“It’s brilliant,” Roman said. “With the right music for the dummy spot, it’ll save the motherfucking day. Right now I’m thinking either Sinead O’Connor singing ‘You Do Something to Me’ or Robert Palmer’s ‘Simply Irresistible.’”
John, though, found this whole proposal too theoretical, too self-referential, and anyway the more attention it garnered, the more of a link it would create in the public consciousness between wearing Doucette’s clothes and looking like a dateless outcast. He, too, had a pet theory, which ran like this: in a market glutted with products of every sort, where the selling itself was no longer a person-to-person transaction, the only way to make one product rise above its competitors was to find a way to link that product, however paradoxically, with the notion of individuality, nonconformity, the assertion of self. His idea was a black-tie wedding at which the groom emerges wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and black jeans, smiling coolly, while his future in-laws look on in horror. He thought Roman could come up with some line about how the truly well-dressed man is comfortable at any occasion.
“I know it’s kind of conservative,” John said, as Roman, eyes squeezed shut, held his head between his hands as if trying to keep it from exploding, “but let me just remind you that this is a pitch, that we have to sell this idea not to a bunch of your East Village film-studies-major friends sitting on a couch watching television but to the marketing director from Doucette, who lives in Wilkes-Barre for God’s sake, who’s a member of the Christian Coalition for all we know.”
Variations on this argument and on the ideas behind them took up a week. Then on Monday morning John arrived to find Roman holding a pink memo he had found pinned to the door of their office, signed by Canning. “To the Doucette teams,” it read. “Effective immediately, the upcoming account pitch is placed under the supervision of Mal Osbourne. All communications with the client go through him, all ideas are to be approved by him, including the final presentation. Mal will run the pitch in Philadelphia personally. He’ll be in touch with all of you directly. That is all.”
The four teams met for lunch at Zen Palate.
“What does this mean?” Roman said. “I wasn’t sure this guy was still alive. He hasn’t done any creative work I know about in three or four years. Is he coming out of retirement or what?”
“Maybe that’s it,” said Andrea, an artist. About to turn thirty, she was lately enamored of a kind of schoolgirl look she couldn’t quite bring off; she wore her hair that day in two pigtails tied with pieces of yarn. “I think it’s kind of exciting, actually. It sure jazzes up the idea of working on this account. Mal Osbourne is one of the big names in all of advertising — maybe not lately. He’s one of the reasons I came to this agency in the first place.”
“But why the note?” said her partner Dale, a copywriter, a pallid young man just two or three years out of college. “Isn’t this the kind of thing Canning might normally take the time to explain to us personally, instead of coming in on Sunday to leave us a note? I heard he wasn’t even in the office today.”
“He can’t be too happy about it,” Andrea said, “if he refuses to talk about it like this.” The way she began speaking before Dale was quite finished brought back to John the memory of his own brief and unhappy working partnership with her, when he first started at the agency almost four years ago. “It must have been forced on him somehow.”
“Jesus,” Dale said, “I feel like one of those — what did they call those people, back in the eighties, those people you’d see on like Nightline, talking about what it meant that they were playing funeral music on Radio Moscow, or who stood next to who at the May Day parade?”
Roman finished chewing hurriedly. “Kremlinologists,” he said. Everyone nodded.
John was the only one not saying much. He was embarrassed by a premonition he had that all this was related to him in some fateful way. He had never told anyone, not even Roman, about the morning he had spent looking at art with Osbourne last spring — the real genesis of their meeting was so unlikely that John felt certain no one would believe he hadn’t engineered it himself somehow, and he had decided to keep it a harmless secret rather than risk being doubted and gossiped about. Right after it happened, Vanessa had of course demanded to know everything: he began by swearing her to secrecy, but with no real faith in Vanessa’s word, he had then lied about it anyway, downplaying every interesting thing about it. Now he was newly nervous that it would get out. If the story circulated even in the most watered-down version that John had spent four clandestine hours one Saturday in the back seat of a car with Mal Osbourne, everyone on the Doucette account, everyone in the agency, would surely start assaulting him with questions about Osbourne’s tastes, Osbourne’s nature, and when he couldn’t answer, they would accuse him of protecting some mysterious access of his own.
Over the next three weeks, Osbourne never once appeared in the CLO offices. He left no procedural instructions for any of the creative teams and no word on how anyone might get in touch with him. The portion of the staff charged with saving the Doucette account was near mutiny. Dale and Andrea were delegated to go to Canning’s office and demand that the pitch be handed over to someone else. Canning was a man of strong, ephemeral passions, and this year it was fishing; fly rods leaned against the glass wall behind his desk, through which the bend of the Hudson just beyond the George Washington Bridge was barely visible. Slumped at his desk, speaking with his eyes closed and his fingers massaging his forehead, Canning told them wearily that since Mal Osbourne was technically a full partner, he couldn’t be removed from a particular project if he didn’t want to go, any more than Osbourne could kick Canning off an account if he had a mind to. All Canning could do was to repeat Osbourne’s assurance that he would be responsible for the final presentation in Philadelphia — which did, yes, include his actually showing up for it. Canning had Mal’s email address, and he promised to send another desperate message, though if the response to his prior desperate messages was anything to go by, he said, he might as well put it in a bottle and drop it in the cyber-sea.
The teams were more dejected than ever when this conversation was relayed to them. Something in the tone of Canning’s promised message to his partner must have changed, though, for the next morning there were email messages for all of them, informing them of a specific date on which a messenger would appear at CLO to pick up all their final storyboards, artwork, magazine copy, videotapes, and market analyses, and would take these packages to Osbourne for his final selection.
John, who had gradually forgotten about pleasing the client in his pursuit of the enigma of what might please Osbourne, gave in at least in part to Roman’s vision of the anti-campaign: he hired a photographer (“Too bad we can’t get Diane Arbus,” Roman said), and asked bemused casting directors to send over glossies of the lumpiest, most unglamorous, least photogenic people they could find. “They don’t even have to be clients,” John said. “Maybe there’s someone who works in your office …” John and Roman picked eight photos and then staged and filmed a fashion show, laying in music and the sound of wild applause for the dummy TV spot to be used in the pitch, if their idea was the one Osbourne chose in the end. Osbourne sent no further word. On the appointed day, the four teams came out to the lobby one by one with their packaged materials, and waited there, staring at the elevator door, unconvinced that the promised messenger would actually arrive. At around four o’clock he came, a teenager with a hand truck: he gathered up the bulky packages and immediately got back into the elevator, looking nervously over his shoulder at the eight strangers glaring at him resentfully, jealously. As soon as the door closed again, Roman bolted to the receptionist’s desk and grabbed the receipt out of her hand. It had no destination address.