Chapter 4

I bought a scarf on my way out of Sheboygan, because my neck was cold, and I hated that too.

The paragraph ran in May, with his picture.

He was right, and I'd known it since the parking lot. As long as I drew a check from Ashworth Stoddard, I was a clever thing Spencer Talbot had done in Chicago.

So in June I got a sack of quarters and went to a pay phone on Rush Street, away from the office switchboard, and I called the three hottest new shops in New York.

The first one loved the beer ad.

The second one loved the beer ad and asked how Spencer was.

The third one said, "Kid, I had lunch with him Tuesday. He says you're the best he ever hired. Why would you want to leave?"

I stood there with four quarters and no answer I cared to give.

So I called Spencer, person-to-person, and resigned as of Friday.

"Nobody will hire you, kid."

"I know. I checked."

"Then what are you going to do?"

"I hired me."

The line hummed for a while, and then he laughed, a real one, the laugh I'd have walked through a wall for at twenty-two.

"How long did you work on that?"

"Since April."

"It shows." I heard him light something. "You've got one beer, and you haven't even got that yet. Call me when you've got a floor wax."

There was thirteen hundred and eleven dollars in the passbook, twenty weeks of Spencer's raise.

It rented two rooms over a candle shop on Wells Street, in Old Town, at ninety-five a month, with bayberry coming up through the floorboards.

That's who paid for my agency. I've always felt he should have been on the letterhead.

I offered Lois two-thirds of what she was making. She had nineteen years in that office.

"Whose name goes first?"

"Mine."

"Then spell mine right. It's got a J in it."

The sign painter charged us eleven dollars for CAVANAUGH WOJCIK, and she stood on the stairs and checked it letter by letter.

Phillip Altmeier moved his beer the next week. His letter to New York was one line long: "I don't buy from buildings."

In August, Douglas Ormsby agreed to see us, the floor wax man whose hand I'd been flying out to hold the day O'Hare closed.

Lustra was made in Kenosha, in a brick plant that smelled of carnauba, and his boardroom had a floor you could count your fillings in.

Every floor wax ad in America showed a woman in an apron, on her knees, in love with a floor.

Lois drew a woman in a good dress sitting up on a kitchen counter with her shoes off, reading a book, and the floor shining away below her with nobody on it.

Four years of college. Now you can see your face in the floor.

Underneath, small: Lustra lasts six weeks. Go do something.

Ormsby read it twice, did the decent thing and told his agency, and gave us all a date in September.

That gave Spencer two weeks, and when we walked back in he was already there, with an easel and a research man from New York.

"I don't want you to take my word, Doug. It's a beautiful line. The kid's the best I ever had. So we asked. Five hundred housewives, Rockford, Illinois."

He flipped the chart himself. It was a lovely chart.

"Eighty-one percent of them found it insulting."

He didn't look at me. He never gloated. He just stood there being right in a good suit.

Ormsby had three daughters and a bad stomach, and he looked at that number like a lab report.

I was as scared as I've ever been, and what came out of my mouth was something Spencer had taught me.

"How many could quote it?"

The research man looked up.

"You went back the next day and asked what they remembered," I said. "You always go back the next day. How many could give you the line?"

The research man looked at Spencer.

I'll say this for him. Spencer Talbot lied about almost everything, and I never once knew him to lie about a number.

"Ninety-four," he said.

"What's a floor wax usually get?" Ormsby said.

"Six," said the research man, to his shoes.

The door opened and Ormsby's secretary came in with the coffee, a gray-haired woman named Mrs. Kopp, twenty-six years with the firm. She got halfway to the table and stopped in front of Lois's layout, holding the tray.

"Mrs. Kopp," Ormsby said, "where'd you go to college?"

"Milwaukee-Downer, 1931. I read Greek."

"You find that insulting?"

She read it again. She looked down at the floor, which she'd been walking on since Pearl Harbor.

"Yes, I do," she said. "I'd buy a case out of spite."

That was the account.

I'd like to leave it there, with Ormsby laughing so hard he had to take a pill. But here's what I didn't tell him.

I didn't write that line.

My wife said it, in the fall of 1964, on her knees in our first apartment with a scrub brush.

"Four years of Smith, Russ, and I can see my face in it."

She was laughing, and so was I, and I wrote it on a matchbook while she was still talking.

I kept that matchbook for three years, and I never told her what I'd done with it, because by then I'd quit telling her things.

Spencer was waiting in the hall when I came out, in front of an old cage elevator with a folding gate, the easel under his arm.

"I was going to call you," I said. "You said to call when I had a floor wax."

He laughed. "Eighty-one percent. That's a hell of a number to beat." He sounded pleased about it.

The car came up. He stepped in, pulled the gate across and looked at me through the diamonds.

"That's her line, kid. She told me where you get them all."