Better Than This (6 page)

“Look at us,” I said. “We’re sitting here with a view like that right in front of us.” I gestured towards the glittering bay which was turning from deep blue to beaten copper in the setting sun. A ferry full of commuters heading home for the evening was making its way towards Sausalito. “We’re lucky. We live in one of the greatest cities on this planet. We’re blessed with a good climate, we have great jobs, nice cars, pleasant places to live, and what are we doing? We’re sitting here moaning about our lot.” I shook my head.

Marcus grinned wryly. “It’s the human condition. We strive for something more than we have.”

“You think so? That’s why we want to quit our nice comfortable safe jobs so we can weigh ourselves down with debt? Can you imagine the stress we’re letting ourselves in for if we do this? Running our own agency means we start from nothing. We’ll face uncertainty every day. We have no clients, no money. We’ll need offices, cars, someone to answer the phone … we must be crazy.” I threw up my hands. “I think we ought to have another beer.”

Marcus shrugged. “Well, I don’t know about you, but there’s only so much longer I can go on figuring out new ways to make chocolate chip cookies sound interesting.”

I smiled. “That’s it for you isn’t it? I mean it’s about choosing what you work on. For that you’d give it all up.”

“I guess. That’s a precondition by the way. If we do this, no food accounts. I have done my last campaign for processed cheese.” He pulled a face.

“That’s what you’re working on?”

“It is. And this is not how I wish to spend the rest of my life.”

“I’ll drink to that.” We touched glasses and drank solemnly.

“So, why would you do it?” Marcus asked. “Really?”

“Quit my job, my decent salary, my BMW three series with all the toys, my top-line health plan?”

“Those things are meaningless to you, right?”

I grinned. “Right. Who needs them anyway?” But I ate the last of my linguine and played with my fork reflectively while Marcus waited for me to give him a real answer. “You know what it is, really? I’d do it for the same reason that you would, in a way. It’s about control. You want control over your work, I want control over my life.”

“Explain,” Marcus said. We were both getting a little drunk, but that’s how it often was when we got onto this subject. When we were sober we talked about the nuts and bolts of where we’d get the finance, how we’d position ourselves in the market, all that good stuff. After a few beers we were into the big questions. Why? And what’s it all about anyway?

“Control. Security. Call it what you like. It’s the same thing,” I said. “Why else do people go to work? I mean if it isn’t for fulfilment, and for most people it definitely isn’t, then it’s to earn money. We have to have it, to pay for the food we eat, the houses we live in, for the education and health of ourselves and our families. We need to know those basic needs are taken care of. Security.”

“You want security?” Marcus said.

“Everyone does. Why else the world over do so many people buy into the lottery even though the odds against winning are practically fucking impossible. There are people out there who would spend absolutely their last buck on a ticket. Even ahead of food for themselves.”

“Isn’t that because they want to get rich?”

“But what is rich? For most people winning the lottery is the only chance they are ever going to have to get real security. And security means control. That’s what it’s all about. Control. It isn’t about houses and yachts and fancy cars. That’s all just gloss. It’s fuck-you money. That’s what people want. They don’t want to be at the mercy of some corporate asshole in an office tower somewhere, who decides one day that he’s going to shut down a plant in Michigan or someplace where people have worked all their lives. They don’t want to be afraid of losing it all. Their house, health plan, car, the works. Where does that lead? Some family is forced to move to another neighbourhood where they don’t know anybody. There’s not enough money coming in. Maybe the guy can’t take it and he gets sick or takes off and leaves his kids so they don’t have a father any more. It all falls apart. The whole fucking thing.”

Marcus looked at me in surprise at my unexpected and sudden passion. “I never picked you as a champion for the common man.”

I shrugged selfconsciously. I hadn’t meant to get so worked up. “I’m just saying. It isn’t money for its own sake that people want, it’s about security.”

“You already have that,” Marcus said. “You make a hundred and fifty plus a year. You’re young, the people you work for like you. You’re a high flyer at KCM.”

“But in the end, I’m just an employee. I have to watch my back all the time because there’s always someone ready and willing to knife me right between the shoulder blades. Like that prick Larry Dexter for instance. That guy would cheerfully kill me if he thought he could get away with it and it’d get him an inch further up the ladder. I don’t need that. I don’t need to know that someday I might screw up, or somebody decides they don’t like my face or the colour of my shirt. I could get fired and lose it all anyway.”

Marcus thought about that, hunched over his beer with his glasses slipping down his nose. After a while he grinned a little lopsidedly. “You see the irony don’t you? You’re prepared to give up what you have now, which is your job, the salary, the car, in short your security. For what? Security!” He chuckled then cocked his head thoughtfully. “Did that come out the way it was meant to or am I drunk?”

“You’re drunk,” I said. “But you’re right. And you know what, I think we should do it.”

Marcus saw that I was serious and hesitated. Then he picked up his glass. “The hell with it. To us.”

“To us.”

Four years had elapsed since then. Now here I sat, at my desk in my office in the agency we had started. Carpe Diem occupied space in a restored brick building that had once been a bond warehouse. It is tucked away in a little street which is surrounded by new apartment complexes which front the Embercadero near Pier 38. The apartments have views across the bay to Oakland and lots of small bars and restaurants have sprung up in the area serving all kinds of food from Korean to burgers to sushi. For years the bond warehouse had fallen into crumbling disrepair until a developer had recognized its potential and bought it for a song. Now it was home to a dozen exclusive boutique stores on the ground floor, and on the floors above a collection of trendy businesses that included a freelance graphics designer, an art gallery and an office design company which sold incredibly expensive minimalist furniture. And us.

The designer we’d hired to outfit our offices had given us a thirty-six thousand-dollar curving glass wall that extended around the perimeter of what had begun as an empty space, and formed the front wall of the various individual offices which looked out over the central work area. It stood for transparency, he said. He’d also given us blonde wooden floors (symbolic of the purity of pine forests) and what appeared to be a partially dismantled scaffolding made out of chrome piping which stood against the west wall. Some of the plaster had been removed to expose the brick underneath, which created the effect of a job incomplete and hurriedly abandoned. The designer claimed this made a symbolic statement in keeping with our name; that we were too busy seizing the day to concern ourselves with unimportant incidentals such as the decor. There was a certain irony in that, given that the scaffolding sculpture, as he called it, had cost us twenty-seven thousand dollars.

That designer and his rabid symbolism had cost us a fortune, but the sad fact is it had been money well spent. Advertising is a reflection of an idealized life. It’s about image and gloss. No matter how good or bad we were, once we had them through the door most potential clients made up seventy per cent of their minds about whether or not to hire us based on how we met their expectations of what an advertising agency should look like. The fact that we’d had to spend so much to create nothing more than a slick office might at first seem wasteful, but without it we’d have died on the day we opened.

Several days had passed since our meeting with the bank and I was busy preparing for a meeting with the marketing people at Spectrum Software. I was weary, and I took a break, leaning back and rubbing my eyes. My gaze fell on a couple of framed pictures on the bookcase in my office. One was of Sally and I just after we were married, a couple of months before we moved to San Francisco. We had flown down from Oregon for a job interview I had with Campbell Armstrong, one of the biggest agencies on the coast with offices across the country. I got the job and to celebrate we drove up the coast for the weekend. The picture had been taken outside the inn where we stayed. I tried to recall the name of it, but it eluded me. I was struck by how much younger I looked then, though Sally didn’t seem to have changed so much. We looked happy. Only the young ever look that happy. It’s because they don’t know what’s ahead of them.

The other picture was of me again, but much younger, nine years old in fact. I was standing next to my dad, both of us smiling at the camera. I went over and picked it up to look more closely. It was something I did now and then, trying to detect anything in my dad’s eyes that might have forewarned of what would happen three months after the picture was taken. There were shadows, which might have hinted of the things that troubled him, but it was probably just the way the light fell on the camera lens.

I closed my office blinds and opened a locked drawer where I kept an old cigar box. Inside was a pistol which had belonged to my dad. It was a .38, hardly used, the grip cool and unfamiliar when I picked it up. Twenty-six years ago my dad had put the barrel against his head then pulled the trigger. It was depression, they said afterwards. I remember standing with my mom and my brother and sister beside his grave on the day of the funeral. I was the eldest of us three kids, and closer to our dad so maybe it affected me more than them. It seems that way now anyway. They’re both happily married, one in Washington State the other in Georgia where my mother also lives. They have decent jobs, families. They seem untroubled by the past.

I put the gun down, and took a letter from the bottom of the box. I knew every word of each line by heart, but I read it anyway. The paper was getting fragile, almost torn at the folds, the ink smeared and faded from the amount of times I’d handled it. My dad wrote it the day he shot himself. He talked about his business failing, about the unfairness of life, about his childhood, fishing with his own father who’d died young, about the world being full of sonsofbitches. It didn’t really sound a lot like him, except in places. It was a rant, and clearly that of a sick mind. The writing was spidery as if he’d written it in feverish bursts. The sentences were disjointed, flipping from subject to unrelated subject and back again without connective thought. But at the bottom was one final sentence. The writing was firm and legible and appeared to have represented at least one clear idea.

There must be something better than this.

I carefully folded the letter away, and locked the gun in its box back in the drawer.

I was too tired to do any more work. My in-tray was overflowing with client folders and unanswered mail. When we’d started the work to secure the Spectrum account I hadn’t expected so much to be involved, but KCM were fighting hard and Sam Mendez and his team at Spectrum were taking inordinate care over their decision. I didn’t know if that was because they were bucking the system within the group by considering a switch of agency, or whether they were just exercising extreme caution. Occasionally when I took the time to think about it I was puzzled. The Spectrum account was sizable for us, perhaps worth half a million or so annually in fees, but that wouldn’t normally warrant a process that had taken this long or involved so much effort. I kept telling myself that Morgan Industries, the real prize, made it worthwhile.

Sometimes that wasn’t easy. I picked up an envelope that had arrived a week earlier. Inside was a letter from We bLink one of our better accounts. It was signed by Jerry Parker, the guy who owned the company, and who I’d dealt with for three years. The wording was terse and to the point. “Due to late delivery and poor execution… despite repeated expressions of concern… the situation has become untenable … no alternative but to advise you that from this date forward the services of Carpe Diem are no longer required.” I read it through with a mixture of feelings. The shock I’d felt when I first opened it had been replaced with anger at myself for allowing this to happen, but also at Parker for not calling me and laying his concerns out straight on the line. When I had called him to try and talk him round he was almost hostile.

“I’m running a business here, Nick. We gave you plenty of warning that we weren’t happy with the attention we were getting. You just weren’t listening.”

He was probably right, I admitted to myself. I’d involved so much of my time on the Spectrum project, and everybody else’s time too, that everything else was on the back burner. We bLink wasn’t our only unhappy client. I felt like a juggler who had too many balls in the air, with sweat on my brow as I desperately tried to keep track of them all, but even though my hands were moving in a blur of speed I couldn’t keep up. One slip, one tiny fractional loss of concentration and I’d drop them all. I told myself again, as I had with increasing frequency of late, that it would be worth it in the end. We were going to win that account.

I contemplated the letter in my hand. Marcus didn’t know about this. I’d put off breaking the news to him until after the bank meeting, but I still hadn’t found the right moment. I knew he’d see it as vindication of everything he’d said. I was tempted to toss it in the waste bin, but it seemed that if I did I’d once again be hiding things from him he had a right to know. As I had hidden the trouble we were in with the bank. On the other hand what difference did it make? There was nothing he could do, and if we won the Spectrum account . correction, when we won the Spectrum account, losing We bLink wouldn’t be such a big deal. I hesitated, torn between conflicting arguments. Logic overruled emotion and finally I crumpled the letter and threw it in the bin.