“Do we still have yesterday’s Times?” Roman asked his wife. They were back to back in the small kitchen, preparing the two different breakfasts for the kids.
“I took the papers down to the basement last night,” Jo said. “Sorry, I thought you were done with them. Why, was there something in there—”
“That’s okay. I didn’t … somebody emailed me about it just this morning. I’ll go look for them.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
After breakfast Roman took the baby on his shoulder and went down to the garbage room in the basement. There were roaches everywhere. This is no place to raise children, Roman thought. He felt Isaac’s tiny chin lift up off his shoulder blade and could picture his son’s goggle-eyed expression as he strained to look around. One new place was as amazing as another to him.
Roman looked through the pile of recyclable paper, vaguely disgusting even though it was only a day old, until he found the New York Times with the little “Joanna Gagliardi” sticker on it. He wiped it on his leg and went back upstairs.
They agreed to split the day — he’d go into the office in the morning while Jo, who had a fundraising job at Columbia University, stayed home with Isaac; Roman would then pick Evgenia up from school at one o’clock (it was Friday, a half day for her, just to make things even less convenient) and take over at home for the rest of the afternoon so Jo could get up to Columbia and at least maybe return a few phone calls. Tag-team, she called it, when these situations came up. Which was quite often: late nights in the office, weekends, school vacations, illnesses. Their marriage had evolved, over the years, into a series of these trivial, unacrimonious negotiations over time, like labor disputes really, between two old, old adversaries who knew each other so well that they weren’t really adversaries anymore.
He walked Evvie to school; she kept her hands stuffed in her pockets and her chin tilted up slightly, just like her father. She walked without seeming to feel the burden of the enormous yellow backpack she carried. It was as if she expected to be gone for days, sleeping outdoors. All her secrets were in there. The two of them didn’t exchange a word. They hadn’t argued, and Roman knew she loved him possessively; she was just getting to that age, that’s all, she had her own thoughts and didn’t need to have those thoughts validated for her by sharing them with an adult. That age came shockingly early, like everything else, for kids who grew up in New York. For just a moment the scene before his eyes was displaced by a premonition of the handful she would surely be when she was fifteen.
“Goodbye, sweetheart,” he said to her outside the classroom. She allowed him to help her get free of the backpack, in order to take her jacket off.
“Is Maria going to die?”
So that’s what all the silence had been about. “No, honey. Of course not. Maria is as healthy as a horse, believe me. She just has a cold, like everybody gets. I’m sure she’ll be back and feeling fine Monday morning. You can do a get-well picture for her if you want.”
On the subway he read yesterday’s Times article. There wasn’t too much in it he hadn’t learned yesterday, around the office, on the phone, on the Internet, in the Post. John Wheelwright, his old partner, had invited a group of corporate clients and art-world poobahs to watch one of his employees commit ritual suicide under the rubric of performance art. In taking himself out, this Milo character had taken out the whole storied antebellum building as well, though there was some question — some fierce debate, actually, among pundits, lawyers, and art critics — as to whether or not this had been a planned part of Milo’s “piece” or an unfortunate and unintended consequence of it. Mal Osbourne had been conveniently out of the country when it happened. At least one of his newly disenfranchised employees was trying to connect all this to Osbourne’s girlfriend, some younger woman he apparently kept stashed mysteriously in the attic like Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, and though this seemed even to Roman like a bit of a stretch, the tabloid press was howling in search of her — unsuccessfully thus far, for she seemed, on the very day of the tragedy no less, to have disappeared.
His old partner. Roman wasn’t at Canning & Leigh anymore either. Those places tended to grow fat on their own success, fat and conservative, and before long they were churning out junk every bit as revolting as the reactionary giants of Madison Avenue. Success brought money, and money always brought a specific kind of fear — the fear of having to do without the money again, Roman supposed — which manifested itself in a creeping dependence on focus groups, management reviews, probationary management reviews. When the atmosphere turned dark like that you just had to get out of there.
So Roman was now at a new shop on Mercer Street, called the Kollective. Ten people, no hierarchies, no office doors, which was the only aspect of the place, actually, that Roman found a little bit precious. The ten came from agencies all over the city, sensitive, disgruntled, highly creative artists who chafed against any sort of corporate restraint. People who rebelled even when they knew it wasn’t good for them, much like Roman himself.
The emergence of these little splinter groups, this rising and thinning and dividing like the branches of a tree, happened all the time in advertising. It was like the Communist Party: all these factional disputes, questioning each other’s ideological commitment, cadres spontaneously forming to protect the doctrine from impurities and compromise. It would probably happen at the Kollective someday, too, Roman knew. That was all right. The interesting question was when, or if, Roman himself would wind up becoming the conservative one, sick of moving on, proud enough of something he’d built to want to stay and wither into irrelevance along with it.
In the office they had all heard the story of the burning of Palladio; they’d spent much of the previous night emailing one another with rumors and jokes about it. No one was in the mood to work. They knew Roman used to work at Canning & Leigh back when Mal Osbourne had his name on the door there. But they weren’t aware that Roman and John Wheelwright had been partners. It didn’t take long to emerge. Roman certainly wasn’t going to lie about it.
“No!” yelled Douglas, a copywriter with a ponytail and a terrible beard; like many of them he was so young he made Roman feel like he was turning into his own father. “No! Partners? Get the fuck out of here!” They all sat forward in their sofas and club chairs. The place was decorated like a million-dollar fraternity.
“You and the guy were partners?” said Kathleen, the receptionist, ignoring a ringing phone. “For how long?”
“Two years,” Roman said softly. “We worked on Doucette, on Fiat, the National Beef Council, whole bunch of things. We did some good work.”
“So what was he like?”
Roman said nothing right away.
“Did he show sadistic tendencies?” Douglas asked helpfully. “Killing small animals in the office, anything like that? Did he ever chase Canning through the office with a cigarette lighter?”
“We were friends,” Roman said. The others were cowed momentarily by the evident feeling in this remark; and, feeling exposed, not wanting to appear too sentimental in front of his colleagues, Roman moved along. “I think he has to be telling the truth about it, that he didn’t have any idea, that no one did. I don’t know. He had this great girlfriend, a lawyer, who he dumped to go take this job with Osbourne. He was a very nice, very polite guy. From North Carolina. Hated to argue. Hated it. I almost always got my way with him because of it. Very kind, very meek almost, but meek in a good way. Naive. I never understood how naive until he was taken in by this whole Mal Osbourne thing.”