Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(7)

Chester wiped his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief as he scanned the page. “Congratulations, Lily,” he said. “This is your finest write-up yet. And I’ll bet you helped them decide to quote your air-conditioning ad. Getting that word out to our simmering mass of sweaty customers seeking relief was a well-timed stroke. Particularly given that it didn’t cost us a red cent.”

The reporter had asked if they could run a sample illustrating my greatest innovation to the ad industry and the secret to my success. “Humor,” read the story, “used judiciously, lifts Boxfish’s ads above the pomp and routine of Macy’s competitors.”

Being funny—it was true; that was my innovation. Everyone took it and began doing it themselves, but nobody was funnier than I was, not for a long time, not for years. Mine was a voice that no one had heard speaking in an advertisement before, and I got them to listen. To listen and then, more importantly, to act on what they’d heard.

I’d given the reporter the image that Helen McGoldrick, true friend and crack illustrator, had drawn, an amusing cartoon of a deer sporting eight antlers with a hat perched on each, as well as my verse that had inspired it.

Chester read aloud from the newsprint in that thunderous voice of his, stentorian and clear as a Roman orator’s, just as he’d done days before when I’d brought him a draft to get his go-ahead:

This reindeer finds Manhattan heat

A shattering experience,

For when he ventures on the street

He undergoes the great expense

Of weighing eight straw hats upon

His antlers, in the hope that they

Will separate him from the sun

And keep him cool despite the day.

Poor deer, his overhead is quite

Absurd. He should be told to go

To Macy’s where the Fahrenheit

Is like the prices, sweet and low.

*

“It was also a not-so-subtle signal to the management that maybe they could pump some of that refreshing oxygen up here,” I said, taking the seat next to Olive and thereby clearing her route to the door, hoping she’d take the hint.

To my utter absence of shock, she remained unmoved and unmoving. In recent months Olive, a junior copywriter, had emerged as my friend-rival. Not my friendly rival; rather, she was someone who pretended to friendship even as she was being boiled alive from the inside out by seething jealousy. My grinning enemy. Someone who, when Chester would approve my copy yet again, even after a tenacious fight, would smile—teeth gritting—and say, “Honestly, Lily, you’re undefeatable as always,” resentful and obviously longing for my eventual defeat.

Olive was in the habit of saying “honestly” so often that even a child could see that she must be deceitful. I marveled at her mother’s prescience in having named her daughter after a green—with envy—cocktail garnish: hollow and bitter.

“It’s hotter than blazes,” said Chester, “so I hope they listen. But look at you, Lily, fresh as a flower, like the heat can’t touch you. Just like in the article.” And he read again from the page: “‘A slim, copper-haired girl in a softly clinging yellow dress is bending over a great clipping book, studying the full-and half-page advertisements pasted there.’”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “And ‘green eyes that smile.’”

“Oh, but those eyes are not smiling now,” said Chester. “What’s the matter?”

Perceptive as always, that Chester. It was he who’d first seen my talent, calling me clever and breezy as he plucked me from the forty-dollar-a-week field in which I’d been toiling—where Olive was still hung down—and flung me into the stratosphere. I had no reason to think he’d accede to my request for more money, at least not easily, but I had to make it. Not out of greed, I hoped he would understand, but out of justice.

“Chester, do you see what the lede of the article calls me?”

“The highest paid advertising woman in America,” he said. “I should think that’s correct and that you more than deserve it. We owe our loyal advertising readership to you. You’re better than vaudeville.”

“Thank you,” I said, giving a stagey bow from my seat. “But woman, Chester. It says woman. Why not person? I’ve come in here to ask for a raise. We both know I bring R.H. Macy’s more business than anyone else on the thirteenth floor, woman or man. Why not pay me what I’m worth?”

“Lil,” he said, resorting to the nickname he always used when things between us became strained. “About that … I know it’s been on your mind. But I’m afraid it’s been decided that we really can’t do that at this juncture.”

“The passive voice, Chip?” I said, resorting to my counterpart to Lil. “The use of the passive voice to disguise one’s role in the making of a decision is imprecise and obfuscatory. You’re a better adman than that. Active verbs! Why not say ‘I refuse to pay you fairly’?”

Chester picked up Olive’s paper, folded it, and handed it to me, though I was still clutching the one I’d walked in with. I could tell Olive wanted to ask for hers back but was too meek to do so.

“In here,” he said, tapping the article from behind his mahogany desk, “you sound so gracious and unassuming. I wouldn’t have expected we’d be back on this again today.”