I

The split-level in Wilton, Connecticut smelled of lemon polish and unspoken disappointments and the particular brand of optimism that flourishes in Connecticut suburbs in 1957. Richard Harrington sat in his home office when the telephones rang. There were two of them. One on the desk, white, rotary, for business. One in the kitchen, almond-colored, wall-mounted, for personal calls. It was a Wednesday. It was always a Wednesday when the personal phone rang, because that was the day his daughter called. Not every Wednesday. Every other Wednesday, sometimes. She lived in California now, married to a television salesman who owned twelve-foot consoles and beliefs about the future that filled rooms, and he lived in this house in Connecticut and the space between them was measured in miles of Turnpike and cross-country airplane tickets and the kind of love that persisted through the medium of long-distance telephone service at twelve cents a minute.

"Hi Dad." "Hi Patricia." "How are you?" "Good. You?" "Fine. How's the—how's the project?" He glanced toward the hallway. The project was there. It was the same as it had been yesterday evening. It would be the same tomorrow morning. It was always almost finished. Almost. "The project is going," he said. "You sound tired." "I'm fine." There was a pause. The kind of pause that exists between two people who love each other but have exhausted the stock of things to discuss that do not involve money or health or the weather or the neighbor's fence. "I'm coming home in December," Patricia said. "For the holidays." "Good." "Love you Dad." "Love you too honey." He replaced the receiver. He sat at his desk for ten minutes, listening to the refrigerator hum through the kitchen hallway. Then he walked to the hallway.

II

The project occupied the dining room table, which had not been used for dining in eighteen months. It was a television set. Not a finished television set—something more complicated than that. It was a prototype, a thing Richard had been building in his spare time for eight years, when spare time existed and weekends meant something and the ad agency did not require him to bring campaign concepts home on Thursday nights.

The television was constructed from vacuum tubes and transformer iron and speaker cones and dial displays, components purchased from Allied Electronics and surplus yards and the occasional trip to New York where he might visit Radio Shack on Broadway and feel, briefly, like an engineer rather than a vice president of creative strategy. It looked like nothing to anyone who had not grown up taking television for granted, which was to say it looked like a complex electronic device to anyone under thirty and looked like magic to anyone over sixty. To Richard, it looked like the thing that was always one week away from completion.

Richard picked up his soldering iron. He joined a connection on the chassis. He powered the set on. The picture tube glowed. A horizontal line appeared on the screen, bright and steady. He adjusted a trimmer capacitor. The line fractured into a raster. Almost.

III

Richard had worked at the J. Walter Thompson agency for twenty years. He had begun in 1937, fresh from Yale with a degree in advertising and a head full of ideas about how persuasion could be systematized and sold. He did not write entire campaigns. He wrote taglines. Not entire slogans—taglines, specifically. The short phrases that stuck in people's minds after they had seen the full advertisement, the kind of linguistic component that had to condense a product's entire value proposition into seven or eight words.

He wrote taglines from nine to five, took a lunch break at the exclusive club on 54th Street where he discussed golf and clients, wrote taglines from one to six, took calls from art directors who wanted approval on typefaces, and repeated this cycle five days a week, for twenty years. He was excellent at it. He was the tagline writer everyone read first in campaign meetings. His creative director, a man named Whitfield who had been writing taglines for twenty-five years and whose son was currently a junior copywriter learning the craft, once told him: "Richard, you're the only man in this room who makes me feel that seven words carry more weight than the thirty thousand words surrounding them. You care too much about taglines."

Richard did not care about taglines in the abstract. He cared about the feeling of a tagline that worked—the way it lodged in a viewer's consciousness after a single exposure, the way it survived the passage of time while the full advertisement was forgotten, the way a product, properly named, sold itself not through features and benefits but through the emotional shorthand that a good phrase provided.

When Whitfield retired in 1955 and Richard was passed over for the senior creative position in favor of a younger man named Gable who had invented a new approach called soft-sell that relied on atmosphere rather than punch, Richard stood in the agency parking lot for twenty minutes after everyone else had driven away, looking at the Chevrolet he had almost bought with his bonus check, and then he went home to Wilton and began working on something in his dining room that was almost a television and always would be.

IV

The envelope on the dining room table, under the crystal document weight that Patricia had given him for his fiftieth birthday, was a notice from the bank. It had been there for two years. Richard had not moved the crystal weight since it arrived. The notice stated: Mortgage Payment Past Due. Immediate Action Required. Richard had received nine notices. The bank was patient. The bank had been patient for twenty years of American home lending, and patience was simply the patient accumulation of interest and late fees.

Mrs. Gable, who lived two houses down and was not related to the Gable at the agency, sometimes left casseroles on his porch. She was sixty-nine, a retired schoolteacher, and the kind of woman who believed that food constituted the closest approximation to love that suburban men received from their wives, who were often away at bridge club or charity luncheons themselves. She would set the Pyrex dish on his step and walk away before he could emerge, because some people don't like being thanked for casseroles and she was one of them.

Richard ate the casseroles sometimes. Sometimes he didn't. He would watch them in the freezer and think about how long they would keep and then he would let them go past their prime and feel bad about it for a week. He attended Mrs. Gable's memorial service in the May rain. He stood at the back of the Wilton church in a suit that was slightly too large because he had lost weight and had not noticed because his mind was occupied by a horizontal hold circuit that refused to stabilize.

After the service, he walked to his car and saw the postal worker placing a package on Mrs. Gable's front porch. It was a television. His television. The prototype. The one he had finished for her in 1954, eighteen months before the bank notices began. A compact design: a twelve-inch screen in a walnut cabinet, with eight knobs and a channel selector that actually worked. She had been using it. Every evening. For three years.

Richard stood in the rain and watched the television sit on Mrs. Gable's entertainment center and thought about how he had built it to provide her with entertainment and companionship and it had provided three years of her viewing, and he had never known.

V

Richard sat at the dining room table on a Tuesday in November. The house was cold because the heating oil tank was low and he had not authorized the delivery. He wore a cardigan and a sweater and thick socks and gloves with the fingertips modified so he could adjust the trimmer capacitors without discharging the high-voltage plates. He powered the prototype on. The horizontal hold was 0.002 inches off. He adjusted the capacitor. He measured again. 0.002 inches. He adjusted further. 0.001 inches. Almost.

He set down his tools. He picked up a pencil and wrote on a graph paper: 0.001. Then he wrote: tomorrow. He sat at the dining room table for some time, looking at the television. It was almost working. It would always be almost working. This was not failure. This was the nesting structure of his life—ad man building television sets while building television campaigns while raising a daughter who was becoming a stranger while paying a mortgage he could barely afford. Play within play within play. Frame within frame within frame.

He stood. He went to the kitchen. He put the coffee on. He waited for it to brew. He poured the hot water over grounds that had been sitting too long. He carried the mug back to the dining room and sat down and looked at the television and said, out loud, for the first time in four years: "Almost."

The television speaker was playing a recording by a woman whose name Richard could never remember. She was singing about a man who went away and came back to find that everything had changed. Richard listened to the recording, drank his coffee, and watched the television sit on the dining table and was perfectly, completely still.

Almost.

The recursive structure of Richard Harrington's life contained nested frames that extended from the surface level of ad campaign strategy down through layers of personal sacrifice and professional compromise and paternal longing and the quiet desperation of a man who could craft the perfect tagline for a product he did not believe in while unable to articulate the tagline for the life he actually wanted. The nested structure was infinite. Each advertisement contained a pitch that contained a dream that contained a compromise that contained a measurement that contained a decimal point that contained a space of 0.001 inches between what was and what could be. The space was almost nothing. The space was almost everything. The television on the dining table was almost a window into a different life, one where the work mattered and the family stayed close and the bank notices were filed away in a drawer that was locked and the key was lost. The television was almost that window. Richard was almost that man. The almost was the frame through which he viewed everything.