Big Driver Read online

  “How was the meeting?” he asks.

  “It was okay.”

  “Did they bring us up?”

  “You know they did. What have you got for me, Billy?”

  He takes a deep breath and turns his poster board around so I can see it. On the left is a prescription bottle of Viagra, either actual size or close enough not to matter. On the right—the power side of the ad, as anyone in advertising will tell you—is a prescription bottle of our stuff, but much bigger. Beneath is the cutline: PO-10S, TEN TIMES MORE EFFECTIVE THAN VIAGRA!

  As Billy looks at me looking at it, his hopeful smile starts to fade. “You don’t like it.”

  “It’s not a question of like or don’t like. In this business it never is. It’s a question of what works and what doesn’t. This doesn’t.”

  Now he’s looking sulky. If George Slattery saw that look, he’d take the kid to the woodshed. I won’t, although it might feel that way to him because it’s my job to teach him. In spite of everything else on my mind, I’ll try to do that. Because I love this business. It gets very little respect, but I love it anyway. Also, I can hear Ellen say, you don’t let go. Once you get your teeth in something, they stay there. Determination like that can be a little scary.

  “Sit down, Billy.”

  He sits.

  “And wipe that pout off your puss, okay? You look like a kid who just dropped his binky in the toilet.”

  He does his best. Which I like about him. Kid’s a trier, and if he’s going to work in the Andrews-Slattery shop, he’d better be.

  “Good news is I’m not taking it away from you, mostly because it’s not your fault Vonnell Pharmaceutical saddled us with a name that sounds like a multivitamin. But we’re going to make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear. In advertising, that’s the main job seven times out of every ten. Maybe eight. So pay attention.”

  He gets a little grin. “Should I take notes?”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass. First, when you’re shouting a drug, you never show a prescription bottle. The logo, sure. The pill itself, sometimes. It depends. You know why Pfizer shows the Viagra pill? Because it’s blue. Consumers like blue. The shape helps, too. Consumers have a very positive response to the shape of the Viagra tab. But people never like to see the prescription bottle their stuff comes in. Prescription bottles make them think of sickness. Got that?”

  “So maybe a little Viagra pill and a big Po-10s pill? Instead of the bottles?” He raises his hands, framing an invisible cutline. “‘Po-10s, ten times bigger, ten times better.’ Get it?”

  “Yes, Billy, I get it. The FDA will get it, too, and they won’t like it. In fact, they could make us take ads with a cutline like that out of circulation, which would cost a bundle. Not to mention a very good client.”

  “Why?” It’s almost a bleat.

  “Because it isn’t ten times bigger, and it isn’t ten times better. Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, Po-10s, they all have about the same penis-elevation formula. Do your research, kiddo. And a little refresher course in advertising law wouldn’t hurt. Want to say Blowhard’s Bran Muffins are ten times tastier than Bigmouth’s Bran Muffins? Have at it, taste is a subjective judgment. What gets your prick hard, though, and for how long …”

  “Okay,” he says in a small voice.

  “Here’s the other half. ‘Ten times more’ anything is—speaking in erectile dysfunction terms—pretty limp. It went out of vogue around the same time as Two Cs in a K.”

  He looks blank.

  “Two cunts in a kitchen. It’s how advertising guys used to refer to their TV ads on the soaps back in the fifties.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “Afraid not. Now here’s something I’ve been playing with.” I jot on a pad, and for a moment I think of all those notes scattered around the coffeemaker back in good old 5-B—why are they still there?

  “Can’t you just tell me?” the kid asks from a thousand miles away.

  “No, because advertising isn’t an oral medium,” I say. “Never trust an ad that’s spoken out loud. Write it down and show it to someone. Show it to your best friend. Or your … you know, your wife.”

  “Are you okay, Brad?”

  “Fine. Why?”

  “I don’t know, you just looked funny for a minute.”

  “Just as long as I don’t look funny when I present on Monday. Now—what does this say to you?” I turn the pad around and show him what I’ve printed there: PO-10S … FOR MEN WHO WANT TO DO IT THE HARD WAY.

  “It’s like a dirty joke!” he objects.

  “You’ve got a point, but I’ve printed it in block caps. Imagine it in a soft italic type, almost a girly type. Maybe even in parentheses.” I add them, although they don’t work with the caps. But they will. It’s a thing I just know, because I can see it. “Now, playing off that, think of a photo showing a big, burly guy. In low-slung jeans that show the top of his underwear. And a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, let’s say. See him with some grease and dirt on his guns.”

  “Guns?”

  “Biceps. And he’s standing beside a muscle car with the hood up. Now, is it still a dirty joke?”

  “I … I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I, not for sure, but my gut tells me it’ll pull the plow. But not quite as is. The cutline still doesn’t work, you’re right about that, and it’s got to, because it’ll be the basis of the TV and ’Net ads. So play with it. Make it work. Just remember the key word …”

  Suddenly, just like that, I know where the rest of that damn dream came from.

  “Brad?”

  “The key word is hard,” I say. “Because a man … when something’s not working—his prick, his plan, his life—he takes it hard. He doesn’t want to give up. He remembers how it was, and he wants it that way again.”

  Yes, I think. Yes he does.

  Billy smirks. “I wouldn’t know.”

  I manage a smile. It feels god-awful heavy, as if there are weights hanging from the corners of my mouth. All at once it’s like being in the bad dream again. Because there’s something close to me I don’t want to look at. Only this isn’t a lucid dream I can back out of. This is lucid reality.

  *

  After Billy leaves, I go down to the can. It’s ten o’clock, and most of the guys in the shop have off-loaded their morning coffee and are taking on more in our little caff, so I have it to myself. I drop my pants so if someone wanders in and happens to look under the door he won’t think I’m weird, but the only business I’ve come in here to do is thinking. Or remembering.

  Four years after coming on board at Andrews-Slattery, the Fasprin Pain Reliever account landed on my desk. I’ve had some special ones over the years, some breakouts, and that was the first. It happened fast. I opened the sample box, took out the bottle, and the basis of the campaign—what admen sometimes call the heartwood—came to me in an instant. I ditzed around a little, of course—you don’t want to make it look too easy—then did some comps. Ellen helped. This was just after we found out she couldn’t conceive. It was something to do with a drug she’d been given when she had rheumatic fever as a kid. She was pretty depressed. Helping with the Fasprin comps took her mind off it, and she really threw herself into the thing.

  Al Andrews was still running things back then, and he was the one I took the comps to. I remember sitting in front of his desk in the sweat-seat with my heart in my mouth as he shuffled slowly through the comps we’d worked up. When he finally put them down and raised his shaggy old head to look at me, the pause seemed to go on for at least an hour. Then he said, “These are good, Bradley. More than good, terrific. We’ll meet with the client tomorrow afternoon. You do the prez.”

  I did the prez, and when the Dugan Drug VP saw the picture of the young working woman with the bottle of Fasprin poking out of her rolled-up sleeve, he flipped for it. The campaign brought Fasprin right up there with the big boys—Bayer, Anacin, Bufferin—and by the end of the year we were handling the whole Dugan account. Bi
lling? Seven figures. Not a low seven, either.

  I used the bonus to take Ellen to Nassau for ten days. We left from Kennedy, on a morning that was pelting down rain, and I still remember how she laughed and said, “Kiss me, beautiful,” when the plane broke through the clouds and the cabin filled with sunlight. I did kiss her, and the couple on the other side of the aisle—we were flying in business class—applauded.

  That was the best. The worst came half an hour later, when I turned to her and for a moment thought she was dead. It was the way she was sleeping, with her head cocked over on her shoulder and her mouth open and her hair kind of sticking to the window. She was young, we both were, but the idea of sudden death had a hideous possibility in Ellen’s case.

  “They used to call your condition ‘barren,’ Mrs. Franklin,” the doctor said when he gave us the bad news, “but in your case, the condition could more accurately be called a blessing. Pregnancy puts a strain on the heart, and thanks to a disease that was badly treated when you were a child, yours isn’t strong. If you did happen to conceive, you’d be in bed for the last four months of the pregnancy, and even then the outcome would be dicey.”

  She wasn’t pregnant when we left on that trip, but she’d been excited about it for the last two weeks. The climb up to cruising altitude had been plenty rough … and she didn’t look like she was breathing.

  Then she opened her eyes. I settled back into my aisle seat, letting out a long and shaky breath.

  She looked at me, puzzled. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. The way you were sleeping, that’s all.”

  She wiped at her chin. “Oh God, did I drool?”

  “No.” I laughed. “But for a minute there you looked … well, dead.”

  She laughed, too. “And if I was, you’d ship the body back to New York, I suppose, and take up with some Bahama mama.”

  “No,” I said. “I’d take you, anyway.”

  “What?”

  “Because I wouldn’t accept it. No way would I.”

  “You’d have to after a few days. I’d get all smelly.”

  She was smiling. She thought it was still a game, because she hadn’t really understood what the doctor was telling her that day. She hadn’t—as the saying goes—taken it to heart. And she didn’t know how she’d looked, with the sun shining on her winter-pale cheeks and smudged eyelids and slack mouth. But I’d seen, and I’d taken it to heart. She was my heart, and I guard what’s in my heart. Nobody takes it away from me.

  “You wouldn’t,” I said. “I’d keep you alive.”

  “Really? How? Necromancy?”

  “By refusing to give up. And by using an adman’s most valuable asset.”

  “Which is what, Mr. Fasprin?”

  “Imagination. Now can we talk about something more pleasant?”

  *

  The call I’ve been expecting comes around three-thirty. It’s not Carlo. It’s Berk Ostrow, the building super. He wants to know what time I’m going to be home, because the rat everybody’s been smelling isn’t in 5-C, it’s in our place next door. Ostrow says the exterminators have to leave by four to get to another job, but that isn’t the important thing. What’s important is what’s wrong in there, and by the way, Carlo says no one’s seen your wife in over a week. Just you and the dog.

  I explain about my deficient sense of smell, and Ellen’s bronchitis. In her current condition, I say, she wouldn’t know the drapes were on fire until the smoke detector went off. I’m sure Lady smells it, I tell him, but to a dog, the stench of a decaying rat probably smells like Chanel No. 5.

  “I get all that, Mr. Franklin, but I still need to get in there to see what’s what. And the exterminators will have to be called back. I think you’re probably going to be on the hook for their bill, which is apt to be quite high. I could let myself in with the passkey, but I’d really be more comfortable if you were—”

  “Yes, I’d be more comfortable, too. Not to mention my wife.”

  “I tried calling her, but she didn’t answer the phone.” I can hear the suspicion creeping back into his voice. I’ve explained everything, advertising men are good at that, but the convincing effect only lasts for sixty seconds or so.

  “She’s probably got it on mute. Plus, the medication the doctor gave her makes her sleep quite heavily.”

  “What time will you be home, Mr. Franklin? I can stay until seven; after that there’s only Alfredo.” The disparaging note in his voice suggests I’d be better off dealing with a no-English wetback.

  Never, I think. I’ll never be home. In fact, I was never there in the first place. Ellen and I enjoyed the Bahamas so much we moved to Cable Beach, and I took a job with a little firm in Nassau. I shouted Cruise Ship Specials, Stereo Blowout Sales, and supermarket openings. All this New York stuff has just been a lucid dream, one I can back out of at any time.

  “Mr. Franklin? Are you there?”

  “Sure. Just thinking.” What I’m thinking is that if I leave right now, and take a taxi, I can be there in twenty minutes. “I’ve got one meeting I absolutely can’t miss, but why don’t you meet me in the apartment around six?”

  “How about in the lobby, Mr. Franklin? We can go up together.”

  I think of asking him how he believes I’d get rid of my murdered wife’s body at rush hour—because that is what he’s thinking. Maybe it’s not at the very front of his mind, but it’s not all the way in back, either. Does he think I’d use the service elevator? Or maybe dump her down the incinerator chute?

  “The lobby is absolutely okey-fine,” I say. “Six. Quarter of, if I can possibly make it.”

  I hang up and head for the elevators. I have to pass the caff to get there. Billy Ederle’s leaning in the doorway, drinking a Nozzy. It’s a remarkably lousy soda, but it’s all we vend. The company’s a client.

  “Where are you off to?”

  “Home. Ellen called. She’s not feeling well.”

  “Don’t you want your briefcase?”

  “No.” I don’t expect to be needing my briefcase for a while. In fact, I may never need it again.

  “I’m working on the new Po-10s direction. I think it’s going to be a winner.”

  “I’m sure,” I say, and I am. Billy Ederle will soon be movin’ on up, and good for him. “I’ve got to get a wiggle on.”

  “Sure, I understand.” He’s twenty-four and understands nothing. “Give her my best.”

  *

  We take on half a dozen interns a year at Andrews-Slattery; it’s how Billy Ederle got started. Most are terrific, and at first Fred Willits seemed terrific, too. I took him under my wing, and so it became my responsibility to fire him—I guess you’d say that, although interns are never actually “hired” in the first place—when it turned out he was a klepto who had decided our supply room was his private game preserve. God knows how much stuff he lifted before Maria Ellington caught him loading reams of paper into his suitcase-sized briefcase one afternoon. Turned out he was a bit of a psycho, too. He went nuclear when I told him he was through. Pete Wendell called security while the kid was yelling at me in the lobby and had him removed forcibly.

  Apparently old Freddy had a lot more to say, because he started hanging around my building and haranguing me when I came home. He kept his distance, though, and the cops claimed he was just exercising his right to free speech. But it wasn’t his mouth I was afraid of. I kept thinking he might have lifted a box cutter or an X-ACTO knife as well as printer cartridges and about fifty reams of copier paper. That was when I got Alfredo to give me a key to the service entrance, and I started going in that way. All that was in the fall of the year, September or October. Young Mr. Willits gave up and took his issues elsewhere when the weather turned cold, but Alfredo never asked for the return of the key, and I never gave it back. I guess we both forgot.

  That’s why, instead of giving the taxi driver my address, I get him to let me out on the next block. I pay him, adding a generous tip—hey, it’s only money—and th
en walk down the service alley. I have a bad moment when the key doesn’t work, but when I jigger it a little, it turns. The service elevator has brown quilted movers’ pads hanging from the walls. Previews of the padded cell they’ll put me in, I think, but of course that’s just melodrama. I’ll probably have to take a leave of absence from the shop, and what I’ve done is a lease breaker for sure, but—

  What have I done, exactly?

  For that matter, what have I been doing for the last week?

  “Keeping her alive,” I say as the elevator stops at the fifth floor. “Because I couldn’t bear for her to be dead.”

  She isn’t dead, I tell myself, just under the weather. It sucks as a cutline, but for the last week it has served me very well, and in the advertising biz the short term is what counts.

  I let myself in. The air is still and warm, but I don’t smell anything. So I tell myself, and in the advertising biz imagination is also what counts.

  “Honey, I’m home,” I call. “Are you awake? Feeling any better?”

  I guess I forgot to close the bedroom door before I left this morning, because Lady slinks out. She’s licking her chops. She gives me a guilty glance, then waddles into the living room with her tail tucked way down low. She doesn’t look back.

  “Honey? El?”

  I go into the bedroom. There’s still nothing to be seen of her but the milkweed fluff of her hair and the shape of her body under the quilt. The quilt is slightly rumpled, so I know she’s been up—if only to have some coffee—and then gone back to bed again. It was last Friday when I came home and she wasn’t breathing and since then she’s been sleeping a lot.

  I go around to her side and see her hand hanging down. There’s not much left of it but bones and hanging strips of flesh. I gaze at this and think there’s two ways of seeing it. Look at it one way, and I’ll probably have to have my dog—Ellen’s dog, really, Lady always loved Ellen best—euthanized. Look at it another way and you could say Lady got worried and was trying to wake her up. Come on, Ellie, I want to go to the park. Come on, Ellie, let’s play with my toys.