Jonathan Dee - Palladio

Eric talked a lot about himself, about movies she hadn’t seen and theoretical journals she’d never heard of, and even though this might reflect badly on him, Molly wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Any effort to draw her out, to get her to fill in her own history, would have spoiled the evening for her. He had long black hair but even though he was no older than twenty his hairline was receding. Molly found this satisfying; she liked to see as much as possible about a man when she looked at one, and in that respect at least you could see fifteen years into his future. His glasses were tinted yellow.

“So you’re not in the film-studies major,” Eric said. “I would have recognized you. Are you a freshman?”

Molly nodded — not because she had thought out this lie beforehand, but because it was the response which least obstructed the flow of his talk.

“Live in the dorms?”

“No,” she said, “in a house on the South Side. My older brother is there.”

Eric lived in the dorms, even though he was a junior. Couldn’t stand those roommate situations, he said — eight people, one refrigerator, no one ever cleaning the bathroom.

He started talking about his efforts to get the film society to arrange a guerrilla screening of Titicut Follies . Molly kept her eyes on him while listening discreetly to the conversations at the tables around them, intimate and vehement, couples and circles of friends. Eric’s presence was what made her a part of all that, for the moment. It didn’t feel so bad, though she was puzzled as always by the general practice of going out at midnight in order to have private conversations in public places. Maybe it was a California thing.

“So what I’d like to do now, Molly,” Eric said, “is take you back to my room and make love to you.”

Molly, her attention divided, smiled for a moment before she thought to be startled. Men. Usually you could learn everything there was to learn about them in around five minutes; she knew instantly, for example, that Eric had never used this particular line before, that he’d been waiting, his whole uneventful sexual career, to meet some stranger so he’d have a risk-free opportunity to try it. And whence the idea that this was what women wanted — a frank, take-charge, no-time-for-games man, a man too evolved for pretensions? Was it grounded in anything that had ever happened to him, or in too many evenings in his single dorm room reading Penthouse Forum? She wondered about all those things so sincerely that she very nearly said yes just to see if he would fall over dead with surprise; but she collected herself and said, demurely but unambiguously, no.

“That’s too bad,” Eric said without missing a beat, as if following a script. “Can I have your phone number, then?”

She gave him a false one. But it got her thinking. Not about Eric, but in a more general way about how her invisibility wasn’t as complete as she thought. You didn’t move through the world without being watched. She liked the idea that boys like Eric, boys who just happened to see her on the sidewalk or in a classroom or a store, wanted to take her home and fuck her, conceived fantasies, instant fantasies in which maybe she would melt at a line like “I’d really like to take you to my room and make love to you,” or fantasies involving bringing Molly home to meet their parents for all she knew. The randomness, the variety of these projections was what she liked. They thought they knew her, but they didn’t. She might surprise one of them one day.

Some days she took BART into San Francisco and hiked the windy streets there, panting at the top of each steep block and tasting the salt in the air. There wasn’t much to see. It was more the bracing sense of hurry she liked to feel, the wealth and coldness, knowing she would only be feeling it for a little while. Street life in the big city was much less ironic than in Berkeley. Once near the Haight she came face to face with a group of girls, her age or younger, runaways with a hard, self-reliant glint. Their experience was not that far removed from hers, she realized; but the notion that she had anything in common with them, not an altogether welcome notion to begin with, was killed by the glare they gave her when they decided she had been looking at them too long.

Thanksgiving came; two of the housemates went home for the five-day school break, but that left seven of them, with a faded thrift-shop tablecloth thrown over the same table they ate at every night. None of them really knew how to cook but they threw themselves into it with a slightly hysterical glee, cooking a turkey in the oven whose thermometer was always broken, trying to re-create from a kind of sense memory various side dishes they remembered from their childhoods — creamed onions, candied yams, Roquefort string beans — with no access to any recipe and no reasonable prospect of calling their former homes for the secret. Molly made a Yorkshire pudding which failed to rise in the temperamental oven but tasted all right anyway with enough gravy. They screamed like children as they cooked, and even with a few dishes which turned out so badly they had to go straight into the garbage uneaten, there was still twice as much food as they needed. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to demonstrate for each other the reality of their own constitution as a family. Richard said grace, and it went on for almost three minutes, with plenty of murmured “amens” from the others; Molly, head down, eyes closed, holding Sally’s hand on one side and her brother’s on the other, didn’t mind it at all this time.

Christmas was going to be harder to manage. The house and the city would empty out to a much greater degree, and her sense of her own marginality would be heightened.

Molly had lost fifteen pounds in her months there, without intending to. It wasn’t a matter of poverty. Living away from home simply meant a different relationship to food; meals came not according to relentless schedule but only when you felt hungry enough to get up and do something about it.

She stood up from her table at the Soup Kitchen, late one morning in December, and fainted on to the floor. She came to after a few seconds with a cook wearing a filthy apron and a hairnet gingerly lifting her arms over her head. The waitress put a paper napkin to Molly’s brow and when she pulled it back Molly saw it was saturated with blood.

“You need to get this looked at,” the waitress said. “What happened to you? Did you just stand up too fast or something?” She was probably a student herself, Molly thought, working her way through college, toward whatever was on the other side of college, her hair in a clean ponytail. Molly wanted to go home with her.

“I guess that’s it,” Molly said, though that wasn’t it; she didn’t want to let on that she was at the point of tears herself.

“Do you think you can get to UHS?”

University Health Services.

“I’m not a student,” Molly said, taking the handful of balled-up napkins the cook held out to her, apologetically handing him the old, blood-soaked ones. Her head was throbbing.

She started to feel dizzy again. The cook and the waitress exchanged a look.

The cook, who was almost off his shift anyway, wound up driving her to the free clinic in Oakland, about twenty minutes away. She did her best to keep her blood off the upholstery of his battered car. This was her first impulse, to gather up any evidence that anything had happened to her at all. He offered halfheartedly to wait with her; she thanked him profusely for the ride and he drove away.

Inside the waiting room, where she would spend the next two hours, Molly got a clear picture of her situation, a picture made clearer — the ways dreams are sometimes startlingly clear — by the feverish wooziness that came over her in waves even after she was certain the bleeding had stopped. Twenty-one people waited ahead of her, or approximately one for each of the turquoise molded-plastic chairs ranged in immovable rows before the receptionist’s empty window. They were people for whom waiting was obviously a condition of life; apart from two children who noisily passed a Cabbage Patch doll back and forth across their mother’s motionless lap, the place was deathly silent. Even the two men who were clearly deranged did little to disturb the atmosphere of timelessness, mumbling quietly, directing their animated gestures to the air. And the smell: alcohol and disinfectant and some other familiar smell like wet wool weaving in and out through the frank human stench. Each person’s complaint was invisible to the disinterested; Molly was the only one there actually bleeding. No one took any special notice of her, though, and she waited for her turn.