A business hotel on a service drive on a freeway exit, it might have been any such place from Dallas to Minnesota, Indiana to Buffalo. This one was in a suburb of Pittsburgh, on an afternoon mostly empty like the parking lots between the hotel and its neighbors, similarly non-descript offices similarly partially occupied. An airport shuttle deposited a group of half-a-dozen people and their luggage, their suitcases and their laptop and portfolio bags, under the shadow of an awning that welcomed them into an orange lobby, carpeted, with modern, chic furniture over which could be seen the restaurant and bar, the hallways that led to the meeting rooms and elevators. Soft, syncopated electronic music, low in volume like the lobby light, accompanied them across the patterned floor to the front desk, where an arresting encounter occurred.

There, at check-in, was another group of half-dozen people similarly dressed and equipped. An observer could not have known but might have guessed by the way they looked at each other that the two groups were members of competing concerns. Unknown to any but them was that they were teams from two different advertising agencies in town to pitch the same account.

Each recognizing the other, for a moment they stood like maneuvering armies surprised and on the brink of skirmish. Then the leader of one grinned and extended a hand to the leader of the other. “Well, would ya look who’s here. I should have known we’d be up against some talent. How you doing, Carl?”

Everybody lowered their weapons. The man that had spoken was Rob Rozegnal, VP of accounts at Braeburn and Associates. The man that accepted the embrace of Rob’s hand was Carl Schaff, new business lead at Finch Newcomb Kincaid. Behind each were the men and women of their respective pitch teams, with representatives from strategy, creative and account. They fingered the straps on the luggage that hung from their shoulders and wrists while Rozegnal and Schaff bantered. “Didn’t think there’d be two firms from Detroit to pass the chemistry check and the first round.” “Must be that old Motown hustle.” “At least you guys are actually in Detroit and not stuck out in Southfield.” “Hey, you got plenty of parking.”

While this hail-fellow-well-met was happening, the two teams eyed each other as much as possible without letting it seem like they were. Some of them knew each other or, given the chance to enquire, to share the lists of places they’d worked, would find they had common acquaintances and knew of each other. Three in particular made the acquaintance apparent by breaking ranks.

A calm, unsmiling man in a denim jacket on the FNK side was first to do so. He set a travel bag on the carpet so that he could step forward and gently embrace the shoulders of a young woman on the Braeburn team, who returned his embrace. “How you doing, Tori? Sorry—Victoria.”

She said, “Come on now, you can call me Tori.” She threw a glance at her companions and warned, “But none of you better. Keith’s an old friend. How you doing, Keith?”

She stepped back to gaze at him from behind her glasses. Flights of hands and sleeves crossed the air between them, six times six combinations of handshakes and head nods as everyone was introduced.

Victoria Brightly, strategist, was lovely in a way that rewarded not the first glance but the second, the fifth, the one hundredth, hair pulled away from a square face by a clip, straight mouth, serious eyebrows. In an era where nobody dressed for the airport except for comfort and that extremely, she had chosen to wear gray plaid slacks, a crush jacket with pragmatic pockets, and boots.

Standing behind her, Jimmy South from account would have said the slacks showed off her ass. He tried to imagine what Keith Caul, the FNK creative director that had embraced her, was seeing, feeling, as he, dark hair carefully parted, in jeans and the sport coat he’d wear in the pitch tomorrow, extended a hand to Keith and pulled him into a one-armed, back-thumping man hug. “Always knew we’d run into each other again but I never thought it would be in Pittsburgh.”

“Right?”

To the pair of concierges behind the desk, such an exchange among traveling business people was familiar. Familiar, too, was the body language of both groups, the unspoken desire now to politely end the activity of acknowledgment and get about the business of checking in, throwing their bags into their rooms, getting to the conference rooms they’d booked to prepare for tomorrow’s meeting. While the specifics of any given industry were unknown to the concierges, while advertising was indistinguishable from engineering or finance, they were expert at identifying the urgency of accommodation, and moved rapidly to accommodate, punching keyboards, accepting credit cards and handing out room keys.

Gradually the tangle dissolved while Rob and Carl continued to trade quips. As it did so, Jimmy South watched Keith Caul watch Victoria Brightly, who tried not to watch Keith Caul, who, Jimmy noticed, wore a wedding ring these days.

********************

Six hours later, the Braeburn team sat, paced, or slumped around a long table in one of the hotel conference rooms, the debris of their work all around them. On one wall projected the deck; Rob and the creative director, Anthony Frawley, continued making small adjustments to slides. On the table, open laptops in front of Ant, his associate creative director Julie Jakubowski, Jimmy, Jimmy’s counterpart from brand, Amy Poretta, and Victoria. Between these, notebooks, pens, paper plates greasy with the pizza and salad that lay, mostly consumed, on the sideboard near a phalanx of water bottles and pop cans, many of which had been transported to the table and emptied or were in the process of being emptied. Beside those, further casualties, crumpled up sheets of hotel stationary, pieces of gum crushed into paper, empty bags of chips, candy bar wrappers, cellophane wrappers of mints, sticky notes, neglected mobile phones. Victoria had been cold, kept her jacket on, gotten warm, taken her jacket off, gotten cold again, put her jacket back on.

She watched Rob, their leader and a veteran of uncountable new business pitches for Braeburn and the other places he’d worked, and tried to gauge what he was thinking, what his level of confidence was. Hard to say. As jovial, optimistic, and unflappable as Rob was, his true feelings about any given situation were usually buried under a wooden calm. This was, she observed, a sensible posture by an account leader given the multiplicity of opinions bound to be held by everyone involved in the process of making ads, something she as the strategist and “voice of the consumer” couldn’t afford to adopt. Still, she looked to him for cues about the state of things, how they stood on the eve of the crucial meeting.

The work of preparing for it had been in turns bewildering, exhilarating, bewildering again, and exhausting. Most of the work of assembling the content had been done over a period of weeks back in Detroit and with a lot more contributors than those present. The intense scrutiny of the RFP, the client brief, the thought starters, the research, the strategic insight, the creative brief, headwinds-tailwinds, rounds of creative ideation, critique, revision, “the big idea,” further research, channel strategy, media planning absent a media plan since they were only pitching to become the creative AOR, and then slides, all they talked about—she should be used to it by now—was “the deck.” If anyone ever wrote a novel about advertising she could think of no better title than The Deck.

But now they had The Deck and the job in the hotel in Pittsburgh was to rehearse, each presenter refining their role. Rob: hello, clients. Good to see you again. Hello, CMO, vice president of brand, brand manager, associate brand manager, shopper manager, trade manager, assistant trade manager, RFP consultants. No need to run through our agency DNA again, so let me just say as I hand it off to the team how excited we are to have made it this far, how much confidence we have in the ideas we’re about to show you and how much we believe we’re the perfect fit to be your agency partner. Then a big role for Victoria, showing their research, the evolution of their thinking, the prompt to creative. Ant and Julie for the star of the show, the Big Idea, the creative executions and ad-lobs, scripts. Jimmy to talk production and nimbleness, Victoria back in to talk metrics, something outside her comfort zone, where she would “fake it until you make it,” as the saying went. Amy with a token speaking role, introducing herself as the day-to-day client interface and showing a high-level timeline from awarding the business to ramp-up to execution, and Rob back in to bring it all home. They had 11x17 placemats, the Deck in index, ad-lobs—"ad-like objects” i.e. spec scripts or copy and layouts on foam core, and they’d built in 15 minutes of Q&A and would have to carefully observe pace. Victoria remembered something from her presentation training. Put your watch on the table. Glance at it as you present. If the meeting starts at 2:00 and you know Rob goes from 2:00 to 2:05 and you from 2:05 to 2:15, use the watch to help you do that. Know whether the whole presentation is ahead of schedule or behind.

And that’s what they did, in that conference room, for six hours. Rehearsed. Practiced hitting their marks. First they ran through it high level, then presented it to themselves, received some critiques from Rob, from each other. Then did it again. Remembering the watch on the table, the unforgiving minute hand, Victoria realized once again the urgency of the assignment.

 A new business pitch is always important, to the agency, and the people it chooses to use. It was doubly important to Victoria. As a senior strategist trying to become an associate director of strategy, she had worked on new business before, but this was her first time “in the room,” her chief strategy officer entrusting her to deliver it alone. Jacket on, jacket off, sitting, standing, she was adjusting to its cadence and weight.

Rob seemed to have come to a decision, because he announced, “All right, everybody. Listen up. Time to put pencils down. We’re never gonna get it perfect, but it’s just as important to be well-rested for tomorrow as it is to keep going over the material. You know it. You know everybody else’s parts. You can practice it some more on your own if you want to, but let’s pack everything up, go back to our rooms and relax. Get some good sleep. You can have a drink if you want to but nobody get bombed. We can do that when we win. Understood? Okay.”

He clapped Ant, who was probably feeling the same gravity as Victoria and showing it by frowning, on the shoulder as everyone stood up, stretched, closed laptops, checked phones, erased white boards, scooped up paper plates and used them to shovel detritus to the trash can. In the midst of this, Jimmy touched Victoria’s elbow and said, “Hey, got a minute? Let’s get a drink. I want to bounce something off you.”

********************

The hotel bar, just off the lobby, was darker at night than it had been in the afternoon. The same electronic euro-Muzak played, decelerated. Drinks in hand—bourbon for him, vodka for Victoria—Jimmy guided them to a corner booth where he could be sure they wouldn’t be overheard by any of the FNK team or their own Braeburn team; none seemed to be in the bar, though they might have been in the restaurant or some other corner of the lobby. “Big day tomorrow,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah.”

“Rob’s an old hand at this. If he says we’re ready, we’re ready, right?”

“I wonder if there’s such a thing as rehearsing too much.” She touched the icy glass to her forehead. “I’m fried.”

“Could be worse. At least we’re not making drastic changes to the deck the night before the pitch. Phoning people in from Detroit, emailing slide revisions back and forth. Trying to find an all-night print shop to make new placemats at two in the morning.”

“Thank God for that.”

“St. Bernardine of Siena. Patron saint of advertising and compulsive gambling.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. How you feeling about what we’re going in with? The creative, I mean.”

Victoria pressed her teeth together, remembering the careful but determined quarrels she and her CSO had with Ant and his ECD. “It’s okay.”

“Just okay?”

“Hopefully it shows the clients what we’re capable of, the range of our creative thinking. But I think Ant and Julie are trying to play Stanley Kubrick when they should be operating more on the consumer’s level.”

“Well, it’s like I always say. This isn’t the avant garde. These guys should be designing a logo, not a Van Gogh.”

“Is that what you always say?”

“It is. But you’re right. They’re ignoring that strategic insight about multi-channel, snackable inspo and digital-first search. You know what I’m after.”

She did. For some time, Jimmy had been walking the halls of Braeburn trying to sell the idea of creating a dexterous, in-house content studio with him leading. The idea was it would work across accounts, identify quick-hit opportunities, produce executions—an investment for the agency—and deploy them across myriad paid and owned media. As sick as she was of hearing about it, Jimmy’s idea was probably right for the account—and it would need a strategic lead. Victoria sipped a little more vodka and lime. “Frankly,” she said, “I think we’re taking a big risk going in with what we’ve got. The strategy’s good—”

“If you do say so yourself.”

“And I do, but the big idea and the creative are gonna make or break us. The clients are either gonna love it or get scared off. Talk about gambling.”

“Better send one up to St. Bernardine.”

“Rob knows what he’s doing, I suppose.”

Jimmy nodded, but by the way his eyes searched over her shoulder, it was evident his mind was on something else. He said, “Hey, how wild was it running into the FNK team today, huh?”

Victoria frowned. “Could have done without that, honestly.”

“You mean seeing Keith again?”

She supposed she couldn’t hide it from Jimmy, but she couldn’t help resenting his knowing it either. “It was bound to happen sooner or later. If not here then somewhere else.”

“He didn’t seem glad to see you, either. But he also couldn’t take his eyes off you.”

Victoria lowered her eyebrows. “You’re imagining things.”

“I’m not, Tori.”

“Victoria.”

“Only a few people allowed to call you Tori, right? Apparently, Keith thinks he’s still one of them.”

Where was Jimmy going with this? She crossed her arms and leaned away from the table. “He said it on instinct and he corrected himself.”

“Then you corrected him again. Say, what was going on between you two?”

“What do you mean? Nothing. Guy shows up at a hotel in Pittsburgh and runs into his ex-girlfriend. An old story.”

“His ex-girlfriend who he’s competing against for a lucrative account. But what do you think he was feeling, looking at you that way?”

“What way? Probably charged and nervous, same as the rest of us. He doesn’t have much new business experience either. Or didn’t, last time we worked together. I imagine this is his first time in the big show, same as us.”

“That’s not what I mean. Do you think he’s over you?”

“Over me? Over me enough to move on and get married to someone else.”

“You noticed.”

“I heard something about it.”

Jimmy paused a moment to sip his drink and look at Victoria over the rim of the glass. “How strong do you think their stuff is?”

“FNK’s got a good reputation.”

“Stronger than ours? Now that you know who we’re up against, do you think we have a chance of beating them?”

“I don’t know.”

He leaned in conspiratorially. “Come on,” he insisted. “We just came out of the same room. You saw the same stuff I did. You said it yourself, it’s a gamble. How do you like our chances?”

Voice of the consumer, remember? She considered how honest she wanted to be, then settled for: “I don’t. That’s what you want me to say, right? Then I admit it, I don’t.”

“Bummer, isn’t it? A win here could be very important to our careers, both of us. Put everyone on notice what we’re capable of. Open doors. Too bad.”

“Rob knows what he’s doing.” Hesitation this time.

“Is that the way you want to leave it? Leave it up to Rob, and Ant’s art school weirdness?”

“You got another idea?”

“I do.” Another sip. “Victoria, Keith Caul is somewhere in this building, probably doing the same thing we’re doing. Trying to relax and be well-rested for the big show tomorrow. He’s not over you. It’s only been two years. Oh, sure, he’s moved on, gotten married, but I can tell you from experience what a man does with hurt. He just sews it up and keeps going. He never really lets it heal.”

Victoria pulled her chin in, just an inch. “You make me sound like a monster.” And not just me, she thought.

“You’re an adult. We’re all adults. I remember when you guys broke up, and why. Look, Keith’s number is still in your phone. What would happen if you texted him? Told him it was nice running into him here, asked him for a nightcap?”

“Jimmy, what are you saying?”

“I’m not saying you should seduce him.”

An incredulous half-laugh. “You sure? Cuz that’s what it sounds like you’re saying.”

“Just distract him, Victoria. Throw him off his game. If looking at you can upset him imagine what a conversation could do.”

“A conversation.”

“Or go ahead and sleep with him, I don’t care. Maybe you’re not over him, either.”

“Jesus, Jimmy.” One side of her mouth lifted into a soft snarl.

“Leave him out of it. Point is, new business is war. A war we want to win. We use every tactical advantage we can think of. Normally that means the right strategy, the right considerations, the right chemistry, every angle. You’ve got an opportunity here. Do you want to use it or not? Do you want to win or not? Where’s the harm? All I’m saying is, go talk to your ex-boyfriend. Maybe it’ll rattle him enough to throw him off his guard in the room tomorrow and we can win with our crap.”

Victoria pushed an exhalation through pursed lips. “I don’t know, Jimmy. I ripped that man’s heart out.”

“And was it all you? He did nothing to force you to be the bad guy? I really don’t know, I’m just calling it like I see it.”

“Well, what if I did? What if I pulled him aside for a drink and a talk? How do we know it wouldn’t have the opposite effect? Make him so fired up he goes in there tomorrow and sinks all his shots?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. When I look at that guy, I don’t see hunger in him. I see remorse. Look, Victoria, if we win this, it’s the perfect account to pilot the content studio. I have it on good authority Braeburn will invest—if we win. It could be my path to VP. It could be both our paths. I’m not telling you what to do. But what I am telling you is that if you do it, whatever you do, I’ll remember it.”

Victoria Brightly, strategist, square face, serious, seemed to be thinking it over behind her glasses. She was still thinking it over when Jimmy thanked her, wished her good night, and went up to his room. A waitress came by the booth and asked, “Another one, hon?” Still Victoria hesitated. Then she replied, “You know what, maybe. Let me see if my friend wants to join me.” She took out her phone, opened a new text message, and typed Keith’s name.

********************

She had always liked the way he wore his shirts, how they hung comfortably on the effortless muscles of a man that could work with his hands. She wondered, as he stood in the place where the lobby ended and the bar began, if the shirts she bought him still hung in his closet, if his wife, perhaps brushing against them while attending some laundry of her own, recognized them as incursions of a former lover. His short hair was thinning in an attractive way men have of surrendering it, and his movement across the bar was likewise natural, a man that belonged to any setting. Once more, Victoria stood for the friendly embrace, only this time she couldn’t help darting a familial kiss to his rough cheek. It rested there like a bird’s feet then departed before she knew she had done it.

“You look well,” he said, taking a seat. The waitress, noticing, approached.

“So do you,” she said. She wanted to say, “you look good,” and she wondered if he meant to say it, too, but as the words left her mouth she realized his was the more appropriate. She added, “Married life seems to agree with you.”

He glanced at his left hand, as if remembering there was a ring there. “Still settling in, but it does, yeah.”

Victoria had another vodka and lime, Keith Jack Daniel’s on ice. When their drinks were in front of them, she raised hers and said, “Good luck tomorrow.”

“You, too. So how’s Braeburn treating you?”

“Still settling in. How do you like FNK?”

“It’s…” He shrugged. “Advertising.”

“Haven’t found the off-ramp yet, huh?”

“If anything, it’s the fast lane, with no exit in sight. How about you, they got you right where they want you?”

Her turn to shrug. “I’m right where I want to be. Doing strategy with a good team, under a good leader. Taking on more responsibility, like this.” She gestured at the nearly empty hotel bar. “Ready to lead.”

“What’re you now, a senior strategist?”

“Yep. If all goes according to plan, I’ll get promoted to associate director, then director, then VP. At Braeburn or somewhere else.”

“I’m happy for you.”

It was a token statement, said without sincerity, from behind his raised guard. “Thank you,” she said just as perfunctorily. Then, “I wish I could say the same for you.”

“What the hell, I’m employed and the money is good.”

“But this was never what you really wanted.”

“It’ll do for now.”

She touched the condensation on her glass. “Are you writing?”

“Sure.”

“I mean your personal writing. Your stories.”

“Some. I’ve been busy. You know, getting married and everything.”

“Well, that was always the danger, wasn’t it? Not marriage. The job. Being a creative director, that was always what you worried about. That it would demand so much of your energy, there wouldn’t be anything left for your real work. Your real writing.”

“It’s a season. The last couple years have been a whirlwind.”

“You’re leading the pitch tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel about what you’re going in with?”

“Pretty good. How about you?”

She hid her mouth behind her drink, raised her eyebrows and demurred. “The strategy’s good.”

“Well, may the better man win.”

She smiled and they sipped. “I wish I could say it’s good to see you, Keith. I mean, you look good. You look great, actually. I’m happy you found someone. But I wish the circumstances were different.”

“I guess being opponents is a little awkward.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean, you don’t belong here.”

“In Pittsburgh.”

“In advertising. This was never your dream. This is the opposite of your dream. It’s my dream, but not yours. I hoped that if or when I ever saw you again, you’d have quit this and become… something else.”

“Like what?”

“Like a carpenter or a paramedic or a janitor. I don’t know. Anything that would leave you with more time to write.”

“You think a janitor has energy left over after a day of mopping hallways.”

“Well it worked for that guy you like. The boxer, he was a janitor.”

“Thom Jones.”

“My point is, a janitor has more of his thoughts to himself than a copywriter. When I said I wish I was seeing you in different circumstances, that’s what I meant.”

“Tori, you’re a blue-collar girl from Waterford that learned she was smart at Ferris State. My dad’s a pipe fitter with back problems. You know another way to make a six-figure salary without degenerating your spinal cord?”

There wasn’t much heat in his words, but it was enough to make her pause. “Maybe this was a mistake,” she admitted.

“Well if you’re gonna make a mistake, make it.”

She studied him with no particular expression. She said, “I never did tell you why we really broke up. I mean all the reasons.”

“I suspect this—” he indicated the table, the drinks, the hotel “—had something to do with it.”

“But maybe not the way you think.”

“Oh? I think you wanted something else. You weren’t sure what it was but you knew it wasn’t me, not anymore. I think it bothered you that I didn’t share your enthusiasm for our profession. That I’m not a believer, like you are, in the culture-defining power of marketing, the sacredness of the strategic insight and the holy white board. I think you saw yourself being with someone that buys into what you do completely, props you up about it, intellectually, and it just wasn’t me. In my darkest moments—which are rare, honestly, I promise you I don’t think about it that much—it occurs to me we broke up because I was no longer contributing to your career. Because we couldn’t wring any more drama from the little office affair between the junior strategist and the older copywriter. Forgive me. Maybe I’m the one making a mistake.”

She recognized this as the beginning of one of his sulks and raised her palms in a gesture of acceptance.

He said, “Anyway that’s what I think. I’m probably making it sound more like a grudge than I intend.”

“I never wanted to hurt you, Keith. I still don’t want to.”

“Don’t worry. You can’t.”

“What you said just now, that’s only partially true. It did bother me that you didn’t believe in what we were doing. You know, it’s incredible that we’re able to make a living at this. You’re right, all my family in Waterford look at me like a caterpillar that turned into a butterfly. And I find myself studying them like I was never really one of them, trying to figure out how they think, what kind of ad could get them to buy more laundry soap, or a specific brand of tires. I love that. Some days I can’t believe how rewarded I am by that. But you, that only seems to disgust you.”

“It’s not disgust, it’s just…a lack of passion.”

“And that’s what I’m trying to get at. Okay, so it’s my vocation and I love it. It’s not yours. But you didn’t do anything about it. Every day we’d get up and I’d put on my strategy pants and you’d put on your copywriter shirt and not your writer shirt, and we’d go to work and you would listen to a brief and write some dumb script about a summer! summer! sale! sale! instead of your stories. And you’d get your direct deposit every other week and we’d go out for drinks or to a movie and… and you’d complain, you’d complain about how stupid it all is, how every stroke of the keyboard spent on a tag line is a down payment on a life leading you further and further away from something you thought was better. What was the line you used to quote about advertising? That Raymond Chandler line?”

“‘Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you will find outside of an advertising agency.’”

“What bothered me was not that you didn’t see it the way I see it but that you didn’t do anything about it. You saw it as a trap, but you didn’t do anything to get out of it. You said a moment ago we broke up because I didn’t know what I wanted but I knew it wasn’t you. What I want is to be with people who know that they are where they want to be. Not someone alienated from their true self. Pretending. Keith, advertising can swallow you whole. People like me want to be swallowed. You don’t, so why are you here?”

“In Pittsburgh.”

“I knew we were in trouble when I began to feel pity for you, and that pity started to grow into resentment. I thought we should break up before resentment turned into contempt.”

“Contempt. Wow.”

“I’m sorry. I really don’t mean to hurt you.”

“I said before you couldn’t hurt me and you can’t.”

“Call it a strategic insight. You’re free to ignore it if you want. Creative directors often do.”

“Thanks. But you always did think a little too highly of your insights. Strategists often do.”

“I didn’t ask you down here to fight with you, Keith.”

“Yeah? What did you ask me down here for?”

She thought it over. “I guess I just wanted to see you again. Had some things I wanted to say.”

“Well, thanks for letting me know.” He stood up. “And thanks for the drink. You can expense it, right?”

“Keith—”

But he was gone.

********************

It was brighter in the hotel lobby the next morning. The bar slept, but its tables and booths had been transformed into welcoming spaces for the clatter of breakfast forks on fruit plates. Victoria was at one of these going over some notes when Rob breezed in from the fitness room in running shorts and sneakers to fetch a bottle of juice and a bagel. He only nodded knowingly at Victoria, who returned the nod. He had his earbuds in and she thought he was listening to pre-game hype music until he spoke and she realized he was on a call.

Jimmy appeared, similarly attired in dumpy basketball shorts, and he probably was listening to music on his earbuds as he crossed the lobby on his way to the treadmills. What, Victoria wondered, would Jimmy be listening to, to help him get in the zone? Gangster rap, she concluded, or some bro country song about hard work and red dirt, even though he was from Troy, Michigan. Whatever it was, he paused it and removed his ear buds as he stopped by Victoria’s table.

“Well? How’d it go last night?”

“Fine.”

“Did you, uh, follow through on my suggestion?”

“I did.”

“And? Anything to report?”

“You know how you said you’d remember it if we won the pitch?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if we win the pitch, remember it.”