“How are things around there?” John said. “Pretty quiet?”
“Still pretty quiet, yes,” Mal said.
“Well, here’s the thing. I guess I didn’t really understand, until I got away, that this whole thing has taken kind of an emotional toll on me, and then with my mother’s passing away … If it’s okay with you, Mal, I need some more time.”
“That’s fine,” Mal said evenly.
“I mean, if there were anything pressing then of course I would come back. But, you know, in all fairness, I never once took any vacation time while—”
“It’s fine, John, really. I don’t need you for anything right now.”
John was brought up short. He couldn’t tell, over the phone, if there was any sort of bitterness in Mal’s tone or if he simply meant what he said.
“I have Colette here to answer the phone,” Mal went on. “And the rest of it, right now, is all pretty much inside my head anyway.”
John felt an unfamiliar surge of pity. He needed to say something just to shake it off.
“No word from her, then?” he said.
“No. So what will you do down there? Keep an eye on your stepfather?”
John didn’t feel like going into it. “I don’t know. Drive around a little bit, maybe. I haven’t been down this way, except to see my mother, in so long. So, maybe just a little motoring excursion through the South.”
There was a pause, before Mal said, “You’re not going off to look for her, are you?”
“No,” John said, startled, feeling his color rise. “No, nothing like that.”
* MESSAGE *
“We had already developed a brand plan that encompasses who I am,” Mr Woods said. “American Express isn’t going to branch off into areas where we’re in conflict. So I’m going to be promoted in the way I hope to be perceived.”
Is this a great time, or what?
Ever tuck your baby in from the airport? You will.
Ever send a fax from the beach? You will.
Advertising is not a new thing. We think of the stained-glass windows in Chartres Cathedral as art, but when they were made they were art only incidentally. They were put there to sell theology — they were billboards — and if the people who built the cathedral had had neon they would have gone crazy for it. There’s nothing new about any of this. The mosaics in Byzantine churches and early Christian churches are billboards selling Christianity. Tiepolo’s ceilings are Counter-Reformation propaganda. Selling is an old
CHANGE EVERYTHING
*
ALL THE WORK was in Los Angeles. But Dex knew — and his friends in the business loved to tease him by confirming — that though he might be capable of surviving a short visit to Los Angeles, there was no way he could ever live there. He was too quick, too belligerent, too much in need of stimulation. It was a moot point, since at this stage no one was offering him work anyway; but it got him thinking, in his many idle hours, that he really was a stranger in his own country, a kind of internal exile, because as far as he was concerned there was nowhere off the island of Manhattan that was adaptable for living. He was stuck there.
And so, while another man in his position — faced with the humiliation of having his live-in girlfriend stolen from him by the one man in all the world he most despises — might have considered leaving town and starting over, for Dex the only truly viable option was to lie about it. He told his friends who asked where Molly was that she had developed a drug habit and he had thrown her out. He felt no guilt about selling her out in this way — look what she’d done to him, after all — and, in terms of being exposed, was comforted by the thought that she had never really kept up a close friendship with anybody in the business. She knew them all through him.
When they had first returned to New York together, after Osbourne asked him to leave, Dex was more energized than ever, full of ideas for making the Palladio documentary even without Mal’s cooperation. But no one would finance any of those ideas. They all wanted to see the inside of the place on film; failing that, there had to be something damning, something to subvert the iconic status of Osbourne himself, and in that area Dex had nothing more concrete than his own deeply felt sense of injustice that the man was so popular in the first place. Dex was returning, in fact, from yet another of these disastrous meetings, trying to kowtow before unimaginative money men, on the very evening he came back to his apartment and found none other than Mal Osbourne standing right there in his living room, condescending and triumphant, with his arm around Molly.
Now Dex’s savings were just about gone. He tried to get back to work. Out of desperation he even accepted an offer to work as an AD on the third sequel to a teen sex comedy; he tortured himself for weeks over the shame of it, and then in the end the studio head was fired and the whole project went into turnaround before even one day of photography. Then one morning he picked up the paper and read about the burning of Palladio. His very first thought — before he got to the paragraphs that mentioned Osbourne’s missing girlfriend — was what a legendary ending this would have made to the film he had imagined shooting there. But his own less hypothetical connection to the events in Virginia had been made clear enough to him by the end of that day, by which time he had unplugged his phone rather than field another call from a reporter wanting to know about Molly, how it felt to have her stolen from him by a famous person, what it was about her that seemed to drive men to such extremes, if he had any idea where she might have gone.
His friends didn’t avoid him after that — many of them had half suspected him of lying about his breakup with Molly all along — but he avoided them, hypersensitive to any real or imagined condescension in their voices now that they knew he had been cuckolded and made a fool of. There was no sense in pretending he wasn’t humiliated, since he had taken the trouble to lie about it so elaborately in the first place. Fuck them anyway, went Dex’s reasoning.
Broke, he finally agreed to accept a gig his exasperated agent had secured for him, directing a commercial for deodorant, on the condition that he be allowed to do it under an assumed name. It only took a day, and by the middle of that day his distaste had been at least temporarily supplanted by the pleasure he took in getting a shot just right or in having a crew to order around. The agency that hired him was very pleased with the result and eager to work with him again. Dex could have as much work of that sort as he wants, in fact, but he only takes enough of it to get by; he doesn’t want it to define him. In between jobs he’s back to sitting in his kitchen and reading through the spec screenplays his agent’s office forwards to him, hundreds of them, looking for the one that doesn’t embarrass him, the one that comes anonymously from out of nowhere to bear out and ratify for him his own vision of the world.
* MESSAGE *
It will be a free literature, because it will serve not some satiated heroine, not the bored “upper ten thousand” suffering from obesity, but millions and tens of millions of workers, those people who make up the best part of our country, its strength and future.
YOUR COMFORT IS MY SILENCE.
YOU KILL TIME.
I am deeply troubled by the suggestion that the university has abandoned its historic commitment to freedom of expression in the process of developing the contractual agreement.
I SHOP THEREFORE I AM.
We Democrats need to speak frankly and often about personal responsibility, knowing right from wrong and being prepared to punish wrong, loving our country and the American ideal, hard work, and caring about those who need help.
Art or Advertising? Either Way, Seoul is Mesmerized