Truth in Advertising Page 0,34
interest in answering. “I got a call two days ago. He’s in a hospital on the Cape.” Cape Cod. Last I’d heard he was in Florida.
Eddie says, “You there?”
“Yeah.”
“Apparently it’s bad.”
His voice is flat, cold, distant. He’s been waiting to deliver this news his whole life but it’s just not coming out like he’s imagined. I think of my green bike. It appears with startling force. I see it, lying on its side on the grass in the yard by the back stairs. No kickstand. It had been Eddie’s and then Kevin’s, and there was no mud flap fender and when it rained there was always a stain from the muddy water along the back of your shirt.
I say, “How did they find you? I mean, what made them contact you?”
“He’s been in a nursing home. Gave them my name, apparently.”
How strange to think of him so close to Boston. How strange to think of him at all.
Eddie says, “Anyway. Thought you’d want to know. I talked with Maura. Left a message for Kevin.” Our sister and brother. We share a last name, the four of us. We share a history. We share this dying man. But we share almost nothing else, not, say, the names of our friends and coworkers, details of our last vacations, the funny thing that happened the other day at the dry cleaner/the gym/Starbucks. We don’t call to check in, to say hi. Eddie knows nothing of my day-to-day life, of who I’ve become. I know nothing about him, very little about his children. I’m not quite sure how it came to be that way. But I do know that once it happened it was far too easy to let it continue, to drift further and further away. You change what you want to change.
But here’s the thing: The way I see it, there are maybe five or six really important things that happen in your life. Big things, I mean. Five or six things that define you, that stay with you. You were teased mercilessly in third grade because of a stutter, say; you had an uncontrollable erection (hypothetically) at age fourteen on a bus and had to go five stops past your stop before it was safe to alight; you were witness to an act of violence that never leaves you. Events that act as markers along the way, that change you, that may not appear so obviously each day but that inform your actions, your outlook, your narrative. To date, for me, Eddie has been there with me for almost every one.
“Are you going?” I ask, knowing the answer.
“No.”
“Are you asking me to go?”
Silence. He was my best friend once.
He says, “Look. Okay. I can’t go. I’ve got . . . things. The kids. I’m just saying, all right? He’s in the hospital.”
“Okay, then,” I say.
“Yeah,” Eddie says.
I hang up.
I go back into the room, take my seat. Jill’s still talking about the brief. I can see that people are fading, doodling, texting. I also notice that someone has defaced a small corner of the large, expensive conference table. Someone has drawn a tiny picture of a turd. He is a turd man, with eyes and arms and little legs. Steam comes off his little turd head. He leans forward, as if atop a precipice, and from his little turd fist drops smaller turds—several of them are in mid-flight—into a basket below marked IDEAS.
WHERE ARE YOU GOING TODAY, MR. DOLAN?
Frank is speaking. My sense is that he’s been speaking for some time now, though I don’t know for how long or, for that matter, what he’s talking about. It’s the day before Christmas, and what says Christmas better than kissing the asses of several oil company marketing executives?
We are gathered—Frank, Dodge, Martin, myself—in the midtown offices of Petroleon, the ninth largest corporation in the world, with headquarters in either Dallas, London, or Dubai (they refuse to say which). Their New York offices occupy one of the greenest, most ecologically friendly buildings in the world, a tribute to renewable architecture and design, and a breathtaking public relations coup, high above the East River, just south of the United Nations. “‘Green’ isn’t simply a wonderful marketing ploy for us, Fin,” one of the marketing people had said to me while we were all shaking hands. He kept shaking my hand as we spoke. “We absolutely believe in it, as is reflected in our sizeable marketing budget. People say, ‘Hey, aren’t you guys an oil