The Learners: A Novel (No Series)

by Kidd, Chip

  I almost gasped. Almost. But Mom raised me better than that. I just gaped.

  “—in that last thing you did, the thing from Tuesday? In the Register? He said—”

  And stared. And you would have, too, because:

  “—could we make the pretzels look less salty this time? He says they look saltier than the chips, and—”

  1) An adult, especially of what appeared to be her advanced age and breeding, just should NOT venture out in public with that many Band-Aids on her head.

  “—that sends the wrong message. It doesn’t say—”

  2) Once it’s become clear that the sun is destroying your skin, it would probably be a better idea to wear a turtleneck. Not a sleeveless V-neck Dior paired with pink and green flower-print pants.

  “—‘eat me’. It’s just going to make people thirsty and they’ll—”

  3) Expensive, flawlessly tailored clothing will only throw your…appearance into sharper relief, especially when you’re starting from somewhere between Barbara Stanwyck and The Thing.

  “—turn the page and buy a Coke. Okay?”

  and 4) Logic dictates that presidents of advertising agencies must make enough money to buy extravagant luxuries, like food. Right? She was going to have to try some. Soon, before collapsing into a bone pile.

  “Oh. Oh my.”

  Oops. This, this Lily Pulitzer wraith, had me in her sights. I had to get out of there.

  “Is this, is…?” And she, whup, clutched my chin and turned my head from side to side, like it was a crenshaw melon she was inspecting at the IGA. “Is this the boy?”

  Bloodless claws. I wasn’t sure. Was I? Sketch must have nodded.

  “Oh, that’s…marvelous,” she hissed, and un-handed me and turned her laser eyes on Spear and yanked him back into her office. The door snapped shut to furious murmurs.

  And then, like a jack-in-the-box he popped out—years obviously gone from his life, and he said, like magic:

  “C-can you start Tuesday? Seventy-five a week?”

  Oh, could I. He led us down the hallway.

  “Mr. Spear,” I started, as we plodded down the staircase, “can you tell me why—”

  No words left in him, he stopped on the landing and took a moment to write something down on an index card from his front shirt pocket, folded and handed it to me—in a scrupulous grab, behind his back, out of view of the secretary. Who wasn’t looking anyway.

  “Read it on the train. We’ll talk.”

  I palmed it. “Right. I can’t thank you enough. I—”

  “Miss Preech will get you a cab.”

  She was typing again. Now, obviously she was a stranger to me, but I already suspected that even if I were to lie on the floor in front of her with a meat axe growing out of my head, in a pool of my own hot hemoglobin, the probability of Miss Preech calling me an ambulance would be remote in the extreme—much less a cab, right now. “Thanks, thanks, Mr. Spear,” I said groggily. I rang one for myself from the corner payphone.

  On the train, safely speeding home, I pulled out Sketchy’s message: a fortune cookie slip that would determine my future for real. Did I really want to know? I kept it closed all the way to Stamford. Then I just couldn’t stand it anymore and shut my eyes, opened it, ready for the oracle’s wisdom:

  CAN’T EXPLAIN RIGHT NOW.

  HAVE YOU EVER USED AN ERASER GUARD?

  JUST ASKING. SORRY.

  SEE YOU SOON.

  It was all in a cartoon speech balloon, coming out of the mouth of…Baby Laveen, pleading to the judge. Perfect to the detail.

  Perfect like I could never, ever draw him.

  “And here’s where—nuts. We’re out of atomic teat.” Tip, in a short-sleeved ash gray madras dress shirt that revealed skinny arms as pale and hairless as zucchini squash, waved the empty powdered milk box, lamenting. “Rats. I love this stuff. It makes my coffee experimental. It gives me hope. Miss Preech!” My first day, in the middle of the unofficial office tour. Mr. Spear wasn’t in yet. In fact, it was ten to nine and aside from Tip, Miss Preech, and me, neither was anyone else. Tip and I were in the little galley kitchen off the pantry, where they made their coffee. I mean, where we made it. God, it was just too amazing.

  “Miss Preech!” he shouted at the ceiling.

  “What?!” she crowed from her desk.

  “Darling, we’re out of powdered milk.” His voice was all knives.

  “No. We are not.” Hers were sharper.

  “Sweetness, we ARE.” Eyes clenched. This guy was a card, a real Franklin Pangborn Jr., but not someone I’d want to be on the wrong side of, I could tell already.

  And then, the rapid-fire click of high heels, angry on the linoleum floor. She rounded the corner, thrust out a new box, and slammed it down on the counter. Wham!

  And back to her desk.

  I offered, weakly, “You, you two don’t seem to, like each other.”

  His eyes bloomed in protest. “Nonsense. Why, there’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for her, and there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for me.” He hurled the old box into the corner trash can with considerable force. “In fact, we spend our whole lives doing nothing for each other.”

  “Oh.”

  He jimmied open the metal pouring spout and shook a small blizzard of Bessie’s Evaporated Moo Juice into his cup. “She’s the princess and the pea.” He sighed. “I’ve spent some time behind that desk myself, so I know why she’s so dreadful. But it doesn’t make it any easier. She hates that I got a rung up.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, what does it matter? Sugar?” Pouring my java.

  “What she needs is a man.”

  “Really? She’s so pretty.”

  “So’s a poinsettia. Ever taste one?”

  The front door buzzed. In walked Sketchy.

  “Morning.”

  Tip handed me my coffee, lit up his Marlboro. “Well, I’ll leave you to your labors.” Nodding his head to Spear, “Sketch, sir? Krinkle meeting at eleven, yes? In the conference room?”

  “What? Sure.” Then, to me, “Well, hello. You made it? Heh.”

  “Yes.” God, I’d hoped so. “Yes, I did.”

  “Good deal. See ya upstairs.”

  “Yes sir.” And I bolted to the steps, took them two at a time, careful not to slosh the coffee.

  The art department. It all looked so different now—the two drawing tables scarred with countless X-Acto marks, the piles of scattered scrap artboard, wads of tape that were overshot to the trash can and dotted the wall behind it like measles. The magic of seeing it for the first time was gone, but replaced by something even more alluring—the promise of inclusion among its details. I saw a stage set that I was now invited to climb up onto. I wasn’t in the audience anymore, I was a player. Maybe just a member of the chorus, but still.

  And yet it was clear from the start that Sketch was uncomfortable having assistants or delegating tasks, no matter how much he claimed to need an “extra pair of hands.” What he meant was an extra pair of his own , not someone else’s.

  Nonetheless, “Let’s have you rule out some mechanical boards. The Register has their own done up, but they’re not worth the, well, the you-know-what they print ’em on, sorry. You good at key lines?”

  Gulp. “That depends. What are they?”

  He chuckled, then winked. “Oh, you’ll see.”

  Sketch. He was the most astonishing contradiction of components I’d ever encountered. Shy yet fiercely communicative when putting an idea into your head. Vocally astringent regarding his own abilities but not to the point that he couldn’t produce—he was as prolific an artist (yes, an artist, and I never use the term, especially regarding people I like) I’ve ever seen. But I could feel it: everything he sketched, penciled, inked, made—was a payment, one he could scarcely afford; as if it physically hurt him to put pencil to paper. Yet that only seemed to spur him on, to live far beyond his means. He was unable not to. For Sketch, to draw was to breathe, and so the
air became lead—silvery in the right light, dark soot in the wrong; heavy, slick, and malleable—into shapes he brought together in glorious orchestration, with a child’s eye and a rocket scientist’s precision, all fortified by a furious melancholy, a quiet engine of sourceless shame and humility.

  When it came to another’s work, he longed to praise it but then couldn’t resist critiquing it all within an inch of its life, analyzing deficiencies with uncontrollable abandon and laser accuracy. He was as sharp as his Radio 914 pen nibs, and as pointed.

  And then he’d apologize. Oh, he would apologize: Oh my GOD, forgive me, please don’t hate me, I’m SORRY, don’t listen to me, why am I saying things, what do I know, I don’t know anything, why do you listen to me you should just tell me to shut UP, I’m awful, forgive me, you hate me, don’t you? Tell the truth. Please don’t hate me. Please don’t. Please?

  That first day, we started off with the concept of the blue pencil.

  “You ever use one of these?”

  It looked like a normal one, except the lead was the color of a robin’s egg. “Yes.” No—don’t. “No.”

  “Heh. Well, this is a lot to take in, but here goes: everything we do gets shot by a high-contrast camera in the basement here called a stat machine. I’ll show you that, later. But basically, this camera sees only black and white—no shades of gray unless we use a Zipatone pattern. I’ll show you that later, too. The main thing is that red registers as black, and blue as white. For all cameras. That’s why you have a red light in a darkroom when you make photo prints. But with blue whatever you draw is invisible. So we use that to do the basic layout and then ink over it. The camera only sees the ink on the board and shoots it as line art. You see?”

  “Wow.”

  “What.”

  “I sure could have used one of those in school. I used to draw everything in regular pencil first and then went back and erased it all after the ink was dry.”

  “We all did. Actually,” he lowered his voice, even though no one could have possibly heard us, or cared, “you’re not really supposed to render with blue pencil—it’s just meant for key lines and such. But one day a couple of years ago I was really pressed for time on a Krinkle full-pager and thought, Hell, why not, and drew the whole damn thing in non-photo blue. No erasing! Saved me a good half hour. Never looked back.” He pulled a sheaf of paper from the side table next to his board.

  “These are sizes for the next month. If you could set these up, that’d be great.” And then he added, with a sincerity that told me who he was—I’ll never forget it: “Do ya mind?”

  Mind? “No sir, not at all.”

  “Thanks, kid.”

  And so I started ruling out mechanical boards, readying them for Sketch to fill. For anyone else this might have have been tedious grunt work. But not for me. Not then. I was finally putting pencil to paper for a real reason . A purpose . For me it was heaven. Blue heaven.

  At around half-past noon, Tip’s head popped in the doorway.

  “Do you have lunch plans?”

  Was he joking? Hard to tell. “No. You?”

  “Mory’s. I’m a member. One thirty? Sketch, is that all right? Wanna come?”

  “Heh. Huh?” Lost in Krinkle-land. “No, you go ahead.”

  It was an “eating club” on the edge of the Yale campus. Dickens would have loved it and probably did. White clapboard, black shutters. Discreet brass plaque on the door with the “Mory’s” name. Inside: photos on the walls of sports teams and captains, crew or baseball or tennis—grimly bright-eyed in yesteryear’s outfits that looked now like an odd pajama party. Ranks of the hopeful young—class of ’15, some of whom probably jumped off windowsills on Wall Street after the Crash; or class of ’40, more than one of them washed up on Omaha Beach. The team captain posed against a mock rail fence, already the master of a jaunty look he’d wear years later in boardroom or bank vault.

  From the ceiling oars hanging in rows, painted with the legend of that year’s victory over Harvard in the Thames regatta: 1952, Yale 21:04, Harvard 22:34, etc. Trophies left behind by the young, who, fresh from the first flush of victory, had no idea where they were finally headed.

  So this was planet Yale. Where I was an alien.

  Our table, as were all the others, was gouged with initials and dates and Latin boasts, the “Kilroy Was Here” of those who weren’t anymore. Our fossilized penguin of a waiter handed us dog-eared menus engraved with a script type that did its elegant best to hold off against years of grease and gravy stains. Tip ordered clam chowder, steak Diane, and a Dewar’s.

  I asked for a club sandwich. And a lemon Coke.

  He laughed. When the drinks arrived Tip raised his glass to me. I met him with a clink.

  “To your first day,” he said, “in this dreadful business.”

  Hmm. “Oh, don’t say that. Don’t you like advertising?”

  He grinned. “Well, I’ve always loved interrupting. I’m made for it. Ask anyone. And that is what we do.”

  “It is?”

  “Of course, it’s the whole nature of the biz. Ads are interruptions—but interruption as main topic. Look at magazines. Look at television. On television, in fact, it goes even further—the ads are far more important than the TV shows.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it? The shows are interrupted by the commercials. But,” he hiked his eyebrow in an arc de triomphe,

  “the commercials are never interrupted.”

  Yes, I thought, because they’re so short. I didn’t say it. Instead, “How many have you worked on?”

  “How many what?”

  “TV commercials. I’ll bet they’re fun.”

  “Oh, how sweet. Yes, I’ll bet they are. Will let you know if I ever find out.”

  “But don’t you—”

  “Buddy boy, we’re not in that league.” He drained his scotch on the rocks. “We’re mom-and-pop. Just Mom actually, for some time now.”

  “Mrs. Rakoff.”

  “Mmmm. Mimi.”

  “Mimi?”

  “Yes, as in,” he sucked in his cheeks and made a vulture voice and poked himself in the chest, “Me! Me!”

  I recounted our rather odd meeting.

  “Pretty typical, I’m afraid.” He tried to coax more liquid from his glass, got ice instead. “She doesn’t go to extremes; she lives there.”

  “Is she…good at what she does?”

  He cracked a cube between his teeth and looked out the window, seeking something in the sky. A star to wish on? A gargoyle on the Sterling Library across the street? “Actually,” he sighed, his eyes back to me, betraying a search in vain, “she would be enormously improved by death.”

  It only took five days to find an apartment, what with most of the students gone for the summer. Tip was all too happy to help look during lunch breaks. He’d had his run-ins with real-estate agents and wanted to spare me the trouble.

  “You’ll be raped otherwise, trust me. Those people will poke out your eyes and make love to your skull. And send you a bill. Oh, no. You’re a child.”

  I settled on a furnished third-floor walk-up on Cottage Street off Orange, just a ten-minute bike ride from the office. It was half of the top floor of a large Victorian house that had been divided into flats. Mine was four small rooms accessed by an outdoor staircase added on to the side—sort of a reverse fire escape. I’m a nester by nature, but here I wanted to start anew, with few possessions and almost no furniture. The rooms—with their threadbare faux Oriental throw rugs and shopworn velveteen armchairs—due to the previous grad-school tenants, smelled like an old wet pizza box. Which I found to be not altogether unpleasant.

  I amazed myself at how quickly I wanted to take to New Haven. I’m usually not good with change, but it was a college town after all, and that dynamic was welcome and familiar. The difference, of course, was that this college was one I hadn’t dared dream of becoming part of. And yet here I was, a foundling on the doorstep of Mother Yale. Was I
trespassing? Maybe. But I wasn’t alone. The rift between Town and Gown was a chasm you couldn’t jump, like nothing I’d ever, ever seen before. Back at State, we shared a sense that even the most grimy, bloated old sot asleep at his hooch down at the Skeller could be roused with a poke to sing the school fight song, if that’s what it took to win the big game. We fed on the underlying “we’re all in this together.” In New Haven it was more like occupied France, but no Allies to the rescue this time. Yale itself was outwardly charming and stately—neo-Gothic colleges that looked as if Hansel and Gretel were on the planning committee, all presided over by the magnificent Harkness Tower. But take one step over the campus line and you were outside the fortress with the enemy advancing. And therein lay my predicament: I certainly didn’t belong inside the walls, and on the other side of them I wasn’t really one of the locals, either. Was I?

  But harder still to get used to was the giddy reality of actually having a job. I was paid to make things. Each morning around nine I’d buzz myself in with a key and slink past the wilting eyes of Miss Preech and wonder why she didn’t drop what she was doing and call the police. And then I’d pop up the stairs, and more often than not Sketchy would already be there, with the phonograph leaking its tired, wonderful ragtime into the warmth of the slatted morning light. And he’d look up (either from his work or the early edition of the paper, depending on deadlines) and throw me half a smile and a wink.

  And I’d be home.

  I learned more that first week than I did in four years of college. To wit:

  1) How to hold a pencil. “Not so tight. You’re strangling it. Let it do what it wants, stray a little. Give it permission.”

  2) How to hold a pen. “Ink, on the other hand, is sneaky—needs discipline. LOTS of it. Let it know you’re the boss. You want it to do what it doesn’t want to. Tough. When you’re in control, it will do it.”

  3) How to sit. “Go ahead and slouch. Life is short, now you are, too. Heh.”

  4) How to use a brush. Truth to tell, I never really did come close to mastering this one, but I did start to get the idea of it. “It’s a pen, really. Just a fluid one.” Sketch could make lines and shapes with a brush that you’d swear were stamped by a machine. Remarkable.