Jonathan Dee - Palladio

It was only possible in the lecture halls, of course; once or twice she got to the door of a classroom, saw that there were only fifteen or twenty desks there ranged in a homey circle, and had to leave the building.

She saw the Bubble Man on Telegraph again and thought about the contradiction at work in him: life had pushed him to the margin, to the very lip of invisibility; he did not appear interested in escaping that region, and yet he had literally made it his life’s work just to be noticed, to be seen.

A sense of an interval in her life, a suspension. It might have been possible to enjoy these months of secret aimlessness on those terms, but for the fact that there was nothing on the other side of them. No prospect, no plan, no eventuality: she supposed that if Richard ever managed to graduate (he was only eight credits short, but lately he seemed to have stopped going to classes at all), he might move out of the house, and then something would have to happen. But he might not. So the most she could hope for, in the way of peace of mind, was to forget the future for a while.

Occasionally, into her life as a ghost with all a ghost’s privileges, came a kind of vestigial awareness of the fame, the cautionary status, Molly’s very name must have back in Ulster: the obverse of her existence now. She found the lives of the people there hard to imagine, even though she had never lived anywhere else until five months ago.

As for her parents, Molly hadn’t spoken with them since the hour the cab arrived to take her to the airport in Albany. They called from time to time and spoke to Richard, who reported that Molly was doing wonderfully, had a job, went to classes in her spare time. He said she had even put on some weight. (In fact she had grown thinner, without meaning to, and had lost some of her color as well; Richard wasn’t directly covering this up, since he hadn’t really noticed it.) Their father — it was always their father who made the call — spontaneously invented and then stuck to the implicit fiction that Molly was out, or asleep, or working, every time he called, and thus could never come to the phone.

“Well, give your sister our love,” Roger would say fondly, “and tell her we’re glad she’s doing well.”

“I sure will,” Richard said. Molly sat at the kitchen counter five feet away, blank-faced, as if trying not to be heard. “Bye now.”

From the day of her arrival, Richard had seemed untroubled, cheerful in an introverted sort of way — almost placid; it wasn’t that Molly was unfamiliar with this face of his so much as that she was conditioned to read it as a danger sign, as highs like this generally presaged an angry sulk of some sort. But his calm remained unbroken, and after the first few months she began genuinely to believe in it. Through July she had slept on the living-room couch; once it was clear to everyone that she would be around for a while, the group decided she could share a bedroom with a graduate student in cultural anthropology named Sally. Sally had had her own room in the house for two years, and this new arrangement came with no reduction in her rent. She took it all quite cheerfully, even enthusiastically. She went with Richard and Molly in the van — the house had a van, to which everyone had keys; it must have belonged to one of them, but Molly never learned to whom — to a used-furniture store in Oakland and came back with a foldaway bed. Sally was twenty-four, petite, hipless; she wore cat’s-eye glasses and 1950s thrift-shop fashions — Capri pants, pillbox hats. On some days she looked unnervingly like old snapshots of Molly’s mother.

It hadn’t taken more than a week for Molly to figure out that everyone in the house was a Christian. She wasn’t sure if they could all be classified under the term “born again” (though certainly Richard would have to be); some of them might have lived this way their whole lives for all she knew. But they never talked about it, at least not in front of her. It didn’t exactly fit her stereotype of young college Christians; she would have expected them to be all over her. Whatever they did was done in secret, with the exception of Sunday dinner, when they put the leaf in the dining-room table and matter-of-factly held hands to say a long grace before eating. It was the one time during the week when they were all together. Otherwise, what with part-time jobs (they pooled their salaries, along with whatever money some of them still received from their parents), classes, volunteer work, they were all on different schedules; if Molly returned for a nap in the afternoon, when she knew Sally would be in the library — Molly slept a lot now, often for two or three hours in the middle of the day — she never knew who else would be at home. There were few visitors.

She sat in a European History lecture and learned about the assault on the Bastille. Afterwards she went to a coffee shop and sat at an outdoor table, without money to order anything, and watched the scenes of student life at the too-small tables, the uneven stacks of books, the couples stroking each other’s arms, the students with their heads in their hands stubbornly reading Lacan or Derrida, not imagining themselves a part of the general pageant of unburdened youth.

Sally came from Massachusetts. Her parents disapproved of Berkeley and wouldn’t pay any of her tuition or living expenses there; she had a TA job and some financial aid. She talked to Molly about all this when they were in their beds with the lights out, like twelve-year-olds at a sleepover.

The student film societies, screening old movies in lecture halls and auditoriums, were one of Molly’s few affordable pleasures. She spent two or three evenings a week there. Admission for students was a dollar, and of course no one there ever questioned Molly’s status as a student; still, mindful of her finances, she snuck in without paying when she was able. She saw The Sweet Smell of Success for the first time that way, and as the credits rolled she still felt so exhilarated by all that hyperverbal moral viciousness that she decided to stay in her seat for the second show. The guy at the door saw her trying to hide, but he smiled discreetly and didn’t make her pay a second time, or perhaps he knew she hadn’t paid the first time either. Watching a movie straight through just minutes after seeing it before, with everything so fresh in your mind it lost its capacity for surprise, produced, Molly discovered, a new sort of awareness of the people who made a movie: an awareness of the actors on screen as actors, of the technicians and assistants who must have been standing disinterestedly just outside the frame as the stars emoted, an awareness of everything they said as words on a page coming out of someone’s typewriter in a room somewhere. It only made the emotions themselves seem more remarkable to her. People right there at Berkeley, she considered, studied the art and the science of making movies. Of course those were small, intensive, hands-on classes, not the sort of classes you could sneak into undetected. Molly felt a little sorry for herself and her outsider status.

After the lights went up again, she saw someone moving against the tide of departing film buffs, deeper into the auditorium, toward her. It was the guy who took the tickets.

Panicked, her face became still. He sat down beside her and smiled. He wore black jeans and a bowling shirt with the name Dave stitched over the pocket.

“Great flick,” he said. “My name’s Eric. I’ve seen it like ten times. Have you seen that Barry Levinson movie, Diner? There’s a character in it who does nothing but quote lines from Sweet Smell . Plays a character who never breaks character.” Molly listened carefully through all this banter for any concealed irony which would end with his busting her for sneaking in without paying. But when he finally asked her if she wanted to go get a cup of coffee at Geppetto’s, she realized he was on the level; she let her guard down and said yes.