"Cost per thou, Dwayne, is an overrated device intended to blind us to the truth of our situation." He waited for Dwayne to ask what the truth of our situation was. "There is only one truth. Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world."
There were probably two dozen people walking the streets in the days after the game, shysters, heisters, fools and knaves, all claiming they had the one and only baseball. Which Charlie devoutly wanted to believe was the selfsame object on his credenza.
Yes, the baseball that marked him as a regular fellow with a soft streak despite his milled-steel veneer. He got fascist haircuts done by Spadavecchia of Milan-his school actually, since Gianni was frequently overbooked. He wore striped shirts with white collars, or white shirts with blue collars. He wore suits so compulsively custom-fit a fart would split a seam. He played squash and handball, did Canadian Air Force exercises, applied bronzing agents to his face and body and sat in front of a sunlamp all winter long. A regular guy with a station wagon heart despite the giddy MG he'd just treated himself to, perfect for tooling the foothills of the Berkshires around their weekend place.
A sentimental weepy white guy.
Yes, the baseball he dearly wanted to entrust to his son Chuckie. To Charles Jr. No longer the bubblegum boy of yore but a failed preppy now, slant-bodied and dissonant, with dumdum eyes and a way of hating you from a distance. Flunked out of Exeter, chased out of Choate, walked out of Andover. Chuckie didn't care. But Charlie did and it was painful. How could he give such an emotional object, whatever ambiguity throbbed in the ball's corked heart, to this aimless wayward aging kid, a displaced person in his own life?
Pasqualini stuck his head in the door on his way back to the art department.
"What do you call a six-foot five-inch two-hundred-and-sixty-pound Negro that you run into in a dark alley?"
Charlie smiled thinly, wary of the new wave of civil rights jokes, and raised his head to indicate, What?
"Mister."
He fired a pregnant woman once. He fired a man related to the Dutch royal family. He fired a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew in fairly close succession. He fired a man for falling in the water on the company boat ride and another for carrying a gun to a client meeting.
"They're doing research, Dwayne, on what they call retinal discharge. They secretly photograph women in supermarkets. They have sensitive cameras hidden on the shelves that record excitations of the inner eye, motions of the eye far more subtle and telling than a simple blink, and it seems that women go completely crazy eyeballwise when they see certain colors, packages and designs. These are orgasms, basically, of the eye, the brain and the nervous system. How do we use this research? Simple. We correlate high discharge events with the particular items that caused them and then we design our products and packaging accordingly. Once we get the consumer by the eyeballs, we have complete mastery of the marketing process."
Sandy came back in and began to mouth some sort of complicated message.
But if Charlie truly believed the baseball was authentic, would he leave it in plain sight, unguarded, where a cleaning woman might decide to take it home to her kid because she doesn't earn enough money to buy him a baseball, or a delivery boy from the coffee shop around the corner-he pictured a swarthy male drifting through the corridors on a slow afternoon, with creamless coffee and a toasted English in a white bag, looking for something to pinch.
"She wants to talk to us, Dwayne. Yes, my secretary. Did I ever tell you how she types? She likes to fold one leg up under her. Before she began sitting on her foot she did about twenty-five words a minute. Now she does two hundred."
Charlie was fascinated by certain quirks and traits that Sandy brought to her job. She had that distinctive English quality of looking terrifically fresh and crisp even while conveying tawdry intimations of the state of her underwear and the fact that she bathes only under pressure from her roommates, Fiona and Georgina.
Charlie talked to Omaha and deciphered his secretary's mouthed message at the same time.
"She's telling us she needs to leave early, Dwayne. She's been leaving early quite often lately. And taking conspicuously long lunches. We know what that means, don't we? An affair with a married man."
Sandy did a stand-up collapse, aghast at the man's cheek. His temerity, his effrontery, his American facking New York nerve. Charlie gave her his Richard Widmark grin. He had no reason to keep her around the rest of the afternoon but asked her to order him an orange juice before she left.
Charlie wanted to pitch the Minute Maid account. He thought about orange juice all the time. He looked at it, drank it, had fantasies about it. He knew how to advertise orange juice. Forget Florida. Forget the piddling vitamins. You have to go for appetite appeal, for the visual hit, because this is a beautiful and enticing beverage and women's eyeballs reach high levels of excitation when they see bright orange cans in the freezer, gleaming with rime ice. You have to show the pulp. You show the juice splashing in the glass. You show the froth on a perky housewife's upper lip, like the hint of a blowjob before breakfast. Of course there is no pulp in concentrate. And there is only a microtrace of pulp in container juice. But you can suggest, you can make inferences, you can promise the consumer the experience of cit-rusy bits of real pulp-a glass of juice, a goblet brimming with partic-ulate matter, like wondrous orange smog. You show it. You photograph it lovingly and microscopically. If the can or package can be orgasmi-cally visual, so can the product inside. There was nothing Charlie liked better than a glass of orange juice on a lazy Sunday morning in the country, nicely spiked with vodka.
He wanted to pitch the Smirnoff account. There was an element of Russian chic in the culture these days. Yevtushenko in his black-market jeans. Those Russian hats that sprouted earlier this winter, still going strong in New York and Chicago. Astrakhans. You wake up one morning and every third man earning a salary in a certain range is wearing a lambskin Russian hat.
"Dwayne, she's gone, good buddy. We've lost her to some lech in the copy department. I'd bet anything on that. Sandy thinks writers are moody and glamorous because they're always in danger of getting canned."
The moans of spewing buses rose into the settling dusk. The office lights were on now and all up and down the halls the girls tapped on the squarish keys of their IBM Selectrics. The graved ball kissed the ribbon, the ribbon kissed the paper, a superior grade of bond that was rag-weaved like the oxford shirts worn by the bosses of the typing girls. Every sixteen seconds one of them hit the wrong key and muttered a middling curse.
The married copywriters met their secretaries, or the secretaries of other writers, or the tall and lissome secretaries of account executives, white-shod and well-spoken, and went about the tender regimen of their lunchtime love-the nooner, it was called, or the matinee-meeting in the secretaries' snug apartments, striking in their dimensional similarity to the cubicles the writers worked in, only decorated more touchingly and vulnerably, with posters of Madrid on the off-white walls, or prints of Marino Marini horses or Bernard Buffet lobsters, or in the larger apartments of secretaries with roommates, which complicated the schedule and made the writers yearn for an intimate glimpse of one of the roommates, barefoot in a partially open robe, perhaps, coming from the shower after a late night with a failed date, the apartments situated nearly always in the sunless hindquarters of white-brick buildings in the East 80s, undoormanned, the small elevators inspected every two years by an individual called A. Bear, according to recent entries on the record of inspection that was fixed to the elevator walls.