Chapter 2

"How do you feel about Chicago?"

He asked it the way you'd ask a man about a restaurant.

The slip of paper lay between us on the desk, eighteen thousand dollars in Miss Tuttle's typing, and twenty-two floors down Madison Avenue was going to work.

I said I'd been flying there on Thursday.

"I know you were." He tapped his ash. "Now you'll live there. Head of copy, Chicago office, nine men and a floor wax. You'll finally be where you're supposed to be."

Everybody at the agency would call it a promotion, he said. He'd already told them it was.

I asked him what happened if I walked.

It was the only brave thing I said that whole month, and my voice cracked on the word like a paperboy's.

He nodded as if that was fair, got up, and took my portfolio off the credenza. He'd had it brought up.

"Let's say you walk. You take your book over to one of those hot new shops on Forty-third Street, where everybody's twenty-eight and nobody wears a tie."

One of those shops had offered me twenty-two thousand dollars the September before. I'd turned it down and gone straight in and told him, like a dog bringing in the paper.

"They turn the pages. They say, this is wonderful, who did it?"

He turned a page with one finger, and there were his initials in the corner of the proof, S.T., in grease pencil, the way they were on every ad I'd ever written.

"You say you did. So they call me, because we all eat at the same four restaurants. And I tell them the truth. I say you're the best kid I ever hired."

He looked up.

"Then they ask you why you left. What are you going to tell them?"

I looked at the initials. I used to show them to my mother.

"You won't tell them," he said. "You won't tell anybody."

"How do you know?"

"You closed the door. That's how I knew about Monday."

Ten words.

I've been in this business most of my life, and I've never written ten better.

I picked up the slip of paper, and I want that on the record too.

"Thank you," I said. I really did say that.

"Don't mention it, kid."

He let that one sit a second, so I could admire it.

That night I went home, because it was still where my shirts were.

Joanna was at the kitchen table in one of my old sweaters, her long hair tied back, with a cup of coffee she wasn't drinking.

She was twenty-six, the kind of woman waiters forgot other tables for, and somewhere around my second mention in the trade papers I had stopped noticing that.

She looked at me for the first time since Thursday.

"Say something, Russ."

I made my living with words, and I had nothing.

I asked her if she was coming to Chicago.

"No." She turned the cup around in its saucer. "It started in October, if you want to know. You were in Kenosha."

I'd spent four nights in a hotel wanting to know, and now I didn't.

"You could divorce me," she said. "I looked it up. It's the one thing they'll give you a divorce for in this state, and you're the one who saw it. You swear to it in a complaint, his name goes in the record, and he's finished by Friday."

That was the law in New York that winter. Exactly one ground for divorce, and I had seen it with my own eyes.

"And what would I be?" I said.

She was the quickest person I ever knew, and she didn't answer that.

I went down the hall to pack.

The bed was made, she'd washed the ashtray, and my Luckies were still on the nightstand.

I packed my shirts and left the pack where it lay. I couldn't have smoked one if you paid me, though I suppose somebody had.

That's where I made my rule, standing there, and it wasn't noble.

He had my wife, my work and every lunch table on the Avenue.

If I told it, even once, everybody would believe me, and it would be easy, and for the rest of my life I'd be a funny story with Spencer Talbot in the lead.

So I'd take what he had, one client at a time, with nothing but ads, and I would never say it. Not to a judge, not to a bartender, not to a priest.

I had no clients and no idea how. It was mostly just the one room he hadn't been in.

The next morning I opened a passbook at a savings bank on Lexington and told them every dollar of that raise was going in it.

The fourteen thousand I needed. I sent my mother forty dollars a month in Scranton, where my father had gone down the mines for thirty-one years and left her a house with a coal chute.

Every November five tons of chestnut coal came down that chute, paid for, with no name on the slip.

She said it was the Knights of Columbus, looking after a miner's widow. I let her say it. It was one bill I didn't have to pay, and I was the kind of son who was glad of that.

They gave me my send-off on a Friday, the tenth of February, at a bar on Third Avenue.

Forty people came, and Joanna stood by the coats in a green dress, because a wife who stays home from that gets talked about.

Spencer got up on the rung of a stool with his glass.

"Five years ago this kid walked into my office in a pair of shoes I wouldn't bury a dog in. I took him over to Brooks Brothers and bought him new ones. I'd like them back."

They roared. He had bought me those shoes, and I was wearing them.

Forty glasses went up, and forty faces turned around to me.

I want you to know how easy it was. It was six words, and they're the second line of this story.

Joanna was looking at the floor.

I lifted my glass. "To Spencer," I said. "He taught me everything I know."

They liked that. A man from media got a little misty.

Later, at the coat rack, he held my overcoat for me like a big brother, and I got my arms in and turned around.

"I'll never tell a soul, Spencer," I said.

He patted my cheek, twice.

"I know, kid. That's why I hired you."