Chapter 7

I watched its lights until I couldn't tell them from the other lights, and then I drove back to Wells Street and went to work.

The pack stayed on the drafting table, eleven left, and Lois worked around it.

Six weeks later we were in a room at the Pere Marquette Hotel in Peoria, at eleven o'clock at night, the two of us and a script.

The letter had come the week after Thanksgiving, one line on plain paper. "Come and show me something. March 7. L. Bristow."

I took that for a wife's way of scaring a husband.

You could smell the Bristow Soap Works from the hotel, tallow and lye coming up off the Illinois River. All that marble on Madison Avenue was standing on that smell, that and one marriage.

Lois sat in the armchair with her shoes off and read the script out loud in her gravel voice.

"This is soap. It gets you clean. Anybody who tells you it does anything else is in advertising. It won't get you a husband. It won't keep one. Twelve cents."

She lowered it.

"It won't keep one," she said. "That's the best line you ever wrote."

"I know."

It would have been the biggest laugh in Peoria.

Mrs. Talbot would be at her father's right hand when it landed, and Spencer would be across the table. Everybody else would hear a joke about soap.

I'd done that once, with an airplane ad, and it had climbed my stairs in a camel coat.

I took her pencil and drew a line through it.

"What's wrong with it?"

"It's too long."

She looked at me about the way she'd looked at the suitcase. Then she took the script back and lit a cigarette, and that was all anybody ever said about it.

The boardroom was over the loading dock, an oak table and a window on the river.

Lawrence Bristow sat at the head, sixty-seven years old, a heavy man in a brown suit twenty years old, with a face like a boiled ham. There were four directors and a little man taking minutes.

Mrs. Talbot sat at his right hand with her purse in her lap. She nodded at me the way you'd nod at a man who'd come about the furnace.

Spencer sat across from me. He'd turned thirty-five in November and lost a few pounds, and it looked good on him, the way everything did.

"Morning, kid."

He went first. They pulled the shades and he ran sixty seconds of color.

An actress you'd have known stepped into a claw-foot tub, with steam and late light, a white bar turning in her hand, and a French horn somewhere far off. There was no copy until the very end. Then her face turned, and a woman's voice said, "Bristow's. For the woman you're becoming."

I want this understood. It was the best thing he ever did. He did it at thirty-five with his agency coming down around his ears, and there wasn't a false frame in it.

The lights came up. A director took off his glasses and wiped them. They applauded, Lois took the cigarette off her lip, and I clapped harder than anybody.

I couldn't help it. I'd been clapping for that man since I was twenty-two.

We had no film and no easel.

I got up, walked the length of that table and set one plain white bar of soap on the oak in front of the old man.

"What's that, Mr. Bristow?"

He enjoyed a silence, and he took his time with that one.

"That's soap."

"What's it do?"

"Gets you clean."

"Ever do anything else?"

"Not that I heard of."

"You've been telling people for nine years that it does, in color. I'd like to put you in a chair in that suit and have you say what you just said. No music. That's the campaign."

"Me."

"You."

"Son, I've got a face like a boiled ham."

"Yes, sir. That's why they'll believe you."

I read him the script, the short one.

"This is soap. It gets you clean. Anybody who tells you it does anything else is in advertising. Twelve cents."

It was dead quiet, and then I heard a noise from across the table.

Spencer was laughing. He'd gotten a hand up over his mouth, but it was too late. It was the real one. He'd seen his own first rule coming back at him, and he couldn't help it either.

That was the last thing I ever got from him for free.

The old man picked up the bar, smelled it and set it down. He looked at the blank screen for a while, and then at his son-in-law.

"Leave the soap," he said to me.

That was all. Fourteen million dollars, in about the time it takes to sneeze.

The directors studied their pencils.

Spencer got to his feet, easily, and buttoned his jacket.

"Lawrence, nobody moves fourteen million dollars over a joke. I've given you nine good years. I think I'm owed the reason."

"Sit down, Spencer."

He didn't. He looked at that boiled-ham face, which told him nothing. He looked at his wife, who was looking at her purse.

Then he looked down the table at me, and I watched him add it up. I told you he never lied about a number.

Three accounts. A poster at the Peoria airport. His wife on an airplane in November. A letter to two rooms over a candle shop. And an old man who didn't even want to argue.

He was sure. I could see it. Everybody at that table already knew.

"What did you tell them?"

He said it quietly. I never once heard him loud.

I didn't answer. I'd had thirteen months of practice.

"You sat her down over your candle shop and you told her. All this time you've been saving it, you little coal-cracker, in the shoes I bought you."

I kept my hands at my sides and my mouth shut.

The smile went, one corner at a time.

"You told them I was in your bed."