The Learners: A Novel (No Series) (18 page)

“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:

W
IPE AWAY YOUR WORRIES WITH
W
ONDREX

W
RING OUT THE RING WITH
K
OLLAR
K
LEEN

H
OLD HANDS WITH
P
ALMSALVE

D
URADREAM HELPS YOU SEE THE NIGHT

S
UNBEAM
B
AKERY
: W
HAT 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.”

“No, I wouldn’t dream of—”

“That lipless bitch gets away with it because she’s got me by the short and curlies. Cunt.”

Whoa. My intuition: He wasn’t really saying this to me.

He was saying it to Lars.

I cleared my throat. “Well, I’d like to apologize.”

“For what.”

“For being thrust upon you, like this, by Mimi. I would think you’d rather work with Sketch.”

“I’d
rather
work with Orson Welles. What can be done? It’s her company. She has a mind of her own, and she’s lost it. Doesn’t seem to stop her. What’s your name, by the way?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m Happy.” That didn’t come out right.

“Okay, Happy, here’s a question for you.”

“Yes?”

“For someone named Happy,” he lowered his head and leered over his bifocals, blue-bloodshot eyes into mine, “why don’t you ever, ever smile?”

Now
that
I didn’t expect.

Was it true? Was it that obvious?

“I, I—”

“Oh, take your time.” He pulled open a desk drawer to his lower left, extracted a section of the newspaper and, oddly, a full cup of coffee. He sipped at it as he scrutinized the crossword puzzle like a baboon searching the back of its mate for ticks. “I have alllll day.”

“I—”

“You wanna tip?”

“Sure.”

“You wanna make it in the ad biz, learn how to do crossword puzzles.”

“Really?”

“It’s the same thing. Tricks.”

“It is? Do—”

“Hah! HERE’s what I mean. A really good one, I’ll bet.” Ignoring me and soliciting my attention simultaneously, he jabbed at the paper with his pen. “The clue is, nineteen Across: ‘
A number of people
.’ See that’s what they do, they try to trick you. That’s the ad biz. Because you don’t know what they’re really getting at, but they’ve got you. So for this? The answer begins with an ‘a’ and ends with an ‘a.’ Ten letters. Doesn’t make sense, right? Those sons of bitches. So what do you think it is?”

Damn. I was not good at crossword puzzles. Life was confusing enough. A number of people, beginning and ending in ‘a’. America? No, not enough letters. “I haven’t a cl—, I mean, I’ve no idea.”

“Ha.
That’s
it: ANESTHESIA!” He scribbled it in, glowing with revelation. “It’s not ‘num-
ber
,’ it’s numb-
er
! Hah!”

“Wow, that’s—”

“I got their
number
. Bastards.” He cackled in cockeyed triumph, put the coffee cup back in the drawer, shut it, and set the paper on his lap.

Then his head eased over like a sand castle at high tide. He began to snore.

Th-th-th-th-at’s all folks.

Useless. I shut the door behind me, in quiet defeat.

Anesthesia: 1. Me: 0.

“Okay, team, where are we?”

Good question. Technically, we were back in Mimi’s office, on Thursday morning, in pretty much the same positions we assumed three days ago—except for Mimi, who held court behind her desk.

In terms of the Buckle pitch, we were nowhere.

“I’ve been drawing shoes,” said Sketch, evoking a fireman who’s been searching the smoking hulks of scorched buildings for burn victims, “and it’s been going feetingly.”

And that made me look at Mimi’s feet, peeking through the gap between the banks of her desk drawers, just as she doffed her open-toed pumpkin espadrilles. And then Hamlet’s head emerged. Splayed on the floor, most of his body concealed by the left side of the desk, his snout encroached upon her right foot, ready to swallow it whole. Could anyone else see this, or just me? He parted his jaws, unleashing his tongue to wrap itself around her big toe (manicured, gloss coral Glistex One-coat) like a boa constrictor closing in on a helpless lemur, then suddenly uncoiling and slaloming its slimy way down the arch. Her left eyebrow flickered oh-so-slightly as he rounded her heel.

“Uh-hmm. Well, that’s a start. Poopy?”

Preston was hard at work, on the
Register’
’s Silly Syllable Scramble, which his eyes never left as he retorted dryly, “The muse has gone on vacation. Unannounced. And she’s apparently having a very, very good time.”

Mimi was not amused, as it were. “Well, then she better at least send a postcard. Soon.” She didn’t look in my direction, but the disappointment was telegraphed—the muse was supposed to be
me
. So much for my great gift. Please make me invisible.

But of course: for all intents and purposes, I already was.

“Nicky, how are we on scheduling a sit-down?”

“Working on it, Mums. I’ve got a call in. Their New England account rep’s a friend of a friend of a friend. Rumored to have a ten-stroke handicap.” He smirked with parochial superiority.

Tip raised his hand.

“Tippy.”

“I’ve had this idea.”

Nicky rolled his eyes.

Tip ignored him. “Why don’t we pull in people off the street and let them weigh in on the product?”