Jonathan Dee - Palladio

He stared at her for a long moment as the others filed past, out of the park. Then he stepped closer to her, quite close. With a quick glance to either side, he unzipped the windbreaker and held one side of it away from his body to reveal, clipped next to the buckle of his wide belt, a policeman’s badge.

He zipped up the jacket again, and stared at her.

“You shouldn’t be hanging around here,” he said. His voice was inflected to suggest that he was indulging a rare desire to do someone a favor. It was his cop voice, clearly, or at any rate the one he used to indicate his moral remoteness from non-cops. But in his small eyes, behind this affected benevolence, Molly detected some more genuine cruelty; and she determined to get at it.

“Where should I be hanging around, then?”

“I don’t know. A beautiful girl like you. Where do you normally hang around?”

She could see right into him, that was the best part. She knew that all she had to do in order to cut herself to his idea, his fantasy, of what college girls were really like was to not go away — just stand there, as he became more forward, stand there and not be repulsed. He thought he was seeing the essence of her, of all women really. Well, maybe she was showing it to him but he still wouldn’t see it, blinded as he was by his vision of himself. She didn’t need to make herself say something complimentary about his physique, which would have been hard to do without laughing; he took it for granted that she would admire him, and nothing in her silence violated that idea.

The park was empty now, except for a few derelicts who had been there before the rally began.

“You’re married,” Molly said flatly, looking at his hand.

“Very observant,” he said. Look at that, Molly thought, with a kind of detached awe. Look how he hates me.

His clothes were perfectly spotless and pressed — which pretty much spoiled the undercover effect he was apparently going for — and Molly wondered for a moment about the spirit in which his wife did this for him; but then she jerked the thought of this pathetic woman’s existence out of her mind.

“You need a ride home, or anywhere?” he said. Every remark pushed him further into a zone where his own fantasy and what he took to be the real nature of men and women grew indistinct.

“Yeah,” she said. “I do need a ride.”

“Well, good. I’m sure you’ll tell me where you want to go.”

They walked to his car, a boxy black American midsize, no siren or police radio visible. In the dust on the trunk someone had written with a forefinger the word PIG. He ignored it.

He drove slowly across Telegraph, pedestrians striding past the car at all points, not waiting for the lights. Molly was looking out her window at the Bubble Man when she felt the policeman’s hand at the top of her thigh.

“Not in the car,” she said.

Of course he knew a place. It was down by the Marina, near the old Fantasy Records plant. The scarier things got the more satisfied Molly felt. He walked ahead of her up three flights of stairs; he knocked, then pushed open a door to a room with nothing but a fold-out sofa in it. He started kissing her, to get that over with, and when she put her arms around him she felt something in the small of his back, underneath the big ugly windbreaker. It was his gun.

He flinched a little, but he let her keep her hand on it, through the fabric. Maybe he’ll shoot me, Molly thought. Maybe after we’re done he’ll shoot me and leave me here. She tried to think of what would stop him from doing that. They could trace the bullet to him, she decided.

He didn’t want to see her body, didn’t want her to take her clothes off, except for what was absolutely necessary, which in this case meant pulling her jeans and her underwear down to mid-thigh. She guessed it was some kind of rape fantasy for him. He bent her over the arm of the sofa without folding it out. It did hurt her a little bit — though probably not as much as he hoped — partly because he was a little larger than she had encountered before.

He mumbled something.

She turned her head and said softly, “What?”

“Say something.”

“What do you—”

“Just say something,” he mumbled, a kind of stage whisper, his thighs banging into hers.

“Do it to me,” she said flatly.

“Shut up! Shut up, bitch!” he screamed. “Fucking cunt! Shut up!” And he shouted wordlessly as he came inside her; if he hadn’t had his fingers dug so tightly into her legs, she would have lost her balance.

Afterwards, he wouldn’t look at her, though now it seemed more a matter of embarrassment than contempt. When he dropped her off on Telegraph, he didn’t even put the car in park. But she wouldn’t let him off that easily; she stared at him as she backed slowly out of the car, smiling coldly, and as he drove away she continued to stare at his rearview mirror to let him know that she could not be intimidated out of her understanding of him.

Molly had the next few weeks to worry that she was pregnant (she wasn’t) and to revisit what she’d done. Sex was what it was to her, an act unconnected to any other and a way of forcing men to reveal their secrets, but she knew too that it was not these things to most other people. To them, sex was intimate; to Molly it was extremely intimate as well, but never mutually so. She could imagine meeting a man (though she never had) who would hold this same kind of power over her, who would leave her crying and exposed and feeling fraudulent afterwards; what she couldn’t imagine was a balance of power. That wasn’t what sex was about. She wondered if she should be worried, though, about the increasing kick she felt from being objectified.

For Christmas her brother gave her a Bible.

On a gray morning, in a steep lecture hall, Molly slipped through the door after the lights were turned out for slides. The class, which she had been to once or twice before, was called Modernism and its Discontents. The chairs in back were filled; even in a class with a hundred students, their instinct was to put as much distance between themselves and the seat of authority as possible. So she walked halfway down the steps and took the first empty spot she could see once her eyes adjusted to the dark, three seats in from the aisle, between a girl wearing a Madonna-like T-shirt ripped to fall off one shoulder and a boy wearing jeans and a white Oxford shirt, his long hair pushed behind his ears, who watched the screen with his hands in front of his mouth, fingertips pressed together.

The hall flashed into darkness for a second, then back to the dim magnesium glare from the giant screen as a new slide appeared.

“The Disturbing Muses,” the professor said. He was fat and wore a multicolored sweater. He sat on the front of the broad desk, looking up at the screen, his back half turned to the class. He held the control for the projector in his left hand. “1917. Remember for a moment Malevich from last week, the concern with movement, dynamism, the restlessness of the industrial age. Here, at virtually the same moment of history, Chirico counterposes an art of almost deathly stillness, not motion but contemplation, reverie, quiet.”

Another flash.

“The Song of Love . 1914. Incidentally, Magritte called this painting, which he saw as a young man on a museum visit in 1922, one of the most important events in his life. Because, he said, in a world of Cubists and other self-conscious manipulators of the flat plane of the picture, here at last was someone who dreamed not of how to paint , but of what must be painted.”

Molly heard the scratching of pens, and indeed it was the kind of resonant remark she liked to write down herself, not for any purpose other than as a way of making the remark pass through her. She patted softly at her pants pockets, then at the pocket of her shirt.