Jonathan Dee - Palladio

Hurting her.

“So what do you think, my boy?”

“All right,” John said. “Yes.”

Osbourne moved immediately into a plan of action, urging him to fly down again as soon as possible to find a home, offering to cover half his moving expenses. The venture, as John had seen, wasn’t up and running yet, and wouldn’t be for another two or three months; since John would of course get no severance for quitting, Mal suggested that he not mention anything at Canning & Leigh about his plans for at least another month.

In the bed, reading a magazine in the half-light of the lamp, her face set, Rebecca looked startlingly old.

“That was Osbourne,” John said. She let the magazine fall and started crying. He stood beside the bed in silence.

“You won’t do it, will you?” she said angrily. He wasn’t sure what she was talking about. “You won’t break through it. You’ll make me do everything. Right up until the time you leave me you’ll be talking like fucking Ozzie and Harriet, trying to make everything seem like it’s someone else’s fault, someone else’s decision.”

“Who said anything about leaving you?” He hated himself now.

“Come on! You just took that job with him. I heard you! What, do you think there’s two of you or something, is that it?”

John knelt beside the bed. “Please come with me. I want to stay with you. I’m in love with you. I want to start a family with you. You act like Mal Osbourne is some lover or something, some third party that’s come between us. It isn’t like that. It’s in me. I love you and I can’t be happy here anymore. Maybe that sounds like two people to you, but it isn’t, it’s one.”

Rebecca pulled him into bed beside her, weeping; he took her in his arms, kissed her lips and her face, stroked her hair; then, to his surprise, she was pushing his pants down and pulling at him furiously, hungrily — in tears but with desperate speed she came loudly and then so did he. It was probably the best sex they had had in years. John had no idea what to make of it.

Canning accompanied John and Roman to Omaha, the most featureless, depressing city John had ever spent a night in. Nothing in it looked like it could have been more than fifteen years old. Only the cowboyish attire of some of the men and women they saw in the lobby of their hotel made them feel the influence of a past, even an ersatz past. Roman — who was acting more and more unpredictably lately, on a kind of creative high which seemed ready to collapse at any moment — all but refused to leave his hotel room. He was in the alien Midwest of his imaginings, and he couldn’t imagine that they wouldn’t know him and hate him on sight.

Roman ran the pitch. The men from the Beef Council wore expensive suits with boots and enormous belt buckles. They were ludicrous; Roman spoke to them in a voice that was almost belligerent. He was not about to explain his work to them. John was worried that these industry giants weren’t used to being talked to that way; but Canning seemed calm, even pleased.

They gave the agency their business on the spot. The campaign was the best they’d ever seen; cutting-edge, they said, avant-garde, just what they were hoping for to change their image. Eighteen million dollars in billings a year.

Three weeks later John took Roman out to lunch and told him he was quitting Canning & Leigh to move to Virginia and join Osbourne’s new agency. When he had finished the whole story — the letter, the postcards, the trip to Charlottesville — Roman nodded thoughtfully; but he kept on nodding for too long. He tapped his fork on the tablecloth.

“It’ll fail,” he said finally. “It’ll go belly up, and everyone will have a good laugh. And you’ll deserve that. Fuck you. Fuck you for lying to me.”

And at that point John would have expected him to get up and storm out: but he didn’t, he went on sitting there, staring at John with a hostility that was really unexpected. John could think of nothing to say. He signaled for the check.

He was shaken enough by this that he put off giving Canning his notice until the next morning. Canning took it gratifyingly hard, though much less personally: he asked John to reconsider, told him how much his work there was valued, even offered him a raise of seven and then ten thousand dollars on the spot. John wouldn’t be moved. The boss was surprised but didn’t seem to take the position, as John had half expected, that he was insane. Canning said he had heard of one or two other defections from within agencies in the city.

Around the office, John was of course subjected to a few sarcastic remarks, but in the end there were no hard feelings, and no one — except for his partner, who wouldn’t stay for long in the same room with him — treated him any differently in his final weeks at work. After his last day they even threw a little bon voyage party for him at the Landmark Tavern. Only Roman didn’t attend. John got drunk enough to forget about that for the evening. In fact, by the time they had to relinquish the banquet room and move downstairs to the bar, they were all as drunk as John could ever remember seeing them.

Rebecca had moved out two days earlier. Her anger had mostly passed. They talked about staying in touch, but it was hard to see how their involvement could survive the discovery that there were attachments in their lives more important to them than their attachment to one another. As for John, the one thing he couldn’t admit to her was that he was glad, in the end, that they had never married. Because a divorced man would always have that failure on his record; whereas for them it would presumably be easier to move on, to forget the past, to start again as if starting at zero.

Dale came up with two double scotches, and handed one to John with an air of great ceremony.

“I propose,” he said, “that since this may be the last time we ever see each other, we get drunk enough to say what we really think.”

John clinked glasses. “Seconded,” he said.

“Here’s something I’ve always wanted to tell you,” Dale said. “That Rebecca. I’ve always had such a thing for her, I’ve always been so jealous of you for getting this amazingly beautiful, smart, hot woman to fall in love with you. So what do you do? You ask her to move down to Deliverance country, to piss her life away in the middle of nowhere. She says no. You dump her. So now my whole opinion of you has changed. You stand before me, revealed as a total fucking idiot.”

John put his hand gently on top of Dale’s head and smiled. “You’re not in her class,” he said. “Go on, ask her out after I’m gone. You’ll never get near her. Besides, there is a whole nation south of Battery Park, you snob. You stay here on your little island ironizing yourself into early heart trouble. I know where the future is.”

“Fuck you,” Dale said affectionately.

“Fuck you too,” John said.

Canning came up behind them, drunk as a lord, and put his arms around both their shoulders. “Isn’t this great?” he said. “All this candor!”

THEIR TIME TOGETHER, over the next month or so, passed predominantly in silence, in half-darkness, looking at slides in Modernism class. There was no real impetus to take things to another level; already Molly spent more time around John, two or three hours a week, than she did with anyone else in her life. It was a relief, actually, to have someone in on the secret of her presence there. Molly would arrive at about ten minutes to eleven and take a seat in the back row; John, whose ten-o’clock class was all the way across campus, would show up a little red-faced, trying not to breathe hard, and sit beside her. This arrangement was never discussed. They had four or five minutes to talk before the lights went down and Professor Leonhard came around to sit on the front of his desk, holding the clicker. Molly watched the screen, watched Leonhard, watched John taking notes as he listened; she felt slightly jilted when he would shut her out in this way, but then the midterm was coming up, which he had to worry about and she didn’t.