Living Room (30 page)

The phone was ringing. She didn’t give Arthur a chance to vent his anger. “We’re coming right down,” she said.

Gathering up her papers, Shirley muttered, “Heads you win, tails I lose.”

“Give a little,” said Cass. “It’s called compromise.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

ARTHUR PUMPED CASS’S HAND as if he hadn’t seen him in months.

Shirley, looking around Arthur’s office, thought,
in this railroad car, the Germans surrendered to the Allies and twenty years later the French surrendered to the Germans.
She had to get out of business.

“Well,” said Arthur, rubbing his hands, “let’s see what you’ve got.”

“The premise first,” said Shirley. “Anyone who gives the consumer back some of the power he once had is going to get one helluva big slice of the marketplace.”

She spread her pages in front of them both. The headline read, MAY WE SEND YOU SOMETHING FREE THAT YOU’VE WANTED ALL YOUR LIFE?

“What I propose,” said Shirley, “is that we offer to send anybody who fills out the coupon a booklet with ten slips marked ‘Service.’ With it comes a letter that explains the plan. If and when you settle on a Ford, the selling dealer will validate the coupons with a rubber stamp. Whenever the car needs servicing, repair, anything, the customer presents the service manager with one of the coupons. He shows it to him, but doesn’t give it to him until he gets what he wants. We explain to both the customer and the dealer—and his personnel—that the consumer is the boss. He pays the bills. The service manager, the dealer is working for the customer. The customer is the employer. That coupon is a reminder of the relationship.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by service,” said Cass. Arthur sought safety in silence.

“What everybody always meant by service—being waited on. Being paid attention to. Courteously, promptly. Getting done what needs getting done as if you’re entitled to it, because you are, you’re paying for it! Our ad tells the customer that every Ford dealer will post a parts price list and a labor price list in a conspicuous place. He’s not there to cheat but to render a service. If the coupon-bearer doesn’t get service, he sends the coupon to the Ford Consumer Affairs Department, which promises to take action within twenty-four hours of receipt.”

“Now hold on.”

“Please let me finish. We don’t want government agencies policing us, do we? So we police ourselves. We explain that in the ad. With that free coupon book, by putting power back into the hands of the customer, we’ll be turning Chevy and Plymouth and whatever else owners into Ford customers because what people want more than body trim and upholstery is to bring back the old days, to find a dealer who services what he sells.

“Look, Cass, it’ll be no trouble selling it to the customers. It’ll be a smashing ad campaign. Dearborn’s job will be to sell it to the dealers. Instead of a price war with each other and the other makes, they’ll learn that customers’ll be loyal to a dealer who treats them like customers. Cass, we are not in the hit-and-run business, sell-the-car-and-screw-the-customer.”

Shirley had intended to make her presentation calmly. Instead, she had sounded like she was on a soap box.

Cass got up, stretched, walked to the window, peered out without seeing. Arthur watched the man’s back.

When Cass turned, he said, “I like it. That doesn’t mean Dearborn will like it. First Ralph Nader, now you. Let’s think it through calmly.”

“I’m not attacking the industry,” said Shirley. “It’s the attitude of the country that’s changed. This campaign is based on the fact that we’re a country of declining expectations. Anybody who reverses the trend is—”

“Please hold the sermon,” said Cass. “There are hitches. Ford has tried the service angle.”

“As a pitch, not as an enforceable reality.”

“I’m wondering what a Ford Consumer Affairs Department will cost. I’m wondering whether twenty-four hours is enough time to rectify a complaint.”

“You’ve got a zillion people right now shuffling complaints and policing dealers. This plan ought to cut down both their workloads. And Cass, this is a testable plan. Take one city. Any city. Run the offer of the booklet. Do it now, well before the model year begins. See what percentage response you get for the coupon books. Check to see how many people take it to the Ford dealer, how many actually buy, how many are switching from other makes. It’ll mean training just the dealers in that city. It could be worked out quickly. You’d know in advance if the plan would work on a national scale.”

“And if it didn’t?”

“I suppose you’d find yourself a new agency.” She darted a glance at Arthur, who cleared his throat and said, “Cass, I think this plan might work, and might be doing something useful, too.”

“Well, Arthur, ultimately the only useful thing is the bottom line to the stockholders. I think the cost might be less than what we’ve been using. Shirley, I’d like to talk this one instead of showing an ad. Put the concept in front of them, then call for the copy. I’ll send up the balloon, get a feel of the reception, set it up as the outcome of discussions, something like that.”

“Do you need a memo on this?” asked Arthur.

Cass laughed. “I won’t screw it up.”

“A drink to it then?” asked Arthur, hesitantly.

“I’m going to skip the drink, thanks, grab a cab and dash. I can be back in Dearborn before ten tonight, get a night’s sleep, and present it fresh in the morning.”

He was gone. In Shirley’s head, her mother was saying,
Next thing you’ll be telling the President how to run the country.

“What do you think, Arthur?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I liked your first campaign, remember?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE TELEPHONE MESSAGE SLIP was not in Twitchy’s handwriting. “Hal called.”

Who Hal? Could it be Al?

She dialed. Just as Al answered, Arthur poked his head into the office door.

“Excuse me,” said Shirley into the phone. Arthur was waving good night. She waved an idiot hand back at him.

“Sorry,” she said into the phone, “this is Shirley. Did you call?”

“No.” Neutral voice.

She glanced at the slip. “Maybe it was for someone else. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“No bother.”

He wasn’t hanging up. “Anything on your mind?”

Oh yes, thought Shirley, I take chances with Arthur’s business, I take flyers into fields I know too little about, I don’t have the courage to take the initiative with you because the rebuff would be intolerable.

“Question,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I was thinking of taking some time off while my boss waits for news from Detroit. Any chance of your being in New York?”

“I can’t.”

Means he won’t.

“The English language suddenly seems so inadequate,” she said. “Shall we try talking French?”

“Shirley, if you want to, you could come up here, but I have to tell you, I have someone here with me.”

“Oh? Male or female?”

“Female.”

A moment’s silence.

“Can I come up anyway?”

The line sounded shrill, as if the connection was barely hanging on.
Please God, don’t disconnect us now.

“If you’re saying yes,” said Shirley, “I can’t hear it.”

“You might as well come,” he said.

“Will you get rid of her before I arrive?” asked Shirley.

“No,” said Al.

“I can make the six-fifty,” said Shirley. “I’ll take a cab up from the station.”

“We’ll meet you,” said Al, and hung up.

*

Nearing Grand Central she realized how tight the time was. She walked as fast as she could, the stream of people hurrying for trains, in front and on either side, making it difficult for her to cut in and out of the walking traffic, and she got to the gate just as the conductor was set to close it.

Down the ramp she could see the three conductors who would travel on the train all getting aboard. Why was she rushing, it wasn’t the last train from Berlin.

She stepped aboard just as it started and she would have lost her balance had the conductor not held her elbow and provided a moment’s balance.

“Thank you,” she said, out of breath, and saw how crowded the car was. She loathed the idea of squeezing in between two men on
a three-seater, but that was her only choice. She apologized to the one in the aisle and he got up so she could put her raincoat on the rack above. She slid in. The one at the window glanced at her out of the corner of his eye resentfully.

In front of her, the man was already asleep, though the train was still in the tunnel. Overtired or overbored?

Across the aisle she saw a brown suit, vest, cuffs on the pants, drab shirt, collar loosened, man of forty, going over a computer printout. Somebody loved him. Wife? Mother? Too old for a mother.

“One hundred twenty-fifth Street,” proclaimed the steadying conductor.

A lone black man got on at 125th Street. He gazed down the aisle of the inhospitable car and went to another car to see if there was a seat next to someone who wouldn’t cause a problem.

As the conductor steadied himself down the swinging aisle, checking commutation tickets, she fished in her purse, found a five-dollar bill.

“Tarrytown, first stop,” said the conductor, making sure her unfamiliar face was not on the wrong train.

“Scarborough,” she said. He punched out a double ticket, stuck one in his large black wallet, gave her the other with her change. “Stop after Philips Manor,” he said.

“I know.”

They learned the faces of their commuters in time. She noticed the bars on his sleeve, time served on the Penn Central, and before that the New York Central, a lifetime walking up and down trains from the city to Croton-Harmon and back, passing under Sing Sing each way, where others also served time.

The man on the aisle was adjusting something inside his trousers. He caught her looking, flushed embarrassment.

Turning the other way, out of the left window she could see the buildings of the Bronx hurrying past, apartment lights, minuscule movements of drapes being pulled
, a light going out, a light going on.

She thought the man at her left was about to offer her the second half of his newspaper to read. One didn’t just sit and stare, or think, on the train, one worked or slept or mostly read the senseless details of the newspaper for the second time that day.

Then the Hudson on her left, enough moonlight to see most of the way across the lapping water. A tug, then a barge, heading downstream, somewhere in the dark a heavy rope between them. Yonkers went by. She thought of Thornton Wilder’s play
The Merchant of Yonkers.
She thought of the hundreds of thousands who stood upright on subways this evening, pressed, packed, rocketing to the Bronx or Brooklyn, worse than Penn Central? Didn’t anyone work where they lived any more? A quarter of the workweek just getting to and from, waste. Driving, you needed the patience of a saint.
Good citizens take public transport.
Like Penn Central, in summer, no air-conditioning, sorry, at times no air, sorry, in winter, frozen switches, trains wouldn’t start, on platforms grown men huddling in batches where the doors would be if the trains arrived, waiting in the windblown cold to be taken, late, to where work waited. What could she sell them? A different life?
Start with yourself.

How successful she had been in not thinking of Al up till now! She could get off at Tarrytown, take the next train back, never arrive, it was all a mistake. Who was with him? Did Arthur go home to Jane or decide to have a few drinks first? He needed a mistress, a fling to feel young again before dying. Where was her humanity, she could have offered herself. Was faithful Cass in the arms of his wife yet, or did he have someone else in Detroit and his wife think he was still in New York? When the Ford people met tomorrow, would she sense their reaction before she heard, ESP?

The men on both sides of her stood to get off at Tarrytown. She could feel her muscles stretch. Had she tensed up, not wanting to touch the man on either side? Why not give them a small thrill to take home, a story for their wives, impertinent girl on the train, the fantasy of a quick lay?

Five minutes more. A quick stop at Philips Manor, then the conductor announcing Scarborough in a pronunciation peculiar to someone who has said the word out loud too often in his life.

The train came into the station too fast, overshot. The conductor shouted for everyone to stay put while the engineer backed the train up. Holding the seat in front of her for balance, she reached high for the raincoat on the rack, then clasped it as if it were a blanket. She imagined touching the third rail with her toe, going up in a puff of smoke, solving everything.

The passengers queued to get off, a middle-class chain gang shuffling toward the door. The conductor standing on the platform reached up a hand to help her. A vestige of courtesy, preserve it in aspic?

Glancing right and left, Shirley saw commuters’ wives jockeying for getaway positions. Where was Al?