The Learners: A Novel (No Series) (5 page)

“Mrs. Rakoff.”

“Mmmm. Mimi.”

“Mimi?”

“Yes, as in,” he sucked in his cheeks and made a vulture voice and poked himself in the chest, “Me! Me!”

I recounted our rather odd meeting.

“Pretty typical, I’m afraid.” He tried to coax more liquid from his glass, got ice instead. “She doesn’t
go
to extremes; she
lives
there.”

“Is she…good at what she does?”

He cracked a cube between his teeth and looked out the window, seeking something in the sky. A star to wish on? A gargoyle on the Sterling Library across the street? “Actually,” he sighed, his eyes back to me, betraying a search in vain, “she would be enormously
improved
by death.”

It only took five days to find an apartment, what with most of the students gone for the summer. Tip was all too happy to help look during lunch breaks. He’d had his run-ins with real-estate agents and wanted to spare me the trouble.

“You’ll be raped otherwise, trust me. Those people will poke out your eyes and make love to your skull. And send you a bill. Oh, no. You’re a
child
.”

I settled on a furnished third-floor walk-up on Cottage Street off Orange, just a ten-minute bike ride from the office. It was half of the top floor of a large Victorian house that had been divided into flats. Mine was four small rooms accessed by an outdoor staircase added on to the side—sort of a reverse fire escape. I’m a nester by nature, but here I wanted to start anew, with few possessions and almost no furniture. The rooms—with their threadbare faux Oriental throw rugs and shopworn velveteen armchairs—due to the previous grad-school tenants, smelled like an old wet pizza box. Which I found to be not altogether unpleasant.

I amazed myself at how quickly I wanted to take to New Haven. I’m usually not good with change, but it was a college town after all, and that dynamic was welcome and familiar. The difference, of course, was that this college was one I hadn’t dared dream of becoming part of. And yet here I was, a foundling on the doorstep of Mother Yale. Was I trespassing? Maybe. But I wasn’t alone. The rift between Town and Gown was a chasm you couldn’t jump, like nothing I’d ever, ever seen before. Back at State, we shared a sense that even the most grimy, bloated old sot asleep at his hooch down at the Skeller could be roused with a poke to sing the school fight song, if that’s what it took to win the big game. We fed on the underlying “we’re all in this together.” In New Haven it was more like occupied France, but no Allies to the rescue this time. Yale itself was outwardly charming and stately—neo-Gothic colleges that looked as if Hansel and Gretel were on the planning committee, all presided over by the magnificent Harkness Tower. But take one step over the campus line and you were outside the fortress with the enemy advancing. And therein lay my predicament: I certainly didn’t belong inside the walls, and on the other side of them I wasn’t really one of the locals, either. Was I?

But harder still to get used to was the giddy reality of actually having a
job
. I was paid to make
things.
Each morning around nine I’d buzz myself in with a key and slink past the wilting eyes of Miss Preech and wonder why she didn’t drop what she was doing and call the police. And then I’d pop up the stairs, and more often than not Sketchy would already be there, with the phonograph leaking its tired, wonderful ragtime into the warmth of the slatted morning light. And he’d look up (either from his work or the early edition of the paper, depending on deadlines) and throw me half a smile and a wink.

And I’d be home.

I learned more that first week than I did in four years of college. To wit:

1) How to hold a pencil. “Not so tight. You’re strangling it. Let it do what it wants, stray a little. Give it permission.”

2) How to hold a pen. “Ink, on the other hand, is sneaky—needs discipline. LOTS of it. Let it know you’re the boss. You want it to do what it doesn’t want to. Tough. When you’re in control, it will do it.”

3) How to sit. “Go ahead and slouch. Life is short, now you are, too. Heh.”

4) How to use a brush. Truth to tell, I never really did come close to mastering this one, but I did start to get the idea of it. “It’s a pen, really. Just a fluid one.” Sketch could make lines and shapes with a brush that you’d swear were stamped by a machine. Remarkable.

And the biggie:

5) How to draw a straight line. “Pretend it exists already and just trace it. Keep your wrist stiff but let your arm glide. Try to forget that straight lines are truly unnatural—created by humans to convey a sense of the mechanical, which isn’t human at all. Think of food.”

“Food?”

“Something yummy. Spicy.”

“Why?”

“Because you have to think of
some
thing. Don’t you like food? Cats then. Fluffy cats. Something.”

“Why don’t I think about drawing the line correctly?”

“Try it.”

He was right, of course—now I was thinking about it to the point of stage fright and the result was not uniform in width, slightly slanting downward to the left, and dotted with blobs. All of which I would have (and did) ignore back in school. As did my teachers (Winter excepted). But now, seen through eyes re-focused by Sketchy, these were high crimes.

“You need distraction when you do this stuff. We all do.” For that, he had the added help of the old Victrola, his pipe, his Felix dolls, lunch.

And I had Tip.

“What does green sound like?” He would just…appear. With questions like this. Tip was forever trying to jump-start his brain to come up with ad copy, and I became his muse of choice. His favorite method was word association, and when that got tired he’d suggest the opposite.

“The opposite? Of what?”

“Of the first thing that pops into your head. Give it a whirl.”

“That’s nuts. Like trying to—”

“
Apply
yourself.”

Right. Anyway, back to “what does green sound like?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Answer, please.”

He was working on something that had to do with fertilizer at the time, that much I knew. “Green?” Well, not my thumb, that’s for sure. “Hmm, I don’t. Um.” I soon learned to give up trying to find the “right” answer and just answer. Which was the whole point. Green sounded like…the woods behind our house.

“Trees.” In a high wind. “Trees walking.”

“Oh.
Oh
. That’s wonderful. Preston couldn’t come up with that in a million years.”

Preston Ware. Tip’s boss. Head copywriter.

When he was awake. How to describe him? Tip: “He’s kind of like Frankenstein’s monster, only without the electricity. In a Brooks Brothers suit,” and, “Pally pal, in our cigar shop, he IS the wooden Indian.” Perhaps more kindly, Lars Rakoff, our dear departed co-founder, was quoted in a local news feature on Preston from 1935—clipped, framed, hung just to the left of the subject’s pristine desk. He put it this way: “My partner is first and foremost a patriot, a Rotarian, an inspirational communicator, a knight.” Sketch, in a private moment once at Saluzo’s after work and feeling a couple thrown back, was a little more succinct: “I’ve always thought of him as a well-wiped asshole.” I had to agree—he certainly was hygienic. Whatever the shambles of his interior life, there wasn’t a hair out of place. Tip even claimed he once caught him in the men’s room of the Quinnipiac Club combing his head with a salad fork after a high wind on the croquet lawn blew his comb-over to the wrong side. Square of jaw and high of forehead, he looked like an amalgam of Dag Hammarskjöld and an Easter Island monolith. He came from old money, a clan of Lake Forest Episcopalians who actually frowned on advertising as a profession, a fact that enabled Preston to think of himself, quaintly, as something of a rebel.

Company lore: Lars and Preston opened the doors of Rakoff & Ware in 1922. They met in Chicago the previous year while working at Otis & Shepherd, where they’d just landed the Wrigley’s account. In a move bold for its time, they split off, fled east, and managed to take Wrigley’s with them—a sort of advertising elopement. They soon brought on Spear, barely out of high school, though it would be many years before he made partner. The launch of Doublemint gum was to be their greatest triumph. Wrigley’s eventually went back to O & S, under dubious circumstances, but a small slice of ad history had been carved.

“You know, Mimi notwithstanding, Lars really was a genius,” said Tip. “
God,
I would have loved to meet him. That quote in the paper about Preston. Just brilliant—it took me forever to figure it out.”

“Figure it out?”

“I’ll show you.”

We snuck into Preston’s office early the next morning and he brought it down from the wall.

“Read it again. The language is too awkward—not Lars’s style. That’s the tip-off. This is the man who came up with ‘
HOLD YOUR TONGUE!
’ for Buster Brown. No, when I first read it I thought, Something’s going on here. I let it go for a while, and then it came to me, like when you abandon a crossword puzzle and it stews in your head for an hour or two and you come back to it and all of the answers are suddenly obvious. Only in this case it took me weeks. Look.” He pointed to the citation. “The clue is ‘First and foremost,’ but then there’s a laundry list, which is weird. And I finally realized: take the first letter of each ‘attribute.’ This is what he’s really saying:

“Preston’s a

P
atriot

R
otarian

I
nspirational

C
ommunicator

K
night.”

“Oh my God. That’s amazing.”

“And no surprise—I think he
hated
him. And figured out a way to vent it—in the press.” Tip gently re-hung it. “I have yet to exercise the opportunity.”

Tip and Preston: could there have been two more discordant souls? Ware had long since sold his stake in the company to Mimi—first emotionally, then, much later, financially. Something about him made it hard to believe that he was ever young, it just seemed biologically impossible. He was
born
seventy. One sensed that he came to work only because he needed the ritual of leaving the house. His two children were well into their failed second marriages, and we often wondered how they were ever conceived in the first place.

“Surely not through any human contact.” Tip was certain: “They must have ordered them from Rogers Peet. The only thing of Preston’s that’s ever been stiff is his shirt. If the world only knew: the man who wrote the selling copy underneath the immortal words
‘DOUBLE YOUR PLEASURE, DOUBLE YOUR FUN!’
wouldn’t know EITHER ONE if he woke up naked in a harem covered with Karo Syrup.”

This was hard to dispute. Eyelids perpetually at half-mast over their ice-blue orbs, Preston showed up (impeccably dressed, yes), he wrote things, he muttered phrases, he went to lunch, he staggered back, he passed out, he woke up around five, he went home. Just in time for cocktails.

Conventional office wisdom: If you needed something from Preston, manage to get it before twelve thirty. Or wait till the next day. Before twelve thirty.

Or try to talk to Nicky.

Nicholas Rakoff, the only son of Lars and Mimi, the inheritor of the family business. I met him by accident when I was looking for Tip one afternoon with a phone message. I heard him outside the door of the conference chamber and thought he was alone, rehearsing a pitch. I bolted in. “Tip, I—”

“Shhhh.”

He was at the other end of the long room, talking to someone—a distinguished man of middle age, in shirtsleeves and bow tie, hunched over. Tip murmured, gravely, “Yes, that’s a better strategy, definitely.” I thought at first the guy was either doubled over with grief or looking for something on the floor and couldn’t bring himself to get down on his hands and knees. I could tell—he wasn’t a hands-and-knees sort at all. And then I realized that he hadn’t lost anything. Not yet.

“How’s this?”

“That’s it.”

“Okay, here we go.”