The Learners: A Novel (No Series) (2 page)

Before me stood a weathered four-story Victorian brick cottage on Trumbull Street. A plaque welded to the right of the entrance announced itself as the town’s first firehouse “in the years when Dickens declared Hillhouse Avenue (a five-minute walk away) the most beautiful street in America.”

Probably because he’d just come from this one.

Parked in the garage off to the left, where one pictured a once trusty horse-drawn water wagon waiting to race to its next bucket brigade, was an Olympic-size ’59 Cadillac convertible the color of raw veal. And it had about as much room to move as a fatted calf—the back end of it jutted out of the garage, blocking half the sidewalk. The top was down and the eggshell blue upholstery, immaculate on the driver’s side, was, on the passenger seat, mauled to a relish of leather and foam.

I rang the bell—not really a bell at all, but a chrome box with rounded edges and vertical slits, hovering over a red Bakelite button. I pressed it again.

Static. “Yes?” A woman’s voice, swarming with electrons. Sounded like she was counties away.

“Is this Spear, Rakoff and Ware?”

“Yes?”

Could she hear me? I pushed the button a third—

“Please stop that.”

Yipes. “Sorry. I’m here to see Mr. Spear, please.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Oh, yes ma’am. He’s expecting me.” I gave her my name. Waited.

And waited. Then

“
ZZZZZZZZZZZZAAAATTT!!!
”

It was the door—apparently several thousand volts of electricity were coursing through the handle. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it.

Finally, it popped open and a lady with ice-white hair the shape and texture of spun sugar stuck her head out and looked at me—the way a duchess would notice a stain on her bedsheets.

“Isn’t this working?” she snapped, glaring at the buzzer with her pretty knife of a face, ready to have the knob drawn and quartered. Her eyes glowed with the fact that her perfect hands and their attending scarlet talons were made for better things than this, than for opening doors for
me
.

“I, I don’t know.”

She sighed mightily and withdrew and let it begin to close. I caught it just before it latched, and followed her in.

The reception area had one small couch—a rounded Machine Age number made of worn gray suede and aluminum tubing. I gingerly sat on it; me—a terrible intruder, a twig in the spokes of this agency’s mighty wheel. The ceiling was double-height, with three windows on the second-floor level (apparently inaccessible to cleaners) facing a balcony with offices behind it. The center of the room was pierced by a polished stainless-steel cylindrical beam that ran from floor to ceiling.

This firehouse smelled…of smoke.

A bowl of potato chips on the coffee table in front of me rested atop five back issues of
Advertising Production Techniques Weekly
. A handwritten and folded piece of paper, like a place card at a dinner party, had been positioned in front of it and said DO NOT TOUCH. The secretary promptly forgot I existed, having clamped an operator’s headset onto her comely skull and set to typing with the fury of an aerial machine gunner laying waste to a squadron of Sopwith Camels. Another bowl of potato chips sat next to her typewriter, with its own warning to stay clear of it.

I waited helplessly for something to happen, sorrier by the second. What could I have been thinking? How could I have thought I’d ever be of any use to anyone here? Those chips sure looked good. Minutes crawled by like desert-marooned cartoon characters. Thirsty. And now I wanted to eat a potato chip more than I wanted to keep breathing. My tie was tightening around my throat, the armpits in my good Arrow shirt grew wet and hot under my confirmation blazer, and my new cordovan Bass Weejuns were strangling my feet. The next train back left in forty minutes. I was going to be on it.

“What’s the matter, sitting on a tack?”

A voice with the timbre of a bell—bright, piercing, capable of alarm. He’d appeared magically to my left—a tall boy-man in white shirtsleeves and a thin crimson tie, dark gray trousers—he was lithe and angular and trying to keep still. His wire-rim glasses were lit by eyes that looked at you and somewhere behind you and someplace beyond that, to be sure. They flanked a beaky nose that didn’t fit in with the rest of his face at all—an uninvited guest to the party of his features.

The yellow legal pad clutched tight in his right hand bore what looked like obsessively scrawled notes for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or an A-bomb.

I started to explain myself. “I—”

Sotto voce, to me: “Don’t tell me Preechy left you here to fend for your
self
.” He glanced back to the secretary’s desk, which was mounted on a platform perched a good two feet above the floor, accessible by steps. He must have thought I was someone else, talking to me like this.

“Well, I’m here to see Mr. Spear. I—”

“Oh, that pasty, slacked-titted harpy.” Louder, to her, “Miss Preech? Woo-hoo! Darling.” Tilting his head to me. “Has he been seen to?”

The woman glowered at him poisonously and shouted, her hands never stopping their mad staccato dance, “Mr. Spear was called AWAY. He will be back SHORTLY.”

Under his breath, eyes sideways: “
Such
a gorgon. Silver bullets would be useless.”

I caught myself in a small guffaw—just what he wanted. He was performing. He switched the pad to his left hand, extended the other.

“I’m Tip. Tip Skikne.”

“Tip?”

“As in ‘of the iceberg’.”

“Oh. I’m…Happy.”

“Well, good for you. I’m morose. But I mask it
beautifully
.”

I explained my nickname.

“Oh, how sad. Mine’s a nickname too—‘Thomas’ sounds too much like an English muffin. Cup of coffee? Our Mr. Spear is probably taking one of his copyrighted ‘inspirational walks.’ He seemed eager for diversion. Could be a while.”

“Oh, thanks. Yes, please. And…” I didn’t know how to ask it.

He looked differently at me all of a sudden. Seriously. Professionally. “You want a potato chip,” he said slyly, “don’t you? Tell the truth.”

“Actually, yes. How did you—”

“And before you came in here it was the furthest thing from your mind, especially at this hour, wasn’t it.”

“Well, yes.”

“Thank GOD. That was the whole idea. You
see
? I’m really onto something.” His face lit up. “CRISPY!”

“What?”

“Don’t be frightened. Just say the first word that pops into your head when I say CRISPY!”

Whoa.

“CRISPY!”

“Uh, ‘Cornies,’ I guess.”

“Cornies? What the hell is that?” A puzzled look, bringing up the pad with a jolt. He urgently started writing.

My eyes went to Miss Preech, grateful to see her oblivious—I was about to bare something personal. For some reason, I knew I could open up to this guy: “Crispy Cornies was my favorite cereal in…the fifth grade. You know, Kenny Kernel sang the theme song. ‘
Crispy Cornies crunch like COOKies! Crunch-crunch-crunch, a whole BIG bunch!’
” I was actually singing—it had come to that. I caught myself, mortified: “It was Flash Gordon’s favorite.”

Scribbling, scribbling. “Mmhmm, the cereal—was it good? Tasting, I mean.”

“No, not really. Too mealy, too mapley. Turned the milk into a muddy sop. But it had the best toys, so there was no question.”

“Go on.”

“Well, they made a Ming the Merciless death ray you could cut from the box and construct entirely out of cardboard, mucilage, three rubber bands, and ten, ten? hairpins.” It actually worked—on tiny, doomed baby field mice plucked from the woods behind our house. “Didn’t you ever try them?”

“I’m Canadian,” he said.

Oh. Maybe that explained it, this immediate familiarity. They just don’t tell you these things in school.

“Wow.”

“I know. I pass for an actual human being. But I rarely try.” Whether he tried or not, the effect was convincing. He radiated a strategic urgency, as if he was working on ten things at once in his mind. He belonged here, no doubt about that. I studied him as he flipped through several leaves of the legal pad and made more notations. Then he put it down, picked up the bowl of potato chips from the coffee table with both hands, and raised it to me, like a grail full of Incan blood.

“Help yourself.”

Maybe it was just me, but the way he said it…it meant more than it usually does.

“You see,
that’s
what interests me.” Tip Skikne’s office, on the first floor, had a real, tennis-playing squirrel in it. “It’s fascinating.” A stuffed one, mounted on an ashtray, on the right corner of his desk. But reclining in his chair, hands behind his head, that wasn’t what he was referring to. “You associate ‘crispy’ not with a natural entity—‘corn,’ say,” eyes glued to something on the ceiling, “but with a completely artificial construct that’s been placed into your mind, your memory, by other
people
…” The squirrel sported Lacoste whites and clutched a tiny racket, suspended forever in mid-serve. “By adding three letters to the word ‘corn,’ it’s no longer made by God, it’s made by man. Amazing.” Mounted on its left leg, the right leg was bent and raised behind him. Perfectly balanced—flawless form. “And that’s not even why I asked you to free-associate in the first place.” I wondered where the ball was. Probably buried under the mound of cigarette butts. “But such is serendipity. I doubt it will help me with my current adversitorial dilemma, but there it is. Am I boring you?” Now he leaned forward, staring.

“Huh? Oh no, not at all. I was just admiring your squirrel.”

He folded his hands and calmly placed them on the desk. “Yes, that’s Victor. Get it? So now, what can I do for you?” As if the last ten minutes hadn’t happened.

What? I finished chewing a potato chip, swallowed. Those were good. “I’m waiting to see Mr. Spear, actually, remember?” I set down my coffee mug. “Maybe I should go back to—”

“Right, yes, yes.” Glasses in one hand, rubbing his eyes with the other. “No. I can’t leave you in the clutches of…” He thought better of what he was going to say and looked over at my portfolio case.

“And you’re here to see Sketchy about…”

Sketchy. “A job. I just graduated. I—”

“That sneak
.
He didn’t tell me they were looking for—”

“Well, that’s because they—you’re…probably not. See, I just sort of called him.”

“Right. Could I have a look?” He gestured to my case.

Here we go, I’d better start getting used to it. “Sure.”

He untied it and looked at the first page. “How interesting. What…is that?”

“It’s a pencil drawing.”

“That I can see. Of what? It looks like—”

“It’s a kiwi,” I deadpanned. “A decapitated kiwi. And a wing-tip shoe.”

He was frozen, in either awe or pity.

“I did it in freshman Still Life. I always thought it looked like they were having a conversation, so later, for my portfolio, I turned it into a cartoon.” I reached down and opened a flap beneath it to reveal the caption:

Help me get a head, and I’ll help you get a foot in the door.

He smirked. “You didn’t go to school around here, did you?”

“You could say that.” I was starting to produce flop sweat. I changed the subject. “So, may I ask, what
is
your current adver, advers…”

“Adversitorial dilemma—my own term.” Proud as punch. “Well,” he said, resting his folded forearms on the drawing as if it were a diner placemat, “it’s no big deal. Or maybe it is. It’s just an
idea
I had.” He said the word “idea” the way most other people would say “dead child.” “See, I keep trying to tell them—it’s really very simple: Ads don’t sell products.”

I didn’t quite know what to say to that. We
were
sitting in an ad agency. Where he worked.

“
Stores
sell products. Right?” One of those
THINK