“Everybody knows this?” John said.
“Well, maybe there are people in the Midwest who don’t know it.” The Midwest, for Roman, was more a psychic space than a geographic one, filled with conservative farm families who were virtual zombies of sincerity. “But those people are eating meat three meals a day already; they’re not who the campaign’s targeted at. They couldn’t eat any more beef. We’re aiming at the people who are trying to cut down on beef. They’re doing it because it makes them feel smart. Stupid ads that show happy families barbecuing just reinforce their position. We have to beat them to the punch.”
“By telling them that beef gives you heart attacks and causes global warming? That’ ll—”
“By not pretending we don’t know it. We know it and we’re trying to get them to eat more meat anyway. We let them know we know it. That’s the joke.” He stood up and paced around the cramped office; as always when he was excited by an idea, he looked almost angry. “‘Six burgers a week. That’s all we ask.’ Just be up-front about it, and maybe give it that little extra sarcastic tweak, to let them know that we know. People really respond to that.”
“Let them know that we know what?” John said.
Roman held out his hands. “That they know,” he said.
John smiled uneasily, but he didn’t say any more, intimidated by the force of Roman’s confidence. He hadn’t gotten into advertising in the first place to make any sort of statement, but rather to exercise, at something close to full capacity, his skills as an artist. If there were ideals in the service of which he wanted those skills employed, he might have become a painter, started a magazine, something in that line. But he had no specifically individual creative impulse. Nor did he care to spend the one life he was given in a state of righteous poverty — he didn’t care about getting rich, but he also saw no reason to do without comforts that were easily within his grasp. So did his work then put forth the values, the beliefs, of whoever happened to hire him? On the contrary — in his experience, he and Roman were hired to do exactly as they pleased. The clients might be unhappy with the results, even to the point of withdrawing their business; but while he was working, John was left alone.
So what was behind the work they did? John knew that most people would have assumed that he himself was behind it, he and Roman and their other colleagues; yet he put nothing of what he believed into it. He felt much more like an instrument — an instrument of what seemed, especially after his we-know-that-they-know conversation with Roman, like a vast and powerful blankness, an opacity. Of course, maybe this was just a lie he was telling himself in order to displace his own responsibility (not for beef consumption, about which he couldn’t have cared less, but for the blankness itself). Or maybe there was something substantive behind that opacity and he just wasn’t astute enough to make out what it was.
He didn’t say anything about all this, to anyone. He let Roman take the six-burgers-a-week idea to Canning, who loved it, and told them to come up with five more spots in time for the trip out to Omaha at the end of the month.
One Wednesday evening John got home before Rebecca and picked up the mail downstairs. Out fell a postcard of Monticello; it was addressed to him but had no other salutation. On it was written, “Cynicism is not useless — only we’re conditioned to be cynical about the wrong things. Before it’s too late let us try to reconnect with the better angels of our nature.” It was unsigned. John felt his heart quicken as he stared at the Virginia postmark. He stuck the postcard under a magnet on the refrigerator door; but after looking at it for a few seconds he took it down again and hid it beneath some magazines on his bedside table, where Rebecca wouldn’t see it.
He didn’t know why he should be afraid to tell anyone what he was thinking. Still, he couldn’t figure out an angle from which to approach the subject with his girlfriend. Then one night, as they were riding the subway home from the multiplex across from Lincoln Center, she brought up, for the first time in at least a year, the subject of marriage.
“I just would feel better,” she said, holding his arm, “if there were some kind of plan about it, if we knew what we were doing.”
“Feel better?” he said. “You mean you don’t feel good right now?”
“I feel okay,” she said. “Just, I don’t know, a little sad. From time to time, not always. And not because I feel unfulfilled because I don’t have a baby or any crap like that. It’s just … time is passing, you know? Time is passing. And I don’t even notice it. We’re so busy that it’s very easy not to notice.”
They were in the front car, and as they rocketed through the darkness John could see each station, grimy white, floodlit, bracketed by thin pillars, turning into view a few seconds before the brakes’ drawn-out screech.
“I think it’s time,” John said. Rebecca kept staring straight ahead. “I’ve been feeling sad, too, since you mention it. Sad about being stuck, you know? That’s the sense I have, when I get a chance to look up from what I’m doing. Being stuck.”
“Well, we shouldn’t get married just to cheer ourselves up.”
“Of course not. But I think our moods are trying to tell us something. It’s time for … it’s time for Act Two. Do you know what I mean?”
The train stopped at Chambers Street, and when it did she kissed him lightly.
“But when I think about it,” he said, trying to keep his tone light, “I think about other things, too. Other changes I want to make.”
“Like?”
“Like I don’t think I want to raise a family in New York. I know that’s one of the reasons we moved out to Brooklyn, but I’ve just changed my mind about it, what can I say. It doesn’t seem sufficiently different, to me. Brooklyn, I mean.”
“Well then where would you want to go?” she said softly. “Out to the suburbs, or what?”
“Oh there’s no way—”
“Thank God, me neither.”
“I was thinking of something more radically different. I mean it has to be a city, or near a city, because otherwise you and I couldn’t keep doing what we do. Not a lot of ad agencies in small towns. But I wouldn’t mind, to be totally honest with you, moving back down South.”
His heart had begun racing.
“Back down South?” Rebecca said. “You mean like nearer your family?”
“That’s not what I was thinking of, though there wouldn’t be anything wrong with being a little closer to them than we are now, particularly if we have children.”
“What are you thinking of, then?”
Suddenly they were there, and John hesitated, trying not to lose his nerve. “Actually,” he said, “and I know you’ll laugh, or have some reaction, but I’ve been thinking pretty seriously about—”
“Oh God,” Rebecca said. “Not Virginia? Not the Mal Osbourne thing?”
His fear of crossing that threshold went beyond the fear of disagreement. Rebecca had a strong temper and a sharp style and thus won most of their arguments, arguments which John had little stomach for anyway: but the timidity he felt in those few seconds was more like a fear of sincerity, a reluctance to show himself even to the person closest to him in the world, and it infuriated him. “Yes,” he said, feeling himself blush, “all right, god damn it, I’m thinking about the Mal Osbourne thing. I want to do it. I don’t know why I should be embarrassed about what I want.”
He had raised his voice to the point where others on the subway car turned to look, which was extraordinary for him; and Rebecca, seeing that he was upset, responded more gently. “You’d really just pick up and move to Virginia, just like that? Sell the apartment? I didn’t realize you were that unhappy here.”