Thank You for Smoking

Have you got a slogan for the meeting?'

' 'We're Part of the Solution,' ' she said. 'What do you think?'

Nick considered. 'I like it.'

'We had a hard time with it,' Polly said. 'They wanted something more aggressive. They're very feisty, the wholesalers.'

'I've got a slogan for you,' Bobby Jay said. 'I saw it on a T-shirt. 'A Day Without a Buzz Is a Day That Never Wuz.' '

'Our first choice,' Polly continued, ignoring him, 'was 'In the Spirit of Cooperation,' but they said it sounded too much like 'spirits.' I spend half my time keeping my beer people from killing my spirits people, and my wine people from trying to kill the other two. The whole idea behind the Moderation Council was strength through unity at a time of volumetric decline, but it's like trying to unify Yugoslavia.' She sipped her iced cappuccino. 'It's tribal.'

Polly lit a cigarette. Nick appreciated a woman who smoked sexily. She leaned back and tucked her left arm under her breasts to support her right elbow, the arm going straight up, cigarette pointing at the ceiling. She took long, deep drags, tilted her head back, and let the smoke out in long, slow, elegant exhalations, with a little lung- clearing shot at the end. A beautiful smoker. Nick's own mother, in her day, had been a beautiful smoker. He remembered her by the pool, summers in the fifties, all long legs and short pants, pointy sunglasses and broad straw hats and lipstick that left bright, sticky smudges on the butts that he filched and coughingly relit behind the garage.

Nick was rousted from the reverie by the shrill cricketing of Bobby Jay's cellular phone. Bobby Jay flipped it open with practiced cool, like it was a switchblade.

.

'Bliss. Yeah?' Bobby said. 'Great.' He said to Nick and Polly, 'The postal worker. They got him. Uh-huh… uh-huh… Missouri… uh-huh… uh-huh… what?' His brow beetled. 'Well how the hell does CNN know? It was on him? FBI… what did, you didn't say anything to them, did you? Look, did you check with Membership?' Nick watched Bobby's face sag and thought, This face is in free fall. 'Sustaining? Was he paid up? Well, yes, check, right away, before you do anything. No, don't call CNN or the FBI back. I don't care. I'll be there in three minutes.'

Bobby Jay folded up his phone. Nick and Polly stared, awaiting explication.

'I got to go,' Bobby Jay said, tossing a twenty onto the table. It landed like a fall leaf in a little puddle of melting ice.

'Do we have to find out what happened from CNN?'

Bobby Jay looked like he was about to break a sweat. 'Take deep breaths,' Nick suggested.

'The son of a bitch was a member,' Bobby Jay said. 'Not just a member, but a sustaining life member.'

'How did CNN find out?'

'He had his membership card with him. CNN got a shot of it lying with the rest of his wallet. In a pool of blood.'

'Hm,' Nick said, no longer jealous about Bobby Jay's incredible good luck. At least with tobacco the casualties were tucked away in hospital wards.

'I'm on SAFETY!' Polly said, doing a take on the famous SAFETY ads showing macho, if slightly fading, actors standing on skeet ranges, holding expensive, engraved shotguns.

'Polly,' Nick rebuked her. She was so cynical, Polly. Sometimes Nick wanted to spank her. She made a big-deal gesture. Bobby Jay was oblivious, staring at the center of the table. Polly waved a hand back and forth in front of his face and said to Nick, 'I think he's going into shock.'

'Oh my Lord,' Bobby Jay said quietly, 'the video.'

'You probably want to recall it,' Nick said, but Bobby Jay was already out the door, on his way, it appeared, to a long afternoon of certain buttlock.

3

While you were out a producer for the Oprah Winfrey show had called to ask if Nick would go on the show in Chicago on Monday afternoon. The SG's call for an outright ad ban was getting a lot of play, and Oprah wanted a show on smoking right away. Nick called back immediately to say that, yes, he'd be available. This was face time, major face time. Millions and millions of women — tobacco's most important customers — watched Oprah. He was tempted to pick up the phone and tell BR, but decided to play it cool and conduct a little experiment. He called Jeannette and, in the course of asking her about some routine stuff, slipped it in. 'Oh, I almost forgot, I have to do the Oprah show on Monday, so can you get me everything we have on the ineffectiveness of advertising?'

He set the timer on his watch. Four minutes later BR was on the line wanting to know what the deal with the Oprah show was. Nick laid it on a bit about how he'd been 'cultivating' one of the producers for a long time and it had finally paid off.

'I was thinking maybe we should send Jeannette,' BR said.

Nick ground his jaw muscles. 'It's going to be a pretty splashy show. Top people. They made it pretty clear that they want the chief spokesman for the tobacco industry.' Not your office squeeze.

BR said with an edge, 'All right,' and hung up.

His mother called to remind him that he and Joey had not been by for Sunday supper in over a month. Nick reminded her that the last time he had, his father had called him a 'prostitute' at the table.

'I think it says how much he respects you that he feels he can speak to you so frankly,' she said. 'Oh, by the way, Betsy Edgeworth called this morning to say she saw you on C-SPAN talking about some Turkish sultan. She said, 'Nick's so attractive. It's such a shame he didn't stay in journalism. He might have had his own show by now.''

'I've got to go,' Nick said.

'I want you to bring Joey for supper on Sunday.'

'Can't. Sunday's bad.'

'How can Sunday be bad, Nick?'

'I have to cram for the Oprah show on Monday afternoon.'

Pause. 'You're doing the Oprah Winfrey show?'

'Yes.'

'Well. You'd better get her autograph for Sarah. Sarah loves Oprah Winfrey.' Sarah was the housekeeper, the reason Nick was incapable of standing up to his own secretary. 'Does Oprah smoke?'

'I doubt it.'

'Maybe you'd better get her autograph before the show. Just in case everyone gets angry, the way they did when you were on with Regis and Kathy Lee.'

He was late. He hurried down to the basement garage and drove aggressively through the Friday afternoon traffic, and pulled up in front of Saint Euthanasius a good half hour late. Joey, in his uniform, was sitting on the curb outside the main building looking miserable. Nick screeched to a stop and bolted out of the car as if he were part of a SWAT team operation. 'I'm late!' he shouted, loudly belaboring the obvious. Joey cast him a withering glance.

'Ah, Mr. Naylor.' Uh-oh. Griggs, the headmaster.

'Reverend,' Nick said with what forced delight he could muster. Griggs had never quite forgiven him for putting down under 'Father's Occupation' on Joey's school application form, 'Vice President of Major Manufacturers' Trade Association.' Little had he realized that Nick was a senior vice president of Genocide, Inc., until one night when he caught Nick on Nightline duking it out with the head of the flight attendants' union over the effects of secondhand smoke in airplanes. But by then Joey was safely enrolled at this, the most prestigious boys' school in Washington. Griggs glanced at his watch to indicate that it was not lost on him that Nick