Living Room (12 page)

“Just take the East Side Drive over the Willis Avenue Bridge and instead of getting onto the Deegan, I’ll show you where you get the Grand Concourse, no problem.”

The driver glanced at her in the rear-view mirror as if she had just announced plenty of problems.

Shirley settled back in the seat. In her lap, a small present for Pop, wrapped in tinsel with the Abercrombie label. He’d think she was nuts, buying seven-power binoculars for a sixty-eight-year-old Bronx tenement dweller. He’d say,
What do you expect me to do, go out to Van Cortlandt Park and watch birds like an idiot, what do I want with a present like this, pawn it?

But Shirley knew of the long hours he spent just looking out of his window at people on the street and others in windows across the way, a voyeur of street life, and thought that with his vision fading, at least now he could indulge his curiosity without complaining, as he did from time to time these days. “It’s not my eyes, it’s just the people keep walking further away.”

She paid the Puerto Rican cabdriver the seven dollars and ten cents on the meter and gave him a two-dollar tip and carefully described for him the way back into Manhattan. He looked disconsolate, certain he would get lost. What could she do, drive back with him?

The four children on the sidewalk stopped playing and watched her. Cabs did not let out passengers in this neighborhood often. She smiled at the children, remembering herself here, at that age. Should she be distributing pennies, lollipops?

Upstairs, she rang the bell above the elegantly printed name, Philip Hartman, clipped from a calling card he had had printed up in the days when he couldn’t afford the carfare to go calling on people. “What kind of individual doesn’t have a calling card?” he said.

Through the door she heard footsteps, then a clearing of a voice and “Who’s there?”

Forcing her voice to contralto, Shirley said, “This is a stickup.”

He opened the door, pulled her into the apartment, and then into his arms. “In the hallway, don’t
say
things like that, every other person who rings a bell in this house has a switchblade, it’s not a joke, the neighbors are scared, how are you,
neshumah?
Let me look at you.”

He examined her face as if she might be a soldier-son returned from a war, he searched for visible signs of a change in her soul. While he patted her face with his palms, assuring himself of her reality, his co-sinner, Mrs. Bialek, stood in the background.

“Hello Poppa,” Shirley said, handing him the green foil-wrapped package from Abercrombie’s. “Happy Father’s Day!”

*

To get away from Mrs. Bialek, and to give them both some exercise, they went for a walk to the nearby park. (“Shirley,” he had once said, “if you exercise every day for eighty years you’ll live a long life.”)

He held her hand as if she were a small child, then changed his mind and took her by the elbow across the street to the park. “Sunday,” he said, “is muggers’ day off. You should see on a weekday evening, dozens of them watching you, scratching
armpits like monkeys, making rude remarks, and God forbid you’re
alone and no policeman is hanging around! Tell me about your work.”

“Nothing to tell, Pop. It’s the same.”

“Are you satisfied, it gives you pleasure?”

“Sometimes.”

“And other times?”

“It gives me money.”

“Neshumah,
money is only good till you have enough. You have enough?”

“Yes, Pop.”

“Then don’t talk to me money. You could do something for the good of mankind, like Einstein.”

“What makes you think Einstein did something for the good of mankind?”

“So I picked the wrong name. You know what I mean. You should be an artist, a scientist, a teacher, something useful.”

“Be grateful there’s advertising, Pop.”

“I hate to see Philip Hartman’s only child settling for making something which gets thrown away with each day’s newspaper. Those ads are clever bullshit, how can a grownup person of twenty-eight spend time on that?”

“A lot of work goes into some of those ads.”

“A lot of work goes into digging ditches, you want to dig? You should be—listen, I have an idea. In
shul
Friday, the boring rabbi was reading from Leviticus and I thought somebody ought to rewrite that, for God’s sake liven it up a little. Why shouldn’t somebody be Shirley?”

“I’m not on the God account.”

Hartman sat his daughter down on a park bench and studied her face. Then he said, “
Neshumah,
I shouldn’t be giving you advice. You’re the famous one. What did I do with my life
? You should be telling me. I’ve made you unhappy on Father’s Day, that’s not good.”

“No, Pop. You’ve given me something to think about.”

“Good!” he said, pulling her up and walking her faster than they had walked before. “Thinking is the best thing for anyone. Without thinking there’d be no Scripture, no King Solomon, no Brandeis, no Einstein. The Arabs would have won the Six Day War!”

“Pop, you’re a chauvinist.”

“Absolutely not, I’m an American citizen like everybody else!” He squeezed her arm. “Come, let’s go back, Mrs. Bialek’ll think I’ve run off with you!”

CHAPTER TWELVE

ON MONDAY AT ELEVEN when the Plans Board met, Shirley surveyed the two rows of male faces.

When executives in the same company convened, it was not to solve problems; these were solved ahead of time. The meeting was a forum for convincing others. Each player had a role, protecting or enhancing his reputation, covering up errors, scoring points, upstaging those less competent in the sport. The boys were no longer in Little League uniforms, parents no longer watched from the sidelines; the spectators did not cheer or boo, and gamesmanship—not batting or fielding skill—now counted most.

The team captain sat at the head of the table. This morning, thought Shirley, he seemed to be avoiding her eyes.

To Arthur’s right was Richard Stewardson, whose family had owned Newport property in its heyday. The female Stewardsons were debutantes, the males all lawyers, all Yale, though none of them ended up practicing law. Several were in merchant banking, one devoted his life to racehorses, two were civil servants of ministerial rank, one had taken on a failing distributorship of Japanese electronics equipment and turned it into the most profitable Stewardson enterprise ever. The only difference between the traditional Stewardson males and Richard was that Richard was the only one who, after Yale, was less than six feet tall. In fact he was five feet four, and though the family had decided he was a mutant rather than a bastard, it was felt that because of his shortness he would be a menace in banking, industry, or public affairs, and so, despite a complete lack of creative flair, he was installed in advertising as an administrator. He was very persuasive as Arthur’s follow-up man because everyone in the company knew he didn’t need the job.

To Arthur’s left was Tony Tantillo, the firm’s principal art director, who sat close to the head of the table only for convenience, so he could bob up and down to the displays behind Arthur on which anything visual was on view. Tony made it in the first Italian immigration into advertising, justifying his widowed mother’s persistence that he not change his name to get ahead in the business world.

Carter Ellison was head of research. He was well compensated for following the fads, eye-blinking in supermarkets, consumerism, finding out through tens of thousands of questionnaires and interviews what any smart man could have figured out in a bare room, thinking. He was not admired by Arthur, but used. When Arthur determined what a client should do, Carter Ellison came up with the proof in the form of numbers and percentages.

Marvin Goodkin, lanky, energetic, garnered half a dozen ideas from each morning’s study of
The New York Times
;
a cornucopia of ideas to be disgorged at meetings, a man who had early in life learned to throw fifteen darts at the board, knowing that if one would stick, that’s the one everyone would be looking at as soon as the flashy throw was over. He publicly criticized what he called Shirley’s one-track mind (said Shirley, “If you want to get from here to there, one track at a time seems sensible”), had tried to discourage Arthur from appointing “someone so young” to the Plans Board and settled down to become her chief antagonist. If
successful campaigns were a measure,
Shirley should have Marvin’s job. What Marvin would never realize was that if Arthur had ever offered Shirley a title like creative director, she would have laughed.

After Max Caiden had taken off like a pirate, Arthur had appointed two account executives to the Plans Board, Philip Reardon, who was simply a super salesman for anything to anybody, and the more intangible the product the better. He loved his life, his wife, several other wives, drank less than the industry average, owned real estate from saved past earnings, had small interests in successful small businesses, and came to every Plans Board meeting as if it were an opening night, and like opening-night playgoers, capable of simulating excitement about anything at all.

The other account executive on the Plans Board was Jean-Pierre Moch, all of whose talents Shirley attributed to his Alsatian extraction. From the German side, he derived his methodical attention to detail, his love of what he called “structured meetings,” his devotion to business success, his capacity to consume food without regard to his increasingly convex shape. From the French side, he got his intense devotion to his family and to nobody outside it, his small-shopkeeper’s way of keeping control of costs, his love of the abstract, symbolic, and fanciful, and his astonishing success with both men and women by treating all of them as objects of his intense seduction.

It was unusual for a personnel director to be on such a board, but Benson Chabrow had a more important place in this company than personnel directors in other agencies simply because Arthur Crouch felt that he himself had faults as an orchestrator of human ambitions, salaries, compensation schemes, wiles, expense accounts, titles, and handed it all over to Chabrow, including all of the people who outranked Chabrow except, de facto, Shirley. Arthur had once told Chabrow, “You’re terrific with people, but you’ve got to stop thinking of Shirley as one of our people. She’s really an outside contractor who happens to work here.”

After a minute of chatter about the weekend’s golf, Arthur
passed to each person present a Xerox of Shirley’s ad copy and a stat of the layout, which they studied as they sipped their coffee. Shirley watched them trying to control their expressions as they read.

Shirley, who had not read the proposal since she had handed it to Arthur, suddenly felt the terror of forgetfulness, not remembering what she had written. Feeling foolish, she glanced at the first page.

IF YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH MY CAR

YOU’LL STILL NEED A HUSBAND

When you’re behind the wheel of my car, ladies, the first thing you’ll notice is the new steering wheel itself, scooped out like the top of an airplane pilot’s wheel. That’s because women are shorter than men, by and large, and why the hell should we have to strain so to see over the top of the wheel when driving? You won’t have to. Your neck and back muscles will love this new steering-wheel design. And so will your husband if he’s less than average height, or your teen-age driver. It doesn’t hurt the tall ones, and it helps the rest of us a lot. Sit down behind that wheel and you won’t want to ever sit behind any other kind of wheel.

Reading it in this room, in the presence of the stone faces of her colleagues, Shirley could imagine their objections: it’ll take Dearborn three years to redesign the steering; they’ve probably thought of a scooped-out wheel a dozen times and discarded it; even if they haven’t, it’d take three years to engineer it; even if it could be done in time for next year’s cars, how much negative flak would they get from customers who don’t like anything new; would they lose more than they would gain?

What they probably wanted in Dearborn was a full-color picture of the car seen from an angle that exaggerated its front, and standing next to it a blonde windblown model that no woman reader who used a car to pick up kids at school and drive to the shopping center could ever identify with.

Shirley skimmed the rest of the copy, the little and some not-so-little things that would make a car more appealing to a person with common sense. Like eliminating the lip on the trunk so luggage or grocery bags could be pulled out instead of lifted out.

She turned to the concluding paragraph on the last page.

I don’t want you to make love to my car. It’s a vehicle designed to get you from here to there safely and in comfort. The new things that are useful and convenient are standard. If another car has them as options, that’s substandard. The only optional thing is: Do you want to buy my car or somebody else’s substandard car? It’s easy to find out. Check all these features out at the dealer’s showroom. Ask for Shirley’s car. It looks pretty nice and comes in any color of the rainbow. I’m sure you know what the colors in the rainbow are, that’s why this ad is in black and white (we’ve put our money into the extras in the car, not into advertising).

It was signed, “Yours, Shirley.”