The Deed (4 page)

But Nivens grinned impishly and touched his finger to his nose. “Bingo,” he confirmed, and Jason resisted the impulse to smash the fruit into that pasty little face.

“That’s a stupid rumor,” declared Jason. “A month ago, you told me we were supposedly getting bought by Disney/ABC. Where the hell do you guys hear this crap?”

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” Nivens assured him. “You’re not scheduled to go down with the ship. Even if you don’t get along with the new guy, you’ll probably just get shifted to another account group.”

“Or the new
gal,
” chimed in Walters.

“Or the new gal,” Nivens agreed.

But Jason was shaking his head. “I don’t think so,” he declared, out of equal parts loyalty and conviction. “Halloran’s the golden boy.” He looked down at his hands, then the orange, a suddenly pointless prop, and set it down, trying to maintain a credible nonchalance.

“Suit yourself,” shrugged Nivens. “But I get his file cabinet.”

“You can have it,” said Walters. “
I
get his office.”

“You can’t call offices,” said Nivens. “They’re assigned, you moron.”

“Guys, thanks for the scoop,” said Jason, holding up his hands as if preparing to applaud, “but I’ve really gotta get some work done.”

“Beware, O unbeliever,” said Nivens. “Seriously, though, you didn’t hear anything from us.”

“I certainly didn’t,” said Jason. “Mark my words, gentlemen: Halloran will still be here when we’re all wearing mahogany overcoats.”

After they finally left, Jason sat in quiet contemplation for a few moments. He’d never bothered to track the always-dire forecasts of the Brothers Grim over his three years of employment, but they seemed to be right at least half of the time, making them difficult to dismiss out of hand. It
was
preposterous…and yet, there the notion remained, a grinning barnacle securely attached to his forebrain.

His still-tentative grasp of office politics encouraged him to keep the information under his hat, although he had no idea what private use he could possibly make of it. In the end, he based his decision to say nothing to his boss on purely practical concerns. Even if Halloran
did
have his walking boots on, what could calling attention to the situation prematurely accomplish beyond embarrassing them both?

The buzz of the phone called Jason back to reality, and he decided to make haste and let the machine answer. Picking up the Hair Peace file and grabbing a notebook to pad his insubstantial load, he stepped out and headed for that big, quiet corner office at the end of the hall.

Pathologically tidy, furnished in a colorless, antiseptic institutional style, Pete Halloran’s office had all the plastic charm of a suburban model home. On the far wall, behind a smooth, gray art-deco desk subdeveloped with pristine little stacks of neatly clipped papers, a three-paneled picture window anchored the room’s preternatural symmetry. Identical file cabinets graced the end walls; a pair of chairs on the left balanced a small couch on the right; twin ferns buttressed the window, arching in gently opposing angles toward the sunlight. As usual, Jason felt oddly compelled to run a comb through his hair before entering.

As the room’s sterility made clear, Halloran no longer engaged in any messy acts of creation, and Jason could not avoid reading the evidence here of some desperate, alien thirty-something crisis of the soul.

The opening door revealed his boss in the act of chain-smoking, a fresh cigarette caught in the corner of a Popeye sneer, the still-smoldering cherry of another held tenderly to its naked tip. “Howdily-doodily, neighbor,” said Jason from beyond the threshold.

“Morning,” Halloran replied between puffs, drawing in the fire. His haircut was a well-manicured auburn lawn, his suit crisp and unruffled.

“There’s a lung surgeon out in the lobby to see you,” said Jason.

Halloran managed a wan smile as he inhaled deeply to establish the flame, dropping the old butt in a smokeless ashtray and closing a teeny garage door to pinch off the smoke. “Tell him to come back tomorrow,” he replied. “I’m having a drink with my liver specialist.”

Jason pulled up a chair and watched in mute fascination as his boss wet his little finger and picked up single ashes from his desktop.

“You’re not interested in half a ten-K share at the Jersey shore this summer, are you?” said Halloran. “It’s all the weekends.”

“Not unless you called me in here to give me a fat raise.”

Halloran smiled. “So…not in this lifetime. Well, I had to ask. It’s been a complete nightmare. Yesterday, I interviewed a woman who wanted to bring her entire group-therapy group down for the month of July. She’s already called twice to let me know she’s not taking my rejection personally.”

Jason smiled. “I think I’ll just skip the traffic again this year,” he replied. “I see enough New Yorkers in New York.”

“Fair enough,” said Halloran.

Though Halloran had assumed the paternal duty of guiding Jason through his fledgling corporate ascendancy, the two enjoyed an almost peer-level friendship, limited only by their age difference and the asymmetric power axis. Halloran had once even tried to set Jason up with his younger cousin, a dismal experiment that was never, ever spoken of, even in jest.

“That’s the Hair Peace project, I take it?” Halloran wondered, indicating the folder. “Looks rather…svelte.”

Jason tried not to wince visibly. The casual humor only underscored his unshakable concern that his inability to come through for Pete amounted to some sort of personal betrayal. “I’ve got some ideas cooking,” he replied.

Halloran nodded. “But nothing you’re ready to share just yet.”

“That’s pretty much it, yeah.”

“I warned you that this was going to be a tough one,” said his boss. “Talk to me.”

Jason laid the file on the desk and took a deep breath. “I don’t even know where to start. It’s problematic pretty much across the board.”

“Well, let’s see,” said Halloran, checking his ceiling for inspiration. “For one thing, it’s an idiotic product.”

Jason smiled, relieved already. “Yeah,” he agreed enthusiastically. “That’s it in a nutshell. It’s supposed to soothe itchy scalps and provide an appetizing ‘wet’ look. But it doesn’t actually, medically, address dandruff or any of the
causes
of itchy scalps; it just sort of
greases
the itch. Which is soothing, I guess, if you’re in deep denial. And the ‘wet’ look hasn’t been appetizing since Fonzie.”

“True,” said Halloran. “This is one of those miracle products conceived by some sixty-year-old would-be Ron Popeil while he’s sitting on the john. So start by fine-tuning your demographics: What kind of consumer
is
likely to think this sort of thing is cool?”

Jason was shaking his head. “But it’s more than that,” he complained. “I mean, Hair Peace, for Christ’s sake. It’s a lame pun on toupees, which aren’t that funny to start with. And the whole thing’s a blatant attempt to latch on to enviro-chic. Borderline-toxic, animal-tested ingredients, in a conscience-soothing forest-green package. I mean, look at the damned
bottle,
” he protested, opening the folder and pulling out a product shot, a photograph of a green Hair Peace bottle illustrated by several lines of glowing text. “These guys actually had the temerity to press a damn
peace sign
right into the petroleum-based, landfill-gagging plastic of the bottle. It’s the most baldly cynical thing I’ve ever come across.”

“‘Hair Peace’ also sounds like ‘herpes,’” Halloran noted, looking up from the photo. “If you say it with sort of a French accent.”

Jason grinned. “Right. So you agree.”

Halloran took a healthy drag from the cigarette, and guided a precarious ash cone to the tray. “Well, what does
that
mean? That it’s impossible? It’s a tough sell, granted,” he continued, forestalling Jason’s interruption with an upraised hand. “But so what? If it were easy, they’d do it in-house.”

“I know, I know,” said Jason, signaling his perfect understanding with an exaggerated nodding of his entire upper body. “I guess…I guess it’s just hard to get fired up extolling the virtues of a product you don’t stand behind.”

“Well, let’s not get all starry-eyed,” said Halloran dismissively. “The reason it’s hard to extol its virtues is because it hasn’t
got
any, that’s all. But that’s the
challenge,
Jason. Don’t be so concrete.” After a perfunctory puff of his cigarette, he began waving it around as an abstract pointer. “I mean, really, a potbellied pig with a number-two pencil can sell Coke and Pepsi. If you can peddle
this
piece of shit”—here he tapped the product shot with his free hand—“it will mark you as a player. This is a made-to-order opportunity to prove yourself.”

In the unbearable floodlight of Halloran’s scrutiny, Jason’s thoughts kept twisting themselves into maddening phone-cord tangles. “Maybe…it’s just hard for me to get away from the idea that it’s already taken a lot longer than it should have.”

“Listen, this is not worth choking over,” said Halloran. “Hair Peace is just an ill-conceived product that needs a lot of help—that’s all.” Jason started to speak, but was again silenced by an upraised finger as Halloran exhaled a smooth stream of smoke out of one side of his mouth. “I understand how paralyzing this kind of pressure can be, believe me. Just try and think more abstractly; don’t tie yourself to the product. Think lifestyle. Think joy, happiness, dancing supermodels. Think sex.”

“Yeah,” Jason agreed, smiling. “Okay, that sounds good.”

“Don’t be so concrete,” Halloran reiterated, sliding the Hair Peace photo back into the folder, which he then closed and held out before him. “And don’t abuse my leniency. I still very much expect you to produce.”

“I understand,” Jason replied with a sober nod, accepting the folder and rising to his feet. “Listen, thanks, Pete. I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

“Give me something in a week,” said Halloran.

Running his fingers through his own shaggy blond mop, Jason closed his eyes and pictured great disembodied tufts, cute dangling braids and ringlets, embarrassingly spare comb-overs. He focused in further, on slender individual fibers, long tendrils of dead cells excreting themselves backward out of the head and into the waiting jaws of eager clippers, tumbling end over end to the barbershop floor. He was running through a forest of hair on the head of a giant, sidestepping sweat-oozing sinkhole pores, hacking his way through gently curling thickets with a nanomachete. Suddenly the heavens darkened: Looking skyward, he yelped as an immense plop of noxious Hair Peace, impelled by a monstrous hand, blotted out the sky.

The buzz of the phone broke up his reverie; hungry for the interruption, he scrambled forward to pick it up on the first ring and barked his knee on the desk. “Y and G,” he said wearily.

After a long moment of silence, a female voice tentatively began. “Jason Hansvoort?”

“That’s me,” he replied cautiously. “Can I help you?”

Another long pause. “I think so,” the voice continued at last. “Yes, I definitely think so. I’m sorry, it’s just…amazing to hear your voice.”

Jason frowned. “Who
is
this?”

“My name’s…Amanda,” the caller said haltingly, as if constructing a pseudonym on the fly. “You don’t know me.”