Jonathan Dee - Palladio

“How long have you two been together?”

“Three and a half years,” John said.

“And you’ve been living together for …”

“About eighteen months.”

“I’m guessing,” Osbourne said, “there are no children then.”

“No, sir.”

“No, of course not. It’s not something you would have left unmentioned.”

John smiled.

“She’s not pregnant, then, is she?”

Blushing uncontrollably, John said that he was sure she was not.

“Okay,” Osbourne said. “Forgive me. I can see I’ve overstepped my bounds. Let’s change the subject then. What are you working on now?”

John told him about the Beef Council campaign. Osbourne’s expression did not change.

“And is it work you’re proud of?” he said simply.

John thought for a long time before answering, mostly because he was afraid to say no out loud. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “I mean, we’re doing basically the same thing we’ve been doing, for years, but lately I feel like I don’t get how it all works. Which would be fine if I was sitting at home watching it all on TV, but I’m the one making it, and I still don’t understand how it gets made. It’s a weird feeling.”

“Have you shared this feeling with your partner? What’s his name?”

“Roman Gagliardi.”

“Roman? Or with anyone else there?”

“No.”

“You feel you have to act a certain way, don’t you? In your work environment? You have to take a certain less-than-honest attitude, not just about colleagues’ work, but about your own?”

John nodded.

Osbourne winced sympathetically. “Don’t you get tired,” he said, “of all the lying?”

Back at the office, light-headed, lazy from the rich food, John stared without seeing for what remained of the day; then he took the subway to Brooklyn. The apartment didn’t seem comforting either. He sat by the window until Rebecca came home. He expected her to take a sarcastic tack in asking about his lunch; instead she was quite grim and serious, and he didn’t know whether to take that as a good sign or not.

“He’s invited us down to Charlottesville, not this coming weekend but the next,” John said in a breezy, high voice that didn’t sound right to him. “He has the offices about finished, and we can just, you know, tour the town, see if we like the feel of it or not.”

Rebecca was squatting in front of the open refrigerator, washed in the white light. Her heels came up out of her shoes.

“So is that a problem for you, next weekend?” John said.

She straightened up. “Is that a problem for me? In what respect?”

John swallowed. “Do we have anything that would conflict with that, I meant.”

“No. I’m sure we don’t.” She stooped and looked again through the empty shelves.

“So will you come?” John said.

“I don’t think so.” She shut the fridge and began opening the cupboards; she seemed not to want to look at him, and John, still in his chair, wondered if she was crying.

“Can you tell me,” she said, “why it is we never have anything to eat in this fucking place?”

THE PERPETUAL PRESENT tense of a college town. Always in the foreground, lively and faceless, the student body remains forever between eighteen and twenty-two; only those who accrue around their needs — the shopkeepers, the landlords, the tenured professors — are allowed to watch each other grow old. On the South Side, on Telegraph Avenue, the Bubble Man was out again, in his purple suit, playing the kazoo and banging cymbals strapped to the insides of his knees; Molly saw him through the window of the Soup Kitchen, a self-consciously down-and-out diner where she went most mornings for her coffee and toast with apple butter, a simple pleasure which, strictly speaking, she could no longer afford. Signs on the lampposts for a rally to protest the Gulf War, noon under the Campanile, three days ago. The UC campus lay in a sort of natural bowl; around it, the terraced streets, the eclectic homes set close together, the enervated brown of the hillsides.

Fall in California. The money from her father had lasted a long time, but now it had run out, though Richard and his seven roommates in the house on Vine Street had recently told Molly she was welcome to stay on there rent-free until she found a job. They told her this collectively, the way they did everything, all eight of them in the living room, facing her and smiling. Their earnestness, their cheerful uniformity, was disquieting and easily mocked (or would have been, had she any friends outside the house to talk to about it): but over the weeks and months their genuine kindnesses to her had accumulated into a charity that was not so readily dismissed.

Molly had tried diligently to find some work; she had never held any sort of job before, other than babysitting, but her lack of experience wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she hadn’t started looking until the end of September, after ten thousand students in need of beer-and-pizza money had flocked back to Berkeley. Everywhere she tried — bookstores, restaurants, thrift shops, laundromats — the spots were all filled. Her only income at the moment came from an odd job in a fancy North Side home, reading the San Francisco Chronicle for an hour or so every weekday morning to an old man who wasn’t blind by any means but who claimed that small-print reading gave him migraines. Mr Whalen was eighty and rich and that meant he could be unembarrassed about self-indulgences. He paid her ten dollars an hour, which was generous, but it still came to only seventy or eighty dollars a week. Nor did he reimburse her for bus fare; he was a kind enough man, but his scattered thoughts never for a moment came to rest on the question of just how Molly arrived in his living room on a given morning, or where she went to afterwards. She was too embarrassed to ask for it.

Inadequate as it was, the job had come her way only through subterfuge. She had gone into the UC Student Employment Center on campus, where they posted jobs on a bulletin board. You were supposed to make an interview appointment through the center, but that was out of the question for Molly, since the first thing they would have asked her for was a student ID number. Instead, she memorized the information from the sheet on the bulletin board, walked across Sproul Plaza to the student lounge, and called from a pay phone. Mr Whalen didn’t seem to notice or care that she hadn’t been referred by anyone from the university. In fact, he hired her over the phone; he liked her voice, he said, not too loud, so many young people were so loud these days. She hung up, chanting the address to herself, and ran to borrow a pen from one of the students playing Donkey Kong in the din of the lounge.

Molly haunted the university in much this way throughout the fall, living on the margin of student life, taking what she needed, unnoticed in the crowd. Her age made her inconspicuous; it was reason enough for her presence anywhere. There were always rallies in the plaza to protest something or other, huge effigy Bushes, signs condemning the Livermore Lab, which operated in contemptuous silence just a few hundred yards away, “the people united will never be defeated,” and Molly liked to attend now and then, not at all insensible to the rightness of the cause, but more immediately energized by her bogus affiliation with the crowd, by the simultaneous thrill of belonging and not belonging. Boredom was a danger because it was so easy to get used to it, to forget to want to escape it. She would flip through her brother’s course catalogue — he lent it to her the first week of classes and never asked for it back — and sometimes when a class looked good to her she found out where it was meeting (lists were posted in the student lounge) and dropped in just to listen.