Peter Carey - Bliss

She did not mind looking for the girl. Which is not to say that she was totally free of jealousy or that she wasn't hurt by Harry’s anger and irritation. But as she prowled up and down the factory-lined streets, while Harry questioned rows of workmen having sandwiches on the footpath, she was as conscientious as she could be. In the end, however, she could not stop herself from suggesting they give up and go home. It wasn't that she was frightened of finding Honey Barbara, or even that she was bored.

She just wanted to show Harry her ads.

The house was in disarray. Harry had always liked it neat: the grass trim, the floors polished, the magazines in their rack, but today he was pleased to see it looking different. At least there was some external sign of change. There was a mattress on the floor in the living room (Joel – he won't go home) and another upstairs folded against the wall (friend of Lucy's). There were empty tins everywhere and, on the front lawn, an ancient Cadillac with a crumpled tail fin (some nonsense Lucy's going on with: tell her to shift it). The back garden was high with weeds (had to fire the gardener) and Bettina glowed.

She was a hot-shot.

'Let me show you ads,' she said. 'Let me show you ads.'

'Where do I sleep?' he asked, looking around the blanket-strewn living room.

'You have our old room.'

'What about you?'

'Don't worry, don't worry, it'll be alright. Come on, Harry, look at my ads.'

He sat down at the table, his heart heavy with thoughts of Honey Barbara, while his wife stood up near the fireplace and presented him with some forty comped-up magazine advertisements.

A comped-up ad is not a final ad. It is, technically, a rough. It is the sort of rough that is done when a client has no imagination or, more often, when the person doing the ad is too much in love with it to show it in any way that is really rough and does everything to make it appear finished, taking 'rough' photography and getting colour prints, ordering headline type and sticking down body copy in the exact type face (if not the correct words), carefully cut to give the appearance of the final paragraphs. And over all of this is placed a cell overlay, so that a comp ad, framed with white, mounted on heavy board, covered with its glistening cell overlay, looks more precious to its maker than it ever will again.

But as Bettina said, presenting her work to Harry, 'It's only a rough.'

For a moment Harry forgot his pain. 'Who did these?'

'I did. I told you.'

'I mean, who did the art direction?'

'I did it all. I wrote them. I laid them out. I ordered the type.'

He was silent for a long time, rubbing his moustache.

Bettina stood at the end of the table, holding an ad upright.

'You did it all?'

'Yes,' she said.

'Oh Bettina,' he said, 'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.'

She had dreamed of this moment for years and still she was shocked to hear the pain and remorse in her husband's voice. He was like a dead man's friend speaking to the dead man's widow.

She did not need to ask him why he was sorry. It was damned right that he be sorry. But it was shocking. And embarrassing. She could not look him in the eye. She became frightened he might display weakness and weep. But it was right, he should weep for all those wasted years when he wouldn't listen to her.

She did not regret the years. She valued them. She valued the strength they had given her. If she had spent the years working with him she would, probably, have had her skill blunted, her perfectionism tainted with pragmatism. There were no greater teachers than the Advertising Annuals she studied, no harsher critic than herself. If she had worked with him, she would have been good. But now she was not just good: she was great.

'Don't be sorry,' she said. A cold, polished consolation she gave him, a hard-starched handkerchief for his tears. And anyway, she did not want to veil his eyes with tears or remorse and blubbering about the past. She wanted nothing to come between his eyes and the crystal clarity of the images in the advertisement. There was nothing in the past to discuss, only the future.

'I'm really sorry,' he said slowly.

'Don't be sorry.' She lined up three cardboard-mounted ads on the mantelpiece. 'Are they great ads or are they great ads?'

She arranged them around him in a magic circle, along the couch, propped on chairs, along the skirting board. She did not intend a ritual. She was merely being practical. He stood in the middle of the circle and blew his nose.

What he saw in those advertisements, in their shimmering reflections, was the possibility of safety. With advertisements like that you could make a lot of money. You could be rich and even, in a limited way, famous. You would be undeniably Harry Joy and there would be no one to take it from you. No one was going to steal your shirts or suits or shoes. If anyone tried to give you Therapy you could give them money. The principle was so simple, it delighted him.

He did not, for an instant, forget Honey Barbara. He would find her. He would bring her here. She could be safe too. There were so many silk shirts here, so many suits.

'When do these appear?' he asked Bettina.

'They've been rejected. We can't sell them.'

'We?'

'Joel, me,' she still had the vulnerable air of the amateur. 'We.'

The cretins couldn't sell them. Other morons couldn't buy them. He (money plus anger equals success) would sell them: He, Harry Joy.

From nowhere, for no reason, an erection forced itself up sideways along his leg and he eased it upright, secretly smiling at Bettina. He wanted to fuck her, to celebrate their life, their power, their joys of freedom, fame, riches, safety, no Therapy, anything and everything.

'I'll sell them for you, Bettina. They're beautiful ads.' He knew how to survive here. He stood up to hold her, to forgive her, to be forgiven, to congratulate her, to push his hard cock against her little stomach.

But she made it a stranger’s embrace: all angles, bones and stiff hard lips.

'Thank you,' she said.

Honey Barbara would have understood this ceremony: the powerful circle of advertisements surrounding him.

Had the neighbours been able to see the advertisements the way Bettina did they would have been in no way surprised. They knew that something decadent was going on in number 25 Palm Avenue and the only firm sign they had of it was this great derelict Cadillac parked in the middle of the nice neat lawn. Around this Cadillac they had watched Lucy and her new boyfriend dance with wrenches and electric drills, but they did not see that as the problem, more as a symbol.

It was a straight-laced suburb where people brought home alcohol in special little cases. And only the clink of two bottles as they went through their front gates gave them away. The children, what few there were, all had clean nails and in many houses they still said grace.

Perhaps if they had stumbled into number 25 on this night at half-past six and found the stove unlit, the fireplace full of cold ashes and only two lights turned on in this big empty room where Harry and Bettina (madman and wife) stared at these cellophane covered mock-ups of advertisements, they might have guessed at their black magical powers, but they would not have seen. Few people in the world could see, perhaps fifty in England, eighty in America. Most of the people who made advertisements for a living could not see.

Even Harry could not see what Bettina saw: the combination of all the complexities of a product, a market, competing forces, the position, the image, this writhing, fluxing, strug-gling collection of worms all finally stilled, distilled and expressed in its most perfect form, which, to Bettina's taste, was in one big picture and one single line of type running underneath it.