“But will it sell?” Barber asked, eyes swinging scythe-like up from Glen’s little offering.

“I think so,” Glen proffered, shallow-voiced.

“Will it really?” Barber cut again, rapping his Parker pen on the table with a judge’s timing.

Hoping that his sweat wasn’t showing, Glen adjusted the knot of his necktie, feeling clownish in its polka-dot pattern. Velma had picked it out for him that morning, though he’d opted for a tamer brown at first. “It’ll give you verve,” she’d said, “a bit of energy for your big meeting.” It gave Glen no verve. He heard Bozo’s honking horn every time he looked at it.

“Um,” Glen stalled, clawing for latent confidence, “I—I really think so. ‘Better Detergent for a Better Clean.’ It convinces buyers there’s a superior product out there, or it implies it, when so many people just look at all detergents the same.”

“But why is it better, Glen? See, you’re trying to convince them, and that takes too much time.” Barber leaned forward, plasticine hair haloed by the conference room’s fluorescents. Glen struggled to meet the Creative Director’s assertive gaze, to look squarely at the keen gravity in Duke Barber’s eyes.

“Do you have a wife, Glen?”

Glen Homewood raised his left hand with a weak smile, displaying the band.

“Beautiful. What’s her name?”

“Velma.”

“Can we talk frankly, Glen? Man to man, for just a moment?”

“Sure.”

“Tell me, then, when you first fucked her, did you just whip out your cock,” Duke pantomimed an obscene unsheathing, “and did she say ‘boy oh boy, that’s the product for me, I can just tell I need it?’”

Glen’s legs tensed, a gelatinous knot of discomfort lodging in his throat.

“Or,” Duke went on, “ did you have to do some convincing? A few weeks—hell, maybe even months in your case—of laughs, whispers, and little touches at the hem of her dress, before she even thought of letting you take a bite outta her?”

Duke had the same sort of look Glen’s priest gave him when he was overdue for confession. As if he could see Glen’s weakness somewhere in his dense frame, or his mediocre mustache, or the desultory movement of his fingers. Where was this going? Why was he talking like this?

“Now, just looking at you,” Duke reclined, “I’m guessing it’s the latter.”

At that, a mote of resistance told Glen to fight back. To defend his wife’s honor, swat Duke’s pantomiming hands from the table, to assert himself, reject this insult on Glen’s manhood.

But Duke was right. He was spot-on about he and Velma having sex—or, how long it took before they did. So a larger, much more powerful thing in Glen told him to confess. Just like at St. Etienne’s. To listen to Duke’s words, terrible though they may be, because he had pinned Glen square. And he surely had more knowledge to give.

Glen nodded.

“Of course. Let me ask you another question—of those two options, which would you rather have? That sort of reckless presentation,” Duke pantomimed again with a naughty grin, “and all the pleasure that follows, right then and there? Or all that convincing? You wanted to fuck her so bad, and ultimately, it didn’t really matter whether you did it sooner or later, because you eventually got it. But you deserved it then. She wanted it then, too, just didn’t know it yet, and all the weeks you wasted with those sweet nothings and hours-long talks about salary and kids weren’t ultimately worth a damn ‘cause your dick was still dry!” Glen squirmed in his chair. “So the better route, for you and her, would’ve been to save all that agonizing, the blueballs, the platitudes, and one night in your car, to whip out your cock—your superior cock, as any Barber & Matheson man’s surely is—so all Velma had to do was take a look, maybe even a feel, to know that you’re the man for her. Tell me, Glen, wouldn’t that have been much better?”

The soupy knot of unease in Glen’s neck thickened. He felt like he’d have to go to confession soon and he hadn’t even said anything yet. Glen thought of Velma, the mote of resistance hating the sound of her name in Duke’s mouth. But then, another thought. Another, more powerful thing. A projection of the lurid scene Duke Barber so casually described. The quick-flashing fantasy of a rapid, virile act in the back of his Chevrolet 2100. A reckless unsheathing, just like Duke said, so different from the nights they’d spent learning each other, tenderly molding the clay of their hearts to fit in the other’s palm. So different from courtship over soft and quiet conversations, luncheons, strolls…

What Duke described was another world. A better world? More worthy of Duke Barber, who sat in the corner office, and drove a Porsche 904, and drank fine Laphroaig scotch, and held gravity in his eyes?

More worthy of a man?

Glen nodded.

“That’s right, Glen. Of course that would’ve been better. And the truth is, the same goes here. You’ve got a superior product—Dr. Oscar’s Bubbleclear Detergent—and you’ve got the choice to persuade and convince,” Duke sneered, “or to whip it out now and save both you and the customer the blueballs. Which also avoids the possibility of Velma—the customer, I mean—finding an inferior cock in the meantime that’ll solve the problem faster, even if not so well. Do you see what I’m saying, Glen?”

“I—I think so.”

“Then do it,” Duke said, reclining.

“What?”

“Whip out your cock, Glen.” With his head turned just so, the fluorescents’ glint made bladed crescents in his gaze.

Glen stammered, then went silent, words choked by the thing that clung inside his neck. Duke’s eyes were steady. His hair chiseled, as if from marble. His jaw locked, lips sealed, as if he’d never spoken a word before. As if he’d sat, inevitable, in this room since the day that it was built, waiting for Glen to reveal himself. To show what he was made of. What was he asking?

“I…I don’t think…I can…”

“The product, Glen. We’re still working in analogy here,” Duke condescended. “Stop the persuasion and show her why Dr. Oscar’s Bubbleclear Detergent is the better detergent. And show her now.”

Glen’s fingers wiggled without his command, as if signaling Duke for a breather.

“Fuck her, Glen,” Duke bit. “In 10 words or less.”

Glen’s first instinct was to ask exactly what Duke meant, the analogy still too coarse for his taste. The fantasy Duke had planted of him and Velma in the back of the Chevy still flashed in his mind, and he needed to wrap his head around all this persuasion, and blueballs, and that ugly word, ’fucking’, but he had no time to reckon it all.

He could see it in Duke’s face, an almightiness that had only grown since Glen had sat down. A look that said if Glen asked another question, if he pussyfooted with one more word, he would be disassembled like a catalog-ordered home appliance, put back into the build-your-own employee box he’d come from, and shipped immediately back to Sears Roebuck’s nonentity warehouse.

So Glen found himself, once again, at the cusp of non-belonging. Staring at the insignificance that had been his home since grade school, a dark, smothering smallness he’d finally overcome by getting into Barber & Matheson as a technical writer seven years ago. A thing that now opened its mouth to take him again, pulling him closer with the weighty draw of Duke Barber’s cunning and relentless eyes.

Glen looked down at his polka-dot tie. The thing that would give him verve. Then, back up to Duke. He spoke with as clear and steady a voice as he could muster:

“Bubbleclear Cleans With Verve—Your Clothes, Whiter in Less Time”.

Duke Barber’s jaw clenched, muscle ridged and swelling beneath his skin. Then, he smiled.

“That’s a headline that sells, Mr. Homewood.” In an instant, the lump in Glen’s neck was flushed out, erased by the clean, bright sound of Duke’s acceptance. And he belonged. And he was good again. “That is why they recommended you from Technical, Glen. Welcome to the Creative Department.”

Duke lithely stood and extended a statuesque hand. Glen hefted himself from his chair to meet him.

“I’m honored, Mr. Barber—”

“Of course. But let’s not keep going with the blueballs, let’s cut to the chase. You’ll be attending our next conference with Dr. Oscar and his product development team to discuss new detergent and washing machine products—that’s on Tuesday. They’ve been having some trouble and asked us to pitch a few ideas for them. Nothing too revolutionary, just small offerings to fill in the gaps.”

“Of course, Mr. Barber,” Glen said, hand tingling in Duke Barber’s firm grip. He would have to cancel his standing appointment for steak dinner with Velma on Monday night, he was certain. But that was small potatoes.

“And one more thing. You can write, and that’s all well and good, but part of my little analogy here was to see if you can stomach the hard talk. How you do under pressure. That, I’m still not so sure about.”

Glen nodded slowly.

“So put on a suit of thicker skin, Mr. Homewood. You’re in a different world now.” Another instinct to ask a question, to get Duke to clarify just what he meant—Glen’s mind was still reeling. Before he could ask, though, the other man leaned in close, speaking softly into Glen’s ear as he held his hand in a firm grasp. “Maybe take a bite out of lovely Velma tonight, like we talked about. Try cutting to the chase.”

“Oh,” Glen said, “I’m not so sure I could—”

“Just try, Glen. See what happens. It’s a different world than you think, up here.”

 

When Glen got home, he smelled Thanksgiving. The screen door swung open with a whine and when the front door gave way, a fragrant yawn of roasted turkey and butter and fresh greens met him there, lazy and perfect.

“Velma?” he said.

“Oh!” a call from the kitchen. “I didn’t hear the door!” Then he saw her, capering toward him through the hall—soon as she saw his face, the smile at the corner of his lips, she grinned a sunbeam. “You got it, tell me you got it—no you don’t have to tell me, look at you, I can see it all over you, come here!” Velma laughed and brought him in for a hug, and he smelled butter, flour, home upon her neck. Glen laughed with her, the two swapping giddiness for as long as their limbs could hold them.

“I made you a big spread!” she said.

“I can tell, smelled it soon as I opened the door. Have you been cooking all day?”

“Mhm! I knew you’d earn it, Mr. Homewood,” she pulled him in close again with an embrace, friendly, generous, and unexpecting. That touch, molded to him, that he’d come to know over so many soft afternoons, luncheons, and strolls. “Did your tie help?” she asked.

“Yes,” Glen smiled. “It did.”

A table resplendent with a whole turkey, mashed potatoes, squash roasted with olive oil, salad with butter lettuce, cabbage and carrots and a homemade vinaigrette awaited him in the dining room.

“You shouldn’t have, Velma,” Glen said, mouth full of mash. “You didn’t know if I—damn, these are good.”

“I knew, I knew. I could tell you were unsure, but Barber & Matheson knows talent and cares for you well.” A spasm in Glen’s neck as she said the name ‘Barber’, referring to the man who had not spoken her name so kindly that afternoon. A mote of resistance. “That’s why they hired you, and that’s why Mr. Barber asked you to meet today, and that’s why you’ve got your big promotion,” Velma wiggled in her chair. “They knew you’d earn it, even though you weren’t so sure.”

Glen smiled, but as the mashed potatoes went down, a slimy ghost of disquiet trickled after it. The things he’d heard today. About her. The things spoken by Duke Barber, a man among men, who’d been talked about as God in the technical writing room, who’d been spoken of with hushed and jealous voices.

Velma smiled at him. Glen thought of their dates, their trips to ballgames, their afternoons, luncheons, and strolls. Their courtship.

How reckless he could have been.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing,” he replied. “Just thinking about the meeting.”

“It went well, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”

“Then why do you look so glum?”

“Oh, I just—he said I needed thicker skin, is all.”

“Did someone say something mean?” she cocked her head.

“No, no, nothing mean. Just, you know how guys get in the bullpen. A little crass sometimes.”

“What did they say?” she smiled.

“Nothing, really.”

It took a moment for Velma to cut the line. “Well,” she said, “you don’t need to be worried about finding crass men to be crass, Glen. Don’t pay it no mind, alright?”

“Alright,” Glen conceded. Velma looked beautiful there, at the other end of the table. In the dim light between their chairs, his foot sought hers and found it, toying with her toes through thin dress socks. Both of them blushed. And as he saw her cheeks turn red, Glen recalled what Duke had said. How he’d told him to just try. To take a bite.

“So what’s next?” Velma asked, tucking into a piece of soft, well-seasoned squash.

“Well, there’s a meeting next Tuesday, a big one with the Dr. Oscar people.”

“That’s exciting! Did he just love your detergent headline? I’m sure he did. ‘Better Detergent, Better Clean’? I thought that was so good, Glen, clean, and simple, and—”

“Oh, he thought it was alright. Had me try another one that he liked better, said it was more…direct.” Under the table, Glen slid his foot along the top of hers, a long, slow glide. “He wanted something more upfront,” Glen said, lowering his voice to something he thought was sultry. Trying to meet her gaze. Trying something. Just like Duke told him.

“Well,” she went on, unaffected, “he liked whatever you said enough to let you meet the famous Dr. Oscar, how wonderful!”

“That he did,” Glen said, a little disappointed by her obliviousness to his advance.

“What’s the meeting about?”

“Product development, I think,” Glen said as he softly wiggled his toes against hers, trying to make it obvious. “So we’ll talk about new products and such, how they’ll sell, who they’ll sell to, how to market them. Come up with new ideas.”

“You think you’d help them make a new detergent? Is that what you mean?”

“Probably a new detergent in the Bubbleclear line, but maybe something else, something for the washing machine itself, I’m not sure what.”

Seeking again, his foot found the inside of her arch and tickled at it, brushing along it with a soft pull. He tried again to meet her gaze, to catch her eyes in his look of wanting. But Velma seemed entirely unaware, chewing on another idea instead, looking confused. “I don’t know how they come up with all those products, to tell you the truth, Glen. Don’t you think we have enough soaps and detergents, I mean?”

“Maybe,” he said, a little curt as he subtly tapped his big toe against her, one more attempt to get her to notice the look he was putting on. “I just—”

“Don’t get me wrong, of course, Glen, I’m so proud of you, but I’m just not sure what sort of thing you’ll come up with. I remember when my momma made her own soap, mind you, and all these new products just feel unnecessary most of the time. Speaking as the one who does all the cleaning—”

“And the talking,” Glen said more harshly, firmly, sharply than he’d intended. Like smearing a warm cigarette into the driveway with a mean, heavy twist of the heel.

After a moment, he pulled his foot from her, back to his side of the table, uncertain of himself, and took another mouthful of mash. When Velma looked up at him from her plate, it was with surprise. And a bit of hurt.

“Sorry,” Glen said, “sorry. I’ve just been a little stressed today, dear. As you can imagine.”

“Of course,” Velma said in a faux-cheery voice, sunbeam blotted out for the moment.

“And I’ll be sure to let you know what we come up with,” Glen offered up in truce.

“Please do,” she smiled.

They ate, and finished, but the night never returned to the same bubbling, giddy joy of their first embrace. Velma offered to do dishes as Glen took a beer and cigar out onto the back porch, removing his shirt—something he never did—to let his chest and arms soak in the cool spring evening. To try on a new suit of skin.

As Glen sat and smoked in his plastic armchair, he considered. Watched lights pop on and off amid the suburban maze behind his back fence. Listened to the distant bark of dogs and the clatter of steel-lidded trash cans. Watched light spill and snuff out as porch doors opened and shut. Cigar smoke surrounded him. His exposed limbs rested.

Why had he said that to her? Why had he barked? Glen closed his eyes and played his own words back in his head: ‘and all the talking.’ As he repeated the sound in-mind, the voice began to morph. Edging away from Glen’s meager tenor and dipping down to Duke Barber’s imposing baritone. Hell, he had sounded like Duke. Just a little bit.

Soon, with the slow wash of beer and the incense of the cigar wafting over him, Glen dipped into other thoughts. Something like dreaming.

Duke’s words from their meeting made their way across the heady night like radio, entering his haze. How crass and terrible they’d sounded. So obscene, he’d felt the need to drive straight to St. Etienne’s on the way home for a confession, though something had stopped him. It was the memory of Duke’s chiseled, robust look, the statuesque grip with which they’d shaken hands. His eyes, which had already pulled from Glen enough confession for the day. Which had already given him an idea or two for penance.

Glen leaned further back in his vinyl-backed chair, dipping deeper into miasmic thought, and took a blind toke of his cigar. Tasting its burnt warmth, he pictured the interior of his 2100. Pictured Velma, beautiful and young and pert as before they’d married. Pictured sitting with her in the back seat. Pictured her waiting for him to do something reckless. Something he’d never known she’d wanted.

“Fuck them,” Duke said. The Creative Director was there, somehow, in the car’s front seat, taking in the scene of Glen and Velma in the back with his steady, noble eyes, watching them. Catching them.

“Fuck them in 10 words or less,” Duke said.

“Bubbleclear Cleans With Verve,” someone said. Glen turned and saw the backseat again, only he wasn’t in it anymore. Instead, sitting next to Velma, his would-be-wife, was a handsome blonde man in a laboratory cloak, a stethoscope around his neck and a reflecting disk strapped to his head—Dr. Oscar. The mascot Barber & Matheson used in their ads. “Your Clothes Whiter in Less Time,” the stranger’s perfect voice croned as he disrobed, as Velma—the buyer, the housewife, the one who needed him, looked on in awe.

Glen twitched in his armchair, eyes still closed. This was making him feel sick—he tried to shake the image off, to envision something else. With a feverishly heavy draw from his cigar, he strained to remember how he’d felt shaking Barber’s hand, to remember the feeling of acceptance he’d so long craved, the sound of him saying “that sells.”

But it did not last. The scene in the car went on, as if he couldn’t shake it. As if something in him didn’t want to.

Then it got worse.

Dr. Oscar, unsheathing himself.

Velma, in the backseat, eyes wide with delight.

Terrible, suffocating feelings in Glen’s throat.

“Fuck them,” Duke baritoned loudly from the driver’s seat. “They want it, whether they know it or not. Show them,” he droned as Velma took Dr. Oscar in hand with her perfect sunbeam grin, bending down to him. “Give them what they want.”

The cigar smoke caught in Glen’s esophagus, stale, rotted, sour. He tensed his neck to keep from coughing. His lip began to tremble. His eyes stayed closed. The projection kept playing, playing, playing—

The back porch’s screen door swung with a creak and Glen’s eyes shot open, sweat dripping from his temple. Turning, he saw Velma emerge from the house. Beautiful, perfect Velma, glowing beneath the bulb hanging over the doorway, a beer in hand.

“Where’s your shirt?” she asked casually, then, after another look, “Are you alright, Glen?”

“Cigar smoke,” he grunted, stumbling over the words. “Took a little in the wrong pipe, that’s all.”

“Oh,” she said, taking a seat in the chair next to him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Yeah.” Glen looked back over the neighborhood and took a long throat of beer. They sat in silence for a while. Watched trash cans glinting in headlight beams. Listened as someone tuned their radio to “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes a few doors down. The sweating subsided.

“I suppose I’m a little nervous,” Glen said after a while. “My meeting with Duke…it just feels different than I’m used to, maybe. A different world.”

“How so?” Velma asked, taking a swig of her own drink.

“It’s a…a different ethic, I think.”

“A different ethic.”

“Yes.”

“…How?”

Glen pondered. “You know how my cousin Adam talked about Korea? Said once you got there, the second you stepped off the boat, you finally realized you might have to take a life. But that it was necessary—just a different ethic. So you got used to it. And it was okay.”

“Glen,” she chuckled awkwardly, “I’m not sure making an advertisement for the Bubbleclear detergent people is the same as killing a Korean.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Probably not.” In the silence that followed, radio waves crept back into Glen’s mind, ghostly words sent out from the hours-past, uneasy tremors of a Barber & Matheson conference room. The lights of the suburb beyond them popped in and out. And something in Glen silently fermented. Thickening, unseen, within his skin.

“Velma?” he eventually asked.

“Mhm?” she said.

“Lie down on the porch.”

She looked like she was about to laugh, but as she took stock of his face again, her expression fell, sunbeam eclipsed with concern.

“What?”

Glen looked at her, his arms flexing with uneasy potential against his frame. He looked her in the eyes, Duke Barber’s voice coming out his mouth as he tried wielding gravity with his gaze.

“If you want me to fuck you,” Glen said, the slightest hint of a tremor on the last two words, so unfamiliar, “then lie down on the porch, on your back.”

“You can’t be serious,” she attempted a laugh but caught herself again. She looked like she could not reckon him.

Eyes still as firm as he could keep them, Glen drained the rest of his beer, each swig reminding him of his body, deadening the sickly uneasiness that he told himself was thinner skin washing away. He held her gaze as she searched him for a tell, and in her stare he caught flashes of curiosity, of worry. Then, something else, something stranger, anxious even. Alluring.

It almost looked like she feared him.

With a slow, unsteady hand, she reached across her breast to the buttons of her cornflower-blue dress. Glen kept steady on her, letting his eyes drift down and watch as a button was undone with a quiet, dampened snap. Then another—a peek of mauve brazier, lace-frilled. Another, and the globes of her breasts warmed in the light of the backdoor bulb. Button after button, revealing navel, stomach, relaxed and soft-looking in her chair. Glen felt his hands trembling, fingers uncertain of their hold on the beer bottle, clinging to their grip of the plastic armrest.

They locked eyes again. He felt completely incapable of saying anything more, of trying to tell her what he was feeling—at once stirred and revolted by what he saw. By what she confirmed for him. Still, she undid herself, looking at him curiously, hesitantly, with each undone button, as if hoping this one or the next would finally make him say something.

A flash of disgust in Glen’s mind, and he nearly told her to stop, to cover herself, that the lights in the dark beyond them would surely see her. But he said nothing, the last words he’d spoken having sucked the strength right out of him.

He’d tried something. Now he saw what it got him.

Velma then stood before his chair and let the dress fall. Glen met her eyes, watching this woman, his wife, unclasp the back of her bra as lights popped on and off behind her in an endless collage of screen doors and kitchen windows and glinting trash cans that had never looked so odd to him before.

The bra fell. Her panties soon after.

Wordless, that strange, alluring look still on her face, she knelt down and leaned back on the unfinished porch wood—surely unsmooth, surely scratching her back.

From his chair, Glen looked at her over the curvature of his own belly. Watched her waiting for him, cataloged her patient gaze.

Then, as the radio sounds in Glen’s head fuzzed again into a static, he stood, and unbuckled his belt, and a small, strange piece of his molded heart cracked off, falling as a shard onto the back porch wood, where it teetered and faded into nothing.