Palladio

by Jonathan Dee

  One summer Monday, Roger surprised them all by walking through the door, pale and secretive, at three in the afternoon; the whole office had been sent home early because Roger’s boss, a man in his fifties, had had a heart attack while introducing the staff to a special guest speaker from Research and Development in Armonk. By the next morning he was dead. From scraps of conversation and tensely veiled references over the next few days, Richard and Molly picked up that their parents were fighting over the question of whether they, the children, should be forced to attend this man’s funeral. In the end, Roger’s concern for appearances (would his colleagues think him insufficiently respectful? Would they think of him as a man whose children could do as they pleased?) won out, and the kids were dressed up and driven to the funeral home in Oneonta. On the way their mother leaned her coiffed head over the seat and explained that what they were going to was not a funeral, strictly speaking, but a wake, and that they should try their hardest not to act shocked or to say anything at all when they saw their father’s boss’s casket at the front of the reception room with the lid open and Mr Murphy in it.

  They both did as they were told. At a whispered signal from their mother, Richard and Molly walked slowly up to the casket and knelt on the little upholstered bench, as they had seen those ahead of them do, even though they then had to crane their necks to see inside. Molly was told she had met Mr Murphy before, but she did not remember it; in any case, the face before her, wearing makeup, smelling of perfume, lying in a frame of satin, with its strange concavity around the mouth, was not one she had ever seen before. She was aware of Richard next to her, his head down and his hands folded, looking very solemn, even close to tears. “Goodbye, Mr Murphy,” he whispered. He was older than she and might well remember meeting this man, Molly thought, maybe even more than once; still, she was puzzled by this evidence of a feeling stronger than muted curiosity. He did not seem to be faking. She folded her own hands and lowered her eyes to the polished side of the casket, watching Richard as well to see when he would stop or what he would do next. She knew that their posture was that of prayer. But she wasn’t thinking about anything but the posture itself, and she was still waiting for something to happen when her brother stood up and whispered sternly, “That’s enough.”

  She was smart, and passively respectful, but she was also the kind of child who notices everything, who takes everything in and doesn’t ask questions, and while that made some adults fond of her, others were discomfited even to the point of suspicion. Her teachers at school fell into these two camps as well. All of them were women; the only men she ever saw in her school building were the principal and the janitor. Her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs Park (who, like every teacher of Molly’s, was wary of her at first, remembering the more temperamental Richard from three years ago), was the only one who said to herself that there was clearly something more inside the girl than was getting out: she tried to befriend her, to find out what that something was, but Molly only felt the maternal heat of this interest as something contrived, something to be tolerated rather than understood, and nothing more than kindness ever came of it.

  What did the other children see? Molly was not the kind of shy girl who took pains to keep from being noticed, but rather one who seemed not to notice herself, not to assert or even bear in mind her own presence in a group. Thus she was not offended when others did not recognize it either. Unlike her brother, though her pleasures were unshared ones, it didn’t follow that she could find pleasure only in solitude. She could often be found in the band of children – children of all ages hanging out together, as happens in small neighborhoods – on their bikes on the aesthetically crooked roads of Bull’s Head, on the expanse of tended grass just before the boundary line where the slope of the valley began. She was considered by adults a child who loved to read, and relative to others perhaps she was; still, in those years she spent no more time reading each day than she did in front of the television, usually sitting on the floor, occasionally scooting forward to turn the dial on the box which controlled the rooftop antenna, knowing it oriented toward New York City or Albany or Vermont but preferring to imagine an element of magic to it, watching happily as the rotor hummed and the lives of the families on the screen were retrieved from a purgatory of the unobserved, brought into focus through a kind of electronic snowfall, their voices growing clearer, along with the bodiless, ratifying laughter that enclosed them wherever they went.

  Holidays were spent all the way up in Syracuse, where Kay’s mother lived; Molly’s other grandparents were in Illinois. Kay was from a large family, none of whom seemed to have gotten very far away from Syracuse: they were all there, along with Molly’s cousins, at Christmas and Thanksgiving.

  The snow drifted all the way up to the windowsills. The children ate at a card table set up for the purpose in the passageway between the kitchen and the dining room; an hour after dinner, the whole house still smelled like food. The heat was always up too high. Kay sat on the stairs, talking quietly and intensely with her sister. The six cousins still sat at the cleared table in a kind of limbo of parental circumscription: they couldn’t play outside, and they couldn’t watch TV, because Roger Howe and his brother-in-law had the football game on.

  Kay had a maternal uncle whose own children were grown and lived far away; after a few beers, it always seemed, he couldn’t leave the cousins alone. When they were having a good time at something, Great-Uncle Phil would come over and muss their hair and ask them if they were having a good time; when they were bored, his idea of entertainment was to find ways to extract from them declarations of their affection for him. Now, from his seat at the end of the kitchen table, he called the six restless cousins over to his side.

  “You kids have been so good today,” he said, “that your Uncle Phil wanted to give you something. Something for the holidays. I said to myself, I’m gonna give each of those good kids a dollar.”

  The children, Molly included, shouted in celebration. From the sink across the kitchen, their grandmother frowned at Phil, but said nothing.

  “But you know what?” Uncle Phil said, pulling a sad face. “I just looked in my wallet, and I found out I only have one dollar in there. I just don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to decide who should get it. I guess I’m just going to have to give it to the boy or girl that wants it the most.”

  They whined and jumped in place and tried to make their voices heard over one another.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Uncle Phil said, amused. “I’ll tell you something. I just hope nobody wants it so bad they’re going to cry if they don’t get it. I think if something like that happened, if somebody busted out crying, well, I couldn’t stand that, I’d just have to give it to them.”

  The kids set about moaning and making pouty faces, saying “Boo hoo,” and other sorts of received imitations of sadness.

  Uncle Phil glanced all around the kitchen, smiling slyly, trying to catch the eye of one or two of the other adults so he could wink at them; but they were all looking away from him. He turned back to the cousins and shook his head skeptically. “I meant real crying. Real tears. Cheaters never prosper, you know. I don’t believe you really are sad.”

  That silenced them for a moment: they wanted, as much as they wanted the dollar, to solve the puzzle of Uncle Phil. Molly stood a few inches from Uncle Phil’s knee; she looked at his big head, at the pale tones of old age. Her face was still and unrevealing. Half a minute went by. Uncle Phil’s eyebrows were too long; his upper teeth, which were false, were beautifully proportioned inside his loose mouth. Sadness is easy, Molly thought, though she wasn’t sad at all just then. Uncle Phil shifted in his chair; “I think we’ve got something here,” he said excitedly. Everyone turned to look at Molly; in another few moments, she blinked, and two thin tears rolled down her face.

  THE HARDEST THING was concentration. John Wheelwright got up from his desk and opened the door to his office a few inches so as not to miss the woman with the coffee trolley when sh
e circled by. The oversized sketchpad on his desk had a ring on it from the coffee he hadn’t finished yet. John’s copywriting partner, Roman, was off this morning on some personal time involving his daughter’s interview for nursery school. John had even come in half an hour early to take advantage of the uncommon solitude, imagining how he might surprise Roman after lunch with a brainstorm; but the solitude was doing nothing for him. He pushed up the sleeves of his shirt, with the felt-tip pen still between his fingers, leaving another hatch on the blue cotton.

  Of course it was only a rough storyboard, whose eventual realization, even if it managed to win the signoff of the AD, would become some director’s problem; but a rumor had begun circulating that the Doucette casual wear account was going to be put into review, so John was well aware that he and Roman and the other teams were being watched more anxiously than was usual there. And John took his work seriously in any case. Their first proposal, which Canning had rejected on Friday, was one continuous thirty-second shot of an urban intersection, say Eighth Street and Broadway: it would be shot in black and white with a deep-blue wash, except for those items of Doucette clothing – jeans, T-shirts, caps, shorts – worn by a few strategically placed pedestrians, which would show up in full color. John wanted to mount the camera on a waist-high pole in the middle of the intersection and spin it horizontally 360 degrees, as in a shot he remembered from Brian De Palma’s Blowout. The soundtrack was a talky Altmanesque burble: Roman didn’t even want to write it, he said, just edit it down from whatever ambient conversations the filming happened to pick up. Canning had liked the thought of it but said that it skewed too young, too hip for the room as he liked to say, too funky an image for an essentially conservative line like Doucette, whose whole appeal lay in the idea that it stood outside the exigencies of fashion. Roman offered to change the soundtrack from dialogue to music – something old and wryly cheesy, like Petula Clark, or something from Saturday Night Fever. Canning still wouldn’t go for it: more precisely, he thought the client would never go for it, and if that was the case, then there was no point in any further compromising to make it real. Their only course was to come in Monday and start all over again.

  But where was the starting point? John closed his eyes. The office they shared was personalized with three years’ worth of imaginative detritus, little totems of an ironic sensibility: a framed photo of David Ogilvy with Roman’s forged inscription; the old Farrah Fawcett poster from the 70s; a Frisbee with the Backstreet Boys’ faces on it; an original Looney Tunes cel; several of those miniature football-player dolls whose heads bobbed when you tapped them; a typeface directory; Pee Wee Herman’s mug shot, clipped from the New York Post; a vintage deck of pornographic playing cards; a Lyndon LaRouche for President bumper sticker; a huge Atlantic City beer stein filled with Magic Markers; a mounted ad for Chesterfield cigarettes featuring John Cheever; a three-foot-high, inflatable Monica Lewinsky doll, which Roman had ordered off the Internet; a dog-eared copy of American Psycho; a stuffed iguana; six packages of margarita mix and a blender. All around the windowsills and on top of some of the piles of magazines were samples of the Doucette clothes themselves, khaki pants, corduroys, loose V-neck sweaters. He could put the most gorgeous models money could buy in the clothes, but that had been seen. He could just show the clothes themselves, uncompromised by bodies; that had been seen. He could take the product off the screen and out of the ad entirely and replace it with something else; that was at least as old as Infiniti. In the comfortable office, with no partner to remind him of things like deadlines, John stared some more at his blank pad, wiggling his pen between his fingers and thinking about where newness lies.

  There was a soft knock on his open door, and before he could even lift his head Vanessa had slipped in; without a word she sat down sideways in the low blue velour armchair perpendicular to John’s desk, her legs over the arm of the chair that faced the wall, so that she almost had her back to him. John looked at her curiously but politely; she turned her head and smiled at him but said nothing, swinging her feet back and forth. She took a sweater off the coffee table and held it up against her shoulders. John pushed his long hair back behind his ear and leaned over the sketch pad again.

  Vanessa Siegal worked at Canning Leigh & Osbourne as an account planner; she was wearing the sort of skirt only she would or could wear in the office, a short red tight synthetic garment that never seemed to wrinkle or to move in disharmony of any kind with the way she moved. She was tall and angular and her hair was marcelled into a kind of fashionable helmet which followed the curve of her ear, and which never moved either. Her austere stylishness and its translation into other realms was a subject of great and admiring speculation among a particular type of man. John was not of this type; if anything, he was a little afraid of her. It was distracting to have her come into his office unannounced like this even though the two of them were certainly on friendly terms. She sighed loudly. John pretended to go back to work, not out of aloofness or to express annoyance but instead out of the exaggerated deference to women that still characterized him, that was his most exotic feature to Northern women like Vanessa. She looked furtively at him, which he did not miss, and bit at one of her nails.

  “What are you working on?” she said.

  “Doucette,” John said, amiably; but when a few more seconds went by and she didn’t seem to want to say any more, he started drawing again.

  “Listen,” Vanessa said, and she swung around to sit normally in the chair, in profile to him. “You like me, right?”

  John felt himself start to blush. He sat back in his chair, but even as he struggled to find something to say, she waved her hands and frowned. “I mean, you like me as a person, a friend, am I right?”

  “Well, of course I do,” John said. His accent still crept defensively back into his voice at moments like this.

  “And when you like a person,” Vanessa went on – he could hear that there was some irony in her vulnerable, cautious tone, that she was acting something out – “you accept that they might have bad points as well as good points. That they may have flaws.”

  “Everyone has flaws,” John said patiently.

  “Or not flaws, so much. That they might make a mistake from time to time. They might blurt something out sometime, because, because that’s what people sometimes do, right, in social situations? They blurt things out.”

  John put his pen down. He couldn’t help smiling a little. Out in the lobby, the bell for the coffee trolley rang.

  “What a word, right?” Vanessa said gaily. “Blurt.”

  “Is there something you’re trying to tell me?” John said.

  Vanessa grimaced and stood up. The skirt, John observed, never creased. What could it be made of? She went to the door of his office and shut it. Her long arms folded, she stood in front of his desk. Striking was the word that sounded in John’s mind.

  “So last week”, she said in a lower voice, “was the MPA Awards dinner? You remember?”

  “I remember people talking about it.”

  “Right, well, so, I went, and during dinner there was this—”

  “Hold on,” John said. He leaned forward and put his hands flat on the desk. “You went?”

  Vanessa made an impatient gesture.

  “That was three thousand dollars a table,” John went on, enviously. “That was partners only. And you went?”

  “I went,” Vanessa said simply; her eyes moved all the way to her left in a manner that was simultaneously coy and uncomfortable.

  “With whom?”

  “Never mind.”

  “With whom?”

  “Never mind. The point is that they had this dinner at MOMA, right, and so of course at some point the talk turns to the art, somebody says, like, Hey, have you seen the Francis Bacon show here, it’s monumental. So then a couple of them start discussing Bacon, and Anselm Kiefer, and whether Basquiat could draw or not, and before long everybody’s got their dicks out, you know how it is when those g
uys get together.”

  John had been lagging behind her narrative just a little bit, hung up as he was on the question of which of the partners Vanessa was secretly dating – though apparently it wasn’t much of a secret anymore – but the affectless coarseness of her language brought him back to the present. He’d never really grown accustomed to women who swore so casually. His inclination was to hear it as a sign that the speaker didn’t take John seriously in the masculine realm.

  “And of course it dawns on me, while they’re talking, the arc that this conversation is going to follow: at some point, they’re going to patronizingly drag the women at the table into the argument. The ‘feminine perspective,’ you know? Like they care. I swear, put these guys, any guys really, into a tux and stick a cigar in their mouths and they turn into their grandfathers. I’m sure you’re the same way.”

  John raised his eyebrows and pointed to his chest.

  “So anyway.” She sat down sideways in the chair again, facing him, her knees nearly as high as her chest; conscientiously he looked into her eyes. “This is the bad part. What I know about painting you could fit on the head of a pin. I mean, I know the names. But in this of all situations, you don’t want to conform to their stereotype. Right? So when Canning finally asks me—”

  “Was it Canning?” John said. “That took you?”

  “No. When he asks me who are some of the living artists whose work I admire most – well, these are my bosses, in the end, and you don’t want to look like an idiot in front of them. So I mumble something about how I used to like Julian Schnabel but you never hear about him anymore, and then about Keith Haring, because I forgot for a second he was dead, and I notice that the men are all looking at me in this way. In the way my father used to look at me when I came downstairs in my pajamas because the party was too loud. You know what I’m saying?”