A Thousand Pardons (18 page)

Helen flipped listlessly through the research. “Americans Against Higher Taxes?” she said. “What is that?”

The Pepsi woman looked confused. “That’s the nonprofit we established to serve as sponsor for our TV and print ads against the bill,” she said. “To make them look like PSAs.”

Helen pinched the bridge of her nose. “I feel like you’re reacting emotionally,” she said. “In terms of long-range thinking, I know you know better than this. This kind of aggression ultimately gets you nowhere. Soda is not particularly good for you; in conjunction with other things that are not good for you, it can affect your health. You can keep contesting the facts, or commissioning new studies. But do you really want to keep bailing the boat, or do you want to get in a different boat?”

The Pepsi woman sat stone-faced.

“Well, whatever, the point is you have to adapt. Fifty years ago cigarettes were being marketed for their health benefits, for goodness sake, but if you tried that today you’d be laughed out of business, right? So here’s what you do: you admit it. You take away their weapon. You admit your complicity in the sins of the past, because that way you take the past out of the conversation. You resolve to conduct yourself differently in the future, and then—you know what?—you conduct yourself differently in the future. This is how you stay in business. People relate to brands as if that relationship were emotional. So you have to play the role they want you to play, you have to personify it, and ask forgiveness the way you would if you were talking one on one. The first thing you do is kill off this ridiculous Americans Against Higher Taxes. People are too smart for that nowadays. You can’t predicate your PR strategy on the idea that people are morons. Whose gem was this idea, anyway?”

“Yours,” the Pepsi woman said irritably.

Helen did not look over at Ashok. Instead she got them to agree to
at least try to draft a hypothetical release in which they applauded the motivations of health-minded politicians and looked forward to playing a leading role in helping Americans of all ages live longer. They’d call it The Next Century Initiative or something forward-looking like that. She wasn’t positive they’d be able to go all the way through with it, but the look on Ashok’s face as they rode back to Manhattan in the town car—the look of a man who’d been called down from the gallows—made the day feel like a success in any case.

The next day—again, just as she was packing up to leave for home—he walked into her office and gently shut the door behind him. “I just wanted to say thank you,” he mumbled.

“No problem. They’re living in a kind of bubble up there, that’s all. Sometimes you have to explain your client to people, sometimes you have to explain people to your client.”

“Right. So listen, I was thinking that, being at home with your daughter, you probably don’t get out much—”

“I don’t know that it’s as bad as all that,” she laughed, though in fact it was.

“—and I have these two premiere tickets for
Code of Conduct
next Tuesday night. Julie in Promotions gave them to me. I thought maybe you’d like to go.”

“Tuesday,” she said, thinking how nice it would be to do something with Sara, to let her share in a big-city perk. “It’s a school night, of course.”

“Sorry?”

“You remember the whole school-night phenomenon? But I don’t think Sara would mind if I made an exception this time. Thank you. We’ll take them.”

“Ah,” Ashok said. He turned to look behind him at the closed door. “Well, you’re very welcome. I mean of course I couldn’t use them, which is why … So Sara is your daughter’s name. Very nice. Okay then.” But he didn’t move.

Did I say something wrong? Helen thought, and then it hit her: he was asking her out. He was asking her out on a date. Sweet Jesus. It was staggeringly inappropriate of him; and yet her first reaction was shame
at having humiliated him by not even realizing what he was doing, by not taking him seriously enough to say a proper no.

But he had to be fifteen years younger than she was. Maybe more. She had no idea what to make of it. Maybe he had some kind of depraved mommy issue. Maybe he sensed that she was somehow ascendant around there and was just trying to advance his own career. In fact maybe he
knew
she would say no, but gambled that the flattery of his asking her at all would linger and maybe work to his advantage down the road. Because who would ever ask her out, right? An old lady like her? Why not give Grandma a little thrill?

“I never said we don’t get out much,” she said, a little more angrily than she meant to. “She just turned fourteen. It’s not like I’m upset she’s not out more. What is Code of Whatever, anyway?”

“It’s a movie.”

“What’s it about?”

“What’s it
about
? I don’t really know.”

“Who’s in it?”

“Hamilton Barth, Minka Kelly, Bradley Cooper.”

Helen’s eyebrows shot up.

“Why do we get tickets?” she said.

“Because we get tickets to everything.”

“But I mean do we represent all of these people? Is Hamilton Barth a client of ours?”

“Not really. I mean, in a sense,” Ashok said, relaxing as he saw her expression change. “We represent the studios, the studios make movies with him in them, so you could say he’s sometimes a client of ours. You’re a fan?”

“So he’ll be there?”

“I imagine they’ll all be there. You know how it is with him. He’s expected, but there’s always some suspense.”

Helen smiled.

“So you’ll go?” Ashok said. “Great. I’ll tell Julie to put you on the list. It’s at the Ziegfeld.”

Helen knew her daughter well enough not to overplay the element of glamor in attending a red-carpet premiere; at Sara’s age, what you
wanted most was not to be looked at too hard or by too many people. “It’s supposed to be a good movie,” Helen said, “and we’ll get to see it before anybody else, and we’ll get a good look at a bunch of celebrities probably.” She did not mention Hamilton, in order to spare herself the torrent of eye-rolling abuse that name always provoked.

“I don’t have to buy a new dress or anything?” Sara said warily.

She was a very different girl than her mother had been. But they were all like that now. “You can wear what you want,” Helen said, “within reason.”

“Cool,” Sara said. “And I have to go with you?”

These moments had been coming more regularly of late: cold-eyed expressions of disregard from her own daughter, made more stunning by the offhandedness with which they were delivered. Helen had been spoken to disrespectfully for at least two years, but this was different. Remarks like this used to be intended to hurt her, which was hard but at least comprehensible. Now it was more like the effect of her words didn’t matter to Sara at all. She even looked a little different lately, in the face mostly. She was spending more time out, at night and on weekends; Helen thought maybe there was a boyfriend in the picture, though she had made the mistake of asking about it only once. She’d signed Sara up for weekend soccer, but for some reason Sara had actually extracted from her a promise not to attend the games. She said her mother’s presence, since unnecessary, would be embarrassing.

The insults, though, were not the issue; the issue was that they made Helen feel her child was slipping away from her. She kept trying to think of new approaches. They ought to take more advantage of the city, Helen knew, and go to museums together, or to shows or on walking tours. They ought—both of them—to be a little more cognizant of their own good fortune and find some volunteer or charity work that they could do together, preferably on weekends. Not that arresting Sara’s drift was a simple matter of tacking on a few supplementary lessons in culture and humility: Helen’s own positive influence was, she feared, being trumped by unseen bad ones, and in that light she started wondering about how to get Sara out of that awful school all the published rankings had told her was so good. Forms were already beginning
to show up in the mail from the high school she was slated to attend next year, a place reportedly, as even Sara admitted, not much different from where she was now, just bigger, and therefore likely worse. Why not private school instead of public next year? Helen thought; but when she called Trinity to ask if maybe there were still spaces left for the fall, the woman on the other end actually laughed, before apologizing politely and profusely, saying she had assumed Helen was kidding. Maybe for tenth grade, Helen resolved. They’d come up with the money somehow.

“Stop trying to improve me,” Sara would snap when topics such as this came up. “Like you’re so perfect.” Helen was terrified by the guilty thought that it was all some delayed reaction to the trauma of the move, or of the divorce itself—that she herself might be a source not just of love but of damage. But if her own actions had contributed to this damage, then her own actions could put it right. Not that she was willing to take all, or even half, of the blame for events that had knocked Sara off the loving equilibrium that, as a child, she’d always shown. But Helen was the parent who stayed, the one who was always right there, so naturally she was the one who got excoriated. One day soon she would get up her nerve to pursue the issue of contact with Ben, but, truth be told, she was scared he would use the opportunity to open up the custody issue too, and that she could not handle just yet. Anyway, she scolded herself, wanting to share some of the burden of getting insulted was not a very admirable reason to try to bring Sara’s father back into their lives.

It was true that most of the celebrities at the premiere would be people whose names and faces meant nothing to Sara or anyone else her age. Still, they were going to spend a few hours inside the barricades of that world where movie stars came and went. They were going to walk a red carpet, even if they did so hours before the carpet was cleared for those whom the tourists and gawkers and photographers really wanted to see, even if the sight of a middle-aged mother and her daughter in fancy dress would cause people to turn away in disappointment or derision. It had to mean something to her daughter, whether she was capable of admitting it or not, that, having fallen so low together
in the world, they had now risen to the level where they were, if nothing else, visible again.

Helen, at any rate, grew excited about it, and even permitted herself to fantasize that she might get to say hello to Hamilton Barth, or sit near him in the roped-off VIP seats, maybe talk about old times, introduce him to her child. She knew this was not how these tightly scripted public events generally worked, but she indulged the thought anyway. And then her sense that life in general was on the uptick was boosted further when she got a rare phone call from their lawyer from the dark days up in Rensselaer Valley, Joe Bonifacio. She felt fear in her throat just at the initial sound of his voice, but it turned out he was calling with excellent tidings. A new buyer had emerged for their empty house. She hadn’t given up on that, of course, but the fact that the house was long since paid off in full kept its existence from weighing too heavily on her mind day to day.

“Not that I care,” she said happily, “but how far did you have to come down in terms of price?”

“The buyer has offered the full listing price—”

“Are you
kidding
?”

“—in exchange for a few considerations regarding the closing. Chief among these is that he would like his identity to remain anonymous. He won’t be present at the closing itself, and he has given me his proxy to sign all affidavits, et cetera, on his behalf.”

“What about financing? Won’t all this secrecy be a problem there?”

“He will pay cash.”

“Oh my God,” Helen said. Into their lives, already stabler than they were used to, was about to drop $315,000 in cash. “What is this guy, like some kind of celebrity or something?”

“Yes, actually,” Bonifacio said coolly. “He is something of a celebrity, and for that reason would like everything done as quickly and as secretively and uncontentiously as possible. A fast closing. Is that acceptable to you?”

Helen allowed that it was. The day before the premiere, she took the afternoon off from work to ride the train back up to her old hometown and sit in Bonifacio’s threadbare office and sign a stack of documents,
and their last tie to their old life was cut. She was surprised not to feel any more ambivalence or nostalgia than she did. Mostly she just felt an unfamiliar pride. From the shipwreck of her marriage, with no resources at all, she had made a new existence for herself and her daughter, and that existence, at the present moment, would have to be counted a roaring success.

Movie theaters had basically followed the model of airplanes—what once had a now all but unimaginable aura of luxury had become as depressingly cost-efficient as possible—but the Ziegfeld had been left sufficiently alone that it could be pressed into service on nights when a little old-Hollywood glamor was on order. Helen had been instructed to arrive no later than five-thirty even though the movie didn’t start until eight. She understood why. Sara did too, she was sure, though that didn’t stop the poor girl—who looked amazing, Helen thought, amazing and pitiably self-conscious at the same time—from denouncing the whole operation as a perfectly refined symptom of everything fake for which she somehow held her mother responsible. They got out of a yellow cab at the end of the block (as far as the traffic cop posted there would let it go) and walked to the head of the pristine red carpet, where the spotlights were turned off and dozens of photographers, who had to get there early to secure their positions, fiddled irritably with their equipment. Helen wasn’t sure whether to savor the moment and walk leisurely with her head up, smiling, or to speed into the theater as discreetly as possible. Sara walked almost directly behind her about halfway through the bored gauntlet, and then, incredibly, she stopped dead and answered her phone.

“Sweetheart,” Helen said reproachfully, but Sara held up a hand to silence her. She was reading a text; whomever it was from, it put a welcome smile on her face, and she flipped the phone around in her hand and began snapping pictures of the paparazzi. “Smile!” she called out, and one or two of them did, though most simply looked annoyed with her for daring to clog up the charged public space with her ordinariness. Sara’s phone beeped at her again as she was holding it aloft for another photo; she brought it down, read what was on the screen, laughed, and started texting back.