The Learners: A Novel (No Series) (4 page)

“C-can you start Tuesday? Seventy-five a week?”

Oh, could I. He led us down the hallway.

“Mr. Spear,” I started, as we plodded down the staircase, “can you tell me why—”

No words left in him, he stopped on the landing and took a moment to write something down on an index card from his front shirt pocket, folded and handed it to me—in a scrupulous grab, behind his back, out of view of the secretary. Who wasn’t looking anyway.

“Read it on the train. We’ll talk.”

I palmed it. “Right. I can’t thank you enough. I—”

“Miss Preech will get you a cab.”

She was typing again. Now, obviously she was a stranger to me, but I already suspected that even if I were to lie on the floor in front of her with a meat axe growing out of my head, in a pool of my own hot hemoglobin, the probability of Miss Preech calling me an ambulance would be remote in the extreme—much less a cab, right now. “Thanks, thanks, Mr. Spear,” I said groggily. I rang one for myself from the corner payphone.

On the train, safely speeding home, I pulled out Sketchy’s message: a fortune cookie slip that would determine my future for
real
. Did I really want to know? I kept it closed all the way to Stamford. Then I just couldn’t stand it anymore and shut my eyes, opened it, ready for the oracle’s wisdom:

CAN’T EXPLAIN RIGHT NOW.
HAVE YOU EVER USED AN ERASER GUARD?
JUST ASKING. SORRY.
SEE YOU SOON.

It was all in a cartoon speech balloon, coming out of the mouth of…Baby Laveen, pleading to the judge. Perfect to the detail.

Perfect like I could never, ever draw him.

“And here’s where—
nuts
. We’re out of atomic teat.” Tip, in a short-sleeved ash gray madras dress shirt that revealed skinny arms as pale and hairless as zucchini squash, waved the empty powdered milk box, lamenting. “Rats. I love this stuff. It makes my coffee
experimental.
It gives me hope. Miss Preech!” My first day, in the middle of the unofficial office tour. Mr. Spear wasn’t in yet. In fact, it was ten to nine and aside from Tip, Miss Preech, and me, neither was anyone else. Tip and I were in the little galley kitchen off the pantry, where they made their coffee. I mean, where
we
made it. God, it was just too amazing.

“Miss Preech!” he shouted at the ceiling.

“What?!” she crowed from her desk.

“Darling, we’re out of powdered milk.” His voice was all knives.

“No. We are not.” Hers were sharper.

“Sweetness, we ARE.” Eyes clenched. This guy was a card, a real Franklin Pangborn Jr., but not someone I’d want to be on the wrong side of, I could tell already.

And then, the rapid-fire click of high heels, angry on the linoleum floor. She rounded the corner, thrust out a new box, and slammed it down on the counter.
Wham!

And back to her desk.

I offered, weakly, “You, you two don’t seem to, like each other.”

His eyes bloomed in protest. “Nonsense. Why, there’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for her, and there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for me.” He hurled the old box into the corner trash can with considerable force. “In fact, we spend our whole
lives
doing nothing for each other.”

“Oh.”

He jimmied open the metal pouring spout and shook a small blizzard of Bessie’s Evaporated Moo Juice into his cup. “She’s the princess
and
the pea.” He sighed. “I’ve spent some time behind that desk myself, so I know why she’s so dreadful. But it doesn’t make it any easier. She hates that I got a rung up.”

“Why?”

“Oh, what does it matter? Sugar?” Pouring my java.

“What she needs is a man.”

“Really? She’s so pretty.”

“So’s a poinsettia. Ever taste one?”

The front door buzzed. In walked Sketchy.

“Morning.”

Tip handed me my coffee, lit up his Marlboro. “Well, I’ll leave you to your labors.” Nodding his head to Spear, “Sketch, sir? Krinkle meeting at eleven, yes? In the conference room?”

“What? Sure.” Then, to me, “Well, hello. You made it? Heh.”

“Yes.” God, I’d hoped so. “Yes, I did.”

“Good deal. See ya upstairs.”

“Yes sir.” And I bolted to the steps, took them two at a time, careful not to slosh the coffee.

The art department. It all looked so different now—the two drawing tables scarred with countless X-Acto marks, the piles of scattered scrap artboard, wads of tape that were overshot to the trash can and dotted the wall behind it like measles. The magic of seeing it for the first time was gone, but replaced by something even more alluring—the promise of inclusion among its details. I saw a stage set that I was now invited to climb up onto. I wasn’t in the audience anymore, I was a player. Maybe just a member of the chorus, but still.

And yet it was clear from the start that Sketch was uncomfortable having assistants or delegating tasks, no matter how much he claimed to need an “extra pair of hands.” What he meant was an extra pair of his own
,
not someone else’s.

Nonetheless, “Let’s have you rule out some mechanical boards. The
Register
has their own done up, but they’re not worth the, well, the you-know-what they print ’em on, sorry. You good at key lines?”

Gulp. “That depends. What are they?”

He chuckled, then winked. “Oh, you’ll see.”

Sketch. He was the most astonishing contradiction of components I’d ever encountered. Shy yet fiercely communicative when putting an idea into your head. Vocally astringent regarding his own abilities but not to the point that he couldn’t produce—he was as prolific an artist (yes, an artist, and I never use the term, especially regarding people I like) I’ve ever seen. But I could feel it: everything he sketched, penciled, inked, made—was a payment, one he could scarcely afford; as if it physically hurt him to put pencil to paper. Yet that only seemed to spur him on, to live far beyond his means. He was unable not to. For Sketch, to draw was to breathe, and so the air became lead—silvery in the right light, dark soot in the wrong; heavy, slick, and malleable—into shapes he brought together in glorious orchestration, with a child’s eye and a rocket scientist’s precision, all fortified by a furious melancholy, a quiet engine of sourceless shame and humility.

When it came to another’s work, he longed to praise it but then couldn’t resist critiquing it all within an inch of its life, analyzing deficiencies with uncontrollable abandon and laser accuracy. He was as sharp as his Radio 914 pen nibs, and as pointed.

And then he’d apologize. Oh, he would
apologize:
Oh my GOD, forgive me, please don’t hate me, I’m SORRY, don’t listen to me, why am I saying things, what do I know, I don’t know
anything
, why do you listen to me you should just tell me to shut UP, I’m awful,
forgive
me, you hate me, don’t you? Tell the truth. Please don’t hate me. Please don’t. Please?

That first day, we started off with the concept of the blue pencil.

“You ever use one of these?”

It looked like a normal one, except the lead was the color of a robin’s egg. “Yes.” No—don’t. “No.”

“Heh. Well, this is a lot to take in, but here goes: everything we do gets shot by a high-contrast camera in the basement here called a stat machine. I’ll show you that, later. But basically, this camera sees only black and white—no shades of gray unless we use a Zipatone pattern. I’ll show you that later, too. The main thing is that red registers as black, and blue as white. For all cameras. That’s why you have a red light in a darkroom when you make photo prints. But with blue whatever you draw is invisible. So we use that to do the basic layout and then ink over it. The camera only sees the ink on the board and shoots it as line art. You see?”

“Wow.”

“What.”

“I sure could have used one of those in school. I used to draw everything in regular pencil first and then went back and erased it all after the ink was dry.”

“We all did. Actually,” he lowered his voice, even though no one could have possibly heard us, or cared, “you’re not really supposed to render with blue pencil—it’s just meant for key lines and such. But one day a couple of years ago I was really pressed for time on a Krinkle full-pager and thought, Hell, why not, and drew the whole damn thing in non-photo blue. No erasing! Saved me a good half hour. Never looked back.” He pulled a sheaf of paper from the side table next to his board.

“These are sizes for the next month. If you could set these up, that’d be great.” And then he added, with a sincerity that told me who he was—I’ll never forget it: “Do ya mind?”

Mind? “No sir, not at all.”

“Thanks, kid.”

And so I started ruling out mechanical boards, readying them for Sketch to fill. For anyone else this might have have been tedious grunt work. But not for me. Not then. I was finally putting pencil to paper for a real reason
.
A purpose
.
For me it was heaven. Blue heaven.

At around half-past noon, Tip’s head popped in the doorway.

“Do you have lunch plans?”

Was he joking? Hard to tell. “No. You?”

“Mory’s. I’m a member. One thirty? Sketch, is that all right? Wanna come?”

“Heh. Huh?” Lost in Krinkle-land. “No, you go ahead.”

It was an “eating club” on the edge of the Yale campus. Dickens would have loved it and probably did. White clapboard, black shutters. Discreet brass plaque on the door with the “Mory’s” name. Inside: photos on the walls of sports teams and captains, crew or baseball or tennis—grimly bright-eyed in yesteryear’s outfits that looked now like an odd pajama party. Ranks of the hopeful young—class of ’15, some of whom probably jumped off windowsills on Wall Street after the Crash; or class of ’40, more than one of them washed up on Omaha Beach. The team captain posed against a mock rail fence, already the master of a jaunty look he’d wear years later in boardroom or bank vault.

From the ceiling oars hanging in rows, painted with the legend of that year’s victory over Harvard in the Thames regatta: 1952, Yale 21:04, Harvard 22:34, etc. Trophies left behind by the young, who, fresh from the first flush of victory, had no idea where they were finally headed.

So this was planet Yale. Where I was an alien.

Our table, as were all the others, was gouged with initials and dates and Latin boasts, the “Kilroy Was Here” of those who weren’t anymore. Our fossilized penguin of a waiter handed us dog-eared menus engraved with a script type that did its elegant best to hold off against years of grease and gravy stains. Tip ordered clam chowder, steak Diane, and a Dewar’s.

I asked for a club sandwich. And a lemon Coke.

He laughed. When the drinks arrived Tip raised his glass to me. I met him with a clink.

“To your first day,” he said, “in this dreadful business.”

Hmm. “Oh, don’t say that. Don’t you like advertising?”

He grinned. “Well, I’ve always loved interrupting. I’m made for it. Ask anyone. And that
is
what we do.”

“It is?”

“Of course, it’s the whole nature of the biz. Ads are interruptions—but interruption as main topic. Look at magazines. Look at television. On television, in fact, it goes even further—the ads are far more important than the TV shows.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? The shows are interrupted by the commercials. But,” he hiked his eyebrow in an
arc de triomphe,

“the commercials are
never
interrupted.”

Yes, I thought, because they’re so short. I didn’t say it. Instead, “How many have you worked on?”

“How many what?”

“TV commercials. I’ll bet they’re fun.”

“Oh, how sweet. Yes, I’ll bet they are. Will let you know if I ever find out.”

“But don’t you—”

“Buddy boy, we’re not in that league.” He drained his scotch on the rocks. “We’re mom-and-pop. Just Mom actually, for some time now.”