Palladio

by Jonathan Dee

  “It went fine,” Richard said, not at all impatiently. “The list is still Berkeley, Amherst, Williams, Connecticut College, Reed, and Tulane, with SUNY New Paltz as my safety.” Again, the bright tone of his voice walked right on the edge of mockery; Molly knew that he thought this sham attitude effectively excused him from the conversation itself, but his strategy was less different from the others’ than he thought. His ironic manner was over the head of no one; but as long as nobody called attention to it, things went on just as before.

  Kay stayed in the kitchen much longer than was necessary. When she returned, the children had already gone up to their rooms. She looked into her husband’s faltering smile. She found herself perilously close to expressing what she felt: that she was thrilled to imagine that Roger’s office might be shut down, that he and indeed most of the people they socialized with might suddenly be jobless, ruined, that they would lose the house and not be able to send their son to college, that existence would become the wreck she had long dreamed of and to which she felt temperamentally better suited than the infuriating haze of life as a middle-class wife and mother.

  “Well, that was delicious, as always,” Roger said. “If you don’t mind excusing me, I think I’ll go catch the start of the news.”

  Molly never felt any sort of teenage scorn for the outright bogusness of all this, nor any lament for the absence of the genuine in every look, every word exchanged within her family. Of course it was false, but there was no true language that she knew about in any case; every place had its idiom, and this was the idiom of home.

  Word filtered quickly back to Ty that Molly had mentioned his name in conversation in a nondismissive way; he began turning up in places she knew he had no reason to be, never saying more than “Hey,” though he let his eyes stay on her longer now – nothing aggressive about it, just a loosening of his self-restraint. She did nothing different, and this, apparently, was all that was expected of her. Even though she had initiated whatever was going to happen, even though he had by all reports never been in this position before, he seemed to take it for granted that he would assume the role of the pursuer. A week went by. Then one evening Molly was in her room when Kay yelled upstairs to her that she had a phone call.

  “Some boy,” she heard her mother saying as she came down the stairs.

  “And so it begins,” said Roger.

  Ty sounded dull, disaffected; with no preamble at all he asked if she wanted to go to the playground next Friday night. The elementary school playground after dark was always full of teenagers, smoking or surreptitiously drinking: it was a place Molly might well have gone on Friday anyway, alone or with Annika; there was nowhere else to go in town that you could make belong to you that way, unless you had a car. But Molly was not confused, because Ty, like any sixteen-year-old boy, was so easy to read: he wanted to make sure that if he was wrong about Molly or if the whole thing was some sort of mistake – the two of them had never really spoken for more than a few minutes – he would learn this in a place where he could easily pretend, in front of others, never to have thought otherwise at all. They would be in a group, and whatever might set it apart from any other Friday evening when they ran into each other there would be a matter only of an understanding between the two of them. She said she would do it.

  “That’s excellent,” Ty said, with a little more animation.

  The next afternoon Molly went to the Vincents’, and when she knocked it was Dennis who opened the door. He was not dressed in a way that suggested he was going back to the office. Her first sensation was annoyance. If she wasn’t needed, she couldn’t imagine being paid, and there were other things she could have been doing with her time.

  “Have I made a mistake?” she said, though in fact Dennis was smiling at her as if he’d been expecting her.

  “No, no,” he said softly, absently, “I’m sorry, I ought to have called you, to give you the choice, I didn’t know I’d be home so early. But I’d like you to stay. The kids are in the yard playing. I need you here. They’re so attached to you.”

  Something was wrong with him. He seemed upset, though he was trying to hide it – the way a parent will try to act as if everything is normal in order to avoid transferring fear to the children. He was staring at her. It was strange that he was still standing in the doorway.

  “So how are you?” he said, too loudly.

  This was interesting, in the way that misfortune is interesting, to the point where it was hard to take her eyes off him; she wanted to stay in the room, to see what would happen next, but at the same time not to be in the room, not to be a part of whatever was taking shape. She remembered the two children, and that decided it for her, for the moment.

  “I’ll just get a soda,” she said, stepping forward, “if that’s okay, and I’ll go make sure Kevin and Beth are all right.”

  “Oh,” he said, finally backing out of her way. “Okay.”

  A few hours later Mrs Vincent came home. Molly had dinner with the kids and then Dennis drove her back to Bull’s Head. His face was red. He didn’t say a single word to her on the way, not even when she opened the door and said goodbye to him. At home there was something of a celebration: Richard had been accepted to Berkeley, and though Kay and Roger made several plaintive jokes about his getting as far away from home as possible, mostly they seemed relieved to know that now the worst-case scenario still had him going to college somewhere. Roger even let Molly have a glass of wine. While they were all still downstairs, Molly went up to her parents’ bedroom and looked at herself for a minute in the big semicircular mirror above her mother’s dressing table.

  Friday night she told her mother she was going to Annika’s house; she met Ty outside the Bull’s Head sign. He acted just like any other boy on a date, bluff and nervous, and she felt a little disappointed in the first few minutes. There were eight or ten other kids at the playground, mostly boys. The girls sat on the swings, pushing off gently with their feet; the boys hung on the jungle gym or walked up the slide. When the sun went down they all became shadows, and one or two pairs moved off into the darkness. Ty produced a joint, which he and Molly shared. The leaves shivered in the wind, and whenever a car slowed down on the road in front of the school, they all stopped what they were doing for a moment and turned their heads to listen like deer.

  Ty walked Molly back to the sign, and they kissed, taking a moment first to throw out the gum Ty had brought to mask their breath for their parents – not that his parents would ever notice, he said, but he didn’t know what hers might be like. It struck her then how much thought he had given to tonight. All of his tentativeness, which she had been waiting for all night, was in his kiss. She held her hands still on his back, wondering where under his shirt the unseen, damaged skin was, wanting to avoid touching it not out of squeamishness but simply out of a fear of offending him. She let him put his hands on her breasts over her sweater, but when he tried to pull out the tails of her shirt his hands were cold and she gently pushed them away. He didn’t pursue it. He counted on being stopped, maybe not right at that point, but at some point.

  “See you,” he said curtly, trying to behave a certain way, but he had to turn his back in order to hide the fact that he was smiling.

  Monday at school he asked if she wanted to go to the movies in Schenectady with him – he had his license and had pledged an unspecified future favor to his older brother in return for one evening with his car. Molly’s parents had a rule against unchaperoned dates involving cars, but the important thing to them was the rule itself, not its vigilant enforcement; so she told Ty to meet her in front of Annika’s house on Route 3, where she would spend the night. It was a deception that meant nothing to her, but she could see Ty’s confidence swell as she related the plan.

  That Wednesday at the Vincents’, Dennis wasn’t there when she arrived, and in fact when Mrs Vincent came home at quarter to eight he still hadn’t been heard from. She insisted that Molly must be starving and that she stay for di
nner. When Dennis came home at nine, his tie loosened, he seemed surprised to see Molly at the table, doing her homework.

  “There you are,” his wife said, coming out of the kitchen. “Listen, I know you must have had a horrible day, I hate to ask you, but it’s Bethany’s bedtime now. Can you give Molly a lift home?”

  He nodded somewhat glumly, turned and went back to the car without a word. Molly got in beside him. They were approaching the center of town when Dennis suddenly said – a little hoarsely, as if he had not spoken in quite some time – “Nine minutes, it takes, to drive from our house to yours.”

  Molly looked at him. She wondered if she ought to be afraid of him, but he seemed so weary, so beaten, it was hard to feel any sort of tangible danger at all.

  “You don’t say much,” he went on. “It’s hard to get a word out of you. It’s hard to figure out what you’re thinking about.”

  He seemed to be in some kind of distress, and Molly felt genuinely chastened by it; she wanted to say something reassuring to him now but she had no idea what to say.

  Then when they reached the intersection, instead of going straight through toward the valley, he turned left.

  “I thought we could take the long way this once,” he said quickly. “I hope that’s all right. I just thought we could talk a little. We never really get to talk.”

  They drove on the empty road, past the drugstore, the school, the silhouetted barns.

  “Is that all right?” he said gently.

  “Sure,” Molly said, and she was telling the truth. Whatever was happening now, in the car, surely it was not something she had ever seen before. She knew him well enough to be certain that whatever trouble she might be in now was not imminent, not physical, deferred.

  “We’ll just go up to Route 2,” he said needlessly, “and then into the valley the other way. Maybe ten extra minutes at the most.”

  “It’s fine,” she said quietly. Then, after a moment, she added, “I’m not scared or anything.”

  But that remark seemed to scare him; he took a deep breath and flexed his fingers on the wheel. Maybe she had said the wrong thing, maybe he wouldn’t have minded her being scared – scared enough to demand he turn the car around, so scared that she would then tell her mother or his wife about it, and so bring an end, even a disastrous one, to something he had given up on ending himself.

  It was important to the current of Dennis’s desire that Molly was so good with the kids. It meant that he could go on fantasizing for himself an alternate life, however farfetched, without the guilt of imagining the kids away as well. He was not made to be anybody’s mentor; Molly’s youth, to him, represented not something to be exploited but something indomitable, even frightening, a seat of power; and the pull of the thought of sex with her had to do, strangely, with the certainty that somehow, quite apart from any question of experience, she would be in control of it, above it all, above him, knowing the physical authority she had over him. A matter of decades, really, since sex – just the thought of it – had that power to make him feel panicked, ungoverned.

  Molly may not have sensed all of this, but she did grasp right away that in this situation, where by rights he should have had all the power, he was clearly powerless. He was in the grip of all he had to lose, her approbation, the approbation of everyone he knew.

  “A girl like you,” he said, “must really dream a lot about getting out of this town. You probably can’t wait to leave here.”

  The headlights showed them nothing, just fresh blacktop and the broken line and the lit surface of the woods at every curve. She felt incapable of asking him what he wanted. She just had to go where he took her. Already she could see some of the lights of Bull’s Head at the bottom of the slope out her side of the car.

  “I guess so,” she said. “It’s pretty boring here. Unless you want to go work for IBM, I guess.”

  “Well, it looks like even that won’t be an option a whole lot longer,” he said casually, relieved to get on to a less dangerous topic, forgetting for a moment who her father was. He kept his eyes on the road.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do I – I mean, I must seem really old to you. Not even real, somehow, in a way. I remember what it was like being your age, what parents appeared like. I hate to think that’s how I look now to people, to you. But you know, you’ve got it all going for you, everything serves you, the world is set up to be at the service of a beautiful young woman. As it should be. As it should be.”

  Molly said nothing.

  “Didn’t I start that out like I was asking a question?” he said, and laughed. “Well, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, I guess that’s pretty apparent by now.”

  She didn’t want to cut him off, and she didn’t want to do anything to bring it all to a resolution: she wanted to keep it going, not because she enjoyed being the object of it but because for these few minutes everything that was unreal seemed to have been scraped away, everything was vital and true only to itself.

  “You’re a very secretive girl,” he said as they started down the hill. He was crying a little. She could not have been more amazed. He spoke as though to himself: “You keep it all private. You don’t say anything to anyone. You keep it all inside.” Suddenly she could feel the truth of this. Not only that, it became more true the more he said it; the more he showed of himself, the further he came out of his own self-control, the further she withdrew into mystery, without even trying to, without doing anything at all.

  He stopped the car and turned it off just around the corner from the Howes’. She turned to look right into his eyes, which may not have been smart, she knew, but she couldn’t help it, she didn’t want to miss anything.

  “Can I,” he said, and he had to clear his throat. “Can I just give you a hug?”

  She couldn’t figure out what saying yes meant, and she was afraid of what saying no meant, so she just continued to look at him, helplessly, and he took this helplessness for assent: he turned from his waist and reached out with his hands – abruptly, cheerfully, as if making one last effort to convince himself that everything that was happening could be taken two ways. But he couldn’t fool anyone. His suit felt beautiful under her hands, against her neck. He was shaking. They couldn’t really see each other in the green light of the dashboard. Suddenly it no longer seemed possible to hold what was happening in abeyance. Molly pulled away from him and opened her door; when she did so the dome light came on, and Dennis, his lips apart, his skin pale, flinched.

  I don’t have to sell my soul

  He’s already in me

  Weeks before it was necessary, Richard started packing for college. He had quit his summer job in early August so he’d have time, he told his startled parents, to reflect and prepare himself mentally for the big challenge ahead of him. He didn’t feel inclined to share these reflections with anybody. When the day came for him to leave home – his flight to California was the following morning – Roger drove him to New Jersey with all his luggage in a van borrowed from a friend at work. They would stay that night in a motel near Newark Airport and Roger would drive back the next day, once he was satisfied, as he said in his stylized but peculiarly unevocative Dadspeak, that his son was “squared away.” Molly and Kay had the house to themselves. Molly had chosen to stay home that evening; she felt that something was happening which, while not momentous exactly, might be worth trying to mark in some way, even if just with a conversation which was contextually larger than they were used to.

  “So Richard’s gone now,” Molly said. “It’s weird.”

  “One down,” Kay said. She looked at Molly and smiled fondly.

  “Soon it’ll be just the two of you.”

  She nodded. “That’s what he thinks,” she said.

  There came a weekend afternoon when Molly knew where each of her parents was and when they would return. She watched out the leaded-glass windows framing the door until Ty appeared, on foot, around the bend in the road. He knew wh
y he was there. He had probably never been so eager for anything in his life and yet he chose this moment to be polite, accepting her offer of a soda, asking how her classes were, mentioning his admiration of her house, which he had never been inside of before. Finally she went up and kissed him, her hands at her sides but taking his fingers in hers. She could feel him trembling. It was what she was hoping to feel.

  She took him into Richard’s room; it was a room which, for the most part, her mother never entered anymore, and so she could feel less paranoid about leaving behind any sort of unintentional evidence. Ty did exactly as he had done before, only this time things kept going past the point where they usually stopped, the way a dream often stops at the same point. The burn scars went all the way up his arms and shoulders, on to his neck, halfway down his back, and in a more random pattern – as if embers had fallen on him – on his chest and stomach. The healed skin was hairless and looked almost like bubble gum. He started to shiver, and kept shivering even after she ran downstairs in her underwear and turned up the thermostat. But it was important to her that he was completely naked; she knew all along that that’s how she wanted him, even stopping him when he tried to enter her before all their clothes were off. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to insist on anything or to contradict her at any point. A hard-on like that had to hurt, she thought, and it did seem to be hurting him in some way. The more exposed he became, in the daylight with the blinds half-open, the more his confidence eroded. You could see it. He couldn’t stay on top of the desire that he felt when he saw her, her breasts, her stomach, her hips, her hair. When he tried, in vain, to close her eyes with his fingertips, that was the moment she came closest to feeling sorry for him.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he said, and though he meant it, it didn’t sound at all spontaneous – as if he were saying it in some other language, knew what it meant in a general way but still needed to take a moment to translate it from the language in which he thought.