The Learners: A Novel (No Series) (6 page)

Cigarette clenched into lips pursed with concentration, he tilted the considerable bulk of his upper body oh so slightly to the left, and then released it. It snapped back, as if attached to a small spring, and the stick in his hands connected with something on the floor—
PAP!
—which shot perilously across the carpet in my direction, to the man’s intense concern, and then—
PLUNK!—
into an overturned coffee cup a yard to the right of my wing tips. His face, his whole head, glowed with supreme satisfaction, like a jack-o-lantern.

Tip, still solemn: “Bra-
vo
. See? That new thumb technique is
flawless
.” And then, brightening up a bit and finally acknowledging me, “Nicky, this is Happy—Sketch’s new assistant.”

Still savoring his hole-in-mug. A careless glance. Then a thought. “Great!” He approached me. Now I could finally see: he was all Golden Boy gone to seed, a Ken doll left out in the sun too long. Once molded, now molten. “We could use some new blood around here. ’Bout time!” He reached down, with effort—“Oof”—picked up the cup, rolled the ball out of it, and handed it to me. “Black. Two sugars.”

“Uh—”

“Thanks, sport.” And he turned back to Tip.

“Sure.” It was plain from the beginning that I was nothing to him—just another admirer from the peanut gallery, ready to follow him to the next hole, to the clubhouse, to the ball washer.

I didn’t think this a problem, because there was no reason to take it personally—he treated just about everyone this way because it never occurred to him not to, and yet there was something pathetically charming about it. This man was the progeny of the divine Lars, after all.

But Nicky was
not
his father. He pretty much saw the firm as a handicap to his golf game, in both senses of the word. Whenever the weather would allow he’d skip out to the Quinnippiac, with some client or other in tow “to do the back nine.” And during the winter he would hole himself up in his office and putt. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the ad business—he did, with an accounting major’s sense of directive.

He just completely hated it.

Now, while Mimi was the firm’s legal owner, and it was Nicky’s responsibility to actually run the place, it would be three weeks before I met the real, driving force behind the agency. And when I did, it completely changed my mind about how an office works. On a Monday during our lunch hour, Tip and I were conducting an experiment in the second-floor hallway, he on the stairwell landing and me half a flight above, my back to his. He wanted to do a sort of blind word test. Our goal was to develop catchphrases for Krinkle’s new line of flavored pretzels.

He began: “Onions!”

Me: “Tears.”

“Chives!”

“Confetti.” From somewhere downstairs burst a faint cry. Mimi: “
Oh Haaaaaaaammeeeeeeeee!
” I turned and looked at Tip, who either hadn’t heard it or was too consumed with his analysis. I turned back. Suddenly a dark shape rounded the corner at the far end of the corridor. Moving. Fast.

Tip: “Garlic!”

“Power…” It skidded into the water cooler with a sloshy thud, regained its balance, and made for the other end of the hallway. Sprinting.

“Bacon!”

“Saturday?” Toward
me.

“Brilliant! Barbecue!”

“Sunday. Tip?” Holy shit.

“Pork!”

I was frozen. Look at it!

“Oh Haaaaaaaammeeeeeeeee! Heeeeere, darling!”

“I said PORK!”

Help! “Tip!”

“What?!”

SLAM! Its head went into my stomach, then herky-jerked and rolled and—
huk!
—in a single gesture tossed me against the wall. And then was gone. It scarcely broke stride.

Tip: “Hamlet! No!” He threw himself out of its way, shielded his head with the arc of his arm. “You
lummox
! Bad!”

Papers scattered everywhere. The thing faltered and tumbled mightily down the steps, falling over itself, landed on the first floor, shook, and reared. Vanished.

I asked, trying to learn how to breathe again, “What—what was
that
?”

“That,” scowled Tip, gathering up his notes, “was Mimi’s husband.”

Shortly before Lars’s untimely death in 1955, he bestowed upon Mimi a pedigree Great Dane puppy for her sixtieth birthday and named it, yes, Hamlet. She never got the joke. And never needed to, because of what she
did
get—something she thought she’d had once, many years ago. But here was Hamlet—proof in the quivering, hirsute flesh that she was wrong. She’d
never
had this before, and now that she did…oh. Oh. How could she have lived without it? It wasn’t that she made the dog any kind of replacement for Lars, or his keen mind, or merely his companionship. Frankly it wasn’t about Lars at all. Their marriage had worked well only to the extent that He was the Money and She was the Class. What Hamlet represented, in the most concrete, literal way, was the first time that Mimi had ever experienced, ever found…true love.

Hamlet had full run—not just of the agency—but of Mimi’s life, her soul, her nervous system. Which was incalculably nervous. The two of them together would practically vibrate in frenzied syncopation, like mixed plaids that somehow harmonized successfully, despite the laws of aesthetic cohesion.

Few who beheld it were ever able to erase the sight from their minds: Mimi on a temperate day in her pink cadillac convertible (top down, natch), cruising along Trumbull with Hamlet in the passenger seat, his monstrous head flopped over the side and leaking viscous drool like transmission fluid from a faulty, quivering hose.

Tip: “That is
not
a dog. It is Jerry Lewis, undergoing perpetual heroin withdrawal, in a dog costume.”

Usually heard, sensed, and smelled before he was ever seen, Hamlet would stagger or stamp by in the hall, in frantic search of a nameless quarry, his cranium covered with dozens of Mimi’s lipstick stains. The first time I encountered that, I was with Tip and he just couldn’t help himself: “Check between his legs. Go ahead. You’ll find a whole
rash
of them.”

By the second week, I’d earned enough of Sketch’s trust to start penciling some hand lettering for him to ink. He was a master of what’s called display type, usually elaborate script, which was used for the headlines and sub-heads. As a rule he relied on as little machine typesetting as possible, only for the large blocks of sales copy. This was an aesthetic decision; but because he was as fast at it as he was brilliant, it also helped keep the bills down. And that, I soon learned, was what it was all about. I had to precisely record exactly how much time I spent on each job and for whom, so the billable hours were charged to the right client for the right amount. I’d never had to literally account for my time this way in my life and at first it was oppressive and draconian. I considered myself an organized person, but this crossed a line. As long as I got the job done, on time, what the hell did it matter? There were also times when for reasons of technical complication I was working on two jobs at once. What to do then?

“Bill ’em both the same.”

“Gotcha.”

This, when I thought about it, was as ingenious as it was unethical, and I came to learn that most ad agencies do it. And nearly all law firms.

However, once I got used to meticulously chronicling my hours and who was to pay for them and it became second nature, I began to rely on it as a comfort. It was an imposed diary, recorded evidence of my life on Earth that I otherwise wouldn’t have created. I kept personal copies of all of my time sheets out of a fevered nostalgia, the way I still had all my valentines from fourth grade. See? I was
needed
.

It wouldn’t be long before I was summoned to my first client meeting. Sketch thought it was time I met one of the people I was really working for. We had the week’s new potato chip ads to show and I’d done all the coupons myself. I was terrified, convinced that I’d be recognized as the feeble neophyte I was.

“Happy, Mr. Stankey.”

A hand was extended. Or was it a baseball glove molded out of human skin?

“Pleased ta meetcha, kid. I’m Dick.”

Just one of the many attributes of Dick Stankey, the client representative for Krinkle Kutt, was there was no need to waste time coming up with something funny to call him behind his back. Even Tip didn’t bother. “I just use his real name and try to keep a straight face. How do you improve on perfection?
Dickens
couldn’t have come up with better: ‘Let’s see, what do I call a three-hundred-pound potato chip salesman who’s scarcely five feet two, sweats like a roasting ham hock, plays the theme to
Your Show of Shows
on the ukulele, and once got stuck in a diner booth during a fire alarm?’ ” All true. But what a good sport—when it came to making fun of him, he’d beat you to it. He was the first flesh-real jolly fat person I’d ever met, smiling even when he wasn’t smiling, his eyes forced into delighted squints by the physics of face flab. A bag of Krinkles forever grafted onto one of his mitts, he devoted himself to enjoying his company’s product in full view of humanity and did so with unashamed abandon in his office, his car, at our drawing tables, before and after lunch. Unfortunately, he also chewed tobacco at the same time. How he negotiated these two digestive actions (which I held to be at alarmingly violent cross-purposes) I could not know. I tried not to think about it, but did. A lot.

On top of all of that, he had man-bosoms. Tip was enthralled. “Talk about he-lights! You just know Meem’s bitty titties lie awake at night, desperately longing to somehow usurp through osmosis the heft and shape of Stankey’s.” Mimi was flat as a mesa. “And they shall be forever wanting.”

Even if he hadn’t had such an agreeable personality I would have liked Dick Stankey anyway because he regarded Sketch with something like worship and genuinely greeted each new ad with the infectious enthusiasm of a mongoloid child grabbing a nice bright red balloon.

“That’s amazing! Oooooooooh! Ooh! Oh!”

And boy, was he right. Sketch didn’t so much draw newspaper ads as he created magic worlds to step into that just happened to be populated with potato chips and pretzels. I came to understand that he took as his inspiration the Sunday comics pages he’d read as a child, back when they truly were an art form. Gasoline Alley, The Kinder Kids, Polly and Her Pals, Skippy, and of course Little Nemo—all of them were made with a virtuosic care and skill that wouldn’t survive to the 1940s. And they were regarded by most of the public as fishwrap. Yes, some of them survived and were reprinted, but many were not, and what Sketch was doing—at least for himself as much as for Krinkle Kutt—was keeping their spirit alive. I’m sure Mimi never understood that; but Dick did, and this, I have since learned, is the key to every single interesting piece of graphic design that you have ever seen. Winter explained to us in graphic design class once, during a critique on corporate trademarks, his face a mask of righteous accusation. But we were too naive to grasp it:

Dick Stankey gave Sketch the keys, went to the rear of the coach, sat back with a delighted grin, and—buffeted by the roar of the engine—gleefully crunched.

And spat. To the moon.

“When did Sketch make partner?” I don’t know why I asked it.

Tip was on his second scotch at Mory’s. A Friday lunch. “That’s a funny story, actually. Classic Mimi. I once got it out of Preston at a breakfast meeting. You know,” he leaned in, “here’s the thing: the Meems occasionally betrays moments of lucidity that are positively frightening. Sketch was last to make partner and yet his name is ahead of the other two. Now, why do you suppose, that is?”

“I dunno. Because he has the most talent?”

“Oh, right. As if that would cross what’s left of her mind in a million years. No, here it is: Mimi said she wanted Spear’s name first, and I quote: ‘So it sounds like we have a point,’ unquote. Now, as atomically idiotic as that may seem, you have to admit: the ring of ‘Spear, Rakoff and Ware’ just somehow
works
. Right? Scary.”