by Kidd, Chip
He explained: The instant she got wind of the news, roasting under a Promethean hair dryer at Jilda’s, Mimi vowed with dog as her witness that the Buckle Shoe ad business was rightfully ours. And we would stop at nothing until it was.
At first, Tip dismissed it as a whim. “Oh, she wants lots of things. Legalized bestiality. Breasts. A Chanel suit made of bubblegum. Jack and Jackie over for tea. Then she forgets about it. This too shall pass, worry not.”
Worry not. Now there was a concept.
Because you see, Tip didn’t really know—how could he—who he was talking to. And I wasn’t so sure now myself. Was he talking to the designer, the me who was finally finding his way in the working world, actually taking the next great step in his life?
Or was he talking to the murderer? The me who tortured and killed a total stranger. And got away with it. The me I was still becoming acquainted with, the me with the great secret.
And to think I used to love secrets.
“Downstairs. Everyone. Mimi’s office.” The next day, Tip’s head in the doorway, grim: “Cancel lunch. Notify next of kin. Batten down the hatches. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”
“Oh for land’s sake.” Sketch was in the middle of a full-pager for the Food Clown’s Back-to-School Bacon Blitz. A five o’clock deadline. This was not on the agenda.
“Sorry, cap’n. Meems has spoken. She is calling us to her bosom. Such as it is.”
Did that mean me? “Uh, should I…?”
“You, too. She said so.” Yowza.
We filed in. Sketch, Nicky, Preston, Tip. Even Miss Preech was there, a steno pad in her lap, pencil tip on her tongue.
Mimi’s office. Her lair. Originally the fire chief’s bunk room, Mimi brought the flames inside, lapping at every available surface—the curtains, sofas, rugs, Erté prints, the modernist table-desk shaped like a mutant amoeba, too many needlepoint pillows to count—all bore a riot of colliding shades of magenta, plum, lava, blood orange, and Pepto-Bismol. Anything vulvic and volcanic. I will admit: the reflected amber light made our skin look sensational.
“Okay, everyone…” Perched on her fuchsia velvet settee, Hamlet’s massive head embedded in her lap and his motionless body trailing to the floor like a fallen oak, Mimi surveyed us—her fiefdom—with imperious zeal. She stiffened her back straight with purpose, a wizened Joan of Arc in a salmon cashmere sweater set and pearls, the freshly lit Winston in her right hand her broadsword. She pulled her small, pinched mouth tight and coiled in front of her chin, like the drawstring of a dufflebag. With a tilt of the head, a deathless gleam in the squinted eyes (crow’s feet, size twelve), Mimi was ready to impart upon us the forbidden wisdom of the cosmos, to lay bare the very secrets of the meaning of life itself, the molten air surrounding her still—thick and leaden with the gravitational pull of Mercury:
“Shoes.”
A pause. Then she added with accusation, as if identifying a rapist in a police lineup:
“Buckle. Shoes.”
Sketch was already doodling in fourth gear, rendering a hangman’s noose made out of a notched leather strap and a metal clasp.
“They have been dropped onto our doorstep, and we are NOT turning them away. We are taking them in. This account was meant for us. It’s a sign. I know about such things. What we must do—” Hamlet started to yawn and then fell asleep in the middle of it, not bothering to close his mouth “—is let them get a load of us.”
Surely some of this was fueled by the trouble we were having with Krinkle, but Tip later told me he suspected it had a lot more to do with the firm’s “glory days” with Buster Brown—that she steadfastly believed we had some sort of legacy-borne right to represent one of the biggest shoe companies in the country.
Yes, the campaigns done here in the 1930s for BB were brilliant, in their day. Hold Your Tongue! Tie Your Games! Skip Your Cares!
And as Tip would have been quick to remind, they were all Lars’s. Preston wrote the body copy, but it was all in the headlines, and that was Lars. Over thirty years ago, during another era. A dead one.
“Mrs. Rakoff,” Tip started, “just how do you want us to proceed?” He said it with all seriousness, but the twinkle in his eyes betrayed the sheen of pure folly. We might as well have been a rural band of French peasants in 1944, plotting to storm the Reichstag.
“Well, Tipsy, I’ve been thinking about that.” Hand to the rear of her skull, she gently caressed the eave of her giant, poofy bottle-blonde flip, fresh from Jilda’s perma-caress. “And I’ve decided what is best is to come at them from both directions.”
“Both…directions.”
“Yesssss. We’re going to divide and conquer.”
“Divide.”
“Precisely. I have thought about this very hard, with my entire brain.” Mimi aimed her gaze on Tip, as if trying to zap him into another plane of existence with infrared laser-heat vision. “We’re going to show them two completely different ideas. You and Sketch will work on one campaign,” she turned to me. “And Preston and the boy will devise another, simultaneously.”
The boy? Me? Working with Preston, why?
Miss Preech scrawled like mad.
Tip’s eyebrows launched in protest, Sketch’s did something like the same. Preston’s remained fixed on the Register’s daily Word Jumble.
Tip glared at me, helplessly, for a moment. I knew what he was thinking—the teams were mismatched: he and I should be working on this, and Sketch with Preston. It should be the Rookies versus the Vets. We’d basically been training for this since I got here. “Mrs. Rakoff—”
“Unheard!” Her left hand, sheathed with industrial-strength Band-Aids, shot out toward Tip. Mimi’s head recoiled in the opposite direction, as if she were warding off Dracula with a crucifix. “I know what you will say. You don’t see the logic of it. You will.” She turned to her son, who was focusing on the handle of his putter with raptorial intensity. “Nicky, I want you to devote all your resources to scheduling a sit-down with the Buckle people. And soon.”
Snapping out of his front-nine spell, Nicky replied with a squeak, “Will do, Mummy. But just because they’re moving doesn’t necessarily mean they want to change their advertising. It won’t be easy.”
“Duly noted: Not. Fun. Let’s reconvene Thursday with a strategy update. Before lunch. Over and out!” Thus endeth the meeting. Everyone got up.
“You,” she said to me, hungrily, “stay here.”
A small firework exploded in my stomach.
Tip beamed a tell-me-EVERYTHING glance and slipped out. The others followed. Miss Preech shut the door behind her. Hamlet, mouth still open and flaccid tongue askew, made the sound of a punctured bicycle tire and shifted his head in Mimi’s loins.
I sat back down, ready to take notes. What could she possibly want with me? In the ensuing uncomfortable silence, as she studied Hamlet, I studied her. What did I see? I saw a figure from an old outdoor advertisement, painted onto the side of a tenement here in town, three stories up. A woman whose youth and glamour had been slowly eroded by decades of sun and wind and rain. Not completely gone, but what was left was fused to the brick, stubborn and steadfast. And Hamlet, the beast to her ruined beauty, easily outweighing his mistress by thirty pounds, pinned her to the earth in order to keep her from floating away into the stratosphere, like an errant prune-shaped helium balloon.
“You have a great gift,” she said, gazing deeply into Hamlet’s slack, gaping maw. Did she mean his tongue? Why was I needed to witness this? Then something occurred to me, and with the fear of presumption I dared:
“I do?”
“Oh, yes.” She was looking at me now. “I don’t think you know it. But you do.” Hamlet snorted in his sleep, as if weighing in. “Lars once said that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are only two kinds of people in this world and everyone else. I’ve never, ever forgotten that.”
What?
“Listen to me.” She kept me hard in her sights, this wa
s the crux of it: “Your life will become Buckle Shoes. You will eat, drink, sleep, sing, live, die for shoes. That’s what Lars used to do—when he knew we had to have the business and he knew we didn’t have a chance. And he didn’t care—what mattered was that we needed it and he’d have to find a way to get it.” She adjusted herself under the dog’s heft. “But of course I wasn’t part of it then. I didn’t become part of it till he was gone, when I had to. Who else was going to?” She asked it as if I was supposed to give her the answer.
“I can only imagine what—”
“Why am I telling you this? Well, why shouldn’t I? What else do I have to tell?”
“Mrs. Rakoff, I—”
“You will work with Poop.” Serious. “You will wake him up. He sleepwalks. Since Lars left us. You will bring him back to the land of the living, and when you do, the two of you will figure out how to get us Buckle. You can do it.” Her gaze softened, her tone thawing into something like warm. “This account. I want this. For Lars. He.” She bowed her head, parted her lips, and planted a big wet kiss on Hamlet’s bristled pate. Her tongue brought up the rear, trailing a smidgen of her liver-toned lipstick and several slight, slick strands of hair. “He would never think I could do it.”
Mouthwash. I could think only of mouthwash. Listerine, specifically. But then I thought of this, too: “Mrs. Rakoff, I’ll do my best.” Was there any Listerine in the pantry? Probably not. Maybe some mints in a drawer next to my desk? “That’s all I can promise. And I know everyone else will, too. Tip, Sketch, they’re the best, really.”
“Thank you,” she said, ogling Hamlet’s gullet, her eyes crimson-rimmed with brine. My cue to vamoose. I did, quick and quiet, clicking the bolt of the vaginal pink door.
What was all that about? It’s not as if I’d done anything that would have garnered her attention. The Milgram ad? No, not at all likely.
And that only reminded me: a gift.
Mimi, you don’t know the half of it. I have been given a gift, all right. Unexpected, unwanted, unwelcome, unforgettable, unreturnable.
Surprise!
And I have been opening it, daily, for a month. And counting.
I used to love gifts, too.
When I got back to my desk, Tip was waiting, his face eager, as if I were a surgeon emerging from a long operation. Sketch was back at his bacon, conjuring exquisite, glistening strips of it in the shapes of rulers, erasers, and protractors.
“Well?” Tip sat on the edge of my chair, swiveling.
“Well, she seems to think I’m going to be able to.” I didn’t know quite what to say.
“To what?”
“To wake, I mean—to work, with Preston. To get the best out of him. I just don’t, I just don’t frankly understand it.”
“Heh. Good luck, sport,” said Sketch with a mirthless grin. “Don’t forget to bring the swizzle sticks.”
Thanks a lot. “But how serious is this? It just sounds crazy. Doesn’t it?”
“Mrs. R. is often wrong,” he replied, frowning at one of his drawings, “but never in doubt.”
Tip lit up a Marlboro, waved it back and forth in conversational gesture. “I’m of two minds. On the one hand, yes—it’s an egregious waste of time. We haven’t done spec work since the Eastern Connecticut Children’s Hospital. But that was years ago and a whole other ball of wax.”
“Spec work?”
“For free, basically. What she’s either forgetting or willfully ignoring is that we can’t bill for any Buckle ideas. We’re just not equipped to chase big accounts like this. Which means we have to work on a pitch on as much un-billable time as possible.”
“Which means?”
“Which means evenings and weekends,” Sketch spat.
Tip jumped up, too animated to sit. He was sparked. “But on the other hand, there’s something oddly freeing about it. My grandfather had this lovely saying: ‘If you intend to die, you can do anything.’ ”
“What a card,” said Sketch, grimly sharpening a fresh blue pencil.
“I know. He was a Socialist. But really—since we don’t have a devil’s chance in heaven of getting this thing, why don’t we try thinking about it in a whole new way? It’s an opportunity, really.”
Sketch’s face reddened, throwing his bushy rabbit-gray eyebrows and mustache into sharp relief. “It’s an opportunity for me to bust my balls drawing a zillion goddamn shoes for squat while the missus sits on her tuffet and lobs bonbons at that barking slab of meat!” His pencil tip snapped in two. “Damn it.” He removed his glasses, massaged his eyes, and reached for the sharpener. “The sooner we get this damn folly over with, the better.”
Tip sidestepped toward the door. Now was not the time to pursue an argument. Sketch almost never down-talked Mimi to us, at least to this extent. He was really steamed. Tip eyed me warily and we both tacitly agreed it was better to keep quiet and let him blow over like a thunderstorm. I was unnerved to see him so riled. It was against his character, like watching Ozzie Nelson throw a tantrum on camera.
So, I sat and began ruling out the day’s job boards. My mind was trampled with shoes, grateful for the mandate to think about something other than Himillsy, torturing people, and my newly revealed capacity for human cruelty. Maybe Tip was right: Despite the impossibility of what Mimi wanted us to do, there was something undoubtedly exciting about at least giving it a shot. This would be the first account I’d be involved with in any meaningful way. But how to start? Preston wasn’t about to work late on anything, except most likely a pitcher of martinis, at home.
Ipso facto: The next morning at eleven sharp, having cleared the morning’s billable hours, I stood outside his office, door closed. Not a peep from within. I knocked.
A jostling sound, then, “Present.” What did that mean?
“Uh, may I come in?”
A grunt, unintelligible.
Here we go. I turned the knob, poked my head in.
“Can I bother you for a second?”
“Sure. Anything to eat?” He looked a bit stunned, his hands poised on a 1925 Underwood No. 5 typewriter with a fresh, blank leaf of paper peeking up from the roller.
I think I woke him up. Happy now, Mimi?
“No, I’m afraid not, but I thought if you had a moment, we could discuss the Buckle presentation.”
“Huh-huh. Humpf.” Yawning, he squeezed his eyelids tight and weaved his fingers together, palms outward, extended his arms and produced the sound of ten Popsicle sticks snapping in half.
I eased myself into one of the two chairs facing his desk. The smell of Pine-Sol bored itself into my nostrils. Not having noticed when Tip and I snuck in here before, now I understood: to be in Preston’s office was to step onto the stage set of a production designer’s idea of what an advertising copywriter’s office should look like, twenty years ago. But only if he never actually used it. “Tidy” didn’t really explain it. “Obsessively ordered” was more accurate. His desktop could have been a place setting at a state dinner rather than a space for work. Exactly one pencil (sharp as a compass), one eraser (unused), and one fountain pen in its cradle were precisely lined up, parallel to the top of the pristine leather-cornered deskblotter. To the left of that marched a platoon of paperclips, laid out and evenly spaced, troops at the ready. A fluorescent-tubed light fixture from the 1940s was suspended three feet from the ceiling and washed everything in the room ice blue. On the walls, aside from the newspaper clipping with Lars’s encrypted quote, were two prints, Currier and Ives winter sleigh scenes. The sole family photograph in view, framed in polished sterling and positioned on the right next to the intercom, was of a Labrador retriever, panting and awaiting the order to speak. A freshly pressed suitcoat hung on one rung of the blond wood floor-model hanger, a navy felt fedora dangled over a khaki Burberry mac on the other. Even the three crumpled pieces of lined paper resting on the bottom of the brushed aluminum wastebasket were arranged to form a perfect isosceles triangle. There wasn’t a single thing out of place.
Except me. I could feel my very presence here upsetting the balance of it all. I was the microbe invading this otherwise sterile petri dish.
But I also understood it, this need to construct his environment with such an anal compulsion; it provided a sense of control and predictability, no matter how illusionary. I was frankly jealous—this was how Preston made sense of his small and eroding slice of life. The world outside could go to hell in a handcart, but by God, in here it would all behave.
A modest shelf of awards lined a few feet of the wall to the left, above the file cabinets. A small parade of plaques and squat trophies, all from the New Haven Ad Club and dedicated to “achievement in advertising copywriting.” When you actually zoomed in and read them, the citations themselves revealed a legacy of heralded mediocrity: Honorable Mention. Third Place. Second Runner-up. Distinctive Merit. Official Nominee. Sheets of polished brass, mounted with hot glue onto slabs of laminated mahogany, etched with the legends of products that bowed out of the marketplace before I was born. Pseudo-haikus of whimsical, doomed hope:
WIPE AWAY YOUR WORRIES WITH WONDREX
WRING OUT THE RING WITH KOLLAR KLEEN
HOLD HANDS WITH PALMSALVE
DURADREAM HELPS YOU SEE THE NIGHT
SUNBEAM BAKERY: WHAT WAS THE BEST THING BEFORE THERE WAS SLICED BREAD?
None of them were dated after 1939.
Preston: Slouching in a frayed pale pink broadcloth Oxford shirt with the monogram PCW in all-caps Gothic Medium 12-point type, kerned out to an eighth of an inch and positioned three inches below his left breast. I’d never seen that before. I liked it—WASP-weird yet sensible.
His head started to bow. Yipes.
“Should we get started?” I asked, mildly terrified.
He bolted up. “Hmmf. We should get finished.” He sighed. Grinned. “That was a joke.”
Oh. Was it also a spark of life? Keep him going.
“That’s funny. Mr. Ware, I—”
“Preston.”
“Prest—”
“But NOT Poop.”
