The Learners: A Novel (No Series) (24 page)

It was ten to twelve. What did he want? “Yes ma’am, be right there.” I straightened my tie, dusted the blue-pencil shavings from my pants. “It’s Preston,” I said to Sketch. “I’m being summoned.”

“Here’s look’n at ya.” He winked.

Ware’s office door was cracked, an oblique invitation. He motioned for me to sit.

“It finally came to me this morning.” He looked elated. As in awake. “When I was getting dressed.”

“It did?”

“Ha! I’ve still got it.” He gripped the sides of his desk as if it were a rocket, ready to take off. “Okay, kid, are you ready for this?”

Was I? “Sure.”

“One, two…” He leered at me suspiciously, his right eyebrow hoisted high above the left—was I supposed to join in? To what?

“Yes?”

“Jiminy! One, two…”

“Three! What?” Help me, help me,

“Oh, COME ON. One, two. One, two!”

Was I an idiot? Or being accosted by a lunatic?

“We all learned it in school! It’s the easiest thing in the world. And they’ve never used it!”

“Never used what?”

“Buckle my shoe!!”

“You’re wearing wing tips.”

“NO! You moron! That’s the slogan!”

“It is?”

“Of COURSE it is. ‘One, two, buckle my shoe!’ It’s been on the tip of our tongues the whole time!”

“Hmmm.”

“It’s pure gold!” He turned and typed it up, ripped it out of the roller. Thrust it at me. “Here ya go, kid.”

“Thanks.”

“Thank
God
that’s over with. Let’s go to lunch.” He was already standing, collecting his jacket.

“Together?”

“Why the hell not. I finished the crossword already. It’s a Tuesday. Hungry? I’m always hungry,” he declared, buttoning up the front. “I shouldn’t be, too old. But you.” He paused, accusing. “You should be hungry, all the time.”

“The usual, Dimbleby.” The tables at the Graduate Club—a white clapboard colonial mansion on Elm Street, facing the Green—were covered with a stiff custard linen that bore the small tell-tale holes of decades of boiled Irish laundering. And that’s exactly how the members liked them. The floors, billowing warped oak boards undulating beneath frayed runners, led to a receding series of rooms lined with flocked wallpaper and dotted with foxed etchings of Harkness Tower. Seated in the rear-most alcove, Preston was the most at home I’d ever seen him. Sprung from the office prison.

“Yes sir. And for the gentleman?” Dimbleby, our waiter, was out of central casting—grizzled as a dried apple, shrinking by imperceptible increments in his starched tuxedo, incurably haunched by decades of leaning in close to take orders.

“I’ll have—”

“Make it two,” Preston interrupted, “we’re celebrating.”

“Very good, sir.”

The menu: shrimp cocktail, thin Rhode Island chowder, Steak Diane, Chicken Kiev, buttered wax beans, parsley potatoes. I suspected the food was an afterthought to what was really on the diner’s mind.

“Here we
are
.” Dimbleby placed a pair of martinis, straight up with olives, onto the center of the table.

Yikes. Where I came from, martinis were for Saturday evenings, not Tuesdays at noon.

Oh well. This
was
something of an occasion, right? Warily, I lifted it in his direction, took a metallic sip, “Cheers—”

“Aaah. Not half bad.” Preston’s glass was empty, the olive practically spinning. He popped it into his mouth like an aspirin.

“The same sir?” Dimbleby sprited away the glass, not missing a trick.

“You’re my
saviour
, Dimble.” Preston cracked the menu. “Now let’s see, what looks good today?”

Once he’d ordered his Clams Casino and Shepherd’s Pie, and me my iceberg wedge and Chicken Español, I thought I’d try a little shop talk. “So, how do you see the ad?”

“
See
it?” The very idea: anathema. “I won’t see it until you show it to me. That’s your job.”

“Right.”

“You’ll be able to do a lot with it, too. It’s a well-spring!”

And, halfway through my second drink, I believed him: “One, two, buckle my shoe” revealed itself, thanks to the transmogrifying powers of gin, as the genius stroke of the decade—all things to all people, the doorway to greater knowledge in the universe. How could I not have seen it? It’s what Buckle was made for. Surely they could not but kneel in awe at its nearly obscene greatness. And it was my job to see it through. My job. This is how it must have felt when Rakoff & Ware was in its salad days, wooing the big accounts. Exhilarating. “Preston?”

“Mmm-hmm.” He was on his fourth martini now. Entering initial stages of Shut Down.

I was still in a Sputnik orbit, able to temporarily forestall the impending disaster below. “How is it different now than then?”

“What?”

“The firm.”

“Than then, when?”

“When you and Lars were pitching, I don’t know, Buster Brown?”

“Hrrummff, we were kids. Kids who got lucky. The ad game was still new. We were just making it up as we went along. I honestly think half the time the clients were just too polite to turn us down—it used to be a gentleman’s business.”

“And now?”

“Hah. It’s a horse orgy! Back there,” he nodded sideways, I supposed in the general direction of the office. “They think I’m just an old fool. And maybe they’re right.” He flexed his eyebrows and inhaled the rest of his drink. “But I’ve got their number, every one of ’em. They think I don’t see anything. I see it all.”

“You do.”

“Oh, you betcha.” He was really fired up now.

I couldn’t resist. “Okay, so I’m just going to run down the list, and you tell me the first thing that pops into your head.”

“The list? Wha—”

“Nicky.”

“Oh. Hah! Waiting for Mummy to die.” No hesitation. “He should try a tent stake and a wooden mallet.”

“Sketch?”

“Mmm. Wasting his time and talent. Always did. He could have been jeezing Disney, he had any sense. Keep going.”

“Tip?”

“A smart-ass. He could sit on a Popsicle and tell you what flavor it is.” Then he waved his left hand up and down, suddenly boneless, and snarled, “He’s a
flit
.”

I pretended I didn’t hear that. Which was half true. “Miss Preech.”

“A hair-pie with fangs.”

“Why is she so angry?”

“Women are always angry. It’s how they get things.”

“Really?” And what, I wondered, had it gotten Miss Preech?

“That, and crying. Look at Mildred.”

“Mrs. Rakoff?”

“She got far on tits and tears. Farther than I ever did.” A dark smile. “Christ knows.”

“I can’t—somehow, picture her crying.”

“You’ve never had to. You don’t want to. It’s not for the squeamish.”

“When was the last time you saw her cry?”

“Heh-heh.”

“Uh, what?”

“You’d think it would be when they found Lars’s body…”

Jesus. “Why, what were the circumstances?”

“Not good.” Dour. He didn’t elaborate.

“So. That wasn’t it. When Mimi cried.”

“No. It was…after that.”

A burp.

“…when Hamlet got the croup.” His eyelids met each other in rapturous memorial bliss.

Check, please.

Without a word, Dimbleby ushered us into the club’s Cadillac and drove us the eight blocks back. I walked Preston up to his office, guided his key into the lock.

Loaded at three in the afternoon, I truly understood him: It was the only way
to
understand him. “Well, thanks for—”

Slam. Over the transom I heard the murmur of sozzled grunts—the Burberry mac and suit jacket shed with impatience and tossed to the floor, a squeaky office chair yanked and slumped into, an unwanted consciousness eagerly and swiftly abandoned.

Three, four, shut the door.

Wallace had been “visiting” me almost every night now for the last two weeks, the same nightmare. You’d think I’d get wise to it eventually, but it took me by horrified surprise every time. It was as physically exhausting as it was emotionally flaying.

Was there some part of me that wanted it that way?

“Here, take these. On the house.” Tip had set the small amber bottle on my desk two afternoons ago. A month’s dosage of prescription Duradream sleeping pills.

“Oh, thanks. Look, you really didn’t have to do that.”

Extra strength.

“No sweat. You don’t look well, Hap. I mean it.”

I was going to return them, but changed my mind. Instead I set them next to my night table at home and would stare at the label until dawn. I didn’t dare take one.

Not yet.

In the clear light of the next day, my head restored to at least its own sense of troubled recognition, the scales had fallen and “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe” turned back into the pumpkin it was before the ball. And with the big Buckle presentation less than a week away. Yes, I would do something with the copy, but now I had to do something else. Another ad, something of my own, on my own. But this time what I needed before I had the right words was the right image. The latter would give birth to the former, not the other way around.

With a new sense of focus, I did what I used to do in school—I camped out two whole nights in the Sterling Library, researching the subject of the problem at hand. Shoes: their history, role in society, what they meant in different cultures. What I kept coming back to was that in the Western World, when trying to ascertain one’s social status, it’s not so much about the shoes themselves, but about the lack of them. Preston had that much right: The Depression taught us that the only thing that screamed “poverty” more than eating a shoe to survive is not even having the option. Okay, so now what?

I was still without an answer when, waiting in line to check out my books the second night, my eyes fell upon a row of pictures—an exhibition from the library’s photography collection—framed and hung along the west wall of the nave. There it was, literally staring me in the face, my epiphany in the shower now made manifest: a black-and-white study by Dorothea Lange of a young man’s bare feet, lying in the grass, toes curled. While luxuriating in their repose, they also betrayed a naked vulnerability. Cowering, helpless, afraid of the world. In pure need.

In need of…friends.

Oh, it was perfect.

Now I needed permission to go with it. I couldn’t just spring this on everyone at the meeting. Not if I wanted to keep my job. No sense in not going right to the top. “Mrs. Rakoff?” I caught her that afternoon, in her office, just as she was preparing to leave for the day.

“Yes?” she answered, studying her hands stretched out before her. Two yards away, Hamlet was splayed on the floor like a jackknifed tractor trailer.

“May I have a quick word with you?”

“All right, but you have till my nails dry.” She began waving them furiously, as if they’d caught fire. “I have a four o’clock at Jilda’s.”