Today would not be an exception. But later, after everything went down, I wondered what might have turned out differently if I’d heeded the cashier’s advice. In this alternate history, I convince Wendy to play hooky from work, and I whisk her upstate. In this alternate history, humbled before nature and modernist sculpture, I find the courage to come clean about the millions of dollars that I lost on the market. In this alternate history, Wendy is angry, but after hours of open and honest discussion, she arrives at forgiveness. And in this alternate history, we hit traffic on our way back to Brooklyn, and Wendy never meets Lucas or lands the Project Pinky account, and my best friend, Ricky, skips the Great Gatsby party because I’m not there to be his wingman, and he avoids the riot, and he doesn’t get murdered.
But I was not ready, just yet, to come clean. There was still time to fix things before Wendy found out. I had a plan, and I was heading to Ricky’s to ask for his help.
Andrea K. ran my Amex, handed back a receipt. Her forearm, I noticed, featured a list of men’s names: Albert, Sadeeq, Tino, Bartholomew. Each tattooed name was struck through with a line.
“Those guys take you to Storm King?”
“Bartholomew did.”
“And?”
“It was nice.”
“So what happened?”
She rolled her eyes. “One good deed,” she explained, “does not a winner make.” She studied my card before handing it back. “Are you a loser, Michael Mixner?”
I told her it remained to be seen.
Wendy
I was already thinking of leaving Michael by the time we found blood on the bedsheets. The amount was minuscule, a few dark dots. I assumed I was spotting.
There was more blood, the next day, on Michael’s side of the bed. Michael said he’d cut himself shaving. We didn’t connect the marks on our skin to these stains. The marks itched, and I’d falsely sourced them to dander allergies. Michael had recently brought home an itinerant tabby. As a child I was afraid of cats, their abject nihilism. I still am. At night, the unnamed cat gnawed my heels and toes. Sometimes she broke skin, another explanation for the blood.
When I uploaded photos of Michael’s bites to MeMD.com, the range of responses was broad. There were fifty-four comments. One user suggested that Michael had a rare form of leprosy, previously contained to the sub-Saharan desert. Another suggested that Michael was a self-denying victim of spousal abuse. Six were spam posts offering sets of Don’t Tread On Me windshield decals at a competitive price. Eleven members of the forum suspected bedbugs.
I blamed the cat and demanded her eviction. Michael defended the cat. The cat cowered. She looked guilty, but that’s how cats look. We agreed to disagree. The cat was granted probation. An exterminator laid pesticide throughout our apartment. We took our vacuum-packed clothing to my father’s storage space where it would sit for the recommended eighteen months. Our spoiled furniture littered the sidewalk. I left a note warning rummagers to steer clear. It was not an ideal moment for this drama.
We were courting an enigmatic client at work, referred to on the books as Project Pinky. In lieu of an RFP, the client had provided a study syllabus of theoretically comparable marketing campaigns. The syllabus included familiar campaigns like Joe Camel and Just Do It, but also campaigns selling abstract commodities: Ronald Reagan’s appropriation of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”; the public relations circus surrounding the O. J. Simpson trial. The final item was Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, the Greek comedy about women who withhold sex from their husbands in an effort to end the Peloponnesian War.
The plan was to pitch our ingenuity by presenting updates on these historical campaigns. The client had offered an unprecedented $10,000 materials fee to cover preparation costs. It was unclear what materials we were meant to acquire—O. J.’s glove?—but the message came across: despite the absurdity of our assignment, Project Pinky was serious business. We had a week to prepare. The client would not be approaching other agencies. The account was ours to lose.
Communitiv.ly, where I worked, is a Think Tank for Creative Synergy and Digital Solutions. More simply, the company helps heritage brands engage with consumers on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Ru.ffy, Pim-Pam, Twitch, and Instagram, and provides access to in-house strategists, as well as to a network of freelance designers, community managers, editors, journalists, programmers, videographers, and copywriters.
It is the network of freelancers that sets Communitiv.ly apart. Say, for instance, that your cosmetics company wants to set up an aspirational webzine that promotes a branded lifestyle and provides entry points for single-click purchase. Communitiv.ly will find a freelancer in its network to curate editorial content. Communitiv.ly will provide that editor with a database of underemployed fashion writers. Then Communitiv.ly will design, build, and optimize your site, create promotional communities on social media, launch traditional print, TV, and radio campaigns, and provide event planners and viral marketing experts to make sure the site’s launch gets enough old-media coverage to incite traffic-fueling buzz. It’s a one-stop shop, and it works because brands like Marc Jacobs and Revlon have more to spend on editorial projects, and can milk more revenue from them, than struggling old-media entities like Condé Hearst.
I’d heard people say that this was the future of journalism. What they meant was the end of journalism. Despite my active role in the razing, I was among its mourners. In ninth grade, while classmates tested their developing wiles in Spice Girls costumes and witchy lingerie, I went as Bob Woodward for Halloween. I must have been a sight: five-nine with a tangerine Jew-fro and pimples, wearing my dad’s corduroy suit. I dressed my Welsh Springer Spaniel as Carl Bernstein.
In college, I covered student activism for the Columbia Spectator. I was both too cowardly and too skeptical to participate in the demonstrations that were a fixture of campus life. The protested causes weren’t always commensurate with the protesters’ zeal, and I sometimes wondered if the real cause wasn’t the self-validation of those involved. I’m thinking, particularly, of a weeklong hunger strike devoted to curtailing fraternities from referring to beer pong by its insensitive alias, Beirut. I found the reporter’s role empowering, a way to participate while maintaining a balance between distrust and support. I harbored hopes of putting truth to paper.
Project Pinky was something else. Lillian arrived in the mornings on three hours’ sleep. Greg fine-tuned our General Deck, a PowerPoint presentation explaining our business model through buzzwords and animation. I mocked up a “Free O. J.” fan page, complete with links to articles on police corruption and racial profiling, as well as a message board where people who’d been harassed by the LAPD could share their stories. Greg’s shirts grew progressively more unbuttoned until, by week’s end, a briar patch of black hair threatened to garrote anyone who stood too close. I combed interviews with Springsteen for quotes that might reiterate right-wing talking points if taken out of context. Lillian lost her voice screaming supposedly inspirational marketing clichés about team building that she’d found on a Tumblr dedicated to cherry-picking from a handful of marketing blogs that, in their turn, had cherry-picked from books by blog-anointed marketing gurus. The gurus were paraphrasing the founding fathers.