That was, in the end, the sentence that did it, because it was true and because Dana respected true sentences about money. The featured slot of the gala was the survival circle, and the survival circle was Sabine: Marcus Webb and Tyler Brooks were excellent, and rising, and there were four other clubs in Houston where a person could watch two athletic young men try to corner somebody. There was exactly one room in the city where a thirty-eight-year-old former sabre fencer stood alone in a chalked circle and could not be touched, and that room was this one, and it was this one because she had built the drill out of her own ruined and rebuilt career, one Tuesday at a time, for six years. Dana knew the ticket ledger the way Sabine knew footwork. Dana folded the poster in half, which took some doing, as it was printed on stock meant to survive weather.
"Plain," Dana said. "Give me plain and tell me exactly what plain means, and I will pay for the reprint, and I will not sulk, which for me is a significant additional concession."
"Three names," Sabine said. "One circle. The format's proper title. The programme in letters as large as the date."
Carla was already writing.
The reprinted poster was, by any honest measure, a better piece of design. It used the same photograph โ Sabine had approved the photograph; it was a good photograph, and she was not vain but she was French, which came with opinions about images โ and above it, in clean white type on the deep blue of the club's mats, it said SURVIVAL CIRCLE. Below: SABINE RENAUD. MARCUS WEBB. TYLER BROOKS. And below that, in the largest type on the sheet after the title: A GALA EVENING FOR THE WOMEN'S SELF-DEFENCE PROGRAMME OF BAYOU CITY. No crown. No boys. Nothing about anybody falling.
Dana had them up across the city by Wednesday โ in the windows of two boxing gyms and a physical therapy clinic, at the community college, at the library branch on Westheimer where the self-defence programme ran its Saturday classes, in the lobby of a hotel whose manager trained at the club on Thursdays and had asked, with surprising passion, for six.
And then the thing happened that Dana would dine out on for the rest of the year, and that she was honest enough, later, to attribute correctly. Ticket sales rose. Not held steady โ rose. The first print run of the poster had been in the world for two days and the club had sold forty-one gala tickets. By Friday evening, four days into the plain poster's life, they had sold a hundred and ninety. The phone, Carla reported, had acquired a new category of caller: women who had taken the Saturday classes, and their sisters, and their mothers, and the office manager of a law firm who bought a table of eight and asked whether the programme took donations beyond the ticket price, because her firm matched them.
"It is the programme line," Carla said, reading the ledger. "People are not buying a fight. They are buying the programme, and the circle is the proof it works."
"People are buying that the woman in the photograph looks like she has somewhere to be," Dana said, but she said it looking at the numbers, and there was no fight left in it. "Fine. Fine. Craft sells. I will put it on my tombstone. Somebody write it down that I said it."
"I write everything down," Carla said.
Sabine hung one of the new posters in the footwork room herself, at the end of the piste, where her Tuesday class would see it. She straightened it twice. She told herself she was checking the frame.
What Dana did not say at the poster meeting, and what Sabine only learned later, was that Dana had been running a second negotiation all month, in parallel, in private, with the two young men โ and that it was a better piece of promotion and a worse piece of management than anything she had put on paper.