Henry had gone into one of those strip joints once. It was the cleavage on the young woman who accosted him as he was walking to North Beach for some pasta that had beckoned him in. And yet she spoke to him so gently. “You seem like a nice person,” she said. “You do, too,” he replied, feeling incredibly stupid the minute the words came out of his mouth. But she smiled and said, “Aren’t you sweet!” and parted the curtains and led him inside. It wasn’t until he was at a table that they told him the girls wouldn’t sit with him unless he ordered a bottle of champagne. But he didn’t want them to sit with him. In fact, he wanted to get out, but the girl, still holding his hand, said, “Don’t worry. I’ll sit with you, no champagne,” so he sat. There was another girl onstage dancing lethargically in complete nakedness except for high heels. The one holding his hand spoke with a slight southern accent.
“Used to be, back in the day, like in the seventies or something, we could be nude the whole time. Way before me. Now we have to wear at least lingerie when we sit with the guys.”
“Really?” he said.
“Um,” she replied.
She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. It was all the paint on her face that had fooled him. Christ, he thought to himself, what am I doing? He was suddenly struck by how her makeup stopped so abruptly under her chin. How pale her neck was. And under the pancake, pimples. And then he had a flash of inspiration: he would get her out of there! Out of this terrible life. How? He would marry her! Yes!
Except he was already married.
“Buy me a white wine?” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
He ordered her one, but the waitress brought her two. And also two for him.
“Two-drink minimum” the waitress muttered. “Per person.”
“I love white wine,” the girl said. “Don’t you? You know, I can dance for you if you like. A private dance, you know? In the back there are rooms.”
“Sorry?”
“Just you and me. Say a hundred bucks.”
“Oh!” he said.
“It’ll be fun.”
“I know this sounds crazy,” he blurted, “but I want to get you out of here.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Private room. Lap dance, strip, it’ll be really fun.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.”
“Well, okay, sure, whatever you need. Why not? Only a hundred. A lot of places it’s a lot more, believe me. But I like you. In fact, I’ll do it for eighty because I really like you. You seem like such a nice guy.”
She placed her hand on his leg, ran it up toward his groin.
And before he realized it, he’d bolted from his seat, run out of the darkened club, and found himself standing in the white glare of the street.
Except the bouncer ran after him and grabbed him by the collar. “Hey, man, the bill. You probably want to pay that.”
“Oh,” said Henry. “Sorry, sorry. I forgot.”
“Right.”
“No, really, I just forgot.”
“It’s one-twenty.”
“One-twenty?”
“Hundred and twenty.”
“For a couple of glasses of wine?”
“That’s what it costs. Read the menu.”
“They didn’t show me a menu.”
“One-twenty,” the guy said.
“Do you take American Express?” Henry asked.
But the beery scent of that room and the sweat he felt coming off the girl stayed with him for a long time. Even now, as he stood there looking across the yard, he brought to mind that place on her neck where the line of makeup gave way to the real girl—and sometimes he wished he hadn’t run away and hadn’t already been married, because the two of them—he and the girl—could have started over: a house in the country, a passel of kids, an all-electric vehicle. He placed the palm of his hand upon his grimy little window and tried again to see past the curtains on the upper floor of the strip joint. Poor kid!
But then he heard the door to his office open and he turned to see Denise, the tattooed art director, leaning against the doorframe with an armful of layouts.
“Hey,” she said. “You ready?”
“You’re here already?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” she replied. “It’s almost ten. They’ll be here in half an hour. I’m going to go set up.”
“Right,” he said.
“You okay?”
“Why does everyone always ask me that?”
She went off in the direction of the small conference room, but his eyes did not move from the spot she had vacated. He wondered if people leave a trace of themselves when they rest somewhere—not in the way of perfume or body odor, but in the way of essence, of soul. What if we leave little vestiges of our souls wherever we go? And is the totality of the soul diminished or is it somehow enlarged? This brought to mind a little carved soapstone someone had once given him—his old professor of anthropology at Chicago—from India, though he couldn’t recall which dynasty—a tiny little frog crudely carved—from the Maratha period, yes—from northern India, some village, he never knew which, and really he had no idea how old it was, maybe from the seventeenth century, maybe from the eighteenth—and this frog was only as big as the tip of his pinky, and the white of the sandstone had turned muddy and dark where it had been rubbed over and over, especially on the ridge of the frog’s back where it glistened with oil from a thousand hands—and when Henry held it in his own hands, when he touched it to his cheek, when he put it to his lips, he got the uncanny sensation he was touching not the frog but all the people who had ever rubbed it for good luck, even down to the fellow who first carved it, and that they had all left traces of themselves just as he was leaving something of himself. What an exquisite feeling that was! To be attached to all those lost lives, those obscure creatures without which this little frog would have no patina. They had lived their lives just as he was living his, the only difference being that he knew his own name and he didn’t know theirs. And also they were Indian and he wasn’t. Although some of them could have been British.
And then he couldn’t remember why he was staring at the doorpost, so he pulled out his laptop, powered it up, waited till the screen opened, clicked on the Protox files, reviewed his notes, closed the lid, and carted his computer with him into the conference room.
CHAPTER 2
* * *
10:15–11:45 a.m.
On the way to the conference room he stopped to look in at the IT guy, Larry McPeek, who was busy writing code or maybe just shopping on Amazon, and they said hello to each other and said “Merry Christmas,” which everyone had been saying to one another for days now, and so Henry continued down the hall wishing everyone a merry Christmas in a very cheerful voice, but actually he was thinking about Denise, the art director. She wasn’t exactly hot, because she had a horsey kind of face, but with the tattoos and the hair extensions and the skin-tight jeans with the bright orange cuffs, she was definitely sexy, a model’s body as they liked to say when you had no boobs and were tall and slender with a nice little backside; but it was her hands that got to Henry—the fingers like eels, long and elastic, as if they had no bones and which she held aloft and widespread when she was trying to make a point, or otherwise squeezed upon her waist at either side when she was standing in the hall. Sometimes she used them as a pillow for her chin when she was listening to music or contemplating the placement of a photograph. No matter what they were doing, these fingers were astoundingly erotic—what would they feel like? he wondered. He knew women hated when men objectified them this way. And he hated that he objectified them. But, jeez, he was a guy. And it was hard, really hard, to change fifty thousand years of objectifying women. You try it! he silently cried out to Gloria Steinem, the only feminist he could remember the name of at the moment. Yeah, you try it! And by the way, he pointed out to Ms. Steinem, I am completely aware that Denise has a brain. She’s kind of egghead-y actually. So please.
He returned to his contemp
lation of Denise’s lubricious hands but had to ask himself: When did people truly take note of their own hands? For instance, you don’t see monkeys wearing rings on their fingers. Not Australopithecus, either. Not even Homo erectus. No. It must have happened at the same time we started painting and making music and praying to gods. Just forty thousand short years ago. That’s when we saw our hands not just as useful but as beautiful.
He thought about the cave paintings at Chauvet, and the film about them, and how art at the very beginning of its existence was so extraordinarily beautiful, and that the world in those days was filled with Rembrandts and Titians, only they didn’t know it, they thought they were doing magic, not art, which maybe aren’t so different after all, and he wondered what those first artists would think of the work Denise did, and this led him again to wonder at her tattoos. Modern primitive, they called it. But she wasn’t primitive, was she?
When he entered the conference room he was pleased to notice that Denise had lots of rings on, including a very large one that covered two fingers.
How far we’ve come! he thought. One ring, two fingers!
He opened his computer and sat himself down next to her with a nonchalant smile. Meanwhile, Alan Schwartz, the associate creative director, came in, sat down on the other side of her, only much closer, and threw his arm around her chair and announced, “We’re gonna rock ’em this morning, ain’t we?” Alan was educated at Stanford, but he used bad grammar to prove he had street cred.
“It’s da bomb!” Henry agreed. “We’re gonna pimp that hustle, bro.”
“Jesus,” said Denise.
Laid out on the table were drawings of people using Protox. They represented the most impossible optimism Henry could imagine. The first was a cute spot with Jennifer Lawrence extolling the virtues of Protox. Next was Chris Froome, the winner of a couple of Tours de France, who counted Protox “team member number one!” Then Tom Brady of the New England Patriots explaining to his supermodel wife how Protox can turn beautiful skin “into Perfect with a capital P.” And the tour de force? Brad Pitt, who, according to Schwartz, has notoriously bad skin, taking the six-week “Beauty Really Is Skin Deep!” cleanse, on camera, 24-7. Together, these people would have to be paid around fifty million dollars. (Not counting the one in which Robert Downey Jr., in full Iron Man regalia, confesses that clearer skin gave him the confidence to get off cocaine and “back into saving the world again. Thank you, Protox!” and then does a tap dance with Gwyneth Paltrow.) Henry knew none of this could ever happen. The budget was six hundred thousand dollars including talent, shooting, editorial, music, special effects, graphics, travel, meals, and the agency’s 18.5 percent profit.
“Boy, these look good,” he remarked, as Denise gathered up the storyboards and set them facedown upon the rail.
There were also, of course, more realistic approaches. Backup, they called them. But they weren’t going to show them unless they absolutely had to.
“You know what?” Henry had said. “Might as well show everything. That way they can see how great the recommendation really is.”
When the time came, Henry made a brief introductory presentation and then got lost in his own head for most of the rest of it, having become obsessed with the varieties of fish you could no longer get in the market and the whole business about acid rain and tuna. Occasionally he awoke and jotted down some notes. Finally came the time for client feedback. He looked up from his computer, eyes bright with interest, and said, “So? What’s the verdict?”
The clients had been laughing at the scripts in all the right places and had listened attentively to the rationale for each of the campaigns. They’d nodded at the appropriate times and took notes whenever a research fact was mentioned. But now it was their turn. Gretchen, the VP of marketing—the senior person at this particular meeting—looked to her right and her left, found the most junior person in the room, and said, “Albert, what are your opinions?” Albert said that the work was very creative and he really liked the spot where they were all singing, but he was disappointed that it didn’t rhyme.
“It’s a work in progress,” Denise chimed in.
“Even so,” he said.
And then, looking back and forth at Gretchen, he began to point out the deficiencies in each and every spot, always, however, counterbalanced with a nod to their strengths, because Albert apparently couldn’t quite tell what Gretchen thought about them.
Next came Pat. Pat was feisty. There was always a feisty one, and in this case it was Pat. With the instinct of a cobra, she tore into the fifty-million-dollar campaign. Aside from being “a bit too expensive,” it was something she had seen before, at least a million times.
“You’ve seen a spot with Iron Man doing a tap dance with Gwyneth Paltrow?” Alan Schwartz asked.
“That’s not what I mean. I mean the idea of it.”
Well, of course she was right, Henry thought. It had all been done before. But hasn’t everything? They say there are only seven basic plots in literature—but so what?
Then Ralph, the second-in-command, began his spiel. He was soft-spoken and measured and had a way of making everyone fall asleep after two sentences. He went methodically through each commercial, at each step asking, rhetorically it turned out, “How does this realize the strategy? That’s my benchmark. How does this realize the strategy? Does this realize the strategy? I look for the strategy in each part, in each line, and I ask myself, does this realize the strategy? And finally, does it, overall, communicate the strategy? In other words, is it strategic?” Of the Tour de France spot, he said, “Isn’t the guy Italian or something? Is that strategic? Do Italian bike riders forward the strategic goal? I’m not sure. I’m just not sure.”
“He’s British,” said Schwartz.
“Yes, but is that strategic? This is what I’m asking.”
Finally it was Gretchen’s turn. She was about fifty years old, which was actually quite old for this job. By fifty she should have at least been an executive VP and not just a brand VP, but she was an idiot and there was nothing she could do about it.
“Well!” she said with a bright and somewhat off-putting smile. “I don’t really have much to add. I guess we’re not quite there yet. Why don’t we take another stab at it? Excellent work, everyone!”
And just then, Frank Bigalow, Henry’s boss, the one with his name on the door, popped his head in. “Anyone for Michael Mina?” he said, meaning the clients, not the staff. But then he added, “Quantum, you want to join us?”
“Can’t,” said Henry, half truthfully. “I have an appointment. But enjoy yourselves!”
And off they went to spend about eight hundred dollars on lunch.
In the emptiness that followed, Henry Quantum announced that he would write up a meeting report and do a new creative brief, and with great enthusiasm told them the work was brilliant and the clients were just Philistines.
Alan Schwartz stood up. “Did you see the look on Gretchen’s face? We might as well have been reciting Finnegans Wake.”
When he left, Denise gathered up the layouts. “Alan needs to feel his work means something.”
“What a shame,” quipped Henry, which to his surprise elicited a gay laugh from Denise. He had been serious.
In any event, Denise took off a minute or two later and Henry was left alone with his laptop. He looked at his watch. Eleven thirty. He would do a couple of little housekeeping things on his computer and then go get the perfume. The housekeeping had to do with the notes for Protox and how to make the client’s idiotic comments cogent. He sighed.
* * *
Henry felt honor bound to do his best for Protox, as he would for any client, though as he sat there he had to ask himself why.
For instance, he always insisted creative make it clear that Protox was not a Botox rip-off but an entirely different product. You drank it, it cleansed your system and made your skin glow. That was the basic selling proposition: Drink your way to younger-looking skin. Did Protox live
up to that claim? Well, if you looked at the before-and-after photos you would certainly think so. But what was rarely (never!) mentioned is that you would always be running to the bathroom. Especially during the three-day super cleanse. Basically, Protox was a laxative.
But you had to believe in your clients’ products, didn’t you?—believe with your whole being, like Billy Graham believed in Jesus: you had to give yourself up to it or you just couldn’t get to the promised land. But Henry had been trained as a philosopher, and this was becoming more and more of a problem. Because anyone who has ever read Plato knows that Socrates taught that there are philosophers—and then there are sophists. A philosopher seeks truth. A sophist merely wants to convince you of his argument.
Henry sat looking at the notes he had been typing on his screen. “I am a sophist!” he cried aloud. It was like a blade inserted into his femoral artery and pushed all the way up to his heart. He clutched his stomach. I’m a fucking sophist! All my brainpower, all my persuasive talents, all of me, in the service of a laxative! The reason your skin glows is that you are totally dehydrated and feverish.
And what about the other crap I’ve worked on? Malcolm T. Farnsworth Trousers That Fit. Fit? They didn’t fit! They were shit. And soup, he said to himself, I wrote reams and reams on the benefits of canned soup. Not even Campbell’s. Some off-brand called Health Country. Should have been Death Country. Cans of salt and sugar is what they were. Cans of liquefied chicken from chicken concentration camps! But the worst was not even the soup or the Protox. It was the Samurai Brand Real Beef Chewing Jerky and Pinch of Beef. Grotesquely processed from the lowest-quality desiccated meat, it was shredded to look like chewing tobacco or powdered to look like snuff, and packaged that way for little kids. Not only was he selling children a food item that was grossly unhealthy, but he was glorifying chewing tobacco! And he had done it with pleasure, with passion, with the true belief of a convert. In fact, if you asked him even now, in this very second of self-flagellation, he would have told you the commercial they made was great. They got a CLIO for it!
The Heart of Henry Quantum Page 2
