“What are you talking about?” He looked baffled.
“I understand you guys are gonna want to talk books and stuff.” I sniffed and shrugged my shoulders. “I just thought it was rude.”
Ben cocked a brow. “Me getting to know your friend you brought me here to meet?”
“You know, if you’d rather hang out with her and Gina tonight, that’s fine.”
He threw up his hands. “Casey! Where is this coming from?”
Decades of competing for the attention of men, I could have said. Instead I said, “Ummm, from you guys ignoring me?!”
“I don’t even know what to say to that, it’s so far from true.”
Say you won’t leave! I wanted to drop to my knees and beg him. Instead, I put my hands on my hips and roared, “Say you’re sorry!”
Yes, it took a while to clean that one up, not until I’d stomped around some more and eaten four tacos and sobered up and tearfully admitted at one in the morning after much bluster and evasion that I’d been jealous and insecure and suffered chronically from impostor syndrome around him and Susan, not to mention the chronic issues simmering wordlessly between Susan and me. “I’m sorry,” I sniffled, wiping my eyes. “For taking my garbage out on you.”
I could only assume now that Ben would run screaming in the other direction. But in fact the opposite was true. “Come here, you goofball,” he said tenderly at my kitchen table and pulled me in for a hug, the peppery detritus from the tacos getting cold on our plates. “It’s okay.” He kissed the top of my head. “You’re okay. I adore you.”
Lord. If only it were easier to be adored, to receive the affection we’ve always longed for, to heap it back on the person generous enough to put it on offer. But it’s a lot harder to take in good stuff than bad. We keep goodness suspiciously at arm’s length, waiting for the other shoe to drop, since at one point or another all of us were loved imperfectly.
Or at least, that’s what I found myself thinking about on various airplanes in the peripatetic days following that interaction. In late May I traveled to Vermont to poach another potential asset, the highbrow, New Yorkery nature writer Tracy Mallard. One of Tracy’s essays about loons had made its way onto that short list that high school teachers use for teaching composition, so she was something of a household name, at least among people who paid a modicum of attention during English class. Nature’s Harvest, another established client of People’s Republic, best known for their granola bars, was hoping to use Mallard to get their brand, as Celeste put it, “back to nature.” The sugary granola bars, once a nationwide staple in children’s lunchboxes, were now the sort of thing on parental “banned food” lists, or what you’d only reluctantly pick up at a gas station.
Nature’s Harvest was too calcified to do anything about the nutritional content of the granola bars, but their marketing department was all right with spending a lot of cash decalcifying their reputation. After several conference calls, we’d coaxed them into making new compostable wrappers with animals on them, in honor of the 0.05% of profits that would now go to the World Wildlife Foundation. Inside the wrapper, we’d put a little bon mot from Tracy. When, on the first call, someone in the Nature’s Harvest marketing department suggested it would save time and money if they, instead of contracting with Mallard, paid for the rights to use her previously published work, Celeste handled the dissent with the deftness of a career diplomat.
“Everyone’s quoting someone these days,” she said smoothly. “Even the parking garage beneath our building has a Gandhi quote on the wall. It’s not enough to use Tracy’s outdated content. We want Tracy to develop original content for us, and solely us. Something no one else has. Casey and I are also going to ask her to sign away any rights for anything outside her books so that in the end the only place people will be able to read Tracy is through a brand to which they know she is deeply committed: Nature’s Harvest.”
We are? I thought, alarmed. The marketing team murmured in approval. “I wouldn’t have thought of that,” one of them said.
“No, you wouldn’t,” Celeste said in a soothing voice. “And that’s why you hired us.”
Scheduling a visit with Tracy ended up being tricky. It was well known that she was a little crazy, that she talked to animals. She also had very specific times she was willing to talk to me. I pulled into the gravel driveway in my rental at 4:45 P.M. Per the instructions I received from Tracy’s assistant, Harriet, I waited in my car until exactly 4:50, then headed for her old farmhouse. At 4:53 I knocked on the front door, then crouched down and put my eyes up to the mail slot. Naturally, with all this tiptoed pageantry, I expected a madwoman to open the door.
“May I help you?” A pair of eyes, blue-gray, appeared on the other side of the mail slot. The voice was tremulous and soft and sounded the way sunlight felt on bare arms after winter.
“Hello there!” I said in a voice that I hoped sounded like my yoga teacher’s. “Peaceful greetings to you! My name is Casey Pendergast, and I’m here to spend a very special afternoon with you! I also brought you cheese!” I dropped back from the mail slot in order to hold up the gourmet basket I’d bought in town.
“Did Harriet say you could come?” the voice said.
“Yes, she did!” I said. “Harriet even said she had left us fresh iced tea!”
After a moment there was a rustle, then the sound of the door unlocking. I scrambled to my feet. Before me stood a small woman, at most five two, hair arranged in an unkempt, graying bun on the top of her head. She wore soft cotton pants and matching tunic, along with socks and Birkenstocks. But her face was like nothing I’d ever seen. Though the day was overcast, her wrinkled visage was golden, radiant. Some bulb was lit up in the back of her head.
“Come in,” she said in her sunlit voice, fluttering like a bird with her small, thin hands. “Come in.”
Her house looked the way you might imagine a hippie’s house in Vermont to look—prayer flags and woven rugs and Mexican blankets folded over the back of the couch. It was very quiet and sparsely furnished and smelled like essential oils, save for the corner where three big, old, lumberly dogs were snoring on mattress-sized dog beds.
“Jacob, Moses, and Rumi,” Tracy said, pointing to them.
“Can I pet them?” I asked. She nodded. I went over and let them nuzzle and lick my hands.
“They’re rescues,” Tracy said over my shoulder. “They found Jacob on the side of the road, hit by a car. Moses and Rumi came from the same litter, a box of puppies dropped off at the shelter in the middle of the night. They’re my guardian angels. Yes, you are,” she said to them in a singsong voice. “Yes, you are.”
I loved dogs. I could have petted them all day, had their breath not smelled like mustard gas. I stood up and wiped the saliva on my pants, dry-cleaning bills be damned. “They’re adorable. Do they like cheese? I brought cheese.”
Tracy clapped her hands. “They love cheese!”
Her enthusiasm was genuine. Everything about her was genuine; she was like quicksilver, moving from emotion to emotion with a nakedness I wasn’t used to seeing on adult faces. It disarmed me. Alarmed me, even. I was so unused to that degree of sincerity that I found myself, strangely, wanting to protect myself from it. Or maybe I wanted to protect her from the likes of me.
Eventually I learned, while swallowing my cheese and moral anxiety, that the reason Tracy was willing to work with Nature’s Harvest was that she wanted to buy the animal shelter where she’d gotten her dogs. It was a kill shelter, she explained, not because they wanted it to be but for lack of revenue. Apparently Harriet had already met with a lawyer who was going to help them get their nonprofit status and establish an endowment in Tracy’s name that would hopefully continue ad infinitum. “So no animals in Bennington will ever be killed again,” Tracy said, her palms clasped together resolutely.
Her eyes were so bright and hopeful
that it didn’t seem worth bringing up, say, abuse, car accidents, hunting accidents, et cetera. When she spoke of her dogs and other species she’d fostered it was clear these creatures were her friends and family, that she felt more akin to them than to people. To accommodate this sensibility I tried to make myself as canine as possible: snuggling into the couch, chewing enthusiastically. I reassured her that yes, I was positive no animals would be harmed by her signing a contract with Nanü, that in fact because of us, Nature’s Harvest would be cooperating with the World Wildlife Foundation to save even more animals than she, Tracy, could save on her own. At the sound of this, Tracy lit up. “Oh, good!” she exclaimed. “Oh, glory! I knew your heart was in the right place! I knew it from the moment you walked in the door!”
Well, let me tell you. It felt…not great…hearing her say this and then putting a document on the chipped mosaic coffee table that basically said Nature’s Harvest, and Nanü by proxy, would own the distribution rights to all Tracy’s writing, minus what was published in book form by her New York publishers. And yet this is exactly what I did.
Be it the cheese, or my gut in serious conflict in my brain, I came down with a case of indigestion. “I’m so happy you’re happy,” I said, as my stomach burbled and lurched.
“I am so happy,” she said, and clasped her hands to her chest girlishly. “Just when it seems possible to give up on the world, a young person like you comes along.”
“Oh, stop,” I said, as my gut continued to grumble. Didn’t Tracy deserve to be saving animals without signing all of her intellectual property away? Then again, there are always trade-offs to be made, that’s what living in a democracy is all about: the best possible solution for the greatest number of people. Or animals, in this case. Tracy’s shelter was a perfect example of idealism and pragmatism lining up with one another. It was a cause she cared a lot about, and she couldn’t do what she wanted without Nature’s Harvest’s money. And really, what was worse for Tracy, having to spend a few hours writing inspirational messages for granola bar wrappers or weighing countless litters of dead puppies on her conscience?
“Tell me about you now,” Tracy said as I was putting the signed contract in my bag.
“Oh, but I should let you go!” I said. I was going into my obsequious mode, an equal and opposite response to seedy behavior. “You must be exhausted!”
“Do you enjoy your work?” Tracy said, as if she hadn’t heard me.
“I do! I love it!”
She nodded. “But perhaps it’s not the right work for you.”
I shifted uncomfortably on the couch. I’d ended up with a Mexican blanket wrapped around my legs. “I don’t think that’s true. After all, I get to help writers like you achieve your dreams and reflect your core values to the American people!”
“But you have your own dreams.”
“No, I don’t.” The words shot out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying. Nothing makes you correct someone faster than when they’ve just said something about you that’s dead-on correct. “I mean, this is my dream.”
She smiled and continued to pet Jacob, who had sidled up and rested his flat head on the couch cushion. I felt like she was trying to communicate with me at a decibel I couldn’t hear, too high for a regular person’s frequency. “Anyway,” I said, putting down my empty cheese plate and half-empty glass of iced tea. “Thank you again for everything. I’m available by phone or email if you have any questions, and I’ll tell Harriet that too.”
At the front door, she leaned over and hugged me goodbye. She was so slight and fragile. I wanted to take care of her. She must have felt the same way, because as I skipped down the porch steps and down the driveway she called out, “Be careful in Vegas!”
I turned around in surprise. “I’m not going to Vegas.”
She was waving, then she stopped. “You’re not?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, silly me. I’m always doing that. Mishearing things.” She laughed, unperturbed. “Travel safe now, Casey. The world is such an unruly place.”
* * *
—
“I dunno, I feel icky about it,” I said to Ben later that night. I was filling him in on the most recent developments of my moral dilemma over FaceTime. There was a lot you could do with another person over long distance, thanks to technology. I was lying on my side on the hotel bed in my underwear, looking at my phone, which I’d propped up on the pillow next to mine. Ben’s face filled the screen, save for the corner where I could see myself. Often, instead of looking at him, I’d find myself worrying about the hotel room’s lighting and criticizing my own features.
Ben grimaced. “Yeah, that’s tough. Most writers are pretty clueless. I can’t think of a single one of my writer friends who could even tell you what the price of milk is.”
I stiffened a little, though I was still draped in a self-consciously artful repose. “Do you think we’re taking advantage of her?”
“I don’t know.” Ben scratched his head. His unruly hair was sticking up everywhere. Seeing him rumpled like that turned me on terrifically. “Maybe if she’s that fragile?”
“It felt like I was bringing a lamb to slaughter.”
“But if she’s willing to slaughter herself so the pit bulls can be redeemed—”
“Ugghhhh, God, that’s terrible!” I flopped on my back. I was tired of having a moral dilemma. It was the first one I’d ever contracted, and I could see why people avoided them. They didn’t make you happy. They weren’t fun.
“We should keep talking about it. It’s interesting.”
I turned over on my side again and propped my head up with a bent pillow. “Is there something wrong with you? Some genetic defect you have that makes you a good listener but is also going to give you, like, liver disease?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I’ve never met a dude who’s not just waiting for his turn to talk about himself?”
Ben didn’t laugh like I thought he was going to. In fact, he looked a little dismayed. But this was one of my favorite subjects, so I kept going. “Even the guy sitting next to me on the plane, oh my God, wouldn’t stop going on about his trail races and how many miles he earns from work travel. It’s like, you idiot, don’t you see I’m reading Us Weekly and I do not care?”
Ben frowned. “Maybe he just wanted someone to talk to.”
“We all want someone to talk to,” I interrupted. “Men just think they have the right to that whenever they want.”
He made a whuffing sound. He cast his eyes down toward his lap.
“I mean, not you,” I added. I concluded, “But most of you. Anyway, we can talk about something else. How was your day? How’s your mom doing?”
Ben talked about his mother rarely. Though he was open about most things—his work, friendships, even past relationships—something in his eyes flinched every time I brought her up. I don’t think he believed that I could understand. When we’re hurting, when the thing hurting us is very much in the present tense, it’s hard to believe that anyone else can understand, even, or maybe, especially when they’ve been through the exact same thing.
Ben didn’t answer right away. Finally he said, casting his eyes back up at me, “I’m not like that, you know.”
“Like the guy on the plane? I know!” I said. “That’s what I just said! But a lot are. Trust me.” I took the opportunity to tell him what had happened with Wolf in Brooklyn. It was the first time I’d said anything about that night out loud, and it was harder than I’d reckoned. Ben kept shaking his head as I talked, until he finally said, his voice grittier than usual, “I knew that guy was an asshole.”
“I know you knew. Everyone does.”
“I wish I’d gone with you to the party. I could have done something—”
I waved my hand. “Oh please. It’s fine now. I’m fin
e. I’m just telling you ’cause, I dunno—”
Ben looked grave. “ ’Cause there’re reasons you see the world the way you do.”
I nodded. “And there’re reasons you see the world the way you do.”
“I want to understand them.”
He looked so earnest that I couldn’t help but smile. “I want to understand yours, too.”
* * *
—
My next assignment took me straight from Vermont to Reno, Nevada. It was my task to bag Johnny Hard, one of those guys who’d made a name for himself writing about sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll in the seventies and held a unique place in the hearts of sexed, drugged, and failed male rock stars and burnout writers everywhere. Poor down-on-his-luck Johnny was living in a Motel 6 across from a coin-operated laundromat. It took a fair amount of coaxing to get him to undo the chain on the door. He’d lost a number of teeth since his days of wine and roses and spoke with an aggravating and paranoid lisp.
“Leasch me alone!” he cried when I first started pounding on his door. White Castle was coming out with its own version of McDonaldland—Castleville—and Celeste had convinced them that Johnny should both be a model for one of their new characters, Castlesnitch, and write the commercial treatment. “They want a strung-out addict to write their script?” I’d asked, mystified. Celeste’s reply was terse. “Appealing to their demographic.”
“Johnny,” I said, knocking on the door. “Come on.” I rummaged through my purse, where I had a number of Fruit Roll-Ups, and slid one through the crack at the bottom of the door. In the dossier, Simone had included an interview in which he, high as a rocket, had described Fruit Roll-Ups as “my motherfucking favorite food, man.” I had this down to an art by now—do research on the assets’ preferences in advance and bribe them accordingly.
He grunted in receipt. “CIA sench you?”
“I’m with Nanü. We talked on the phone, remember? Like an hour ago?”
A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Page 15
