“Who knows? He could have it himself, I guess. It’s not impossible.”
“Does he know this Elaine Sizemore?”
“Not from Eve. He just said he’d been following her career and admired her work. I guess he’s just headhunting. No one here got a letter?”
Everyone shrugged. John could feel his face coloring; he considered leaving the room but thought that might be even more conspicuous. And when Roman looked directly at him, he shook his head no.
“Man,” Dale said. “I can’t believe I didn’t hear from him.” Those who had witnessed Dale’s humiliation at the Doucette pitch smiled appreciatively at the joke.
“Why Charlottesville?” Roman said. “Does he think he’s Jefferson or something?”
“You laugh,” Andrea said, even though Roman hadn’t laughed, “but wait’ll you hear this. The new agency has a mission. He wants to take the irony out of advertising. He wants it accepted as an art form. He wants to make it a force for social good.”
Again they sat dumbstruck for a few seconds, unsure whether to laugh — not because it wasn’t funny, but because the humor seemed at the expense of their former boss’s derangement.
“Kinky,” Roman said finally.
“So,” John said, and they all turned to look at him. “This Elaine Sizemore, then — she’s not taking him up on his offer?”
Andrea snorted. “She’s a god damn star at Needham, and she’s going to leave that and move to Virginia to work at the Osbourne Institute for the Painfully Sincere? What would you do?”
“You talked to her?”
“No, to another guy there. But if she was considering leaving I think she would have kept this letter to herself, don’t you?”
Within a week a copy of Osbourne’s “Dear Colleague” letter — not from Elaine Sizemore, but from some other unnamed source — had flown via fax to every agency in Manhattan. A cruelly annotated copy went up on the Canning & Leigh bulletin board for a day until Canning himself tore it down. The following week AdAge ran a small article about Osbourne’s quixotic reemergence, full of diplomatic quotes from other agency heads; Osbourne himself, the article said, could not be reached for comment.
In bed one night, in the minute after the lights were turned out and the shadows of the window frames angled across the ceiling, Rebecca said suddenly, “You do understand that if I left my job we’d be turning our backs, potentially, on a lot of money. I mean a lot.”
“I know that,” he said, as if they were in the middle of a conversation.
“There are things we could have, things we could do, that we wouldn’t be able to do. Because we couldn’t — at least I couldn’t — ever get back to the point I’m at right now, in terms of career prospects. We’d have to do without those things. We can’t have it all, is what I’m saying. We can’t pick up and move away from this life and still enjoy everything that happens to be good about this life.”
His heart leapt to hear Rebecca even discussing it, to know that she had gone to the length of imagining what she might sacrifice in order to stay with him; but he felt instinctively that the wise course here was emotional caution. He turned on his side and laid his forehead in the space between her shoulder blades. “I don’t care about money so much,” he said gently. “I care about doing work that satisfies us both, in a place we’re actually pleased about living in.”
She didn’t say anything more, and in a few minutes her legs jerked in the way they always did in the moment just before sleep.
That weekend, another postcard — this one picked out of the mailbox by Rebecca: “Lawyering and advertising: impartial advocacy. Of course, even in defending someone you hate, you’re really defending something you love. Or that’s the idea.”
Rebecca waved it at him. “Postmarked Charlottesville,” she said. “Have there been other cards like this?”
John nodded, his eyes stubbornly on the TV.
“Have you been in touch with him?”
“No. There’s literally no way to get in touch with him. Unsigned cards just keep showing up in the mail.”
Rebecca stood still for a moment, as if expecting him to say more. Then she laid the postcard on the arm of John’s chair and left the room.
As the trip to Omaha approached, Roman kept churning out spots for the Beef Council with a spiteful prolificacy. Every morning he smiled coldly as he transcribed on John’s sketch pad the ideas he’d had the night before: What are the chances you’ll ever visit the rain forest, anyway? Name one tough vegetarian. Cows are too stupid to live. You only go around once; might as well go around fat and glossy. Tofu is for girls. It’s the law of nature. With a week to go, they had nearly twenty ads dummied up when they only needed six; oddly, though, in spite of this, and in spite of the fact that some of his copy was clearly over the top, Roman angrily refused to edit any of it, and when John tried to get him to narrow it down to ten Roman accused him of censorship.
John came back from lunch one day to find “Who wants soft, squishy arteries?” written on his pad. He scowled.
“Do it,” Roman said.
“Come on. We have more than we need.”
“Do it.”
“It won’t work. It can’t work. Can you really picture yourself flipping through Newsweek and coming across this?”
“It’ll work, god damn it. All of it will work. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
They stayed late at the office, getting ready for the pitch; Rebecca was working long hours those days too. John more or less took it for granted that no one would be home in the evening when he returned. The apartment looked half-decorated and impersonal. John didn’t cook at all; sometimes he would order Chinese food and save some for her, but more often he would just have his dinner delivered at work. With a sense of romantic diligence they hadn’t felt since the early days of their relationship, they met each other for long lunches at elegant restaurants, L’Espinasse, Arcadia, and they never paid for a thing.
The answering machine blinked with unanswered calls, from their parents, from alumni associations, from investment firms, and then finally, one evening before John, untucking his shirt as he walked in the door, had even turned the lights on, from Osbourne.
He was in Manhattan; he was free for lunch the next day. He wondered if John had had time to consider his proposal. He was sorry to bother him at home like this, but considered that a call at the office might have caused some awkwardness.
John was already asleep by the time Rebecca came home; but struggling mightily he raised himself on his elbows and said, “Mal Osbourne called today. I said I’d meet him for lunch tomorrow.”
Rebecca, her back to him, made no hitch in her motions to betray that she had heard. In the urban half-darkness to which his eyes were accustomed, he watched while she stood in front of her closet and slowly undressed. She looked like someone else, like a stranger with whom he wanted to have an affair.
He told Roman the next morning that he had a dentist’s appointment.
Osbourne sat at a banquette at La Réserve, staring into space, his back to the mirrored wall. He looked rather put out — nostrils flared, fingers tapping — just as if John were late for this appointment, when in fact he was five minutes early. When he sat down, Osbourne brightened somewhat, but only for a few seconds. He wore an expensive-looking gray suit, and his hair was now cut very short, in the fashionable Caesar style.
The waiter poured John a glass of mineral water from the bottle that sat on the table. Osbourne rested his chin on his hands, stared at John in the fully intent yet charmless way a surgeon might have stared at him, and said nothing. John, who was nervous enough anyway — he could never seem to get the wardrobe right with Osbourne; he wore a simple black sweater today, with no jacket or tie — became flustered and forgot the whole script by which he had intended to steer this meeting.