David Gates - Preston Falls

The elevator doors open on fourteen and Jean sees Helen, talking on the phone at the reception desk, and the pure white wall with her own smoky Lucite letters spelling PALEY, and she has to say: it's a relief to be here.

Either she was too tired to enjoy it after driving down from Preston Falls, or Halloween really hadhecn dreary this year, (The three messages from Marty Katz on the answering machine in Chesterton didn't help her mood either.) Roger had wanted to be Dennis Rodman — this would've involved a blond wig and blackface, which Jean thought was racially tricky — but luckily he changed his mind and decided to be Frankenstein. (Frankenstein's monster, Willis would say. But while the cat's away.) She got him a rubber mask that had the things sticking out of the sides of the neck, and he wore Willis's arctics, tied around his shins with twine, the toes stuffed with newspaper, Mel was Courtney Love: basically an excuse to put on a hiked-up skirt, fishnet stockings, heavy makeup. Jean wouldn't let her go to the party ail her friends were going to, ostensibly because it was a school night, and really because she'd heard rumors of dosed Hawaiian Punch at the same party last year. So Mel declined to go through the motions of trick-or-treating — she's stopped eating sugar anyway — and stayed, in costume, in the Cherokee, watching Roger thrust his treat bag at grownups in their doorways, smiling their forced smiles. Next year they've got to have a better plan.

Jean left Carol to hold the fort while she took the kids around. But only four trick-or-treaters came to their door the whole night, so they're stuck with all this candy, plus the bagful of loot Roger collected. Before he brushed his teeth, Jean let him have some M&M's and a Milky Way from their stockpile, and told him he could start on his own stuff tomorrow, after she'd looked it over. She saw no signs of tampering, but of course with an expert job you wouldn't. When he went to bed, she

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noted down everything in his treat bag, took it all out to the garbage can and drove to Rite Aid to buy replacements.

This morning the kids whined and dawdled from the minute she woke them up, and she finally just said, which was really unlike her, "Why are you punishing meV They both gave good imitations of bewilderment, and probably they were bewildered. She poured Product 19 into their bowls and sogged it down with milk, thinking (stupidly) that if she poured in the milk they would have to hustle. Meanwhile she didn't even have time to make herself toast; she folded a piece of bread and gnawed at it to keep the coffee from making her sick to her stomach. She did finally get them mobilized and into the Cherokee; she dropped Mel at Chesterton Middle School, then Roger at Mary M. Watson. Watching him safely inside, she began to weep because all she ever did was crab at them and they really seemed to do so much better with Carol. So then of course when she got to the station she had to pull the mirror down and fix her stupid makeup in the parking lot, with a million people looking. No wonder all these men on the train don't go home until like eight o'clock at night. Though by this afternoon she'll be longing to be with her children again.

The Paley Group was her first job interview when she finally finished Pratt, and she was too stupid then to realize how lucky she was. While every other investment firm was cutting back, Paley had committed to a ground-up in-house redesign. She now knows this was Jerry Starger's idea, hiring some young designer (on the cheap) to take charge of everything from stationery and brochures to the monthly newsletter to the whole look of the offices. Jean probably got the job because she wasn't all that young and therefore seemed more trustworthy than some little chickie from Parsons or FIT with a stud in her nose. And things being what they are, it couldn't have hurt that she was a woman. And okay-looking: not the beauty of the world, she knows, but sort of perky — a word she hates. You can be too beautiful, like Claudia What's-her-face, the supermodel. (At the newsstand downstairs this morning, Jean saw her on the cover of some magazine: "A Supermodel Who's Super-Nice.") You can picture all these men tripping over their shoes and, in the end, not liking you because of it. Jean has an idea Anita Bruno — another of Jerry's hires — suffers because of her looks. Though on the other hand, if not for her looks she might not be here to suffer, if that's not too catty

Anyhow, she earned her keep that first year. She came up with the

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new logo (basically PALEY in this austere lettering) and made sure it got on business cards, letterhead, all the signage. They needed the help: one of the old brochures actually had this crosshatched drawing of two white guys in suits facing each other across a desk, one pointing to something on a piece of paper and the other cocking his head like the RCA dog. She even picked new art for the corridors, getting rid of the giant color photos of sailboats and bringing in these plexiglass-framed constructions of torn-paper triangles, thread and birds' bones that she'd found at a show in Connecticut.

Of course everything was a battle royal. "How the hell is it supposed to show up?" Arthur Paley said when Jean and Jerry Starger brought the big Lucite P into his office to show him. "Hell, you see right through it."

"Right, but don't forget," Jean said, "that wall's going to be absolutely white."

Arthur Paley held up the smoky P and looked through it out his window at Central Park. "Christ," he said.

"Trust me," said Jerry Starger. "This is perfecto." He brought thumb and forefinger together to make an OK sign and pumped it three times. "This says ex^^c^ly what needs to be said. The name is there, three-D, an inch thick. Solid. But at the same time it's not up there screaming its head off at you. It's like: We are here, for those who know."

Arthur Paley shook his head. "The world lost a great Fuller Brush man when they let you into Princeton," he said. "I have to think about this." But he came around, and the reception area won Jean her first bonus. A thousand dollars, which she used to start a little fund for Mel and Roger.

The redesign's pretty much in place now, and she's gone on to stuff like working with the computer people on the new Web site, which Jerry Starger wants up and running by the first of the year. But she always has to keep an eye out to make sure everything isn't sliding back. Accounting complains about the cost of repainting this wall every four months, but in order to work, it has to be absolutely white, not just sort of white like everything else in New York.

Helen, shoulder raised to wedge the phone against her ear, is writing on a pink While You Were Out slip; she sees Jean and turns on a smile. Jean always feels funny waltzing in here wearing slacks and whatnot past Helen, in her outfits and power blouses. They sometimes ask about each other's children. Helen hangs up the phone and puts the call slip in the S section of the metal rack on her desk. There's a story about that metal

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rack. What convinced everybody that Jean was a head case was her taking it home and painting it white; she just couldn't stand looking anymore at that tan thing plopped down on the white desk in front of the white wall and next to the terrific square white vase she'd found at Pier 1. She called around and learned that nobody carried these racks in white, so she asked Helen if she could borrow it over the weekend. Out in the garage on Saturday morning, she took it apart — twenty-seven fins plus the base — and sprayed everything with white Rust-Oleum. She reassembled it on Sunday and brought it back Monday morning in a plastic bag inside another plastic bag, dreading that she'd scratch it.