Blood risk

with the women in the commercials; therefore, family goods were sold by cutesy women or plain types. Bombshells like Elise were reserved for pitches aimed at men: cigars, automobiles, beer and hair-grooming preparations.
        "They've come up with a different approach for this one," she said.
        "Who has?"
        "Marcus, Marcus, Pliney and Plunket," she said.
        To Tucker the name of the ad agency always sounded like the first line of a children's nonsense rhyme.
        "What's the approach?"
        "Fellatio," she said.
        Tucker almost spat out a mouthful of good Scotch. When he did at last manage to swallow it, he coughed and cleared his throat. "Beg pardon?"
        "It's another one of Plunket's brainstorms. My agent's gotten work for me with Plunket before, both times for crazy things. Plunket's convinced the Peter Piper Pickle people to try something different in hopes of boosting sales. He's cooked up quite an argument for making a sexy pickle commercial, family goods or not."
        "I'd like to hear it."
        "Plunket says, with the new wave of female awareness, modern housewives are more and more dissatisfied with their husbands as bed partners and, more and more, have sex on the mind, either subconsciously or consciously, and he uses polls, sociological studies and tons of other data to make his point. He's sold the pickle people on the idea; he says they can't go wrong by showing a sexy girl, full-face, slowly devouring a nice big Peter Piper dill while the voice-over announcer gives the regular sort of pitch." She chuckled again, finished her drink and put down the glass. "Plunket says that it'll implant, in the woman's mind, the notion that pickles from Piper are a sensual experience. A pickle is very phallic, you know."
        "I never noticed."
        "Oh, yes, indeed."
        He said, "Will the average housewife really go for this, though?"
        She shrugged. "It's to be a limited approach, just one commercial, playing only in a few selected test areas. No national exposure unless it proves workable. So, I don't get any residuals, but a pretty good flat fee for a day's work."
        Tucker recalled the night that, watching a two-hour network special sponsored by a soap company, they saw three commercials featuring Elise, played three times each, which had earned her an additional five hundred and forty dollars under the residuals clause in her contract. Most weeks, she averaged between a thousand and two thousand dollars as one of the most popular current commercial faces, all of it from work already finished and on the air weeks before; and when she worked on a new one, she doubled that particular week's take with her initial payment. It almost seemed to Tucker that he should give up a life of crime and start hawking toothpaste.
        He finished his Scotch, stood up and put the glass on the stand. He looked at her and said, "Do you feel like practicing?"
        "Practicing what?" she asked.
        "The pickle commercial, of course."
        Much later, finished with that practice and a number of others, having eaten a late dinner and practiced some more and having fallen asleep together in the big bed in the front room, Tucker woke, his heart beating like a sledge driven against an iron block, the rhythm ringing along his bones. He had been frightened by some nightmare that he could not recall, and he reached out and touched Elise's warm, bare buttocks, concentrated on her until he could see her lines draped across with sheeting. As her nearness sank in, as he realized he was not alone, his heart slowed and his mouth grew moist again, the fear subsiding. In a moment he was even able to remember what the nightmare had been about: his father.
        

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        Even for the president of a Fifth Avenue bank, Mr. Mellio's office was too rich, paneled in too much teak, carpeted in too deep a pile, furnished in much too luxurious a style. The painting behind his desk was clearly an original Klee, and even though it was surely on loan from the bank's investment art collection and had not been purchased solely for Mr. Mellio, it gave you the feeling that these people were not managing your money very properly and were, in fact, almost throwing it away on personal aggrandizement, baubles and unnecessary luxuries.
        Mr. Mellio himself, however, countered this impression so completely that you could almost forget entirely about