Old Neighborhood (10 page)

“No one is really in charge of meals at our house. We all help.”

“Does that include you, Steven?”

“Whenever I can.”

The program lasted for twenty-seven minutes of air time. It felt as though we were there overnight. There was something cheap about our posing, I could sense Beverly becoming uncomfortable about it as I was, the two of us putting on a performance for promotion purposes. I was asked a few questions about the advertising business: “How do you get your ideas?” “From real life,” I answered, and the moderator said that was wonderful. Eventually, Beverly was able to discuss the Institute and talk about the programs she offered. The phone number for the Institute was shown on the screen, so from a publicity aspect, our first and last television appearance was useful. In closing, the moderator said:

“Beverly and Steven Robbins have a special relationship. They respect each other’s careers, and the traditional husband and wife roles do not exist in their household. They just seem to—flow in and out, wouldn’t you say, Beverly Robbins?”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“Steven Robbins?”

“Yes. We flow. I flow one way and Beverly flows the other.”

“Wonderful.”

B
EVERLY SUGGESTED THAT WE
see a marriage counselor and I agreed. We needed help. Sylvia Pressman, a silver-haired woman of about fifty, was someone Beverly had met at several community functions. She had an office in her home in Glen Cove. In our first meeting, she asked Beverly and me to talk about our relationship so we could hear each other describe the situation. Both of us said that we were work-preoccupied, and that we had spent little time being attentive to one another. Sylvia was of the opinion that we did not have much of a life together as a couple and recommended that we see her on a regular basis. The discussion between husband and wife concerning a convenient hour for the sessions was in and of itself a reason to seek a marriage counselor.

We settled on ten o’clock Saturday mornings, and over the weeks that followed, Sylvia explored our personal psychologies, suggesting that I might not have had the best example in the world in my parents’ marriage, while Beverly was confronted by the possibility that she might have been holding herself back from me to court her parents’ approval. Sylvia also talked about an empty nest syndrome, that with the children older we no longer had them as a team goal to connect us. The psychological factors Sylvia presented seemed less persuasive to Beverly and me than the realities of our daily lives, and we kept returning to the problems of two people in demanding careers. One day Sylvia said:

“What we have here are two people who still have concern for each other but haven’t the time for the care a marriage requires.”

“I don’t know how you do it,” Beverly said.

“There is no formula. You have to be attentive to each other’s needs—and express those needs.”

“If you need your head rubbed because you have a headache, it’s hard to get your wife to rub it when
she
has a headache.”

Sylvia looked perplexed.

“This is a new development, to have the woman working at the same level of intensity as the man. We don’t know what it will all mean yet.”

“Just what I always wanted to be,” I said. “A new development.”

We decided to terminate the therapy. To give the counseling its due, we were more aware of the problems we had in being intimate with each other, but we did not require the services of a marriage counselor to tell us that we were under pressure because of our careers. Sylvia had suggested we try to interfere with the patterns we had established with each other, so Beverly came into New York and met me for lunch a couple of times, and I went out to Long Island and met her for lunch, with disastrous results, we were both so tense about how much time it was costing us in the middle of the day. We joined a film series at Stony Brook, movies were an interest we had once shared, and it obliged us to spend Wednesday nights together. We were not always able to protect the time from emergencies at work.

We decided to take a trip without the children—to Antigua in the Caribbean—ten days and nine nights to save a marriage. On the evening of our arrival, the steel band played “Yellow Bird,” the first of innumerable “Yellow Birds” we were to hear. We tried. Two people never tried so hard to be romantic. We made love in the shower to the aroma of mildew, we made love in the middle of the day to the rattling of the air-conditioner, we made love at night trying to find the right instant. “Wait a minute. There’s a mosquito in the room.” With clenched teeth, we were going to have a good time, since so much was at stake. But by the eighth day, having sat on the beach, and having entered the dance contest, and looked at the coral from the glass-bottomed boat, and seen the historical site, and heard more “Yellow Birds” than I thought possible, we were bored with the tranquility of the tropics and ready to go back to the tensions that had produced the need to get away in the first place.

As we waited for the luggage at Kennedy Airport, we were both solemn, disappointed. We were tired from traveling but we did not go straight home from the airport, I drove aimlessly along secondary roads, hoping that one of us would think of something to say that could help. I parked on a dead-end street.

“I won’t be Pat Cleary,” she said suddenly.

“I wouldn’t want you to be. A little, perhaps, but not really.”

“Is this the price you have to pay? If you want to be independent, you get your marriage screwed up?”

“It’s both of us. We’re both so busy.”

“I’m not running away from you, Steve. I’m just trying to do something on my own.”

“I know. I love you, Bev.”

“I love
you.
But I don’t even know what that means. And I don’t even know if it’s enough.”

Because of the problems in getting everyone together, I was given the choice of celebrating my forty-fifth birthday with a family dinner at an Italian restaurant two days early or one day late. I chose two days early to get it over with. I received a wallet from Beverly and slippers from the girls. I had received wallets and slippers, the gifts seemed as tired as I.

I was sitting in the living room reading a long memo from Tolchin concerning new accounts he wanted to solicit when Sarah breezed by on her way out for the evening. They came around several times a week, boys with expensive cars. They were once the enemy, boys as rich as these. Now they waited in the foyer for my daughter and called me “sir.” Had I co-opted the enemy or had the enemy co-opted me?

We took on a new account, a health-food company that was about to market a line of herbal teas on a national basis. I recommended a television-and-print campaign which stressed that caffeine was found in most teas, but not in these herbal teas. A nutritional chart was to be included in the print ads and the line I wrote for the campaign was: “The tea you can take before bed.” The advertising manager of the company said, “You’re a genius.”

I had wanted desperately to succeed in the advertising field, an old battle that eventually I had won. Having won, I no longer had benefit of the quest. I was left with the work itself and after twenty years the work had become increasingly monotonous to me. I was obliged continually to turn out clever phrases here, gimmicks there.

One could do acceptable work and be bored at the same time, and this was disturbing to me—it seemed to prove how unimportant the work was in the first place. The public looked at what I had done, turned the page or flipped the dial, then bought the product or did not. I was called a “creative” executive, but my creations did not touch people in any significant way, my work was not anything the public cared about, nothing I did was of lasting value.

When I was younger, I had written a commercial with a batter hitting a plastic plate past a pitcher, now I had a ballet dancer dancing in ballet shoes made of a new paper towel, and another with an elephant sitting on a football helmet. I was repeating myself—and you don’t bat plastic plates or dance in paper towels, elephants don’t sit on football helmets. It was ridiculous, and yet, in advertising, it was considered very fine work.

I wrote a campaign for a new line of hi-fi speakers, the speakers were to be on the market for a year and then the manufacturer was going to discontinue them for another line. Hi-fi ads, tea commercials, they were different, the same. Everything I worked on was becoming interchangeable to me. I went to meetings, constantly doling out clever little ideas. I argued with Tolchin about his headhunting for new accounts. And as my disenchantment increased, I ate too much and drank too much, writing off the excessiveness with credit cards, coming back to the office from business lunches, sluggish from the food and the wine.

One of our clients was Frederick Boujez, who had changed his name from Fred Birnbaum when he took over his family’s business. He was in his late twenties, five feet seven, dark, with good-looking features that he liked to appraise in the reflection of mirrors and windows. Under his direction, Boujez Enterprises, formerly Birnbaum Products, expanded from perfumed soaps to a low-priced line of perfumes and colognes. Tolchin was excited about the account, he thought it was “good diversification” for the agency. I was having problems with Boujez. He wanted to name a new perfume after a tough-looking Broadway dancer he was seeing named Diedre DeLuca.

“Trust me on this, Steve. She’s gonna be another Lauren Hutton.”

“Diedre is hard to say. Why don’t we do some market testing?”

“Don’t gimme a hard time. Just get me some layouts. I already promised her a fragrance.”

I asked the copy and art departments to start developing ideas, but when Boujez and I were having a business lunch, he drank more than I and drunkenly told me that he was not really interested in creating a product, only in creating layouts, so he could use the material to keep the girl in his bed. I was already having dark thoughts about the monotony and the triviality of my work—now I felt like a pimp.

The problem was solved for me when the girl suddenly left town with her new lover, who happened to be a woman.

“There’s a bottom line to it, Steve. I’m gonna turn the experience into profits.”

Two weeks later, Boujez called for a meeting at the agency with my partner and me. Boujez arrived wearing his best custom-made suit and new Gucci shoes, so the meeting was to be Important.

“Homos are getting very big these days,” he announced.

“Oh?” I said.

“I want to go after The Homo Market.”

“The Homo Market?”

“Steve, I had some research done,” and Boujez placed a folder in front of me prepared by our research department. It was evident that Tolchin had permitted this to be prepared without my knowledge. The report was entitled “The Homosexual Market in America.” I leafed through it quickly. It contained various estimates of the numbers of homosexuals in market areas in the United States, projected buying power of homosexuals, a loathsome document.

“I’ve thought a lot about this. What homos need,” Boujez said, “is their own fragrance! And we’re gonna give it to them!”

I put my head in my hand to prop it up.

“Fred, we’ve been hearing about gay rights,” I told him. “But I don’t recall that as one of their demands.”

“I want to introduce two new homo lines, one for men and one for women. I’ve already got the names—‘Macho’ for men and ‘Lesbo’ for women.”

“Steve, this is your area, of course,” Tolchin said. “But Fred and I were talking about ads which feature touching.”

“And naked,” Boujez added. “Naked and touching, that’s the breakthrough.”

“But tasteful,” I said sarcastically.

“Steve, I’m counting on you to come up with brilliant copy for me, beautiful ads.”

“This is very important to Fred,” Tolchin said, coaching me. “He believes this is a milestone in American marketing.”

“Let’s see if I have this. You want to isolate homosexuals as a market and get them to walk into stores everywhere for a product that identifies them in public as homosexuals?”

“They protest, don’t they?” Boujez said. “In big groups with banners?”

“For their rights, not their aromas.”

“Steve—”

Tolchin ended the meeting quickly and shepherded me into my office. He told me the agency would lose the account if I did not cooperate, that I was guilty of prior censorship if I resisted at this stage of product development, and that at least twelve people would be let go if we lost the account, and how did that sit with me? I squeezed my fingers against the side of my head.

“I also have a headache from this,” he said.

“I have more than a headache,” I said. “I have what sounds like it should be a French general.”

“What?”

“General Malaise.”

I agreed to take the research report home with me to read over the weekend. My agency was addressing itself to “The Homosexual Market.” Is this what I’ve become, I said to myself, a pimp
and
an exploiter?

I was in the house, reading the report, when Amy bounded past me wearing her latest button, “Save the Whales.”

“Fuck the whales!” I said to myself, under my breath.

She stopped in her tracks.

“What did you say, Daddy?”

“I said, Fuck the whales. You’re saving whales and I’m sinking into the sea.”

“Oh, Daddy—don’t be so ethnocentric.”

They grow up to call you names that don’t even make sense. I sat with “The Homosexual Market in America” and she went off to save whales.

B
OUJEZ WANTED TO PROCEED
carefully with his marketing milestone, so I was given a reprieve on what my position would be. He was going to do further research. “We gotta talk to the homo on the street,” he said.

I came back to the agency after another “creative” business lunch, having consumed more than my customary quota of wine, and was feeling so logy I fell asleep on the couch in my office.

“I’m drained,” I told Beverly that night.

“You look tired.”

“I thought when the girls are at camp we could go somewhere for a couple of weeks. Not the Caribbean. No more ‘Yellow Birds.’”