Truth in Advertising (16 page)

Marta has the blank look of a woman who grew up watching East German national TV and Franz Beckenbauer and lightly veiled anti-Semitic dramas (
“Das Juden Frau”
) featuring broad-shouldered, big-toothed, fondue-eating Germans who border on good-looking but are mostly just scary. She clearly has no idea who Tommy Lee Jones is. But she nods slowly. Janie looks at Marta.

“Marta, he's the one from, ya know, oh, what's that one where the prison bus falls over and Sela Ward gets her head smashed in?”

“
The Fugitive
?” I offer.

Janie snaps her fingers and points at me. “That's the one.”

“
Jaaaaaaa
,” Marta says, realizing who Tommy Lee Jones is. “But noooo,” she says. “No, I don't zink zo.”

“Yes, Marta. He's the spitting image of a young Tommy Lee Jones. Look at his eyes.”

“Doesn't he have very bad skin?” I ask.

Janie nods. “He does. But you don't. That's not what I mean. Facially. Bone structure.”

I take a big gulp of my beer.

“Ya know who I get a lot?” I ask.

“Who?” Janie wonders, leaning forward.

“Gandhi.”

You can almost hear the tumblers falling into place. The slight squint. Click.

“Gandhi,” Marta says, howling with laughter, turning to Janie. “Gandhi. Yeah, yeah. Only he doesn't look like Gandhi, though.” Making the final ironic link for herself, desperately fighting her German DNA.

“You're a pistol,” Janie says, laughing. “Marta, he's a pistol. That's funny. Gandhi. Very funny. Now which one was he?”

Janie catches me looking at her abundant cleavage and smiles.

“What is your line of work, Tim?” Marta asks.

“It's
Fin
, Marta,” Janie says, smiling but annoyed. “Not Tim.”

They're both drunk. Marta keeps trying to make her eyes wider, as if trying to adjust the focus.

“I'm a freelance U-boat captain,” I say.

Janie says, “That sounds interesting. Do you like it?”

Marta says, “Did he say ‘U-boat'?”

Janie says, “Wait. What do you mean? Like . . . a submarine?”

“That's exactly right. I pilot German-made submarines on a freelance basis.”

Janie, still smiling, though the smile is changing into a bad-smell confusion.

“I don't understand.”

A waitress comes over with a basket of buffalo wings, hot sauce, sour cream, and a pornographic knockwurst with a side of hot mustard. Both of them go at it like rabid animals, not taking their eyes from me as they eat, too drunk to know that their hands are covered in sauce.

“I think he's funning with us, Marta.”

“I am funning with you, Janie. No, I'm a copywriter at an ad agency,” I say.

“Oh my land!” Janie says. “That sounds quite exciting. What does that mean exactly?”

“I write television commercials, Janie. I come up with the ideas for TV commercials.”

“Did you hear that, Marta? He writes television commercials. You
know what one I like is that little dog for the taco place. He is so cute. I like the funny ones.”

“I wrote that commercial, Janie,” I lie.

She screams. Screams like she's won the lottery.

“You are a
famous
person.”

“In many ways I am. I travel only by private jet, if that's what you're wondering.”

“I find television commercials confusing,” Marta says to a buffalo wing.

Janie says, scooping a wing and dunking it in sour cream, up to her second knuckle, “I once saw a commercial where they fired a gerbil out of the cannon and I laughed and laughed.”

“And why wouldn't you?” I say.

Janie's hand is on my knee. Her eyes are red, exploded blood vessels. Her breath smells of booze and soup.

“What's your room number?” she says, a grin on her face.

It's getting late.

•   •   •

I want to call Phoebe but it's late. I start to text her but stop. She thinks I'm in Mexico. Why worry her?

I flip through the channels. MTV and VH1 and Portuguese news and all-Arabic dramas and kickboxing and a Latvian documentary about a dairy farmer with one arm and a Hallmark special about a mentally challenged boy lost in the woods who finds the true meaning of friendship with an animal and a program on the History Channel about Nazis that they seem to play a lot and a thing on the Discovery Channel about gigantic equipment and the history of gigantic equipment and old footage of steam shovels and newer footage of trucks the size of ocean liners and there are movies, lots of movies, all of which I've seen before but I watch them nonetheless. And there are commercials. Foot odor and erectile dysfunction and toilet paper and tampons and cars, lots of cars, almost all on a road with no other cars, going fast, far too fast it seems, on winding, rain-slicked roads, leaves flying, and there are ones for beer, with a young guy doing
something to get a young girl's attention but embarrassing himself in the process and his friends watching the entire time and laughing in the corner only the girl thinks it's cute and sits with him anyway and a line at the end, intoned by a cool-dude voice-over who says something like, “Because life's worth living” or “What it means to be a man” or “Here's to good times,” jumbles of words that mean nothing, that merely sound like they mean something, words that were thought about by large groups of intelligent people for months at a time. Words that in some cases were written by me or my colleagues, there, on TV. If you only knew what went into it. The hours, the days, the weeks, the meetings, the stress, the deadlines, the money, the approvals, the casting, the flights, the hotels, the flare-ups, the drinking, the casual sex, the hope that it will mean something because at the time it certainly seemed to. It seemed to be important. And then you see it on TV. And it goes by so fast. A shot we spent half a day lighting is on the screen for eighteen frames—less than a second, a second being twenty-four frames, unless it's video and then it's thirty frames. The point is . . . what is the point? I look for
It's a Wonderful Life
, but can't find it anywhere.

•   •   •

I wake early and have no idea where I am. It's still dark, 7
A.M.
I take a long, hot shower, make coffee in my room. It tastes like coffee I made in my room. I have two hours before visiting hours begin and I have to fight the regret of coming here. I turn on my phone and see a text message from Phoebe.
Merry Christmas, mister! Wear sunblock!

I walk through town, the deserted Main Street, the quaint shops with quaint names, The Grumpy Oyster, Clam Up, selling bric-a-brac like seashells and other crap you'll find at a yard sale in a few years. Lots of things with the words
CAPE COD
written on them. The outline of the Cape itself is permanently ruined for me after Ian once described it as looking like an erect penis with extreme curvature.

I keep walking, hoping to find a coffee shop. Near a rotary, mercifully, I find a Dunkin' Donuts that's open. I stop for a coffee and a plain donut. The woman behind the counter has bad skin and speaks
with a heavy Brazilian accent. I know one word in Portuguese. Thank you. “
Obrigado
,” I say. She looks up and smiles. “Merry Christmas,” she says.

The road cuts behind the little airport and comes out onto the other side of the Cape, Route 6A. Here the feeling is of a very different place than the strip malls and fast food dumps of Hyannis. It looks like something out of an Edward Hopper painting. Small, neatly-kept wooden houses from the 1700s, stone walls worn smooth, slate roofs. I turn down a side road. You can smell the ocean, the salt air. There'd been a light wind but now it picks up, colder. The sun is up. The road opens up onto the water. I don't know the name of it, a harbor of some kind. There's a sandy spit of land across the water and an old lighthouse. It looks like a painting. It looks so beautiful.

On Sundays, in the winter, my mother and I would sometimes drive, just she and I, to New Hampshire, early, after breakfast, to watch the dog sled races. Bitterly cold. So much snow. A huge field, a blanketed farm, maybe a cornfield. People lined a track and waited for the dogs to come out into the open from the woods. Eight or nine times around the course they'd go. Beautiful Siberian huskies. Thick coats, Fresca-blue-green eyes, mouths open, plumes of steam, the condensation of their labored breath. “Isn't this something?” she'd say, her eyes wide, a good clean feeling of joy and purpose, of being in the right place at the right time, at being away from a place of menial chores and quotidian tasks, being far from that man who shared her bed, who would never make this trip, who thought it foolish and said so. Of course it was something. It was the best thing. How could anything be better? I was alone with her, standing next to her, in our boots and hats, and later we'd walk to the shack at the edge of the field, near where people parked their cars, and get warm by the wood stove, drink a hot chocolate, eat a plain donut. When the dogs came around, out of the woods, people cheered and clapped, the sound of their hands muffled by gloves.

•   •   •

I'm surprised to find Margaret on duty. She says her kids are out of the house and that she likes to take a shift for one of the younger
married girls. She says she'll be home by 3:00
P.M.,
anyway, and that she and her husband have a nice dinner and open presents then.

“Any improvement?” I ask.

“Still the same,” she says. “These things can take time, especially with older folks.”

I sip my coffee. I read the newspaper. I occasionally look up at my father. It's really no different than waiting for a flight in an airport, if the airport has dying people in it and beeping machines and no planes.

The paper says that inflation is down and unemployment is holding steady.

The paper says that there is good news for life expectancy, up from 77.2 years to 77.4 years (lower for blacks and Hispanics, slightly higher for white women). The story says that last year, 2,417,797 people died in the U.S.

The paper says that yesterday's Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 10,240.29, up 0.21 percent on a volume of two million shares, and that prices closed higher on the Nikkei in Tokyo. I have no idea what this means. I don't understand how the stock market works.

The paper says there's a chance of more snow Sunday night and that western Massachusetts reservoirs are at their highest point in over a decade.

I use the bathroom, wash my hands, scan my face in the mirror. Do I look like him? Hard to tell without a tube in my nose. His skin is ashen, his lips dry and cracked in places. He was a handsome man, with jet-black hair and a ruddy complexion, a man who worked outdoors in all kinds of weather. He took odd jobs, especially painting, between shifts at the police department. Will this be me someday? Will I look like this? Will anyone be in the room?

My cell phone rings. It's Phoebe.

I say, “Merry Christmas from Meh-he-co.”

Phoebe says, “How's your father? Ian called me.”

“He's great. We just played paddle tennis. I kicked his ass.”

“That's not funny. Okay, it's a little funny.”

“He's not good.”

“Where are you now?”

“The hospital. But I might as well be on a park bench for all the good it's doing.”

“I want you to do me a favor, okay?”

“Phoeb. I'm fine.”

“I want you to do me a favor. There's a bus from Hyannis to Boston. I want you to get on it and I'll come pick you up. You can have dinner with my family tonight.”

Phoeb, I can't.
These are the words I want to say. But they don't quite make it out because the idea of staying in this room another minute, of going back to the hotel for what is sure to be Leftover Knockwurst Night, is too much. And for what? Why am I here? What would happen if he did regain consciousness? What if he wakes up and he's pissed? What if he says, “Get the fuck out of my room”? Won't I feel like an asshole. Still, I'm going to say no. Because it's awkward. Because I'd be imposing. Because I don't know Phoebe's family.

“That sounds really nice,” I say.

•   •   •

I do the dishes and talk with Phoebe's mother, Judy.

Dinner was a rack of lamb and parmesan potatoes and green beans, followed by pumpkin and pecan pies for dessert with ice cream from Brigham's, a Boston institution. They talked and listened and laughed. No one said a single mean or sarcastic thing.

Phoebe and her father are in the living room. Her brothers and their wives have left. They hugged on their way out. Judy's putting away the dishes I wash. She says, “But here's what I don't understand. I'm going to buy mayonnaise
any
way. Why does someone need to go to all that trouble to
ad
vertise it? I've bought the same brand of mayonnaise for forty years and not once do I remember an ad for it.”

The dishes are old and can't go in the dishwasher. I take my time with them. The hot water and the soap and the sponge feel good. The window above the sink looks out onto the expansive backyard, mature trees, bare branches. It's the house Phoebe grew up in, a stately
old pale yellow Victorian at the end of a wooded road in Brookline, a leafy town next door to Boston.

“Judy. You're calling into question my very existence.”

She grins and sips from her wineglass, moves clean cups and saucers back into the cupboards.

We had drinks in the living room. They opened presents. There was one for me, wrapped in today's newspaper. An old scarf that could not have been uglier. I smiled, they laughed. Her brother said, “Everyone in this family has worn that scarf, Fin. And every one of us has tried to pawn it off on someone else.” I wrapped it around my neck.