by Jonathan Dee
John clinked glasses. “Seconded,” he said.
“Here’s something I’ve always wanted to tell you,” Dale said. “That Rebecca. I’ve always had such a thing for her, I’ve always been so jealous of you for getting this amazingly beautiful, smart, hot woman to fall in love with you. So what do you do? You ask her to move down to Deliverance country, to piss her life away in the middle of nowhere. She says no. You dump her. So now my whole opinion of you has changed. You stand before me, revealed as a total fucking idiot.”
John put his hand gently on top of Dale’s head and smiled. “You’re not in her class,” he said. “Go on, ask her out after I’m gone. You’ll never get near her. Besides, there is a whole nation south of Battery Park, you snob. You stay here on your little island ironizing yourself into early heart trouble. I know where the future is.”
“Fuck you,” Dale said affectionately.
“Fuck you too,” John said.
Canning came up behind them, drunk as a lord, and put his arms around both their shoulders. “Isn’t this great?” he said. “All this candor!”
THEIR TIME TOGETHER, over the next month or so, passed predominantly in silence, in half-darkness, looking at slides in Modernism class. There was no real impetus to take things to another level; already Molly spent more time around John, two or three hours a week, than she did with anyone else in her life. It was a relief, actually, to have someone in on the secret of her presence there. Molly would arrive at about ten minutes to eleven and take a seat in the back row; John, whose ten-o’clock class was all the way across campus, would show up a little red-faced, trying not to breathe hard, and sit beside her. This arrangement was never discussed. They had four or five minutes to talk before the lights went down and Professor Leonhard came around to sit on the front of his desk, holding the clicker. Molly watched the screen, watched Leonhard, watched John taking notes as he listened; she felt slightly jilted when he would shut her out in this way, but then the midterm was coming up, which he had to worry about and she didn’t.
Four or five minutes a day, three days a week, for a month, was time enough to learn a good deal about each other. Molly answered his questions partially. She told him, for instance, that she was not on good terms with her parents, and had come to live with her brother for a while. John never pushed her for more; he politely accepted every answer as complete, even when she was obviously holding something back. Nor was he the kind of boy – the only kind she knew, when she thought about it – who listened to your speech hoping to hear something in it which would remind him of a tangentially related experience of his own, which he would then explain in full, as if this were evidence of empathy of some sort. Maybe it was only because his experience was so very different from hers.
John just looked at her when she talked. It was a look whose intensity she knew he was not aware of showing. She knew what was going on. Still, he never asked her out.
Leonhard turned the lights off, and directed two TAs to pull the enormous shades down. In the sudden darkness and slightly laggard silence, the first slide, already on the screen, brightened into view.
“Kandinsky?” Molly whispered to John. She could feel him nod. He took out his pen and his notebook; she folded her arms, put her feet on the back of the empty chair in front of her, and stared.
The best way to deflect his interest in her background was to ask questions of her own. Thus she learned that John was from Asheville, North Carolina; that he was the only child of his father’s second marriage; his father, a lawyer, was forty-eight when John was born, dead now for eight years, and John’s two half sisters were both more than ten years his senior. His mother was very Old South, old money, a great thrower of parties and arbiter of other people’s reputations. As he grew older he had an inkling of how small his parents’ world really was. It was a desire to shock them out of being who they were that led him to enroll at Berkeley, which they and all their friends had considered – even in 1985 – to be a virtual outpost of Comintern. John had never seen the school, had never seen the state of California, before he arrived for his freshman orientation, three and a half years ago.
Spring break was approaching, just after exams; John would fly home to endure more questions about the ruin of his future prospects, a ritual which would end with his stepfather Buzz guiltily handing over a big wad of money as John waited for the cab to take him back to the airport. But it was the imminence of those two weeks, during which they wouldn’t see each other, that finally emboldened John to ask Molly on an actual date.
“You know the LaValle’s on the South Side?” he said, his nervousness showing. “Will you meet me there Thursday at about eight?”
Pizza and beer, jukeboxes and shouting; Molly didn’t love it, but she suspected that John didn’t, either, that he took her there because he didn’t want to demonstrate for her the fact that he could afford something nicer. He was waiting for her in a booth, and, unsurprisingly perhaps, for the first few minutes they couldn’t find much to say to each other.
Around them few of the tables were full; there were some solitary diners, people who had probably studied through the serving hours for dinner at the cafeteria, and one round table crowded with what looked like freshmen who evidently had no exams tomorrow and were celebrating by playing drinking games – Quarters, Thumper, Boom Schwartz. The waitress who avoided them wore a shirt and tie and one of those miniaprons.
“So what will you do,” John said, “over the break?”
Molly shrugged. “Not really a break for me,” she said, “strictly speaking.”
“Yeah, but no classes to go to during the day, no … Are your roommates going home?”
“A couple of them,” Molly said, but this was not true, not one of them was leaving the house.
“Your brother?”
“My brother hasn’t been back home since he came out here. It’s a long way to fly for just a couple of weeks,” she said, a little defensively.
The waitress stood on her toes to lean through the serving window. One of the girls at the table full of freshmen chugged a beer while the others chanted her name, the boys with particular vigor, a drunk female being a special kind of desideratum for them.
“Is it okay,” John said, leaning forward on the table, with his eyebrows low, his hair falling into his face, “if I say to you that I worry a little about you?”
Molly stared at him. The thought that rolled through her head – to her instant amazement – was that he was a guy and so she should just take him home and fuck him as a way of killing whatever it was that was growing here, a way of not being taken in by the seeming genuineness of it; and that thought was quickly supplanted by something even more surprising, which was an aching desire to be normal, to be a part of every stupid thing, a desire to play Thumper with a table full of idiots in a public place spending pocket money Daddy sent from home, a pain, in fact, at the idea of being worried about.
John sat back in his chair. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve said the wrong thing. Please forgive me. Sometimes I don’t know what to keep to myself.”
Molly started to tell him it was all right, but at the same time she didn’t want their conversation to go any further along that particular path; so she said nothing. Politely, he began talking about himself again.
An hour later, they were done, and the place was becoming noisier. He asked if he could walk her home. But things had been getting strange at the house lately. It was irrational of her, she knew, since he would only be taking her as far as her front door; still, for whatever reason, she didn’t want him to see it. She asked him if she could walk him home instead.
He lived with a roommate in a three-story apartment complex on Bancroft. On his face, when they reached the door to the lobby, was a little amused smile, a look of comic dignity; Molly realized it was because the simple role reversal involved in being walked home after a first date made him as mirthfully self-conscious as if he were in drag. “I had a great time tonight,” he
said. “Would you like to come up, have another beer or some coffee or something?” And right then she thought she saw, like a shaft of light coming from under a closed door, all the dates he had ever been on in high school, how conscious he was of what was expected of him, and how much, if she got him into bed, he would enjoy being controlled, being overwhelmed; she could do it, she could lose herself and what she was feeling for him in that clinical administering to him of what she knew he would want, even if he didn’t know it himself.
But she didn’t want to have sex with him. It was a bad and confusing sign. Of course, when she said, “I think I should just get home,” he took it for simple restraint. “I guess I won’t see you for a couple of weeks, then,” he said. And he reached out very gently to where she stood with her arms folded against the chill and touched her very lightly on both elbows as he kissed her.
Something about it, the tenderness of it, upset her; and she thought about what this might signify the whole way home, on the overlit side streets, past the parking garages roofed with artificial turf for soccer games. She was glad she hadn’t slept with him, and she was glad she wouldn’t see him for a while, but she didn’t know the reasons for these feelings. When she got back to the house there were six people, none of whom she had ever seen before, in sleeping bags on the living-room rug. She stepped over them, went to her room, and closed the door.
Some kind of seismic shift, the nature of which she was not made privy to, had taken place in the last few weeks in the house on Vine Street. It now resembled less a home than a sort of base of operations, though what sort of operation it was impossible to say. All day long there were meetings in the house, some involving all the housemates and some composed of just a few; they would stop talking when Molly passed through the room.
Two nights before her date with John Wheelwright, she had come home late from a film-society screening of Knife in the Water. No one seemed to be awake. She tiptoed into the bedroom she shared with Sally, carefully closed the door, and began undressing in the dark. Slowly, as her eyes started to pick out shapes in the dark room, Molly began to feel that something was wrong. Her anxiety spread until finally she reached out to the wall and felt around for the light switch. Sally’s bed was stripped to the mattress; the closet doors and dresser drawers were all open, and every one of Sally’s belongings was gone.
Next morning four of the strangers were at the breakfast table, eating as if late for some appointment; Richard sat at the head. Molly waited until the others had left before asking Richard, her voice scratchy, what was going on.
“Sally’s gone,” Richard said offhandedly.
“Yes I can see that, but—”
“We took a vote, which was unanimous, and asked her to leave.”
“Without any notice?”
Richard shrugged.
“Did she do something wrong?”
Her brother reacted as if this were not a simple question. After a long pause, he said, “It was … I guess you could say more on an ideological plane, but I don’t want to say any more, we all agreed not to discuss it. In fact, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t make reference to it in front of the others.”
While Molly, who still lived there rent-free, could hardly afford to feel slighted by her brother’s continual use of the word “we,” she began to wonder how safe her own place there really was. As long as she didn’t start antagonizing them – bringing men home, doing drugs, things like that – she supposed they would continue to ignore her as she flew, so to speak, below the radar of their Christianity. Of course, her only real protection was afforded by her kinship with Richard, who seemed more and more, if also obscurely, in charge. If something should happen to cause the others to turn on him, or if he should turn on her himself, then she would have no place to go. She went back to her barren room and thought about it. Not quite twenty years old, she found herself without an attachment in the world she could rely upon, not even within her own family. Calmly she turned over the question of whether or not something was wrong with her.
On the Friday that marked the midway point of spring break she cut across the empty campus to Mr Whalen’s house. She read him Herb Caen’s column in the Chronicle. Friday was payday; on the sidewalk, once she was out of sight of his windows, she tore open the envelope in which he always put her cash: seventy dollars. It wasn’t enough to protect her from anything. On Telegraph she walked past a group of five or six blank-faced kids sitting under and on top of some army blankets, passing around an open can of peaches with a plastic spoon in it. She felt everything she came across cutting through the veil around her now, the veil that separated her from what was real.
Outside the BART station she found a copy of that day’s Chronicle, the same one she had just read to Mr Whalen, on top of a trash can; she took it to a bench by the parking lot and opened it to the want ads. It was like a catalogue of the ways in which her own short life had quietly defamiliarized her with the customs of the world. When she saw an ad for phone sales, she remembered that she had always been told she had a good voice. But when she called from a phone booth the woman on the other end of the line rejected her on the spot. “Sorry, sweetie,” she said. “You’re too timid. I can hear your voice shaking. I mean, come on.”
Phone sex operator: she could do that, she thought, and she liked the idea that her working life would consist of fantasy, that she would be another person entirely. But the “girls,” she learned, were expected to take these calls in their homes, at all hours, and that, at least for now, was out of the question.
At some point during the week she had begun to think about John Wheelwright. The form this took, at first, was a series of startling realizations that wherever he was at that precise moment, he was very likely thinking about her too. There was no one else in the world about whom she could say that right now.
Still, she fought against the feeling of missing him, or of looking forward to his return. She didn’t believe that these feelings were authentic on her part. John’s kindness, his concern for her, was genuine, she had no doubt about that. Her vulnerability to these things was what bothered her. By virtue of their very intensity, she thought, her own feelings couldn’t be trusted.
At home she found Richard doing the dishes, wearing a red polo shirt and khaki pants, which didn’t strike her as unusual until she walked through the dining room and saw two of her housemates, Steve and Guy, typing into laptops at the table, also wearing red polo shirts and khaki pants.
The weather was growing warmer, and as a consequence the streets, even before the students’ return, were more and more crowded with people who weren’t going anywhere: preachers, entertainers, schizophrenics, bums. Molly had never given John her phone number or address. On the weekend before classes resumed she realized this meant that, since he had no way to contact her, she never had to see him again if she didn’t want to. While having a cup of coffee at the Soup Kitchen she saw a blue spring-term course directory on the table beside her. She asked the couple sitting there if she could borrow it for a second; quickly she flipped through the Art History section until she found a course called The New York School which met Monday in Sprague Hall – it sounded like something John might be enrolled in. She borrowed a pen from the waitress and wrote the room number on a napkin.
Monday morning she went to the first floor of Sprague Hall and took a seat in the back row. John never came. After half an hour she left to go to work. She read Mr Whalen an editorial about the sale of the Empire State Building to the Japanese.
On the way home, on the corner by the secondhand clothing store, Molly caught a glimpse of a red shirt, and was a few steps past before she turned to see her brother, Richard, standing on a wooden stepstool, reciting the Bible from memory. She felt a kind of constriction around her lungs. No one was listening, and yet he did not acknowledge her when she retraced her steps and stood in front of him. He did not acknowledge anyone – he stared into the bricks halfway between the first and second stories of the b
uildings across Telegraph. On some level, Molly thought, she must have seen this coming, because, though thoroughly frightened, she was not exactly surprised. She noticed a stack of leaflets on the stool beside his feet and took one. “Ten Righteous Men?” it read.
That night she had a hard time getting to sleep. She now believed it was imperative that she see John Wheelwright again soon, but not just for the sake of seeing him. The larger his absence grew, the more he came to stand for everything missing from her life. He was becoming inhuman in her mind, and she longed for the disillusionment of seeing him again, of being reminded of some compromising thing about him which she had apparently managed to forget.
Awake almost till dawn, she then slept past eleven. Deliberately she showered, dressed, and ate a bowl of cereal, before walking to John’s house and sitting on the front steps. She did not ring his doorbell. After three hours she saw him walking up the street, alone, in and out of the shade of the elm trees. By the time his face came into focus for her he had recognized her, and he was smiling broadly. He took out his keys as he reached the steps.
“Molly,” he said, a little too jovially. “Come on in.”
“No, thank you,” she said.
They stayed like that for a little while.
“Can you come for a walk with me?” Molly said.
They went to the Soup Kitchen. “Will you buy me some coffee, please?” she said. Then she told him the story of her fainting spell here and her trip to the clinic in Oakland. She regretted having started the story – it sounded too much to her like a plea for sympathy – but she followed it through. When she pointed through the serving window to the cook who had driven her to the clinic, he waved at them. She looked hard at John, who was holding her hand now, for any sign of fear or insincerity. Not that she would have been put off by such a sign; in fact, she would have been reassured. She didn’t see any.
John said he had to go to the registrar’s office to drop off his tuition check, and Molly went with him, standing silently in line, feeling a little foolish. By the time they came out on to the plaza again it was after four o’clock. They bought a six-pack and went all the way up the hill to sit on a bench outdoors in the empty Greek Theater, to drink and watch the evening fall.
