“Yes, but for the record, you dumped her,” Eleanor pointed out. “You found the next one and traded Sara in: left her cold and flat. You should never have married her, obviously, which is your only excuse. That’s the great unanswerable question about love posed by your Queen Lear: what on earth were you thinking of? Also, you got yours when the next one, the Wagnerian Valkyrie with the Harley, threw you over for which composer was it?” She knew the answer perfectly well, but it was a story they both enjoyed. “Fucking Rummenigge.” Solanka grinned, calming down. “She worked as an assistant on one of his three-orchestras-and-a-Sherman-tank efforts and afterward he sent her a telegram. Kindly refrain from all sexual intercourse until we can examine the deep bond that evidently lies between us. And the next day a one-way ticket to Munich, and she disappeared into the Black Forest for years. She wasn’t happy, though,” he added. “Didn’t know when she was well-off, you see.” When Solanka left Eleanor, she added a bitter postscript to these reflections. Actually, I’d like to hear their sides of these stories,” she said during one difficult telephone call. “Maybe you were just a coldhearted bastard from the start.”
Malik Solanka, strolling alone toward a late-night Meslowski double bill at the Lincoln Plaza, tried to imagine his own life as a Dekalog movie. A Short Film About Desertion. Which Commandments could his story be said to illustrate or, as the Kieslowski scholar who introduced last week’s episodes preferred, interrogate? There were many Commandments against the sins of improper commission. Covetousness, adultery, lust, these things were anathematized. But where were the laws against sins of improper omission? Thou Shalt Not Be an Absentee Father. Cometh to Thinkst of It, Thou Shalt Not Walk Out of Thy Life Without a Fucking Good Reason, Buster, and What You’ve Put Up So Far Doesn’t Even Come Close. What Dost Thou Think? Thou Canst Do Any Goddamn Thing Thou Wantest? Who the Fuck Dost Thou Imagine Thou Ist: Hugh Hefner? The Dalai Lama? Donald Trump? At What the Sam Hill Art Thou Playing? Huh, Bub? Huh???
Sara Lear was probably right here in town, he suddenly thought. She would be in her late fifties now, a big shot with a booming portfolio, the secret booking numbers for Pastis and Nobu, and a weekend place south of the highway in, ah, Amagansett. Thank heavens there was no need to track her down, look her up, congratulate her on her life choices. How she would have crowed! For they had lived long enough to witness the absolute victory of advertising. Back in the seventies, when Sara gave up the serious life for the frivolous, working in ad-land had been slightly shameful. You confessed it to your friends with lowered voice and downcast eyes. Advertising was a confidence trick, a cheat, the notorious enemy of promise. It was—a horrible thought in that era—nakedly capitalist. Selling things was low. Now everyone eminent writers, great painters, architects, politicians-wanted to be in on the act. Reformed alcoholics plugged booze. Everybody, as well as everything, was for sale. Advertisements had become colossi, clambering like Kong up the walls of buildings. What was more, they were loved. When he was watching TV, Solanka still turned the sound down at commercial breaks, but everyone else, he was sure, turned it up. The girls in the ads—Esther, Bridget, Elizabeth, Halle, Gisele, Tyra, Isis, Aphrodite, Kate—were more desirable than the actresses in the shows in between; hell, the guys in the ads—Mark Vanderloo, Marcus Schenkenberg, Marcus Aurelius, Marc Antony, Marky Mark—were more desirable than the actresses in the shows. And as well as presenting the dream of an ideally beautiful America in which all women were babes and all men were Marks, after doing the basic work of selling pizza and SUVs and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, beyond money management and the new ditditdit of the dotcoms, the commercials soothed America’s pain, its head pain, its gas pain, its heartache, its loneliness, the pain of babyhood and old age, of being a parent and of being a child, the pain of manhood and women’s pain, the pain of success and that of failure, the good pain of the athlete and the bad pain of the guilty, the anguish of loneliness and of ignorance, the needle-sharp torment of the cities and the dull, mad ache of the empty plains, the pain of wanting without knowing what was wanted, the agony of the bowling void within each watching, semiconscious self. No wonder advertising was popular. It made things better. It showed you the road. It wasn’t a part of the problem. It solved things.
As a matter of fact, there was a copywriter living in Professor Solanka’s building. He wore red suspenders and Hathaway shirts and even smoked a pipe. He had introduced himself that very afternoon by the mailboxes in the vestibule, holding a set of rolled-up layouts. (What was it about Solanka’s solitude, the professor silently asked himself, that apparently obliged his neighbors to disturb it?) “Mark Skywalker, from the planet Tatooine.”
Whatever, as Perry Pincus would have said. Solanka was uninterested in this bow-tied, bespectacled, markedly un-Jedi-knight-like young man, and as a former science-fiction buff despised the lowbrow space opera of the Star Wars cycle. But he had already learned not to argue with self-invention in NewYork. He had learned, also, when giving his own name to omit the “Professor.” Learning annoyed people, and formality was a form of pulling rank. This was the country of the diminutive. Even the stores and eating places got friendly fast. Right around the corner he could find Andy’s, Bennie’s, Josie’s, Gabrielas, Vinnie’s, Freddie & Pepper’s. The country of reserve, of the understatement and the unsaid, he had left behind, and a good thing too, on the whole. At Hana’s (medical supplies) you could walk right in and buy a MASTECTOMY BRA. The unsayable was right there in the window in red letters a foot high. So, anyway, “Solly Solanka,” he replied, neutrally, surprising himself by using the disliked nickname; whereupon Skywalker frowned. “Are you a landsman?” Solanka was unfamiliar with the term, and said as much, apologetically. “Oh, then you’re not.” Skywalker nodded. “I thought, because of Solly, maybe. Also, excuse me, something about the nose.” The meaning of the unknown word quickly became clear from context and raised an interesting question, which Solanka refrained from asking: so, they had Jews on Tatooine?
“You’re British, right,” Skywalker went on. (Solanka didn’t get into the postcolonial, migrational niceties.) “Mila told me. Do me a favor. Take a look at these.” Mila was presumably the young empress of the street. Solanka noted without pleasure the euphony of their naming: Mila, Malik. When the young woman discovered this, she would no doubt be unable to resist mentioning it to him. He would be forced to point out the obvious, namely that sounds were not meanings, and this was a mere interlingual echo from which nothing, certainly not a human connection, need follow. The young adman had unrolled the layouts and spread them on the hall table. “I want to get your honest opinion,” Skywalker explained. “It’s a corporate-image campaign. “The layouts showed double-page-spread images of famous city skylines at sunset. Solanka gestured vaguely, not knowing how to respond. “The copy line,” Skywalker prompted. “Is it okay?” All the pictures bore the same heading. THE SUN NEVER SETS ON AMERICAN EXPRESS INTERNATIONAL BANKING CORPORATION. “Good. It’s good,” Solanka said, not knowing if it was in fact good, average, or terrible. Presumably there was always an American Express office open somewhere in the world, so the statement was probably true, though why would it be useful to an individual in, say, London to know that the banks were still open in Los Angeles? All this he kept to himself, and looked, he hoped, judicious and approving. But Skywalker evidently wanted more. As a Britisher,” he probed, “you’re saying the British won’t be insulted?”