Palladio

by Jonathan Dee

  Meanwhile, Mal goes up to the fourth floor, opens the door to his bedroom, and Molly’s in there.

  After a few hours I went back upstairs; the light under the door was out. I opened the door and slipped into bed beside Elaine without waking her.

  HE HADN’T EVER met her until that day I escorted her into his office; Dex hadn’t even brought her along when he crashed that opening, back in New York, in order to introduce himself. When Mal invited Dex down to Palladio for a visit, Dex asked if it was okay to bring his girlfriend along. Mal said sure, whatever.

  And those trips to New York the past couple of weeks, those were trips to see Molly. That one I figured out for myself. He had Dex’s address from Colette, he told me, so he just concealed himself in a restaurant across the street until he knew Molly was alone and then called on his cell phone. They went out for coffee, they went out to eat, and he gave her his pitch. Finally she agreed to leave her old life behind.

  I never really got a straight answer as to how old Dex took it when she told him. I know Mal came along, which was standup of him, I have to admit – prudent, too, since Dex did always strike me as a guy with a temper. You wouldn’t send Molly alone on an errand like that.

  * * *

  SAW JEAN-CLAUDE today. He was sitting on the top step of the third-floor landing, both arms around his knees as if he were cold, drinking from a huge bottle of water. Behind him I could hear the roar of the vacuum cleaner; Rose had grown tired of waiting and had kicked him out of his room in order to clean it.

  I sat beside him for a moment. I didn’t have anywhere else I needed to be. The sunlight on the stairs and the modulating whine of the vacuum cleaner being pushed repeatedly under the bed seemed as familiar, for a moment, as boyhood, as home. I turned to Jean-Claude; he was just staring at the scrollwork on the banister beside him. I nodded toward the water bottle.

  So, I said. How’s that fridge working out for you?

  He smiled at me, but I swear to God it was the smile you give to someone when for the life of you you can’t remember who they are.

  * * *

  A FULL WEEK now since her arrival and Molly, as far as I know, still has not made an appearance downstairs. Mal says she’s self-conscious because she thinks of the place as an office, and she’s the only one there with no work to do, no job to perform. Maybe so. It occurs to me, as it may not occur to Mal, that she’s avoiding me, that she’s embarrassed by this whole turn of events and understands that it may stir up certain feelings in me. She’d get why I might even be angry.

  Of course I have no reason to assume Mal’s lying, either, when he reports that Molly is satisfied that she and I are all square now, just pals with a history. Fantasizing about how she’s avoiding me just takes me further into the vortex of the completely pathetic. At least I’m able to hide it from everyone, how humiliated I feel, how obscure are the sources of that humiliation: there are these two people I love, and now they love each other. A real disaster, right? It’s stupid. I’ll get over it.

  * * *

  A LITTLE SOMETHING to take my mind off it today, though not in a particularly pleasant way. We have more than half a million dollars committed to Palladio by an outfit called Virtech, out in Tucson; they’re trying to develop various sorts of virtual reality technology cheap enough for home consumers, and at this point they’re not much more than a gigantic R&D department. But they’re just two or three years away, from what we’re told, and if they hit first, they’re going to hit big. So today their CEO calls from out of nowhere, sounding very nervous. It turns out he just got back from some investors’ meeting at which a vocal minority, evidently not big fans of ours, wanted to know why these guys have ceded so much of their budget to their ad agency, when they don’t even have anything to advertise.

  So why was he calling, Mal wanted to know. We were sitting in his office. He has a picture of her on his desk now, a picture taken one flight upstairs, which strikes me as ridiculous and boyish though of course I’d never say anything.

  Because he wants to know what to say to the guy in response.

  Jesus Christ. These high tech operations. The CEO is probably like twenty-four, right? Where are they again – Phoenix?

  Tucson.

  Can you fly out there and calm them down?

  I frowned. Let’s wait and see, I said. I’ll go if it becomes necessary.

  Well, let’s not wait too long. Mal rubbed his neck; he’s developed a sunburn there from spending so much time in the car. Eighty-six degrees yesterday. Spring is just about over.

  * * *

  A NOTE ON my desk this morning when I arrived at five of nine. Can I talk with you? I’m too nervous to run into you in the hall where there might be other people around. I don’t know how much you’ve told anyone and I don’t want to put you in a bad position. I’ll be in the orchard tomorrow morning at ten. On that bench where we talked before.

  I folded it into my pocket and went back out to Tasha’s doorway. Was anyone in my office this morning? I said.

  Tasha had the tiniest oscillating fan I’ve ever seen, and she was trying to get it to work but it kept tipping over. Present from my father, she said. They just came back from Japan. Anyway, no, I haven’t seen anyone, but I just got here about ten minutes ago. Why?

  I turned and went back to my office, shutting the door behind me, bewildering her, I’m sure. I don’t know why Molly feels it has to wait until tomorrow; maybe she and Mal have plans today. Of course, I can’t assume that she’s keeping this meeting a secret from him either. Why would she?

  If she starts to apologize to me over this I may lose it. But I don’t particularly want her to treat it like it’s no big deal either. I don’t know what I want. So I’ll go see what she wants.

  ELAINE ASKED ME last night if I’m depressed about something. I should say that Elaine’s excellence as a girlfriend has its source in her emotional self-sufficiency. If I am upset, she doesn’t take that personally, she doesn’t assume that she must somehow be either the reason or the solution for it. Her independence lets her be utterly empathetic. She asked me this, as we sat having Brunswick stew for dinner at the big butcher-block table in the pantry (where the house staff used to eat, a century ago; it’s less stuffy than the dining room), with respectful concern – not that conspicuous overconcern that’s meant to hide the self-interest at its root.

  I slept about three hours last night.

  Elaine is very smart. I’m always drawn to these brilliant women, women I can look up to. (Rebecca was like that too.) She reads a lot, and I’m always finding these strange highbrow books beside my bed as if some set designer had snuck in there to help me look more intellectually audacious in my spare hours than I really am. She has a thin, slightly adenoidal voice, and a hyper-articulate manner – actually, manner is the wrong word there: she’s just very articulate – that she hedges with an appealing sort of fondness for self-deprecation. I sometimes wonder how she sounds when she’s talking to herself, if that makes any sense. Her latest kick is the weight room: a month or two ago, mostly at her behest, I filled one of the unused basement storage rooms with a few machines, a Gravitron, a StairMaster, a treadmill. She comes up to the room after dinner to change and she takes the back stairs to the basement. She wears a kind of halter top like a jogging bra, and a pair of Lycra bicycle pants which make her ass, not exactly small even under the best of circumstances, look enormous. No one sees her but me, usually; still, I love it that she doesn’t care.

  I don’t know what keeps us together, really. We never have any problems. We’ve never talked about getting married. Which is fine with me, and with her too I’m sure. Not every relationship has to be about the rest of your life.

  We should go away somewhere, is what I said to her at dinner. We should take a vacation together, travel somewhere. I’m tired of our always being here in the house.

  It was an unassailable suggestion, strange only because it was coming from me, and so she couldn’t exactly say no to it. Su
re, she said, let’s do that; keeping it, considerately, on that vague hypothetical plane, knowing it would probably stay there. She looked at me when she said it. I hadn’t been looking at her.

  * * *

  WELL, I CAN still be myself around Molly; I suppose that’s one lesson that might be drawn from today. I’ve spent so much time since that dinner with Mal trying to reason away this feeling I have that I’ve been wronged, telling myself that there’s no justification for it, I certainly have no claim on her, or on him for that matter – but when I saw her, sitting wide-eyed and sheepish on that iron bench in the orchard, there was no more reasoning to be done, it just all came pouring out, directed at her, which is maybe unfair, but really why should I always be the one who gets hung up on these questions of what’s fair or unfair?

  She looked like she was ready for it. Like she was expecting it, which is more than I can say for myself. Maybe she just knows me better than I know myself, even after all these years. Or maybe everyone sees through me, everywhere I go, maybe I just walk through life as no mystery to anyone but myself.

  We sat in silence, side by side, for a while. I could feel that I was breathing hard.

  Thank you for coming to see me, Molly said after a while, just to get me going, probably.

  Coming to see you? I said. You’ve moved into my house.

  She sighed. You mean a lot to me, John. A lot. I would never do anything to hurt you. You know that, right?

  This struck me as incredibly patronizing. She went on.

  In fact, I resisted it longer than I might have because I had an idea that you might be upset by it. I –

  You had an idea about that, did you?

  Molly raised her eyebrows.

  But you went ahead and did it anyway. It seems to me you’re trying to have it both ways here. What, are you supposed to be so irresistible? So impossible to get over? Is this the same speech you gave to that poor sap Dex, by the way?

  She sat back slightly, resting her shoulder blades against the iron railing, and I could see her relax: the stoic bit, the martyr bit. Her patience with me – everything she did infuriated me now.

  I mean I understand that it’s all the same to you who you fuck, so it might as well be somebody with a few million bucks and a nice house. But you couldn’t find anybody like that in Manhattan? You had to come and do it here under the same roof as me?

  There; that did it. Finally she looked at me with some anger of her own.

  Please don’t talk to me that way again, Molly said. Ever. I haven’t done anything to deserve that from you.

  No?

  No.

  So you’re serious about Mal. You’re in love with him.

  I – I have no idea whether or not I’m in love with him. It’s only been a couple of weeks. I don’t fall in love as easily as that. I mean Mal has, I don’t know, a certain magnetism. An allure. I know I don’t have to tell you that.

  From somewhere out in the direction of the road the breeze blew us the faint sound of sirens.

  Anyway, Molly said, which answer would you hate more?

  What?

  Which would you rather hear? That I’m totally in love with him, or that this is all just some sort of sugar-daddy, mercenary-fuck situation so I can live in a mansion?

  I just want to hear the truth, I said. (It sounded so lame, coming out of my mouth; I could tell just from the sound of it that it was a lie, just as surely as if I were listening to someone else.)

  You know, she said with some heat, talk about wanting to hear the truth, we sat right here a couple of weeks ago and you told me that everything was okay between us; more than okay, forgotten, and I actually believed that, I took that to heart when I was back in New York trying to decide what to do. Plus you’re involved with someone else now, with that Elaine, and you told me that was a serious thing and so did Mal.

  I wanted to say that the two things – my relationship with Elaine and Molly’s indifference toward our old feelings – had nothing to do with each other. But I was starting to sound ridiculous even in my own ears.

  Whatever, I said instead, standing up. Fine. You want my blessing or something? You got it. The two of you are perfect for each other.

  And I walked back to the house.

  It’s all happening again. The helplessness of asking these questions (Are you in love with him?) when I know the answers will torture me. The total defenselessness. Laid wide open, completely obvious, unable to protect myself against total honesty, total exposure. Well, that’s not so bad, I guess; after all, it’s nothing she hasn’t seen before. Just so no one sees it but her.

  * * *

  I DON’T ACCEPT it. I don’t. He doesn’t love her. I don’t mean he’s lying about it: I’m sure he thinks he’s in love with her, and I’m sure she thinks he is too. They can’t see themselves the way I see them; that’s the key. She’s so full of self-hatred. She holds herself so cheaply, her sense of her own worthlessness is so profound, that she’s drawn into situations she knows are bad for her; and then when they don’t work out, when things fall apart, she says to herself, See, see what you’ve done, you knew it all along, you’ve left it worse than you found it. Then it’s on to the next disaster. If someone should come along who’s able to see more clearly, more objectively, what’s so beautiful and original and valuable about her, she wouldn’t believe in it; she’d think there must be some other motive at work.

  And Mal: he sees something unique, original, unprecedented, something unbeholden to anything but itself, and he has to have it. That’s how he loves. How can I make her see him – see herself – through my eyes? Because if she could do that even for an instant – see herself as I see her – then she could at least see how she ought to be loved. She was loved, once, and somehow she’s forgotten what that’s about.

  * * *

  IN BED, ALONE, when Elaine came into the room and flipped on the light.

  Hey John, she said. You awake?

  I picked up my watch from the bedside table and squinted at it. 3.19 a.m.

  No, I said. I am not awake.

  She pulled the sheet off me. Please, she said. Please. I finished it.

  With some difficulty I lifted my head. You what?

  I need to show you something. She started to put her finger in her mouth to bite the nail, but then pulled it away again, smiling.

  I put on a T-shirt over my pajama bottoms and we went down to the ballroom. She already had two chairs pulled up to the editing machine.

  It’s a short film, just sixty seconds, opening with a shot of the tight interior of the coach section of an airplane; one flight attendant acts out the rote pantomime of what to do in case of an emergency water landing, while another, whom we don’t see, drones the familiar instruction over the intercom. A slow track down the narrow aisle shows that no one is paying the least attention. Then the track stops, and zooms slowly toward a guy in a window seat reading a book; the book, of course, is On the Road.

  As the zoom finishes, the voice-over makes a seamless, volume-up, volume-down transition between the practiced, stultifyingly cheery sound of the flight attendant and a reading of a passage from On the Road itself.

  So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast …

  The zoom moves slowly toward the tiny window beside the reading man, and as the tarmac moves we see the plane is taking off. (I have Elaine’s copy of the book open here as I write this, since it’s handy and I want to get it right.)

  … and all that road going, all those people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa by now I know the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry … the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie …

  The zoom seems to move through the window and it gazes down as the runway ends and the plane banks over the cloverleaves of crabbed
highways surrounding Newark Airport; it seems like we’re looking at one particular car but as the plane ascends (reversing the zoom itself, in a nice, dizzying way) more and more cars fill the screen, smaller and smaller, until the plane breaks through the twilit cloudline.

  … which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old …

  I let it loop four times before I looked over my shoulder at Elaine. She had her arms crossed tightly, elated and nervous. Sometimes you can live with people, sleep with them in fact, and still be surprised by their recesses. Her eyes jumped back and forth from my face to the screen; she was too worried about what I would say to be impatient. I smiled at her.

  He’s going to love it, I said.

  IT WAS IN the sex that things started getting strange, that I sensed I might not have my hands on all the ropes, so to speak, in terms of what I was feeling. I was used to all Elaine’s likes and dislikes by now. I didn’t try anything different, anything that would help me pretend she was someone else or anything along those lines. It was more perverse than that. I just remember thinking that it was like Elaine was wearing some sort of mask that night, a mask she couldn’t remove, and the mask was her – Elaine’s – own face.