Palladio

by Jonathan Dee

  They were older than I had expected; the one named Liebau is fifty-five if he’s a day. They wore tweed jackets and looked the part, as I’m sure their lawyer had the good sense to hope, of endearingly eccentric college professors.

  The judge brought in eighteen prospective jurors and announced she expected to cull from that small group the whole jury of twelve, plus two alternates, in time for lunch. Everything went without a hitch for the first eight people: what’s your name, where do you work, do you have any connection with the advertising business, a few other questions, and done. Seven of them were empaneled on the spot, and the eighth was excused by the judge on the grounds, as he announced with near-belligerence, that he had irritable bowel syndrome.

  The woman in the gallery I assumed was the reporter had her pen between her teeth. Across the aisle from me a man who looked like he could have been Liebau’s younger, more successful brother had his knees up against the bench in front of him and his mouth open, sound asleep.

  Then the ninth citizen questioned, a guy wearing jeans with a crease ironed into them, who looked to be about forty and said he was a dog obedience trainer, said something about how he vaguely remembered having heard of this case on the local news, but he hadn’t formed an opinion about it; in a spirit of cooperation he volunteered that he hadn’t paid much attention at the time and couldn’t recall any of the details. Jack Gradison, the second defendant, scribbled a note on a legal pad and pushed it toward Farber, who was doing the questioning from his seat. The lawyer ignored it and asked the juror how long he had lived in the Spokane area.

  All my life, the dog trainer said.

  Gradison tapped loudly on the pad with his index finger. Calmly, as if he just needed a stretch, Farber stood up and walked away from him, toward the jury box, buttoning his jacket as he went.

  Mr Pope, do you have any relatives who –

  Ask him, Gradison said. Every face in the room turned toward him. Farber, though he had been stopped mid-question, kept his cool. After a considered pause he turned to the judge and said, Your honor, may I have a moment to –

  Ask him! Gradison yelled.

  The judge’s first response was to put on, with a matronly sort of sternness, a pair of glasses. Mr Gradison, she said, I’m afraid I’ll have to warn you not –

  Turn off your TV! Gradison shouted at the jury box. Turn it off!

  You might have thought Farber would go over at this point and put a hand on his client’s shoulder or something; but for reasons best known to himself, the lawyer stayed where he was, leaning with one elbow on the jury box, watching this meltdown with an air of worldly disappointment. Everyone who had been dozing a minute before in the small, overlit courtroom – the handful of spectators, the locals called to jury duty, even the fat old bailiff who was still seated but now had his hand on his gun – had his head up, alert, like a hound. Something out of the ordinary was happening.

  Wake up! Gradison shouted at the jury, red in the face. Wake up! Death is coming for us all! Take responsibility for your own life, your own thoughts! Don’t let them tell you what’s beautiful! Snap out of it! Take a look at the work you’re doing!

  I was surprised they let him go on in this vein for as long as they did, but when he climbed up on top of the defense table, that was the end of that. The bailiff spoke into a walkie-talkie and almost instantly three guards banged through the door behind me. They pulled the middle-aged man on to the floor and cuffed his hands behind his back, as he continued to shout. One of them finally put his hand over Gradison’s mouth. At some point I looked at the defense table and saw the other defendant, Liebau, still in his chair. He was laughing.

  The judge called the lawyers into chambers and emerged about two minutes later to announce that all jurors present, even those already questioned and empaneled, were hereby excused. The case was continued until the following Tuesday, when jury selection would start all over again, this time with Mr Gradison in restraints, if necessary.

  The next morning I went down to the hotel lobby and borrowed from the desk clerk his copy of that day’s Spokane paper. A three-paragraph story was buried on page A7. Outburst Postpones Ad Vandals’ Trial. I went back upstairs, sat on my bed with the laptop, and searched the various wire-service sites on the net for an hour: nothing. So I checked out and went to the airport. I took the puddle-jumper to San Francisco and the red-eye from there to Washington. It was nearly two o’clock by the time I got back to Palladio.

  Mal’s not in, Colette called out her door as I passed.

  No? Where is he?

  New York.

  What for?

  Some kind of personal business. He said to expect him back tomorrow.

  A WORD ABOUT process. Companies don’t subsidize any work of art directly; they subsidize the place itself, on a yearly or biyearly contract, and in return they are permitted, within very strict guidelines, to associate themselves with the existence of the art that’s produced here. No company’s name may appear on or in any work. Before or after the work, separate from it somehow, as in film credits or a book cover or a gallery program, is technically okay, but frankly even the clients themselves are starting to view this desire as stodgy, old-guard: far hipper to leave their name off it entirely.

  As for the marriage of a particular work with a particular patron, Mal still handles most of that; his sense of appropriateness in these things is keen, and while some clients ask more questions than others, everyone trusts his judgment. Occasionally, a kind of buzz will arise about one of the artists here, and when that happens people will naturally start asking specifically for him or her. But the artists are on their own timetable; if someone happens to be waiting for something, Mal and I make sure that the artist never knows about it. The client will wait, or, if they feel they can’t wait, we’ll provide them with something else.

  Nobody’s saying it’s a perfect system, of course, and sometimes we do get a complaint. Today a nervous young woman from Oracle called me, all in a snit about Milo. I should say that one of Mal’s great attributes is how undogmatic he is. (Well, now that I think of it, he can be quite dogmatic: it’s just that he reverses field easily, in terms of dogma, if that’s what circumstances dictate.) So that when Milo’s own aesthetic started moving more in the direction of performance art – to close the gap, as he says, the tragic gap, between his own person and his art – Mal went right along with that, even though the sorts of events Jean-Claude began mounting more or less contravened Mal’s stand on the whole notion of the technological, the reproducible, as the foundation of popular art.

  (Truth be told, I think Mal’s hand was forced to some degree on that one. In January the Whitney is giving Milo his own one-man, mid-career retrospective, Charles Saatchi has started acquiring some of his work – his star is rising at least as fast as Palladio’s own within the art world, and I don’t know that Mal has much of a choice but to make philosophical room for whatever Jean-Claude feels he needs to do. Not that there’s any risk of our losing him. But you just don’t want even the appearance of turmoil, of some kind of aesthetic conflict, to get into the air where it might start affecting future commissions.)

  So I’m looking at this prospectus, the Oracle woman says to me, and I see that this Milo intends to go sit on some mesa, in, in—

  New Mexico, I said.

  New Mexico, and cut himself? And execute a painting with his blood?

  Jean-Claude’s been doing this for years, I said. And it’s not like he invented it. Look at Andres Serrano, look at –

  It’s not the medium that’s the problem, she said; she really did have a naturally unpleasant, nasal way of speaking. It’s that he specifies no reproductions of the finished work?

  That’s right, I said, looking through papers on my desk for something to refresh my memory about all this. No reproductions, no pictures of the blood, but the blood itself.

  Well, that’s a problem for us. I know how well-respected he is, but I have to justify to people here how we�
�re spending this kind of money for something that will ultimately hang in a gallery to be seen by a total of what, maybe a couple hundred people?

  You want me to talk to him? I said. Because I will, but I can tell you right now that when Jean-Claude gets hold of an idea, he generally—

  Actually, the Oracle woman said, what I wanted to ask, and it’s not at all personal, I know you’ll understand that, but I wanted to ask if you would get Mal to talk to him.

  I said I would, and we hung up. It was a more delicate matter than she supposed. Because Mal’s likely reaction, I thought, would be to fly into a rage about it and cancel the Oracle account altogether, give them their money back, which would not be a great development. Not because of the money. It would mean that a lot of great art we already have in the pipeline with those guys would lose its chance to be seen and heard.

  So I buzzed Colette and asked if Mal was back from New York yet. I believe so, was her answer. I walked upstairs slowly, rehearsing how I would present this to him. His door was ajar, so I gave a polite warning knock and went right in.

  Mal was there, all right, and next to him was Molly; they were there together, sitting in the window seat behind his desk. They were not looking out the window. I think I can be forgiven for staring, because I had to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. When they became aware of me they turned, startled, and took their hands off of each other.

  I could feel my own mouth working, but no sound came out.

  John, Mal said solemnly. Would you give us a minute or two, please?

  Of course, I said. I backed out and shut the door. It was what I wanted, too, at that moment. It’s what I want now. Just to erase the sight.

  * * *

  MAL SENT WORD through Tasha that I was to meet him for dinner at Il Cantinori at 8 p.m. Actually, his message, which Tasha read to me off her steno pad while leaning in my doorway, was more politely worded than that – he asked if I was free to join him – but after all I work for the man, my livelihood is totally dependent on him: when he sends a summons like that, am I going to say no?

  I drove there alone, top down, and only on the way did it occur to me to wonder if he had asked Molly along to this dinner as well. He hadn’t; another thing, though, which might have dawned on me but didn’t, was that this was Monday, the one night of the week when Il Cantinori is usually closed. Mal had them open it up just for us. Palladio spent upwards of ten thousand dollars there last year, so I guess he feels entitled to the occasional favor. We were the only two people in there. One waiter and one busboy stood impassively in the shadows against the wall of the empty restaurant, while the two of us ate at a round table in the center of the floor.

  It seems odd, would be a polite way to put it, that he would want to confide in me of all people about this – ask me for advice, even. Truth be told, I came there half expecting he had made this date with me in order to apologize, or, what would have been more horrifying, to ask for my blessing. But no. Eating ravenously, talking more loudly than I’m sure he realized, he just needed to tell the story to someone; and Mal doesn’t have a whole lot of people in his life he can talk to, on a personal level, outside of me, and now, I guess, her.

  First off, he said, I know about you two. I know you have a history. Molly’s told me all about it, that you guys were very serious at one time, and I guess things ended badly. It’s a pretty amazing coincidence, even though in another way it just bears out what I’ve known all along, that you and I are so on the same wavelength that we could even fall for the same woman. I don’t know why you felt you couldn’t tell me about it back when Molly was first down here, but that’s another conversation, and anyway, in retrospect I’m kind of glad I didn’t know.

  Mal drained his wine glass; the waiter was beside us before he had even placed it back on the table.

  It’s like something you read about, he said sheepishly, shaking his head; he wasn’t talking about me anymore. That first day she walked into my office, we hardly exchanged a word, but I just knew, I knew. I was completely transformed. I fell in love with her on the spot. There was this instant connection. Then you suggested inviting them to stay in the house; it was all I could do to keep a straight face, because it’s exactly what I was hoping for, but I didn’t know how to suggest it myself.

  So I spent as much time as I could, that whole week or two, in Molly’s presence, but of course that meant Dex was always there too. I kept looking for some kind of signal from her, and I never got one, but then I’d think, well, of course not, how much of a signal is she going to give me with her boyfriend two feet away? So finally there was that one afternoon, the day before they left; I called downstairs to ask for you and Tasha told me you were in with Dex.

  So I dropped what I was doing and went downstairs, and I found her in the parlor, on the window seat, just looking out toward the road. I closed the door and I just unloaded, I said it all. I told her I was madly in love with her. I told her that she was unlike any other woman I’d ever met in my life, from the moment I met her I suddenly had that feeling of knowing just what I wanted, and that I was sorry if all this put her in an awkward position but I knew if I let her go without declaring myself I’d regret it the rest of my life. It just poured out of me. Usually I have such trouble saying what’s in my heart. I don’t know where it all came from this time.

  He exhaled nervously, reliving it. The waiter impassively poured more wine and withdrew again from earshot.

  She didn’t say anything; she just turned redder and redder and stared at me. I felt bad for having put her on the spot like that, but on the other hand it was a terrible position for me to be in too, you know? Totally vulnerable. Wide open. I was dying, but I remember thinking, at least she’s not turning away. So then I hear these footsteps on the stairs behind me and it’s Tasha, coming to tell me that you need to see me about something.

  Mal speared and ate the zucchini flower, the last thing on his plate. He wasn’t even looking at me anymore, he was so lost in the drama of it all. I wouldn’t mind knowing, actually, what I looked like just at that moment.

  You know what? he said, sitting back. I think I’ve figured out what it is about her that’s so … inspiring. Tell me if this sounds right to you. She’s not uncomfortable with silence. If she has nothing to say then she doesn’t say anything. In fact, now that I think about it, she goes further than that: she makes these silences. She asks you something, you answer her, and then suddenly there’s just this silence. There’s something about it that’s intolerable, really, in terms of how self-conscious it makes you: it makes you want to fill it up. And so you go on to give more of an answer than you thought you wanted to, and inevitably that’s where you say your best stuff, you know? She brings it out of you.

  I nodded, I suppose, but if I had crossed my eyes and stuck my tongue out at him I doubt it would have changed the course of the conversation. He was talking just to talk, just to get it out. It didn’t have to be me there. I could have been anyone.

  I wonder if she even knows she’s doing that, Mal said. So anyway, I was grateful, really, to be interrupted there in the parlor, because the tension was just too great. And then I had to hear about this whole episode with Dex and Fiona. I knew he had to go after that. I’d known it for a while, I suppose, but I wouldn’t act on it because I wanted Molly around. If only there were some way to keep her here and get rid of him: that’s what I was thinking. But I couldn’t figure out how to make it happen. And anyway, she hadn’t said anything! She hadn’t given me anything to go by. Of course, she hadn’t said no either. But I got to thinking that maybe what I was doing was just too reckless, or maybe it was some sort of midlife crisis starting to surface. I mean I barely knew this woman at all, and here I was ready to sacrifice everything. So I let them go back to New York. But that just made it worse. I thought about her every second. I went to Bilbao and just lay in my room and thought about her. Finally I decided to go back home via New York. I had to do a little detective work. But I found her.<
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  He wiped his mouth. He poured out the rest of the wine himself; from the shadows the waiter raised his eyebrows to ask if we wanted another bottle, and Mal shook his head no. What is it about her? he said. You know what? You’re the only one in the world I can have this conversation with. Literally. Except Dex, I suppose, but that’s not awfully likely. But what is it? She’s a beautiful woman, but there’s something about her beauty, something elusive, something withheld from you that you want to get hold of. Not having hold of it makes you crazy. I tell you, most women you meet, most people you meet, you feel like inside the first hour you’ve learned everything about them there is to know. But Molly, there’s so much inside her, so much you have to work to get at. Innocence is the wrong word, it’s definitely the wrong word. It’s purity. It’s an unconsciousness of being observed. Like – like the anti-Heisenberg; she’s not changed by being observed. Right? Like a work of art. In fact I keep wanting to say Mona Lisa, but of course that’s a terrible cliché.

  I thought if I stayed silent long enough myself, the momentum of his excitement would just carry him past this pause and he’d start talking again. But he waited, and stared at me, until finally lines of concern appeared on his forehead.

  Listen, he said. You’re being honest with me, right? That you’re okay with this? Because both Molly and I have nothing but –

  We’re fine, I said hurriedly. She and I are all square. It’s ancient history anyway, and anything that was left to put to rest about the way it ended, we put that to rest. The two of you, well, it’s a huge surprise, obviously, but I’m very happy for both of you.

  * * *

  WE DROVE, EACH in his own car, back to the mansion. Mal, who enjoys driving like a lunatic even when he’s not as keyed up as he was tonight, beat me there by several minutes and was already inside when I pulled up behind the kitchen. From the third-floor landing I could see light escaping from under my door – Elaine was back from New York. I stood motionless for a few seconds, looking at that sliver of light; then I turned and went back downstairs. I went to the pantry and got myself a beer, and I drank it as I wandered around the darkened first floor, down to the empty basement, dark and silent except for some indeterminate noises coming from behind Milo’s studio door. It wasn’t that I was too upset to face Elaine, or anybody else; it’s just that sometimes when you have your mind on something, you’d rather be alone than have to pretend that your mind’s on anything else. I didn’t want to have to act interested in how anyone else’s day had gone. So I killed some time.