Palladio

by Jonathan Dee

  No one was home.

  It was cold and sunny, the sky a cloudless icy blue. Molly went back out to the parking lot, sat on the rear fender of a nice car that must have belonged to one of the doctors, and cried. She cried forcefully, looking at the pavement, her head pounding, for fifteen minutes or so. Then she stood and returned to the clinic waiting room and asked the broad woman with the two children for directions to a bus stop. The first bus she got on took her in the wrong direction, but the driver told her where the transfer point was for a bus back to Berkeley. She got off at Shattuck Avenue, and by the time she made it back to the house on foot it was well after dark.

  Everyone fussed over her when she came in, standing up from their chairs, bursting out of their rooms, helping Molly on to the couch, and she let them do it. Richard even led them in a prayer. Molly took four aspirin and went to bed early. She wasn’t sure how late it was when Sally came into their room, undressed quietly, and got into Molly’s bed, folding her knees behind Molly’s and lightly draping one arm around her stomach, just above the curve of her hip. Molly was amazed but still too exhausted to let it keep her awake for long. Nothing happened; they lay there like an old married couple. In the morning when Molly woke Sally was gone.

  Molly was sitting in the big red chair with a bowl of cereal, watching television, lightly touching the bandage on her head, when Richard walked in. “Can we talk a little?” he said, smiling; he turned the set off without waiting for an answer.

  Molly put the bowl on the floor and struggled to sit more upright in the enormous chair. Her brother stood in front of her, still smiling, his hands folded. His hair was cut very short now; in fact, Molly was pretty sure he was cutting it himself.

  “Molly, I’m worried about you,” he said.

  “It’s just a cut. And the fainting thing, the doctor said I just needed some more iron,” she said, even though she knew that wasn’t what he was talking about.

  He shook his head. “I’m worried about your soul,” he said.

  The room was filled with sunlight at that time of day, and the carpet showed so threadbare in the glare that you could see through to the heavy skeletal weaving underneath it.

  “My soul?”

  “You’re drifting. You’re drifting badly.”

  “And this is because.”

  “I think you know why.”

  “Because I’m not saved?”

  Richard said nothing.

  “And who’s going to save me? You?”

  “Who does it is not the question. The question is how. And there’s only one way.”

  “What way is that?” Molly said angrily. “What are you, Jimmy Swaggart?” She didn’t understand the defensiveness she felt all of a sudden.

  Richard’s smile weakened. “Molly, you have to admit I’ve never broached this with you before. I’ve never pressured you. You’ve been living in our house for six months and I’ve let you go your own way. But you’re my sister and I can’t watch you drift toward damnation like this and not do anything about it. Look at what happened yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Are you going to tell me you didn’t feel some despair? That you didn’t feel lost? Don’t you think there’s some sort of message for you in all that?”

  “I fainted,” Molly said, exasperated. “I fainted and hit my head. A nice man took me to the clinic, and I had a hard time getting home. That’s all.”

  Richard shook his head. He seemed close to tears now. “Don’t you see the connection?” he said.

  In People’s Park, overgrown and unmowed, piebald with bare earth and strewn with bottles and condoms, there was a pro-democracy rally during exam week. Molly stopped to watch. The day was overcast and cold; under the familiar bright-red flag on a homemade banner tied between two trees, students took turns standing on a milk crate and declaring their support for their fellow students suffering under martial repression in China. A Chinese-born exchange student briefly interjected a note of authenticity with a speech about the conditions in the smelting plant where his uncle worked; but the speech went on quite long, and people began moving away. All of a sudden three students from the Berkeley Communist Party pushed through the small crowd, shouting their support for Zhao and claiming CIA involvement with the Tiananmen Square occupation. They were quickly shouted down by the others, energized by this suddenly visible opposition, and the three Communists marched off again, red-faced.

  Molly lingered at the back fringe of the gathering, hands in her pockets. After a while she noticed another man standing on the fringes, twenty feet away; and when she noticed him, he quickly turned his head away from her.

  It wasn’t just his age that made him look out of place there – he might have been thirty, but it was not unusual to see grad students around the city that age or older. He had red hair cut to a kind of military bristle; his face bore some old acne scars. He wore a pristine white turtleneck under a long windbreaker, and creased navy-blue pants, though slacks might have been a better word for them. Even under the windbreaker he had the overdeveloped arms and shoulders of someone who spent a lot of time in a gym. When Molly turned back to face the speaker she could see the man’s face turn again toward her.

  “We will not waver,” said a young woman in a green field jacket whose head was shaved on the sides, “in our mission to topple the fascist lords of China, and tyrants everywhere.” There was such an element of longing in their anger, a frantic dismissal of the idea of inconsequence.

  She turned to look at him again; and this time, when she turned away, the red-haired man ambled over casually and stood beside her.

  “I will now read the text of a letter the committee has drafted to Premier Li Peng and to Boutros Boutros-Ghali.”

  “You a part of this?” the red-haired man asked her.

  Molly shook her head.

  “I didn’t think so,” he said.

  After the letter was read and its contents approved, the meeting ended. Molly continued looking at the empty space above the milk crate.

  “What’s your name?” the man said.

  She turned to look at him.

  “Why should I tell you that?” she said.

  He stared at her for a long moment as the others filed past, out of the park. Then he stepped closer to her, quite close. With a quick glance to either side, he unzipped the windbreaker and held one side of it away from his body to reveal, clipped next to the buckle of his wide belt, a policeman’s badge.

  He zipped up the jacket again, and stared at her.

  “You shouldn’t be hanging around here,” he said. His voice was inflected to suggest that he was indulging a rare desire to do someone a favor. It was his cop voice, clearly, or at any rate the one he used to indicate his moral remoteness from non-cops. But in his small eyes, behind this affected benevolence, Molly detected some more genuine cruelty; and she determined to get at it.

  “Where should I be hanging around, then?”

  “I don’t know. A beautiful girl like you. Where do you normally hang around?”

  She could see right into him, that was the best part. She knew that all she had to do in order to cut herself to his idea, his fantasy, of what college girls were really like was to not go away – just stand there, as he became more forward, stand there and not be repulsed. He thought he was seeing the essence of her, of all women really. Well, maybe she was showing it to him but he still wouldn’t see it, blinded as he was by his vision of himself. She didn’t need to make herself say something complimentary about his physique, which would have been hard to do without laughing; he took it for granted that she would admire him, and nothing in her silence violated that idea.

  The park was empty now, except for a few derelicts who had been there before the rally began.

  “You’re married,” Molly said flatly, looking at his hand.

  “Very observant,” he said. Look at that, Molly thought, with a kind of detached awe. Look how he hates me.

  His clothes were p
erfectly spotless and pressed – which pretty much spoiled the undercover effect he was apparently going for – and Molly wondered for a moment about the spirit in which his wife did this for him; but then she jerked the thought of this pathetic woman’s existence out of her mind.

  “You need a ride home, or anywhere?” he said. Every remark pushed him further into a zone where his own fantasy and what he took to be the real nature of men and women grew indistinct.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I do need a ride.”

  “Well, good. I’m sure you’ll tell me where you want to go.”

  They walked to his car, a boxy black American midsize, no siren or police radio visible. In the dust on the trunk someone had written with a forefinger the word PIG. He ignored it.

  He drove slowly across Telegraph, pedestrians striding past the car at all points, not waiting for the lights. Molly was looking out her window at the Bubble Man when she felt the policeman’s hand at the top of her thigh.

  “Not in the car,” she said.

  Of course he knew a place. It was down by the Marina, near the old Fantasy Records plant. The scarier things got the more satisfied Molly felt. He walked ahead of her up three flights of stairs; he knocked, then pushed open a door to a room with nothing but a fold-out sofa in it. He started kissing her, to get that over with, and when she put her arms around him she felt something in the small of his back, underneath the big ugly windbreaker. It was his gun.

  He flinched a little, but he let her keep her hand on it, through the fabric. Maybe he’ll shoot me, Molly thought. Maybe after we’re done he’ll shoot me and leave me here. She tried to think of what would stop him from doing that. They could trace the bullet to him, she decided.

  He didn’t want to see her body, didn’t want her to take her clothes off, except for what was absolutely necessary, which in this case meant pulling her jeans and her underwear down to mid-thigh. She guessed it was some kind of rape fantasy for him. He bent her over the arm of the sofa without folding it out. It did hurt her a little bit – though probably not as much as he hoped – partly because he was a little larger than she had encountered before.

  He mumbled something.

  She turned her head and said softly, “What?”

  “Say something.”

  “What do you—”

  “Just say something,” he mumbled, a kind of stage whisper, his thighs banging into hers.

  “Do it to me,” she said flatly.

  “Shut up! Shut up, bitch!” he screamed. “Fucking cunt! Shut up!” And he shouted wordlessly as he came inside her; if he hadn’t had his fingers dug so tightly into her legs, she would have lost her balance.

  Afterwards, he wouldn’t look at her, though now it seemed more a matter of embarrassment than contempt. When he dropped her off on Telegraph, he didn’t even put the car in park. But she wouldn’t let him off that easily; she stared at him as she backed slowly out of the car, smiling coldly, and as he drove away she continued to stare at his rearview mirror to let him know that she could not be intimidated out of her understanding of him.

  Molly had the next few weeks to worry that she was pregnant (she wasn’t) and to revisit what she’d done. Sex was what it was to her, an act unconnected to any other and a way of forcing men to reveal their secrets, but she knew too that it was not these things to most other people. To them, sex was intimate; to Molly it was extremely intimate as well, but never mutually so. She could imagine meeting a man (though she never had) who would hold this same kind of power over her, who would leave her crying and exposed and feeling fraudulent afterwards; what she couldn’t imagine was a balance of power. That wasn’t what sex was about. She wondered if she should be worried, though, about the increasing kick she felt from being objectified.

  For Christmas her brother gave her a Bible.

  On a gray morning, in a steep lecture hall, Molly slipped through the door after the lights were turned out for slides. The class, which she had been to once or twice before, was called Modernism and its Discontents. The chairs in back were filled; even in a class with a hundred students, their instinct was to put as much distance between themselves and the seat of authority as possible. So she walked halfway down the steps and took the first empty spot she could see once her eyes adjusted to the dark, three seats in from the aisle, between a girl wearing a Madonna-like T-shirt ripped to fall off one shoulder and a boy wearing jeans and a white Oxford shirt, his long hair pushed behind his ears, who watched the screen with his hands in front of his mouth, fingertips pressed together.

  The hall flashed into darkness for a second, then back to the dim magnesium glare from the giant screen as a new slide appeared.

  “The Disturbing Muses,” the professor said. He was fat and wore a multicolored sweater. He sat on the front of the broad desk, looking up at the screen, his back half turned to the class. He held the control for the projector in his left hand. “1917. Remember for a moment Malevich from last week, the concern with movement, dynamism, the restlessness of the industrial age. Here, at virtually the same moment of history, Chirico counterposes an art of almost deathly stillness, not motion but contemplation, reverie, quiet.”

  Another flash.

  “The Song of Love. 1914. Incidentally, Magritte called this painting, which he saw as a young man on a museum visit in 1922, one of the most important events in his life. Because, he said, in a world of Cubists and other self-conscious manipulators of the flat plane of the picture, here at last was someone who dreamed not of how to paint, but of what must be painted.”

  Molly heard the scratching of pens, and indeed it was the kind of resonant remark she liked to write down herself, not for any purpose other than as a way of making the remark pass through her. She patted softly at her pants pockets, then at the pocket of her shirt.

  “Need a pen?” the boy next to her whispered. She started. His voice was soft, and had, of all things, a Southern accent; he looked at her simply and with his index finger pushed the hair back behind his ear.

  “No thanks,” said Molly. The moment of admiration had passed, and the slide was gone. “I don’t have any paper anyway.”

  He smiled. After a minute, not looking at her, he leaned on the armrest between them so his head was closer to hers. “Can I ask you something?” he whispered. “Are you even a student here?”

  Molly’s heart raced a little in the near-darkness; she said nothing.

  “Because,” he said, whispering now, still not looking at her, “it’s almost midterms, and this is only the third time you’ve been in here.”

  She considered getting up to leave, but there was nothing threatening in his manner – just curious. The professor went on talking.

  “No,” she said finally, in a whisper. Their heads were almost touching in the darkness, though they didn’t look at each other. “My brother goes here. I live with him, and I read through his course catalogue, and sometimes I go to classes if they look interesting.”

  “Well, I admire that,” he said, and sat back.

  A half hour later the lights went up, and Molly tried not to look at the boy to see what he would do, with this new advantage he held over her.

  He stacked up his books, exhaled as if satisfied, and smiled at her.

  “May I ask your name?” he said.

  His manner was almost courtly. But there was no exaggeration in it; she could tell that he wasn’t about to ask her out.

  “Molly,” she said.

  He put out his hand. “John Wheelwright,” he said. They shook hands, which made her laugh a little. He blushed, and stood up to go.

  “Molly, will I see you again?” he asked.

  OSBOURNE OFFERED TO send a car to the Washington airport, but seemed delighted with John’s offer to rent a car and drive the two and a half hours to Charlottesville himself. At the last minute he upgraded to a convertible and paid the difference in cash. He didn’t know what he was expecting to feel: the airport was like an airport anywhere, Highway 29 like all highways; t
he damp heat was the only thing that gave him any sense of geography at all. In a town called Culpeper he turned off the highway for lunch, and there in the dining room of some forgotten country inn he felt a little touch of the South again, the voices like his inner voice, the dark interiors and ceiling fans, the old locals who regarded his long hair and fancy car with a hostile opacity no one from Manhattan could ever have understood. He would have driven the back roads the whole rest of the way, but he had told Osbourne that he would be there in plenty of time for dinner, and he didn’t want anyone to worry.

  Charlottesville itself, from the car at least, was a disappointment. Every midsized city he went to nowadays – Columbus, Lexington, Eugene, no doubt Omaha just a week from now – looked the same, the chain hotels and chain stores, the strip malls and overused local roads, the grotesque boosterism that led to the too-expensive Center for the Performing Arts. Only the sight of the Rotunda, as he inched along Ivy Road on the way to the Courtyard Marriott where he would be staying, fulfilled any longing for a sense of the verticality of time. He had visited his cousin at UVA two or three times as a teenager, and the way the empty lawn stretched out before that imposing dome was all he remembered of the whole city.

  The jammed roads, the strip bars, the prefab apartments: John kept thinking, almost in spite of himself, how Rebecca would hate it all. He acted with faith in the best possible outcome, which was that the trip would go well, and Rebecca would be surprised and converted by John’s own enthusiasm, and they would move down South to restart their careers together without any sense of pessimism or martyrdom. This vague, sentimental refrain was really a way of keeping at bay a more surprising and threatening feeling: which was not simply that it would be possible for John to start over by breaking it off with her, but that there was a dangerous appeal – an element of subversion, of role reversal – in being the one who leaves.