Jonathan Dee - Palladio

There was experience and there was learning, and Molly knew that the last several weeks had consisted much more of the former than the latter; still, one of the things she could say she had learned about herself in that time was that she was a marvelously gifted liar. She took this in without self-satisfaction, nor with a bad conscience — more in the spirit that any knowledge about one’s self is a constructive thing. No one ever questioned her; no face showed any skepticism, no one ever caught her in a contradiction. She could only guess that Dennis was not nearly as persuasive with whatever lies he had to tell to get away from the bank at three-thirty in the afternoon, since he did such a poor job trying to convince her, when they were in the car together, that he was courageous, unconflicted, that his thoughts were only with her. It was touching, if also slightly condescending, that he should think she needed to be convinced of that.

The car trips, thirty minutes each way, were hard on Dennis. He tried to make conversation but it always tapered off into silence, and sometimes he looked through the windshield in such a way that Molly worried he didn’t see the road in front of him at all. It would have made more sense for Molly to drive herself to Oneonta and meet him there, since she had her license now; but Roger and Kay, who thought little about it if they didn’t see Molly over the course of an afternoon, were far more likely to notice if the car was gone for a few hours.

Sometimes she talked to him about trivial things, to try to cheer him up. Sometimes she too said nothing and they made the trip in a kind of considerate silence. And sometimes a very different feeling overtook her, and she would reach across and stroke his leg as he drove, unzip his pants and let him grow hard under her hand, watching as his face turned red, or undo a button or two on her own shirt and guide his hand inside the fabric under her breast. She’d see how far she could push him. This impulse was hard to describe, except to say that it felt closer to abandon than to excitement, less like lust than capitulation.

The motel in Oneonta was a long prefab rectangle, with an office at one end, and a brackish swimming pool behind a locked gate in the front. It was across the road from a strip mall. Parking and room entrances were in the back. Dennis always made her wait in the car while he went inside and paid. She looked around to see if there were any other cars in the lot; sometimes there were none. The best thing about those minutes in the car was the chance to savor the idea that no one in the world could have known where she was just then.

Inside, there was always some initial awkwardness, though some of that was dispelled by the fact that they needed to hurry, they were always so pressed for time. Dennis began by insulting himself, so reliably that Molly started to wonder if he wasn’t getting some sort of erotic charge out of it; but that didn’t seem to be the case.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here. If anyone sees us, I’ll be destroyed. How did I let this happen? Where will it all end?”

“It’ll end when we end it,” Molly said frankly, soothingly. “What, are you afraid I’m going to ask you to marry me or something?”

He seemed hurt by this; he wanted everything both ways. He would sit on the bed, looking lost, until Molly started to take her shirt off, or his. Then he would forget everything.

That October in Ulster the thing that had seemed to be happening so slowly happened all at once: the official announcement made its way from somewhere within the most rarefied precincts of IBM that the central New York regional sales office would be closed down entirely in twelve months’ time. As it was, nearly half of all those who had moved to Ulster in the last twenty years to work for IBM were already unemployed; and most of those people were stuck in the town until they could find a buyer for their house or at least until their children’s school year was over. There was no comparable work for them anywhere nearby. Much of what had been the town’s new professional class now found themselves virtual deadbeats, late with the mortgage, having their credit cards rejected at the IGA. First the dry cleaner and then the Baskin-Robbins went out of business. Twelve months was considered a merciful notice, but nevertheless, life in Ulster had begun to take on a mournful, irritable, last-days quality.

The Howes, at least, were exempt from the harshest effects. Roger had achieved a position of such seniority within the doomed enterprise that he was promised that he could stay on at work until the very last day — he would be turning the lights off behind him, he joked. And he had also been offered a transfer to the office in Armonk, though there was at least a temporary hitch in that plan: Kay was refusing to go. She said she liked it here, Ulster was her home, the thought of organizing a move to another strange place was too stressful for her. It was the purest perversity — she would go to her grave in that town to punish him for bringing her there. No one in the family took her refusal seriously.

Sometimes Dennis was passive, sometimes he was forceful: he was trying to figure out what Molly liked, but what she liked, really, was to see him trying everything. The passive role certainly seemed most true to himself. He lay on his back, with his head to one side, while she straddled him with her knees up, her feet flat on the bed, so that she sometimes had to grab his shoulders for balance.

He had things that he liked. He liked her on her stomach, the wrong way across the bed, so that her arms hung down. He loved blowjobs, and Molly found them a lot less complicated than she had expected; but she discovered that she didn’t really like it when he went down on her — it felt wrong, too intimate somehow, though she wouldn’t say that aloud — and he was reluctant to let her do it to him if he couldn’t reciprocate.

His body was small with just a few hairs on his calves and a sprouting right around his nipples that she found comically unattractive. He always took a shower afterward. While she waited for him, Molly peeked out behind the moldy curtain into the parking lot, or looked through the drawers to see if anyone else had left anything behind. Sometimes there were condoms, or pennies; once, a pair of black lace underwear.

He dropped her off a half mile from Bull’s Head, on a stretch of road across from a cow pasture; before they parted they would schedule their next meeting, because it was not always possible to speak to each other on the phone. Like a child he looked both ways before kissing her goodbye, something she only let him do because he insisted on it — such were the ways in which he worked off, through a sporadic and self-devised romantic etiquette, the guilt he felt over treating Molly like a mistress. The car moved off, and Molly walked back home in the twilight, happy deep within herself like a spy, feeling the weakness in her legs. Her mother, in the chair by the TV, smiled with frail disapproval and got up to fix Molly a plate. With Richard away at college, and Molly keeping such unpredictable hours, the family had stopped dining together; Roger and Kay ate early, in front of the television, which did away with the silence between them. So Molly sat alone at the table, eating slowly, listening to the faint music and occasional laughter coming from the TV in the next room. And it was those moments — not the moments in bed with Dennis inside her, not the walks through the woods or the lies themselves — which were happiest for her, because she had escaped the world, it had lost her scent, she knew that she was not who anyone thought she was. The only way to stay pure in the world was to live inside a lie.