She did not appear to want to do this, but I coaxed her along. In the car, I asked if she thought she might come visit me in Chicago soon. “We can do a girls-night-out type thing.” Whenever my parents visited me over the years, it did not escape my attention the way my mom seemed to shrink from every sound of the city. She hated the motion of the train, and even escalators gave her pause. My ex, Jefferey, used to chatter with her on the L because he could see how unnerved she was by every young Black or brown male passenger.
“Will I meet anyone?” she asked.
“Anyone like who?”
That Midwestern look of disapproval. It was all in the absence of any outward sign of disapproval. “Anyone you might marry.”
“Unlikely, Mom.” The encounter with Fred was already draining away, as though it had never happened. The way I had come to like it.
“Hmmm.” She was quiet for a moment. “You’ve really disappointed me,” she said.
My skin went numb with the brutality of those words. “Excuse me?” She stared out the window and said nothing. “What does that mean?”
“Never mind,” she muttered.
I took a breath.
“So how long did you know Dad was seeing that woman? Do I use that to accuse you? No. I don’t. Because it’s not my friggin’ business, Mom. I don’t judge you about that.” This barely felt cruel. Because what I really wanted to say was, Fuck you, you numb, grieving cow. How insular and pathetic my parents seemed to me now. My father stepping out on his wife and ignoring a kidney infection until it was too late and my mother still going to the church where he met his mistress. How utterly false my entire childhood felt.
Mom didn’t speak to me again until we were in the gardening section of the Walmart superstore. Pointing to the soil choices, she finally said, “Get the Miracle-Gro, but just the gardening soil, not the Organic Choice. Organic’s just a marketing scam they made up to tack a couple dollars to the price.”
Driving east on 80, one of the most familiar stretches of highway in my life, fuming about my mother, I was struck by the landscape. What I’d loved as a girl now filled me with a sense of desolation: the yawning expanses of corn and soy in every direction, interrupted occasionally by an evergreen shelterbelt or a cropping of maples and oaks, the repeating farmhouses and grain elevators battered by prairie winds, the scent of cut grass, pavement, and pig shit, that particular manure stench that was never far from the back of one’s nostrils. It began well before Dad’s death, this quiet revulsion at the bucolic, at the chopped and spliced lands for which he’d had bottomless loyalty.
While I was listening to that one Kate Morris interview for possibly the tenth time, my Tesla interrupted to read me a text from Linda Holiday: “We got the account.”
Back in the office that Monday, Darnell, Linda, Beth, and I sat around a linkup of Yeats beaming in from New York.
“I wanted to congratulate all of you on this. Beth and Jackie, especially. You two brought this home, and let me tell you: I think it’s going to have a cascading effect. Fred Wimpel is already advising several of the member companies and trade groups to move their accounts to us. We’re talking top oil and gas, Xuritas, aluminum, and even huge, huge fish like GM and Ford are going to take meetings. They want to coordinate this message across social media, TV, whatever’s left of print—everything.”
“It’s wild,” said Linda. “We’re talking potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of new business.”
McClann looked happy but humbled. All the weeks she’d fought me on this, all the passive-aggressive emails and worried, constipated looks when she didn’t like my direction. All obliterated by this news.
“You ready, Don Draper?” Yeats asked me. “You just wrangled us an asteroid made of money.”
Like that, my mom’s cruelty was forgotten. My head swam with what I’d do with this artist’s heyday. For me, creativity has always come from a place of opportunity. It’s what electrified me about advertising—there was simply no purer rush in all of business. Every client has a problem, and you must solve that problem in color, light, sound, and suggestion. Everyone now spoke of the algorithms of persuasion, and yes, we had those tools. But at the end of the day, the job came down to crafting a narrative that would win out over Kate Morris and her ilk. I’d just been handed the keys to one of the largest, most expensive campaigns of the century. It was the chance to charge into the fray, shape the American consciousness, and make my name in this business for a generation.
“Forget the nudge tactics for now. We want images of abundance, symbols of health and well-being,” I told my team in a conference room. Gruber twiddled a pen on a pad and favored me with his punk smile. Two of my favorite copywriters, Michelle and Sophie, who looked like little blond twins and wore their hair in the bouffant sixties style that was suddenly in, gazed at me with wide eyes. Sophie had once confessed, “I’ve been looking for a mentor my whole life, and I just really want it to be you. You’re the reason I came to work here.”
“Abundance is not just economic, though,” I told them. “It’s the natural world, and we want that imagery suffusing the campaign. Yes, this is industry declaring itself reformed, that it’s all in for the future—”
“Oh!” said Sophie, perking up. “That’s not a bad tag!”
Everyone laughed. “And they say we’re all failed novelists and art school rejects!” My mom might as well have lived on another planet. Procter & Gamble might as well have been an ex-boyfriend from another lifetime. “But we also want images of aliveness,” I went on. “Of people expressing almost a subversive joy.”
“Sort of that carnivalesque attitude,” said Gruber. “We can save the world in a sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll way.”
“Exactly,” I said. “People living vital, rebellious lives and becoming a part of this transformation.”
We stayed until midnight, ordering pizza and filling up dozens of e-board screens with our brainstorming. My team could sense the energy that had dimmed in recent months and left me cold and snapping at their efforts abruptly renewed. Now they were all too happy to shovel fuel on the blaze.
Fred’s text landed two days later. Congratulations. I teased him about getting the job after sleeping with him (Coincidence?). Still, when he asked me if I was free on the weekend, that he would be in Chicago to meet with a client, I hesitated. Sleeping with a married man was one thing—all the premium shows were teaching us that open relationships and polyamory were no longer taboo, after all. But twice would mean we were having an affair. Twice would mean I’d probably spend the night in his hotel. Maybe even the one downtown, where long ago I’d followed an actor to his room.
Ultimately, I decided against it. Told him I had plans.
In my condo, I’d turned the master bedroom into my workspace while I did my sleeping in the guest room. I wanted to spend the weekend with storyboards, tags, and ad proposals. I only left for runs and yoga. The older I got, the more addicted I became to my exercise routine. Part of that might have been the vanity that accelerated with age, especially if one was still single.
That Saturday, I got back from a run. I drank a glass of water and ate a yogurt with my tablet on my thigh. The blue Earth spun, half in and half out of darkness. Lights winked on as the hemispheres changed from day to night. Translucent type floated across the screen. WE ARE THE GREEN NEW DEAL.
Not there yet. I drew arrows to elements I wanted to highlight, typed a few notes, and sent them back to the crew. I needed a break, so I got a glass of wine, slipped on my VR set, and found myself scanning through news of the actor’s full-blown career change.
Of course, I’d followed him over the years from afar ever since I left his hotel without giving him my number or even telling him my last name. I’d even gone to a few of his movies before he kept putting his foot in his mouth. His films were increasingly downgraded to the far reaches of cut-rate streaming services. His roles dried up, and he couldn’t appear in an interview without blaming diversity politics. Now I studied his clean, taut face almost unchanged in the intervening fifteen years. He meant something to me, yes, but not what one might suspect. I didn’t pine or ache for him in the slightest. He was more a totem of what I’d consciously changed about my life. After Jefferey, I made up my mind to never again allow a man to determine the course of my happiness. Maybe one forms scar tissue too thick for any more hurt to pierce them, but I likened it more to living on my own terms. There’d been a couple partners and several fleeting encounters since then, but mostly I slipped away, leaving behind a few wounded people myself. Don’t let yourself be sold and sold to like that, I wanted to tell these men. Love can often be a conjurer’s trick. J. Walter Thompson once said, “This is an age of faith. All ages have been ages of faith. Disbelief requires an effort of the will while belief requires only acquiescence.”