“Miss Boxfish?” said Tuck, theatrically inquisitive. “Your thoughts?”
Meeting Tuck’s phony gaze felt unwholesome, like talking to a wax dummy, so I looked past him to Mindy, who was watching through the windows of the control room. Nothing in her unflaggingly upbeat mien suggested that this was going any way other than as planned; she displayed no concern that rather than honoring my legacy, Tuck and my fellow guests were painting me as the Neanderthal in their History of Man diorama. Instead of Let’s thank the pioneering women who came before us!, their tone was more along the lines of Remember how we used to wear hoop skirts?
“My thoughts?” I said. “My thoughts are that I am on this program by some mistake.”
In the glowing window, beyond the cameramen, Mindy was shaking her head.
“I’m afraid I’ve arrived unprepared to defend my approach to writing ads,” I said, “never mind the very concept of professional responsibility, or the practice of simply treating people with respect. Therefore I’m compelled to defer to the au courant expertise of my two successors. Please, ladies, resume the accounts of your efforts to unwind the supposed advances of civilization and return us consumers to a state of pliable savagery. Who knows, perhaps some young lady who watches this program will take up where you leave off and find a way to ease us all back into the trees with the orangutans, who I gather are deft hands at the fruit market. With luck and hard work, perhaps we’ll even recover our old gills and quit terrestrial life entirely. Back to the sea! That Florida swampland Mother bought may prove to be a good investment after all. In any event, I wish you both luck in your quest. I will not be keeping track of your progress, however. My interests, such as they are, lie elsewhere. To be clear, it’s not that I no longer want to work in the world that you’re describing. It’s that I no longer want to live in the world that you’re describing.”
Tuck Merkington looked at me, then at Leslie Monroe and Geraldine Kidd, neither of whom seemed to have anything to say to that.
My intention wasn’t to be rude, but I couldn’t remain.
I got to my feet from the sleek stuffed chair.
“Thank you so much for having me,” I said, clearly and with courtesy, “but I simply can’t stay. I have to be going. Thank you, Tuck. Thank you, Leslie, Geraldine. Good-bye.”
Mindy intercepted me the instant I stepped off camera. She tried to convince me to continue the panel, but I declined every one of her exclamatory entreaties.
It’s probably not accurate to say that I realized, as I unclipped my lavalier mic, wound its lead around the transmitter, and deposited both in Mindy’s beseeching hand, that this would be the last act of my career in advertising. I had known already that it was over; I had allowed Mindy to leverage my vanity to convince me otherwise, to lure me—like a safecracker or an assassin from some silly film—into taking one last job. Never again: Henceforth I would say no to all similar invitations, though these were not exactly flying thick as locusts anyway. My public appearances since then have been limited to a few speeches at girls’ schools for commencements or career days, occasions at which I was introduced only as a vague eminence, an old lady who used to be funny. All these events I have enjoyed tremendously.
Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs.
I asked for and received my coat from Mindy’s cringing assistant, buttoned it over my absurd, optimistic, embarrassing scarlet suit, and headed outside into the late-March sunlight to set about walking home, knowing that only a walk—zigzagging among strangers on their own peculiar errands, setting my pace in counterpoint to my pulse, dissolving myself in the street—would help me feel better.
A motto favored by the ancients was solvitur ambulando: It is solved by walking. Sometimes, I might add, by walking out. I like to imagine that that irascible tub dweller Diogenes would have approved of my big exit, my stroll away from the rolling cameras, even if he spared no contempt for the career that brought me before them in the first place. Well, too bad, Diogenes: I make no apologies for a life that privileged pleasure, poise, and politesse. Had your lantern light fallen on my face that bright March morning I could have told you, honestly, that I have never been dishonest. In any event, I daresay the brand of cynicism displayed in that television studio was not one you would have recognized.