“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.
Yours, Lydia Mixner (Doctoral Candidate)
The signature linked to MyCrosstoBear.blogspot.com, where my mother-in-law analyzed “evidence” “proving” that the historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth was not, in fact, the Son of God.
This mission was Lydia’s raison d’être. On various visits, clippings from Biblical Archaeology Review concerning the possible found remains of Jesus’s biological half-brother had been presented to me as if by a district attorney. I couldn’t count on two hands the number of articles I’d been emailed explaining that the term Son of God was, in Jesus’s time, a common way of referring to a righteous person. One year, Lydia gave me a book called The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany for my birthday. As a half gentile on my mother’s side, I bore the brunt of her findings. I typed a reply.
Dear Lydia,
Michael is MIA. I guess he hasn’t crawled back up your shriveled cunt after all. Not sure where else to look.
Kisses, Wendy
I hit delete and tried Michael’s phone again. I did not leave a message. Lillian called me into her office.
She said, “You look like shit.”
So much for denying the body’s betrayals. I picked up a coffee mug and absent-mindedly attempted to sip. The mug
