“Follow me,” he said. I got up, grabbed my portfolio and raised the Perrier bottle to the receptionist as I passed, grinning. She wasn’t watching.
The temp led me through a labyrinth of cubicles, past offices with their doors slightly ajar. I looked carefully for Susan, who I thought would surely find me before the meeting, but she failed to materialize.
Eventually the temp and I arrived at a corner office, a cavernous chamber with oaken paneling and purple carpet and windows twice as tall as I was. “Wow,” I said.
“Yep,” the temp said proudly, sitting down behind a huge desk.
I blinked at him. Suddenly it occurred to me that he wasn’t young at all, was in his forties and just looked young owing to his childish face, his sneakers. I stood there like a fool, clutching my portfolio across my chest.
“You’re…”
“Raymond Burn. Niceta meetcha. Have a seat!”
I lowered myself into a leather armchair, looking around for a place to put the Perrier. I opted for the floor. “Uh, well! Thanks! For seeing me!” I said, wondering if the windows opened and, if so, whether I should fling myself out one. Why hadn’t he introduced himself already? Why didn’t he shake my hand? Why didn’t I shake his? I sprung back to my feet and leaned across the desk, my hand extended. The postcard I’d gotten downstairs slipped from my pocket and fell onto the desk, so I retracted my hand, grabbed it, stuck it back into my pocket, held the pocket shut with my portfolio and re-extended the hand to where Burn’s was waiting impatiently. We shook.
“Love your dad’s work,” he said. “Love it! You could say I’m a Fan.” He gave the shook hand a surreptitious glance, then wiped it with a handkerchief.
“Well,” I said. I sat down again. “Me too.”
“You better be, heh-heh. Tim, I was just talking to Ken Dorn the other day. You know Ken?”
“A little.”
“Ken was saying he didn’t think you had the stuff to draw the Family Funnies. Now, don’t get me wrong,” he said, holding up his empty palms. “We’re committed to you, Tim. You’ve got the legacy, you see. But I just wanted to know if maybe you had any interest in responding to that statement of Ken’s, whaddya think, Tim?”
I set down my portfolio and noticed two enormous dark handprints on my knees. Where had they come from? I looked down at my hands: black, as if I’d been delivering newspapers all morning.
“Sure,” I said. “Sure, I have a response to that. Uh, I just want to say that I can do it, sir. I mean, I want to do it, and I’m the right man, uh, for the job…and…” I picked up the portfolio again. “And I think my portfolio will speak for itself, sir.” I lifted the heavy thing over the edge of the desk and set it down, open end first, before Ray Burn. “I think perhaps you should take them out yourself, sir, owing to the fact that my hands…I don’t know what happened…seem to be very dirty suddenly…”
He peered over the portfolio at my hands, which I was holding out to him. “Yeah, you got yourself a little mess there, heh-heh.”
It wasn’t just my hands and pants, of course; it was my white shirt, too, the inside of my jacket. The postcard had fallen out of my pocket again and onto my lap, and I understood now that it was the culprit. I picked it up. The penciled side was half rubbed off: it hadn’t been fixed on there after all. I could see the artist’s name, scrawled in thick black magic marker, hazy beneath the worn parts. “Maybe…” I said. “Maybe you should go ahead and give those a look, sir. While I go clean myself up a little.”
He was already sliding the cartoons from the portfolio. “Sure, sure,” he said, distracted. I jumped to my feet and headed out of the office at a brisk jog. The maze confounded me. Which way around the desks? It took me several minutes to get back to the lobby. Once in the restroom, I dropped the postcard into the trash and looked at myself in the mirror. A disaster. Not just my clothes and hands but my face, my neck…how had I touched myself in so many places so quickly?
I washed my hands with liquid soap from the dispenser, then wet a crumpled ball of paper towels and used them to dab at the huge stains on my shirt and pants. The towels grew dark, but the stains didn’t seem to diminish; on the contrary, they spread, losing definition, and my chest and thighs became soaked with dirty water. I took off my jacket before attempting to clean it, then decided to just leave it off, despite the inkstain on the arm. I checked myself in the mirror. I looked like I’d been splashed by a dozen cabs.
Back in the office, though, Ray Burn was laughing. The sound was so shocking, so unself-conscious, that I considered backing out into the hallway until he was finished. Laughing! This was something, I realized, that had been missing: an audience. I stood paralyzed in the doorway, listening to him.
“Mix!” he said. He pounded his desk. It made a sound like a bank vault door crashing open. “This is a gas!”
“It is?”
“‘Liberries!’ That’s it exactly! What a killer!” He moved another drawing to the top of the pile. “And how ‘bout this—‘If Puddles doesn’t use a fork, how come we have to?’ Tim, this is brilliant!”
“Thanks!” I said.
“It’s like you’re the reinfuckingcarnation of your old man, pardon the French. You got that same sense of humor. That’s what a good strip really needs! A sense of humor!”
I sat down slowly, setting my jacket on the floor. I picked up the Perrier and took a sip. “I think you’re right, sir.”
“Ray,” he said, “call me Ray.”
“You got it, Ray.”
He set the drawings down, and tilted his head up, toward a corner of the ceiling. I resisted the impulse to look there too. “What was it like?” he said, then looked down at me. “Living with the Maestro?”
“You mean Dad?”
“Yeah, yeah! Did the fans flock to the old home place? Was it a barrel of monkeys? I’ll bet it was a barrel of monkeys.”
“Oh, sure,” I told him. “We had some prime yuks.”
And this is what we discussed for the rest of the meeting: a highly selective, often imaginary version of my childhood, complete with adoring throngs, madcap domestic adventures, familial harmony and mountains of fan mail. To my amazement, Burn was utterly riveted. We laughed like old friends. It was fun, in a peculiar way, inventing this zany childhood for myself, and I began to realize that this was what the Family Funnies was all about: fulfilling the wishes of the American family with a delicate, photo-album detachment, letting the reader fill in the blanks with more goofy good will instead of the usual tedium and heartbreak most people’s blanks were filled with. I realized that Ray Burn was a completely fabricated person, that he had made, at some point in his life, a conscious decision to let the world fill him up according to his wishes, which he had been letting it do for so long that he no longer had an ounce of objectivity to his name, nor wanted to. Susan was right: tabula rasa. I was impressed with her judge of character.
My departure consisted of a lot of handshaking and back-slapping. My clothes were dry now, and I looked like a third grader’s math test, blurry with inept emendations. We thanked each other profusely. I half-hoped Ken Dorn would make one of his mysterious appearances, so that I could gloat.
“Say, Ray,” I said at the threshold of his office. “Do you know where Susan is?”
“Susan who?”
“Susan Caletti? Who works here?”
“Oh, sure!” he said. “Little Susie! Yeah, she’s down in that last office.” He pointed down a long, narrow hallway, where light shined from an open door. “You two know each other?”
“Uh…She’s my editor here, I think.”
He slapped his forehead. “Right, duh! I dunno where my head gets to.”
I headed down the hallway, leaving Burn with a little wave. I wondered how long he would remember our meeting.