Jonathan Dee - Palladio

When, for example, the family that was renting Dennis’s childhood home broke their lease and left town after the father was laid off by IBM, Molly thought the hardship of finding a place to meet was finally over for the two of them; after all, the heat and electricity were still on, and the house was furnished, nearby, empty, and not for sale. Dennis said that it was simply out of the question. He said he felt it would be tempting fate, and when she was impatient with that answer, he said that the idea of cheating on his wife with his babysitter in his parents’ bed was such a psychic minefield that he doubted he would be able to perform at all. Molly thought that this was a little sentimental of him; she pointed out that the logistical difficulties of seeing him — walking through the woods, waiting behind trees, being dropped off by the side of the road — were very hard on her, hard enough that they might well outweigh some neurosis that he didn’t even have yet but was only worried about developing. In the end, he was too afraid of her displeasure. When he finally consented, on the condition that they use only the guest bedroom, Molly felt simply that common sense had triumphed; though his distress — and her power to make him do something so rich in significance for him, so discomfiting — was not lost on her.

In the new, narrow bed, his obsession with variety continued; often he would want to change positions three or four times in the course of one encounter. At first Molly had thought this was a courtesy to her, an assumption that she would want to try new things (which she did) that she’d never had the opportunity to try before. But it went on like that, like he was trying to pose her for a deck of dirty playing cards or something; and it dawned on her that he was searching for a particular reaction from her. Not just trying to make her come — she did come, sometimes — but to find something that would make her lose control of herself, make her feel she needed him. He was a submissive man more by nature than by desire, because he still dreamed, apparently, of dominating her, of seeing her beholden to him, a dream that he couldn’t make come true.

Of course it wasn’t as cathartic now as it had been the first time — or the first time with Ty Crawford, when she couldn’t imagine such a thing as a sexual routine and thought it would be that self-consuming, that final, every time. But a long sexual relationship introduced its own dynamics, the unromantic awakening of the senses, the grind of repetition, the powerful reduction of everything that attempted to make sex stand for something greater than itself. Passion as a kind of drug, in the sense that it granted you an absence from yourself. Besides, even to the extent that it did become boring, what was there in Molly’s life to take its place? Sometimes she became depressed, but the remarkable thing, she found, was that the sex itself could also be used as an instrument of her depression, a way in which to negate herself, to lose faith in everything.

“Do you ever feel,” she asked Dennis once, in the first few minutes on the bed when there was still room for talking, “like just a body?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just, like a body. Like all your thoughts or your feelings, everything you normally think of as being part of you, has just, I don’t know, flaked off; but your senses are still there, and the truth is you’re just this body that needs to be fed or that’s food for somebody else.”

He lifted his head. “Is that how I make you feel?”

“No. That’s not what I meant. Never mind, it was stupid.”

She wanted to say to him sometimes: You’re screwing your seventeen-year-old babysitter; you’d be the envy of every male friend of yours, if they knew. Is this the real meaning of fantasies, that if they ever came true you couldn’t enjoy them? But he wasn’t the type to be able to enjoy it thoroughly — he worried too much. He even worried that if he ever took her too much for granted she might turn on him, expose him even if it meant shaming herself — everyone would think it was his fault anyway. But that was a fear based on nothing. Once Molly had waited for him by Route 2 for an hour and he never showed: she had had to walk three miles home. The next day at the Vincents’ he came home early, in a panic to get her aside and apologize almost tearfully, imagining her furious and vengeful. But she knew what sort of thing must have gone wrong the day before. She would never let him get to her like that.

It was fall, then winter, of her senior year. College catalogues arrived in the mail for her, from all over the country, some by request, most not. The type was large, the words were vague, the pictures were a kind of gentle censorship: they looked like advertisements. It wasn’t possible to learn anything from them. Molly thought optimistically about living in a big city, Boston or New York or San Francisco, but beyond that she had no idea where she wanted to go, when it was time for going.

“What about Michigan? I hear Michigan is great,” Dennis said. He had traveled very little in his life and wasn’t able to be helpful; but then he didn’t really want to be helpful anyway.

“I don’t know,” Molly said. “I think I’d rather be in a city, but I’m really not sure about anything at this point.”

“Of course, there are good schools right around here. Union is an excellent school. Bard’s not too far, maybe that would be a good place for you, Bard. You could still come home a lot.”

She looked at him.

“What?” he said. “Okay, maybe I would have a little stake in that.”

“Really? But this will be over with before then, don’t you think?”

Dennis agreed with her, but he winced anyway to hear her say it. Whether or not they were still lovers next fall, it would be hard for him to see her leave town. As ever, he treated it as something that would happen to him rather than something he might conceivably try to influence or prevent. He had imagined at the beginning that the whole affair would somehow run its course, end as inevitably as he believed it to have started; but lately the whole thing had taken on a different imagery for him, which was that when it ended, he would be old. Though he never said so, he was waiting for her to end it.

Molly spent a little less time with her friends now, but not that much; actually, the greater difference in the amount of time she now spent hanging out with Annika — giving her some pretext for putting off the return to her parents, though it was true that the longer she waited, the drunker they were — was due to the fact that Annika was going out with a boy in their class named Mike Lloyd, a short, strong, soft-spoken boy. Mike was on the wrestling team, and on every winter Friday he had to make weight for that weekend’s competition, which sometimes meant spending Thursday night jogging in a rubber suit or spitting for hours into a can. He seemed so much less intelligent than Annika. But he was awestruck by her, given to writing poems about her which his friends would steal and shout aloud in the cafeteria; and Annika’s own emotional longing for at least the appearance of constancy was not to be underestimated. Molly took a pleasure in their happiness which, though genuine, was nevertheless tinged with condescension toward the ordinariness of it.

The girls sat drinking in the TV room at Justine’s house, on a Friday afternoon. “You should have seen this place,” Tia said. “It’s near the Albany airport. My brother said just giving me the name and address would cost me a bottle of one-fifty-one.”

“Speaking of which,” Lucy said, standing up unsteadily and heading for the kitchen.

“I don’t know how it stays open — there must be some serious bribery going on there somewhere. Because it’s all totally out in the open. They didn’t even ask me for an ID. And then in the parking lot this kid, this boy who was like twelve maybe , came up and offered me five bucks to buy him a bottle of Bacardi. I should have told him I was a cop! Hey Moll, where were you yesterday?”