I kept wanting to look in the closet to see if I could find the guy a sandwich board.”
“It doesn’t matter, and you know it doesn’t. None of them bills a tenth of what Sharp bills. What else can I say? You know Sharp and the kid are going to want to talk to both of us. Do I book you a seat or not?”
The thought of ten days, five in Boston and five in New York, gave Vic a mild case of the cold sweats. He and Roger had both worked for the Ellison Agency in New York for six years. Vic now had a home in Castle Rock. Roger and Althea Breakstone lived in neighboring Bridgton, about fifteen miles away.
For Vic, it had been a case of never even wanting to look back. He felt he had never come fully alive, had never really known what he was for, until he and Donna moved to Maine. And now he had a morbid sense that New York had only been waiting these last three years to get him in its clutches again. The plane would skid off the runway coming in and be engulfed in a roaring firecloud of hi-test jet fuel. Or there would be a crash on the Triborough Bridge, their Checker crushed into a bleeding yellow accordion. A mugger would use his gun instead of just waving it. A gas main would explode and he would be decapitated by a manhole cover flying through the air like a deadly ninety-pound Frisbee. Something. If he went back, the city would kill him.
“Rog,” he said, putting down his meatball sandwich after one small bite, “have you ever thought that it might not be the end of the world if we did lose the Sharp account?”
“The world will go on,” Roger said, pouring a Busch down the side of a pilsner glass, “but will we? Me, I’ve got seventeen years left on a twenty-year mortgage and twin girls who have their hearts set on Bridgton Academy. You’ve got your own mortgage, your own kid, plus that old Jag sportster that’s going to half-buck you to death.”
“Yes, but the local economy—”
“The local economy sucks!” Roger exclaimed violently, and set his pilsner glass down with a bang.
A party of four at the next table, three in UMP tennis shirts and one wearing a faded T-shirt with the legend DARTH VADER IS GAY written across the front, began to applaud.
Roger waved a hand at them impatiently and leaned toward Vic. “We’re not going to make it happen doing campaigns for Yor Choice Blueberries and the Maine Realtors, and you know it. If we lose the Sharp account, we’re going to go under without a ripple. On the other hand, if we can keep even a piece of Sharp over the next two years, we’ll be in line for some of the Department of Tourism budget, maybe even a crack at the state lottery if they don’t mismanage it into oblivion by then. Juicy pies, Vic. We can wave so long to Sharp and their crappy cereals and there’s happy endings all around. The big bad wolf has to go somewhere else to get his dinner; these little piggies are home free.”
“All contingent on us being able to save something,” Vic said, “which is about as likely as the Cleveland Indians winning the World Series this fall.”
“I think we better try, buddy.”
Vic sat silent, looking at his congealing sandwich and thinking. It was totally unfair, but he could live with unfairness. What really hurt was the whole situation’s crazed absurdity. It had blown up out of a clear sky like a killer tornado that lays a zigzagging trail of destruction and then disappears. He and Roger and Ad Worx itself were apt to be numbered among the fatalities no matter what they did; he could read it on Roger’s round face, which had not looked so pallidly serious since he and Althea had lost their boy, Timothy, to the crib-death syndrome when the infant was only nine days old. Three weeks after that happened, Roger had broken down and wept, his hands plastered to his fat face in a kind of terrible hopeless sorrow that had squeezed Vic’s heart into his throat. That had been bad. But the incipient panic he saw in Roger’s eyes now was bad, too.
Tornadoes blew out of nowhere in the advertising business from time to time. A big outfit like the Ellison Agency, which billed in the millions,