by Jonathan Dee
Return to what, after all? They couldn’t conduct business out of hotel rooms for long, if they expected potential clients to take them seriously. Two weeks went by before they moved their business operations to an office borrowed from their lawyer, a silver-haired Southern gentleman who looked at least a decade younger than his seventy-three years and who owned the two-story office building in which he practiced, in the commercial section of downtown Charlottesville. The move made sense, since most of what was left of Palladio was a matter for everybody’s lawyers to pick through anyway. In the flurry of local and then national interest in the half-sinister, half-absurd circumstances of Milo’s self-immolation, the Charlottesville DA had even announced he was opening a criminal investigation, but Shays laughed this off, both publicly and privately, and he was right. On the other hand, lawsuits filed by clients seeking refunds (even when the work they’d commissioned had already been completed and displayed – they claimed all the work that had ever emanated from Palladio, except for Milo’s, was tainted and devalued now), by a group of former employees claiming emotional distress, and by the Virginia State Historical Commission were all harder to ignore.
John sat at a desk six feet from Mal’s, without much to do, having been decorously told by Shays that the best help he could provide right now, in light of all the pending lawsuits, was not to say anything at any time to anybody. Still, he did have a particular responsibility. Several times a day Mal would ask him if there was any word yet from, or about, Molly. There was not. As far as taking a more active approach to finding her, the few things they could think to try had all been tried in the first day or two: the Virginia state police had no luck locating the car; and if she had any credit cards there was no record of her using them anywhere. Nervously, John had called Dex in New York, who affirmed that he had had no contact at all with Molly, though if he did he would welcome the opportunity to hang up on her or slam the door in her face, and by the way John and Mal deserved what they had gotten and should go fuck themselves. Later that same day, John dialed the number of Molly’s parents’ home in upstate New York. It rang and rang, but no one answered.
He couldn’t know whether Molly had taken his advice to heart and fled the place, coincidentally on the day it burned down; or whether she had simply been out on an errand that day, returned to find the house in flames, and taken this as some sort of opportunity or directive to move on; or, as seemed most likely to him, whether there was some other explanation entirely for her disappearance, one that he wasn’t equipped to imagine. John’s most persistent worry, though, was that it would occur to his boss, in a moment of idleness, to ask about what might have preceded that disappearance, if John had seen Molly, spoken to her, heard her say anything significant in the days just before the fire, when Mal was still in Italy. But he never asked. As with the lawsuits, which he made no effort at all to dispute but only to dispose of, Mal made a point of refusing to dwell on the recent past, because his current mindset was all about the future.
Bulldozers came and razed the walls of Palladio, and with them, so it seemed, went the general air of secrecy that had surrounded the place; anonymously sourced news accounts of its mysterious inner dynamics, of Milo and Mal Osbourne and the woman whose arrival in the mansion seemed to prefigure its destruction, went into their customary upward spiral. Milo’s ambiguous legacy proved suggestive to every sort of extreme opinion. To some, the whole episode only cemented Mal’s own genuinely messianic status. Then there were those who concluded Milo had been nothing but a sort of double agent all along, bent on destroying the house of Osbourne from within, all for the cause of integrity in art, even at the cost of his own life. And many, to be sure, did not consider Milo an artist at all, but simply a young man suffering from a mental illness, whose suicidal cries for help were turned to account in a Barnumesque fashion by cynics interested only in money.
And then in September, John, too, left Virginia, under sad circumstances. His mother died of a swift and unprecedented heart attack, on her knees in the flower garden behind her condo. Mal, who despite their physical proximity had lately seemed quite withdrawn, frowned at this news but remembered to offer John his condolences. John went out to the parking lot behind Shays’s office, put on his sunglasses, and drove to South Carolina to help his stepfather, Buzz, make arrangements.
* MESSAGE *
You have to appreciate authenticity in all its forms.
I will peer around corners.
I will see past clouds.
I will get to the source.
“Isn’t it good to believe in something?” he asks the crowd as he strides on to the stage after an introductory hymn from the choir, his eyes bugging, teeth gleaming, blond-tipped hair holding fast in its swept-up place. “Isn’t it bizarre to believe in something?”
But there’s a twist. The artist is not Garry Gross, who took the picture, but Richard Prince, who took a picture of the picture and then
THE RIGHT RELATIONSHIP IS EVERYTHING
*
THE NANNY CALLED in sick, which was a huge inconvenience; it would shorten Roman’s hours at work, and Jo’s, and certain things they had come to take for granted they didn’t need to know, like what time Little Bear was on, they would now have to figure out for themselves. But at least you could be sure, when the nanny said she was sick, that she wasn’t faking. This was only the third time, and she’d been with them five years. You couldn’t get too angry about it.
“Do we still have yesterday’s Times?” Roman asked his wife. They were back to back in the small kitchen, preparing the two different breakfasts for the kids.
“I took the papers down to the basement last night,” Jo said. “Sorry, I thought you were done with them. Why, was there something in there—”
“That’s okay. I didn’t … somebody emailed me about it just this morning. I’ll go look for them.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
After breakfast Roman took the baby on his shoulder and went down to the garbage room in the basement. There were roaches everywhere. This is no place to raise children, Roman thought. He felt Isaac’s tiny chin lift up off his shoulder blade and could picture his son’s goggle-eyed expression as he strained to look around. One new place was as amazing as another to him.
Roman looked through the pile of recyclable paper, vaguely disgusting even though it was only a day old, until he found the New York Times with the little “Joanna Gagliardi” sticker on it. He wiped it on his leg and went back upstairs.
They agreed to split the day – he’d go into the office in the morning while Jo, who had a fundraising job at Columbia University, stayed home with Isaac; Roman would then pick Evgenia up from school at one o’clock (it was Friday, a half day for her, just to make things even less convenient) and take over at home for the rest of the afternoon so Jo could get up to Columbia and at least maybe return a few phone calls. Tag-team, she called it, when these situations came up. Which was quite often: late nights in the office, weekends, school vacations, illnesses. Their marriage had evolved, over the years, into a series of these trivial, unacrimonious negotiations over time, like labor disputes really, between two old, old adversaries who knew each other so well that they weren’t really adversaries anymore.
He walked Evvie to school; she kept her hands stuffed in her pockets and her chin tilted up slightly, just like her father. She walked without seeming to feel the burden of the enormous yellow backpack she carried. It was as if she expected to be gone for days, sleeping outdoors. All her secrets were in there. The two of them didn’t exchange a word. They hadn’t argued, and Roman knew she loved him possessively; she was just getting to that age, that’s all, she had her own thoughts and didn’t need to have those thoughts validated for her by sharing them with an adult. That age came shockingly early, like everything else, for kids who grew up in New York. For just a moment the scene before his eyes was displaced by a premonition of the handful she would surely be when she was
fifteen.
“Goodbye, sweetheart,” he said to her outside the classroom. She allowed him to help her get free of the backpack, in order to take her jacket off.
“Is Maria going to die?”
So that’s what all the silence had been about. “No, honey. Of course not. Maria is as healthy as a horse, believe me. She just has a cold, like everybody gets. I’m sure she’ll be back and feeling fine Monday morning. You can do a get-well picture for her if you want.”
On the subway he read yesterday’s Times article. There wasn’t too much in it he hadn’t learned yesterday, around the office, on the phone, on the Internet, in the Post. John Wheelwright, his old partner, had invited a group of corporate clients and art-world poobahs to watch one of his employees commit ritual suicide under the rubric of performance art. In taking himself out, this Milo character had taken out the whole storied antebellum building as well, though there was some question – some fierce debate, actually, among pundits, lawyers, and art critics – as to whether or not this had been a planned part of Milo’s “piece” or an unfortunate and unintended consequence of it. Mal Osbourne had been conveniently out of the country when it happened. At least one of his newly disenfranchised employees was trying to connect all this to Osbourne’s girlfriend, some younger woman he apparently kept stashed mysteriously in the attic like Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, and though this seemed even to Roman like a bit of a stretch, the tabloid press was howling in search of her – unsuccessfully thus far, for she seemed, on the very day of the tragedy no less, to have disappeared.
His old partner. Roman wasn’t at Canning & Leigh anymore either. Those places tended to grow fat on their own success, fat and conservative, and before long they were churning out junk every bit as revolting as the reactionary giants of Madison Avenue. Success brought money, and money always brought a specific kind of fear – the fear of having to do without the money again, Roman supposed – which manifested itself in a creeping dependence on focus groups, management reviews, probationary management reviews. When the atmosphere turned dark like that you just had to get out of there.
So Roman was now at a new shop on Mercer Street, called the Kollective. Ten people, no hierarchies, no office doors, which was the only aspect of the place, actually, that Roman found a little bit precious. The ten came from agencies all over the city, sensitive, disgruntled, highly creative artists who chafed against any sort of corporate restraint. People who rebelled even when they knew it wasn’t good for them, much like Roman himself.
The emergence of these little splinter groups, this rising and thinning and dividing like the branches of a tree, happened all the time in advertising. It was like the Communist Party: all these factional disputes, questioning each other’s ideological commitment, cadres spontaneously forming to protect the doctrine from impurities and compromise. It would probably happen at the Kollective someday, too, Roman knew. That was all right. The interesting question was when, or if, Roman himself would wind up becoming the conservative one, sick of moving on, proud enough of something he’d built to want to stay and wither into irrelevance along with it.
In the office they had all heard the story of the burning of Palladio; they’d spent much of the previous night emailing one another with rumors and jokes about it. No one was in the mood to work. They knew Roman used to work at Canning & Leigh back when Mal Osbourne had his name on the door there. But they weren’t aware that Roman and John Wheelwright had been partners. It didn’t take long to emerge. Roman certainly wasn’t going to lie about it.
“No!” yelled Douglas, a copywriter with a ponytail and a terrible beard; like many of them he was so young he made Roman feel like he was turning into his own father. “No! Partners? Get the fuck out of here!” They all sat forward in their sofas and club chairs. The place was decorated like a million-dollar fraternity.
“You and the guy were partners?” said Kathleen, the receptionist, ignoring a ringing phone. “For how long?”
“Two years,” Roman said softly. “We worked on Doucette, on Fiat, the National Beef Council, whole bunch of things. We did some good work.”
“So what was he like?”
Roman said nothing right away.
“Did he show sadistic tendencies?” Douglas asked helpfully. “Killing small animals in the office, anything like that? Did he ever chase Canning through the office with a cigarette lighter?”
“We were friends,” Roman said. The others were cowed momentarily by the evident feeling in this remark; and, feeling exposed, not wanting to appear too sentimental in front of his colleagues, Roman moved along. “I think he has to be telling the truth about it, that he didn’t have any idea, that no one did. I don’t know. He had this great girlfriend, a lawyer, who he dumped to go take this job with Osbourne. He was a very nice, very polite guy. From North Carolina. Hated to argue. Hated it. I almost always got my way with him because of it. Very kind, very meek almost, but meek in a good way. Naive. I never understood how naive until he was taken in by this whole Mal Osbourne thing.”
“Yeah, well, that’s in the toilet now,” Douglas said.
“I heard they got it on film,” Kathleen said. “A snuff film, basically. I heard MOMA’s already offered Osbourne a million bucks for it, but Osbourne can’t get it back from the cops.”
“Hey, who says irony is dead?” Douglas said.
No one accomplished much that day, which suited Roman fine. He kept one eye on the clock all morning long. He was nagged by the knowledge that he had left a lot out of his account: not so much about John, but about John and himself. The bitterness with which they fought at the end – well, with which Roman fought: John, he remembered, was mostly just taken aback. Too startled to defend himself against the force of Roman’s feelings of betrayal. And that was how it had all ended between them – the partnership, and there was a friendship there that ended, too.
Roman ate his lunch on the subway. Evgenia greeted him with a solemn look when she emerged from class into the cubby room, as if this were a gravely unusual occasion, having Daddy pick her up from school.
“Did you remember I was coming?” he said cheerfully, stroking her hair.
They didn’t even take their coats off at home; Jo, anxious to get going, already had the baby in the stroller and the diaper bag packed. She kissed them goodbye on the corner of Broadway and went off to work, and Roman and the kids walked to the playground.
Isaac was asleep in the stroller by the time they got there. Roman pulled the canopy down to keep the sun off his face. Evvie saw some friends from school and ran off to play. Roman sat on the bench, watched her for a while, watched all the kids enjoy their noisy sovereignty.
He was secretly thrilled, on a kind of secondary level, that this whole pretentious Palladio effort had failed so spectacularly. He felt he had known it all along, though certainly no one could have predicted the form in which this failure would come. But he was also self-aware enough to be unsettled by the depth, the intensity, of that thrill. It had a bitter quality, in fact. Palladio’s success, while it lasted, had eaten at him. Not just in the way of jealousy, either, nor in the sense that he felt a private humiliation at being proven wrong (for he never accepted that he had been wrong). It was more that it made him feel alienated, profoundly so, though from what, he wasn’t sure. He just didn’t want to live in a world that took people like Mal Osbourne seriously.
Still, there had to be something going on down there that nobody was talking about, something that had wrought such a change in everybody. What was it? Maybe it would all emerge in time.
It stirred him up, as he sat on the bench, hands in pockets, surrounded by the penned energy of a bunch of five- and six-year-olds at the start of their weekend. And all emotions, as they escalated, eventually converged in one place with Roman, and that place was anger. He was angry all over again that someone as thoughtful as John could have made such a stupid decision – by which he meant the decision to move to Charlottesville in the first place – and th
rown away the promise of his life. He was angry all over again at John for lying to him. And there was Osbourne himself, and the woman, whoever she was, and the reporters who had already started to pick them apart for the sake of the common amusement until there was nothing left of them at all.
“Daddy,” Evvie said. She was suddenly standing right beside him. “Did you bring snacks?”
He looked through the diaper bag and found a bag of Wheat Thins Jo had tucked in there.
“Here you go,” he said.
She looked at him with that air of detachment, that air of taking his existence, as a parent, entirely for granted.
“Why are you mad?” she said.
Roman, startled, said, “I’m not mad, sweetie.”
Evvie lost interest; she took the bag of Wheat Thins from his hand and ran off. Roman saw her sharing them with some girls he didn’t recognize. Maybe Evvie had just met them. She formed these instant friendships all the time.
That was the hard part, he found, about spending any extended time with the kids. You had to be so careful not to show them what you were feeling. They could only understand it, at that age, as something either directed at or caused by themselves somehow; and so you had to hide it from them. And then maybe it wound up emerging, hours or days later, with your wife or a telemarketer who called during dinner or some idiot on the street who didn’t pick up after his dog; or in some other inappropriate way.
