True-Life Adventure

on the furniture. She had two very serious-looking lines on her forehead, right between the peepers. I knew these signs— the nail-gnawing, the unsatisfied look, the lines. These were the signs of a woman who would soon be biting your bicep if you didn’t get a sandwich inside her instantly.
    I panicked. Sinbad’s, which was where I’d planned to take her, would probably be crowded. I was trying so hard to think of another place that I forgot to introduce myself.
    “Mr. Mcdonald?”
    “Oh. Hi. Yes.”
    “I remember you. You were at Kogene this morning.”
    “I remember you, too. You didn’t look quite so hungry at the time.”
    “I am faint from hunger. Weak.” She had very little southern accent, but she used the sort of dramatic intonation I associate with Dixie belles. I hoped it only came out under stress.
    “We’ve got to do something about your blood-sugar level. Do you have to have food right away or will a drink do it?”
    “I’d love a drink.”
    Good. If there was a crowd at Sinbad’s, we could wait at the bar and my bicep would probably be safe. But there wasn’t a crowd. It was nearly two o’clock, and that was probably why. It also accounted for Miss Kincannon’s faintness and weakness.
    We got a table outside, right on the water, practically under the Bay Bridge, with Treasure Island nearly at arm’s length. It was gorgeous, and so was Sardis Kincannon in my book, even with those two funny lines in her forehead.
    They smoothed out after about half a glass of white wine.
    “So, Miss Kincannon”— what a suave devil I am— “what part of the South are you from?”
    “For heaven’s sake, call me Sardis. This is California, isn’t it?”
    “Yes, and very few of its residents bear the name of the ancient Lydian capital. You have to go south to find much of that.”
    “Well, I am from the South; it’s true. But I’m not named after any old ancient city.” She’d dropped the italics; thank God.
    “There’s another Sardis?”
    “Yep. A reservoir in north Mississippi. I was conceived on its shores, in the back seat of a car.”
    “Mississippi! I knew it.”
    But enough about her, apparently. She went right from there to business. “What about you, Paul? What kind of corporation are we identifying?”
    “Well, now, if I had,you people do my corporate identity, what would I get? I mean, a logo and what else?”
    She laughed. “People always think it’s just logos. C.I.’s a lot more than logos.”
    “Well… like what?”
    “It’s how your corporation projects itself to its various publics— your employees, your stockholders, your clients, and the general public are your four publics. We like to call C.I. an identity system that visually separates and distinguishes a firm from its competitors.” She was warming to her subject, slipping into her own corporate identity. Her voice was getting crisp, and to my mind, a little phony. She was starting to sell. People always get earnest when they’re selling something and I don’t like them as well. She was no exception, but it was my fault she was on the subject and I’d just have to take the selling side of her.
    I interrupted her. “But what could I get? Business cards and stationery, right?”
    “On our corporate identification checklist, we have nineteen classifications under stationery alone. Then there’s your literature— your annual reports, quarterly reports, brochures, catalogs, newsletters, and what-have-you. All that’s got to be designed. Then there’s transportation: your trucks, company aircraft, all that— even your parking lot decal. People forget about things like that. After that, there’s your packaging, your architecture, signage, marketing and sales material, employee relations designs, dining accessories, operational materials. To name a few.”
    “What, pray tell, is an ‘employee relations design’?”
    “Well, let’s see— how about a five-year pin?”
    “You people don’t miss a trick, do you?”
    “A lot of people seem to feel they need our services.” She was getting huffy, but I didn’t care. I thought this stuff was garbage, and as you know, I’m not very emotionally mature. I did not exercise the self-control and tact the situation called for.
    “Need it for what?” I said.
    “Look, do you know what a corporate image is?”
    “Isn’t that what we’ve just been talking about?”
    “No, indeed. Your corporate image is the way your company feels it projects itself