Jonathan Dee - Palladio

Then one day Roman, John, and a few others were sitting on the sofas in Canning’s empty office. Their boss had left early to go to a Knicks — Pacers playoff game at Madison Square Garden.

“I don’t think he even likes basketball,” Dale said. “I think he just goes because you have to be so rich and plugged-in these days to get playoff tickets at all. He’s displaying for the people in the other corporate boxes.”

Mick, staring into the rain through Canning’s glass wall, said, “And the weird thing is, you can always see it better on TV anyway. It’s like going to the taping of a TV show.”

“That’s all pro sports is now,” John said, “is television programming.”

“Oh, I’d go further than that,” Roman said. “Pro sports is nothing but an advertising delivery system. He” — gesturing to Canning’s empty chair — “took me to the Virginia Slims tennis tournament last year, and I have no idea who played who but I remember that sitting in my seat, without turning my head, I could see thirty-two different ads. And that’s not counting what the players had sewn on to their shirts. Thirty-two.”

“What do you mean, ads?”

“Well, you know. Placements. Logos. Fila, Chase, Rolex.”

“Brute ads,” Dale said. “Chinese water torture ads.”

“Exactly. More negotiations than ads. Man, imagine if that was your job? Haggling over the size of the X in Ex-Lax on some sign behind a tennis court?”

“Talk about your mental static. Talk about your—”

“Oh my God!” Andrea yelled. “That reminds me!”

They all looked at her, taken aback by this show of genuine excitement.

“All that talk about ugly advertising gave me this sudden Mal Osbourne flashback—”

Everyone in the room who had been on the Philadelphia trip winced and laughed.

“—and I can’t believe I forgot to tell you guys this awesome bit of gossip I heard! You know Elaine Sizemore, at DDB Needham?”

Roman nodded. “Nice girl,” he said. “Did those Jerry Brown spots.”

“Well, apparently out of nowhere she gets a letter, at her home, from none other than Osbourne, inviting her to quit her job and join this new agency he’s starting in Charlottesville fucking Virginia.”

The silence in the room was uncertain and polite, the way people are silent when they hear of a misfortune that has a comic element to it which no one wants to confess to seeing.

“Osbourne is starting his own agency?” Mick said.

“Yup.”

“Partners, or just himself?”

“Apparently just him.”

“Where does the money come from?”

“Who knows? He could have it himself, I guess. It’s not impossible.”

“Does he know this Elaine Sizemore?”

“Not from Eve. He just said he’d been following her career and admired her work. I guess he’s just headhunting. No one here got a letter?”

Everyone shrugged. John could feel his face coloring; he considered leaving the room but thought that might be even more conspicuous. And when Roman looked directly at him, he shook his head no.

“Man,” Dale said. “I can’t believe I didn’t hear from him.” Those who had witnessed Dale’s humiliation at the Doucette pitch smiled appreciatively at the joke.

“Why Charlottesville?” Roman said. “Does he think he’s Jefferson or something?”

“You laugh,” Andrea said, even though Roman hadn’t laughed, “but wait’ll you hear this. The new agency has a mission. He wants to take the irony out of advertising. He wants it accepted as an art form. He wants to make it a force for social good.”

Again they sat dumbstruck for a few seconds, unsure whether to laugh — not because it wasn’t funny, but because the humor seemed at the expense of their former boss’s derangement.

“Kinky,” Roman said finally.

“So,” John said, and they all turned to look at him. “This Elaine Sizemore, then — she’s not taking him up on his offer?”

Andrea snorted. “She’s a god damn star at Needham, and she’s going to leave that and move to Virginia to work at the Osbourne Institute for the Painfully Sincere? What would you do?”

“You talked to her?”

“No, to another guy there. But if she was considering leaving I think she would have kept this letter to herself, don’t you?”

Within a week a copy of Osbourne’s “Dear Colleague” letter — not from Elaine Sizemore, but from some other unnamed source — had flown via fax to every agency in Manhattan. A cruelly annotated copy went up on the Canning & Leigh bulletin board for a day until Canning himself tore it down. The following week AdAge ran a small article about Osbourne’s quixotic reemergence, full of diplomatic quotes from other agency heads; Osbourne himself, the article said, could not be reached for comment.

In bed one night, in the minute after the lights were turned out and the shadows of the window frames angled across the ceiling, Rebecca said suddenly, “You do understand that if I left my job we’d be turning our backs, potentially, on a lot of money. I mean a lot.”

“I know that,” he said, as if they were in the middle of a conversation.

“There are things we could have, things we could do, that we wouldn’t be able to do. Because we couldn’t — at least I couldn’t — ever get back to the point I’m at right now, in terms of career prospects. We’d have to do without those things. We can’t have it all, is what I’m saying. We can’t pick up and move away from this life and still enjoy everything that happens to be good about this life.”

His heart leapt to hear Rebecca even discussing it, to know that she had gone to the length of imagining what she might sacrifice in order to stay with him; but he felt instinctively that the wise course here was emotional caution. He turned on his side and laid his forehead in the space between her shoulder blades. “I don’t care about money so much,” he said gently. “I care about doing work that satisfies us both, in a place we’re actually pleased about living in.”

She didn’t say anything more, and in a few minutes her legs jerked in the way they always did in the moment just before sleep.

That weekend, another postcard — this one picked out of the mailbox by Rebecca: “Lawyering and advertising: impartial advocacy. Of course, even in defending someone you hate, you’re really defending something you love. Or that’s the idea.”

Rebecca waved it at him. “Postmarked Charlottesville,” she said. “Have there been other cards like this?”

John nodded, his eyes stubbornly on the TV.

“Have you been in touch with him?”

“No. There’s literally no way to get in touch with him. Unsigned cards just keep showing up in the mail.”

Rebecca stood still for a moment, as if expecting him to say more. Then she laid the postcard on the arm of John’s chair and left the room.

As the trip to Omaha approached, Roman kept churning out spots for the Beef Council with a spiteful prolificacy. Every morning he smiled coldly as he transcribed on John’s sketch pad the ideas he’d had the night before: What are the chances you’ll ever visit the rain forest, anyway? Name one tough vegetarian. Cows are too stupid to live. You only go around once; might as well go around fat and glossy. Tofu is for girls. It’s the law of nature. With a week to go, they had nearly twenty ads dummied up when they only needed six; oddly, though, in spite of this, and in spite of the fact that some of his copy was clearly over the top, Roman angrily refused to edit any of it, and when John tried to get him to narrow it down to ten Roman accused him of censorship.

John came back from lunch one day to find “Who wants soft, squishy arteries?” written on his pad. He scowled.