Free Truth in Advertising by John Kenney Page A

his guitar down. “Have you decided on the vacation thing?”
    â€œMexico. Christmas Eve. Very excited. How about you?” I ask. “Where are you going for the holidays?”
    â€œWife’s family in Westchester.”
    I nod to his guitar and say, “Sounds really good, Paulie. Nick Drake?”
    Paulie says, “You got that right.”
    â€œTortured soul.”
    Paulie shakes his head slowly. “He felt too much, Fin. Saw beauty everywhere. Too overwhelming, ya know?”
    I say, “I’m not that deep, Paulie.”
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    In my office, I open up The New York Times , turn to the obituaries. Whole lives, right there, in three hundred words. Full, rich lives. Exciting lives. Sad lives. Lives lived through war, depression, children, success, failure, ridicule, public embarrassment, famous patents, Nobel Prizes, moon landings, prison, Academy Awards, the invention of tubing, coils, rheostats, anti-lock brakes, the Kelvinator, the pilot light, lived in Paris/Taos/Mill Valley, supported passage of civil rights, textile imports, Holocaust survivor, Cold War spy, OSS. It’s all there. A modern Shakespearean drama.
    Also there, on the next page, is a gravy boat. It’s in an ad for Bloomingdale’s, for their fancy dinner plate collection. For the holidays. For families who get together and set the table with fine china. And who use a gravy boat. Or sauce boat, as I learned they are called. We got a sauce boat, Amy and I. For our engagement. We promised each other we wouldn’t do the usual thing: the round of parties, the formal invitations, the registry. But we ended up doing all of it because Amy wanted it. And so did her mother. Amy said we had to register. I said we didn’t need anything. She said I didn’t understand, that people wanted to show us their love by buying us an ice cream scoop from Crate & Barrel. I said I found that hard to believe. We argued but mostly ended up laughing about it. Especially the gravy boat. She had registered for an eight-piece fancy dinner set, complete with gravy boat. She said it was essential to have a gravy boat. I asked her if she often made gravy, because I’d never seen the results. She finally admitted that she’d never actually made gravy but was eager to try. She said it felt old-fashioned, a thing married couples do. The more I ridiculed her about gravy and its accompanying vessel, the more I found I wanted it. Once set up, we followed the registry online, like a kind of video game, watching as the things she’d chosen were ticked off. We waited for “sauce boat—quantity 1” to disappear. I’d suggested we ask for ten. It all seemed unreal to me. But not to her. Amy could see the dinner parties we were going to have. With gravy.
    Then there was the engagement party. This was about eighteen months ago. Amy’s mother’s apartment, Brooklyn Heights. A swanky neighborhood just over the Brooklyn Bridge. Looks like a movie set of old New York. The family bought their townhouse in 1980 for the then-princely sum of $275,000. I would never ask how much it’s worth now. But I don’t have to with Zillow.com, which says it’s worth $4.5 million. Amy grew up there. Went to Saint Ann’s, played squash at the Heights Casino. She could see us living there, she said. See raising our children there. Grace Church School had a wonderful preschool program. Two hours a day, two days a week, for just $7,000. And then either Saint Ann’s or Packer or Brooklyn Friends,each running about $30,000 a year from age five on. This wasn’t taking college into account, mind you. A quick tabulation had the education bill, per child, at $500,000. Good. Excellent. All made perfect sense. I nodded and smiled. But who was she talking about? Who was this man named Fin who would be the father and do the things fathers do? Surely not me. Didn’t she know I