‘It’s like a dirty joke!’ he objects.
‘You’ve got a point, but I’ve printed it in block caps. Imagine it in a soft italic type. Or maybe small, in parentheses. Like a secret.’ I add the parens, although they don’t work with the caps. But they will. It’s a thing I just know, because I can see it. ‘Now, playing off that, think of a photo showing a big burly guy. In low-slung jeans that show the top of his underwear. And a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, let’s say. See him with some grease and dirt on his guns.’
‘Guns?’
‘His biceps. And he’s standing beside a muscle car with the hood up. Now, is it still a dirty joke?’
‘I … I don’t know.’
‘Neither do I, not for sure, but my gut tells me it’ll pull the plow. But not yet. The cutline still doesn’t work, you’re right about that, and it’s got to, because it’ll be the basis of the TV and ’Net ads. So play with it. Make it work. Just remember the key word …’
Suddenly, just like that, I know where the rest of that damn dream came from. It snaps into place.
‘Brad?’
‘The key word is hard,’ I say. ‘Because a man … when something’s not working – his prick, his plan, his life – he takes it hard. He doesn’t want to give up. He remembers how it was, and he wants it that way again.’
Yes, I think. He sure does.
Billy smirks. ‘I wouldn’t know.’
I manage a smile. It feels godawful heavy, as if there are weights hanging from the corners of my mouth. All at once it’s like being in the bad dream again. Because there’s something close to me I don’t want to look at. Only this isn’t a lucid dream I can back out of.
This is lucid reality.
After Billy leaves, I go to the can. It’s ten o’clock, most of the guys in the shop have offloaded their morning coffee and are taking on more in our little break room, so I have the shithouse to myself. I drop my pants so if someone wanders in and happens to look under the door he won’t think I’m weird, but the only business I’ve come in here to do is thinking.
Four years after coming on board at Andrews-Slattery, the Fasprin Pain Reliever account landed on my desk. I’ve had some special ones over the years, some breakouts, and that was the first. It happened fast. I opened the sample box, took out the bottle, and the basis of the campaign – what admen sometimes call the heartwood – came to me in an instant. I ditzed around a little, of course – you don’t want to make it look too easy – then did some comps. Ellen helped. This was just after we found out she couldn’t have babies. It was something to do with a drug she’d been given when she had rheumatic fever as a kid. She was pretty depressed. Helping with the Fasprin comps took her mind off it, and she really threw herself into the thing.
Al Peterson was still running things back then, and he was the one I took the comps to. I remember sitting in front of his desk in the sweat seat with my heart in my mouth as he shuffled slowly through the comps we’d worked up. When he finally put them down and raised his shaggy old head to look at me, the pause seemed to go on for at least an hour. Then he said, ‘These are good, Bradley. More than good, terrific. We’ll meet with the client tomorrow afternoon. You do the prez.’
I did the prez, and when the Dugan Drug VP saw the picture of the young working woman with the bottle of Fasprin poking out of her rolled-up sleeve, he flipped for it. The campaign brought Fasprin right up there with the big boys – Bayer, Anacin, Bufferin – and by the end of the year we were handling the whole Dugan account. Billing? Seven figures. Not a low seven, either.
I used the bonus to take Ellen to Nassau for ten days. We left from Kennedy, on a morning that was pelting down rain, and I still remember how she laughed and cried ‘Kiss me, beautiful’ when the plane broke through the clouds and the cabin filled with sunlight. I did kiss her, and the couple on the other side of the aisle – we were flying in business class – applauded.
That was the best. The worst came half an hour later, when I turned to her and for a moment thought she was dead. It was the way she was sleeping, with her head cocked over on her shoulder and her mouth open and her hair kind of sticking to the window. She was young, we both were, but the idea of sudden death had a hideous possibility in Ellen’s case.
‘They used to call your condition “barren,” Mrs Franklin,’ the doctor said when he gave us the bad news, ‘but in this case, your inability to conceive could be a blessing. Pregnancy puts a strain on the heart, and thanks to a disease that was badly treated when you were a child, yours isn’t strong. If you did happen to conceive, you’d be in bed for the last four months of the pregnancy, and even then the outcome would be dicey.’
She wasn’t pregnant when we left on that trip, and her last checkup had been fine, but the climb up to cruising altitude had been plenty rough … and she didn’t look like she was breathing.
Then she opened her eyes. I settled back into my aisle seat, letting out a long and shaky breath.
She looked at me, puzzled. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. The way you were sleeping, that’s all.’
She wiped at her chin. ‘Oh God, did I drool?’
‘No.’ I laughed. ‘But for a minute there you looked … well, dead.’
She laughed too. ‘And if I was, you’d ship the body back to New York, I suppose, and take up with some Bahama Mama.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d take you, anyway.’
‘What?’
‘Because I wouldn’t accept it. No way would I.’
‘You’d have to after a few days. I’d get all smelly.’
She was smiling. She thought it was still a game, because she hadn’t really understood what the doctor was telling her that day. She hadn’t – as the saying goes – taken it all the way to the heartwood. And she didn’t know how she’d looked, with the sun shining on her winter-pale cheeks and smudged eyelids and slack mouth. But I’d seen, and I’d taken it to the heartwood. She was my heart, and I guard what’s there. Nobody takes it away from me.
‘You wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘I’d keep you alive.’
‘Really? How? Necromancy?’
‘By refusing to give up. And by using an adman’s most valuable asset.’
‘Which is what, Mr Fasprin?’
‘Imagination. Now can we talk about something more pleasant?’
The call I’ve been expecting comes around three thirty. It’s not Carlo. It’s Berk Ostrow, the building super. He wants to know what time I’m going to be home, because the rat everybody’s been smelling isn’t in 5-C, it’s in our apartment. Ostrow says the exterminators have to leave by four to get to another job, but that isn’t the important thing. What’s important is fixing what’s wrong in there and by the way, Carlo says no one’s seen your wife in over a week. Just you and the dog.
I explain about my deficient sense of smell, and Ellen’s bronchitis. In her current condition, I say, she wouldn’t know the drapes were on fire until the smoke detector went off. I’m sure Lady smells it, I tell him, but to a dog, the stench of a decaying rat probably smells like Chanel No. 5.
‘I get all that, Mr Franklin, but I still need to get in there to see what’s what. And the exterminators will have to be called back. I think you’re probably going to be on the hook for their bill, which is apt to be quite high. I could let myself in with the passkey, but I’d really be more comfortable if you were—’
‘Yes, I’d be more comfortable, too. Not to mention my wife.’
‘I tried calling her, but she didn’t answer the phone.’ I can hear suspicion in his voice now. I’ve explained everything, advertising men are good at that, but the convincing effect only lasts for sixty seconds or so. That’s why you keep hearing the same ads and slogans over and over again: A little dab’ll do ya. Save time, save money. Pepsi, for those who think young. I’m lovin’ it. Breakfast of champions. It’s like driving a nail. Driving it right into the heartwood.