Palladio

by Jonathan Dee

  It’s lovely, she said.

  Beats the hell out of the Courtyard Marriott, Dex said, maybe a little anxious that Molly’s tone wasn’t sufficiently polite.

  So you guys can of course just do what you want today, take it easy, be our guests; but listen, Dex, if you’re interested, there’s someone here named Elaine Sizemore who’s familiar with your work and she wondered if you had a few minutes this morning to give her some help with a film project she’s working on.

  Film project? Dex said, wiping his lips. She’s a director?

  She’s not, that’s the thing. She’s a scriptwriter. So there’s a visual element she’s having trouble with in this short film she’s doing.

  A short film, Dex said. So you mean a commercial.

  Well, that’s not a distinction we make around here. It’s something she dreamed up herself, it hasn’t been commissioned by anyone, it has no commercial content.

  He sighed. Yeah, okay, he said. All right. Why not. I’d love to get a look at the way things work around here.

  That’s terrific. And Molly, I was thinking that would also give us a little while to catch up. I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to.

  Silence. Rose brought my latte from the kitchen in a mug with a lid on it. I stood to go.

  You guys went to college together, Dex said, is that right?

  That’s right. So Molly, that sounds good to you? In maybe an hour or so?

  She looked at me warily. Not much fear left in those startling blue eyes now: just resignation, a kind of dignified resignation, like you’d show your executioner. Sounds good, she said.

  Great. I’ll come find you.

  ONCE, YEARS AGO, in Manhattan, I thought I saw her. I was with Rebecca, and we were walking across Spring Street after the movies, on our way to Fanelli’s for a beer before heading back to her apartment. Through the windows of the bookstore I saw the back of someone’s head. Her hair, her build. I didn’t stop. I made sure we were all the way to Fanelli’s and had already ordered.

  Oh my God. My wallet is gone.

  You’re kidding me, Rebecca said.

  I bet it fell out when I was sitting in the theater. I had my feet up on the seat in front. Listen, you stay here, I’ll run back and look.

  It’s okay, I don’t need –

  No, it’ll just be a minute; and I ran out the door. It’s like the more insane you get, the more instinctively crafty your lies become. At the bookstore, panting, I went through every aisle, and unbelievably, she was still there: head down, behind the curtain of hair, sitting cross-legged on the floor between the shelves with a William Burroughs novel. She looked up at me.

  It wasn’t Molly. Still, strange to think that somewhere in the world there walked a woman who had that sort of power over me.

  DEX CAME TO my office promptly an hour later. I escorted him downstairs to the parlor, where Elaine stood waiting by the window, and I shut the door behind me again as the two of them were shaking hands. I went looking for Molly, in the dining room, in the ballroom, in the basement, upstairs in her and Dex’s bedroom. She wasn’t there.

  Quietly I unlatched the front door and stood on the lawn, making sure I couldn’t be seen from the parlor windows. I stared up the driveway, and off toward the mountains. Finally I thought to run around to the back entrance to see if their car was still parked there: it was.

  So I walked into the orchard, and that’s where I found her, sitting on one of the iron benches. She had cleared a spot to sit, but it was no use, really – spring is here; more white blossoms had already fallen in her hair as she sat there. I try now to imagine seeing her as if for the first time, and I can’t, but still, there’s no getting around the fact that she’s a beautiful woman, more so, actually, than she was as a twenty-year-old. I felt a twinge of the same inappropriate sort of pride I used to feel when I’d be out with her, or even alone with her: that a woman such as this would go out with me. That not unpleasant feeling of being watched, even when it was just the two of us.

  I tried to slow my movements.

  You might have left word where you were, I said, sitting beside her. Or were you hiding from me?

  She shook her head. If we’re going to talk, I thought we might do it somewhere where people aren’t walking through the room every two minutes.

  Well, here we are, I said. I brushed some blossoms off my shoulder.

  You engineered all this, didn’t you? she said.

  All what?

  You knew where I was. You brought us down here.

  I was taken aback that she might have considered this. Absolutely not, I said. You saw my face when you walked in, right? I’m not that good an actor. The only thing I engineered was inviting you to leave the motel and stay with us. You said yes. Hardly anything sinister about it.

  She held her arms crossed tightly in front of her, hands clasping her elbows.

  I guess, I said (the edge on my sense of martyrdom dulling already, at the sight of her unhappiness), that I just couldn’t accept that after everything that happened, that you could run into me somewhere … I mean, I know it was a long time ago. But that’s all the more reason. Probably you hoped you’d never see me again. But you did see me. And you acted like you didn’t. You would have turned right around and left again. I can’t understand that.

  Had you been hoping to see me? she said.

  Sorry?

  She looked down. All these years. Did you ever want to see me again?

  I’d stopped thinking about it, I said. There was a while there. I mean, I actually flew out to Ulster to look for you. You knew that, right?

  Her head sank lower, so that the hair – that reddish-brown hair that I’d once held in my hands; each memory was like a little pinprick now – curtained her face entirely.

  I went to your house, I said. I’m amazed that you seem not to know this. I spent the night. I drove to the hospital to bring your father home. He didn’t know who the hell I was. He was waiting there for you.

  Stop it.

  Why are you scared of me? I said.

  What is it you want? Molly said. She turned in her seat so that her leg was folded on the bench between us, and laid her hand against the side of my face, and I’m sure I jumped; I was the one who was scared now. What, an apology? What would be a proper apology, for what I did to you? If I killed myself, maybe? Of course I’m scared of you! You’re my nightmare! In my whole life that was the cruelest, most selfish thing I’ve ever done. Running away from you like that. Do you think I’ve forgotten any of it? And so now it’s all come back. Well, I deserve it. You’re right. It was cowardly to run. I deserve what I get. You must hate me.

  Molly, I said, pulling my head back. Molly. Settle down. Keep your voice down.

  Her eyes were shining now, but mostly she just looked dull, defeated. She let me put my arm around her. I don’t know what I’d imagined would be the outcome of this little meeting, but by now I had just about lost my taste for it; the stakes seemed too high. I wanted some remorse but I didn’t want her in pain like this. I tried to reassure her, it felt like an instinct to do so; at the same time, I couldn’t help but push on a little bit, gently, because I found there were still a few things I wouldn’t mind knowing.

  When you would tell me you were in love with me, I said. Were you lying?

  No.

  Then I … I don’t get it. I don’t understand what happened. What do you mean by selfish?

  She sat up a little straighter, composing herself, and slid out from under my arm. You saw my parents? she said, wiping her eyes.

  I did.

  She shook her head. I couldn’t watch them, she said. They’re monsters. All those years of living together turned them into monsters. You can’t join yourself to another person like that.

  I would have married you then, I said.

  I know that! I couldn’t … I might have said yes. I was getting to the point where I’d lost all confidence in my ability not to say yes. I was losing myself to you because
your, I don’t know, your talent for intimacy was so great. Think where you and I would be right now. Think what would have happened to us. I was barely twenty years old. It would have destroyed us.

  Is that what you thought? I said. You thought I wanted to destroy you? I wanted to save you. You seemed so damaged. I wanted to make the space that would let you just be who you are. The problem isn’t that love would have destroyed you. The problem is that you don’t see yourself as someone worthy of being loved. So you throw yourself away.

  She raised her head and blinked away the last remaining tears. She stared into the branches for a long time, as the breeze came along every few seconds and slowly stripped them. Then, without looking at me, she told me the story of our unborn child.

  * * *

  ALL THOSE YEARS, I’d been wondering what I’d done. She knew what she’d done. She was afraid of me because I was the only one in a position to forgive her. If I didn’t quite understand why she’d done it, well, I don’t suppose it was important that I understood. Of course I forgave her.

  I don’t know how long we were in the orchard; but when we came out, I know I felt that there was nothing left unsaid. It was upsetting, but it was purgative, and though I haven’t exactly spent the last ten years pining for closure, still, it was nice to get it so unexpectedly. That was probably the greatest heartbreak of my life, Molly abandoning me like that. But I was twenty-two, she was twenty: it’s the age of heartbreak.

  We went into the house the back way, and in the kitchen we hugged for a long time before she went back up to her bedroom to wash her face and I returned to my office to see what calls I’d missed. I walked in and there was Elaine, sitting across from my unoccupied desk, her mouth set in a tight line.

  Well, that was a fucking waste of time, she said. Where have you been, anyway?

  DEX, ACCORDING TO Elaine, was no help at all. He flat out refused to go to New York and do the filming for her; she made it clear he’d be very well compensated for it, but he said the money wasn’t an issue. Then, as much as she tried to keep him on the topic, he kept asking her biographical questions, what had she done before this, what sort of writing had she always dreamed of doing, how did Mal recruit her, etc. He wanted to know how much control Mal exercised over her work, over everyone’s work; he wanted her to divulge the identity of the client who was paying for the production of this so-called short film she was working on. When she answered him – Mal doesn’t control content; there was no client – he said he didn’t believe her.

  I placated her by promising we’d spend the next morning on the phone lining up a crew to get her airplane shot for her. Then I went off to find Dex, really just to apologize to him for any misunderstanding. Colette told me Mal had taken him out in the Triumph for a drive to see James Madison’s house; Molly, too.

  * * *

  IT MIGHT SEEM odd that when Palladio is as busy as it’s ever been, at the apex of its influence and success, its leader feels free to go off on these joyrides through the Virginia countryside. Mal’s traveled a lot this spring, too, sometimes on a kind of quasi-official business (he’s now on the board of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, for instance), sometimes just for the hell of it. He bought a house in Umbria, and he’s been over there twice to supervise its renovation. He’s doing less and less work these days, it’s true; but that’s all by design, a design he discusses only with me.

  Not that he lacks for things to do, or at least for opportunities. For a period in the aftermath of that speech at NYU, half my day was spent sifting through and then politely rejecting all the offers that came his way. My sense of it is that there’s a kind of ego conflict going on within Mal right now. He’s well known, on a national, maybe even an international, scale, and he gets a lot of what’s generally classified as star treatment. People ask for his autograph; total strangers show up on the Palladio grounds to take his picture or to try to talk to him or put in his hands something they’re working on. Magazines arrive in the mail with articles devoted to him, some of them on a scholarly level, some treating him as just another element of the pop-culture firmament, wondering who he’s dating (nobody, is the answer to that one), reprinting his high school yearbook photo.

  Having that kind of talk in your ear, I don’t care who you are, has to have an effect. There’s a part of Mal that sees this space being cleared for him, this space in the national psyche, and he wants to take his rightful place in it. He wants to respond, though up until now he hasn’t, whenever some reporter calls up to ask for a quote on the awarding of the Pritzker Prize or the role of propaganda in Castro’s Cuba or how he would have advised Bill Gates before his testimony on Capitol Hill.

  But the true Mal, to me, is the facilitator, the one who stays behind the scenes. Real power is secure enough not to feel this constant need to show itself. I can understand that kind of feeling, actually. He doesn’t want the focus on himself. It’s counterproductive. It goes beyond simple modesty; I wouldn’t call Mal a modest man, exactly. He wants praise, but he wants it for his work, and so, in order to prevent people from making the reductive mistake of worshiping him, he hides himself from view. That’s one reason why he has me.

  Anyway, in a nutshell, what he tells me sometimes is that his greatest achievement when all is said and done will be his own obsolescence – the withering away of the state, he calls it, which I subsequently learned is a phrase from the Communist Manifesto. In the early days, he had to ride the artists constantly, try all kinds of tricks to get them thinking out of the box, to break down the culturally imposed barriers between their own ways of thinking (about art, about advertising, about money, about form, about originality) and his vision of the way things might be, ought to be done. But once they get it – once they understand, and internalize, that new way of thinking – they don’t need him anymore. The more they work, the more they establish a tradition, one from which the next generation of artists will spring. Mal is laboring to make himself disappear. If he also seems ambivalent about this idea at times, I think that’s understandable.

  * * *

  MAYBE I HAD an original agenda in asking Dex and Molly into the house for a few days; but if so, Dex certainly had his own in accepting, and he hasn’t lost sight of it. He goes right around me, it seems, and through Colette to get to Mal, figuring, I suppose, that all he needs is enough time in which to ingratiate himself before Mal will relent and allow himself and all of Palladio to become the subject of some hip indie nonfiction film.

  In one respect he’s been successful: Mal seems infatuated with him and with Molly, to the point where the three of them have spent much of the last few days together. Mal took them out to Monticello, he took them out to Il Cantinori and also to his favorite barbecue place out on Route 20; he arranged for a screening of Throw Down in the ballroom and of the Matthew Barney Cremaster films; he’s even had them up to the sanctum sanctorum, Mal’s own living quarters on the fourth floor of the east wing, where usually only I’m invited – and even then only in the little dining alcove, never in his bedroom at the opposite end of the hall. (Not that Mal makes me feel unwelcome – just out of respect for his privacy; besides, I’d have no reason to be in there anyway.) Of course there were times during the day when Mal was unavailable to them for one reason or another, and during those periods I’d sometimes see Dex just strolling through the ground floor, down to the basement, peeking into the different rooms, trying, somewhat insensitively I thought, to engage the artists in conversation about what they were working on, what they thought about Palladio itself.

  Then today Fiona came to see me in my office. She’d seen Throw Down the previous night, by herself in the ballroom, and she was powerfully impressed. She’d been thinking recently about a video installation, a sort of after-Warhol piece in which she’d be filmed while sleeping, only every time she fell asleep, she wanted the person doing the filming to wake her up again, by poking her, making a loud noise, whatever was necessary. She envisioned this going on for ten or twelve hours; she
wanted a record of her reactions. This is actually a somewhat chaste-sounding project for Fiona, who’s about five feet tall, a voluptuous and deadly serious young woman whose work usually involves a strong, some would say discomfiting, element of sexuality. Would Dex, she wondered, be interested in collaborating on it with her?

  Let’s find out, I told her. I looked around for him or for Molly but they were out somewhere. So I wrote Dex a note and slipped it under the door to their third-floor bedroom.

  He turned up in my office a few hours later. We talked idly about the virtues and the downsides, for an artist, of living in New York, while my assistant Tasha went downstairs to round up Fiona. When everyone was seated, Tasha left and closed the door behind her.

  Fiona started by complimenting him effusively on his one film, a ritual Dex made no effort to hurry to a close. Then, leaning forward in her chair, she described for him the project she had in mind. It was just as she had described it for me with the exception of the added detail that she’d be sleeping naked. She knows how to sell herself, that’s for sure.

  So I’d love it if you’d be my partner in this, Fiona said. Are you interested?

  No, Dex said tonelessly, as if she’d asked him if he’d mind if she opened the window.

  She was brought up short. No? she said. I mean, maybe I didn’t make it clear enough that I don’t intend for this just to be a camera on a tripod; there’s lots of room, hours of room, for all kinds of creative approaches to shooting the bedroom, the bed, my body.

  Sorry, no, Dex said again. I’m not interested.

  I felt a little awkward about having brokered this meeting, which seemed on its way to engendering some bad feeling.

  Does it have to be video? I said. Because maybe Dex is partial to film, or hasn’t done a lot of work in –