It was the broad-spectrum spiel we fed all our clients. Lillian oversaw the proceedings from the perch of a barstool. She gave me a look that said: we’ll talk about this later. I found a seat up front.
Our team—Greg, Lillian, and myself aside—consisted of developers with poor fashion sense. Felt, red trim, fedoras, bandanas. The occasional splash of platinum lamé. They could have passed as bar mitzvah DJs or landlocked pirates headed out on the town in 1980s Las Vegas. Communitiv.ly is a casual company. The tech world takes cues from San Jose. Across one wall, graffito-style spray paint declared creation isn’t an ism. Greg was on the part about the speed of culture.
“The United States,” he said, “is not just one country.”
The client looked unconvinced. He was handsome, almost boringly so. His shoes must have been the ones Lillian had described. She was right about the leather.
“The United States of America is many tiny countries,” Greg continued. “And each contains multitudes.”
At the mention of multitudes, a new slide headed demographics appeared on the projector. The slide featured illustrations of men and women done in a variety of gray-spectrum skin hues. At center was a young African American man—you could tell from the hair and dark shading—wearing both a hooded sweatshirt and a necktie. He wore AirPods in his ears. The man was labeled urbanite. A caption described urbanite as someone who makes over $80,000 a year and spends up to three nights per week in bars and nightclubs. It was a slide we’d made for a pitch to Axe Body Spray in July.
“There are many countries within us,” Greg said. “Within each and every one of us.” He pointed to his heart.
“But there are also many countries without us. We are part of a global economy now, a global movement. The globe is spinning faster every day. The world makes more revolutions around the sun now than ever.”
A cartoon of a spinning globe appeared on the projector as techno played from the wall-mounted speakers. In stop-motion photography, the globe’s revolution around a tiny sun increased to hundreds of frames per second.
“In Kenya,” Greg said, “Pim-Pam is ubiquitous.”
“But what about—” the client began to ask.
“Hear me out,” Greg said.
A cupped ear appeared onscreen. The image had ear hair.
We were offered the account. Greg’s presentation had gone over okay, and my reimagining of Lysistrata as a wage gap protest, complete with an Instagram hashtag—#RemunerateOrMasterB8—for photos of begging, frustrated husbands, was declared, by the client, a smashing success. He wanted to meet with me privately that afternoon.
“Just me?” I asked Lillian.
“If he was into short, dickless men, he would have asked for Greg. As it stands, you’re all we’ve got.”
“That makes me uncomfortable.”
“Who said anything about comfort? Throw on some Spanx and contour your cleavage. You might get some onion rings out of the deal.”
If pressed, she would have said she was joking. I wasn’t certain she was. During the early days of the #MeToo movement, my boss made a public show of support. She retweeted celebrities’ uncontroversial platitudes. Bylined an op-ed in Ad Age, ghostwritten by me. She was shrewd enough to know that, as a female CEO, expressing outrage at our industry’s endemic sexism would benefit her brand.
Privately, Lillian expressed reservations. She worried that male acquiescence to demands for gender parity—by which she meant the façade of acquiescence—would leave women ill-served. Sex was a weapon, she’d explained to me once. This was at some industry gala. We stood sipping wine, watching the tuxedoed swarm. “They want to network with my cleavage,” Lillian said. “And I want to network with their wallets.” She was worried #MeToo would scare these wallets away. She was afraid she’d be forced to surrender a weapon that she’d spent years learning to wield.
I told her about one night, at a campaign launch party, when I was cornered by an account exec from a major international brand. The man twirled his martini. He sucked the olives off his toothpick in a single, noisy slurp. From our vantage, at the railing of a downtown hotel roof bar, the city looked glazed after an earlier storm. The man offered his jacket to cover a wet seat. He held my elbow as I lowered myself. His finger poked my lowest spinal notch and traveled down to the point of my tailbone. “Come home with me,” he slurred. “We can discuss the account.”
“What account?” said Lillian.
I named the brand.
“Well that explains why they went with Ogilvy.”
The office was quiet. The development team was unit testing a cross-promotional app that matched Uniqlo T-shirts to colors of Benjamin Moore paint. The marketing team was gathered around a monitor watching YouTube videos of animals fainting. Others ate at their desks: oatmeal and oversized burritos and leftover kugel from a Shabbat-themed cocktail hour. In their corner, designers tossed Swedish Fish into each other’s mouths. Our CFO could be seen bobbing beneath the weight of puffy headphones, operating an invisible turntable. The intern next to me glued magazine cutouts of Michelle Obama to her mood board. The rest of Communitiv.ly stared into their monitors and sipped coffee from novelty mugs shaped like blocks of Swiss cheese we’d ordered in bulk for an Instagram-cosponsored benefit for a Brooklyn-based artisanal fromagerie. I picked up the phone.
The representative I reached sounded chipper. He said his name was Orlando and asked how he could be of help.
“I tried to buy some outfits and my card got declined.”
Orlando explained that Michael and I were in debt to American Express. Our line of credit had been cut off. A trip to Duane Reade had tipped us over our limit.
I asked how much debt.
Orlando gave a figure.
I apologized, though I had done nothing wrong. I hung up and called Michael. He didn’t answer.
Among the morning’s emails was a message from Michael’s mother. Born in Lodz, Poland, Lydia Mixner née Schulman had been a concert violinist until arthritis wreaked havoc on her fingers. Now she was a late-budding academic, completing her PhD thesis while teaching freshman composition at a local college.
Lydia’s subject is the evil that men do. Specifically, the evil that men did, during the first half of the twentieth century, to Jews. She has trouble letting go. This explains her relationship with her son.
Dear Princess Wendy Mixner (wife of Prince M. A. Mixner),
It has come to my attention that my one and only son, Prince Michael Andrew Mixner of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and the surrounding counties, is currently without access to telephone or Internet. This must be the case. Otherwise, he surely would have returned the many calls, texts, and emails sent to him by his mother over the last few days. Nothing urgent. Tell the Prince his mother longs to hear his voice.