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  Because of Donald

  “The most beautiful is the object which does not exist.”

  —Zbigniew Herbert, from the poem “Study of the Object”

  “I can’t decide . . . if you have everything . . . or nothing.”

  —Don Draper, ad executive on AMC’s television drama Mad Men

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  AFTERWORDS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TURN OF THE CENTURY

  August 1999

  CHAPTER ONE

  Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

  —Total cereal

  It is 4:00 p.m., after the after-lunch meetings when junior creatives start assignments that are due the next day; when working mothers whose children are too old for babysitters retreat behind phones and speak urgently into them; when commuters are tempted to bag the last meeting because it will make them miss the 5:48 and the next train won’t get them home until 7:00, which will fuel the resentment of those waiting there, who are now turning on talk shows that they don’t sit and watch but absorb half-consciously for the sake of companionship in rooms where they’re cleaning or cooking or folding—shows that are pageants of human misery: incest survivors and hermaphrodites and wives remarrying ex-husbands who beat them, and these parades are interrupted by processions of products that promise to relieve more common afflictions: hair loss or heartburn or penile dysfunction.

  No, not quite 4:00 p.m., Audrey notes, stepping into the elevator, glancing at the LED news box on the wall, the modern equivalent of a town crier, that announces 3:56 according to some national institute, along with changes in weather and stock fluctuations and news of no import in capped letters (the modern equivalent of shouting): WHITE HOUSE INSTALLS NATIONAL Y2K HELPLINE TO ANSWER QUESTIONS ON MILLENNIUM BUG.

  Some days, like this one, it is her only source of news of the outside world. It is as if she is sealed inside the biosphere, that giant bubble where, in the interest of science, strangers lived together, isolated from the rest of the world for years. From time to time, she envies the freedom of those who come and go at will: freelancers, talent reps, voice-overs, illustrators, the bike messenger for whom brass doors now pull apart, a thick chain of steel links encircling his torso. But she would not want to exchange places with them, would not want to forgo perks that corporate entrapment makes possible: well-made clothes and leather handbags soft as a baby’s bum, business-class seats and hotel rooms where sheets are Frette linen and handwritten cards on the nightstand inform of the weather the next day. She likes being part of a giant machine, likes feeling herself part of something grand and complex, formidable in its immensity.

  She has the job she dreamed of having as a child, before she knew what a copywriter was, when she’d sat cross-legged in her school uniform drawing an ad for Cross pens: The Cross you’ll love to bear. She’d mailed it to the company and started flipping through magazines, hoping to see the idea in print. She’d been disappointed that the company hadn’t responded, not even to thank her, not knowing that agencies don’t acknowledge unsolicited ideas on advice of their lawyers who fear contributors will sue them.

  Doors open again, releasing her onto a floor she’s never been to before, a floor she didn’t even realize the ad agency occupied. It doesn’t look like an ad agency. The carpet is floral. And unlike the walls of the floor she’s just come from, which are black and chalked with motivational mantras (Your job is to bring dead facts to life), walls here are beige and hung with Impressionist posters one might expect to see in a dentist’s office.

  It doesn’t smell like an ad agency either. No salt in the air from microwaved popcorn, no industrial coffee scorching a pot, no noxious fumes of rubber cement, no scent of perfumes wafting from magazines piled in messy stacks on the floor in offices of art directors looking for scrap. (Of course, ad agencies stink a lot less than they used to; she marvels that no detriment was done to her by years of breathing in air rank with smoke from cigarettes and cigars, the vapor of markers, and droplets of glue from spray cans.)

  Strange, too, is the silence. No thrum from boom boxes, no voices raised in brainstorming or argument, no screech of reel machines rewinding commercials on tape. The offices are empty. She feels as if she has fallen thirty floors into a void. Steel nameplates are engraved with numbers, she notices, not names. What number is she looking for? She can’t remember. Why the hell didn’t she print out the e-mail?

  How provincial are creatives who work in big agencies, rarely venturing forth from their offices, inured to the privilege of meetings coming to them, so as to maximize the time they can allot to creative development? On the infrequent occasions they are forced to exit their lairs, they advance with the trepidation of lost pioneers.

  Audrey squints at her wrist, trying to make out the time without reading glasses. She hates wearing reading glasses, although she has fashionable ones—vintage frames found in a store that sells hearing aids, recommended in the glossy pages of a long-ago issue of New York. She buys these frames in bulk once a year; she loses them easily and refuses to secure them on a chain around her neck, as if she were a middle-aged matron, although of course, she is a middle-aged matron—exactly in the middle, if she lives to be ninety-two.

  Is the watch still ten minutes fast? The hands on her Timex are as narrow as pins. It’s a watch that is elegant in its simplicity. She’d bought it years ago at an auction of Andy Warhol’s estate. She’d stopped into Sotheby’s at lunch on a whim and signed up for a paddle. In the midst of heated bidding, she’d lifted the paddle, just to see what bidding would feel like. In that moment, the bidding fell terrifyingly silen
t. And she owned a watch that cost twice what their monthly rent was in those days. Oren hadn’t minded. She’d loved him for that.

  “Think of it as a piece of jewelry,” he’d said when she’d promptly confessed her deed from the nearest pay phone. “You never buy jewelry.”

  She often sets the watch ten minutes ahead to trick herself into being on time. But sometimes it makes up time on its own.

  Luckily the meeting she’s late for is of no importance. She’d initiated it by e-mailing Personnel a question about pension changes. They could have e-mailed her the answer or dispensed it by phone, but everyone is going the extra mile these days in the wake of layoffs.

  She rounds a corner, and suddenly the hallway looks familiar, and she wonders if she is retracing her steps. All the offices look alike on this floor. There’s little left of the agency she once knew. So much has changed since she first shook hands with Gordon when she was twenty-six years old and couldn’t believe her good fortune: that a famous ad man to whom she’d typed a fawning letter was taking her on, rescuing her from a gray, anonymous future of writing classified ads for a recruitment agency where the most creative contribution you could make was to design a border around a three-inch ad for employment. Of course, she’d imagined rising through the ranks to be Gordon herself, the executive creative director, not an undistinguished associate creative director, assigned to products nobody else wants to work on. But she’s a team player, a good soldier. It’s why she and her art director, Howard, have made it through so many rounds of cutbacks.

  It’s the only office with words on the door: PERSONNEL COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER. She’s about to knock when she hears “Come in” from the depths of the room. Sitting behind a desk is a boy who looks to be not much older than her teenage son. As she enters, he jumps to his feet, adjusting the knot of his tie in a collar too large for his neck. It is as if he has borrowed a shirt from his father.

  “Thank you for coming.” Like a host at a party, he waves her in. The room has the smell of new vinyl, new paint. She suspects that the boy himself is new, but she won’t ask, not wanting to make a point of his age. Young people always want to look more experienced than they are, and in fact, he might have been here for years.

  “So,” says Audrey, settling into a hard plastic chair on the visitor side of the desk. The chair on which the boy sits is larger and swivels. She glances at an engraved metal slab on his desk: Drew Colby. “So, Drew, what kind of changes do I need to know about?” She wishes they’d sent her the new policy in Lotus Notes instead of taking up her time in person.

  Drew appears to need a moment to think about this. He adjusts his round wire glasses, takes a deep breath, and speaks to a stack of papers centered on the wood laminate plain between them. “I, uh, Ms. . . . Ms. Walker.”

  “You can call me Audrey.” She tries to remember if he was at the offsite session last month, three days spent in a hotel ballroom when no work was accomplished, rumors of further layoffs were put to rest, and surviving employees were made to engage in team reconstruction consisting of earnestly organized activities: role-playing jobs and scavenger hunts and navigating blindfolded between rows of chair backs. She’ll never forget the sight of a senior account manager, a tight-lipped man with white hair and red cheeks, being made to stand on one of the tables.

  “Audrey,” he obliges, still addressing the stack of papers before him. “You’re aware of the pending merger between Tadd, Collins and k + d?”

  Did he think she was clueless? Talk in the hallways is of little else. Tadd, Collins is merging with a creative boutique out of London, a union the press likens to mating a dinosaur with a pit bull.

  “I was given to understand that the merger wouldn’t impact negatively on pension plans,” she says, leaning forward. Joyce, Gordon’s assistant, had made a point of this. Hadn’t she?

  Drew stares at the stack of file folders on his desk, as if he’d acquired X-ray vision and was reading, through folder covers, what to say next. Slowly he raises his eyes to meet hers.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not authorized to talk about pension plans.”

  “You’re not?” Audrey searches his face as he swivels in the chair. He peers anxiously at the open door behind her.

  “Well, then, what am I here for?” She makes a show of checking her watch. It’s the reason she’s still here after 4:00 on a Friday. She has a voice-over downtown in twenty minutes. If she leaves now, she’ll have just enough time to dash upstairs, gather her things, and make it there only a few minutes late.

  Drew leans forward and takes a deep breath. He brings his palms together as if in prayer and speaks with his eyes closed, like a child calling up a psalm from memory. The bumps on his chin could be vestiges of acne.

  “Ms. Walker, I am charged with the task of informing you that due to impending changes in corporate structure, your services to the company are no longer required.”

  Audrey’s brain goes cold, as if it is snowing inside her head. “What?” This boy couldn’t possibly be firing her, couldn’t have the authority to sack someone of her stature.

  “Is this a joke?” A page-a-day calendar on his desk reminds her: it’s Friday the 13th. She turns to the place to which his gaze has been flickering. Okay, Howard, she thinks. You’ve had your fun. You can come out now. But Howard is out in Toledo at focus groups.

  “No, ma’am, I’m sorry. This is not a joke.”

  She sees the fragile towers she has built with Oren—their farmhouse upstate, private school tuition, the kitchen renovation they have just signed the contract for—toppling in the wake of tides set in motion by a man too young to have towers of his own.

  “Wait a minute.” Audrey stands to give her words emphasis. “Just you wait a goddamn minute.” They’d promised from the podium that layoffs were over. Decades of service to the company couldn’t end like this, without warning, without even the dignity of being let go by a grown-up. She’d given half her life to this agency, untold weekends, last-minute trips out of town, years of missed soccer games and school events for her son.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She’s taken accounts other associate creative directors wouldn’t touch—drugs and toilet paper and feminine hygiene—and turned out campaigns. They were short of brilliant, of course, but way better than the standard schlock for the category. She’d helped land Silky soap, a $22 million account.

  “What. The fuck. Do you think. You’re doing.”

  She senses movement above and glances up at the acoustic tiles. Protruding from a tile is the red eye of a camera. Its all-seeing eye stares down at her, censorious. Of course! She’s being taped. What she says or does can be used against her.

  “There must be some mistake,” she says stiffly, sitting down again and assuming a patronizing look that she hopes will intimidate him. But as her words release into the recycled air, she realizes what a cliché they are—precisely the words he’s been told to expect.

  “There’s no mistake, ma’am. I’m sorry,” he says. That annoying, insipid, distancing ma’am.

  He continues to speak, but she is deaf to all but a crashing sound in her head. She gleans only intermittent oncoming phrases: environmental transference, outplacement service.

  He has no idea of what he is wrenching from her. She won’t find another job in the business. Not at her age. Forty-six! Headhunters—the good ones—stopped calling years ago.

  Now he is handing her a thick manila envelope closed with a string. This packet will explain in detail . . .

  Bricks of her comfortable existence go flying. Gym membership. Health care. Will she have to cancel Paley’s SAT tutor?

  . . . vested stock options . . . benefit continuity . . .

  Something turns in her stomach; she’s afraid she’ll throw up. She concentrates on resisting the rise in her gullet, willing the bile to reverse its ascent. Her distress is compounded by the esca
pe of a humiliating sound: a cross between a burp and a hiccup. Her cheeks, she realizes, are wet. The boy kindly stops talking and pushes a box of tissues toward her—a brand that she notices is her client’s fiercest competitor. Brand loyalty to your clients is common courtesy, Gordon insists.

  Does Gordon know about this? He’d left for France last week for his annual three weeks in August and had given no hint when he’d said good-bye that their separation would be permanent. He’d urged her, in fact, to bring her family to visit the chateau in Cap d’Antibes, an invitation he’d been extending for years, one she’d assumed was pro forma. She’d never taken him up on it. Maybe she should have.

  As she blows her nose in the traitorous tissue, something rustles behind her, and the rustling makes the boy’s face bloat with relief. She turns to see a large woman approaching. The rustle is hose. Most women don’t wear hose in summer anymore. The sound and a powdery fragrance remind Audrey of her mother who passed away a few years ago, the sad event that made Audrey finally feel like a grown-up, though she hadn’t realized she’d not felt grown-up before.

  This is Marisol, the communications retainer, who is going to escort you back to your office . . .

  At the sight of Marisol’s bright, kind eyes and wide arms, Audrey feels a tendril of comfort unfurl.

  . . . assemble the personal possessions you are able to carry.

  She is tempted to bury her face in Marisol’s bosom.

  . . . must ask you not to communicate with other employees . . . access to the server terminated during this meeting . . .

  Audrey follows Marisol out of the office, trailing her down the long corridor, watching herself as if from on high, a speck in the universe dumbly following another, the path to the elevator a long, treacherous, interminable trek.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A surprise in every box

  —Cracker Jack

  The blow of dismissal is delivered full force by the sight of flattened moving boxes outside her office. Marisol helps her fit the boxes together, a task at which she is tellingly expert, then stands discreetly outside the door as Audrey throws things inside them. In go art books and awards annuals; in stacks of tapes in teetering piles on a shelf (recent spots she hasn’t had time to add to her reel; how will she do this now without access to the production department?); in go the laminated print ads she unpins from the wall (work she is proud of, done years ago when she was still young enough to get good assignments); in go sample bottles of wrinkle creams and lotions not yet for sale (Are they hers to take? Let them arrest her.); in, of course, goes the gold statuette, her only award, procured thanks to Howard, dear Howard.