Before I made a move, though, I sat for maybe twenty seconds, failing to feel my heart beat, though at that moment I wanted to. The feeling of the inconsequence of whatever I would do, of anything I would pick up or think about or turn to see was at that moment being set in the very bone marrow. How does one get through this? I asked myself. By doing something that is at hand to be done was the best answer I could give; that and not saying anything about the feeling to anyone. It was the old mortal, helpless, time-terrified human feeling, just the same. I had had a touch or two before, though it was more likely to come with my family, for I could find ways to keep busy at the studio, or at least to seem busy, which was harder, in some cases, than doing real work. But I was really frightened, this time. It had me for sure, and I knew that if I managed to get up, through the enormous weight of lassitude, I would still move to the water cooler, or speak to Jack Waskow or Thad, with a sense of being someone else, some poor fool who lives as unobserved and impotent as a ghost, going through the only motions it has.
I picked up a rough I had done of the Kitts’ ad. If there was one thing I felt a reasonable certainty about, it was my ability to get the elements of a layout into some kind of harmonious relationship. I didn’t as a rule like too traditional, cheap Boraxy ads, with screaming typeforms and an obvious and chillingly commercial use of sex, nor did I like the overly “creative” kind of ad, with some farfetched or gimmicked-up formula or calculated craziness. I liked harmoniousness and a situation where the elements didn’t fight with each other or overwhelm each other. I had won a couple of modest awards for art direction around town, where admittedly the competition was not of the first class, and they were hanging in the office. I took a close look at the Kitts’ layout, which was for a line of artificial silk women’s underwear called Kitt’n Britches. It showed a girl in nothing but panties with her back to the camera looking over her shoulder. As we had planned it, a kitten’s head was to appear under her chin as she held it, and I was a little worried that, with a photograph large enough to show the britches, the cat’s head might be too small. We could crop in, of course; we didn’t actually need to show the girl’s feet, as the account man had said, but I kind of wanted to. I like feet, for one thing, and a whole being in a photograph is in an odd way more effective, a lot of times, than someone who has been cut up with scissors. We had gone back and forth with the agency about this, and with the Kitts’ sales manager, an incredible countrified jerk who had originally had the idea of using a real girl in a situation like the one in the Coppertone ad, where the Scotty is pulling the little girl’s bathing suit down off her bare behind. “If we did it with a cat,” he said, “it would also show that the pants won’t run or tear.” The agency and I had managed to talk him out of this, explaining that a reputable trade book wouldn’t run it, and we couldn’t find a decent-looking girl who would pose for it, either. He agreed with us, finally, but he still wanted more obvious sex in the ad than I did, and had told me when we broke up that “Whoever we get should really fill out those panties.”
I fiddled with the elements of the rough, bringing the girl forward and moving her back, until I thought I had what was a good compromise, with the type centering around the girl’s hips. Who will she be? I wondered. Whose body will try to fill out these lines I’ve put down? I went in to look at the studio.
Thad was there, moving things and people around with his expert, interior-decorator’s formality and fussiness. The model was sitting in a camp chair, shading her eyes against the lights. She was in a checked black-and-white robe that—at least to me—had something unexpectedly carnival-like about it, and she looked nothing like a carnival girl, thank God. Around her the room seemed to swarm and tremble with men, though there were actually only five of us, including the lighting technician. Thad’s secretary, a mean-mouthed little woman named Wilma, came in with the kitten we’d got from the SPCA, holding it in the crook of an arm as though she were going to be photographed herself. Max Fraley, one of the paste-up men, went to get a saucer of milk for it. I sat on the edge of a table and undid my tie. Inside the bright hardship of the lights was a peculiar blue, wholly painful, unmistakably man-made, unblinkable thing that I hated. It reminded me of prisons and interrogations, and that thought jumped straight at me. That was one side of it, all right, and the other was pornography. I thought of those films you see at fraternity parties and in officers’ clubs where you realize with terror that when the girl drops the towel the camera, is not going to drop with it discreetly, as in old Hollywood films, following the bare feet until they hide behind a screen, but is going to stay and when the towel falls, move in; that it is going to destroy someone’s womanhood by raping her secrecy; that there is going to be nothing left.
Thad asked the girl to stand up. Her feet were strong-toed and healthy and a little tomboyish; I would have bet money that she came from a farm. She had a fine, open, gray-eyed face with a few freckles. She was somebody I didn’t mind looking in the eyes. And straight into them, too, so that if she’d permit it, the look would go deep. I did this, because on the spur of the moment I wanted to. There was a peculiar spot, a kind of tan slice, in her left eye, and it hit me with, I knew right away, strong powers; it was not only recallable, but would come back of itself. One hand, also strong and quiet, was holding the throat of her robe closed, and she put her head back—very far back, almost like an acrobat—and shook her hair so that it hung free of her neck. All at once two more secretaries materialized like nurses or prison matrons, all revolving around the model. Thad had her stand in the chalk marks from around which we had cleared the newspapers. Her feet gripped the cold cork floor. She held out her arms, and Wilma slipped off her robe. She had soft long legs, not as muscular as I would have thought, with those feet, but very shapely and harmonious, though it struck me that they were not firm enough to last for long. Her bare back had a helpless, undeveloped look about it, and this seemed to me more womanly and endearing than anything else about her except her eye. She filled the Kitt’n Britches well enough, but there was nothing especially provocative about the way she did it; she might have been someone’s sister, and that was not at all the effect we wanted. Not knowing exactly how I wanted to change the pose, or if it could be changed, I stepped over and touched her.
She turned and looked into my face at close range, and the gold-glowing mote fastened on me; it was more gold than any real gold could possible be; it was alive, and it saw me. Standing this close, she changed completely; she looked like someone who had come to womanhood in less than a minute. Her hands were folded across her breasts in a way that managed to give the effect of casualness, and Max was not quite sure of how to hand her the cat. She took it with one hand, and in doing so, protecting herself with the other, she simply took her left breast in her hand, and the sight of that went through me, a deep and complex male thrill, as if something had touched me in the prostate. She fixed her feet in the marks, wavering for a moment throwing light off her shoulders, the filaments of the bulbs spitting and buzzing about her, and then seemed to settle.
We got what Thad thought might be some good stuff, though he really didn’t believe, he said, that the girl was good enough to use again. I went back to the office and did something I hadn’t done since the early days of the studio. I brainstormed with myself for the rest of the afternoon. Nothing much came of it, but my mind was jumping quickly from one thing to another, and the associations were very good ones. I left a sheaf of roughs with Thad and told him I needed Friday off to do some work around the house. He didn’t argue with me. We had made it as it was; we had made it.