The Learners: A Novel (No Series) (26 page)

“Oh!”

And began to charge down the length of it. At Greene.

“RARRFF!!”

“Whoa there!”

Tip and Sketch sat frozen with disbelief. As did I.

“He’s just playing. Down, boy!”

Hamlet, despite his handicap, gained speed—struggling to gallop, flailing wildly and clumsy with purpose.

CLOPP-
CLOPP
CLIP-
CLOPP
, CLIP-
CLOPP!

Then, the buckle on his right front foot caught itself in the one on his rear left, and down he went, with a weighty thud. He rolled, end over end—it was like watching a horse trying to do cartwheels. Greene instinctively brought up his arms, shielding his face.

“I—”

WHAM!
Hamlet skidded to a stop and slammed into him. Nicky leapt onto the massive, whimpering animal like a rodeo clown on a crazed bull, wrangling him down off the table.

“Bad dog! Bad!” he yelled, yanking him tightly by the collar. “Doyald, I am SO sorry. This is not like him at
all,
really.”

Right. Normally he’s more aggressive.

Greene, to his credit, straightened his tie and pulled himself together. “I, I appreciate the gesture. It was charming.” Now that was class. Hamlet was about as charming as a caesarean birth, sans the anesthesia. It was a miracle this guy wasn’t halfway out of the room by now. Miss Pillbox had turned as white as her note cards.

With Hamlet hauled away and the door shut tightly behind him, Nicky announced that we would be presenting several ideas, worked up by different teams within the firm.

“Ahem.” Preston stood next to the easel, ready to give the first pitch. Once he had everyone’s attention, he smiled slyly and started,

“One, two…”

Silence.

“One, two…?”

Greene was non-plussed.

“One,
two
…?”

From there it went pretty much as it had with me, with everyone as baffled as I had been, until he delivered the punchline. And the payoff, when it came, didn’t make much of an impact.

Not that Preston noticed.

“Cute,” said Greene, obliging but dismissive, in the manner of someone who’d lived all his life with a funny name and just had it crudely mocked for the millionth time. Yes, he’d heard “One, Two; Buckle My Shoe,” and he didn’t need to hear it again, ever.

“Live with it for a while, you’ll see,” said Preston as he returned to his seat, beaming with blithe assurance. Oh, he’d earned his Manhattans today, yessir.

Tip’s turn. He placed a two-and-a-half-by-three-
foot black presentation board on the easel, obscuring mine and Preston’s. He pivoted. “Mr. Greene, we here at Spear, Rakoff and Ware, have done a great deal of research in preparation for today.” He slowly paced back and forth in front of the easel as he spoke, hands held behind his back. He was Perry Mason, only better. “But not of shoes.”

Greene was intrigued.

“No, we figured you’ve already done plenty of that. What we decided to research instead, here in New Haven, is people.”

He let it sink in, then,

“Yes, we talked to your potential customers, living in the area, and do you know what we found?”

I did, and longed to tell him: a bloated self-mutilating fruit peddler, a lethally displaced member of the Ku Klux Klan, an emotionally unstable Amazon warrior, and Pippi Longstocking on barbiturates.

“We found that they don’t want one pair of your shoes.”

What? Alarm began to register across Greene’s face.

“Or, I should say,
just
one. Because that’s not enough. Not when it comes to Buckle.” True and totally misleading. So, so smart. “There is, of course, that oft-told aphorism: ‘I felt sorry for myself, because I had no shoes,’ ” he paused for effect, “ ‘and then I met a man who had no feet.’ This is what we call lending a sense of perspective. Invaluable, certainly, but what happens when the perspective is on the other foot, as it were?” He opened the board like a huge book and set it down. “What happens, we think, is this.”

They’d worked up a double-page format, enlarged to five feet wide. A miniature billboard. Across the top the headline read:

When it comes to Buckle Shoes…

Underneath that, high-contrast photo-stats of Sketch’s drawings were arranged in a horizontal checkerboard pattern, alternating black and white squares, one shoe per box. The different backgrounds offset the drawings beautifully. It was incredibly striking. Below the illustrations, the legend blazed:

It’s a shame you only have two feet!

A hush.

Then, “That’s very clever.” Greene smiled with genuine surprise, turned to Miss Pillbox. “I like that.” And he meant it.

Direct hit.

“I’d like to show that at next week’s planning meeting. Can I take this with me?”

Bull’s-eye. Unbelievable.

Tip was glowing. Iridescent. “Of course.”

Mimi vibrated her hands in little girlie-claps. Sketch gave his pipe a triumphant puff. Tip closed up the board and laid it in front of Greene.

This was it. If I was going to do it, I had to do it now. I stood. My blood was frigid electricity. “Um, pardon me, if I may.” I had the floor, and introduced myself. “I worked up something on my own, too. I just wanted to show it to you.”

Nicky scowled. “Son, what—”

“Let the boy talk,” said Mimi. Greene offered no objection.

“I started thinking, what
are
shoes, after all?” I’d rehearsed the speech, for almost a week now. What else did I have to do in the night’s dark hours? “Shoes are our protectors, our shields against the cold ground. But they’re more than that. They’re…our
friends
. I know that may sound strange.”

Greene considered it. “Go on.”

“Well, it’s been said that a man is lucky if he can count the number of his friends—real friends—on the fingers of two hands. So what if he could count them on two…,” I pulled back the cover sheet to reveal the Lange photo of the languid feet. Below it I’d placed a stark white field, in the middle of which, floating eight inches above a tiny Buckle Shoes logo, it said

HELP US.

“On two feet. That’s what you want, from your friends.”

Greene winced, confused. “You mean, it’s an ad for shoes…with no shoes in it?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “An ad itself can’t sell you a shoe. But what it can
give
you is…a
need
for shoes.”

I couldn’t bring myself to look at Tip.

“Huh.”

And then—with bright, inhuman clarity, Doyald Greene said something that he really shouldn’t have said.

“You’re killing me!”

No. No.

“It’s a joke, right? A shoe ad with no shoes! You’re killing me!! A-ha-ha-ha-ha!” He was practically doubled over, drowning in a rapturous torrent.

“Stop it,” I murmured, shrunken, helpless. “Please. Stop—”

“You’re killing me, I swear—”

“NO!!” Someone was screaming. Hysterical. “NO, I AM NOT!!” It was me.

The room went soundless, Greene’s hiccups of laughter became a rapid-fire succession of painful stomach cramps. Oblivious with delirium.

I was panting, shaking. He wasn’t Greene anymore. He was Wallace, in pain. I had to save him. “I AM NOT. KILLING YOU!! STOP SAYING—”

He caught himself. “Hey, take it easy, kid, I didn’t—”

Nicky materialized next to me, grabbing my arm. “Yes, very funny, Hap. Doyald, he was our comic relief. Say good night, Gracie.” He hastily shoved me aside, taking Greene by the elbow and leading him up and out. Sketch put his hand on my shoulder. Forcibly. Tip had disappeared with Miss Pillbox and the presentation boards.

Nicky hustled Greene to the door. “So, can I take you to lunch and go over things?”

“Sure, sure.” Greene wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and blew his nose, “You folks are a pip, I’ll tell you what. First the dog and then the ad with no shoes. Jumping Jehoshaphat!”

Minutes later, Sketch brusquely shut our office door and bolted it. I slumped in my chair, exhausted. He emptied and re-lit his pipe, trying to remain calm. “Well, that was a damn fool thing.”

Words didn’t come easily. “Look, I—”

“No,
you
look.” His tone was bitter, sharp. He’d never spoken to me like that. Ever.

“You can’t just go off half-cocked like that. Screaming at the client. What the Sam Hill were you thinking?”

What was I thinking? What
wasn’t
I thinking by that point? Too much to think about. The train was coming. I couldn’t run much longer. “He. He said that I was…” Soon I’d be able to sleep. It seemed like months since I’d had a decent night’s sleep. “I…”

The phone rang. Sketch put it on intercom. “Speak.”

It was Nicky, calling from the Quinnipiac Club, to tell Sketch to tell me that the only reason I wasn’t fired was that I gave Greene such a good laugh. Bastard was still cackling like a tickled bitch.

But if I ever tried that again, I’d be
shining
shoes, not doing ads for them.

Sketch gave me a darting glance. “I hear ya.”

“Another thing,” Nicky’s voice flattened, sober, “I just heard from Judy at Krinkle.”

“Yeah?”

“…Stankey’s been let go.”

“What?”

“They’re calling it an early retirement.” He sighed.

“He’ll get most of his pension.”

“But that’s—”

“Sorry, gotta run.”

Click
.

Sketch looked like he’d just taken a full-force gut punch. “Son of. A. Bitch.” He unbolted the door and tramped down the stairs.

The shock of the news brought me around, at least enough to function. On the docket for the rest of the afternoon was, wouldn’t you know it, laying out the next month’s Krinkle ads. It had to be done.

So I made myself do it—four half-pagers and five full. And I felt each scarlet keyline I drew mapping out Dick Stankey’s sorry fate, each photo-stat I cut and pasted in place as another brick in his tomb. Don’t think it, don’t think it: “I am only following orders.”

At six, I’d just stacked the finished layouts on Sketch’s desk for inspection, when there he was in the doorway. He seemed hesitant to enter.

“Is it true?”

He crept over to the window and stared out at the fire-lit sky. And nodded. “Almost forty years in the business. Two kids still in college. That’s how they thank him.” He tore himself away from the sunset and looked over the boards with mechanical disinterest.

“Nice job. Thanks for doing that. You hungry?”

Not for food. “Starving.”

Draft Hull’s and burgers at Saluzo’s, in Sketch’s favorite booth, the one next to the jukebox. Not that he ever played it, he just liked the design—“An igloo of chrome and glass, with its own Northern Lights.” The beer was helping. Our ties loosened, the tension eased. The lilt of the Duprees poured out of the machine, a serenade: We belonged to
them
.

“Sorry I yelled at ya.”

I needed to hear that. “It’s okay. I deserved it.”

“No, no you didn’t. I was letting off steam. Hell of a day.”

“Yes, but not all a bad one, right? You and Tip really scored a hit.”

“We’ll see. They haven’t exactly written the check yet.”

“They will. Nicky’s at least good for that, right?”

“Humpf.” He pushed his plate away, suddenly smiling. “Heh. Heh-heh.”

“What.”

“You standing there, next to that crazy thing. Trying to sell it.”

I winced. “Pretty funny, I guess.”

“It reminded me of—”

“Mortimer Snerd.”