Palladio

by Jonathan Dee

  Then Molly told John the story of how she had come to live in Berkeley, of how she had been estranged from her parents, of her affair with the man whose children she had been hired to care for. She left nothing out. She did it so he would hate her, because she felt quite strongly now that if she couldn’t do something to change his mind about her she was going to lose control.

  They looked across the top of the stage at the sunset lighting up the hills. John waited a long time; then he said, “Do you think it was a mistake?”

  “What?”

  “Sleeping with this guy, this Dennis. Looking back on it, do you think you made a mistake, doing that?”

  Molly nodded; then, realizing he was still staring off at the hills, she said, “Yes, I guess so.”

  He sighed. “So then you were seventeen,” he said, “and you made a mistake. I tell you, I hope you won’t hold it against me, speaking badly of your family. But I just can’t understand how your mother and father could turn their backs on you like that. I can’t understand how anyone could turn on their own child.”

  Molly burst into tears. John took her hand and kissed it. “I’m guessing that you haven’t told too many people that story before,” he said. “I did nothing but think about you the whole time I was home. Don’t ever think that there’s something about you I wouldn’t want to know.”

  They lapsed into a long silence on the downhill walk home. John, who still had no idea where Molly lived, stayed half a step behind her, guessing they were going back to his apartment but afraid that saying anything would break the spell. When they reached his door he took out his keys and they stepped inside without a word. His roommate could be heard in the shower; so they went straight to John’s bedroom and closed the door. The walls were covered with hundreds of postcards, all reproductions of great paintings, like a museum in miniature. There was nowhere to sit, apart from one desk chair, so they both sat on the bed.

  When they kissed she felt a shudder go through him, an actual shudder, and after that there was nothing she didn’t want to give to him. They stood to undress each other; once her pants were off John remained on his knees for a few moments, his hands on her back, kissing her stomach, kissing the red impressions left by her jeans at the belt line. They sat cross-legged on the bed again, facing each other; Molly took John’s cock gently between her hands and looked as intently as she could into his eyes, doing nothing, feeling him grow hard in her palms.

  He was so patient. She leaned forward, kissed him, and let her weight push him down on to his back. She straightened up, reached between her thighs, and guided him into her. She was trying to move as slowly as possible – not because that was more enjoyable for her, nor in response to any sign from him. She didn’t really know why she was doing it.

  Still, it didn’t last very long. He closed his eyes and she felt him contracting inside her. She lay down on top of him; he laughed a little, then, still inside her, he began running his fingertips along her back, touching her as lightly as possible, from her neck down as far as he could reach, just below her hips. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, and it went right through her, painfully enough that she hoped he wouldn’t say anything more.

  In the silence they heard the bathroom door open; John’s roommate walked past them on the other side of the wall and into his own room, where he shut the door and put on some music. Molly got up from the bed and carefully opened the door to the hallway.

  “Everything all right?” John asked softly.

  She nodded. The bathroom was shrouded in steam; she couldn’t see her own face in the mirror. She sat on the lid of the toilet, inhaling the heavy air, her palms up in front of her face, and watched her hands shaking.

  By the time three weeks had gone by, Molly had pretty much moved in with him, though she now had so few belongings that she wasn’t altogether sure John even knew this was the case.

  “HERE ARE SOME words that I never want to hear again,” Osbourne said. “Edgy. Postmodern. In your face.”

  Nervous laughter around the table. They were gathered in the dining room – or what was formerly the dining room; no one ate there, and John kept waiting for it to be given some new name, but it remained “the dining room” – for their first staff meeting. The table around which they sat was a magnificent cherry-wood oval; at each place was a china cup and saucer. Apart from that, the sunlit white room was free of any decorative touch, for a few more hours at least. Some workmen had been in the first stages of the delicate, complex process of installing one of Osbourne’s own brushed-steel Frank Stellas on the long wall opposite the windows, when Osbourne had walked in, trailed by his new staff, and told the installers to take an early lunch.

  “We are here to make art. We will make it in a communal setting. However, that doesn’t mean you’re going to hear a lot of that team-first bullshit that you might have been subjected to in some of your old places of employment. I believe in cooperating, but not at the expense of the emergence of individual genius. No great work of art has ever germinated from some committee decision. Greatness is a pure product of the individual consciousness.”

  There were nine people, including Osbourne, around the table, six of them holding pens and notepads. No one had written anything down yet. The pads and pens were supplies they had brought from home. No one knew where to find them inside the mansion, because no one had been given an office yet. Osbourne’s hair was still wet from a shower; he wore a bright-green polo shirt with the collar turned up and chinos, and his feet were bare. He swiveled restlessly in his chair as he spoke, as if he could hardly wait for this meeting, which he had spontaneously convened, to be over.

  “What else, what else. In the west wing there are several bedrooms, just about all of them furnished by now, I think – I’ll have to go take a look. Those are for you, as you want or need them. The kitchen can only stay open until eight p.m. Rose – that’s the housekeeper, for those of you who haven’t met her – is here twenty-four hours. As am I, by the way. For those of you who haven’t figured it out” – he held up one bare foot – “part of the east wing has been kept as a living quarters as well, and right now that’s where I live. Ah, Benjamin!”

  Benjamin walked in from the kitchen entrance, a stout man somewhere in his sixties, John guessed; nodding at the mention of his name, he went around the table pouring coffee from a silver pitcher. A few of them held their hands over the small china cups and smiled apologetically.

  “I hope you’ll all take the opportunity at some point today to introduce yourselves to Benjamin, who heads the kitchen staff, and to Rose as well. Now, a couple of you have asked me, in the last two days, when your various job descriptions will be spelled out. The answer is that there are no job descriptions. Titles, same answer – you have none. As for where your own individual office is located, you don’t have one.” He gaped, good-naturedly exaggerating their looks of surprise.

  John had not yet met all seven of his colleagues. Interestingly, they all had the same expression, as far as he could see: gameness, he would have called it, a willed overcoming of the skepticism that every casually dropped bit of information about their new workplace instinctively produced.

  “But the real reason I called you all here,” Osbourne said, “is to announce some happy news. Which is, we have our first client.”

  A murmur of relief, and then some soft, somewhat sarcastic but good-natured applause spread around the table.

  “Yes, it’s true. It’s a local client, a bank in fact. The First National Bank of Charlottesville. Now I’m going to try a little something here. Which is, I’m not going to tell you another thing about them.”

  He stood up and went to the windows, which overlooked the dogwood trees behind the kitchen.

  “No research, no market information, no looking at previous campaigns. No history. None of you are from here, and so I’m assuming you have no idea if this is the number one bank in the city or the number twenty-one. I want to keep it that way.”

&nbs
p; Elaine Sizemore, who was sitting across the table from John, threw her little notepad on the table, where it made a louder noise than she had intended.

  Osbourne didn’t turn around. “No idea what this client needs. No idea what their self-image is. Because they don’t know what they need. We’re the ones who know that. We know it already, and market research would just cloud our judgment about that. And if any of you have any experience doing campaigns for banks – well, I can’t do anything about that, I suppose, but really what I’d like is for you to forget all about it. Banks want to be humanized, and humanizing banks leads to lying, and lying leads to irony as a way of dissociating yourself, and your audience, from the lie. That’s no good. That’s the chain we’re trying to break.

  “So we don’t relate the campaign to the bank at all. We don’t associate our work with the bank; we do our best work, and then we allow the bank to be associated with it.”

  He looked around the table. “That’s all,” he said brightly. “I’ll be around. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.”

  Osbourne walked by the table, stopped to drain his cup of coffee, and disappeared into the hallway. The others, smiling and perplexed, stood slowly. They didn’t speak to one another. What was in their minds was doubt, and no one was willing to express it – not out of fear of being reprimanded or informed upon, but because everyone had a significant stake in the success of this enterprise, and right now that success seemed to be largely, if not entirely, a matter of personal faith.

  The installers came back in, one holding a carpenter’s level and drill and the other reading a pamphlet of some sort; they resumed preparations for the enormous Stella. John, grateful though he was for Osbourne’s generosity regarding starting salaries, had all along been expecting a much more shoestring-type operation than the one that was so far in evidence – the china cups, the full-time domestic staff, the sleeping quarters. Where was the money going to come from to pay for all this? With local banks as clients, how could Osbourne run the place at this level for more than a few weeks?

  But these reflections were swallowed up in the instinctive fear that had been reinstilled in all eight of them by the familiar vague directive to get to work, to come up with something. John went into the south parlor and sat on one of the couches, trying to think about advertising without the impurities of an actual product to advertise. He sat and thought in earnest, but with nothing to build on his mind began to wander, toward what he might be able to order from the kitchen in the way of lunch, toward the amenities he still needed for his new apartment, toward Rebecca and what she might be doing now; and when Daniel, the novelist, noticing the blank look on his face, asked him if he wanted to go down to the basement and play some pool, John said okay.

  IN THE MIDDLE of June came graduation day; but John, whose thesis on Goya was incomplete – abandoned, actually, at least for the time being – wasn’t ready for it. He called his parents and told them not to come. They did not react calmly. At the end of the month, John’s roommate, diploma in hand, said goodbye and moved south to Los Angeles. John renewed the lease in his own name, this despite the fact that his parents had told him to expect no more money from them. He took a word-processing job in San Francisco at a law firm, to cover the extra rent; and he and Molly had a home together, a home they couldn’t really afford, a home with one empty room in it.

  Sometimes in the mornings, after John had left for the BART station, Molly would sit in the kitchen and cry for a while, without really knowing why. It wasn’t because she missed him. It just seemed like a good idea, at that point, to set aside part of the day for crying, and that was the part of the day she chose. She asked John once what his post-graduation plans had been, before meeting her that is, and he said he hadn’t had any; she knew this was a lie. The exodus of students for summer vacation made a certain type of job much easier to come by: Molly now worked as a waitress at Fondue Fred’s, a forlorn little restaurant in a mini-mall on Telegraph, four dinners and two lunches a week. Between them they made enough to pay the bills. Neither of them had much of an inclination to learn to cook, but they ate as cheaply as they knew how, frozen dinners, rice and beans from the taqueria. Weekends, unless Molly talked him out of it, John still went to the library to do some research for his thesis, which he now hoped to complete in time to graduate in December. All his friends were gone from Berkeley, either for the summer or for good, so the two of them spent every evening together. In February he would turn twenty-three years old.

  Molly felt scared most of the time, particularly when she woke up. Her fear was exacerbated by a sense that she wasn’t entitled to it, that by all rights she should have felt safer now, in the embrace of someone completely devoted to her, than she had ever felt in her life. If she awoke before he did she would try to forget things by seeing how aroused she could get him without waking him up. But the early mornings were usually passed in that way in any event; it was a way of blocking out everything. They could hold each other’s eyes for a long time while making love. She’d never really thought of it before, but now, when it came easily, she realized what an unusual thing that was to do.

  They never answered the phone anymore because chances were the call was from his parents, unless it was from a bill collector. They had no TV; it had belonged to John’s roommate, who had taken it with him, and their financial margin was too narrow at the end of each month to afford one. Neither of them could call on family, at this point, for any help with money, or with anything. Molly wondered to what extent true love was properly bound up with one’s feeling of having nowhere else to go.

  She bought a cookbook from a Krishna selling odds and ends off a blanket beside Euclid Avenue. Since their incompetence in the kitchen was so general, they tried fancy things as readily as the most basic: vichyssoise, steak au poivre, crème caramel. The latter was doomed from the start, since Molly thought “egg white” meant the white part of the egg, i.e., the shell. John made fun of her; she picked up the phone, ordered a pizza from Domino’s, and bet him that she could make him come twice before the pizza arrived. Hours later they were still laughing at the way they had had to pass the money around the corner of the door to the delivery boy; later still, though, as Molly lay awake thinking about the ways in which these evenings were binding them together, there was less and less funny about it.

  She was the one taking him through everything, trying everything, acting experienced even when it came to things she had never done before. Trying, she supposed without really acknowledging it, to lose him, to leave him behind, to shock him or to test the reality of what he seemed to feel for her, which was total loyalty, an unwillingness to let her cast herself for him in any light other than the light of his love.

  She all but goaded him, for instance, into anal sex, even though it was something she had never tried before. The thought that it might hurt her went against every instinct he had. Ultimately, the pain of it, while not as severe as she might have thought, wasn’t balanced out by any great corresponding pleasure, other than maybe an abstract, intimate sort of pleasure born of mutual transgression. But the whole thing, though they never repeated it, was worth it for the look on his face, tenderness bordering on alarm, as he held himself frozen uncomfortably in one position, balanced on one elbow, waiting for her muscles to relax, the other hand stroking her hair.

  They did go out, of course. The city was hushed, depopulated, yet strengthened in its character somehow, like something boiled down to its essence. When they could afford it they went out to a movie. On the occasional Thursday – half-price day – they took BART into San Francisco and went to the Museum of Modern Art. John talked her through the dim rooms, modestly, reluctant to offer any evidence of his expertise unless he was asked. Molly was warmed by the pleasure he took not just in knowing a lot about the paintings but in the paintings themselves; and she was even a little jealous of the years he had spent in classrooms, lecture halls, auditoriums, developing this interest. Jealous because it al
l seemed to have passed her by, impossible now, like a trip back in time, even though she was just twenty years old.

  September arrived, and then October. The life of the university renewed itself; neither of them was a part of it now.

  Her brother Richard had become, on an irregular basis, part of the street life. He wore his red shirt and announced the damnation of everyone who passed in front of him, damned them without looking at them, his gaze leveled above their heads. Molly stopped to listen to him on her way to work. She didn’t have to worry about being exposed. He knew where she was living now, and so he did not even acknowledge knowing her, much less being her brother. Students who stopped to listen for a moment, she noticed, usually broke the connection by laughing, or imitating him, or pantomiming great fear. Their irony was something to which Richard was completely impervious; but it was no less mighty an instrument for that.

  Sometimes she encouraged John to dominate her a little bit, to be a little less gentle, less considerate, both because she liked it and also to jolt him out of what he thought he knew about women; but he couldn’t really do it, that wasn’t who he was. Once he made her gag slightly and he apologized so many times she finally started to laugh at him.

  She thought a lot about her brother and what had happened to him, and about whether, apart from the fact that she missed him, what had become of him was something to be mourned. Unabashed eccentricity; a desire for a sense of family, a sense of mission in the world, to rescue life from the pointless and the sham; a longing for something real in the midst of everything that seemed insubstantial; a need for something besides oneself to fear. Were these reasons to doubt the authenticity of a man’s religious feeling, or the strongest evidence of that very authenticity?