord. We started out as just a little copy and art service, but we began picking up accounts, and pretty soon we were able to move out of our respective kitchens and took offices up on the strip. We took on a few staff and were actually turning out completed ads. We did very well.”

  “Oh, yes. Lord and Lord—I remember. There was a magazine write-up about you, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes.” It was queer how many people remembered that magazine story; it was so long ago. He and Cathy had been so excited about that story at the time, but afterward it had seemed to cause so many problems. “We had quite a lot of publicity at the time,” he said.

  “What happened to Lord and Lord?” Tom Barry asked.

  “My sister died,” Charlie said simply.

  “You never found another partner?”

  “I tried—for a while. But there just wasn’t anyone as good as she. Nobod
y who had her talent, her flair, her imagination.” And it was true, he suddenly thought, there had never been anyone—anyone he had worked with since—who had been as good as she. “And all the fun had gone out of it. Because that was the greatest thing about our partnership—the fun we had doing the things we did. And we never compromised with taste. Without her, it was only half a business, half a—” He realized he had been about to say “half a life,” which would not have been true. And yet, of course, it was true in a way, since theirs had been a shared life from the beginning by the accident of their twinship. “Don’t forget we’re a freak of nature,” she used to say. And he remembered her that day, after the army, when she had first suggested the partnership. “Come to California, Chazz,” she had urged him. “It’s just like Nahant all year round.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  “I joined Fawcett-Chisholm as their—”

  “How long with them?”

  “A year, a little over.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I went with—”

  “In other words,” Tom Barry said, putting down the pencil, “that was when this pattern started. One job to another. Fast start, fast finish. After your sister died.”

  Charlie Lord jumped to his feet. “Who is this from—this talk about a pattern? Who? It’s more Ryerson, isn’t it? Don’t you see what he wants? He wants my neck, Tom—”

  “Now wait a minute, Charlie,” Tom Barry said in a grave voice. “This is me talking, not Ryerson. I think you’re good. I think you’ve got real talent. I like you. But I think I see another fast finish coming for you, and I’d like to prevent it if I can.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Tom. This office isn’t big enough for both Bill Ryerson and me. If you want me, you’ll have to get rid of him.”

  “You wait a minute, Charlie,” Tom repeated. “Is this an ultimatum you’re giving me? If it is, go home and think about it first.”

  “There’s no need to think about it, Tom. I can’t work with Ryerson—it’s as simple as that. The man has no taste and no talent. I want to work for you, but I only will on one condition—that you put one man in charge of your art department. Me or Ryerson.”