“Jack, do you think Erik will want Daddy’s sweaters?” she asked. I couldn’t see my brother wearing any sweater Dad had ever worn. He also lived in Florida, but pointing this out would only lead my mother to accuse me of being flip.
“You’ll have to ask him.”
On my way outside I passed through the modern quadrant of kitchen that Dad had built onto the side of the house, which had been in the family since 1902. Survivor of two tornadoes, according to family lore. Hanging on the peg by the door was his hunting vest, Mossy Oak camo, the pockets still bulging with shotgun shells. On another peg hung a wooden turkey call and duck-cloth bibs. His work boots neatly twinned on the shoe rack, covered in creamy streaks of last fall’s dried mud.
On the porch, I dialed Gruber and walked farther into the backyard twilight so my voice wouldn’t carry. I stared out over the eight hundred acres of corn and soy my father had been forced to sell as the profits in small plots dwindled. He would have had to grow the farm to an enormous size to compete with Cargill. “You farm small, you might as well take a vow of poverty,” he’d muttered to Mom just before the sale that changed his life.
A foreign haze hung in the winter air. I thought of “walking the beans” with Erik and Allie. Dad would hand us machetes to hack away at weeds in the soybean rows, one of the only chores he ever made us do. Erik hated it. He hated everything about the farm.
“How you doing, Jackie?” asked Gruber, my art director. It was eerie. The voice tech on the new generation of phones made it sound like the person was standing next to you.
“We saw this coming. P&G thinks it can rebrand something that’s more structural than they realize. Fine. Let them try.”
“McClann is pretty pissed off,” he said. “She thought we could hold on to them.”
No matter how successful you got in this business, you were only measured by your most recent victory or defeat, and this implosion lay heaped at my feet. Maybe the “Live Simply” campaign had been defeatist and uninspired, as Beth had warned, but my specialty was steering into the skid, and that’s what I’d done.
“All Beth needs to worry about is Thursday’s pitch.”
“Are you two even on speaking terms?”
The people with whom I wasn’t on speaking terms were my brother and the man whose miscarriage I’d had the year before. Beth McClann and I were just competitive.
“We’re fine. How’s the art coming along?”
“We’re ready. Beth doesn’t like that you took two days off before this pitch.”
“My mother’s bereaved and my selfish siblings won’t handle anything. Tell her I’ll be good to go. I’m driving back first thing tomorrow.”
“He’ll be there, by the way.”
“Who?”
“Who else? Wimpel. Dark Arts himself.”
I hung up but stayed outside a moment, hugging myself in the chill. To the south, the three large grain bins that once stored the corn and soy no longer looked like skyscrapers as they had in my childhood. To the north were the two Morton sheds that held my dad’s tools, equipment, his tractor and wagon. There’d been a barn that my great-grandfather built, but when I was in junior high it blew apart in a storm. An acrid smell hung in the air now. The remnants of a dust storm coming up from the plains, carrying a fog across Amber, Iowa. I thought of what Allie had told me: that Dad had been seeing the woman from church even at the end. She’d come to the hospital when my mother wasn’t there.
When I returned to the house, my mom had CNN on, and I couldn’t help but stop and watch, as the anchor reported on a once-famous actor who’d just legally changed his name.
The next day, on the plane from O’Hare to LaGuardia, I overheard two middle-aged women talking about the actor. I ordered a screwdriver and instead of scanning through content on the VR set, I listened to the two women. He’s gone full cuckoo clock, they said.
I tried to think if I’d ever told anyone the story. Maybe Trish, before she moved to Naperville and our friendship dried up. I could picture us drinking wine in her last apartment in the city, her jaw on the floor when I divulged, but then it also had the tinge of an invented memory. Maybe I’d never told anyone.
Eventually, I put on headphones and opened the file on my AR glasses. I looked over the artwork and my notes. Stirring in my gut, the anticipation of the pitch at least distracted me from all the raucous hurt banging the walls for my attention. I messaged Gruber: There’s still too much green in here. Green’s a dead brand.
He wrote back, The earth is not without shades of green to it.
Darken it. A forest green. Not a limp “recycle more” green. Make that blue of the water pop.
When measuring grief, I’m always surprised by what lingers and what dissipates. That night I thought often of the actor—how his eyes had grown sad and wet in that violet bar—and occasionally about Procter & Gamble, and almost not at all about my father.
Everyone from our agency met an hour in advance in the creamy Manhattan lobby of Palacio-Wimpel to go over the game plan, and how to pivot if my “unorthodox approach,” as McClann called it, bombed.
The way I saw it, our team felt fifty-fifty on this bid. Linda Holiday, our global chief creative officer, and Darnell Greene, our chief strategy officer, had backed my approach. McClann had fought it every step of the way, and seeing as how it was her account, this had produced a month of turbulence and backbiting in the office. Our CEO, Patrick Yeats, only a year into the job, had a consummate poker face. It was my first pitch with him in the room, and I couldn’t read where his head was at. I’d come up in the company under Linda, a chain-smoking, twice-divorced munchkin spitfire who claimed she’d never actually had a good idea in all her years in advertising but knew how to spot secret artists when she saw them. We became close, and she mentored me to never think of the audience. Let the work speak.
“My question,” said McClann, pointing to Gruber, “is do we keep him in the room?”
As expected, Gruber showed up to a meeting of professionals wearing a short-sleeve denim shirt buttoned to his neck. The tattoos coating his arms glowed darkly, and the word written across the right ridge of his jaw that looked almost like an odd birthmark: COLLIDE. Gruber had been my right hand for two years.
“He’s my art director,” I said. “This pitch wouldn’t exist without him.”
“These aren’t the kind of clients who want to see Post Malone,” said Darnell.
“It’s meeting theater,” I explained. “Part of the client problem is generational. Gruber represents the demographic that grew up not trusting them.”
“You’re the meeting theater,” said Yeats. “A young, attractive woman who calls to mind a kind of…” he spun his hands around in the air, not in a hurry to get to his point, “Kate Morris for the rational set.”
“She Who Must Not Be Named,” said Darnell, and he laughed at his own joke.
The debate went around for a bit. Finally, I interrupted Beth McClann to say, “Gruber stays. I need him in case there are questions about the art.”
McClann glared at me. Over the years, you learn to say things in such a way that people stop arguing with you.
These corporate boardrooms always gave off a sense of desperation. They are spaces meant to demonstrate wealth and control, but no matter how historic the client, the room and the people in it are ephemeral, trying to hold on to the market share that allows them the skylight and high-end seating. This particular boardroom required a long, supervised walk through the tight security of Palacio-Wimpel, the PR firm specializing in crisis management. Then it was our choice of bottled water or coffee and a tray of fruit and pastries that no one touched. The Sustainable Future Coalition was an unprecedented black box of money that counted among its members the National Association of Manufacturers, the Aluminum Association, GM, Ford, four agribusiness firms, several railroad companies, a dozen electric utilities, fifteen major real estate developers, three private security and logistics firms, including the behemoths of the field, Sentry and Xuritas, and every major player in the oil, coal, and gas sectors, from primary energy developers to the associated industries that serviced exploration and transportation of fuels. We shook hands with several junior-level railbirds, two middle-aged men, a tight-lipped Asian woman, and the president of the SFC, former Exxon chief Tom Duncan-Michaels. They were led into the room and shown around the table by Dark Arts himself. Though I’d seen him before in some of our HoloChat meetings, in person Fred Wimpel reminded me of the actor. They had the same kind of faux-rugged handsomeness that was likely more the product of fighting off middle age through Botox and light plastic surgery than it was honest weathering. He wore a short brown beard streaked with gray. Despite his and his firm’s reputation, he didn’t demand attention in the pre-meeting scrum of handshakes. When he reached me, he put his hand on my elbow. “I’m a big fan of your work.” His voice was unexpectedly high and melodic for a man I was certain had Sun Tzu on his office bookshelf. “I’ve been showing Tom and Emii what Sine qua non did for Adidas. Not to mention your work for the Pentagon. Beyond impressive.”