Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [95]
“Think about it,” he repeats, as I’m running down the corridor toward the elevator. I don’t reply and instead fling myself into the open door of the car going down.
Josie has left me a message that she needs to see me in her office at 9:00 A.M., and though I’m uncertain as to why, I suspect that the Coke team has been less than pleased with one aspect or another of our ideas for the spring campaign. You would think that this would be easier—creating ads that I’d already seen before—but I’ve spent countless hours, too many hours, I suppose, attempting to remember the commercials and print layouts and copy from six years ago, and . . . I just can’t. They are details, like so many other life details, that at one point occupied a temporary space in my brain and now have jumped ship and drowned themselves. So I’m working solely with my own imagination, skills, and creativity, and I fear today, as I hustle into the lobby of my office building, that this simply isn’t adequate anymore. That I’ve cashed in all my talent chips and that maybe the pot I assumed lay within me, a pot that I grieved through my years of full-time mommyhood, wasn’t such a bounty to begin with.
Josie’s staring out her window, her back toward me, when I rap on her door.
She swivels her chair around and wanly smiles. She is still tanned, but now, underneath her browned skin, she looks ashen and drawn.
“Oh God, I screwed something up, didn’t I?” I say before she can speak. “Coke hates the new ideas. Jo, I’m sorry. I feel like I’m spinning my wheels with these ideas and not getting anywhere.” I toss my bag on the floor and sink into the chair opposite her desk.
“I haven’t heard anything from them,” she says with surprise. “I’ve actually thought what you’ve been coming up with is good. Quite good. You don’t?”
“Oh, well, er . . . I think maybe I’ve just lost perspective. You know, we’ve been working so much that it’s like a vacuum, and I can’t get a grip on the quality that I’m producing.” And this was true. Maybe my shortcomings were simply imagined, and I was a broken barometer whose gauge fluttered about freely.
She nods, then chews on her words. “Well, I’m pleased, and as far as I know, they’re pleased.”
“So . . . what’s up?” I furrow my forehead.
“I have some news.”
“Oh my God, you’re not pregnant, are you?” I clap my hand over my mouth.
“No, no, definitely not pregnant.” She manages an ironic laugh, and I can tell that she’s thinking, I’d have to have had sex to be pregnant. And I know she’s thinking this because I’d think it so often in the last days of my marriage to Henry.
“I’m, well, I’ve let the other partners know that I’m leaving.” She casts her eyes downward and picks a stray cuticle.
“Leaving what?” I say with genuine confusion.
“This. Here. I’m leaving the firm.”
“For where? Why?” This isn’t what happens in your life story! You stick around to create award-winning, world-recognized campaigns!
“Well,” she says after she clears her throat, “I’m moving to San Jose. Art wins.” She shrugs. “We’re going.”
“But Jo, you love this job!” I sit up straighter in my chair.
“Sometimes,” she says simply. “Sometimes not really.”
I look at her for a moment: I’d never really considered it, that Josie wasn’t here because she loved it. Of course I knew that the job took her away from her children and her home life and other parts of herself that she might want to nurture, but never for a moment did I realize that what she was getting in return wasn’t adequate bounty for her, that she might have fallen into this path and been unable to correct her course until now. That life swept her up and before she realized it, her children were half-grown and her husband barely knew her, and while she could craft a hell of an ad campaign, that didn’t feel worthy of much.
“I . . . I don’t know what to say,” I answer finally. “But I’m happy for you, Jo, if this is what you want.”
“Who knows what I want.” She shrugs, then sips her coffee. Her red lipstick leaves a ring around the lip of the mug. “But, more important, I