Jonathan Dee - Palladio

Then when they reached the intersection, instead of going straight through toward the valley, he turned left.

“I thought we could take the long way this once,” he said quickly. “I hope that’s all right. I just thought we could talk a little. We never really get to talk.”

They drove on the empty road, past the drugstore, the school, the silhouetted barns.

“Is that all right?” he said gently.

“Sure,” Molly said, and she was telling the truth. Whatever was happening now, in the car, surely it was not something she had ever seen before. She knew him well enough to be certain that whatever trouble she might be in now was not imminent, not physical, deferred.

“We’ll just go up to Route 2,” he said needlessly, “and then into the valley the other way. Maybe ten extra minutes at the most.”

“It’s fine,” she said quietly. Then, after a moment, she added, “I’m not scared or anything.”

But that remark seemed to scare him; he took a deep breath and flexed his fingers on the wheel. Maybe she had said the wrong thing, maybe he wouldn’t have minded her being scared — scared enough to demand he turn the car around, so scared that she would then tell her mother or his wife about it, and so bring an end, even a disastrous one, to something he had given up on ending himself.

It was important to the current of Dennis’s desire that Molly was so good with the kids. It meant that he could go on fantasizing for himself an alternate life, however farfetched, without the guilt of imagining the kids away as well. He was not made to be anybody’s mentor; Molly’s youth, to him, represented not something to be exploited but something indomitable, even frightening, a seat of power; and the pull of the thought of sex with her had to do, strangely, with the certainty that somehow, quite apart from any question of experience, she would be in control of it, above it all, above him, knowing the physical authority she had over him. A matter of decades, really, since sex — just the thought of it — had that power to make him feel panicked, ungoverned.

Molly may not have sensed all of this, but she did grasp right away that in this situation, where by rights he should have had all the power, he was clearly powerless. He was in the grip of all he had to lose, her approbation, the approbation of everyone he knew.

“A girl like you,” he said, “must really dream a lot about getting out of this town. You probably can’t wait to leave here.”

The headlights showed them nothing, just fresh blacktop and the broken line and the lit surface of the woods at every curve. She felt incapable of asking him what he wanted. She just had to go where he took her. Already she could see some of the lights of Bull’s Head at the bottom of the slope out her side of the car.

“I guess so,” she said. “It’s pretty boring here. Unless you want to go work for IBM, I guess.”

“Well, it looks like even that won’t be an option a whole lot longer,” he said casually, relieved to get on to a less dangerous topic, forgetting for a moment who her father was. He kept his eyes on the road.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do I–I mean, I must seem really old to you. Not even real, somehow, in a way. I remember what it was like being your age, what parents appeared like. I hate to think that’s how I look now to people, to you. But you know, you’ve got it all going for you, everything serves you, the world is set up to be at the service of a beautiful young woman. As it should be. As it should be.”

Molly said nothing.

“Didn’t I start that out like I was asking a question?” he said, and laughed. “Well, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, I guess that’s pretty apparent by now.”

She didn’t want to cut him off, and she didn’t want to do anything to bring it all to a resolution: she wanted to keep it going, not because she enjoyed being the object of it but because for these few minutes everything that was unreal seemed to have been scraped away, everything was vital and true only to itself.

“You’re a very secretive girl,” he said as they started down the hill. He was crying a little. She could not have been more amazed. He spoke as though to himself: “You keep it all private. You don’t say anything to anyone. You keep it all inside.” Suddenly she could feel the truth of this. Not only that, it became more true the more he said it; the more he showed of himself, the further he came out of his own self-control, the further she withdrew into mystery, without even trying to, without doing anything at all.

He stopped the car and turned it off just around the corner from the Howes’. She turned to look right into his eyes, which may not have been smart, she knew, but she couldn’t help it, she didn’t want to miss anything.

“Can I,” he said, and he had to clear his throat. “Can I just give you a hug?”

She couldn’t figure out what saying yes meant, and she was afraid of what saying no meant, so she just continued to look at him, helplessly, and he took this helplessness for assent: he turned from his waist and reached out with his hands — abruptly, cheerfully, as if making one last effort to convince himself that everything that was happening could be taken two ways. But he couldn’t fool anyone. His suit felt beautiful under her hands, against her neck. He was shaking. They couldn’t really see each other in the green light of the dashboard. Suddenly it no longer seemed possible to hold what was happening in abeyance. Molly pulled away from him and opened her door; when she did so the dome light came on, and Dennis, his lips apart, his skin pale, flinched.

I don’t have to sell my soul

He’s already in me

Weeks before it was necessary, Richard started packing for college. He had quit his summer job in early August so he’d have time, he told his startled parents, to reflect and prepare himself mentally for the big challenge ahead of him. He didn’t feel inclined to share these reflections with anybody. When the day came for him to leave home — his flight to California was the following morning — Roger drove him to New Jersey with all his luggage in a van borrowed from a friend at work. They would stay that night in a motel near Newark Airport and Roger would drive back the next day, once he was satisfied, as he said in his stylized but peculiarly unevocative Dadspeak, that his son was “squared away.” Molly and Kay had the house to themselves. Molly had chosen to stay home that evening; she felt that something was happening which, while not momentous exactly, might be worth trying to mark in some way, even if just with a conversation which was contextually larger than they were used to.

“So Richard’s gone now,” Molly said. “It’s weird.”

“One down,” Kay said. She looked at Molly and smiled fondly.

“Soon it’ll be just the two of you.”

She nodded. “That’s what he thinks,” she said.

There came a weekend afternoon when Molly knew where each of her parents was and when they would return. She watched out the leaded-glass windows framing the door until Ty appeared, on foot, around the bend in the road. He knew why he was there. He had probably never been so eager for anything in his life and yet he chose this moment to be polite, accepting her offer of a soda, asking how her classes were, mentioning his admiration of her house, which he had never been inside of before. Finally she went up and kissed him, her hands at her sides but taking his fingers in hers. She could feel him trembling. It was what she was hoping to feel.

She took him into Richard’s room; it was a room which, for the most part, her mother never entered anymore, and so she could feel less paranoid about leaving behind any sort of unintentional evidence. Ty did exactly as he had done before, only this time things kept going past the point where they usually stopped, the way a dream often stops at the same point. The burn scars went all the way up his arms and shoulders, on to his neck, halfway down his back, and in a more random pattern — as if embers had fallen on him — on his chest and stomach. The healed skin was hairless and looked almost like bubble gum. He started to shiver, and kept shivering even after she ran downstairs in her underwear and turned up the thermostat. But it was important to her that he was completely naked; she knew all along that that’s how she wanted him, even stopping him when he tried to enter her before all their clothes were off. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to insist on anything or to contradict her at any point. A hard-on like that had to hurt, she thought, and it did seem to be hurting him in some way. The more exposed he became, in the daylight with the blinds half-open, the more his confidence eroded. You could see it. He couldn’t stay on top of the desire that he felt when he saw her, her breasts, her stomach, her hips, her hair. When he tried, in vain, to close her eyes with his fingertips, that was the moment she came closest to feeling sorry for him.