Jonathan Dee - Palladio

When they came back to their inn the owner had left a space heater with a note outside the door to their room. John showered while Rebecca used the lobby phone to check which restaurants were still open for dinner this time of year. They drove on the beach road in the twilight out to Edgartown. By the time they had had a drink and ordered dinner, all John’s worries had retaken possession of him, but out of consideration for Rebecca he kept it inside. She ordered a second bottle of wine.

“You know,” she said, “in another few years, we’ll probably have a baby, and we won’t be able to do this kind of thing anymore.” She said this neither excitedly nor with regret; but she seemed happy enough now.

John had to drive back much more slowly than he had come on the beach road, because he was drunk. There were stretches where the road dropped off to water on both sides. In their cold room, they took off each other’s clothes quickly, laughing, and jumped into the noisy old bed. Soon she was holding his hair tightly between her fingers. Her eyes had a way of seeming to blur, and, seeing this, he stopped for a moment and moved his hands so that her legs bent over his shoulders. He tried to transmit to her some of the passionate honesty, the defenselessness, with which his fear inspired him.

When the work week began, the atmosphere at the agency was one of forced carelessness, a mask of cheerful fatalism gradually swallowed up, as each day progressed, in a fog of lost revenue, lost jobs. It didn’t take long for the tension to inform each close working relationship. That was no problem — creativity learned to thrive on such pressure. The problem was that Roman, a born and bred New Yorker, wanted to resolve that tension by arguing in loud voices, while John was too thin-skinned, even with a good friend, for that kind of approach to be fruitful.

Roman had a theory as to why the previous year’s Doucette campaign had failed: in fact, it was the same overarching theory he offered to explain the failure of any ad campaign, anywhere. People, he said sternly, hated advertising. They hated being spoken to like idiots, they saw five hundred ads a day in some form or other, they knew all the tricks that had been refined in order to sell them things they needed and things they didn’t. The more you smiled at them, complimented them, sang to them, the wiser they were to what you really thought about them. And yet, he said. And yet they had not let go of their innate compulsion to be amused — not to consume or to have their self-image stroked, but purely and simply to be amused — and they would still agree in effect to subsidize that amusement by purchasing the product associated with it. So the answer, according to Roman — a burly, sloppy man in his mid thirties, with two unpublished novels in his desk at home, a man whose imagination was powered by a deep conflation of passion and irony — was anti-advertising, advertising that looked nothing like it was supposed to, that looked — if you were willing to go all the way with it — like it was trying to subvert its own purpose. His idea, which he defended with gusto, was this: find the ugliest, most misshapen, unintelligent, comic-looking faces and bodies imaginable (he even brought in videos of Amarcord and Stardust Memories to show what he was talking about), put them in the Doucette khakis, bathing suits, lambswool sweaters, pocket T’s, and photograph them. At the end of the TV spot, a title, or a voice-over, would deliver the tag: “Be honest. If we’d gotten Cindy Crawford, would you have noticed the clothes?”

“It’s brilliant,” Roman said. “With the right music for the dummy spot, it’ll save the motherfucking day. Right now I’m thinking either Sinead O’Connor singing ‘You Do Something to Me’ or Robert Palmer’s ‘Simply Irresistible.’”

John, though, found this whole proposal too theoretical, too self-referential, and anyway the more attention it garnered, the more of a link it would create in the public consciousness between wearing Doucette’s clothes and looking like a dateless outcast. He, too, had a pet theory, which ran like this: in a market glutted with products of every sort, where the selling itself was no longer a person-to-person transaction, the only way to make one product rise above its competitors was to find a way to link that product, however paradoxically, with the notion of individuality, nonconformity, the assertion of self. His idea was a black-tie wedding at which the groom emerges wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and black jeans, smiling coolly, while his future in-laws look on in horror. He thought Roman could come up with some line about how the truly well-dressed man is comfortable at any occasion.

“I know it’s kind of conservative,” John said, as Roman, eyes squeezed shut, held his head between his hands as if trying to keep it from exploding, “but let me just remind you that this is a pitch, that we have to sell this idea not to a bunch of your East Village film-studies-major friends sitting on a couch watching television but to the marketing director from Doucette, who lives in Wilkes-Barre for God’s sake, who’s a member of the Christian Coalition for all we know.”

Variations on this argument and on the ideas behind them took up a week. Then on Monday morning John arrived to find Roman holding a pink memo he had found pinned to the door of their office, signed by Canning. “To the Doucette teams,” it read. “Effective immediately, the upcoming account pitch is placed under the supervision of Mal Osbourne. All communications with the client go through him, all ideas are to be approved by him, including the final presentation. Mal will run the pitch in Philadelphia personally. He’ll be in touch with all of you directly. That is all.”

The four teams met for lunch at Zen Palate.

“What does this mean?” Roman said. “I wasn’t sure this guy was still alive. He hasn’t done any creative work I know about in three or four years. Is he coming out of retirement or what?”

“Maybe that’s it,” said Andrea, an artist. About to turn thirty, she was lately enamored of a kind of schoolgirl look she couldn’t quite bring off; she wore her hair that day in two pigtails tied with pieces of yarn. “I think it’s kind of exciting, actually. It sure jazzes up the idea of working on this account. Mal Osbourne is one of the big names in all of advertising — maybe not lately. He’s one of the reasons I came to this agency in the first place.”

“But why the note?” said her partner Dale, a copywriter, a pallid young man just two or three years out of college. “Isn’t this the kind of thing Canning might normally take the time to explain to us personally, instead of coming in on Sunday to leave us a note? I heard he wasn’t even in the office today.”

“He can’t be too happy about it,” Andrea said, “if he refuses to talk about it like this.” The way she began speaking before Dale was quite finished brought back to John the memory of his own brief and unhappy working partnership with her, when he first started at the agency almost four years ago. “It must have been forced on him somehow.”

“Jesus,” Dale said, “I feel like one of those — what did they call those people, back in the eighties, those people you’d see on like Nightline , talking about what it meant that they were playing funeral music on Radio Moscow, or who stood next to who at the May Day parade?”

Roman finished chewing hurriedly. “Kremlinologists,” he said. Everyone nodded.

John was the only one not saying much. He was embarrassed by a premonition he had that all this was related to him in some fateful way. He had never told anyone, not even Roman, about the morning he had spent looking at art with Osbourne last spring — the real genesis of their meeting was so unlikely that John felt certain no one would believe he hadn’t engineered it himself somehow, and he had decided to keep it a harmless secret rather than risk being doubted and gossiped about. Right after it happened, Vanessa had of course demanded to know everything: he began by swearing her to secrecy, but with no real faith in Vanessa’s word, he had then lied about it anyway, downplaying every interesting thing about it. Now he was newly nervous that it would get out. If the story circulated even in the most watered-down version that John had spent four clandestine hours one Saturday in the back seat of a car with Mal Osbourne, everyone on the Doucette account, everyone in the agency, would surely start assaulting him with questions about Osbourne’s tastes, Osbourne’s nature, and when he couldn’t answer, they would accuse him of protecting some mysterious access of his own.