Danny kept his eye on the streets outside, watching to see if they turned off the wrong way — toward some swamp across the state line. They didn’t. Tunny guided the Lexus straight down the avenue, then over to Danny’s apartment building. The Lexus pulled up alongside the row of parked Toyotas and Hondas.
“Thanks for the lift,” said Danny.
“No problem,” Tunny answered in a deep, dull voice. “You made a good friend tonight. I’ll be seeing you.”
When he was standing on the curb, Danny tried again to get a look at the driver’s face. He thought he saw acne-scarred skin, a smirk. He wasn’t sure. Then the Lexus was gone.
At work on Monday, Danny told the story of his daring rescue and showed off his bruised knuckles to his friends. He played down the part about Mary’s father. He made a joke of it. “I wanted to say, ‘Hey, you’re welcome, you racist scumbag.’ ” His friends laughed. Gina praised him for his courage. Ellis obviously envied him and tried to tell some old hero stories about himself. It felt good — especially Gina’s praise. Gina was small and slender with short black hair and cute, impish features. She was smart and ready to work hard with the guys, but she wasn’t afraid to be frivolous and vulnerable and girly either. Danny liked that. Ellis liked it too. It was pretty well understood among them that she was going to choose one or the other of them after a while.
The three were the agency’s hot team right now. Their work on the Wingdale account had made them up-and-coming stars. They were currently putting together a proposal for Paulson’s, the national grocery chain, which was in play after leaving Michaelson & Fine. Bringing them into the agency would be a huge coup. That’s what they’d been working on that Friday night when Danny had walked home by the park.
They were at it again all that week, brainstorming, putting the finishing touches on their pitch. By Thursday, they had it pretty well nailed down. They were in the tenth-floor conference room rehearsing and tweaking the last details when the door opened and Wally Harris poked his head in.
“Brad Spinker landed Paulson’s,” he told them — just like that.
The three charged into Spinker’s office, Danny in the lead.
“I feel like crap about this, guys, really, I swear,” said Spinker. He was tilted back in his chair. He had his feet up on his desk. He didn’t look as if he felt like crap. He looked as if he felt great. “It was a casual thing. Y’know, a party. Paulson started unloading on me. So I was telling him you guys were working on something terrific — I was. But, you know, I threw in a couple of casual suggestions of my own along the way and…” Spinker was wearing a silk burgundy tie and had a burgundy handkerchief in the pocket of his pinstripe suit. His father ran a huge consulting firm. He’d probably gotten him the intro to Paulson.
Danny went into a rage. He didn’t hold back. He started cursing at the son of a bitch right there in his office, pointing his finger at him, calling him names. It started to sound as if he’d actually punch him — which he probably wouldn’t have. But the fury felt like bubbling acid in him and there was no question he would’ve loved to knock Spinker and his burgundy tie right over the back of his chair.
Finally, Ellis got in front of him, between him and Spinker’s desk.
“It’s over,” Ellis kept saying to Danny, holding up his hands as if to push him back. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here. It’s over.”
What could Danny do finally? He let Ellis maneuver him out of the office, still cursing over his shoulder, still calling the smirking Spinker names. Then they were out in the hall and he had nothing but his anger and his disappointment. It was the same for all three of them. They had nothing else left. They went to sit in the coffee shop on the corner where they’d done some of their best work on the proposal. They stared into their coffee concoctions and shook their heads and cursed the unfairness of it. They blamed Avram, their boss, for encouraging the agency’s “cutthroat culture,” and they fantasized about what they’d like to see happen to Spinker. All the while, they felt like losers because that’s what losers did: blame and complain and fantasize and curse the unfairness of things.
But the Japanese have an expression — at least, Danny thought it was the Japanese. They said: Sit by the river long enough, and the body of your enemy will float by. If it was the Japanese, they sure knew a thing or two. Because, one week after Paulson signed on with the agency, Spinker underwent some kind of nuclear head explosion or something. One day, he just didn’t show up for work. Next day, same thing. Then after he was AWOL almost a whole week, he called in — and he was in St. Louis. St. Louis, as in Missouri. When he got put through to Avram, he started babbling about too much pressure and a change of priorities and “a major reevaluation” and this, that, and the other. The bottom line was: He was gone, he’d quit, he was history. Suddenly, the agency had the Paulson’s account and no one to handle it — except they did have someone because Danny, Ellis, and Gina had done nothing but work on Paulson’s before Spinker pulled his double cross. So not only did Avram give them the account, within two weeks they were able to sell Paulson on all the stuff they’d been planning to sell him on in the first place. And because they’d rescued the agency in a crisis, they were even bigger stars than they would’ve been had they simply won the client over from the start.
From cursing in the coffee shop, they went to clinking beer mugs in their favorite bar.
“The gutter to the stars nonstop,” as Ellis put it.
And Danny thought: Life was funny. You could never give up. There was always a chance that something good would happen.
Of course, now they were working practically around the clock, getting the campaign ready to go. It was tiring, but it was fun. Also, Danny and Gina wrote most of the copy, so there were a couple of times when they worked late together, without Ellis. That gave Danny the chance he’d been waiting for.
He was careful about it. He didn’t try anything at the office. Women could be sensitive about these things, Danny told himself sagely. Instead, he waited until they were at his apartment one night, doing a mind-meld over pizza. Gina was at the desk, at his laptop, Danny was leaning in toward the screen over her shoulder. She smelled like roses. The scent seemed to draw him in. After a while, his face was so close to hers, it was nothing to lean just that much closer and let his lips brush not even her cheek but only the soft, soft down on her cheek.
Gina jumped — jumped as if a spark had leapt between them. She twisted in the chair, rolled the chair an inch or two away from him. She gazed up at him with her big, tender brown eyes.
“Oh God. Oh God, Danny,” she said sorrowfully.
Danny felt a terrible heaviness in his chest. “What? No good?” he said. “I thought…”
“No, no, no, it’s not your fault. I should’ve said something. I kept meaning to, it’s just… me and Ellis, we…”
“Oh. Oh jeez…” Danny straightened away from her chair. Threw his hands up like a basketball player pretending he hadn’t committed a foul. “I’m really sorry, Gina.”
“No, Danny. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I should’ve said something. I was going to. I just…”
“Sure. Sure. No, that’s okay. It’s, you know, you and Ellis — it’s great. Bad for me, but great for you guys. Really.”
He meant it. He didn’t blame Gina. He didn’t blame Ellis. He liked them both. He was just sad, that’s all. He was surprised how sad he was. And disappointed. And jealous, too — he had to admit that. It wasn’t only that Danny had imagined sleeping with Gina. He imagined sleeping with every cute girl he met. But he had also imagined waking up with her, holding her after the radio alarm started playing, sitting with her on a Sunday morning and talking over coffee while they read the paper. It hurt like hell to think that Ellis would be doing all that instead.