(the first time ever) i saw your face

“Campbell! As I live and breathe! What are you doing here?”

There must have been something wrong with those tapes he learned diction off of, because when Bob Benson says as I live and breathe it sounds completely normal. It sounds like a big catalog-ready smile from the most conventionally handsome man he’s seen since Draper went AWOL and started wearing caftans.

It’s the fourteenth of December, 1972, and nothing about California feels like Christmas. The Southern California Auto Dealers Consortium pays for a good spread, but plastic boughs and cotton-ball snow really undercut the mood.

Pete rolls his swizzle stick uneasily and discreetly looks for the exits. “I thought I’d bow out early, but everyone looked like they were having too much fun.”

In reality Pete had planned to make a strategic entrance, have some ham squares and olives on sticks, gaze dolefully at the sociology students in jumpsuits doing key bumps outside the nightclub next door, and call it a night.

“I’m glad you didn’t, Pete. Hey, you’re looking great.”

“Same goes for you,” Pete lies. Really, he looks — the same. Square jaw, twinkling eyes, disturbing sincerity. “So what brings you to the valley?”

“I’m in town with Buick for a conference — you’ll see some of my colleagues around here.”

“Buick, huh?” Even after all that mortifying business with GM, the man comes out on top. How in God’s name had he managed that? Scratch that, Pete would rather not know. “You’re moving up in the world, considering.”

Benson’s smile flags a little. “Right. Look, Peter, I wanted to apologize for how we left off back there, with your mother, and the agency, and all of it. I wanted to see you so I could apologize.”

Apology not granted. “Just pretend it didn’t happen. That’s what I do.”

“If you’d find it in your heart to let me make it up to you, I’m sure we can find some sort of understanding That’s why I’m so glad you didn’t miss the ritual tonight.”

Pete stops with his Tom Collins glass halfway to his lips. “Come again?”

“Oh — I’ve said too much. If you don’t know, don’t worry about it.

“Hold on, a ritual? Benson, what are you even talking about?”

“Well, you saw all the mistletoe.”

“Is there going to be a wicker man later?”

“That would be ridiculous.” Bob is still smiling, smiling, smiling, with the softest brown eyes Pete Campbell has seen since his mother’s King Charles Spaniel passed. “It’s really not that big a deal. It’s just something we do before the new year.”

“What’s that?”

“Every fourth quarter, the biggest players in the industry throw a party like this to celebrate the accomplishments of the last year. Two guests are chosen to celebrate the act of creation. They pair off together, they enter the sacred space — matters proceed from there. They emerge, they receive a ceremonial libation from the heads of sales, and it ensures four more quarters of growth.”

So just like a Manhattan Christmas party but the booze comes afterward.

Pete’s head is spinning like a Rolodex. “Act of creation? But it’s two men. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Creation by an act of will, Pete. You’re the most creative man I know. I’m not naming any names, but we had a very well-placed consultant in the field who workshopped the whole idea. With the way the foreign imports are treating us, it’s a sound investment.”

“And what do the guys get out of it? Everybody else has just watched them cornholing each other.”

Bob’s brow furrows. “Oh, nobody watches, Pete, it’s not the Middle Ages.”

“So they just go off into a room together and come back—“ Pete does mental math. Two men ought to take twice as long as your regular coupling, and it was hard to imagine everyone had Pete’s own staying power under stress. Maybe if they tried tantra. “Ten minutes, twelve seconds later, and everybody just takes their word for it that they did the deed?”

“If you don’t do the deed, then you don’t get the luck. I’ve been doing it for three years running, and the fellows running the show are great guys, trust me. They’ve all done it. I’m not naming any names, but some of the fellows from Detroit — does Le Mans mean anything to you?”

“You’re kidding me! You don’t mean—“ Lee Iacocca? Somebody at this party has ceremonially balled Lee Iacocca?

“Lee’s a great guy.”

Pete can feel a sly smile starting to tug at the corners of his mouth, and a bad idea hatching. “So when were you planning to ask me?”

*

The coatroom was more like a coat closet, lit unsettlingly by a single red-tinted bulb. The far wall is taken up entirely by a leather couch, and someone has helpfully supplied a tub of Vaseline and a 1969 Chevrolet commemorative wall calendar. Outside that door everyone’s waiting with bated breath. Inside, Bob Benson smells like Binaca and fine cologne.

“Sort of a school photography club energy,” Pete says, unsettled but turned on. Pete laughs, having visibly no idea what he’s talking about.

“I can unscrew it if it’d put you at ease.”

“I thought there’d be more accouterments. I pictured myself laying you down on a marble slab covered in rams’ skulls.” Pete loosens his tie. “Let’s get this ball rolling, shall we?”

Bob doesn’t look like he’s about to lay down anywhere. He’s very upright, and very solid, and his hairline looks incredible. “Good man. I knew I could count on you, Pete.”

“Sort of like kissing under the mistletoe,” Pete says, but then Bob is kissing him and he’s not thinking too much about Christmas.

It doesn’t feel bad, exactly, but even the gentle pressure of Bob’s body has him off-balance, bending backward; it feels like a competition, and that’s exactly how Pete’s going to treat it. The climate in California might be different but the industry is just as cutthroat — maybe more so, underneath all the love beads and key parties and solid gold miniature vacuum cleaners for sweeping up cocaine. Maybe once this whole sex ritual is over with and his career gets a bump he’ll buy himself one of those, and maybe he’ll invite Benson over to watch him use it.

Pete kisses and Bob kisses back, mouths battling for dominance and arms grappling, until Pete hits his head on the wall and knocks the Chevy calendar off its peg.

“Jesus Christ!”

Bob cups his hand to the back of Pete’s head. “You know, it’s not a fight. You can just enjoy yourself.” He strokes Pete’s sideburn with the backs of his fingers, and by the light of the lone red bulb he looks gently Satanic.

Enjoy, hell. This is a competition and Pete Campbell is going to win it. So what if Bob Benson is a Gatsbyesque homosexual fraud with a track record of using his considerable physical charms to get ahead in life — they’re in Los Angeles now, he’ll fit right in. Peter Dyckman Campbell, in turn, must bring his A-game.

“You’ve been waiting years for this, haven’t you?” Pete purrs. He means for it to sound sexy but it mostly just sounds kind of sad. He grabs Benson by the hips, pulling him in closer, and looks up at him with his best sexy-occult-sacrifice look.

“It means a lot to me to share this with you.” Benson is an absolute lunatic. Pete grabs his ass with both hands, and Bob hoists him up with surprising strength, setting him down like a debutante on the antique leather fuck-couch. “When’s the last time anyone told you you’re a great-looking guy?”

Christ, but Benson makes the whole ‘perfunctory sexual hazing’ thing hard to stay objective about; Pete grinds against Benson’s absurdly well-muscled thigh. At least at Dartmouth everyone on the rowing team came from decent families. “Flattery will get you everywhere, country boy.”

So Pete’s got an undeniable hard-on, which looks good for the sex magic but bad for his self-image — it ought to be Benson who’s begging him to drop trou, all of this is absolutely backwards. It must be the lighting. Once he’s been thrown over the padded arm of the couch, which by the way smells like his grandmother’s handbag, it occurs to Pete that he ought to protest. “Look, Benson, I don’t know how you people do things—“

“Relax,” Bob says, cupping Pete through the polyester. “Let me do the hard work.”

*

Upon his exit from the ceremonial sex dungeon, an awful little man in a novelty Christmas-themed necktie hands Pete Campbell a cold can of Schlitz. He jerks around to look at Bob for some kind of cue but Bob is already opening his beer and pounding it while two gray-haired men applaud. Shouldn’t it feel different? Shouldn’t there be — robes, or sashes, or something other than a bunch of middle-aged men in ugly suits?

The abrupt transition would be enough to leave anyone disgruntled — exiting somewhere dark and fragrant and sort of womblike to genial Midwestern applause and wolf-whistles, pats on the back, someone trying to hand him a commemorative branded letter opener. If this is how the auto industry operates, no wonder they ran Ken Cosgrove ragged — Pete’s pleasantly sore, but at least he has both his eyes intact and doesn’t look like he’s lining up to audition at Disneyland.

From the way the guys from corporate are acting, you’d think he was Nixon — everyone’s lining up to shake Pete’s hand, and he can’t make it through the line without feeling vaguely shell-shocked. The orgasmic afterglow is vanishing faster than a Fudgie the Whale cake in July, and Pete hauls Bob aside by the arm in the middle of their third post-sodomy victory lap around the dance floor.

“Are you kidding me? We just broke the California state penal code and I feel like I just pledged a frat!”

“That’s just the industry.” Bob grabs him across the shoulders like he’s going in for a politician-caliber photo op, and maybe he is — lights are flashing, the house band is tuning up, and Pete is dying for a cigarette. “Consider the positives!”

“Like what? When am I going to start seeing a turnaround on this?” He can hear himself talking a little too loud, a little less mellow than he’d care to appear about the whole thing.

“Give it until tomorrow morning. Come back to my place and I’ll make you French toast, you can call your stockbroker.”

Breakfast with the man who took a hit out on his mother still sounds better than a cab ride back to an empty house. Pete takes his arm.