Free Otherwise Engaged by Suzanne Finnamore Page A

then had him run us both over. Death to the hypocrites.
    Today the Creative Director from L.A. came by to tell Graham and me that our television campaign had tested well in the initial focus groups, and would definitely be produced. He announced it dismissively, as though it were a prelude tosomething much, much bigger created by himself which he would at any moment reveal.
    He was in my office for about five minutes, but wouldn’t sit down. He methodically picked up things from my desk, glanced at them, and put them down again. I offered him a chair. He declined, examining a stapler. He of course had probably never used a stapler. He had people to staple for him. As I started to rise, he ran out. I thought of how kings have to have their heads higher than everyone else’s.
    When I left the building to go home, the Hostess pie and cake truck was out front, loading snack cakes into Kwick Mart. I looked to see if the driver was fat. He was.
    Everyone is being their perfect selves.
    I torture Michael when we’re watching television; I take my diamond ring off and place it on his baby finger or his little toe. I put it on the Cow’s tail. Michael hates this, so he finally grabs it away from me and jams it back on my ring finger.
    This makes me feel like he’s asking me all over again. A feeling that time can slide backward and forward, that we can afford to dawdle.
    At 6 a.m. the alarm went off, on my side of the bed. I told Michael that I was taking a day trip to L.A. to attend the final focus groups for the new campaign: what Graham calls the Fuck Us Groups. This is where, for fifty dollars apiece, people from all walks of life sit around eating free sandwiches and ripping the wings off the advertising we have created.
    “I’m leaving for L.A.,” I said.
    Michael scowled, flopped over, and said, “You have to tell me the day before.”
    “Why?” I said.
    “I need to prepare for your flying. I need to fly the plane with my mind.”
    I hear myself agreeing to this.
    Back home, a Saturday. I went to my childhood friend Yvonne’s baby shower in Pacific Heights. Immediately upon arrival I was cornered by a petite blond woman from Yvonne’s office who’d just left her husband. When she heard I was engaged, she explained to me, in detail, how love dies. Smiling and hovering like Tinkerbell, she described how one day she just woke up and realized she didn’t love her husband anymore. Her two-year-old son, she said, is living with her in Mill Valley.
    Then she said I should read
The Road Less Traveled.
    Eventually I was saved by the appearance of an eggplant frittata. I moved toward it. I told her it was very nice to meet her. And thank you for killing my buzz.
    I left early, making up a lie for the room. Yvonne understood, knowing my history of mental illness.
    I walked alone down Washington Street. The maids were all leaving the Broadway mansions, walking to the bus stops, to crinkled American cars that don’t fit in.
    I hate showers. All those women in one place. Terrifying.
    I wonder whom I can convince to throw me one.
    I tell Reuben about the dream I had, where the back of my wedding dress has a big hole in the rear.
    He said, “How did that make you feel?”
    “Exposed,” I said.
    He nods, and says, “When the Navajo weave their blankets, they put a mistake in every one. Because nothing is perfect.
    “A very smart people,” he concludes, putting his feet up on a hassock, and crossing them at the ankles.
    At work the person in the office next to me has been made a partner. His commercials consistently feature pouty-lipped Asian girls in midriff tops and lean yet muscular men with lizard eyes just like his.
    We started at the same time, in this agency. Like, the same month.
    And when I pass him in his new giant-sized office, with a wet bar and a black marble shower, I have to fucking
congratulate
him.
    Last night I made Oprah’s unfried spa recipe chicken. I have to make it every two weeks now. Michael