The Husband (28 page)

While Peter and Elizabeth had worked on the same account on occasion, they now for the first time were put on an account together at inception, he handling copy, she handling art. And what an account! Paul had made a presentation to a beer company that was sixteenth or seventeenth in the New York area—and that mainly by accident. If a grocer’s hand happened on that brand when someone ordered a six-pack of beer without specifying, they got Brew, for that was its unfortunate name. Unlike the brands with a history, its life had been short; it had been advertised with obvious rhymes like “true” and “new,” which sold nothing to anybody. The brewery was owned by Hans Christian Seitz, an immigrant, self-made, who admitted to Paul during their first interview that more than half of Brew’s dollar volume came from his truckmen passing bills to tavernkeepers to get them to take in kegs. Seitz himself was perfectly content to go on in this way, using bribery as his main advertising medium, but was increasingly incapacitated by multiple sclerosis and was gradually turning over active command of his small brewery to his son, Hans Christian Seitz II, just twenty-seven and only a couple of years out of Harvard Business School. Seitz II had devoted his post-Harvard time to studying the business by riding the trucks with the men, visiting bars, and seeing what actually happened at the point of sale. He had told Papa Seitz that the company’s problems would be a classic case at the Business School, and that unless the old man found a new way of selling his product, the business would stagnate. Papa hadn’t taken too kindly to “stagnate,” even after the word was explained by Seitz II as meaning lack of growth. After all, hadn’t he raised a family in comfort on that kind of stagnation? But what was the point of sending your son to Harvard Business School if you didn’t listen? And anyway, the old man was halfway to helplessness, and he didn’t want his son taking an executive job with a competing brewery. So he agreed to listen to marketing presentations from several interested agencies. Paul saw Brew as a possibility for an experiment he had wanted to try for a long time.

Paul’s pitch was hard to beat. He agreed to try a radically different campaign, and if sales didn’t increase by at least 25 percent by the end of that period, Paul would refund the agency’s full commission, and since the agency would obviously incur costs against that commission, it would take a bath. It sounded “challenging” to young Harvard. What sounded even better to him was Peter’s part of the presentation.

“Sir,” said Peter, addressing the young man in his father’s office in the brewery, figuring that since he was going to tell him how to run his business, he’d start with “sir.” The boy took it well. “I haven’t tasted your beer, and I may not before this campaign is over. I don’t like beer very much, and in any event, I have never found any appreciable difference between the brands that are bottled in Brooklyn. All the campaigns I’ve seen blink the fact that beers made locally taste the same. What I’d like to do is come right out and say that.”

“Go on,” said the tolerant young man, who actually felt in a panic about how to deal with that home truth.

“I’d like to prepare a TV commercial which says right out all beers made with the same water taste pretty much the same. That’s the attention grabber. Then we’ll show them the new Brew bottle, which isn’t a bottle at all but a glass with a lid.”

Peter unveiled for both Seitzes—but playing to young Harvard—Elizabeth’s grand contribution to the scheme, an attractive glass with a lid like a jam jar, not a bottle cap. “All you do, says our commercial, is get it from the fridge, take the lid off, so, and drink. Don’t reach for a glass and a beer, reach for a Brew. And if you don’t drink beer from a glass, wouldn’t you rather drink out of a Brew bottle than a beer bottle? Moreover—and this little point will appeal to the women who buy the beer at the supermarket—the glass you get with Brew becomes a permanent asset in the kitchen. If the children break glasses frequently—actually it’s the women who break the glasses, but we don’t say so—you’ll have a constant new supply of glasses when you buy Brew beer. Brew costs the same as other beers, but you get six free glasses with every six-pack.”

The kid from Harvard was stunned because he had heard all the stuff about creativity in business, but this was the first concrete example that had excited his glands.

D-day for the campaign was the first day the new bottle glasses were distributed, and nobody had to wait ninety days for the results, which were immediate and astonishing. The problem was not how to sell enough Brew, or even to brew enough Brew—they put the brewery on three shifts to meet the demand—but how to get enough of the new bottles fast enough.

“With the profits you’ll make this year,” Paul told Harvard, “you’ll be able to buy a glass plant. After all, that’s what people are buying from you—glass.”

Success makes laughter easy. They laughed together, and Peter, enjoying the triumph, even drank a glass of Brew, which, as he had said, tasted no different.

To celebrate, Paul took Peter and Tony Cavallo to lunch at the Baron.

“You know,” said Paul, looking around at half a hundred tables of executives lunching mostly with each other, “anybody in this room who’s not in advertising knocks it as a lousy business to be in. They just don’t know the feel of finding a client with a big problem, dreaming up a solution and watching it work. Some of these guys have been canning tomatoes for twenty years. Same tomatoes, same cans.”

“Boring,” said Tony Cavallo.

“Right,” said Peter. “Here’s to advertising, the great horse race.” He raised his water glass for a toast.

“Hey, we can do better than that,” said Paul, signaling the waiter, who turned on a quick fawn. “Three bottles of Brew.” He had to explain twice more before the waiter understood it was a brand of beer. Finally Paul said, “Check the bartender,” and the waiter vanished, only to return a minute later with the news that they had “Budweiser, Schlitz, Heineken, and Lowenbrau. Which, please?”

The three of them had a good laugh. “Oh, well,” Paul said to the uncomprehending waiter, “we do well enough with the six-packs. Let’s have three Beefeater martinis, which is what we wanted in the first place.”

“On the rocks,” said Tony.

“With peel,” said Peter.

“Three Beefeaters on the rocks with a twist,” said Paul, sending the waiter off to the bar.

“We really should have Elizabeth here,” said Tony. “That glass she designed is a beaut.”

A moment elapsed while Elizabeth’s name registered its different thoughts in each of them.

“It takes a good art director not to let the bright ideas get by,” said Peter.

“I noticed you didn’t let her get by, either,” said Tony.

All three of them laughed nervously.

“They say you’re going to marry her,” said Tony.

“Who’s they?”

“You know, the office, talk.”

“Maybe that’s personal,” Paul chimed in, trying to be helpful.

“Yes,” said Peter, “marriage is kind of personal. Actually,” he continued, “I’m still married.”

Tony and Paul laughed at that.

“Let’s leave eventually for eventually,” said Paul.

“You’re going to get thrown out of the union if you marry her,” said Tony as the waiter put the drinks down in front of them.

Paul raised his glass. “To Brew, the unobtainable,” he said.

“What union?” asked Peter.

“The union of all us fellows who have a broad on the side,” said Tony. “It’s finking on the fellows to ditch the wife and marry the broad.”

“You mean the married Mafia will get me?” asked Peter.

Any reference to the Mafia always angered Tony.

“Why don’t we order?” said Paul, noticing that Tony was already halfway through the oversized martini. He signaled for menus.

He and Peter both knew Tony’s wife. Tony had married her while he still lived in Little Italy up in the Bronx. He was just out of Evander Childs High School, messengering for an agency and studying art at Pratt Institute at night, too busy to date lots of girls and so concentrating on one, the only daughter of near neighbors, who assumed in time that their daughter would marry nice-looking Tony Cavallo. Not to disappoint their assumptions, or those of his parents either, Tony married Mary and they had five kids in eight years, by which time Tony was making his name as a commercial artist and his wife decided that they needed something more reliable than the rhythm method.

By the time Mary and Tony officially stopped procreating, Mary, to whom spaghetti was soul food, had broadened in beam, chest, and chin to the point where Tony was embarrassed to be seen publicly with her. She looked so much older and, in professional company, so inappropriate.

Mary was recuperating from Cavallo number five when Tony met the Widow, which is how he always referred to her. Actually the Widow was about twenty-five then, pretty as hell, safely Italian, and no children; her husband had been killed in an accident on the Queensboro Bridge. The Widow appealed to Tony’s aesthetic sense—a lithe, quick body, black eyes in a beautiful dark face.

“Tony,” said Peter, “how often do you see the Widow, once a week?”

“Who do you think I am, that old creep in Any Wednesday? Three, four times a week, sometimes every day.”

“Weekends?”

“Sometimes.”

“You still have time for a mercy fuck for Mary once in a while?”

“Listen, you’re the guy that’s getting the divorce, remember?”

“Why don’t we order?” said Paul, whose arrangement with Big Susan had never involved marriage or divorce.

Paul ordered a sirloin on the rare side, Peter a junior steak medium, and Tony gave the waiter an elaborate order in Italian for his own special formula of fettucini.

“No hard feelings?” asked Tony.

“Of course not,” said Peter. “Nothing intended.”

“Sure,” said Tony.

“Do you see the kids often?” Peter asked.

“Sure,” said Tony.

“I mean, aren’t they asleep when you get home from the Widow?”

“Who comes home?” said Tony, laughing mischievously. “Listen, they know who their father is. That’s what counts.”

“Doesn’t the Widow want any kids?”

“She’s got enough on her hands at confession. What do you want, a couple of bastards to get the priest all upset?”

Lightly, lightly
, Peter cautioned himself.

“Does Mary know about the Widow?”

For a moment, Peter thought Tony wasn’t going to answer. “Sure,” he said, “you think she’s stupid? Better that way,” he said, twirling the fettucini between fork and spoon. “It keeps me off her back. I mean her front,” said Tony, laughing it up, Paul joining in but wishing the conversation would stop. “Listen,” Tony went on, “I must know over a hundred guys in this business, or some other business, I mean know personally, who got a woman on the side. What’s so unusual?”

“Nothing,” said Peter. “Just old-fashioned, I guess. Tony?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you love the Widow?”

“I think,” said Paul, “the company is indebted to you both for a first-rate campaign for Brew.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Tony, and the conversation about wives and widows and children was laid gently to rest, except in Peter’s mind, which, as they talked about how the principles of the Brew campaign could be applied to other products, tumbled mercilessly with the thought that he had a 2:30 appointment with J. P. Hill, the lawyer he had hired to negotiate the separation agreement with Jack.

They were still over coffee when Peter excused himself. “I have a two thirty date on the outside,” he said, getting up.

“Good luck,” said Paul.

“What luck?” asked Tony.

“Oh, he’s seeing that lawyer about the property settlement.”

Peter wished Paul had kept his big mouth shut. Tony motioned Peter back to the table. Peter wanted to continue out, but knew that Tony was quite capable of announcing his message across the Baron’s dining room. He came back to the table but didn’t sit down.

“I tell you,” said Tony, “my way is a lot easier on the nerves.”

*

Hill was a little man with rimless glasses who had been recommended for his savvy on marital affairs, his willingness to take on husbands, sure losers under the law, and most particularly for his cool, which Peter welcomed as an offset to his own lack of composure.

Peter was only a couple of minutes late, and Hill saw him right away.

“Look,” said Hill, pumping Peter’s hand and gesturing toward a chair, “this isn’t going to be comfortable for you. I don’t mean the chair, I mean what we’ve got to talk about. But it’ll go a lot better if you let me lead, you follow, and try to keep calm even if you don’t feel calm. I’ve got the facts. I’ve had my meeting with what’s-his-name—”

“Jack Baxter.”

“Right, and what we’ve got to do now is work out the strategy. You been a soldier?”

“World War Two,” said Peter, feeling uncomfortable.

“Well, this battling’s different because you can’t win. No husband does. The law for husbands stinks, but it’s the law. The wife gets custody. You get visitation rights, but they have to be negotiated, and she’s going to make visiting the kids as difficult as possible. She’ll use every loophole to block you. Remember that for later, too. She’ll also get most of what you’ve got—I’m talking property now, and money—and you’ll get nothing of what she’s got. She can be the most able-bodied woman in the world. She can work; it doesn’t matter. You continue to support her. That’s alimony. And you support the kids until they’re twenty-one. That’s child support. If you miss alimony payments or child support, you can be locked up in jail. You’re not supposed to go to jail for debt, but the jails in this country are full of husbands who don’t or can’t pay alimony. That’s the system. You can duck the system by going abroad, changing your name, and maybe she can’t find you. Maybe. But you’ve got a life to pick up here, so you stand your ground. What we do is try to keep her from getting everything she wants to get. If you think that’s all unfair, I agree with you, but until the divorce laws become fairer—and you and I will both be dead by that time—we play it this way.”