Arthur Hailey - Wheels

"I know a little about art. You're good. You could be great."

"That's what I tell him." After a moment, Barbara replaced the cloth on the easel and turned out the light. They went back into the living room.

"What Barbara means," Brett said, pouring more Dom Perignon, "is that I've sold my soul for a mess of pottage." He glanced around the apartment. "Or maybe a pot of messuage."

"Brett might have managed to do designing and fine art," Barbara told Wingate, "if he hadn't been so damned successful at designing. Now, all he has time to do where painting's concerned is to dabble occasionally.

With his talent, it's a tragedy."

Brett grinned. "Barbara has never seen the high beam - that designing a car is every bit as creative as painting. Or that cars are my thing," He remembered what he had told the two students only a few weeks ago: You breathe, eat, sleep cars . . . wake up in the night, it's cars you think about . . . like a religion. Well, he still felt that way himself, didn't he? Maybe not with the same intensity as when he first came to Detroit.

But did anyone really keep that up? There were days when he looked at others working with him, wondering. Also, if he were honest, there were other reasons why cars should stay his 'thing'. Like what you could do with fifty thousand dollars a year, to say nothing of the fact that he was only twenty-six and much bigger loot would come in a few years more. He asked Barbara lightly, "Would you still breeze in to cook dinner if I lived in a garret and smelled of turpentine?"

She looked at him directly. "You know I would."

While they talked of other things, Brett decided: He would finish the canvas, which he hadn't touched in weeks. The reason he had stayed away from it was simple. Once he started painting, it absorbed him totally and there was just so much total absorption which any life could stand.

Over dinner, which tasted as good as it had smelled, Brett steered the conversation to what Leonard Wingate had told him in the bar downtown.

Barbara, after hearing of the cheating and victimization of hard core workers, was shocked and even angrier than Brett.

She asked the question which Brett DeLosanto hadn't. "What color are they - the instructor and the secretary who took the checks?"

Wingate raised his eyebrows. "Does it make a difference?"

"Listen," Brett said. "You know damn well it does."

Wingate answered tersely, "They're white. What else?"

"They could have been black." It was Barbara, thoughtfully.

"Yes, but the odds are against it." Wingate hesitated. "Look, I'm a guest here . . ."

Brett waved a hand. "Forget it!"

There was a silence between them, then the gray-haired Negro said, "I like to make certain things clear, even among friends. So don't let this uniform fool you: the Oxford suit, a college diploma, the job I have. Oh, sure, I'm the real front office nigger, the one they point to when they say: You see, a black man can go high. Well, it's true for me, because I was one of the few with a daddy who could pay for a real education, which is the only way a black man climbs. So I've climbed, and maybe I'll make it to the top and be a company director yet. I'm still young enough, and I'll admit I'd like it; so would the company. I know one thing. If there's a choice between me and a white man, and providing I can cut the mustard, I'll get the job. That's the way the dice are rolling, baby; they're weighted my way because the p.r. department and some others would just love to shout: Look at us! We've got a board room black!"

Leonard Wingate sipped his coffee, which Barbara had served.

"Well, as I said, don't let the facade fool you. I'm still a member of my race." Abruptly he put the cup down. Across the dining table his eyes glared at Brett and Barbara. "When something happens like it did today, I don't just get angry. I burn and loathe and hate - everything that's white."

The glare faded. Wingate raised his coffee cup again, though his hand was shaking.

After a moment he said, "James Baldwin wrote this: "Negroes in this country are treated as none of you would dream of treating a dog or a cat." And it's true - in Detroit, just as other places. And for all that's happened in the past few years, nothing's really changed in most white people's attitudes, below the surface. Even the little that's being done to ease white consciences - like hard core hiring, which that white pair tried to screw, and did - is only surface scratching. Schools, housing, medicine, hospitals, are so bad here it's unbelievable - unless you're black; then you believe it because you know, the hard way. But one day, if the auto industry intends to survive in this town - because the auto industry is Detroit - it will have to come to grips with improving the black life of the community, because no one else is going to do it, or has the resources or the brains to." He added, "Just the same, I don't believe they will."

"Then there's nothing," Barbara said. "Nothing to hope for." There was emotion in her voice.

"No harm in hoping," Leonard Wingate answered. He added mockingly, "Hope don't cost none. But no good fooling yourself either."

Barbara said slowly, "Thank you for being honest, for telling it like it is. Not everyone does that, as I've reason to know."

"Tell him," Brett urged. "Tell him about your new assignment."

"I've been given a job to do," Barbara told Wingate. "By the advertising agency I work for, acting for the company. It's to make a film. An honest film about Detroit - the inner city."

She was aware of the other's instant interest.

"I first heard about it," Barbara explained, "six weeks ago."

She described her briefing in New York by Keith Yates-Brown.

It had been the day after the abortive "rustle pile" session at which the OJL agency's initial ideas for Orion advertising had been routinely presented and, just as routinely, brushed aside.

As the creative director, Teddy Osch, predicted during their martini-weighted luncheon, Keith Yates-Brown, the account supervisor, had sent for Barbara next day.

In his handsome office on the agency's top floor, Yates-Brown had seemed morose in contrast with his genial, showman's manner of the day before. He looked grayer and older, too, and several times in the later stages of their conversation turned toward his office window, looking across the Manhattan skyline toward Long Island Sound, as if a portion of his mind was far away. Perhaps, Barbara thought, the strain of permanent affability with clients required a surly counterbalance now and then.

There had certainly been nothing friendly about Yates-Brown's opening remark after they exchanged "good mornings."

"You were snooty with the client yesterday," he told Barbara. "I didn't like it, and you should know better."

She said nothing. She supposed Yates-Brown was referring to her pointed questioning of the company advertising manager: Was there nothing you liked? Absolutely nothing at all? Well, she still believed it justified and wasn't going to grovel now. But neither would she antagonize Yates-Brown needlessly until she heard about her new assignment.

"One of the early things you're supposed to learn here," the account supervisor persisted, "is to show restraint sometimes, and swallow hard."

"Okay, Keith," Barbara said, "I'm swallowing now."

He had had the grace to smile, then returned to coolness.

"What you're being given to do requires restraint; also sound judgment, and, naturally, imagination. I suggested you for the assignment, believing you to possess those qualities. I still do, despite yesterday, which I prefer to think of as a momentary lapse."

Oh, God!, Barbara wanted to exclaim. Stop making like you're in a pulpit, and get on! But she had the sense not to say it.