Jonathan Dee - Palladio

“You’re so beautiful,” he said, and though he meant it, it didn’t sound at all spontaneous — as if he were saying it in some other language, knew what it meant in a general way but still needed to take a moment to translate it from the language in which he thought.

She didn’t know what she was doing either but he was so clearly looking to her the whole way. When he lifted first one knee and then the other so that his legs were finally between hers, he was so scared, so in thrall, that she thought she had never seen anything more worth looking at in her life. He couldn’t pretend, he couldn’t hide anything from her, nor from himself, there was nothing interposing itself between the two of them and what was real. It had nothing to do with any feeling that she might have had for him.

“I love you,” he said.

Of course he didn’t love her. He was just looking for something to borrow that would approximate what he felt. It was as if, having stripped away all the outer layers of his self — the ingratiation, the fear of ridicule, the sense of his misfortune, the layers which were himself, the rest of the time — in order to discover what was essential in him, it had turned out that there was nothing there: he still said what he thought he was expected to say. Nothing at the core of him — at least not yet. That was okay. He was sixteen years old.

She didn’t have to do anything, really, not in the physical sense nor in any other. Just by fucking him she could get him to agree to show her everything about himself while she showed him nothing. The private space within her was maintained, it was defined, by this act of withholding it from him. Here he is, inside me, she thought, and I couldn’t be more of a mystery to him. The whole game, as everyone else she knew seemed to understand it, was the boy’s endeavor to solve the puzzle of the girl, to unlock the riddle, to find the trick that would make her vulnerable enough to him that she would agree to have sex with him. And often that was the end of it; once the riddle was solved, the boy’s interest evaporated. But that’s not how it is with me, she thought — triumphantly; that’s not how it is right now. She could see it in his face. It was the fucking that provided the riddle.

It was all over, at least from his perspective, in less than a minute. In his face, at the moment which was supposed to define pure sensual thoughtlessness, was shame, weakness, loss of control. He turned away from her to take the condom off. She sat up, her legs still framing him, and ran her fingertips gently, proprietarily along the tight scar tissue on his back. Belatedly she thought that the pain really wasn’t as bad as she’d been led to expect.

She had to ask him to leave pretty shortly after that, but he was obviously glad to. His face was still burning. He didn’t appear exultant or relieved or any of the things he might have expected to feel. No part of him was invisible. Molly knew it wouldn’t last long. It would last just as long as he could keep from telling his friends about it, for in the telling it would change, and soon the public version would harden over the real one and he would forget the way he felt right now. He would sacrifice her in the telling and go back to life as part of the group, go back to his popular identity. She didn’t care. So much the worse for him. Or maybe it was better, the way it was sometimes said to be for the better when a dog was put to sleep.

IN SEPTEMBER, THE phone call came to announce officially that the Doucette casual wear account was going into review. Five agencies had been selected by a search committee and granted the opportunity to pitch the account; Canning Leigh + Osbourne was one of those five, a courtesy not always extended to a dissatisfied client’s incumbent agency, but generally and pessimistically viewed as a courtesy nonetheless. The account, which CLO had held for five years, was worth thirty-five million dollars in billings each year.

The call came on a Wednesday. On Thursday morning, Canning walked into John and Roman’s office and told them the same thing he had told the other three teams previously assigned to Doucette: to take the work they had heretofore done on the new TV spots and shred it. Everyone was to come in first thing Monday morning and start all over again with, Canning said unhumorously, a new vision and a new attitude.

John did indeed have a new attitude: dread. “Doucette has had problems for years,” he told Rebecca, who sat sideways on the couch, her legs folded beneath her, and ran her finger along the hairline at his temple. “And I’ve only been on it since spring. Still, if they lose it, that’s got to mean cutting some jobs, at least in the short run. And the first people to go are going to be the people with that stench coming off them, the people who got lazy and let Doucette out the door. You know it.”

Rebecca looked at the side of his face — the thin Waspy nose, the strong chin. “Well, I know that won’t happen,” she said soothingly. “But just to try to dispel your fears, let’s say it did. How long would it take you to find another job at an agency in this city, with a book like yours? Four minutes? Five minutes? A better-paying job, too, probably.”

John shook his head gloomily. “The point is, I want to stay,” he said. “You have no idea what some of those bigger Madison Avenue agencies are like. No idea. Guys in suits with pipes, guys telling you how they learned everything they need to know about advertising doing point-of-purchase ads for P&G in 1958. Bosses who will tell you in all seriousness that there are only two angles you’re allowed to shoot a car from, or there are only three different typefaces you’re allowed to use, because those are the three the dead founder said he liked in his memoirs. I can’t go back there. It would be like grave-digging, compared to the work I get to do now.”

The sun had gone behind the townhouses across the street. From the apartment upstairs they heard the sound of the neighbor’s boy riding a tricycle across the wooden floor.

“I want to stay,” John said simply. “I’m too used to the freedom of it. And if I want to stay, then I just have to come up with something. It’s my fault as much as anybody’s. It’s my fault for not being creative enough. I have to come up with something new.”

Rebecca said nothing more. But the next day she called John at his dead-calm office and told him she had rented a car, and made ferry reservations, and found an inn that was still open, and they were going to Martha’s Vineyard for the weekend. She had just decided, she said, that this was something he needed and deserved. She had taken care of everything — even packed for him after he had left for work. He agreed to meet her downstairs at five on the dot, and hung up, smiling bashfully. It was the form their love always took, in the moments when love needed to reassert itself: she would act for him, and he would put his pride in her rather than in any thought of resisting.

When the ferry came in sight of Vineyard Haven, they went up on deck and watched, hands jammed in their pockets, chins tucked down into their collars, as the low lights approached. They weren’t alone, in spite of the wind and nocturnal cold; a half-dozen other passengers braved the open air as well. The late September days still held the warmth of summer, then the nights stole back with frost: the lure of the off-season.

Their hotel in Oak Bluffs was a Victorian-looking gingerbread affair, with tight staircases and low ceilings. It was closing up for the winter the day after John and Rebecca were scheduled to leave. When they came downstairs Saturday morning to search for some breakfast, they saw the owner, a robust woman in her fifties or sixties with a long gray braid, atop a stepladder outside, looking in at them through the windows; she was putting up the storm panes. They drove out to the cliffs at Gay Head, and descended to the hidden beach where people of all ages went naked and covered themselves with the thick, comic, unguentous mud. John stood in the clay and looked out to sea and quite managed to forget himself for a while. He thought about how some beautiful women looked better clothed than naked and how Rebecca was not one of those women. The others must have seen that too. But something about the envelope of mud desexed what might otherwise have been a lusty atmosphere — they were all more like children, like statues, purely bodies, for that interlude when the sun was high.