by Jonathan Dee
When they had no money to go out, John and Molly sat at home and read, looking up from time to time and shaking their heads at the picture of premature domesticity they presented, or would have presented if there were anyone looking at them. Once she caught him looking up at her rather more than she was used to.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Nothing.” He had a pen in his hand. She got up and walked to his chair, and saw that on the flyleaf of his book he had drawn a picture of her face.
“It’s good,” she said.
“I’m not very good with portraits.”
In the depths of one night in their bed – out of breath, unaware what time it was – John said, “I don’t know what to do. I can’t remember what I used to feel like before this. I’m worried all the time that something will happen to change it.”
She curled up against his chest. “You’ve just never gotten laid like this before,” she said.
She felt him tense up. When a minute had gone by, and he hadn’t said anything, she raised herself on her elbow, so that he could feel she was looking at him.
“Don’t do that,” he said softly. “Don’t joke about it.”
Some days Molly would feel, without any particular cause, that it was all bound to end badly, and when that happened she wanted to turn herself off, to make herself stop thinking, usually by trying to flood out with lust these pockets of despair. John didn’t really understand what was going on at such moments. She would suddenly engage him in some kind of pointless sexual dare: sitting on his hand on a crowded BART train, blowing him, at three-thirty in the morning, in the brightly lit lobby of their building, sitting astride him, her feet braced against the wall, in a men’s-room stall at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She wanted to find his limit, because knowing that limit would drive a wedge between them; but in his mind, the question was not how far he would go but how far he would follow her, and she couldn’t find the limit to that.
The chef and the maître d’ at Fondue Fred’s were constantly asking her out. They knew she was living with someone, but they took it for granted that an attachment like that in someone so young – they were both at least ten years older – was not solid enough to withstand the right pressure. For some reason they preferred to harass her in each other’s presence; they were emboldened, or maybe just put at ease, by the knowledge that when they said something outrageous to her they could look for each other’s reaction rather than just Molly’s. Manny, the maître d’, had a small ponytail and wore shiny, ventless suits, of which he seemed to own only two. The difference between his deportment with the customers – practiced, a little too unctuous to be as classy as he thought he was – and his amazingly profane manner among Dylan and the other kitchen staff was so broad that Molly found herself wondering about the circumstances of his life outside of work. But she didn’t ask any questions; curiosity about Manny, she knew, would be instantly and eagerly misinterpreted.
Dylan had been in the navy, or so he said, and had no obvious connection to this part of the country at all, having grown up in New Jersey and apparently resolved never to go back there. He had a series of Japanese ideograms tattooed on his biceps, which he always kept exposed. One evening Molly dropped a tray and broke a few glasses just on the kitchen side of the swinging door. She swept the shards into a bread basket and went out back to the alley to dump them in the trash. Dylan was out there, smoking a cigarette. Black trash bags were piled against the stucco walls on three sides; the fourth was the narrow open end of the alley, with a streetlight just beyond it, where every few minutes someone would walk past.
Molly’s eyes met Dylan’s; she turned away to dump the glass in a garbage can, but the first two she opened were full to the brim.
“You didn’t have to smash those glasses,” Dylan said, “just for an excuse to meet me out here.”
Molly laughed halfheartedly. “I guess I could have taken up smoking,” she said.
“Want one?”
“No.” She dumped the glass, straightened up, and looked at the pillar of night sky visible at the end of the alley. It was quite a peaceful spot, apart from the smell, which was powerful. She felt Dylan’s eyes on her again, and she turned around. Through for the night, he had taken off his apron; his chef’s jacket was stained with sauces and animal blood. His hands were scalded red. He mistook her curiosity.
“You and me should party sometime,” he said.
“Party?” she said, with distaste.
“Your boyfriend wouldn’t have to know.”
She had already taken a step back toward the door; no doubt he was growing bolder because of it. No doubt he didn’t really expect she would turn around again. So she stopped. Your boyfriend wouldn’t have to know. The light from the stree-tlamp seemed to swim as a wind blew through the leaves. The air smelled of eucalyptus and fish.
“Hey Dylan,” she said in a new voice, a voice that was like a sneer. Her eyes were locked on to his. He said nothing, but threw his cigarette away.
“How long does it take you, Dylan?” she said.
His eyebrows went up; even his surprise looked more like a simulation of surprise.
“That’s up to you, I guess,” he said. “Little girl.”
In the grip of some powerful urge – not self-destruction, exactly, since what Dylan said was true: no one would have to know – Molly reached out and lowered the zipper on his blue-and-white-checked chef’s pants. Stepping closer to him, she wove her hand through his jockey shorts until she could take his cock out and hold it in the air between them. She didn’t look at it. It was jumping slightly in her fingers. Though he tried not to, he kept looking over her head at the door to the kitchen. He took another half-step closer to her.
Something was wrong, though, inside her, and she fought against it. Then the fighting took the form of her resisting the pressure of Dylan’s one hand between her shoulder and neck as he tried to push her down on to her knees. She let go of him and stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Quickly he pushed his cock back in and zipped up; with the outline of it so conspicuous, he seemed more self-conscious than he had when it was out levitating in the night air. He laughed, without smiling, not at all in a promising way.
“You little cunt,” he said evenly.
“I can’t, I’m sorry,” Molly said, and she pushed her way through the door and into the kitchen. She stayed in the dining room until her shift was over; then, telling her busboy that she felt sick, she left the restaurant without cashing out. Halfway home she sat down on a bench at a bus stop; the buses didn’t run at that hour. She sat and thought and didn’t come home until one-thirty, hoping John would be angry at her for it. But he wasn’t.
The struggles just to get by, to meet the rent and have enough left over for a couple of nights out of the apartment, were a blessing in a way; it kept them, for the most part, from lifting their heads to see the vast amount of time that lay before them at that tender age, time they had no plans to fill, time that represented an unfathomable test of the love that got them through the here and now.
The student film societies started up again, and Molly and John paid a dollar (he refused to sneak in) to see The Magnificent Ambersons, Downhill Racer, Meet Me in St Louis. On the walk home, Molly told John the story of Margaret O’Brien’s snowman-whacking scene, how Minnelli got her to throw a tantrum by telling her that someone had killed her dog.
“How do you know that?” John said.
“I read the textbook for one of the film courses I was auditing,” she said. “It was before we met.”
“Read it how?”
She looked at him, as if unsure of the tone of his question. “I would go to the UC bookstore,” she said, “and sit in the stacks in the textbook section, and read it there.”
They walked on in silence for a little while.
“What do you want to do?” John said.
From the stress on the word do, Molly knew what he
was talking about; but she pretended not to.
“For a living, I mean,” John said. “Or a career, or whatever the word is. What kind of work would you most want to do?”
Molly shrugged, unhappy with the question.
“I don’t remember how long you have to have lived in California to establish residency, but if you had it you could enroll here really cheaply, you know. Of course, even a really cheap tuition, at this point we don’t have the money.”
“I couldn’t ask you to do that,” she said.
“Of course you could. I mean, maybe not right now.”
The streetlights flooded the leaves as they walked in step on the empty sidewalks toward home. Molly simultaneously loved and resented John for his optimism. She couldn’t have found the words to explain how hopeless it actually seemed.
Two weeks later Molly was walking up Telegraph, on her way to work, wearing her uniform, when two of her old housemates from Vine Street, Steve and Guy, appeared on either side of her. At first she was happy to see them, especially since they acknowledged her, or at least made no conspicuous effort to get away from her. Then, at the corner of Telegraph and Dwight, Guy took her arm and directed her away from the restaurant, in the direction of the house. “Richard wants to see you,” Steve said. Molly laughed at their serious expressions, but before she had even stopped laughing things had ceased to seem comic. They were acting so strangely that Molly had to remind herself that these were people whom she had shared a home with, people who had been quite charitable towards her, that there was nothing to worry about.
Richard was seated at the kitchen table; surprisingly, unlike Steve and Guy, he was not wearing his usual red polo shirt. Over his shoulder Molly could see that the furniture was now gone from the living room, replaced by six or eight foldaway beds. Richard nodded at the other two and they left the kitchen.
“I’m sorry to surprise you like that,” Richard said. He seemed to have acquired the ability to sit for long stretches without fidgeting, without moving at all. “But Steve and Guy didn’t want to cross your threshold, knowing how you live, and honestly I can’t blame them. Your father has attempted suicide. Through God’s intervention this attempt has failed. He’s in the hospital in Albany. Your mother has asked that you return home for a while.”
Molly felt her jaw trembling. She didn’t speak. There was something in Richard’s manner that made her fear the consequences of crying. He looked at her without any tenderness at all – only with a kind of professional conscientiousness, as if he were delivering a telegram and took care not to give any indication he had looked at it to see what it said.
“If you call and give her your address,” he continued, “your mother says she will wire you the money for an airplane ticket.”
Molly, try as she might, couldn’t really make vivid for herself what she had just been told, and his flat tone wasn’t making it any easier. “What about you?” she said finally.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean aren’t we both going back?”
His expression did not change; which is to say, his face did not resolve itself into any recognizable expression at all. “She asked me. I told her it was of no consequence to me, and that in any case her husband had now sinned mortally and without evidence of his repentance I could not be in his company.”
“How – I mean, did she say how he—”
“I don’t have any idea.”
“Tell me what else she said, anything at all.”
“She asked me to pass the message on to you, since she didn’t know where you were living, and I’ve done that. If you want to know more, I think you should call her. In fact, I think you should call her anyway.”
Molly scrutinized her brother; confusion was making her squint. “You’re really not coming with me?”
“I have business here,” he said.
They sat across from each other for several more minutes, until his patience with her began to seem like a form of ostentation. But when she stood up to go, she suddenly realized what she wanted to ask him.
“Can you do that?” she said. “Can you just decide that your family is simply no longer your family?”
She could see him soften a bit. “My family is right here,” he said gently. “The Howe family lived by nothing, for nothing. You are all reaping what you have sown.”
Molly expected to find John home from the library when she got back, but he wasn’t there. She called in sick at the restaurant. Then, after breathing deeply a few times, she called the house in Ulster. Her father’s voice was on the answering machine. “Mom, it’s Molly,” she said quickly; after a pause, she left her phone number. Then she hung up.
John didn’t get back for three more hours, much later than expected. Kay had not called back by then either. When he opened the door, after dark, and switched the lights on, he was frightened to see Molly glaring hatefully at him from the center of the living room, red-eyed, silent, and nearly hysterical from loneliness.
EVERY MORNING, ON his drive to work, John passed two of the five billboards that constituted the First National Bank of Charlottesville campaign. Three different times he had actually witnessed motorists drifting to a stop on the shoulder and getting out to look at the images more closely, which surely wasn’t something you could say about a lot of billboard campaigns. John hadn’t had a hand in them, personally. They were site-specific; one, on a stretch of county road that ran through some undeveloped rolling hills, was a trompe-l’oeil picture of a house under construction. The other, right across from the main gates of the university, showed a mother and daughter hugging beside the open hatchback of a car loaded to the roof with stereo equipment, duffel bags, and cardboard boxes full of books: first day of freshman year. Both contained no type – only the bank’s familiar logo, Monticello with a 1 in the center of it, in the upper left corner.
Initially Osbourne had loved them. The site-specific idea appealed to him right away; the fact that the ads were integral to the city’s very landscape – not something bought on local airtime during Friends or falling out of the Sunday paper with the Arby’s coupons – made them more exciting as ads and also reinforced the idea that the client was a hometown product, not some national chain whose monthly statements showed up from a PO box somewhere in North Dakota. And the clients, skeptical at first, had been won over as well. Their business had seen a slight upturn; more significantly than that, though, they kept reporting to Osbourne that everyone, everywhere they went, was talking about those First National ads. They’d never had such a buzz.
But within a few weeks, Osbourne had soured on the whole campaign. Though he kept stressing that he blamed himself, it was hard not to feel for those whose work was now the object of his undisguised contempt. “Billboards,” he’d say, shaking his head. “What the hell was I thinking? You can call it site-specific or whatever you want, but the fact is a billboard is a billboard is a billboard, people only expect to see one thing on it and that’s advertising. Their relationship to the work is poisoned from the start.” Nor did he care for the ads’ content; the approach was fresh, he said, but the message was still the same old message, your friendly neighborhood bank, look at this beautiful home we’ll help you build – the same old shit, everyone genially accepted it as a lie whether it was a lie or not. He seemed deeply troubled, and they saw him in the working part of the mansion less and less often; it was assumed that he was secluding himself somewhere in the east wing.
In retrospect John was glad he’d had nothing to do with the First National campaign; at the time, though, he had been frustrated, even a little panicked by his inability to come up with any decent idea at all. Osbourne had resolutely refused to do any partnering among the staff; nevertheless, John found that when he had an idea or a question or else just needed some company he was spending more and more time in the third-floor maid’s room where Elaine Sizemore had her desk. Elaine always wore her little round wire-rim glasses, and she didn’t seem to have brought with he
r from New York any sort of casual clothing: she wore skirts, loose dressy pants, blouses with fancy collars, while others walked around like skateboarders in baggy calf-length shorts and Limp Bizkit T-shirts. She wanted that maid’s room precisely because it was the smallest room in the main part of the house; the enormous cherrywood secretary she had found at a local antique store (in the end they had needed professional movers just to get it up the stairs and through the maid’s-room door) made the room even more formidably her own. John respected this bold maneuvering for solitude, even as he violated it by lingering in her doorway, blowing on a latte from the first-floor kitchen, asking her what was new.
Both of them were spending more and more time at the office. They didn’t have a great deal of work to do; but with the presence of a full-time kitchen staff, and TVs, and a pool table, and Internet access, it was easy to begin to feel estranged from their own small, still-unfamiliar homes. And home, no matter how John might wish it otherwise, was not terribly appealing right now. Eager to avoid the student-dominated apartment houses near campus – where the hours were crazy, the noise was tremendous, and where he would have been the oldest tenant by nearly ten years – he had taken a place out by the 250 Bypass. His two rooms were cramped, half-furnished, with no view; but the primary source of his depression on evenings and weekends there was his fellow tenants. Who, after all, in a small city like Charlottesville, would be living in a furnished one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette? Drunks; men who had been kicked out by their wives; men who were keeping mistresses and could afford a cheap place set aside for that purpose.
And the walls were not thick. The noises of sex were common; John felt that his inability to ignore them only reflected badly on himself. Much more upsetting were instances like the Friday evening he overheard his next-door neighbor on the phone; the words were muffled, but from the singsong voice the man was using John could tell he was talking to his children. He heard clearly the sound of the hang-up, followed a few seconds later by a wave of uncontrolled sobbing. The next morning John passed this man – maybe in his forties, with a puffy face under a blond beard – on the back stairs leading to the parking area; the man smiled and asked John if it wasn’t a lovely day. Six weeks of this sort of depthless interaction was about all John could take before he began spending some of his nights in the west-wing bedrooms at the office.
