Truth in Advertising (41 page)

“Thank you.”

“Take a vacation. Think about what you want. The job's still yours if you want it. Maybe you've been in diapers too long. Time for a change.”

“You can't have just said that.”

“I'm not proud of it.”

I say, “What about Frank?”

“I'll handle Frank. ‘Clueless, soulless douchebag.' One of your better lines, actually. Maybe there's hope for you as a writer.”

He walks away. Then stops and turns back.

“Your friend Phoebe stopped by my office yesterday afternoon. Lucky man to have a friend like that.”

He looks at me and does something he's never done in the eighteen months I've known him. He smiles. An honest-to-God smile. And I find that I'm smiling, too.

I shout to him, “I feel like we should make out.”

Over his shoulder, “Dodge says that to me all the time.”

•   •   •

We held a funeral mass for my father in Boston and we all cried and hugged and told wonderful stories about the past, stories we'd all forgotten but that were now rendered clear in our collective memories. It was cathartic and I was deeply changed because of it. We promised to rent a house together next summer on Nantucket.

That is a lie, of course. Life doesn't work that way, except in commercials and adorable Jennifer Aniston movies. It's just that I can
see
that ending so clearly. The wide shot at the cemetery. Pan down from the gray sky to the leafless trees. Cut to a shot of the man (me, I guess) looking at the wind in the trees and the shapes that the fast-moving clouds make on the lawn and the gravestones. Cut to hands grabbing fistfuls of the chocolate-brown dirt that the gravediggers have placed in a pile atop a large square of Astroturf. Cut to the diggers leaning on their shovels. Inevitably one of them must wipe his nose with the back of his gloved hand. Note: Have a wind machine ready if it's not a windy day. Shoot in New York to make it look like Boston. Less travel. If you want blue sky we can color correct it in post, no problem. We can do it in twenty-seven seconds with three seconds left for a VO and a logo. Just tell me what the product is.

The annoying thing about life is that it screws up the production. It's rarely neat and tidy. And yet sometimes it can surprise you.

Maura called me awhile ago, one night at home, out of the blue. She wanted to know the story of the ashes. She told me she wished she'd been there. We talked for forty-five minutes. She told me about her children, how one of them reminds her of me at times. He makes up stories and makes his parents laugh. I promised to visit. They have a summer place in Maine. She said maybe we could all get together there sometime.

Kevin called and we spoke. I'm going to San Francisco in the spring. I've never met his partner.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said that there are no second acts in American lives. I have no idea what that means but I believe that in quoting him I appear far more intelligent than I am. I don't know about second acts, but I do think we get second chances, fifth chances, eighteenth chances. Every day we get a fresh chance to live the way we want. We get a chance to do one amazing thing, one scary thing, one difficult thing, one beautiful thing. We get a chance to make a difference.

I tell Phoebe that I'm going to be at the American Airlines international departures terminal at JFK. I tell her I'll have a passport and a suitcase. I tell her I have these two first-class tickets anywhere in the world.

•   •   •

Thirty yards away, a bobbing mass of lovely energy walking down the wide corridor. I watch her and realize I'm smiling. She pulls a wheelie suitcase behind her. Her long dark coat is open and she wears blue jeans and her tall brown boots and cashmere sweater her mother gave her for Christmas. Her cheeks are flushed and her hair is down and she is wearing her glasses. How strange to see her differently. The eye doctor does the test and says, “Better or worse?” A slight alteration in the curve of the glass can change the acuity, change your vision. And in the flick of his wrist things come into view.

“You certainly do a good first date,” she says, smiling. I can smell her shampoo and it smells like grapefruit.

I take her by the shoulders and move her so that her back is to the large board with the long list of departure destinations.

I say, “Pick a number.”

Phoebe says, “One million nine.”

I say, “There are twenty lines on the departure board behind you. The number you pick is the place we're flying to tonight.”

People say, if you could do anything, if money were no object, what would you do? I've never known the answer to that question. I've never had a passion, a hobby, a calling. Except now. Money no object. I want to be with her. I want to tell her everything. To tell her the truth.

Phoebe says, “Can I look?”

“No.”

“I think I saw Cape Town. I think I saw Rome. I think I saw Mumbai.”

“Pick a number.”

“Oh, God.” She's grinning. “Nine. No. Wait. Yes. Nine.”

I look up at the board, count nine lines down. Marrakech.

Phoebe says, “Where is it?”

I have been waiting for my life to begin.

It takes me a while to find the words. I say, “I don't know how to do this.”

She moves my hand from my face, from my scar.

She says, “You want to know how to do this?”

“Yes.”

“There are two steps. Give me your hands.”

I extend my arms and she takes hold of my hands.

She says, “You just learned the first step.”

“What's the second?” I ask.

“Don't let go.”

•   •   •

I remember the day I bought the tickets. I was going to get married and go on a honeymoon in Italy with my wife. People did this all the time. I used miles. First class. But they still cost more than I'd ever thought I'd spend on airplane tickets. Or a used car for that matter. The big trip. They were my fear-of-flying tickets. My fear-of-life tickets.

Phoebe and I walked to the ticketing window at JFK. Just after 2 
P.M.
I figured we'd get our tickets, have lunch, book a hotel online, sit in the Admirals Club until our flight.

The agent typed in the reservation number. You can sense a thing before you know it, in the details: a slight squint, a small tilt of the head, eyes blinking faster.

“Mr. Dolan,” she said. “I think there's been a mistake. These tickets have expired, sir.”

“That's not possible,” I said.

“I'm sorry, sir. Here, look.”

I looked, half listened. I'd waited a year for this. We have luggage. We have passports. Phoebe started laughing. “So what's our second date?”

Which is how it came to be that instead of boarding the first-class cabin on an American Airlines Boeing 777-400 to Marrakech, we boarded the AirTrain from JFK to the A train at Howard Beach, transferring at Atlantic Avenue for the N train, making all local stops to Coney Island. And there, at Nathan's, in a gray, misty, half-light of dusk, is where we dined on wrinkled frankfurters, soggy fries, and watery beer. It's where, sitting on a stool looking out the window at the old wooden rollercoaster, with a homeless man asleep two tables away, I told Phoebe I loved her.

It wasn't the big trip. But it was a trip. I took ten days off, slept in. We drank coffee, wandered the city like tourists. Skating at Bryant Park, an afternoon at the Frick, rode the Staten Island Ferry. I had never walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. The weather was terrible. Cold and windy, freezing rain. It was perfect.

•   •   •

And then one day I went back.

Martin had told Frank and Dodge about my father, the ashes. I have to say they were very kind, considering how easy it would have been to fire me.

There is a part of me that would like to say that I did quit. It seems so much more heroic. But I do not think that's how it works. Not today. Not in a good job, with high unemployment and real pain out there. I do not think we up and leave our lives. We don't make huge changes for the most part. Subtle shifts, small adjustments in perspective.

If you are one of the lucky ones who know what they want to do for a living—who've always known and who love it—God bless you. If you are a doctor, a priest, a boat builder, a teacher, a firefighter—a person with a calling—consider yourself fortunate. And if you are like me, someone who simply found themselves doing a job they never imagined doing, I'm not sure what to say.

Except this. I will live and I will die and when I do there might be a few lines in the newspaper about the job I did and the children I made, about the wife I left behind and how long we were married. Perhaps some will cry and there will be a get-together at my home after my dead body is placed in the cold ground. Sandwiches will be eaten and coffee drunk and conversation will be had about me and hopefully what a decent guy I was but also about lawn care and insurance and movies and children and the weather and sports teams and politics and whether or not there's more chicken salad. Later, people will go home with a renewed intensity and appreciation of their world, of how precious and fleeting it all is. They'll hold their children a little longer, the kids not sure what's going on with mom or dad as they try to squirm away to watch TV. A husband and wife will make love in the night as a result of the closeness of death. And then,
in the morning, there will be lunches to make and dentist appointments to keep, meetings to attend, ideas to share with clients, leaves to rake, dry cleaning to drop off. The car needs a tune-up.

So there is life. The quiet routine of every day. I read the newspaper, take the subway, go to a meeting. I get a haircut, have dinner with friends, help a woman with a baby carriage up the subway stairs. I get frustrated at a coworker, annoyed by humidity, depressed at the sight of people eating alone. I try to be human. It rains. I go to bed wondering how another day, another week, another year has passed so quickly. It scares me. It makes me want to do better.

We make dinner during these long, cold, dead-of-winter nights. We listen to music and talk and Phoebe teaches me how to cook. We watch movies on my computer. We read in bed. Spring is coming.

Long after Phoebe is asleep I watch the snow fall outside the window, listen to the wind, the rattle of the old glass panes, her hip a touch away. In that moment I think,
This is my life
. This, here and now. This is as close as I am ever going to get to that elusive thing called happiness. How could I ask for more?

•   •   •

Life is best viewed from a distance. The long lens. This has been my guiding principle. If you step back and watch, well, it's just easier. Because if you don't, if instead you pull others close—if you
need
them—you will never want to let go.

Eddie called to say he was in New York for work. He was taking a flight back that evening, but did I have time for a coffee? We met at a Starbucks in midtown, sat for a time, made small talk. I told him about the shoot, about Keita. He listened but didn't say much.

He started to put his coat on and stopped. He said, “I'm getting a divorce.”

“Jesus. Eddie. I'm sorry.”

“Yeah. She met someone.”

I didn't know what to say.

He said, “You know what my biggest fear in life has always been? The thing I've tried so hard to avoid?”

I waited for the answer, but I knew what it was.

Eddie said, “Being like him.”

“You're not him,” I said. “You're not even close.”

“Really? I'm leaving my wife, my kids hate me, and I'm angry.”

The old anger was gone, a spent shell. He seemed lost and wounded.

“Ever see
Apollo 13
?” he asked.

“The movie?”

“No. The Broadway musical. Yeah, the movie.”

“Yeah, I've seen it.”

“Well, it's like that,” he said.

“What's like that?”

“Life.” He looked at me as if I should understand.

He said, “They're coming back through space. At the end. Trying to get home. They have these coordinates and if they don't get them just right, if they're off by even a little bit, it's magnified huge and they slip off the curvature of the earth and shoot out into space, lost.”

He looked out the window and then said, “We got it wrong. The four of us.”

“Yes,” I said.

He kept looking out the window. “Still time, though, maybe.”

“Still time.”

He looked at me. You can grow away from your family. You can run away from your family. You can choose to not talk to them. You can be hurt by them, estranged from them. But then, in a Starbucks off Bryant Park, you can be made whole by them. He smiled, my mother's smile, the little squint.

I don't know why the memory comes now. I've not thought of it in many years. This was after she died. Eddie was waiting for me outside school. He had a Ford Galaxie 500 that he somehow managed to keep running.

“C'mon. Got a surprise,” he'd said.

We drove for a while, south of Boston. It was April. Still cool. Halfway there I knew where we were going. Paragon Park. An old amusement park whose best days were long past. The rollercoaster was wood and it creaked and wobbled, a thick, heavy greased chain
whipping the cars around. The first hill was so steep that when you went over it felt as if you were going to fall out. The park was across the street from Nantasket Beach. We went there a lot as kids. Blue-collar Riviera. The sand was like concrete, the water painfully, wonderfully cold. On an August day, my mother would make tuna sandwiches and wrap tinfoil around cans of Clicquot Club orange soda. The road out there from the highway had a bend and there was a point where the top of the rollercoaster came into view. Past what used to be Howard Johnsons, faded and abandoned now. Past an old motel.
VACANCY. AIR CONDITIONING
!
COLOR TV
! The bend in the road to the left, the beach opening out to the right. Sand blown over onto the road. We pulled into the parking lot near the entrance and saw a hand-painted sign.
OPEN MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND. SEE YOU THEN
!