A Good Marriage (35 page)

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 conceive. 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 Andrews 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 said, “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 your case, the condition could more accurately be called 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, but she’d been excited about it for the last two weeks. 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 to heart. 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 heart. She
was
my heart, and I guard what’s in my heart. 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 place next door. 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 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 the suspicion creeping back into his voice. I’ve explained everything, advertising men are good at that, but the convincing effect only lasts for sixty seconds or so.

“She’s probably got it on mute. Plus, the medication the doctor gave her makes her sleep quite heavily.”

“What time will you be home, Mr. Franklin? I can stay until seven; after that there’s only Alfredo.” The disparaging note in his voice suggests I’d be better off dealing with a no-English wetback.

Never, I think. I’ll never be home. In fact, I was never there in the first place. Ellen and I enjoyed the Bahamas so much we moved to Cable Beach, and I took a job with a little firm
in Nassau. I shouted Cruise Ship Specials, Stereo Blowout Sales, and supermarket openings. All this New York stuff has just been a lucid dream, one I can back out of at any time.

“Mr. Franklin? Are you there?”

“Sure. Just thinking.” What I’m thinking is that if I leave right now, and take a taxi, I can be there in twenty minutes. “I’ve got one meeting I absolutely can’t miss, but why don’t you meet me in the apartment around six?”

“How about in the lobby, Mr. Franklin? We can go up together.”

I think of asking him how he believes I’d get rid of my murdered wife’s body at rush hour—because that
is
what he’s thinking. Maybe it’s not at the very front of his mind, but it’s not all the way in back, either. Does he think I’d use the service elevator? Or maybe dump her down the incinerator chute?

“The lobby is absolutely okey-fine,” I say. “Six. Quarter of, if I can possibly make it.”

I hang up and head for the elevators. I have to pass the caff to get there. Billy Ederle’s leaning in the doorway, drinking a Nozzy. It’s a remarkably lousy soda, but it’s all we vend. The company’s a client.

“Where are you off to?”

“Home. Ellen called. She’s not feeling well.”

“Don’t you want your briefcase?”

“No.” I don’t expect to be needing my briefcase
for a while. In fact, I may never need it again.

“I’m working on the new Po-10s direction. I think it’s going to be a winner.”

“I’m sure,” I say, and I am. Billy Ederle will soon be movin’ on up, and good for him. “I’ve got to get a wiggle on.”

“Sure, I understand.” He’s twenty-four and understands nothing. “Give her my best.”

*  *  *

We take on half a dozen interns a year at Andrews-Slattery; it’s how Billy Ederle got started. Most are terrific, and at first Fred Willits seemed terrific, too. I took him under my wing, and so it became my responsibility to fire him—I guess you’d say that, although interns are never actually “hired” in the first place—when it turned out he was a klepto who had decided our supply room was his private game preserve. God knows how much stuff he lifted before Maria Ellington caught him loading reams of paper into his suitcase-sized briefcase one afternoon. Turned out he was a bit of a psycho, too. He went nuclear when I told him he was through. Pete Wendell called security while the kid was yelling at me in the lobby and had him removed forcibly.

Apparently old Freddy had a lot more to say, because he started hanging around my building and haranguing me when I came home. He
kept his distance, though, and the cops claimed he was just exercising his right to free speech. But it wasn’t his mouth I was afraid of. I kept thinking he might have lifted a box cutter or an X-ACTO knife as well as printer cartridges and about fifty reams of copier paper. That was when I got Alfredo to give me a key to the service entrance, and I started going in that way. All that was in the fall of the year, September or October. Young Mr. Willits gave up and took his issues elsewhere when the weather turned cold, but Alfredo never asked for the return of the key, and I never gave it back. I guess we both forgot.

That’s why, instead of giving the taxi driver my address, I get him to let me out on the next block. I pay him, adding a generous tip—hey, it’s only money—and then walk down the service alley. I have a bad moment when the key doesn’t work, but when I jigger it a little, it turns. The service elevator has brown quilted movers’ pads hanging from the walls. Previews of the padded cell they’ll put me in, I think, but of course that’s just melodrama. I’ll probably have to take a leave of absence from the shop, and what I’ve done is a lease breaker for sure, but—

What
have
I done, exactly?

For that matter, what have I been doing for the last week?

“Keeping her alive,” I say as the elevator stops
at the fifth floor. “Because I couldn’t bear for her to be dead.”

She
isn’t
dead, I tell myself, just under the weather. It sucks as a cutline, but for the last week it has served me very well, and in the advertising biz the short term is what counts.

I let myself in. The air is still and warm, but I don’t smell anything. So I tell myself, and in the advertising biz imagination is
also
what counts.

“Honey, I’m home,” I call. “Are you awake? Feeling any better?”

I guess I forgot to close the bedroom door before I left this morning, because Lady slinks out. She’s licking her chops. She gives me a guilty glance, then waddles into the living room with her tail tucked way down low. She doesn’t look back.

“Honey? El?”

I go into the bedroom. There’s still nothing to be seen of her but the milkweed fluff of her hair and the shape of her body under the quilt. The quilt is slightly rumpled, so I know she’s been up—if only to have some coffee—and then gone back to bed again. It was last Friday when I came home and she wasn’t breathing and since then she’s been sleeping a lot.

I go around to her side and see her hand hanging down. There’s not much left of it but bones and hanging strips of flesh. I gaze at this
and think there’s two ways of seeing it. Look at it one way, and I’ll probably have to have my dog—Ellen’s dog, really, Lady always loved Ellen best—euthanized. Look at it another way and you could say Lady got worried and was trying to wake her up. Come on, Ellie, I want to go to the park. Come on, Ellie, let’s play with my toys.

I tuck the reduced hand under the sheets. That way it won’t get cold. Then I wave away some flies. I can’t remember ever seeing flies in our apartment before. They probably smelled that dead rat Carlo was talking about.

“You know Billy Ederle?” I say. “I gave him a slant on that damn Po-10s account, and I think he’s going to run with it.”

Nothing from Ellen.

“You can’t be dead,” I say. “That’s unacceptable.”

Nothing from Ellen.

“Do you want coffee?” I glance at my watch. “Something to eat? We’ve got chicken soup. Just the kind that comes in the pouches, but it’s not bad when it’s hot. What do you say, El?”

She says nothing.

“All right,” I say. “That’s all right. Remember when we went to the Bahamas, hon? When we went snorkeling and you had to quit because you were crying? And when I asked why, you said, ‘Because it’s all so beautiful.’”

Now
I’m
the one who’s crying.

“Are you sure you don’t want to get up and walk around a little? I’ll open the windows and let in some fresh air.”

Nothing from Ellen.

I sigh. I stroke that fluff of hair. “All right,” I say, “why don’t you just sleep for a little while longer? I’ll sit here beside you.”