by Jonathan Dee
Years were going by. What was she working on?
She had what might be called an artistic temperament, yet she had no inclination toward art itself. Art was communication; she wanted only to be silent. Music, acting, anything that involved getting on a stage was outside the realm of possibility for her. Even writing seemed to her much too demonstrative. It wasn’t fear so much as distaste. In talking about a thing, you automatically forgave yourself for it. She didn’t want to transform her own experience, to pretend it was anything other than what it was.
So she started taking any sort of available job in the film business: as an extra, in craft services, redirecting traffic when directors were shooting on location (legally or otherwise) on the streets of Manhattan. Carrying tape, carrying screens and stands, when it wasn’t a union shoot: offering her labor in the service of someone else’s vision. She didn’t think of it in terms of advancement – only in terms of hopscotching from one job to another, without too much of a nerve-racking break in between. There was a whole society of young people who lived in this way, and their sense of self-importance was tremendous, though, to be fair, most of them went into it with more of an ambition than Molly did.
She did some stupid things, some crazy things, from time to time. This was why she tried to keep her personality tamped down now, because when she didn’t, what tended to emerge was a vengeful sort of self-effacement. Mostly it involved a reluctance to take herself out of the path of dangerous men. Once she and Iggy had to change their phone number; for Iggy, who had that number on the back of countless 8 x 10s sent to casting directors, this was a great inconvenience, but when Molly made her listen to a few of one particular man’s answering machine messages, she said okay. Most of Molly’s sexual experiences were pickup situations, in clubs or at parties, once on the street with an Israeli man who asked her directions to the Circle Line. She gravitated toward (or allowed herself to respond to) the ones who verged on some sort of emotional extremity; but it was no longer about wanting to see what they had to show her. Nights like that were like tearing the veil, like mounting little productions of her opinion of herself. She wanted to see what she would look like having sex with a coked-out Dominican who could only stay hard if he was holding a knife to her face. She wanted to see what she would look like afterward.
She had no news of her family. She had no idea if they wondered where she was, or if they knew. She felt she had forfeited her right to have her curiosity satisfied about these things.
There was never a shortage of men who wanted her. She was beautiful, self-effacing, open in her manner and yet completely unreachable; thus she had become the kind of woman a certain kind of man will want to wreck himself against.
One such man was the director of a film she worked on, a documentary about poetry slams. Molly made herself useful, handing out and collecting releases, taking care of the parking permits for the crew. His name was Dexter Kilkenny. He was tall and unhappy, the kind of man whose legs bounced whenever he had to sit down for too long, and he was driven by a career ambition which shone through any cynical disguise he tried to drape over it. Molly did not miss any of the looks he gave her on location, even though he only looked when he was under the impression she didn’t see him.
When the finished film was accepted at Sundance, eight months after the crew had broken up at the end of shooting, Dex made sure to call Molly and invite her to the celebratory party at Nobu. She had no idea how he had even gotten her phone number, but she didn’t ask. She went with Iggy to the party. Next day, Dex called her at home again.
“Sorry I didn’t get to talk to you much last night,” he said, as if they were old friends. “The guys from Miramax were there, so I had to, you know.”
“Sure,” Molly said. “So how are you doing?”
“Hung over.”
“Drunk with success.”
“Yeah. So I had wanted to talk to you about, about working together again. I really enjoyed what you, what you brought to, uh—”
“You have another movie lined up?”
“Well, no, but from what everyone tells me, the offers should start pouring in after Sundance.” He paused.
“So,” Molly said.
“Yeah?”
“So really this is more like a call where you want to ask me out on a date.”
“Well, yeah, except, except I don’t really do that. Date. No experience in that area.”
“So you thought what you’d do instead is hire me,” Molly said, smiling. She teased him, but she liked how comfortable he seemed with his own eccentricity.
“No, no, I mean don’t misunderstand me—”
“It’s okay. Listen, I have an idea. We’ll go to the movies. It’s dark, no talking, then afterwards we can go to our separate homes if we want to. Sound good?”
Four months later, when he went to Sundance, Dex didn’t take her, which was disappointing. While he was gone, though, she moved her stuff into his apartment on Ludlow Street. He was right, too. The offers came pouring in.
AS JOHN’S BANK account mushroomed, he grew to feel that the two featureless rooms of his rented apartment, even though he rarely set foot there anymore, were an unnecessary drag on his personal sense of well-being. He let his lease expire and moved his few belongings into his room at Palladio while he contacted a few local realtors. But the first few places he saw were not right – too new; too garish; too big for one man living alone – and then, after he’d been forced to cancel two or three real estate appointments at the last minute for emergency business trips, the whole house-hunting effort ran out of the steam of its initial enthusiasm, swamped by the more pressing short-term concerns of work.
This contributed to a peculiarity of John’s new relationship with Elaine Sizemore, a romance about which he was growing very optimistic: they had never had sex outside the office. John, for now at least, had no other home, and Elaine (she, too, had rented a cheap room upon moving to Charlottesville, half expecting the whole thing to go belly-up in the first six months) insisted that her “home” was so embarrassing she would never let anyone who knew her from the office lay eyes on it. So she and John, on the nights they had been able to spend together, often went out – to dinner, to parties, to the movies – but they always returned to Palladio, unlocking the door quietly and moving on tiptoe through the hallways, even though the west wing was usually unoccupied at that hour, and even though their relationship was an open secret anyway.
That was the way the whole thing had started. After a fancy dinner with a group of executives from Pepsi, John and Elaine had left the restaurant in separate taxis, and had laughed tipsily when his taxi pulled up right behind hers in the mansion’s driveway.
“Don’t you have a home?” John teased her. She had unpinned her hair in the taxi, and now she kept nervously pushing it back behind her ears.
“I do,” she said, “but after a meal like that, one should spend the night in a nice room with a fancy bed, don’t you think?”
“One agrees,” said John.
Feeling like he was in college again, he invited her to his bedroom for a drink. She said yes with a kind of mock wariness, and the two of them giggled their way through the dark kitchen until they found a cupboard with liquor in it. For some reason he was now finding her round, wire-rimmed librarian’s glasses terribly exciting in a sexual way; though this feeling was born in drunkenness, it never went away.
Elaine had a graduate degree, it turned out, in comparative literature, from UC Santa Barbara. It was hard, intriguingly so, to imagine her in the context of southern California, but in fact that was where she was from, and where her parents still lived. John told her that he had had plans to go to grad school in the history of art; he didn’t get into why those plans had fallen through, and she didn’t ask. No one, he reasoned, wants to hear old-girlfriend stories, particularly traumatic ones, so early in a new relationship. The time for more detailed and honest presentation of their respective pasts would come sooner or later.
In the meantime, they were at home in each other’s company. The unlikely success of the venture that had brought them together seemed to draft them along in its wake. Elaine had that opaque quality, that air of hidden resources, he liked in women, though she was funny at the same time, alert and undemonstrative and not at all neurotic. Twice she had stopped, in the middle of sex, to ask him – with no trace of insecurity, only a kind of amicable curiosity – what the hell he was smiling about.
In March, Osbourne was informed – by John, over breakfast, in the fourth-floor alcove under the skylight – that he had been awarded the Provost’s Medal by New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. The award came, traditionally, with an invitation to deliver a public lecture on a subject of the honoree’s choosing. John mentioned this in the spirit of thoroughness and obligation, to his boss and to those who extended him the invitation; after all, Osbourne had turned down every public engagement offered him in the last two years.
Now, though, he put down his espresso cup and looked out the window at the gray sky.
“Let’s do it,” he said mischievously.
John leaned forward. “Give the speech, you mean?” he asked foolishly. “Go to New York?”
“Yeah. Yeah. I feel a lecture coming on.” Osbourne laughed. “When is it?”
The date was set for May. The Tisch School dean sounded something close to frightened when John informed him that his offer had been accepted, with gratitude.
Until then John would remain, as he had been since his removal from the creative staff, Osbourne’s public face. Often this consisted of offering short, cryptic, punchy statements to reporters; when possible, John liked to sit and craft these statements with Osbourne himself at the small table beneath the skylight. Though they each had their own east-wing office (John’s was on the second floor, Osbourne’s on the third), their meetings almost always took place at that small dining table, as if the sight of John were itself a reminder to him of his own alimentary needs.
John’s role as Osbourne’s voice even extended, more and more of late, to the inner workings of the office itself. The boss almost never came downstairs, at least not during conventional working hours. He had his meals served to him on the fourth floor, and the east wing had a separate entrance which allowed him to come and go without being seen, though anyone working in one of the upstairs rooms could see and hear his Triumph grinding down the long gravel driveway from time to time. Anytime he had a message he wanted conveyed to the staff, he had John do it. If this was a curious aspect of John’s duties, it was still, from John’s point of view, by no means an unpleasant one. The news was almost always good.
They had lately had inquiries from UNICEF; from the Chicago Art Institute; from two different city governments in the United States, looking for ways to raise revenue through advertising in public places without attracting too much negative press; from the committee to reelect a prominent senator; from a consortium which wanted to build a historical Civil War theme park in nearby Manassas; from Major League Baseball. John felt like laughing with wonder each time Osbourne gave him news of this sort – the scope of their success and their influence seemed to be surging past the boundaries of even their fondest original hopes. But in the time it took him to descend to the first floor and assemble the staff, he tried conscientiously to expunge any of that giddiness from his voice and his manner. The client doesn’t exist: this was Osbourne’s guiding principle, and John, in the interest of their continued success, tried hard to emulate his boss’s thinking.
DEX WAS DOING nothing; he lived in a world of offers. At night he and Molly went out, to clubs, to premieres, to after-hours clubs, to restaurants where no one ate; Molly was usually ready to go home at least an hour before they finally left, in the overlit quiet and the bad smells of Manhattan at 4 a.m. She knew one sure way to get his attention – flirt with another guy, or even just allow herself to be flirted with – but the few times she had tried that, she didn’t like the way it ended. She woke up one morning, surly and hung over, and was amazed to see the fully articulated marks of Dex’s fingers still visible on her upper arm.
Dex got up at about 1 p.m., when the Federal Express man came. He sat at his tiny kitchen table – big enough for only one, really – under the huge poster of Jean-Paul Belmondo, drank coffee, and read scripts. After a few minutes, he would begin flipping through the pages rapidly, as if looking for a particular word, a scowl of restless contempt stealing over his face. Molly, under orders to keep quiet while he read, would read something herself, or look at the TV with the sound down. Eventually Dex would stand up, listen to his answering machine messages, step into the shower, and ready himself indolently for another night out.
This went on for months. Dex accepted every invitation, in a kind of frenzy, not because he felt he had arrived but because he understood that his window on this kind of life might close at some point unless something else as substantial as Sundance happened to him soon. Molly got to meet her share of famous people, the fatuous and the moody; every evening she swore she didn’t know why they went out every night, and every afternoon she became restless to go out again, if only to escape the confines of the tiny apartment on Ludlow Street, which Dex, with twenty-one thousand eight hundred dollars in the bank, refused to give up because it was rent-controlled. Drunk and exhausted every night, hung over every day, their sex life had receded nearly to nothing.
Dex, having told his agent he was eager to look at feature scripts and escape the documentary ghetto, was trying hard to sell out; but something inside him, some kernel of self-regard for which he himself had grown to have a real dislike, was keeping him from doing it. The scripts were all so terrible. He would read aloud to Molly from them.
“Why does everything have to be so awful?” he said, blowing out a thin violent stream of smoke. “And I wouldn’t mind if it was awful in some new way. I wouldn’t mind being the originator of some new awfulness the world has never seen before. You know?”
Then one day Molly came home from D’Agostino’s and played back the messages; after the usual calls from Dex’s agent, party planners, film-school buddies, the last one was from Dex himself, talking excitedly over the street noise, asking Molly to meet him at the southeast corner of Houston and Broadway. Immediately. It was just a ten-minute walk, and she found him standing there, neck tilted back, staring up at the exposed side of a ten-story loft building. Atop it was a water tower, just like the towers atop many of the older buildings left in the city, except that this one had been painted, monochromatically, a shocking, bright, metallic red. There was something else off about it, too, and it took Molly a minute of looking before she understood what it was: a mold had been taken of the original water tower, then recast with some sort of plastic in place of the original wood, so that the lines of the object before her, while instantly recognizable, were smoothed out as well, softened, diminished, like a three-dimensional echo, a death mask, of the everyday object it had supplanted.
Molly touched Dex on his shoulder; he looked down at her for a second and smiled – unusual enough, those days – before he went back to staring. Molly realized that she had been brought here to look at it, too.
“I like it,” she said. “Has it been here long?”
Dex shrugged.
“Kind of eccentric,” Molly said. “What’s it doing there, I wonder.”
“It’s an advertisement,” Dex said quietly.
“It’s what?”
“An ad,” he said – smiling again. “A commercial.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know.” He laughed, without changing expression.
Molly thought about it. “Oh!” she said suddenly. “Is it that guy, that … what’s his name, the ad guy—”
“Malcolm Osbourne.”
“Yeah! It’s one of his?”
Dex said nothing. A kind of sneer was creeping over the lower half of his face. It was a look that was attractive only to Molly, who knew the true engagement it
signified.
“Is this”, she said, “a movie idea?”
He nodded. “I guess it’s that,” he said. “I mean, I’m standing here looking at this thing – the incredible phoniness of it, the way this guy is held up as a great artist, a revolutionary – the emptiness, the pretension – and I just want to take this guy Osbourne, I want to take a scalpel and cut his throat down to his belly and pull him open and show him to everyone, I want to fuck him up the ass, I want to rip his head off and shit into it, I want to pop his lying eyes out with a spoon and skullfuck him. So yes,” he said, “I guess you could say that’s a movie idea.”
Dex wanted to go back home and call his agent. On the way, he kept turning back to stare at the painted water tower from different perspectives, to hold it in his mind’s eye, knowing he wouldn’t be able to see it from the windows of their apartment. Molly mentioned, as they waited for the light on the Bowery, that she had just read somewhere that Osbourne was due to appear at NYU, to pick up an award and give a speech, some time later that spring. Dex’s face lit up at this news. “We’ll go, then,” he said. “You can get us tickets. That’s excellent, that’s ideal, that’s why I need you,” and he took her face between his hands, grinning broadly, in a loving way, though a little harder than necessary.
JOHN FELT AS if he were carrying some sort of explosive secret with him on the trip from Palladio to Richmond, Richmond to La Guardia, La Guardia to the St Moritz. It was just the two of them, himself and Mal, and Mal didn’t say much. No one would be likely to recognize his face, of course; and John, like some employee of the Witness Protection Program, kept restating to himself the importance of acting normally. They sat in their adjoining rooms at the St Moritz for three hours, even ordering separate room service dinners. At Osbourne’s direction, John had turned down a dinner invitation from the Tisch School’s board of trustees; he needed more time, he said, to go over his remarks. He had seemed agitated all day – not worried exactly, but suffering from a kind of surfeit of physical and nervous energy. Now, when John muted the TV in his room, he could hear Osbourne rehearsing his speech on the other side of the wall. John ate his salmon en papillote from a tray and looked out the window at Central Park, feeling strangely subdued. At six forty-five he put on his suit jacket, went out into the hallway, and knocked on Osbourne’s door.
