Chapter 11
The hotel switchboard let him oversleep, and by the time Paul got to the office it was around quarter to ten. He was ready to make apologies for his lateness but nobody seemed to notice. They had something much more important to worry about. Around Harold Dingman's office, there was a tensely gloomy air of impending tragedy.
"Looks like the honeymoon is over," Dingman said, when he saw Paul come in. Paul thought he had never seen such a frightened man. He looked like a puppet with all his strings cut.
"What's wrong?"
"Kay Lennen is what's wrong. Miss Huggable herself. The Bitch of Buchenwald."
"You told me about her at lunch yesterday."
"Did I tell you about the new campaign?"
"No."
"Well, I meant to. Every time I start thinking about that broad I gulp my Martinis, and when I do that I forget what it was I started out to say."
"What about the new campaign?"
"We gave It to her Friday to mull over, over the weekend. With her flunkies, naturally. She takes a whole goddamn retinue up to her place in Westport, some weekends. She just got back to the office this morning. Early this morning. She called here at rune-thirty."
"And?"
"She don't like it," Dingman said. Like news of a death in the family, Paid thought. For Christ's sake. "What don't she like?" he asked, straight-faced. "Everything. Mostly it looks like she don't like us."
"What now?"
"We go up to see her. Me, and Sam Wycliffe, maybe even Bob Gelder. I don't know. You might as well come along. It might be the last chance you'll get to meet her, and I wouldn't want you to miss that"
"When?"
"Four o'clock this afternoon."
"Why four o'clock this afternoon? Why not right now?"
"Because she's a sadist is why," Dingman snapped. "I would like to see you gentlemen in my office at four o'clock this afternoon, if you can spare the time,' she says. The cunt"
"How you talk," Paul murmured.
"Ah, shit" Dingman said, and stalked into his office, Paul followed him.
"What's the new campaign look like?"
"Like all the others."
"Then what makes it a new campaign?"
"New copy. It's introducing a new line of cosmetics that makes a broad glow in the dark or some goddamn thing. All new names for the shades. Cantaloupe coral. Pussy pink. Pomegranate puce. Names like that."
"Can I see the campaign?"
"She's got it, up at Huggable. All we've got are stats."
"I'd like to look at the stats."
"What for?" Dingman said, looking at him. In his nervous agony, Paul was just another aggravation.
"If I'm going up there with you, I'd like to know what the discussion's all about, instead of standing around with my thumb up my ass."
Dingman shrugged.
"All right." He turned to his secretary. "Get the stats of the new Huggable campaign and give them to Paul, will you, Karen?"
Paul jumped, involuntarily. Karen. Saturday. Behave yourself, she'd said. For the furniture pushing. Paul shrugged and went into his office.
Dingman's secretary brought the stats into his office and he leafed through them. Dingman was right. It did look just like all the other campaigns. Same type of layout. Same dismal broads. If the models weren't actually the same models, they looked the same. You couldn't tell one from the other. Maybe Kay Lennen had a point, he thought, although he knew enough already not to say anything like that to anyone in the office.
Well, hell, it was no skin off his ass. Or was it? If they lost the account, it could mean his job.
He started to stew about it, and stewed through the rest of the day. You silly son of a bitch, he told himself. You have the disease already.
At twenty minutes to four Dingman stuck his head into Paul's office, and the two of them walked over to Wycliffe's office. Wycliffe was ready to go. Dingman was a physical wreck. In the elevator going down, Wycliffe snapped at him.
"Harold, for Christ's sake, stop looking like you're going to a beheading. You just make everything worse."
"How could they be worse?"
"Ah, shit," Wycliffe said.
They took a cab to one of the new buildings on Third Avenue. Paul noticed that Wycliffe let Dingman dig around his pockets and pay the driver. Wycliffe was above all that.
They walked past the receptionist and down the hall and directly into Kay Lennen's office. It was a bigger office than Wycliffe's office, much bigger. She was standing behind her desk, talking to two men who were very evidently assistants of some land, from the way they listened. She was a tall woman, as tall as Paul, with jet black hair, in her middle thirties. A beautiful woman, Paul thought, and then she turned to look at them. Her eyes came to rest on Paul, the stranger in the trio. She had-the coldest, hardest eyes he'd ever seen on a woman. Green, they were. Ice cold green.
"Kay," Sam Wycliffe said, all warmth and charm, "we've got some new blood on the account. Meet Paul Beck."
She held out her hand and Paul took it. She kept her eyes on him, and he felt goose bumps starting on his back. Cut it out, he told himself. You'll wind up like Dingman. She's only a woman.
"Hello," she said. "But it may be a little late for a transfusion."
She waved for them to sit. She sat, and they sat. The two men she'd been talking to ranged themselves on the low narrow table running the length of the windows on one side of the office. Paul sat at one end of a long couch, near an ash tray. Dingman and Wycliffe took chairs in front of her desk.
"This new campaign of yours," Kay Lennen said, and waved her hand at the two men along the windows. They got up and propped up six stiff-backed comprehensives against the windows. The advertisements were the ones Paul had seen the stats of that morning. They looked a little better in color, Paul thought, but not much. Same dismal broads. Everybody's phony sister. Who needs a sister?
"Wild Watermelon," Kay Lennen said. "Apple Cheek. Plum Beautiful. That isn't an advertising campaign. It's a fucking fruit salad."
Nobody said anything. Not Dingman. Not Wycliffe. Certainly not Paul.
"Spring Peach. What's the texture of a peach?"
Still nobody said anything.
"Yellow and fuzzy, is what a peach is. You, Paul, you're a young man." She leveled her cold green eyes on him. She didn't bother him, now. Things looked bad but what the hell. He'd regained his composure after the handshake. "You're a young man," Kay Lennen repeated. "Do you like girls who are yellow and fuzzy?"
"I might, just for kicks," he said, reaching for a cigarette. "I never met any."
Wycliffe laughed.
"Paul's on our side, Kay," he said.
"You need all the support you can get," she said. She waved at the next layout propped against a window.
"Cherries in the Snow," she said. "Sounds like gang rape in a snow bank. Maybe the Queen of the Winter Festival, herself. You go to Dartmouth, Paul?"
She was looking at him. He discovered that he was enjoying himself.
"No," he said. "But I've gotten laid in a snow bank."
Wycliffe laughed again. Kay Lennen almost smiled.
"Stop trying to rattle the help, Kay."
"He doesn't rattle easy," she said.
"No, he doesn't. That's the main reason he's working for us."
"As I said before, Sam, I think your new blood got here too late." She was leveling the icy green eyes on the big, gray-haired man now. He took it well, Paul noticed. "I think it's a little late for a transfusion."
"What're you trying to tell me, Kay?"
"I think we are on the verge of a parting of the ways."
"You can't mean it. After all these years."
Paul looked at Dingman. He was shaking, visibly. He looked ready to cry, any minute.
"That's just it, all these years," Kay Lennen said. "The stuff you're doing looks tired. Tired in concept. Tired in approach. Tired in execution."
"I think we ought to take another swing at this one," Wycliffe said. He indicated, with his thumb, the layouts propped against the windows.
"Go ahead, if you want to. What I'm telling you is not final, and there's no hurry. We have plenty of time to get this Spring campaign into the works." Thanks," Wycliffe said.
Tut I ought to warn you, V. V. D. and O. has been smelling around. They'd like to have the Huggable account Round out their goddamn image."
Paul thought "smelling around" was a bad choice of words on Kay Lennen's part. The analogy made her a bitch in heat, and she looked like anything but.
There was nothing but silence in the big office. Any second now, Paul thought looking at Dingman, he's going to break up all this nice quiet He's going to start sobbing.
"Well," Kay Lennen said, "hasn't anyone anything to say?"
Shut up, Paul told himself. It's none of your business. But it was his business, God damn it. Anyway, what did he have to lose? What did any of them have to lose, him, Dingman, Wycliffe? What the hell?
"Mrs. Lennen," he said, "it just occurred to me that maybe you've been looking at these damn' campaigns too long."
She laid the green ice on him.
"Call me Kay," she said. "Everybody calls me Kay."
"All right, Kay," he said, hooking up with her stare. "I think you've been looking at these things too long."
"What makes you think that?"
"You know when you don't like something, but you don't know what it is you don't like."
"You have to realize, Kay," Wycliffe said, apologizing, "that Paul's awful new in this business."
"Shut up, Sam."
"Like this campaign," Paul said, indicating the windows with his thumb as Wycliffe had done. "I think you're right not to like it. I don't like it myself."
"You're refreshing already," Kay Lennen said.
Paul got out a cigarette and lighted it
"The copy doesn't bother me. I don't think it bothers you either, really. What the hell do you care about cherries and snow banks?"
She was still looking at him, but at least the cigarette had broken the locked stare.
"What bothers you?" Kay Lennen asked.
"The models." Everybody in the room looked toward the windows. "The goddam wholesome models."
"What about them? They're beautiful girls."
"Sure they are. But they all look like my sister, and I haven't even got a goddamn sister."
For the first time, Kay Lennen smiled. Her whole face changed. She had a wonderful smile. She was a lovely woman.
"Go ahead," she said.
"Well, hell, who needs a sister? The girls you're trying to sell this stuff to don't want to look like anybody's sister. They say there's nothing wrong with a little incest as long as you keep it in the family, but I don't think the general public is ready to accept incest yet"
"Really?" Kay Lennen asked.
"The lay public, I'm talking about. You should pardon the expression."
"What do you suggest?"
"I think the models should be girls who look like they could be laid maybe once in a while. Like after choir practice."
Kay Lennen smiled again, and some of the ice went out of her eyes. She was really a beautiful woman.
She stood up. The meeting was over. Everybody got to his feet Kay Lennen was still smiling when she looked over at Paul.
I'll think it over," she said, "about the models. Meanwhile, Sam, if you want to take another swing at this campaign, go ahead. But I have to tell you, things don't look good for your agency."
They were at the door when Kay Lennen spoke again.
"Paul," she said, "wait a second, will you?"
He came back to her desk while the others filed out She was looking at her desk calendar.
"Can you come up and see me around five o'clock Thursday? Just you. I want to have a talk with you." She did not look at him.
"Sure," he said, and turned to leave.
"Good night," she said, as he was going out the door.
"Good night."
Wycliffe and Dingman were waiting for him by the elevators.
"What're you trying to do to us, for Christ's sake?" Dingman asked. "Up your ass," Paul said.