Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “It’s coffee,” I imagined him telling them. “Only coffee.” And then, remembering his training. Not only coffee: “The Private Coffee of the Greatest Coffee Merchants.”

  Given his Valentino looks, I felt sure that there were also days he was invited into kitchens that smelled of roasted chicory and apple pie and maybe a spot of rotgut whiskey. It was wintertime, after all, so I gathered there were more folks huddling around their stoves than rocking on their porches—more toasty scenes of hospitality, like the mother fixing up a plate while the slim-legged daughter in a tight white cardigan inquired as to John’s place of permanent residence and plans for the future.

  At J. Walter Thompson, every male employee, no matter his background or ambitions, had to train in each department, including traveling sales and retail, so that he would understand what it was like to try to sell a product—not just write up copy for a magazine, but actually look a customer in the face and get them to say not only yes, but “yes, please.”

  Later, he would reassure me that it hadn’t been private residences so much, but rather small-town grocery stores he’d been visiting—the retailers themselves—and maybe it was my own worried fantasizing about the temptations of a traveling salesman’s life that planted all those domestic pictures in my mind. But whether it was a pretty clerk in a store or a daughter in a shack at the end of the lane, I’m sure he charmed plenty of girls during his salesman days.

  Then he was back, neither deeply humbled nor unduly triumphant, just his regular self, a Boy Scout with one badge, ready to go for the next, which required another training stint—this time at Macy’s. At least that was in the city, where we could be together.

  My job was to set up housekeeping.

  “Go ahead. Shop, decorate. Do what women do,” John said, leaving for his department-store shift. And then he’d remember to smile, that closed-lip smile that still evoked mischief, even though we were no longer hiding or sneaking around.

  It was hard to shop when the money went so quickly and the future supply was not yet secure. There was no point in endlessly comparing sofas and china sets when we couldn’t afford them. Our windows needed coverings, and it occurred to me after an afternoon spent looking through expensive catalogs that there must be a cheaper way. The next day, at the fabric store, it occurred to me that I didn’t know how to sew. Or how to clean. Or how to cook, for that matter. Mother had felt no need to teach me the domestic arts, since I wouldn’t need them; there were always other people willing and able to scrub a stoop or roast a chicken, she’d assured me. John wasn’t suggesting I should become a domestic expert, either. He didn’t necessarily want a wife who cooked. When we had lots of money, other people would do it. Anyway, hadn’t some of our best dinners been nothing more than salami, eggs, and bourbon? No need to get fancy now. What he wanted most, he told me, wasn’t chicken Kiev or steak tartare, but a lively person to come home to.

  John had burned most of his bridges, but he was happy with this new side of the river. Rather than feeling put-upon working as a sales clerk at Macy’s, he saw it as a fascinating challenge. What made people buy certain things? Where did the desires come from? How did they choose? He came home each day bursting with new questions and hypotheses. He started experimenting, by reorganizing the display cases. He moved inexpensive items onto the countertops so people could touch them more easily and spend time gazing at them while they waited for larger purchases to be rung up and boxed. He imagined how impulse-nurturing could change the look and layout of every department, from grocery to footwear. John had been criticized, even in the otherwise positive reference letters that had gotten him this job, for being impulsive. He was determined to prove that everyone was impulsive. Customers could be steered into buying much more than what they’d planned to buy on any given day.

  “And what did you do today?” he asked one evening over drinks, when he had no more stories of his own to tell.

  I hesitated. “This and that. It was just so busy, I’ve forgotten.”

  “Good. Oh—I almost forgot.” His face broke out in a schoolboy grin. “Office day tomorrow. We have a speaker coming.”

  J. Walter Thompson prided itself on being the “university of advertising,” with not only the biggest billings of any agency, and some two hundred employees, but also a philosophy about ongoing education, research, and self-improvement. Every two weeks, a prominent figure was brought in to talk to the staff.

  “Darrow,” John said, loosening his tie.

  “Clarence Darrow, the famous lawyer?”

  I tried to look lively. Not envious, just attentive.

  “That’s right.”

  “Aren’t there plenty of people who hate him for defending murderers?”

  “Anyone who’s great at what he does—anyone with a new idea, period—excites the common man’s wrath.”

  As a sometimes beloved, sometimes reviled man, John was in good company, in other words. But I didn’t want to hear Darrow speak because he was controversial. I just wanted to hear about ideas that mattered, one way or another. Maybe I just wanted out of a boring apartment.

  I’d been scrimping for several weeks, limiting our food budget, skipping my own lunch at home altogether, pretending at dinner that my half-size portion was all that I really wanted, trying to set aside money to buy the curtains I didn’t have the talent to sew, and several other items, besides. Though I was feeling under the weather the day after John mentioned the guest speaker, I knew better than to waste money on a subway token when my own two feet would suffice. I arrived at the JWT building lightheaded but happy. I’d made it in time to casually stop by just in advance of Darrow’s late-morning visit.

  Up I went to the JWT offices, gloves in hand, trying to catch my reflection in the shining gold-trim surface of the elevator doors as the elevator boy stopped at one floor after another. Since John had gotten the job, I hadn’t yet visited him at work, delaying purposefully until he’d finished his training period. But I couldn’t wait any longer. The flutter in my stomach as the elevator cage whirred and shuddered, pulling us up and into those higher reaches of Manhattan, that world high above the noise and street smells, reminded me of my nerves on my first day at Johns Hopkins. John had been excited then to show me every room, every outlet and cabinet and custom-ordered chair, because he’d been instrumental in the lab’s design. This would have to be an even grander tour, given the size of the company and its near monopoly of the top advertising accounts up and down the East Coast. When the elevator boy announced my arrival: “J. Walter Thompson. Have a good day, Ma’am,” I stepped out, not knowing if this were the only floor or just one of many.

  The agency entryway was guarded by two receptionists seated side-by-side. “John Watson, please,” I said.

  Twenty minutes later, John came into the reception area, still laughing over his shoulder at some joke he’d just heard in the hallway. He stopped.

  “Rosalie. Everything all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right. I just thought . . .”

  He took a chair next to me, while I craned my neck to see past the framed soap advertisements on the wall.

  “I can’t go to lunch, you understand.”

  “Oh, I understand completely. It’s just . . .”

  Four men entered the agency, strolled past the receptionists and continued down another hall, into some inner sanctum. One of them might have been Darrow, though I’d seen only the back of him, and surely the man in front was Stanley Resor, whom I’d met once, very briefly and just by chance, when I happened to be standing on a platform with John at Grand Central Station. But then they were gone, off with their kind.

  “Rar, why are you here?”

  It made no sense to me either, now. John wouldn’t have his own office until he finished his training. The biweekly lectures weren’t open to just anyone. I didn’t even care about law or Darrow, especially. I just wanted to
hear what one idea man said to dozens of other idea men. It had to be more interesting than trying to make curtains. But I realized now it had been a wasted trip, and I was only tired and a little headachy from walking all those blocks with the horns beeping and the people late for their jobs, pushing to get around me, all of us dwarfed by the city itself, and made acutely aware of our roles or lack of significant roles in the towering buildings.

  John lowered his voice. “This looks a little peculiar—like my mother noticed I forgot my lunch and came to school with it.”

  “I did bring you something,” I said. That morning, he’d been running late, complaining that one of the socks he’d just pulled on had a hole (one of us really did have to learn to sew, and quickly). I’d thought to pack a different clean pair, folded inside my purse, just in case of this moment, when a better excuse was needed. “Something you were wishing for with great enthusiasm this morning.”

  A mischievous smile formed on his face. We’d had a discussion—I wouldn’t quite call it a tiff—about the manner in which we each woke up, and what our first priorities were, aside from coffee.

  “Not that, of course,” I said.

  “Clean socks?” He put a hand up to his neck, rubbing it, and made an exaggerated head-roll motion that was equal parts fatigue and disbelief. “I hope you’re joking.”

  I was an inch from unsnapping my purse. I pulled back my hand. “Of course I’m joking. I was just in the neighborhood. Before I leave, is there a place where I can freshen up?”

  “Fran will show you. I’ve got to get back.” He gave his own neck one more rub for good measure, reached out to pat me on the side of the arm, and walked away.

  Fran, who looked about my age, turned to the woman at her side, older by ten or fifteen years. “Mel, are you going to the cafeteria soon? I might want a sandwich. When I come back, don’t let me forget. I’ll give you some money.”

  Fran walked me down another hallway, opposite the direction John had gone, and waited as I used the facilities and composed myself. She seemed satisfied with getting a chance to be away from her desk, and when, on the way back, I slowed to look at more pictures on the wall, she loitered alongside me. I noticed another short hallway, with a large interior window onto a conference room filled almost entirely with women.

  “Secretarial training?”

  Fran was still putting her lipstick back in her purse. “Them? No, they’re not secretaries.”

  “What are they, then?”

  She squinted. “Copywriters, mostly. Gladys there is an illustrator—one of the best. Melba is in Research. I think Evelyn just got promoted.”

  The woman standing at the head of table looked up and noticed us.

  “That’s Helen, of course,” Fran said.

  “Who’s Helen?”

  “. . . Lansdowne Resor. Stanley’s wife.”

  So wives did make impromptu visits—dropping lunch, socks, or a clean shirt. Or maybe she was socializing with the female employees she’d come to know through Stanley. But it took only another moment for me to look again at her posture, bent over, one hand braced on the table, the other still holding a pencil with which she’d been marking up a large illustration, until she looked up and noticed us staring. One of her legs was extended slightly back in a general’s stance, directing the attention of the whole room. She looked to be in her middle thirties: hair medium long and loosely pulled away from her face and knotted at the nape of her neck, not exactly the latest style. She was handsome more than pretty, with slightly dark skin, as though she enjoyed being out in the sun and didn’t care for heavy, pale powder. Over her long skirt she wore a double-breasted jacket, mannish at the shoulders, but with a softer collar, and her lace-up walking boots, though freshly shined, were at least ten years out of date, more suited to a former suffragette than a currently fashionable Manhattanite.

  A pane of glass stood between us, but still, I kept my voice to a whisper. “And what does she do?”

  “Why, she runs JWT.”

  “I thought Stanley did.”

  “He runs client services: you know, shake hands, have a drink, and here’s the bill. She designs the ads and comes up with new ways to run campaigns.”

  “Isn’t designing ads and running campaigns the main thing an agency does?”

  “I suppose so. I guess you could say she runs the meetings that the public doesn’t see and Stanley runs the meetings the public does see, if that makes any sense.”

  Helen Lansdowne Resor was still looking back at us, eyes narrowed, as if she was trying to place me. Whenever someone did recognize my face or name lately, it didn’t go well. I instinctively hunched down a bit.

  “She must know my husband,” I said.

  “He’s hard to miss,” Fran agreed, stifling a smile, which raised a tickle of bilious worry in my gut. I wanted John to do well here. I didn’t want him—or our marriage—to be the butt of jokes. We had to prove somehow that we didn’t care, even if I did care. The only way to come up with snappy retorts was to know what everyone was saying behind our backs in the first place.

  “I didn’t mean that in a negative way,” Fran said, hurrying to correct the misunderstanding that was etching new worry lines into my face. “It’s just a story we’ve all heard, that’s all. Mrs. Resor interviewed your husband. He had to say what new ideas he’d bring to the company, of course.”

  “Only natural,” I said, to encourage her.

  “So he said he would use . . . well, sex . . . to sell products.”

  I exhaled. Yes, that certainly sounded like him.

  “And Helen—Mrs. Resor—said, ‘My dear Dr. Watson, I was using sex to sell products while you were still running rats through mazes.’”

  Fran turned, gesturing with her chin toward a triptych of framed advertisements that lined one side of the hall. The nearest read: “Woodbury’s Facial Soap: The Skin You Love to Touch.”

  “That was hers—one of the most successful ad campaigns of all time.”

  I followed Fran out to the reception area and asked if I could take a seat—just a spot of dizziness again, and I wanted to store up enough energy to last me the long walk back. Fran’s deskmate had come back already with the sandwiches.

  “Oh, I thought you’d wait,” Fran lamented. “I was going to watch the desk for you.”

  “Jane went down,” the other woman explained. “She picked them up for all of us.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to look relaxed and not out of place, as Fran lifted a corner of bread. “Egg salad drowning in mayo. Just what I was afraid of. Do you want it?”

  Her deskmate shook her head. “I’m borrowing my cousin’s dress for Saturday and it’s a tight fit already.”

  Fran sniffed again. Her eyes lifted and happened to meet mine.

  “You don’t want a sandwich, do you, Mrs. Watson?”

  I didn’t register what she was asking at first—though I practiced using the name, I wasn’t fully used to hearing myself called Mrs. Watson. I’d been staring with absentminded hunger at that sandwich in her hand, white bread with tan crusts and white-yellow creamy cubes of egg salad spilling onto the wax paper. Her kind offer caught me off guard and brought me, inexplicably, to the edge of teariness. At home, I liked egg salad. But suddenly now, the queasiness hit, as if I’d hated eggs my entire life. I had to drop my head toward my knees.

  It took me a moment to say, “No, thank you.” I studied the herringbone pattern on my skirt, vision darkening for a moment, and then brightening again, the lines of my skirt amazingly sharp, every stitch visible.

  “Are you all right?” Fran asked.

  I looked up, every ounce of effort poured into clearing my expression and looking serene, even while the pinpricks of sweat moistened my forehead. In a flash, I was hot and just as quickly cold, armpits and legs under my skirt and scalp all damp in that quick flash of heat.<
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  Just then, Helen Resor entered the reception area. She put on a bright, just-in-case smile and sang out, “Are you a client?”

  “No,” I said, hurrying to my feet. Steady; steady.

  “I saw you in the hall. You looked like you were searching for someone.” Her voice rang in my ears, unnaturally loud, softening into normal tones as my stomach settled and my vision cleared. “We have a special guest here today so I just thought perhaps you were looking for him . . .”

  When I explained that I was only John Watson’s wife, she responded with what seemed like genuine warmth. For the next minute or so, I tried to sound moderately intelligent and interested in advertising but not desperately so, hoping my face wasn’t shining with too much sweat, hoping that my words were coming out in more or less sensible fashion.

  At the end, she looked over her shoulder, in the direction Darrow and my own husband had gone. She had to get going. “Call me Helen. I so look forward to getting to know you better. I can tell we’d get along. I do hope you’ll be joining us.”

  My breath caught. Joining her, joining them? Joining J. Walter Thompson? John must have put in a good word, explaining I’d been on a job hunt of my own. Perhaps he’d made it clear how well we worked together, or even better—perhaps she simply recognized a modern woman with vitality. I would do anything, in any capacity. At that point, it didn’t even matter whether they paid me. I’d continue skipping lunches if only my brain could be fed. My days in the apartment had become more empty than I’d been willing to admit, even to myself.

  “Joining us two weeks from now,” she added, studying my face.

  So much to do between now and then. So much to learn. “Two weeks,” I repeated back.

  I was glowing—sweating—smiling. Helen looked at me quizzically.

  “Joining us for the celebration dinner?” she clarified. “I take it you know the address. After your husband officially completes his training period?”