A Good Marriage (34 page)

*  *  *

I choose cranberry juice while I wait for the coffee. There’s OJ, which is my usual morning drink, but I don’t want it. Too much like the drink in the dream, I suppose. I have my coffee in the living room with CNN on mute, just reading the crawl at the bottom, which is all a person really needs. Then I turn it off and have a bowl of All-Bran. Quarter to eight. I decide that if the weather’s nice when I walk Lady, I’ll skip the cab and walk to work.

The weather’s nice all right, spring edging into summer and a shine on everything. Carlo, the doorman, is under the awning, talking on his cell phone. “Yuh,” he says. “Yuh, I finally got hold of her. She says go ahead, no problem as long as I’m there. She don’t trust nobody, and I don’t blame her. She got a lot of nice things up there. You come when? Three? You can’t make it earlier?” He tips me a wave with one white-gloved hand as I walk Lady down to the corner.

We’ve got this down to a science, Lady and I. She does it at pretty much the same place every day, and I’m fast with the poop bag. When I come back, Carlo stoops to give her a pat. Lady waves her tail back and forth most fetchingly, but no treat is forthcoming from Carlo. He knows she’s on a diet. Or supposed to be.

“I finally got hold of Mrs. Warshawski,” Carlo tells me. Mrs. Warshawski is in 5-C, but only technically. She’s been gone for a couple of months now. “She was in Vienna.”

“Vienna, is that so,” I say.

“She told me to go ahead with the exterminators. She was horrified when I told her. You’re the only one on four, five, or six who hasn’t complained. The rest of them . . .” He shakes his head and makes a
whoo
sound.

“I grew up in a Connecticut mill town. It pretty well wrecked my sinuses. I can smell coffee, and Ellie’s perfume if she puts it on thick, but that’s about all.”

“In this case, that’s probably a blessing. How
is
Mrs. Nathan? Still under the weather?”

“It’ll be a few more days before she’s ready to go back to work, but she’s a hell of a lot better. She gave me a scare for a while.”

“Me, too. She was going out one day—in the rain, naturally—”

“That’s El,” I say. “Nothing stops her. If she feels like she has to go somewhere, she goes.”

“—and I thought to myself, ‘That’s a real graveyard cough.’” He raises one of his gloved hands in a
stop
gesture. “Not that I really thought—”

“It was on the way to being a hospital cough, anyway. But I finally got her to see the doctor, and now . . . road to recovery.”

“Good. Good.” Then, returning to what’s really on his mind: “Mrs. Warshawski was pretty grossed out when I told her. I said we’d probably just find some spoiled food in the fridge, but I know it’s worse than that. So does anybody else on those floors with an intact smeller.” He gives a grim little nod. “They’re going to find a dead rat in there, you mark my words. Food stinks, but not like that. Only dead things stink like that. It’s a rat, all right, maybe a couple of them. She probably put down poison and doesn’t want to admit it.” He bends down to give Lady another pat. “
You
smell it, don’t you, girl? You bet you do.”

*  *  *

There’s a litter of purple notes around the coffee-maker. I take the purple pad they came from to the kitchen table and write another.

Ellen: Lady all walked. Coffee ready. If you feel well enough to go out to the park, go! Just not too far. Don’t want you to overdo now that you’re finally on the mend. Carlo told me again that he “smells a rat.” I guess so does everyone else in the neighborhood of 5-C. Lucky for us that you’re plugged up and I’m “olfac’trlly challenged.” Haha! If you hear people in Mrs. W’s, it’s the exterminators. Carlo will be with them, so don’t worry. I’m going to walk to work. Need to think summore about the latest male wonder drug. Wish they’d consulted us before they hung that name on it. Remember, DON’T OVERDO. Love you–love you.

I jot half a dozen
X
’s just to underline the point, and sign it with a
B
in a heart. Then I add it to the other notes around the coffeemaker. I refill Lady’s water dish before I leave.

It’s twenty blocks or so, and I don’t think about the latest male wonder drug. I think about the exterminators, who will be coming at three. Earlier, if they can make it.

*  *  *

The walk might have been a mistake. The dreams have interrupted my sleep cycle, I guess, and I almost fall asleep during the morning meeting in the conference room. But I come around in a hurry when Pete Wendell shows a mock-up poster for the new Petrov Vodka campaign. I’ve seen it already, on his office computer while he was fooling with it last week, and looking at it again I know where at least one element of my dream came from.

“Petrov Vodka,” Aura McLean says. Her admirable breasts rise and fall in a theatrical sigh. “If that’s an example of the new Russian capitalism, it’s dead on arrival.” The heartiest laughter at this comes from the younger men, who’d like to see Aura’s long blond hair spread on a pillow next to them. “No offense to you intended, Pete, it’s a great leader.”

“None taken,” Pete says with a game smile. “We do what we can.”

The poster shows a couple toasting each other
on a balcony while the sun sinks over a harbor filled with expensive pleasure boats. The cutline beneath reads
SUNSET. THE PERFECT TIME FOR A VODKA SUNRISE.

There’s some discussion about the placement of the Petrov bottle—right? left? center? below?—and Frank Bernstein suggests that actually adding the recipe might prolong the page view, especially in mags like
Playboy
and
Esquire
. I tune out, thinking about the drink sitting on the tray in my airplane dream, until I realize George Slattery is calling on me. I’m able to replay the question, and that’s a good thing. You don’t ask George to chew his cabbage twice.

“I’m actually in the same boat as Pete,” I say. “The client picked the name, I’m just doing what I can.”

There’s some good-natured laughter. There have been many jokes about Vonnell Pharmaceutical’s newest drug product.

“I may have something to show you by Monday,” I tell them. I’m not looking at George, but he knows where I’m aiming. “By the middle of next week for sure. I want to give Billy a chance to see what he can do.” Billy Ederle is our newest hire, and doing his break-in time as my assistant. He doesn’t get an invite to the morning meetings yet, but I like him. Everybody at Andrews-Slattery likes him. He’s bright, he’s eager, and I bet he’ll start shaving in a year or two.

George considers this. “I was really hoping to see a treatment today. Even rough copy.”

Silence. People study their nails. It’s as close to a public rebuke as George gets, and maybe I deserve it. This hasn’t been my best week, and laying it off on the kid doesn’t look so good. It doesn’t feel so good, either.

“Okay,” George says at last, and you can feel the relief in the room. It’s like a light cool breath of breeze, there and then gone. No one wants to witness a conference room caning on a sunny Friday morning, and I sure don’t want to get one. Not with all the other stuff on my mind.

George smells a rat, I think.

“How’s Ellen doing?” he asks.

“Better,” I tell him. “Thanks for asking.”

There are a few more presentations. Then it’s over. Thank God.

*  *  *

I’m almost dozing when Billy Ederle comes into my office twenty minutes later. Check that: I
am
dozing. I sit up fast, hoping the kid just thinks he caught me deep in thought. He’s probably too excited to have noticed either way. In one hand he’s holding a piece of poster board. I think he’d look right at home in Podunk High School, putting up a big notice about the Friday night dance.

“How was the meeting?” he asks.

“It was okay.”

“Did they bring us up?”

“You know they did. What have you got for me, Billy?”

He takes a deep breath and turns his poster board around so I can see it. On the left is a prescription bottle of Viagra, either actual size or close enough not to matter. On the right—the power side of the ad, as anyone in advertising will tell you—is a prescription bottle of our stuff, but much bigger. Beneath is the cutline: PO-10S,
TEN TIMES MORE EFFECTIVE THAN VIAGRA!

As Billy looks at me looking at it, his hopeful smile starts to fade. “You don’t like it.”

“It’s not a question of like or don’t like. In this business it never is. It’s a question of what works and what doesn’t. This doesn’t.”

Now he’s looking sulky. If George Slattery saw that look, he’d take the kid to the woodshed. I won’t, although it might feel that way to him because it’s my job to teach him. In spite of everything else on my mind, I’ll try to do that. Because I love this business. It gets very little respect, but I love it anyway. Also, I can hear Ellen say, you don’t let go. Once you get your teeth in something, they stay there. Determination like that can be a little scary.

“Sit down, Billy.”

He sits.

“And wipe that pout off your puss, okay? You
look like a kid who just dropped his binky in the toilet.”

He does his best. Which I like about him. Kid’s a trier, and if he’s going to work in the Andrews-Slattery shop, he’d better be.

“Good news is I’m not taking it away from you, mostly because it’s not your fault Vonnell Pharmaceutical saddled us with a name that sounds like a multivitamin. But we’re going to make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear. In advertising, that’s the main job seven times out of every ten. Maybe eight. So pay attention.”

He gets a little grin. “Should I take notes?”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. First, when you’re shouting a drug, you
never
show a prescription bottle. The logo, sure. The pill itself, sometimes. It depends. You know why Pfizer shows the Viagra pill? Because it’s blue. Consumers like blue. The shape helps, too. Consumers have a very positive response to the shape of the Viagra tab. But people
never like to see the prescription bottle their stuff comes in
. Prescription bottles make them think of sickness. Got that?”

“So maybe a little Viagra pill and a big Po-10s pill? Instead of the bottles?” He raises his hands, framing an invisible cutline. “‘Po-10s, ten times bigger, ten times better.’ Get it?”

“Yes, Billy, I get it. The FDA will get it, too, and they won’t like it. In fact, they could make us take ads with a cutline like that out of circulation,
which would cost a bundle. Not to mention a very good client.”

“Why?”
It’s almost a bleat.

“Because it
isn’t
ten times bigger, and it isn’t ten times better. Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, Po-10s, they all have about the same penis-elevation formula. Do your research, kiddo. And a little refresher course in advertising law wouldn’t hurt. Want to say Blowhard’s Bran Muffins are ten times tastier than Bigmouth’s Bran Muffins? Have at it, taste is a subjective judgment. What gets your prick hard, though, and for how long . . .”

“Okay,” he says in a small voice.

“Here’s the other half. ‘Ten times more’ anything is—speaking in erectile dysfunction terms—pretty limp. It went out of vogue around the same time as Two Cs in a K.”

He looks blank.

“Two cunts in a kitchen. It’s how advertising guys used to refer to their TV ads on the soaps back in the fifties.”

“You’re joking!”

“Afraid not. Now here’s something I’ve been playing with.” I jot on a pad, and for a moment I think of all those notes scattered around the coffeemaker back in good old 5-B—why are they still there?

“Can’t you just tell me?” the kid asks from a thousand miles away.

“No, because advertising isn’t an oral medium,” I say. “Never trust an ad that’s spoken out loud. Write it down and show it to someone. Show it to your best friend. Or your . . . you know, your wife.”

“Are you okay, Brad?”

“Fine. Why?”

“I don’t know, you just looked funny for a minute.”

“Just as long as I don’t look funny when I present on Monday. Now—what does this say to you?” I turn the pad around and show him what I’ve printed there:
PO-10S . . . FOR MEN WHO WANT TO DO IT THE HARD WAY.

“It’s like a dirty joke!” he objects.

“You’ve got a point, but I’ve printed it in block caps. Imagine it in a soft italic type, almost a girly type. Maybe even in parentheses.” I add them, although they don’t work with the caps. But they will. It’s a thing I just know, because I can see it. “Now, playing off that, think of a photo showing a big, burly guy. In low-slung jeans that show the top of his underwear. And a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, let’s say. See him with some grease and dirt on his guns.”

“Guns?”

“Biceps. And he’s standing beside a muscle car with the hood up. Now, is it still a dirty joke?”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

“Neither do I, not for sure, but my gut tells me it’ll pull the plow. But not quite as is. The cutline still doesn’t work, you’re right about that, and it’s got to, because it’ll be the basis of the TV and ’Net ads. So play with it. Make it work. Just remember the key word . . .”

Suddenly, just like that, I know where the rest of that damn dream came from.

“Brad?”

“The key word is
hard,
” I say. “Because a man . . . when something’s not working—his prick, his plan, his
life
—he
takes
it hard. He doesn’t want to give up. He remembers how it was, and he wants it that way again.”

Yes, I think. Yes he does.

Billy smirks. “I wouldn’t know.”

I manage a smile. It feels god-awful heavy, as if there are weights hanging from the corners of my mouth. All at once it’s like being in the bad dream again. Because there’s something close to me I don’t want to look at. Only this isn’t a lucid dream I can back out of. This is lucid reality.

*  *  *

After Billy leaves, I go down to the can. It’s ten o’clock, and most of the guys in the shop have off-loaded their morning coffee and are taking on more in our little caff, so I have it to myself. I drop my pants so if someone wanders in and
happens to look under the door he won’t think I’m weird, but the only business I’ve come in here to do is thinking. Or remembering.