The Learners: A Novel (No Series) (3 page)

signs hung on the wall to the left, onto which he’d taped a piece of notebook paper, scrawled in red crayon with the word
“Again!”
“At least nod your head up and down. Even if you don’t mean it.”

I did so.

“Bless you. So, an ad for potato chips shouldn’t be actually trying to sell you potato chips, should it? Because the ad itself can’t give you the potato chips.”

Silence.

“It should be selling you a
need
for potato chips.

That it can give you. Right?”

Hmmm. “Rrrright.”

“Of course. So I said…” He spread his hands, conducting a secret symphony, “let’s do ads that say no one is allowed to
have
potato chips—you know, show big, glorious pictures of salty, crispy, golden goodness—and say…” He paused, then, loudly, “YOU CAN’T HAVE THEM. Genius? Genius.” He sighed and let the music die in his head. “And they look at me like I’ve just asked them to ball my mother.”

A vision of Winter applauding in the classroom, with his all-too-rare grin of fiendish approval, flashed in my head. “I had a teacher once who would have loved that idea. Who’s the them?”

“The Krinkle people. The Krinklies. One of our biggest accounts, for decades.”

“Oh.”

“Actually, it’s not them. I hardly ever get to talk to them, it’s Pr—” We could hear the front door down the hall open and close. A man’s gentle, mumbled voice.

“But I’m pummeling you with this, a total stranger. My apologies.”

“Not at all, it’s—”

“Sketchy’s here. C’mon.” He folded up the portfolio flaps, got up, and motioned me out of the room.

“Maybe you can get ahead.”

By the time we reached Mr. Spear’s office two flights up, he was hunched over his drawing board, deep in his chores. Through the open doorway: it was a tableaux from the cover of
The Saturday Evening Post
. The ceiling was arched and highest in the middle—we were in the attic, which likely served as the firemen’s dorms. A window in the shape of a half-moon, flat side down and divided like the sections of an orange, rose from the floor to chest height and spanned about six feet in the center of the facing wall. The very air seemed a good forty years old—not because it was musty (okay, it was, a little), but because it appeared that nothing in it had been disturbed since Prohibition, or before. A glass shelf of old Felix the Cat dolls of all shapes, sizes, and materials jutted out from the wall behind him, each one looking over his shoulder to see what he was doing. I wanted to join them—to be one of them. Two green-globed Victorian brass architectural lamps flanked the blond oak drafting table, vice-clamped at the top and bent over and scanning the surface like extras from
The War of the Worlds
. Spear was in profile to us, the Sherlock Holmes pipe in his teeth leaking a cherry musk that put me back at my grandpa’s. Arden and Ohman’s recording of “Maple Leaf Rag” tumbled out of the hand-crank phonograph in the corner and colored everything sepia. The steel beam that I’d seen in the reception room continued up here through the middle of the floor and on up to the roof. There was a circular patch of concrete around the base like a plug in the middle of the wooden boards.

Milburne Spear himself was both what I’d pictured and yet a surprise because of it. He didn’t seem so much like a draughtsman as he did a watchmaker, carefully constructing, adjusting. In fact, he could have been the son of Santa Claus, a good twenty years from taking over the family business, just as soon as he grew a beard and put on a gut. Round face and head, with graying hair thinned at the top and crew-cut army style. A strong, hearty man. But he was delicate and sturdy at the same time. The sturdy part was physical—barrel-chested, bushy-browed, his shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows. His left forearm, easily the width of a ham hock, lay across the board in front of him, a furry blockade to anyone trying to see what he was doing. But the delicate part emerged from his work. Whatever he was rendering, it had his undivided attention, and I soon realized we could have stood inside the doorway for hours and he never would have seen us. Tip finally broke the ice.

“Ahem. Sketch?”

“Hmm?” He pushed up his spectacles, tiny ovals of glass connected by a thin gold strip across the bridge of his nose.

“Sketcher, your appointment is here. Mr. Happy.”

Head up, confused, then, “Oh!” Terror, as if remembering he left the gas burner on at home. Or just stepped on a kitten. “Wasn’t that tomorrow?”

He was gracious and very attentive and obviously couldn’t have cared less about my portfolio at all.

Until he saw Baby Laveen.

“Golly, he’s a corker. You do
that
?”

“Yessir.” My own comic strip character. I wasn’t even going to include him, and now thanked God strenuously that I had. Baby Laveen was an infant dressed as a grown man—in fact even though he looked like he was literally born yesterday, in all other respects he lived and functioned among adults, who didn’t seem any the wiser and respected him in his job as assistant district attorney in the mid-Atlantic city called Doddsville. Spear was transfixed. Tickled.

“Heh-HEH. You did this in school?”

“Yes.” Officially, no. There was no cartooning class at State, surprise surprise. It wasn’t something I seriously thought about pursuing full-time, but as a hobby it was a hoot. “I mean, I was in school when I did that, yes, but it wasn’t part of the curriculum. It was just for fun. It’s based on…someone I used to know.”

“
This
is someone you used to know? A baby in a business suit?”

“It’s hard to explain. But yes. I knew his…mother. Just something I wanted to do. S’pretty dumb, I know.”

“No, not dumb. He’s
pesky
.” His face could have been mine when I was five, lying on my belly on the living room carpet on Sunday afternoon with the funnies spread out everywhere. “You’ve figured out his eyes. That’s the hardest part.”

Wow. “You think? Oh, thanks. It’s really all about proportion. And whether or not the eyes should be open circles, or filled in. Or just slits. And how close they are to the nose. But you know all that. Don’t you think Harold Gray changed everything, with Orphan Annie?”

A grunt. “He got a lot of it from McCay. Most everyone has.”

“Who?”

“You don’t know Winsor McCay? Little Nemo?” Scandalized. Stern with me: “
In Slumberland.
”

“Oh, our paper at home doesn’t carry him.”

He very politely and ineffectively tried to look like I hadn’t just said something really, really stupid. Then he pretended I hadn’t said anything at all, and turned the page…

…to my sketches for ketchup and mustard dispensers. Shaped like torsos.

“Those would be molded out of soft plastic,” I said.

“Like what they use for Frisbees, only more flexible? People should be able to squeeze them—I think that’s the future. We shake things—bottles, now, because they’re glass. But at some point I think they won’t be, because glass breaks and doesn’t give. Plastic’s the opposite. I think things should be squeezed.
I’d
rather be squeezed than shaken. Wouldn’t you?” Good Lord, what was wrong with me?

Our eyes locked in an ersatz standoff, and his crippled smile and his eyebrows reaching for his scalp betrayed the thought that one half of me was starkers and the other was the sanest person in the world.

“Heh, yep.” He closed the leather flaps.

“I-” I stammered, desperate, desperate, “Mr. Spear, is there any chance that, you could—”

“Well, like I said,” gazing at his shoes, “I could use the help, and we’ve got a desk.” He looked over at a small drawing table in the corner I hadn’t noticed before. It was smudged with ink and dotted with mummified bits of masking tape and it was all I ever wanted and its beauty mocked me. My pulse went from 45 to 78 rpm. “But I’ll have to teach you how to use a ruling pen. You’re holding it wrong. You a lefty?” I nodded. “Thought so—you’re overcompensating, and the uniformity of the line thickness is suffering. Need to keep your elbow down, close to your side.” He gestured and dropped his head again. “But Mrs. Rakoff’ll have to approve a new hire. She’s the boss lady. Can you,” hesitant, slightly tensing, “can you come back tomorrow morning?”

Rats. Another four hours up and back in the train? Come on, I’m so
close
. “Actually, is there any way I could see her today? I’ll wait however long. It’s just that tomorrow…I have another interview.” At my dentist’s, where he would inevitably ask me why I haven’t been getting at the backs of my rear molars, so it wasn’t a lie.

“Hmm.” Even tenser. “Wait here a sec.” He took my portfolio. After five minutes, he still hadn’t returned, so I screwed up the nerve to stand and look at what was on his drawing table.

Holy smoke. The work surface itself was filthy, but taped to it was a pristine piece of illustration board, emblazend with a new pen-and-ink full-page Krinkle Kutt layout. Near completion. To say it was only a newspaper ad was to say that the Bayeux Tapestry was simple reportage. Under a script banner that read KRINKLE IS KING!, this time His Highness Potato Chip loomed over an enslaved realm of hundreds of mini-pretzels, a networked multitude, each in a tiny harness connected to a massive chariot bearing their enormous conqueror, beaming in tater triumph. It was the snack version of Exodus, a panorama of—

“Don’t look at that.” In the doorway. Not angry—no…embarrassed. Embarrassed to be alive. “I can’t draw.”

Right. And Sinatra can’t sing. Was he serious?

“Please.”

Oh. That face: a rictus of apology, shame. Yes, he was. It made me want to fix the world. For him.

“Uh, sorry. I was just sneaking a look. This is…incredible. Just breathtaking. I mean…”

It was like I’d slapped him.

“She can see us. I think,” he said, not at all convincingly, and motioned for me to follow. We went downstairs, to the second floor.

I’d never seen an office door quite like it, not in the art department at State or anywhere else. It was pink. Even the lettering on the rippled glass.

MILDRED MITCHELL RAKOFF

PRESIDENT

And I mean PINK. A pink like we could get irradiated from standing here for more than five minutes. Sketch knocked gingerly, as if he was reading my mind.

“Yes?” From inside. Muffled yet piercing.

“It’s me.” He shyly turned the knob, cracked the door, eased in, closed it. In the hallway, I strained to hear, but could only make out parts of her end of the discussion. Which were not encouraging. The phrases “second thoughts,” “I know what I said but,” “we don’t need to,” and most oddly, “talk to the shoe!” told me I’d be on the 2:58, one-way after all. Crap. I was almost there.

Dammit.

Then the door opened and a beet-faced Sketch came out and was about to say something when another face—a furious roil of matriarchic agitation and withered glamour—appeared behind him, shrieking, “Oh, and Milby, Dicky says someone named Lenny from Krinkle said that—”

I almost gasped. Almost. But Mom raised me better than that. I just gaped.

“—in that last thing you did, the thing from Tuesday? In the
Register
? He said—”

And stared. And you would have, too, because:

“—could we make the pretzels look less salty this time? He says they look saltier than the chips, and—”

1) An adult, especially of what appeared to be her advanced age and breeding, just should NOT venture out in public with that many Band-Aids on her head.

“—that sends the wrong message. It doesn’t say—”

2) Once it’s become clear that the sun is destroying your skin, it would probably be a better idea to wear a turtleneck. Not a sleeveless V-neck Dior paired with pink and green flower-print pants.

“—‘eat me’. It’s just going to make people thirsty and they’ll—”

3) Expensive, flawlessly tailored clothing will only throw your…appearance into sharper relief, especially when you’re starting from somewhere between Barbara Stanwyck and The Thing.

“—turn the page and buy a Coke. Okay?”

and 4) Logic dictates that presidents of advertising agencies
must
make enough money to buy extravagant luxuries, like food. Right? She was going to have to try some. Soon, before collapsing into a bone pile.

“Oh. Oh my.”

Oops. This, this Lily Pulitzer wraith, had me in her sights. I had to get out of there.

“Is this, is…?” And she,
whup
, clutched my chin and turned my head from side to side, like it was a crenshaw melon she was inspecting at the IGA. “Is this the
boy
?”

Bloodless claws. I wasn’t sure. Was I? Sketch must have nodded.

“Oh, that’s…marvelous,” she hissed, and un-handed me and turned her laser eyes on Spear and yanked him back into her office. The door snapped shut to furious murmurs.

And then, like a jack-in-the-box he popped out—years obviously gone from his life, and he said, like magic: