The Husband (21 page)

She said, “What are you doing in the shower with your pajamas on?”

He felt like a lunatic but handled the situation with style.

“It feels different,” he said, stripping the wet top off, opening the door, and throwing the top at her, his bottoms following a moment later. He closed the door, soaped himself, and sang
Oklahoma!
and World War II songs, not caring that all those rousing words filtered through a voice which his mother had warned “should never sound a note out loud.”

At his breakfast place were perched the usual coffee and orange juice, and because he seemed to be feeling so good, Elizabeth asked if he wanted waffles, bacon, scrambled eggs, sausages, and he stopped the list at that point by saying yes, and she, enjoying it as much as he did, made waffles, bacon, scrambled eggs and sausages, putting them down on his greedy plate as each came off the stove, and he ate them all.

“Well!” she said when he had finished.

“Moderately well,” he said, smiling.

In front of the mirror he admired the way his light blue cotton shirt looked with his black, soft-finish suit, his best, both the shirt and the suit, chosen to complement the day.

“How would you like to walk all the way to work?” he asked. Elizabeth was quick to agree. A fine idea.

Peter didn’t use his usual brisk, near-trot way of getting to the next place fast; he sauntered, casually looking up at tall buildings he hadn’t noticed before, pointing out stray leaves tenacious on a wintered tree, quickening to a remembered story out of childhood he had not told Elizabeth before, aware but not greatly concerned about the fact that they were taking in the city at a country pace and that they were already late for work.

It was a few minutes past ten when they got out of the elevator. There were a few glances as they walked together, not separately as they might have on a more usual day, down the aisle, past the secretarial pool to Elizabeth’s office, where he wished her a good day, and then to his own.

He was startled: Paul was sitting at Peter’s desk.

“Tried to get you twice on the intercom,” he said, “then thought I’d come by to see what was up. It’s ten fifteen.”

“So it is,” said Peter, trying to sound casual, but the first note of fear struck.
Paul had never made a fuss about the time
. His executives frequently worked late into the evenings and on weekends when necessary, and came in early if there was reason, never in fact stopped thinking about the job really, and normal working hours had never been an issue as long as Peter could remember.

His secretary, Nancy, handed him some incoming mail, mainly interoffice memos.

When she left, Paul said, “Maybe we’d better talk in my office.”

Peter noticed the telephone message slip stuck on his pen, where he would be sure to notice it. In Nancy’s handwriting it said, “Jonathan called.”

“Could I make a call first?” Peter asked.

“Make it later,” said Paul. Peter followed him. Paul’s office door was closed behind them.

“Elizabeth is a nice girl,” Paul said.

“Yes,” said Peter, puzzled.

“And you’re a nice fellow,” said Paul.

“Thanks,” said Peter.

“You nice fellows and girls ought to leave your picnic baskets and get in on time,” said Paul, his voice honed to a slight sharpness. Paul was puffing away at his pipe. Peter liked the smell. His senses were still on the alert. He wanted to keep it that way, to stretch the day out calmly.

“I’m sorry we were late.”

“Now,” said Paul. He put the dummy of the TBC brochure in front of Peter. “Why do you think they turned that down?”

“Well,” said Peter, reflecting a moment, “the conception’s fine, we know that. They okayed it with enthusiasm. The design is good, not great, but TBC never went for the visually conspicuous. The copy is straight-forward, clear, the way Cary likes it, enticing only toward the very end. What do you think is wrong with it?”

“What’s wrong with it,” Paul said, “is that the client fired it back at us.”

“I think I know why,” said Peter.

“Go ahead,” said Paul. “I’m waiting.”

“Cary makes a big do about craftsmanship in mass production, but the fact is, he can’t produce a competitively priced industrial scale with his present setup. Sales are off, way off. His consumer scale makes people hate to step on it. That no-slip surface Cary put on feels lousy to bare feet, and most people weigh themselves in bare feet. We’ve told him that a dozen times. You have. I have. He’s sixty-six, insecure, and stubborn. His business is going downhill, and he’s probably been fishing around for advice. And since he won’t listen to advice that says his product line needs a drastic overhaul, he’s finding people who tell him the advertising and sales approach is wrong. He’s probably been interviewing agencies for a month or more. Maybe he’s even decided on one. But he’s also got a conscience. He’s been with us eight years, and the first five or six of them were great all around. So he’s decided to knock the brochure, and I think he’ll knock anything else we show him, green, white or pink, until he’s worked himself up to where he can overcome his instincts and fire us.”

Paul was silent for a minute.

“Why didn’t you say something before?”

“I thought you saw the message loud and clear. Besides, what can we do? Re-engineer his production line? Redesign his consumer models and tell him unless he bought our design he’d lose our agency? Paul, Cary and TBC are finished with this agency. He’s suiciding, and I don’t think either of us can stop it.”

Paul’s expression didn’t change during the ten-second silence. Finally he said, “I think it’s a lousy brochure.”

Peter unfolded his handkerchief and blew his nose to give him a moment to think. “Paul, the ground rule when I came here was, we could con the client if we agreed it was the only way to get through to him, but we’d never con each other. You know damn well it’s not the brochure!”

“Maybe,” said Paul slowly, “if you weren’t spending all your energies elsewhere, you’d have come up with a workable solution.”

Peter started to say something and stopped.
Don’t risk it.
Without Paul, no three hundred and thirty dollars every Monday.

“Maybe,” said Paul, “we haven’t been getting your best efforts lately.”

“You know what the problems are.”

“We’ve all got problems. We do our work anyway.”

“I have been doing my work, Paul.”

As he spoke, Peter remembered, out of the blue, how when he had first joined the firm, the hub of enterprise had been Paul, Big Susan, and a man named Finch. Finch was not only a gifted gabber, but a first-rate copywriter. Hadn’t Paul and Susan and Finch gone on a client trip to the Coast and come back earlier than expected, and wasn’t that shortly before Finch left without a word to anyone, packing up his wife and three kids and taking on a job somewhere in Virginia as ad manager for a small electronics company?

Hadn’t the next triumvirate been Paul, Big Susan, and Bud Blacker? That had lasted a long time. And they had gone on not one but many trips together. And then Bud had had his heart attack, stayed away three months, and then retired to the Southwest somewhere.

Was
that
the pattern? It wasn’t the brochure, it was the trip to Chicago.

“Peter, I think you and Susan and I ought to pay a visit to TBC and swing Cary around.”

Cary wasn’t swingable.
He
was.

Outside, pencil lines of rain were coming down, spotting the window.

“Take your time,” said Paul. “Think about it.”

“I don’t think we can save that account,” said Peter, the day cracking around him.

“I think we should
try
,” said Paul. He paused for emphasis. “There’s a lot at stake.”

Peter knew how much there was at stake. Slowly he got up out of his chair. He thought for a moment. Thinking was useless. Could he threaten to reveal Paul’s voyeurism? How? And who would care? Maybe if some clients—which?—heard Paul was kinky they’d be put off, but that’s…

Peter thought the word “blackmail.” Wasn’t that what Paul was doing to him? Play my special little game of ball, or else you’re fired? Also blackballed with other agencies? Anybody hiring him after ten years with Dale, Bowne would want to talk to Paul, get his views on why Peter left. What would Paul say?

It didn’t matter what Paul could bring himself to say. Peter couldn’t talk about Paul to anyone else and live with it. Maybe Elizabeth, some day—but not a business connection.

He stopped at the closed door of Paul’s office.

“I’m sorry, Paul, I can’t make that scene.”

“What scene?”

Don’t kill it
, came the warning.

“I mean, I don’t think anything will change Cary’s mind now.”

“At least we’ll know we’ve tried.”

“No, Paul.”

“If we lose TBC’s billings, it’ll be awfully hard justifying your salary.”

“There are a helluva lot of other things around here that could use my time,” he ran on, stopping only because he knew he was off the subject.

“Sure there are other accounts. But you’re the highest-paid creative talent we’ve got. It doesn’t make economic sense to use you on penny-ante accounts.”

“I don’t think you should. I think—”

“Last evening,” Paul interrupted, “I ran into Mike Cohen. Very smart copy chief.”

Peter nodded agreement. “He’s young but very good.”

“We stopped for a drink and ended up having dinner. I think he’d come over for about five thousand dollars less than you take down.”

“You’d can me for five thousand?”

“I wouldn’t dismiss five thousand dollars.”

“What about everything I’ve done around here for ten years?”

“I wouldn’t dismiss sentiment, either.”

“Sentiment?”

Paul came around his desk and over to the door and put his hand on Peter’s shoulder. “You’re a good man, Peter. I’d hate to lose you.”

Peter tried to disregard the hand on his shoulder, to concentrate on trying to understand. Despite Freud, it was still hard to see sex as the pivot. God’s magnificent trick for procreating, the needle of desire bringing people together until they could find other common grounds for living together, or finding that the grounds didn’t exist and so sex deployed them for another mate. How many turns could God’s trick take? The cocksman, the table hopper who cannot sit still long enough to make a friend, much less a mate. The numberless Lesbians who married and even reproduced, making God’s trick work both ways. And the homosexuals who settled for being wives to strong women, with an occasional excursion underground when the needling got strong. Well, that was all practically normal now, wasn’t it, compared to the really kinky ones? Now here was Paul, the pitiful voyeur who was going to fire him when all Peter’s defenses were down, when he couldn’t take firing unless he played the kinky game. Paul’s hand came off the shoulder.

And why not play the game if you knew it was only a game? Millions did it, one way or the other. Look at the kids today; they tried everything and weren’t struck down by bolts from heaven. The wife swappers were thriving in the middle-aged suburbs. Why not play the kinky game with Paul and Big Susan, at least until the mess at home quieted down, the economic pressure was off? Would Elizabeth have to know, and if she found out, would it make a big enough difference to change their lives?

Would it change his life? That was the important thing.

Paul seemed to be smiling. Was he sensing the possibility of a victory?

“Let me show you something,” said Paul, turning the lock on the office door. Paul opened the locked drawer on his desk, took out an accordion file full of photographs, and spread them out on his desk.

It was quite a collection. Peter had heard about the collection, but he had never seen it.

The scenes of unorthodox sex shimmered in front of Peter.
Kill it
came the cry inside his head,
kill it
, he’s trying to show you how normal he is, how others do it. And suddenly, with no clear notion of what was happening, Peter found himself raising up the side of the desk until the photographs began to slither off, with Paul clumsily trying to catch them. And then, unable to stop, Peter kept raising the edge of the desk until it was nearly vertical, with a strength he didn’t know he had. His arms screamed with the effort, and then the desk was going over with a tremendous crash, and instantly there was a hubbub of voices outside Paul’s locked door trying to get in.

It was a miracle that Paul escaped injury. His face glowed a fierce red. He spluttered sounds. Finally, “You bastard, you dirty bastard.”

Peter, his right arm now throbbing excruciatingly, a sharp pain thrusting across the knuckles, thought of the irony of Paul calling him a dirty bastard, and maybe the truth of it, at the same time glad he—his instincts, perhaps his fear—had made the decision.

There was hammering on the door now, and Paul had to unlock it and open it a wedge to say, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” and close and lock it again, but not before the eye-popping girls had caught a glimpse of the mess inside.

Without a word, Peter helped Paul right the desk. The edge that had hit the ground had cracked. They gathered up the photographs, and Paul stuffed them into the accordion file, but the locked drawer on his desk wouldn’t lock now, and Paul cursed.