Truth in Advertising Page 0,95

the name and phone number of every crew member, catering, and insurance company. None of it is news to anyone. It’s the equivalent of that part during a wedding ceremony where the minister asks if anyone has a reason why these people should not be wed.

I take a cab to the production company’s office in Santa Monica. A young assistant leads me through the cavernous space. It must have been a warehouse or storage facility at one point. A one-story cinder-block structure, a few blocks back from the beach. In a far corner is a glassed-in conference room. Alan, Jill, Ian, Pam, Jan, and Jan’s team of perhaps six people. Ian and Pam flew out to L.A. two days ago to begin casting, wardrobe, set design. Alan and Jill arrived last night with the client. They have the underappreciated job of shadowing the client, Secret Service–like, throughout the process. Account service, to my mind, is the hardest job at an agency. Much of the blame when things go wrong, none of the credit when they go right. All of them appear to be listening to Keita, fake smiles plastered on their faces. He’s wearing old-fashioned board shorts, a white dress shirt under a seersucker jacket, and Vans. He must have seen a Beach Boys album cover fairly recently. He waves to me and smiles. On a table at one end are sandwiches and bottles of water—sparkling and flat—from a natural spring in Iceland. I can’t shake the bubble of tension in my abdomen. I’m sneezing and my nose is running.

Jan makes her way to me.

“Jan,” I say with a fake smile, kiss-kiss.

“Fin. How are you? How’s your father?”

What if I went in for it, full tongue? I think that Jan is far more sexual than I give her credit for. Then I notice her shoes.

Ian told Jan my father was ill. I’d suggested it, as I thought it would create sympathy and make her more amenable during the shoot.

“He’s much better,” I say. “Thank you. Would you believe he asked for a Philly cheesesteak when he woke up?” I smile and fake a laugh. Jan smiles awkwardly.

“Is he from Philadelphia?”

“No.”

“Strange. Are you close, Fin?”

“How do you define close?”

“We’re all going through it, aren’t we?”

“Yes.” I nod, though I’m not sure what she means.

“We think we’re here for ourselves but we’re really here for our children, aren’t we? We’re placeholders for the next generation,” she says with the head-tilted earnestness of a daytime TV talk-show host.

I’m nodding like a Hasid at the Wailing Wall. “I think that’s right,” I say, though I have no idea what she’s talking about. I think it’s about dying and making room for others.

Jan says, “Fin, I had no idea Keita Nagori would be here. Did you see the Fortune story about him last year? ‘Samurai or Sap?’”

“I missed it.”

Jan tells me about the article, how Keita insisted that every office of Tomo shipping, advertising, and PR have Ping-Pong tables and half-day Fridays in the summer, apparently a very un-Japanese thing to do. An e-mail written to Keita by his father was leaked to the Japanese press (the story intimated that his father leaked it) savaging Keita, calling him stupid and incompetent, a spoiled playboy who didn’t deserve to inherit a great company. The fallout was a massive public embarrassment for Keita.

Jan continues, her thin, glossy lips moving fast while I dial down the volume to almost nothing, the faintest sound of her voice in the distance. My own personal camera has zoomed in on Jan’s mouth. I read a book awhile ago. It was by a Buddhist monk and it talked about how all you had to do—the secret to happiness in life—was to live in the moment. And the way to do that was to breathe and to focus on what you were doing. I’m breathing and I’m washing a dish. I’m breathing and I’m walking down the street. I’m breathing and I’m staring at a woman’s breasts. And I tried this, breathing and focusing on the moment. But for the most part it never worked for me (which, let me just emphasize, is far more of an indictment of me that any shortcoming of Buddhism or meditation). Except this one thing did happen. The handful of times I tried, in that close-to-immeasurably small space of time when I was almost in the moment, all I felt was . . . afraid. I could see myself, as if at a great distance, completely alone