Palladio

by Jonathan Dee

  The sea snapped and unfurled. A soup made from lentils would be their dinner tonight, the fourth night in a row. Gratitude for this bounty would be a hard sell for his sermon afterwards, and anyway, he had taken that as his subject two nights ago. The important thing was fidelity to a cause, God’s cause: they should glory in their own severance from the wickedness and avarice of the world, glory in all evidence of it, even painful evidence. If you couldn’t move through even this brief life with a sense of purpose, then what were you? One of those surfers, maybe, looking for someone else’s property on which to build your small fire and get stoned.

  Of course, words were hollow if Richard himself wasn’t willing to assume a leadership role.

  He felt a kind of cramp, an actual hunger pang, under his rib. And in the next moment he decided he would begin a fast, something he hadn’t done for a long time, as a way of refocusing himself, and through himself all of them, on the unseen. He would invite, but not require, his followers to join him. It would be a way of separating the wheat from the chaff.

  Not that fasting was without its spiritual challenges for him as well. For what he would have to keep secret from them, if the past was any guide, was that the whole experience excited him, in some private and vaguely shameful way. He was not afraid when that point came – the point at which you felt the touch of death. Once he had gone for nineteen days. The others had knelt in a rectangle around him and prayed, sobbing. It was glorious. He could probably match that now, or even do better. But was he really fasting just to purge his mind, or was there some subconscious wish underneath it, the wish to get it all over with, to put behind him the degradations of this life and arrive earlier than scheduled at the feet of a gratified Lord?

  This was the sin for which he was constantly examining himself. Lust for death. He decided he would make it the topic of that night’s sermon.

  * MESSAGE *

  Nobody likes a group of angry do-gooders shouting SAVE THE WORLD. That’s not what this is about. This is a revolution, but it is a joyful revolution. It is a revolution based on a simple idea: Each of us has something inside that is making a noise. UNDERNEATH ALL OF THE LAYERS, theme-first layer and the get-out-of-my-way layer and the keep-your-hands-off-my-stuff layer, a halfway decent person is in there, waiting to be heard. That person isn’t angry. HE JUST WANTS OUT.

  THERE IS A GREATNESS WAITING FOR YOU. We are busy, we are distracted, we are cynical, but this greatness waits. Through a speech by Dr King or the story of the Grinch or even a bumper sticker, THIS GREATNESS FINDS YOU IN A moment, unlikely or untimely, and suddenly you find yourself connected to humanity in away that shocks you. And this greatness will hold you up so high and strong that any previous version of YOURSELF SEEMS FLIMSY.

  WE HAVE NO RIGHT to say anything about anything other than boots. We’re not ministers or gurus;we’re not philosophers or politicians. We are simply bootmakers who have found something to be true. THAT TRUTH IS SIMPLE: Every single one of us has a chance to do something big with our lives, something bigger than any coach or financial consultant or personal fitness trainer ever told us. And by waking up to this potential, and acting on it, amazing things happen: to other people, to ourselves. This has nothing and EVERYTHING TO DO WITH MAKING BOOTS.

  *

  WINTER WAS COMING again and nothing was going to stop it. Kay wasn’t sure what month it was, but in the nights lately she had definitely felt the cold. She couldn’t wait for Roger to do something about it. She had always been more sensitive to the elements. One good draft could put her on her back for a week. If he didn’t care about that by now, she wasn’t going to sit around and wait for him to start.

  So she went up to the attic to bring down the storm windows; but while she was up there she found some other things, a box of Richard’s old record albums, an accordion file, its edges gnawed away, full of Molly’s old report cards from grade school and even her class pictures. Such a serious face! Her teachers all loved her, they knew that town couldn’t hold her, they knew she would make her mark. Kay sat on the attic floor and went through every piece of paper. This was an important find: something Molly’s own children might want to see. Molly would probably be embarrassed, of course; no mother can stand having her own kids see her as a child. By the time Kay closed the attic’s trapdoor behind her again, it was night. The storm windows were forgotten.

  But she wrote a note about them in the diary that she kept in her bedside table drawer, so nothing was really lost. She’d only been keeping a diary for a few years. It started out as a kind of exercise in reminiscence, but before long it ceased reaching any further back into the past than the day on which each entry was written – a list of errands completed, mundane tasks performed, a way of accounting for her time. And each entry ended with a reminder to herself of all that was still left to do.

  Of course, it was somewhat nebulous now, the whole idea of the end of the day. She wrote in the diary when she felt the need of it. She had no schedule for going to bed, or for getting up; no sense of finishing the day in the evening, nor of starting a new one in the morning. She would simply come to, with an awareness of some sort of gap in her consciousness, and would see by the sudden change outside the window that she must have fallen asleep for a while. Sometimes this would happen in her own bed, other times in Molly’s or in Richard’s. When she slept in Richard’s bed she tried to imagine what he was doing over in Germany. One thing for sure, though, she couldn’t fall asleep at all anymore if there was anyone else in the bed.

  In her diary she had noted that a trip to the pharmacy would be necessary.

  She never moved anything in the kids’ rooms, except to clean. It all looked just exactly as it had when they were teenagers. Posters, tapestries thumbtacked to the walls, small photos cut from magazines and stuck to the wallpaper above the desks with Scotch tape that she carefully replaced when it turned brown. It wasn’t for her sake. Maybe they would come back home looking for something in particular, something whose private significance she could never guess. Maybe Richard would come back from Berkeley, where he was a professor now, and his wife, hoping only for some hint, some relic, of the upbringing he had talked so much about, would be stunned to find instead everything kept perfectly intact, for her to see. She might start crying at the sight of it – the habitat of her beloved, when he was just a boy. They were expecting a baby of their own now.

  It was night again, and she definitely felt the cold.

  Molly too might be sitting somewhere, in her office with the incredible view, daydreaming about her childhood, about time lost; she might be recalling the way her room looked in the morning when she awoke, mourning all that as gone for ever. Imagine the rush of amazement and gratitude when she came home to find that nothing had been lost at all!

  “Kay?”

  Roger was calling. She sat on the bed in Molly’s room. “Kay?” She sat, calmly. The doorknob rattled and she realized that she must have locked it. After a while he went away. She could hear him leaving, even though his footsteps were always so soft.

  She had no ill will left for him. For a long time they had just irritated one another, she remembered, but now something like the opposite was true, they moved through the house, which seemed plenty large enough for both of them now, in their independent orbits, natural, regular, where their paths might intersect once every few hundred years, as in an eclipse. The only habit of his that annoyed her anymore was the way he would turn off the radio. He’d go into a room, and when he’d leave it again she would enter to find the radio had been switched off. There were little radios in every room of the house, except the kids’ rooms. She kept them on the talk stations, all of them tuned to the same one, though she would change her station-allegiance every few weeks. Always talk, though. No music. Music got on her nerves; and there were so many things worth knowing about.

  She didn’t know why he couldn’t just leave them alone. She wanted them on continuously – that’s why she’d gotten all electric ones. They
weren’t turned up loud. True, sometimes she craved a little silence, but when she did she just went into one of the kids’ rooms and shut the door. She didn’t see why he couldn’t just do the same thing.

  He had his work to do, and she had hers.

  The children were never coming back. She didn’t even know where they were. Maybe they were dead. She imagined them dead, imagined the depth of her own agony, so vividly that she started to wonder if maybe someone had told her they were dead, told her that on the phone, and she had just forgotten it.

  If you changed around their bedrooms, refurnished them, gave them over to some other use, then they were no longer shrines to the children’s having been there: instead they became shrines to the children’s having left. Besides, change them into what? If they weren’t Molly’s and Richard’s rooms, then what was that extra space doing there at all?

  In the upstairs hall, she put her ear to the closed door of her own bedroom and heard the sound of Roger weeping. She listened for a while; discreet, unmodulated, the sound eventually gave way to silence. She went downstairs. It was morning again.

  Time for the pharmacy. She hated to go, actually. She hated leaving the house, even for a short while; the forces of decay made too much headway while she was gone, so that when she did return, it could be overwhelming. And she hated driving the car. Especially now that she had to go all the way to Canajoharie just to get her prescription filled. The Rexall in town was still open but that witch who worked there had too many questions, questions about money, questions about the prescription and whether it hadn’t expired. Last time, the woman had put on those glasses chained across her flat chest and held the bottle itself up to the light, trying to insinuate that the label had been altered somehow. That was the end of that relationship; Kay took her business elsewhere, to Troy, to Middletown. She had found a place in Canajoharie that would be fine for a while.

  She put on her scarf, her fur hat with the earflaps, her gloves, her long down coat. She got into the car and turned the heater up all the way. Something was agitating her, as was always the case on these trips. She knew they were unavoidable, but still, an hour or two spent in the car just seemed like such a waste of time. She couldn’t bear to waste time anymore. When she sat on the bed to write in her diary, she didn’t want to look back on the time and wonder where it had all gone. There were the storm windows to put in, for one thing.

  And that was just the beginning. There was so much left to do. She could remember, it seemed like years before, talk about selling the house and moving somewhere else. Fine: once everything was finished. But if you started something, and then just abandoned it before it was completed, then what had the point of the time been at all?

  * MESSAGE *

  Do you keep the promises you make to yourself?

  Wash Out Your Mind

  Once you put something out there, people can interpret it anyway they like – nothing contains a specific meaning; nothing is degrading for anybody.

  Communication Without Boundaries

  BOOKS ARE OVERRATED.

  Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar.

  Bring Us Your Content

  generally avoids such trivial speculation, suggesting instead that business in the new age will be transformed, the salvationary spirit of the entrepreneur will soar and the roving ambitions of individuals will find resonance in an incandescent web of knowledge. Freedom will grow, wisdom thrive and wealth spread. What more could a prophet of a “redemptive technology” possibly desire? Forget the mundane

  The Voice of the People Can Topple a Despot.

  While We May Fall Short, We Will Not Give Up,

  Nor Will We Remain Silent.

  In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion.

  *

  MOLLY, THOUGH SHE doubted anyone was looking for her anymore, traveled for a while in an indirect path, in the general direction of the center of the country. Mostly by bus; money was a problem, even after she’d sold the car. She stopped in a state she’d never been to before, in a city she had never heard of.

  She’s been there a while now. She works for an insurance company, one of the larger ones, in their secretarial pool. She had no real secretarial skills when she went in to answer the ad for the job, apart from scoring 100 on their spelling test. But the woman who interviewed her, an overweight woman (but they were all overweight there) with a towering blond perm, kept looking hard at her.

  “And you didn’t go to college,” she said, for the second time.

  “No.”

  “Where did you say you were from?”

  “Virginia.”

  The permed woman stared at her. Molly could see her weighing the possible effects of asking all the questions she wanted to ask.

  “Okay, come here,” she said finally, standing up from her desk. Molly’s first thought was that the woman was going to hug her; but no, she was only waving Molly briskly into her own desk chair. When Molly was seated the woman spun her a quarter turn toward her computer terminal, and right then and there gave her her first typing lesson. QWERTYUIOP. After about five minutes they stopped.

  “Okay, all right,” the woman said. “I can see you’re going to get it. I’ll give you a starting date of two weeks from now. That’ll give you time to practice at home, which you’d better do.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I will, thank you,” Molly said, though she had no keyboard to practice on, and indeed, at that point, no home.

  But that same day she found a place, a beautiful warped old clapboard house painted yellow whose two third-floor rooms had been converted to an apartment after the owner’s husband had run off, leaving her with two young children. The apartment had its own entrance, an outdoor wooden staircase which Molly was responsible for keeping free of snow and ice. When Caroline, the landlord, first saw Molly – an attractive single woman from out of town – she had her doubts, what with the kids sleeping right downstairs from her. But she’s proved to be an ideal tenant. Always pays right on time; hardly makes a sound.

  Caroline’s children were a little shy with Molly at first – a little scared of her, in fact; a stranger, even a nice lady, creaking around upstairs as they lay in their beds in the dark was like a nightmare scenario come true for them – but nowadays, if they’re in the yard when she comes home from work, they’ll yell to her or even run up to tell her about some triumph at school. If Caroline is having a day where she’s particularly depressed, Molly will come downstairs and read to the kids before bed; then the two women sit on the porch glider and drink wine and talk in whispers until they’re sure the two children are asleep.

  Molly’s little secretarial subdivision (“pod” is how they’re told to refer to it) contains five other employees, all women. Her supervisor is a woman too – Fern, the woman who hired her. In fact there are only five men in her entire department, only two who work on her floor. No one speaks to them. Molly lives in a virtual society of women, with the sole exception of her landlord’s son, Tucker, who is five. This wasn’t what she was after, in settling there, but in practice she feels it suits her fine.

  There was one time, back in New York – around dawn, drunk, at home after a party at which some contemptibly suave TV actor whose name she didn’t even know had kissed her on the mouth in full view of everyone by way of saying goodbye – when Dex had hit her with his closed fist. It was in the chest, oddly, as if he’d changed his mind about it at the last instant. The next day she showed him the bruise and he apologized so long and hard that at one point he had started crying. He had always had a temper, and sometimes in the course of making a point he would grab her arm hard enough to leave a mark, but only that one time had it gone further over the line than that. The point was not to defend him but to remember how amazed, how genuinely compelled and shocked, she had been to learn that that was in him: the wild possess
iveness, the terror of abandonment, the capacity to hurt. That seemed like a long time ago. Now she had no reason not to suppose that it was in all of them.

  And there was something in her that seemed to bring it out. She knew she wasn’t supposed to think that way, that someone impartial might say she was only blaming herself for things that were not her fault: still, she thought and thought about it (little to keep her from turning over the past, in the evenings in her two-room apartment) and she could not conclude that she was wrong. They all wanted to make her talk, when all she wanted was to stay silent. Silence maddened them. They all wanted to make her belong to them, for no other reason than that they could see she did not want to belong to anybody.

  There is a multiplex nearby, and when she needs to get out Molly takes the bus there. Some of the movies seem more promising to her than others, but usually she winds up seeing them all. Some more than once. This has gotten her into trouble on occasion – an unaccompanied young woman at the movies, in a city just large enough for people to lose themselves in. Once a man came and sat in the seat right next to her with just ten minutes left to go in Castaway.

  The credits rolled. The man – he was her age, or maybe a few years younger – leaned toward her slightly, without taking his eyes off the screen, and said, “That Helen Hunt – what have I seen her in before?”