The call came on a Wednesday. On Thursday morning, Canning walked into John and Roman’s office and told them the same thing he had told the other three teams previously assigned to Doucette: to take the work they had heretofore done on the new TV spots and shred it. Everyone was to come in first thing Monday morning and start all over again with, Canning said unhumorously, a new vision and a new attitude.
John did indeed have a new attitude: dread. “Doucette has had problems for years,” he told Rebecca, who sat sideways on the couch, her legs folded beneath her, and ran her finger along the hairline at his temple. “And I’ve only been on it since spring. Still, if they lose it, that’s got to mean cutting some jobs, at least in the short run. And the first people to go are going to be the people with that stench coming off them, the people who got lazy and let Doucette out the door. You know it.”
Rebecca looked at the side of his face — the thin Waspy nose, the strong chin. “Well, I know that won’t happen,” she said soothingly. “But just to try to dispel your fears, let’s say it did. How long would it take you to find another job at an agency in this city, with a book like yours? Four minutes? Five minutes? A better-paying job, too, probably.”
John shook his head gloomily. “The point is, I want to stay,” he said. “You have no idea what some of those bigger Madison Avenue agencies are like. No idea. Guys in suits with pipes, guys telling you how they learned everything they need to know about advertising doing point-of-purchase ads for P&G in 1958. Bosses who will tell you in all seriousness that there are only two angles you’re allowed to shoot a car from, or there are only three different typefaces you’re allowed to use, because those are the three the dead founder said he liked in his memoirs. I can’t go back there. It would be like grave-digging, compared to the work I get to do now.”
The sun had gone behind the townhouses across the street. From the apartment upstairs they heard the sound of the neighbor’s boy riding a tricycle across the wooden floor.
“I want to stay,” John said simply. “I’m too used to the freedom of it. And if I want to stay, then I just have to come up with something. It’s my fault as much as anybody’s. It’s my fault for not being creative enough. I have to come up with something new.”
Rebecca said nothing more. But the next day she called John at his dead-calm office and told him she had rented a car, and made ferry reservations, and found an inn that was still open, and they were going to Martha’s Vineyard for the weekend. She had just decided, she said, that this was something he needed and deserved. She had taken care of everything — even packed for him after he had left for work. He agreed to meet her downstairs at five on the dot, and hung up, smiling bashfully. It was the form their love always took, in the moments when love needed to reassert itself: she would act for him, and he would put his pride in her rather than in any thought of resisting.
When the ferry came in sight of Vineyard Haven, they went up on deck and watched, hands jammed in their pockets, chins tucked down into their collars, as the low lights approached. They weren’t alone, in spite of the wind and nocturnal cold; a half-dozen other passengers braved the open air as well. The late September days still held the warmth of summer, then the nights stole back with frost: the lure of the off-season.
Their hotel in Oak Bluffs was a Victorian-looking gingerbread affair, with tight staircases and low ceilings. It was closing up for the winter the day after John and Rebecca were scheduled to leave. When they came downstairs Saturday morning to search for some breakfast, they saw the owner, a robust woman in her fifties or sixties with a long gray braid, atop a stepladder outside, looking in at them through the windows; she was putting up the storm panes. They drove out to the cliffs at Gay Head, and descended to the hidden beach where people of all ages went naked and covered themselves with the thick, comic, unguentous mud. John stood in the clay and looked out to sea and quite managed to forget himself for a while. He thought about how some beautiful women looked better clothed than naked and how Rebecca was not one of those women. The others must have seen that too. But something about the envelope of mud desexed what might otherwise have been a lusty atmosphere — they were all more like children, like statues, purely bodies, for that interlude when the sun was high.
When they came back to their inn the owner had left a space heater with a note outside the door to their room. John showered while Rebecca used the lobby phone to check which restaurants were still open for dinner this time of year. They drove on the beach road in the twilight out to Edgartown. By the time they had had a drink and ordered dinner, all John’s worries had retaken possession of him, but out of consideration for Rebecca he kept it inside. She ordered a second bottle of wine.
“You know,” she said, “in another few years, we’ll probably have a baby, and we won’t be able to do this kind of thing anymore.” She said this neither excitedly nor with regret; but she seemed happy enough now.
John had to drive back much more slowly than he had come on the beach road, because he was drunk. There were stretches where the road dropped off to water on both sides. In their cold room, they took off each other’s clothes quickly, laughing, and jumped into the noisy old bed. Soon she was holding his hair tightly between her fingers. Her eyes had a way of seeming to blur, and, seeing this, he stopped for a moment and moved his hands so that her legs bent over his shoulders. He tried to transmit to her some of the passionate honesty, the defenselessness, with which his fear inspired him.
When the work week began, the atmosphere at the agency was one of forced carelessness, a mask of cheerful fatalism gradually swallowed up, as each day progressed, in a fog of lost revenue, lost jobs. It didn’t take long for the tension to inform each close working relationship. That was no problem — creativity learned to thrive on such pressure. The problem was that Roman, a born and bred New Yorker, wanted to resolve that tension by arguing in loud voices, while John was too thin-skinned, even with a good friend, for that kind of approach to be fruitful.
Roman had a theory as to why the previous year’s Doucette campaign had failed: in fact, it was the same overarching theory he offered to explain the failure of any ad campaign, anywhere. People, he said sternly, hated advertising. They hated being spoken to like idiots, they saw five hundred ads a day in some form or other, they knew all the tricks that had been refined in order to sell them things they needed and things they didn’t. The more you smiled at them, complimented them, sang to them, the wiser they were to what you really thought about them. And yet, he said. And yet they had not let go of their innate compulsion to be amused — not to consume or to have their self-image stroked, but purely and simply to be amused — and they would still agree in effect to subsidize that amusement by purchasing the product associated with it. So the answer, according to Roman — a burly, sloppy man in his mid thirties, with two unpublished novels in his desk at home, a man whose imagination was powered by a deep conflation of passion and irony — was anti-advertising, advertising that looked nothing like it was supposed to, that looked — if you were willing to go all the way with it — like it was trying to subvert its own purpose. His idea, which he defended with gusto, was this: find the ugliest, most misshapen, unintelligent, comic-looking faces and bodies imaginable (he even brought in videos of Amarcord and Stardust Memories to show what he was talking about), put them in the Doucette khakis, bathing suits, lambswool sweaters, pocket T’s, and photograph them. At the end of the TV spot, a title, or a voice-over, would deliver the tag: “Be honest. If we’d gotten Cindy Crawford, would you have noticed the clothes?”