Anight in bed with a pretty, pliable woman made Frank as happy as it might any man, but that satisfaction was nothing compared with the pleasure he found in having denied himself the opportunity, and he had no doubt this was what Alice Reinhart had been offering in her vague, sloe-eyed way. The feeling was not necessarily noble—he was in fact annoyed with himself for finding such a simple person so appealing that his resistance required an effort—but that effort allowed him to put a high gloss of principle on the sense of purpose and accomplishment abstinence gave him.
In this frame of mind, he encountered Melissa at the coffee maker at least an hour earlier than she normally arrived at the office and said in surprise, “Already at it?”
“Already behind,” she said. It was such an obvious attempt to put him at ease, perhaps assure him that she wasn’t trying to outwork him as well as outrank him, that at once he was suspicious. Now he noticed about her a certain shyness that he associated with happiness, because in her modest way Melissa was always somewhat apologetic about feeling good, and he remembered she’d been playing softball last night and began to imagine her hatching a romance with one of that lot. For Melissa, such an unlikely affair would probably fall under the rubric of noblesse oblige. It was a maddening thought, and as if this showed, she said to him, “Frank?” her anxious tone enough to wake him to how far-fetched the idea really was.
“Did you see the commercial?” he asked her.
“No,” she said, “but I heard about it.”
“Did you?”
“From Curtis.” Since this was all she said, for a moment he found himself searching for significance in it: Heard? Heard what? And why Curtis? What about him, precisely, merited a pause? Their encounter last night at the Greenleaf entered into it. Curtis had spoken to her after that. “Why didn’t I know about it?” she said.
He said, “That’s a good question.”
For no reason except that he’d suggested it, she looked chagrined. She said, “I thought we’d decided—”
“So did I.”
“To wait.”
For a second she seemed like a chastised child, so he knew that when he told her that, by the way, Dunwitty’s tests with focus groups, etc., had been great she would mentally search her desk for a missed report or memo instead of requesting proof. In fact, her troubled look was all he got in answer, a look that nonetheless diluted his satisfaction.
“Actually …,” Melissa said. The word sounded like a confession.
“Yes?”
“I’ve been thinking about the ads. And I came up with something that might— It’s an idea anyway. I was going to tell you at a more appropriate time.”
“Now’s fine.”
“In the reading I’ve been doing, I came across some historical stuff—pamphlets, stories out of papers, there’s even an act from the state of Massachusetts, or the colony, whatever it was then, sometime around the Revolutionary War. But they’re funny, things promoting beer because it’s healthier than liquor—‘ardent spirits,’ they say. One, the Massachusetts act, I think it was, encourages the manufacture of beer as, I quote, ‘an important means of preserving the health of the citizens of this Commonwealth.’ Et cetera.”
He’d seen that sort of thing. He said as much and waited with transparent patience.
“So. I started seeing a really old-fashioned campaign. Corny on purpose—like Bartles & James but different—a kind of tongue-in-cheek thing promoting beer as a healthy beverage along those lines—like an eighteenth-century campaign. There’re prints and reproductions in the books, if you want to see them.” Although he’d made no comment, she suddenly whisked the whole idea away with a flick of her hand and said, “We can talk about it later,” turning even as she spoke. When she reached her door, she cast back a quick smile, shy as her first one this morning.
It was an idea their father would have liked. She had an uncanny knack that always took him by surprise. She knew next to nothing about beer, and yet she seemed to have Gutenbier in her blood, some strange access to the spirit of the company—and even so, she had no notion of it, no awareness like his own. Was her mind really the mess of impressions he imagined it was, or was it merely a matter of style that she wavered and deferred and spoke in her roundabout way, one small aspect of a meticulously plotted approach even more cunning than his own? The question, he supposed, was probably more indicative of his approach than hers.
Recovering some of his earlier spirit, even feeling it whetted a bit against the sense of a possible obstacle, he returned to his office and telephoned Henry and told him to reprimand Cole and Hauser publicly for their misbehavior toward Alice Reinhart. Henry continued to listen long after Frank had finished speaking. Nothing had happened, he finally said, and even if it had, it had happened during a softball game, which even Frank had to admit constituted neutral territory. This, he said, was the way to cause real trouble.
“It has always been our policy,” Frank said levelly, “not to tolerate offensive behavior. If the policy hasn’t been enforced, then more’s the pity for anyone who’s gotten the wrong idea, because we’ve had a change of management, as you’re well aware, and now we’re going to be what you might call vigorous about this. Any offender will be demoted or have his pay docked or, after three incidents, dismissed.” He let Henry stew in his refractory silence for a minute before saying to him, confidentially, “I’m sure you see the situation. I’m in a somewhat difficult position at the moment, like you. A matter of adjusting. But let’s just say, the tougher the adjustment, the briefer it might be—you see what I mean.”
Henry said, “I don’t know if I do. Are you saying … it’s temporary?”
“That depends on how it goes—that’s all I’m saying. And, again, things have changed; let’s be as clear as possible on that point.”
Henry met this with another silence, in which Frank could almost hear the man’s mind struggling above the undercurrent—always there, always pressing—of work to be done. “Your sister making things rough for you, Frank?” he said at last.
“Let’s just say she’s doing her best and leave it at that. I’ll tell you what, Henry. Have Cole and Hauser come to my office—now, if you can, I’ve got meetings all day—and I’ll put it to them.”
“I can do that,” Henry said slowly, “but it’s not—now, don’t take this wrong, I’m just saying—it might not be the greatest idea—you don’t know them’s all I mean—to get the guys involved in politics?”
“I’d say they already jumped in headfirst.”
It was not until an hour later that Cole and Hauser appeared at his office, the one a squat man with a muscular swagger, the other tall and dark, squared off at the jaw. As he told them what he’d told Henry, embellishing where he could in an attempt to seem both beleaguered and above the whole business, he pictured the incident, saw the woman as he’d seen her last night, pale and supple, caught between these men in a brutish embrace. The image, repulsive as it was, played on and on, exercising a peculiar fascination over him, so that he ceased to see the men as they were before him. Then he found his place again, concluding, and there they were, a look of enlightenment on their grudging faces. Knowing, for them, had a cunning aspect, which he found somewhat alarming, since it only occurred to him now that he had no way of ascertaining what they understood. His alarm was brief, though, assuaged by the very thing that had prompted it: If they were so far beyond the pale of his own character, how much could their thinking matter? He was regarding them—surprised to feel a twinge of sympathy for Alice, whose unfortunate lot it was to work with such men—when his intercom buzzed and Joan announced for all to hear that his sister and Peter Beeksma were waiting.