Chapter 8

Nobody at that table had said anything about a bed.

Down on the dock a truck was backing up. The little man taking minutes looked up and asked Mr. Bristow, very politely, whether he should get that down.

"No," the old man said. "You fellows go have your coffee."

They went out like men leaving a church during a fire. Lois went last, with her T-square, and she didn't look at anybody.

Spencer was still standing. He was the second quickest person I ever knew, and it took him about two seconds. He looked at me, and I think he looked at my mouth.

Mrs. Talbot opened her purse, laid the Polaroid on the oak next to the soap and turned it toward her husband with one finger.

"I vote my twelve percent in the morning," she said. "He never told me anything, Spencer. I went up there in November and asked him straight out, with this on his table. He looked at your hand and told me you were the best ad man in New York."

Spencer looked at his hand.

"You told them yourself, just now. You might have wanted that in the minutes."

The old man hadn't moved. There was no surprise in that face at all.

"There was a woman at the Ambassador East in 1961," he said. "I've known what you are since before you had your own office, son. Whose bed this time I didn't know, and I never asked. Go get your hat."

Spencer took his time, I'll give him that. He put out his cigarette, picked up his film can and walked out past me without hurrying.

That left me standing there with my mouth shut and nothing to do with it, looking at an old man and a bar of soap.

"You thought it was the ad," Lawrence Bristow said.

I said it was a pretty good ad.

"It's a fine ad. I'll run it, I'll look like a fool and I'll sell a lot of soap." He rubbed his face. "I've had good ads for nine years, young man. He's the best there is. What I never had was anybody who could keep his mouth shut when it would pay him two million a year to open it."

Mrs. Talbot was putting the Polaroid away.

"I told him that same week," she said. "He wrote you the letter that night."

"You could have brought in a picture of a duck," the old man said.

He pushed the soap across the oak to me with one finger.

I had kept one thing out of it for thirteen months. I'd turned down Peoria for it. I'd put my wife on an airplane for it. I'd crossed out the best line I ever wrote.

That was the pitch. Nobody had told me I was auditioning.

By Friday the public offering was dead and the partners had asked Spencer for his keys.

Before the month was out they let forty people go, and I'd raised a glass with most of them on Third Avenue. Stuart Nagle got a letter in Chicago and went out that afternoon and bought a winter coat.

I'd thought about Spencer for thirteen months. I hadn't thought about them once.

The story reached all four restaurants by April, with me in it as the man who never said a word. It did me more good than any ad I ever wrote.

But that came later. Monday morning, at nine-fifteen, I was on the twenty-second floor.

Miss Tuttle sat at her desk with a carton of her own, twenty-nine years in it. She told me to go right in.

He was in his shirtsleeves among the boxes, wrapping things in the New York Times, thirty-five years old, and there's no such thing as a wonder boy at thirty-five.

On the desk was a pack of Parliaments.

I had my speech. I'd written it a few hundred ways. What came out was a question, because I'd been told I didn't ask enough of them.

"Why her?"

He finished wrapping a little statue and tucked in the ends.

"You came in that September and told me you'd turned down a shop on Forty-third Street. You were so proud. You told me like it was a present." He set it in the carton. "I looked at you and thought, he won't tell me about the next one. You were the best thing I ever found, kid. So I fixed it so you couldn't walk in anywhere with your head up."

He reached for another sheet of newspaper.

"It worked for about a week."

So that's what she'd been, a way of hanging on to a copywriter. I'd like to say I felt that for her first.

"One piece of business," he said. "The coal's paid through April. After that she's your account."

"What coal?"

He looked up.

"Don't be dim. Five tons of chestnut, every November, down the chute. You told me about that chute the day I hired you, in those shoes."

I found I was holding on to the back of a chair.

"The Knights of Columbus," I said.

"That was your mother's idea. I thought it was a nice touch."

I counted. He taught me to. Six winters. He'd paid it the month after he started up with my wife. He'd paid it the fall I took his airline. He had stood in three rooms and lost to me, and he could have said it in any of them and cut me off at the knees.

"You never said."

There it was, one corner of his mouth, coming up slow.

"Neither did you, kid."

I let go of the chair.

I walked over to the desk and shook one of his Parliaments out of his pack. I don't smoke filters. He watched me do it.

I lit it with his matches and dropped the match in his ashtray, and I took my time, because I'd learned from the best.

At the door I looked back. He was standing there with newsprint on his fingers.

"Close the door, kid."

I went past Miss Tuttle and her carton. I was halfway to the elevators before I heard it behind me, all the way down that hall.

He hadn't turned the knob first.

I stood and waited for the car and smoked it down.

For thirteen months I'd been thinking about how that cigarette would taste.

It tasted like a cigarette.