I'll Be Your Everything (30 page)

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Authors: J.J. Murray

BOOK: I'll Be Your Everything
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“I doubt it,” he says.
“Yes!” I shout again.
He rolls off me and the bed in a flash. “You know I like it when you shout, but we have some work to do.”
Oh yeah. Work. “Go on. I’ll be there in a minute.”
This place is amazing. Oh, it’s not quite ready for me to live in it yet. There’s so much to do. It isn’t easy turning a house into a home, darling. I’ll have to paint everything first. Vivid colors. Nothing drab. Tia can help me choosing all the right colors. I’ll really enjoy tearing up all the carpet and replacing it with something from this century. The floors are okay, but I’m sure they could use some refinishing. The windows have to be replaced. Aluminum frames? Please.
I go into the master bathroom expecting a garden tub, separate shower, and a double sink. All I see is puke green tile, a puke green toilet, and a puke green bathtub. Who decided puke green would be a good color for a bathroom? This bathroom has to be destroyed and rebuilt with ... mirrors. Yes. Lots of mirrors.
I leave the bathroom and open the sliding closet door. Whoa. There must be fifty suits, all of them blue, gray, or black. Expensive but hideous. Tom will have to donate these to charity. Five pairs of very nice black dress shoes, though, and a few more pairs of boots, all Chippewa boots. Oh, look at the jeans! There must be twenty pairs. Ha! Flannel shirts, too!
My best friend is me, and I am my best friend.
Um, thank You, God.
I wince. Yeah, about last night, God. I sigh. Sorry, but we had to, okay? Don’t be mad. We’ll make it right, I promise. We’re meant to be, right? We just, um, jumped the gun a little. Um, amen.
I fling myself onto the bed again. It’s so quiet here. I won’t be able to sleep. Where are the airplanes? Maybe they pay extra to live in Great Neck so the planes don’t roar overhead. Where are the sirens? Where are the horns, the bus brakes screeching, the people screaming at each other? I listen for a minute.
I may go crazy here. It’s too quiet. I’ll just have to scream a lot.
I slide off the bed and root around in his dresser drawers. Lots of silky black dress socks. They could make nice blindfolds. Hmm. Him or me? Or both of us? Later maybe. I pull out an XXL Cal sweatshirt and hold it up to my body. It hits me at the thighs. Might be sexy. I strip off my shirt and bra and put it on. I’m wearing a sweatshirt dress. It’s all the rage. I drop my jeans, feel the cold hit my thighs, and slide my jeans back on. I’d rather be warm and sexy than freezing and sexy any day.
When I return to the studio, I look up at two of the flat screens. I see frozen, black-and-white, antique-y views of lower Manhattan.
“Good timing,” Tom says, his hand on a mouse. “The one on the left is number four. The one on the right is number eight.” He turns and looks at me. “Nice dress.”
I model it for him. “It’s what every future ad executive is wearing these days.” And if you would turn up the freaking heat, you’d see a lot more of me sprouting from this dress.
“We could wear it together,” he says.
I like Tom. He has so many interesting ideas.
I rest in his lap as he runs both commercials simultaneously, rewinds, runs again, rewinds ... It makes me dizzy.
“They’re both great,” I say.
“I like eight better,” he says. “I get to see your sexy hands more.”
I put my sexy hands on his face and kiss him. “You are a genius.”
“I know what I like.” He kisses my nose. “You’re so easy to work with. Now for Yankee Stadium.” He double-clicks on an icon. “This is number twenty-four.”
At first Tom is just a speck, and then he’s a full-grown man racing toward me, hitting the brakes, and skidding, dust flying in the air.
“That dust is fabulous, darling,” I say. “Can you have the graphics appear out of the dust?”
“Good idea.”
“And airbrush out the signs on the left field wall,” I say. “I don’t think Canon and MasterCard would like us too much because we used a Panasonic camera and your Visa card.”
“Kid stuff. I’ll do it later. Now we need the voices.” He tickles my stomach. “You ready to do some yelling?”
“I thought you were the one yelling ‘safe,’ and I was the one saying ‘drive one home.’”
He rolls us to a microphone and shouts “safe” twenty times with pauses in between.
And despite the noise, it’s how I feel. I feel so safe that I’m weightless.
When it’s my turn, I say “drive one home” twenty times. At first, I whisper it, showing Tom a little stomach. Then I say it as sexily as I can, showing Tom my bare sexy back. Eventually, though, I get silly and sound more like a cartoon character than a grown woman.
He cues each up, and we choose a manly “Safe!” and a sexy “Drive one home.”
I start chewing on his ear.
“Not yet.”
I pout.
He offers me his other ear.
I chew on it a while, and he gives my neck several trillion goose bumps with his tongue.
“Okay,” I say. “Quit wasting time, Tom. Let’s get to work.”
We listen to thirty seconds of sound with all the speakers in the room cranked up. I hear birds, leaves, my giggle, and wheels flying in the wind.
“I like the giggle the best,” he says.
“It’s incredible,” I say. “You have to do the voice-over. You have more of a radio voice than I do.”
“Okay.” We slide back to the microphone, and he starts recording, saying, “No matter where you ride, you’re home. Peterson Bicycles. Made in America since 1969.”
“You added the date.”
He nods. “Hits up the nostalgia angle. ‘Made in America for over forty years’ doesn’t have the right punch.”
“What’s next?” I ask. I am so eager today.
“Let’s see, we need to fine-tune the spots to the millisecond, lay down the voice-over tracks, tinker with and add the graphics. . . make copies. We will always have backups.”
“Always.” I love it when he’s serious.
He rolls his neck in circles. “It might take a few hours.” He kisses my cheeks just under my eyes. “You need a nap.”
I could use one. “Because you kept me up all night, man. Aren’t you tired?”
“Some. I’ll manage.”
The man never sleeps. “I could be working on the actual presentation.”
“Or you could be working on a nap,” he says. “I think these sell themselves. Just cue ’em up and let ’em go. If Mr. Peterson has any questions for why we did it this way, I’m sure you’ll nail it.”
So am I. “I’ll write one up just in case. Always have a backup.”
He rolls his eyes. “You could also be creating the false information for Corrine.”
“I could, but ...” I look at all the cool machines. “I want you to teach me everything you’re about to do. I’ll have to learn eventually, right?”
He smiles. “I like you.”
“I’m likable.”
Because I am a slow learner, for the next
four
hours we make those spots sing, shout, and do lap dances while I do a sultry lap dance on Tom. The final products are everything as professional and slick as what you’d see on TV. Tom is so patient with me, especially when I keep asking the same stupid question: “What’s that button for again?”
I rub his shoulders, he rubs mine, and we drink tea. I have to brew a family-sized tea bag in a saucepan because the man doesn’t even have a teakettle. We eat a few stale barbecue potato chips, a few bites of some frozen turkey dinners that taste like fish and freezer burn, and a pint of slightly crystallized mint chocolate-chip ice cream.
After taking a long walk outside to wake up, we use his empty living room floor to lay out the sixteen billboards, rearranging them until we like the order. We organize the fifty landmark photos in the same way. And then I use the computer images of the photographs to make two PowerPoint presentations—one for our friends on the bike, the other for the landmarks.
“You’re good at this,” he says.
“Corrine never complained,” I say. “And we’ll use the landmark PowerPoint as a backup.”
Tom grudgingly agrees. He’s just mad he had to pay Carl a mint for something we might never use.
Then Tom suggests we add some country instrumentals while our friends ride the bike. “A little ‘Dueling Banjos.’”
Um, no. “Isn’t that the song from
Deliverance
?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Not the message we want to send.” He’s so slow sometimes. “Tom, these are all shots of New York! Sinatra, baby. ‘New York, New York.’ We were just singing it with Carl.” Duh.
“But what if Mr. Peterson doesn’t like Sinatra?”
Tom is tripping. “Who doesn’t like Sinatra?”
“Mr. Peterson is from Georgia. He’s not a New York boy.”
True. Hmm. “Well, Ray Charles and ‘Georgia’ wouldn’t match the pictures. Why not something from Broadway?”
He nods. “A little Gershwin. ‘Summertime.’”
I think the song will work until I run the lyrics in my head. “No fish jumping. Cotton? Also not the right message. And we took all the pictures in the fall, not the summertime.”
He stares at the ceiling. “‘Rhapsody in Blue,’” he says.
I stare at the ceiling. So that’s where he gets some of his ideas. I look him in the eye. “Woody Allen used that song already for
Manhattan.
”
“It’s a signature New York song, Shari.”
“I don’t want to bite off anyone, especially Woody Allen. Why not something by the Allman Brothers?” And I don’t know any of their songs.
He looks at the floor this time. “‘Ramblin’ Man’ might work. You ever hear it before?”
I shake my head. I was never into music made by guys who borrowed food from soul food restaurants in Macon, Georgia.
Tom goes to another computer, finds the song after scrolling through his iTunes list, and cues it up.
I won’t ask him why he has that particular song in his library.
As we listen, I wince. It’s a bit too rowdy, though the instrumentals are excellent. “Tom, I don’t think the being born in the backseat of a bus part is going to help us here. It also references several other
southern
states. Can you see Carl’s picture while that song is playing?”
“No.” He scrolls to another song, and we listen to Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” We decide that, while the song is an all-time classic, it’s too moody and mentions San Francisco, not New York.
“This is so silly,” I say, wishing I had left on my bra. Is there no insulation in this house? “I mean, we’re stressing over music that won’t be part of the campaign.”
“Details, my dear, are very important,” Tom says too seriously. “How food is presented often makes it taste better.”
I want to mock him so badly, but he’s right. The presentation is the key.
“How about ... I don’t know.” He sighs and scratches his head. “We need something that lasts about three minutes and twelve seconds, roughly twelve seconds per slide.”
I won’t ask him how he arrived at twelve seconds. It’s probably a Harrison Hersey and Boulder thing I wouldn’t understand.
“Let’s just run the show silently until something pops in our heads,” I suggest.
He agrees. And it’s not just because he likes me. I saw the suggestion on the ceiling. He must have seen it, too.
I watch our sixteen new friends, and I see them as survivors, every last one of them. Some of them survived World War II as children, and all of them lived through Vietnam, disco, bell-bottoms, hippies, the Reagan years, and 9-11. They deserve the greatest respect. And despite their struggles, they can smile while riding a bike on a fall day in Brooklyn. I always get goose bumps when I see the last slide of Carl. And he just wanted to stand beside the bike. “No,” he said. “I will just stand here, and you will take the picture.”
Taking a stand.
“ ‘Stand Tall,’ by Burton Cummings?” Tom says. “No. That song has something about falling.”
Hush. I’m thinking. And stop thinking along the same lines as me!
“ ‘Can You Stand the Rain,’ by Boyz II Men?” he says.
“It wasn’t raining, Tom.” Now, hush!
“I got it! ‘I’m Still Standing’ by Elton John.”
He waits for my approval.
He doesn’t get it.
And then it hits me. Night. Darkness. No fear. “‘Stand by Me’ by Ben E. King,” I say. “Please say you have that.”
“That’s it!” He hugs me. “And I do.”
He finds the song and plays it “live” while the PowerPoint runs. I sing along, Tom joins in, and when the last slide of Carl fades, the song fades out.
I swallow. “That’s perfect.” That nice slow, uplifting song, those happy old people on bikes, every one of them someone’s “darlin’,” the black-and-white pictures—it’s freaking perfect.

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