Kay had a maternal uncle whose own children were grown and lived far away; after a few beers, it always seemed, he couldn’t leave the cousins alone. When they were having a good time at something, Great-Uncle Phil would come over and muss their hair and ask them if they were having a good time; when they were bored, his idea of entertainment was to find ways to extract from them declarations of their affection for him. Now, from his seat at the end of the kitchen table, he called the six restless cousins over to his side.
“You kids have been so good today,” he said, “that your Uncle Phil wanted to give you something. Something for the holidays. I said to myself, I’m gonna give each of those good kids a dollar.”
The children, Molly included, shouted in celebration. From the sink across the kitchen, their grandmother frowned at Phil, but said nothing.
“But you know what?” Uncle Phil said, pulling a sad face. “I just looked in my wallet, and I found out I only have one dollar in there. I just don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to decide who should get it. I guess I’m just going to have to give it to the boy or girl that wants it the most.”
They whined and jumped in place and tried to make their voices heard over one another.
“Whoa, whoa,” Uncle Phil said, amused. “I’ll tell you something. I just hope nobody wants it so bad they’re going to cry if they don’t get it. I think if something like that happened, if somebody busted out crying, well, I couldn’t stand that, I’d just have to give it to them.”
The kids set about moaning and making pouty faces, saying “Boo hoo,” and other sorts of received imitations of sadness.
Uncle Phil glanced all around the kitchen, smiling slyly, trying to catch the eye of one or two of the other adults so he could wink at them; but they were all looking away from him. He turned back to the cousins and shook his head skeptically. “I meant real crying. Real tears. Cheaters never prosper, you know. I don’t believe you really are sad.”
That silenced them for a moment: they wanted, as much as they wanted the dollar, to solve the puzzle of Uncle Phil. Molly stood a few inches from Uncle Phil’s knee; she looked at his big head, at the pale tones of old age. Her face was still and unrevealing. Half a minute went by. Uncle Phil’s eyebrows were too long; his upper teeth, which were false, were beautifully proportioned inside his loose mouth. Sadness is easy, Molly thought, though she wasn’t sad at all just then. Uncle Phil shifted in his chair; “I think we’ve got something here,” he said excitedly. Everyone turned to look at Molly; in another few moments, she blinked, and two thin tears rolled down her face.
THE HARDEST THING was concentration. John Wheelwright got up from his desk and opened the door to his office a few inches so as not to miss the woman with the coffee trolley when she circled by. The oversized sketchpad on his desk had a ring on it from the coffee he hadn’t finished yet. John’s copywriting partner, Roman, was off this morning on some personal time involving his daughter’s interview for nursery school. John had even come in half an hour early to take advantage of the uncommon solitude, imagining how he might surprise Roman after lunch with a brainstorm; but the solitude was doing nothing for him. He pushed up the sleeves of his shirt, with the felt-tip pen still between his fingers, leaving another hatch on the blue cotton.
Of course it was only a rough storyboard, whose eventual realization, even if it managed to win the signoff of the AD, would become some director’s problem; but a rumor had begun circulating that the Doucette casual wear account was going to be put into review, so John was well aware that he and Roman and the other teams were being watched more anxiously than was usual there. And John took his work seriously in any case. Their first proposal, which Canning had rejected on Friday, was one continuous thirty-second shot of an urban intersection, say Eighth Street and Broadway: it would be shot in black and white with a deep-blue wash, except for those items of Doucette clothing — jeans, T-shirts, caps, shorts — worn by a few strategically placed pedestrians, which would show up in full color. John wanted to mount the camera on a waist-high pole in the middle of the intersection and spin it horizontally 360 degrees, as in a shot he remembered from Brian De Palma’s Blowout. The soundtrack was a talky Altmanesque burble: Roman didn’t even want to write it, he said, just edit it down from whatever ambient conversations the filming happened to pick up. Canning had liked the thought of it but said that it skewed too young, too hip for the room as he liked to say, too funky an image for an essentially conservative line like Doucette, whose whole appeal lay in the idea that it stood outside the exigencies of fashion. Roman offered to change the soundtrack from dialogue to music — something old and wryly cheesy, like Petula Clark, or something from Saturday Night Fever. Canning still wouldn’t go for it: more precisely, he thought the client would never go for it, and if that was the case, then there was no point in any further compromising to make it real. Their only course was to come in Monday and start all over again.
But where was the starting point? John closed his eyes. The office they shared was personalized with three years’ worth of imaginative detritus, little totems of an ironic sensibility: a framed photo of David Ogilvy with Roman’s forged inscription; the old Farrah Fawcett poster from the 70s; a Frisbee with the Backstreet Boys’ faces on it; an original Looney Tunes cel; several of those miniature football-player dolls whose heads bobbed when you tapped them; a typeface directory; Pee Wee Herman’s mug shot, clipped from the New York Post; a vintage deck of pornographic playing cards; a Lyndon LaRouche for President bumper sticker; a huge Atlantic City beer stein filled with Magic Markers; a mounted ad for Chesterfield cigarettes featuring John Cheever; a three-foot-high, inflatable Monica Lewinsky doll, which Roman had ordered off the Internet; a dog-eared copy of American Psycho; a stuffed iguana; six packages of margarita mix and a blender. All around the windowsills and on top of some of the piles of magazines were samples of the Doucette clothes themselves, khaki pants, corduroys, loose V-neck sweaters. He could put the most gorgeous models money could buy in the clothes, but that had been seen. He could just show the clothes themselves, uncompromised by bodies; that had been seen. He could take the product off the screen and out of the ad entirely and replace it with something else; that was at least as old as Infiniti. In the comfortable office, with no partner to remind him of things like deadlines, John stared some more at his blank pad, wiggling his pen between his fingers and thinking about where newness lies.
There was a soft knock on his open door, and before he could even lift his head Vanessa had slipped in; without a word she sat down sideways in the low blue velour armchair perpendicular to John’s desk, her legs over the arm of the chair that faced the wall, so that she almost had her back to him. John looked at her curiously but politely; she turned her head and smiled at him but said nothing, swinging her feet back and forth. She took a sweater off the coffee table and held it up against her shoulders. John pushed his long hair back behind his ear and leaned over the sketch pad again.
Vanessa Siegal worked at Canning Leigh & Osbourne as an account planner; she was wearing the sort of skirt only she would or could wear in the office, a short red tight synthetic garment that never seemed to wrinkle or to move in disharmony of any kind with the way she moved. She was tall and angular and her hair was marcelled into a kind of fashionable helmet which followed the curve of her ear, and which never moved either. Her austere stylishness and its translation into other realms was a subject of great and admiring speculation among a particular type of man. John was not of this type; if anything, he was a little afraid of her. It was distracting to have her come into his office unannounced like this even though the two of them were certainly on friendly terms. She sighed loudly. John pretended to go back to work, not out of aloofness or to express annoyance but instead out of the exaggerated deference to women that still characterized him, that was his most exotic feature to Northern women like Vanessa. She looked furtively at him, which he did not miss, and bit at one of her nails.