The Learners: A Novel (No Series)

by Kidd, Chip

  “Well, I’m here to see Mr. Spear. I—”

  “Oh, that pasty, slacked-titted harpy.” Louder, to her, “Miss Preech? Woo-hoo! Darling.” Tilting his head to me. “Has he been seen to?”

  The woman glowered at him poisonously and shouted, her hands never stopping their mad staccato dance, “Mr. Spear was called AWAY. He will be back SHORTLY.”

  Under his breath, eyes sideways: “Such a gorgon. Silver bullets would be useless.”

  I caught myself in a small guffaw—just what he wanted. He was performing. He switched the pad to his left hand, extended the other.

  “I’m Tip. Tip Skikne.”

  “Tip?”

  “As in ‘of the iceberg’.”

  “Oh. I’m…Happy.”

  “Well, good for you. I’m morose. But I mask it beautifully.”

  I explained my nickname.

  “Oh, how sad. Mine’s a nickname too—‘Thomas’ sounds too much like an English muffin. Cup of coffee? Our Mr. Spear is probably taking one of his copyrighted ‘inspirational walks.’ He seemed eager for diversion. Could be a while.”

  “Oh, thanks. Yes, please. And…” I didn’t know how to ask it.

  He looked differently at me all of a sudden. Seriously. Professionally. “You want a potato chip,” he said slyly, “don’t you? Tell the truth.”

  “Actually, yes. How did you—”

  “And before you came in here it was the furthest thing from your mind, especially at this hour, wasn’t it.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Thank GOD. That was the whole idea. You see? I’m really onto something.” His face lit up. “CRISPY!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t be frightened. Just say the first word that pops into your head when I say CRISPY!”

  Whoa.

  “CRISPY!”

  “Uh, ‘Cornies,’ I guess.”

  “Cornies? What the hell is that?” A puzzled look, bringing up the pad with a jolt. He urgently started writing.

  My eyes went to Miss Preech, grateful to see her oblivious—I was about to bare something personal. For some reason, I knew I could open up to this guy: “Crispy Cornies was my favorite cereal in…the fifth grade. You know, Kenny Kernel sang the theme song. ‘Crispy Cornies crunch like COOKies! Crunch-crunch-crunch, a whole BIG bunch!’” I was actually singing—it had come to that. I caught myself, mortified: “It was Flash Gordon’s favorite.”

  Scribbling, scribbling. “Mmhmm, the cereal—was it good? Tasting, I mean.”

  “No, not really. Too mealy, too mapley. Turned the milk into a muddy sop. But it had the best toys, so there was no question.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, they made a Ming the Merciless death ray you could cut from the box and construct entirely out of cardboard, mucilage, three rubber bands, and ten, ten? hairpins.” It actually worked—on tiny, doomed baby field mice plucked from the woods behind our house. “Didn’t you ever try them?”

  “I’m Canadian,” he said.

  Oh. Maybe that explained it, this immediate familiarity. They just don’t tell you these things in school.

  “Wow.”

  “I know. I pass for an actual human being. But I rarely try.” Whether he tried or not, the effect was convincing. He radiated a strategic urgency, as if he was working on ten things at once in his mind. He belonged here, no doubt about that. I studied him as he flipped through several leaves of the legal pad and made more notations. Then he put it down, picked up the bowl of potato chips from the coffee table with both hands, and raised it to me, like a grail full of Incan blood.

  “Help yourself.”

  Maybe it was just me, but the way he said it…it meant more than it usually does.

  “You see, that’s what interests me.” Tip Skikne’s office, on the first floor, had a real, tennis-playing squirrel in it. “It’s fascinating.” A stuffed one, mounted on an ashtray, on the right corner of his desk. But reclining in his chair, hands behind his head, that wasn’t what he was referring to. “You associate ‘crispy’ not with a natural entity—‘corn,’ say,” eyes glued to something on the ceiling, “but with a completely artificial construct that’s been placed into your mind, your memory, by other people…” The squirrel sported Lacoste whites and clutched a tiny racket, suspended forever in mid-serve. “By adding three letters to the word ‘corn,’ it’s no longer made by God, it’s made by man. Amazing.” Mounted on its left leg, the right leg was bent and raised behind him. Perfectly balanced—flawless form. “And that’s not even why I asked you to free-associate in the first place.” I wondered where the ball was. Probably buried under the mound of cigarette butts. “But such is serendipity. I doubt it will help me with my current adversitorial dilemma, but there it is. Am I boring you?” Now he leaned forward, staring.

  “Huh? Oh no, not at all. I was just admiring your squirrel.”

  He folded his hands and calmly placed them on the desk. “Yes, that’s Victor. Get it? So now, what can I do for you?” As if the last ten minutes hadn’t happened.

  What? I finished chewing a potato chip, swallowed. Those were good. “I’m waiting to see Mr. Spear, actually, remember?” I set down my coffee mug. “Maybe I should go back to—”

  “Right, yes, yes.” Glasses in one hand, rubbing his eyes with the other. “No. I can’t leave you in the clutches of…” He thought better of what he was going to say and looked over at my portfolio case.

  “And you’re here to see Sketchy about…”

  Sketchy. “A job. I just graduated. I—”

  “That sneak . He didn’t tell me they were looking for—”

  “Well, that’s because they—you’re…probably not. See, I just sort of called him.”

  “Right. Could I have a look?” He gestured to my case.

  Here we go, I’d better start getting used to it. “Sure.”

  He untied it and looked at the first page. “How interesting. What…is that?”

  “It’s a pencil drawing.”

  “That I can see. Of what? It looks like—”

  “It’s a kiwi,” I deadpanned. “A decapitated kiwi. And a wing-tip shoe.”

  He was frozen, in either awe or pity.

  “I did it in freshman Still Life. I always thought it looked like they were having a conversation, so later, for my portfolio, I turned it into a cartoon.” I reached down and opened a flap beneath it to reveal the caption:

  Help me get a head, and I’ll help you get a foot in the door.

  He smirked. “You didn’t go to school around here, did you?”

  “You could say that.” I was starting to produce flop sweat. I changed the subject. “So, may I ask, what is your current adver, advers…”

  “Adversitorial dilemma—my own term.” Proud as punch. “Well,” he said, resting his folded forearms on the drawing as if it were a diner placemat, “it’s no big deal. Or maybe it is. It’s just an idea I had.” He said the word “idea” the way most other people would say “dead child.” “See, I keep trying to tell them—it’s really very simple: Ads don’t sell products.”

  I didn’t quite know what to say to that. We were sitting in an ad agency. Where he worked.

  “Stores sell products. Right?” One of those THINK

  signs hung on the wall to the left, onto which he’d taped a piece of notebook paper, scrawled in red crayon with the word “Again!” “At least nod your head up and down. Even if you don’t mean it.”

  I did so.

  “Bless you. So, an ad for potato chips shouldn’t be actually trying to sell you potato chips, should it? Because the ad itself can’t give you the potato chips.”

  Silence.

  “It should be selling you a need for potato chips.

  That it can give you. Right?”

  Hmmm. “Rrrright.”

  “Of course. So I said…” He spread his hands, conducting a secret symphony, “let’s do ads that say no one is allowed to have potato chips—you know, show big, glorious pictures of sa
lty, crispy, golden goodness—and say…” He paused, then, loudly, “YOU CAN’T HAVE THEM. Genius? Genius.” He sighed and let the music die in his head. “And they look at me like I’ve just asked them to ball my mother.”

  A vision of Winter applauding in the classroom, with his all-too-rare grin of fiendish approval, flashed in my head. “I had a teacher once who would have loved that idea. Who’s the them?”

  “The Krinkle people. The Krinklies. One of our biggest accounts, for decades.”

  “Oh.”

  “Actually, it’s not them. I hardly ever get to talk to them, it’s Pr—” We could hear the front door down the hall open and close. A man’s gentle, mumbled voice.

  “But I’m pummeling you with this, a total stranger. My apologies.”

  “Not at all, it’s—”

  “Sketchy’s here. C’mon.” He folded up the portfolio flaps, got up, and motioned me out of the room.

  “Maybe you can get ahead.”

  By the time we reached Mr. Spear’s office two flights up, he was hunched over his drawing board, deep in his chores. Through the open doorway: it was a tableaux from the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. The ceiling was arched and highest in the middle—we were in the attic, which likely served as the firemen’s dorms. A window in the shape of a half-moon, flat side down and divided like the sections of an orange, rose from the floor to chest height and spanned about six feet in the center of the facing wall. The very air seemed a good forty years old—not because it was musty (okay, it was, a little), but because it appeared that nothing in it had been disturbed since Prohibition, or before. A glass shelf of old Felix the Cat dolls of all shapes, sizes, and materials jutted out from the wall behind him, each one looking over his shoulder to see what he was doing. I wanted to join them—to be one of them. Two green-globed Victorian brass architectural lamps flanked the blond oak drafting table, vice-clamped at the top and bent over and scanning the surface like extras from The War of the Worlds. Spear was in profile to us, the Sherlock Holmes pipe in his teeth leaking a cherry musk that put me back at my grandpa’s. Arden and Ohman’s recording of “Maple Leaf Rag” tumbled out of the hand-crank phonograph in the corner and colored everything sepia. The steel beam that I’d seen in the reception room continued up here through the middle of the floor and on up to the roof. There was a circular patch of concrete around the base like a plug in the middle of the wooden boards.

  Milburne Spear himself was both what I’d pictured and yet a surprise because of it. He didn’t seem so much like a draughtsman as he did a watchmaker, carefully constructing, adjusting. In fact, he could have been the son of Santa Claus, a good twenty years from taking over the family business, just as soon as he grew a beard and put on a gut. Round face and head, with graying hair thinned at the top and crew-cut army style. A strong, hearty man. But he was delicate and sturdy at the same time. The sturdy part was physical—barrel-chested, bushy-browed, his shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows. His left forearm, easily the width of a ham hock, lay across the board in front of him, a furry blockade to anyone trying to see what he was doing. But the delicate part emerged from his work. Whatever he was rendering, it had his undivided attention, and I soon realized we could have stood inside the doorway for hours and he never would have seen us. Tip finally broke the ice.

  “Ahem. Sketch?”

  “Hmm?” He pushed up his spectacles, tiny ovals of glass connected by a thin gold strip across the bridge of his nose.

  “Sketcher, your appointment is here. Mr. Happy.”

  Head up, confused, then, “Oh!” Terror, as if remembering he left the gas burner on at home. Or just stepped on a kitten. “Wasn’t that tomorrow?”

  He was gracious and very attentive and obviously couldn’t have cared less about my portfolio at all.

  Until he saw Baby Laveen.

  “Golly, he’s a corker. You do that?”

  “Yessir.” My own comic strip character. I wasn’t even going to include him, and now thanked God strenuously that I had. Baby Laveen was an infant dressed as a grown man—in fact even though he looked like he was literally born yesterday, in all other respects he lived and functioned among adults, who didn’t seem any the wiser and respected him in his job as assistant district attorney in the mid-Atlantic city called Doddsville. Spear was transfixed. Tickled.

  “Heh-HEH. You did this in school?”

  “Yes.” Officially, no. There was no cartooning class at State, surprise surprise. It wasn’t something I seriously thought about pursuing full-time, but as a hobby it was a hoot. “I mean, I was in school when I did that, yes, but it wasn’t part of the curriculum. It was just for fun. It’s based on…someone I used to know.”

  “This is someone you used to know? A baby in a business suit?”

  “It’s hard to explain. But yes. I knew his…mother. Just something I wanted to do. S’pretty dumb, I know.”

  “No, not dumb. He’s pesky.” His face could have been mine when I was five, lying on my belly on the living room carpet on Sunday afternoon with the funnies spread out everywhere. “You’ve figured out his eyes. That’s the hardest part.”

  Wow. “You think? Oh, thanks. It’s really all about proportion. And whether or not the eyes should be open circles, or filled in. Or just slits. And how close they are to the nose. But you know all that. Don’t you think Harold Gray changed everything, with Orphan Annie?”

  A grunt. “He got a lot of it from McCay. Most everyone has.”

  “Who?”

  “You don’t know Winsor McCay? Little Nemo?” Scandalized. Stern with me: “In Slumberland.”

  “Oh, our paper at home doesn’t carry him.”

  He very politely and ineffectively tried to look like I hadn’t just said something really, really stupid. Then he pretended I hadn’t said anything at all, and turned the page…

  …to my sketches for ketchup and mustard dispensers. Shaped like torsos.

  “Those would be molded out of soft plastic,” I said.

  “Like what they use for Frisbees, only more flexible? People should be able to squeeze them—I think that’s the future. We shake things—bottles, now, because they’re glass. But at some point I think they won’t be, because glass breaks and doesn’t give. Plastic’s the opposite. I think things should be squeezed. I’d rather be squeezed than shaken. Wouldn’t you?” Good Lord, what was wrong with me?

  Our eyes locked in an ersatz standoff, and his crippled smile and his eyebrows reaching for his scalp betrayed the thought that one half of me was starkers and the other was the sanest person in the world.

  “Heh, yep.” He closed the leather flaps.

  “I-” I stammered, desperate, desperate, “Mr. Spear, is there any chance that, you could—”

  “Well, like I said,” gazing at his shoes, “I could use the help, and we’ve got a desk.” He looked over at a small drawing table in the corner I hadn’t noticed before. It was smudged with ink and dotted with mummified bits of masking tape and it was all I ever wanted and its beauty mocked me. My pulse went from 45 to 78 rpm. “But I’ll have to teach you how to use a ruling pen. You’re holding it wrong. You a lefty?” I nodded. “Thought so—you’re overcompensating, and the uniformity of the line thickness is suffering. Need to keep your elbow down, close to your side.” He gestured and dropped his head again. “But Mrs. Rakoff’ll have to approve a new hire. She’s the boss lady. Can you,” hesitant, slightly tensing, “can you come back tomorrow morning?”

  Rats. Another four hours up and back in the train? Come on, I’m so close. “Actually, is there any way I could see her today? I’ll wait however long. It’s just that tomorrow…I have another interview.” At my dentist’s, where he would inevitably ask me why I haven’t been getting at the backs of my rear molars, so it wasn’t a lie.

  “Hmm.” Even tenser. “Wait here a sec.” He took my portfolio. After five minutes, he still hadn’t returned, so I screwed up the nerve to stand and look at what was on his drawing table.

&n
bsp; Holy smoke. The work surface itself was filthy, but taped to it was a pristine piece of illustration board, emblazend with a new pen-and-ink full-page Krinkle Kutt layout. Near completion. To say it was only a newspaper ad was to say that the Bayeux Tapestry was simple reportage. Under a script banner that read KRINKLE IS KING!, this time His Highness Potato Chip loomed over an enslaved realm of hundreds of mini-pretzels, a networked multitude, each in a tiny harness connected to a massive chariot bearing their enormous conqueror, beaming in tater triumph. It was the snack version of Exodus, a panorama of—

  “Don’t look at that.” In the doorway. Not angry—no…embarrassed. Embarrassed to be alive. “I can’t draw.”

  Right. And Sinatra can’t sing. Was he serious?

  “Please.”

  Oh. That face: a rictus of apology, shame. Yes, he was. It made me want to fix the world. For him.

  “Uh, sorry. I was just sneaking a look. This is…incredible. Just breathtaking. I mean…”

  It was like I’d slapped him.

  “She can see us. I think,” he said, not at all convincingly, and motioned for me to follow. We went downstairs, to the second floor.

  I’d never seen an office door quite like it, not in the art department at State or anywhere else. It was pink. Even the lettering on the rippled glass.

  MILDRED MITCHELL RAKOFF

  PRESIDENT

  And I mean PINK. A pink like we could get irradiated from standing here for more than five minutes. Sketch knocked gingerly, as if he was reading my mind.

  “Yes?” From inside. Muffled yet piercing.

  “It’s me.” He shyly turned the knob, cracked the door, eased in, closed it. In the hallway, I strained to hear, but could only make out parts of her end of the discussion. Which were not encouraging. The phrases “second thoughts,” “I know what I said but,” “we don’t need to,” and most oddly, “talk to the shoe!” told me I’d be on the 2:58, one-way after all. Crap. I was almost there.

  Dammit.

  Then the door opened and a beet-faced Sketch came out and was about to say something when another face—a furious roil of matriarchic agitation and withered glamour—appeared behind him, shrieking, “Oh, and Milby, Dicky says someone named Lenny from Krinkle said that—”