Excerpt: No Time for Eulogy
Bad news comes like a slap in the face. It’s an ugly intrusion that jars your psyche. When it is about someone else the shock wears off rather quickly and quiet relief sets in with the realization the unpleasant burden for dealing with the bad news rests elsewhere. You are merely a bystander splashed with the mud of its coincidental consequences. When it is your deal, however, you become knee-deep in the emotional muck.
This was the day Jack Phillips would get his slap and it would be very personal. The day was already lousy and it was only ten o’clock. With unresolved client problems, he paced his office as if each step might shake some resolution into his head. The parading he did around his office wasn’t working and he finally resorted to the tried and true technique of staring out the window. That didn’t help either, but he liked the view. It was westward ho; overlooking the scramble of buildings and the spread of urban Columbus sprawl. Way out there somewhere Jack knew there still had to be some farm land.
As he stared, his eyes glazed over and his thoughts slid away into some mental cavern that swallows up reality to provide a cavalcade of fantasy, or deeper yet, to melancholia. Sometimes out of such a brain pit comes a gem of an idea which solves a problem. Unfortunately sometimes there comes self doubt, self pity, or the replay of unpleasant memories. This time there would be no chance to find out which way it would go.
From the darkness of that near-trance Jack heard his office door open and close behind him. Figuring it was one of his partners who liked to bounce in unannounced; he didn’t turn around, but waited to see which one and what would be said. It always amazed him when they did that sort of thing, but they were younger and not as caught with convention – code for courtesy – and the courtesy that he might have liked.
He could have put a stop to them doing it, but then that would have changed the give and take dynamics on which their partnership had thrived. Whoever it was said nothing. Then a faint scent of her perfume, ever so lightly, let him know it was Janet.
Jack turned to see Janet Nelson agonize in a series of distorted facial expressions and suffer the discomfort of trying to get her legs positioned as she tried to stay calm on the sofa near the far wall of his office. She was not doing very well with her efforts. She was a tall, relatively thin young woman with auburn hair and green eyes, and strikingly beautiful. Her awkward maneuvering on the sofa belied the athletic ability he knew she possessed. And she was a fabulous dancer.
Janet sighed, took in a huge gulp of air in order to balance herself, sniffed several times, and seemed to be settled. Jack could see how distraught she was. The sniffs were more than likely the result of crying. She had come into his office without warning, without saying a word, and had thrown herself on the sofa in a dramatic, demanding-attention action. Janet had his attention. She wanted it, she got it. As far as he was concerned, she deserved it.
They had worked together for more than ten years in the advertising business, a business that can be nasty at best and brutalizing at worst. The last five years they had been partners in their own ad agency along with Byron Adams. They had been successful in garnering several large regional companies as clients that wanted to go national with their advertising programs. Jack, Janet, and Byron were doing quite well financially. The fact that the three of them were doing well financially and professionally did not translate so nicely into doing well with their personal lives, especially Janet’s.
Janet and Jack had never been lovers, but circumstances teetered on that aspect several times only to tip away from the kind of intimacy he thought she wanted. It’s not easy defining and maintaining a relationship with a woman when there is no romantic intimacy. They had another kind of intimacy, however, that comes from long hours of closely working together. There were shared frustrations, self-confessed doubts, personal revelations, and the heady almost intoxicating euphoria of success. Those long hours together created a bond, a marriage of sorts that presumes something that may not really be there. Presumes mutual affection, Jack assessed. Respect and admiration are not affection. She had misread him, but maybe he gave the wrong signals. In any case, their relationship didn’t go the way she wanted.
They remained friends, fortunately, very close friends, even after she married Ben Grossman. Jack figured marrying Ben was a reaction from not being able to nail him down. He thought that was what she wanted, but understood it might be his ego talking. In any case, Jack wasn’t ready to get married. She might be the right person, but he wasn’t ready. The subject of sex never had come up, but all the words and touches and life connections were there. It just did not seem right for him. He was confused about his feelings, not able to get past the remorse he felt for a failed marriage and disintegrated family. Jack assumed he was better off without the commitment. It was a moot point, certainly; she married someone else and, happily for Jack, remained his business partner. He recognized that Janet was superbly creative and very savvy about the advertising business.
Right now, by all accounts, her marriage to Ben was coming unglued; a free fall to disaster and that was taking a toll on her. She was not productive with either the running of the agency or in developing creative output for the clients. Her brain was stagnant, numbed by the turmoil of her dying relationship with Ben. Now, all of that emotion was in front of Jack.