Authors: Nancy Mauro
Duncan stares at the desk lamp and thinks, okay, she
was
raised by Catholics. But they’re the colonizing kind, the crusading sort. The type to pay attention to the details of aesthetics. And her mother was so elegant, bashing those tennis balls around the clay court last month. All that keen upper-arm strength.
He scribbles some clotted ink from the tip of a pen. This is no time to be brained by pigs and whiskers. He’s meant to stay focused on damage control this morning. His latest assignment is to write his way out of someone else’s flub. His boss at the agency, Hawke, was axed last month, leaving Duncan the senior man in a creative department that’s keeling starboard.
The reason for Hawke getting the chop was officially unclear, but widely regarded as an accumulation of strikes against him: a salary that had reached its zenith, a squabble with the suits, the internal realignment
of that classic advertising iron triangle, CEO, CCO, CFO.
Adweek
gave it a square inch of editorial space, the agency citing “creative differences.” Hawke, with uncharacteristic prudence, declined to comment.
But the browbeaten knew the truth. A sudden death was never entirely inscrutable but usually deserved. Of course the probationers quaked—
Am I next?
—more mantra than question. Still, the day after lynching day, the creative department rang with fibrous excitement disguised as commiseration. Art directors and copywriters emerged from their Quonset huts to sniff the wreckage, to rub flanks against cubicle partitions, scratch at heads that were flattened from years of flagellation with rolled newspapers. If the terror of dismissal was pure, then the relief of spotting someone else’s boxed articles in the hallway was exhilarating.
These were his people. And when among them, Duncan refused to lampoon.
Satire is dead
, he told Lily once while she sat in his office and compared the scattered industry of his coworkers to the roaches of the Apocalypse.
You mean metaphor is dead
, she’d said.
Sure, sometimes he spots it; the twigging antennae, the rush to dark corners when the Brass drops by to check the progress of the latest Hamburger Helper commercial. He sees it in the resilient shell of an art director who must, without committing a felonious act with a letter opener, explain to the client why the Hamburger Helper Hand cannot bend down its gloved fingers to create a hang-loose sign.
It’s logistically impossible to do that with only four fingers.
Sure, Duncan understands the capacity for parody, but he resists sharing this with Lily. Instead he tells her, in a voice that’s not entirely free of self-pitying inflection,
You try spending your days creating commercials that most people want to avoid.
The thing with Hawke was a grand gesture. Forget the firing of the proletariat, the recession-time dismissal of coffee-fetchers, the pink slipping of senior creatives whose work hadn’t placed high enough at Cannes to justify their bar tab at the beachfront award ceremony. This thing with
Hawke was big. It was the fragging of the chief himself, the executive creative director. And it was a reminder from above that advertising was still commerce before it was art.
To his Downstairs people, those in the department, those still on payroll now that the desire for blood had been slaked, the truth was un-contestable. The last project Hawke had his hands on went yellow-belly up. The campaign idea for the generic-looking denim jean company, Stand and Be Counted, was a trap from the beginning. The product had no cult appeal. The jeans were designed without back pocket embroidery, distressed indigo wash, or burnished copper riveting. They were made cheaply in Filipino sweatshops and the modest price tag ensured no starlet (thong panties splaying ass cheeks and looping high over a low-rider waistband) was ever photographed wearing them. They were flare-legged denim with an interesting name but little else to recommend them.
In short, they were perfect. A hungry sculptor’s chunk of Beijing White. It was a pip in Duncan’s mouth, something rolled between the tongue and teeth. The right solution would be like giving the Man in the Hathaway Shirt his eye patch. Hawke had taken the project for himself, waved back offers of help. Duncan understood; to make something where there was nothing—create a desire within a vacuum of space—this was the kind of thing you jerked off to alone.
“We’re taking a collection.” Leetower, one of the young art directors, held up a paper coffee filter full of coins. “Hawke’s severance. He’s marching toward massacre, friend.”
“Make it a fifty-fifty draw and I’m in.” Duncan felt his pockets for change.
“They were bringing in his lunch and I smelled patchouli, Duncan. I saw a Gibson Hummingbird leaning up against his desk.”
“Well, even Rome fell.”
“You know what this means?” Leetower’s left eye was twitching. “He’s using hippies in the ads. Beatniks.”
“What have you seen?”
“Kooch snuck in while he was in the can. It’s worse than we imagined. Tie-dye, paisley headbands. Dylan before electric. Hawke’s synthesizing lysergic acid diethylamide in there.”
“How’s this all connect to flared jeans?” Duncan asked. “Because hippies wore them?”
“In one of his scripts he has fifty models in bell-bottoms cramming into a VW bus.”
Duncan shook his head. “Retro’s been played out.”
“Residual trails, brother. What is he, like forty?”
This wasn’t cruelty, just the dialect of the industry. Duncan couldn’t despise Hawke; the man had given him his first job. But as he shut his own office door he understood there was an inherent pleasure in watching a colleague misstep, a gentle perversity in nudging that colleague toward his own demise.
In the library cloisters, Lily walks in on the two women from the reference desk as they ravage a chicken carcass with a plastic fork and knife. They look up, startled and feline. On their cheeks, petals of grease.
“You’re new.” One of the women, a ginger tabby, lifts her fork in greeting. “We noticed you right away.”
Lily nods, pushes a cigarette between her lips in place of a smile. She holds fast to the belief that a smile should not necessarily require one in return. This is her mother’s influence, she knows. Lily can count the number of times she’s seen the woman twist the corners of her lips from their usual flat line.
“Yes,” she says. “Up from the city.”
“We know. You’ve opened Oster Haus for the summer.” Ginger’s companion, a cinder-haired Persian, toggles at a drumstick until it gives a small sigh and comes loose from the body. “Would you like some roast chicken?”
Lily shakes her head. She has to keep a cringe from snaking out
between her shoulder blades. She looks at the cigarette smoldering in the fork of her fingers and realizes it’s been ages since she took any pleasure in food.
“You’re suffering from the heat, aren’t you?” Persian watches her over the drumstick. “You’ll have to forgive us, we’ve come out of a wet and backward season. Supposed to be the muggiest June the county’s seen in years.”
Ginger sighs and forks up a load of coleslaw. “Humidity is just the start of our sorrows. It feels to me that we’re going to have some trouble with tent caterpillars this year. Probably get a bad run of deer ticks on the golf course.”
Persian jars a thumb at her colleague. “A prognosticator.”
“It’s a difficult burden, this foresight,” Ginger agrees, unruffled. “I’ll tell you this, keep an eye on the species of mushrooms you collect around Oster Haus.”
“She’s hardly going to collect mushrooms. Young people aren’t interested in that.” Persian untucks her napkin bib and wipes at her chin. “Mind you, if you like history, there’s plenty around that house.”
Lily shrugs. “Like any old place, I guess.”
“Most of it’s uncheery, though.”
“Well, the house just came over to our side recently.”
“Yes, but there was all that bad business years ago,” the old woman continues. “With the housekeeper.”
“No, it was the nursemaid.” Ginger leans in conspiratorially. “Seems we had our very own Lindbergh baby—before the Lindberghs did.”
“Who would that have been? Your great-grandfather?”
Finally, Lily thinks. The sweet spot of the interview. “It was my grandfather,” she says. Like everything else sprouting from her Teutonic ancestry, she believes the story of her grandfather’s abduction by the nanny evolved beyond family folklore just to serve as a cautionary tale.
“But it was hardly tragic,” she adds. “They found him the next day.”
“Of course they did.” Ginger nods at her. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be standing here, would you?”
Thankfully the cigarette is down to a glinting stub. Lily takes the opportunity to move away from the women, to exhale and extinguish the ember underfoot. She doesn’t like this turn to familiarity. Or the conjecturing that follows. Once the conversation loses its historical quality it begins to feel speculative about her own life. A comment on bloodline, the errors of the father that are repeated by the son—this sort of transparency, it’s just not in her nature.
Persian catches her withdrawal. “Please don’t think we’re gloomy.” She gives Lily a gray and brittle smile of patience. “But these stories never seem to stay buried long.”
O
ster Haus is a papery old bone, either too frail or too forsaken to rig with air-conditioning, and by the second morning of their stay the heat inside the plastered walls has accumulated. Once Lily leaves for the library Duncan moves from room to room, drawing drapes against sunshine. The parlor, the sunroom, the smoking room, each of extravagant size, but humbled now by the osteoporosis of architecture. Floors sag and fuss underfoot, throwing up the smell of mildew and potatoes. The house had returned to his wife’s family a few years earlier, dogged and gamboling, sliding sideways into their lives after the death of a Floridian uncle left Lily’s parents holding the deed. The structure itself, primed for torching, dilapidated beyond its Queen Anne elegance, stands in Dutchess County, six miles south of Tivoli. It’s a historical home (attested to by the bronze plaque at the front door), with three fireplaces and knob and tube wiring. A place lonely for visitors and, thus far, unvisited by fire.
Duncan might be considered an impostor here, gaining admittance to the family seat through the lax caste system of the contemporary North American marriage. But according to his schedule, he’s no more than a weekend guest at the historical Oster Haus in the ostentatiously named town of Osterhagen. So he says nothing of the neglect that lurks around him. How chimney flues and dumbwaiter shafts rattle, unprovoked.
The house sits in a corner pocket of grass surrounded by a tidy barley acreage that’s harvested by the town each fall. The land falls short of the river by half a mile and in exchange for the annual reaping and regular maintenance, partial ownership of it had been ceded over to the county years ago.
It’s just a bottom-feeder crop
, the woman from the Historical Society told him over the phone.
Animal feed, I think.
There was trepidation in her voice, a wariness that made Duncan feel as though he and Lily had agreed to foster a particularly troubled ward of the state for the summer.
Still, there was a rustic pleasure in the idea of residing close to a crop of anything and for the first time in ages he could conjure an image of himself outside the office. His weekend self, strolling in ratty wool sweaters and gumboots, a pointer dog at heel, a fragrant pipe snug in his mouth. His serious demeanor would win him the respectful nod and quiet acceptance of the locals. The mornings, Duncan envisioned as a return to the first and happiest years of his marriage when he and Lily would remain unreachable until noon, crowded together in bed using the ballpoint pen meant for crosswords to initial and claim various sections of one another’s bodies. The afternoons, then, would be turned over to work. He’d take long rambles with the dog or trace the river by kayak, contemplating the new television campaign that would make Stand and Be Counted—and by extension, himself—a true contender.
If there was one thing he’d learned from his decade in the industry, it was that the creative process was trying. Fraught with real agony. But there was also tremendous satisfaction in scoring the arc of a concept, capturing his own thoughts in flight and scrutinizing their shape. He would hold the entire ball of it in his head so that when he sat down at the typewriter he’d just be left with the enjoyable business of translating it to paper. (There was a typewriter in this fantasy, the tactile pleasure of keys and carriage.) In the house Lily, who had yet to take a summer off for vacationing, would pour him coffee from an ancient percolator and perch on the arm of his chair. Carefully pluck brambles from his sweater
while he worked out concepts. What he wanted was an idea with legs. Something that would pinch the nostrils of his career and blow lustily down its dry throat.
Although, in reframing this fantasy now, he’d definitely scratch the typewriter prop. It was a contrivance of the profession that had been done to death. Also, he’d have to rethink Lily. Even in fantasy it was a stretch to have her picking brambles from his sweater.
The dog, in any case, would curl up by the fire.
In truth Duncan understood early on this dream would live and die only in his imagination. At ninety degrees it’s hardly the season for wool and rubber. Also the taste of pipe tobacco makes him gag, and those long-legged, golden ideas have yet to materialize. Lily is here, however. Initially her thought was to come up alone. It has not escaped his attention that the one summer she’s decided to spend away from the city is also the one she planned on spending without him.
Still, the estate is a picture and, as Duncan scans the fringe of butterscotch ripple from the kitchen window, he realizes he hasn’t been this close to nature in years. There’s a settled peace to an agricultural lifestyle that doesn’t exist in his corporate world. It would be good to work with the hands instead of the head. Imagine if the day was just a matter of gassing up the swather and driving her in neat runnels across the field. In an agrarian life a man is at the mercy of only one thing: weather. In cities people criticize you for being mediocre or alcoholic, undecorated or on a losing streak. But who would dare criticize a man for submitting to the hand of fate when he toiled against epic wind funnels and prairie fires and flash floods? Who would expect grand acts from a man who was busy sump-pumping his field?