Jonathan Dee - Palladio

Four or five minutes a day, three days a week, for a month, was time enough to learn a good deal about each other. Molly answered his questions partially. She told him, for instance, that she was not on good terms with her parents, and had come to live with her brother for a while. John never pushed her for more; he politely accepted every answer as complete, even when she was obviously holding something back. Nor was he the kind of boy — the only kind she knew, when she thought about it — who listened to your speech hoping to hear something in it which would remind him of a tangentially related experience of his own, which he would then explain in full, as if this were evidence of empathy of some sort. Maybe it was only because his experience was so very different from hers.

John just looked at her when she talked. It was a look whose intensity she knew he was not aware of showing. She knew what was going on. Still, he never asked her out.

Leonhard turned the lights off, and directed two TAs to pull the enormous shades down. In the sudden darkness and slightly laggard silence, the first slide, already on the screen, brightened into view.

“Kandinsky?” Molly whispered to John. She could feel him nod. He took out his pen and his notebook; she folded her arms, put her feet on the back of the empty chair in front of her, and stared.

The best way to deflect his interest in her background was to ask questions of her own. Thus she learned that John was from Asheville, North Carolina; that he was the only child of his father’s second marriage; his father, a lawyer, was forty-eight when John was born, dead now for eight years, and John’s two half sisters were both more than ten years his senior. His mother was very Old South, old money, a great thrower of parties and arbiter of other people’s reputations. As he grew older he had an inkling of how small his parents’ world really was. It was a desire to shock them out of being who they were that led him to enroll at Berkeley, which they and all their friends had considered — even in 1985 — to be a virtual outpost of Comintern. John had never seen the school, had never seen the state of California, before he arrived for his freshman orientation, three and a half years ago.

Spring break was approaching, just after exams; John would fly home to endure more questions about the ruin of his future prospects, a ritual which would end with his stepfather Buzz guiltily handing over a big wad of money as John waited for the cab to take him back to the airport. But it was the imminence of those two weeks, during which they wouldn’t see each other, that finally emboldened John to ask Molly on an actual date.

“You know the LaValle’s on the South Side?” he said, his nervousness showing. “Will you meet me there Thursday at about eight?”

Pizza and beer, jukeboxes and shouting; Molly didn’t love it, but she suspected that John didn’t, either, that he took her there because he didn’t want to demonstrate for her the fact that he could afford something nicer. He was waiting for her in a booth, and, unsurprisingly perhaps, for the first few minutes they couldn’t find much to say to each other.

Around them few of the tables were full; there were some solitary diners, people who had probably studied through the serving hours for dinner at the cafeteria, and one round table crowded with what looked like freshmen who evidently had no exams tomorrow and were celebrating by playing drinking games — Quarters, Thumper, Boom Schwartz. The waitress who avoided them wore a shirt and tie and one of those miniaprons.

“So what will you do,” John said, “over the break?”

Molly shrugged. “Not really a break for me,” she said, “strictly speaking.”

“Yeah, but no classes to go to during the day, no … Are your roommates going home?”

“A couple of them,” Molly said, but this was not true, not one of them was leaving the house.

“Your brother?”

“My brother hasn’t been back home since he came out here. It’s a long way to fly for just a couple of weeks,” she said, a little defensively.

The waitress stood on her toes to lean through the serving window. One of the girls at the table full of freshmen chugged a beer while the others chanted her name, the boys with particular vigor, a drunk female being a special kind of desideratum for them.

“Is it okay,” John said, leaning forward on the table, with his eyebrows low, his hair falling into his face, “if I say to you that I worry a little about you?”

Molly stared at him. The thought that rolled through her head — to her instant amazement — was that he was a guy and so she should just take him home and fuck him as a way of killing whatever it was that was growing here, a way of not being taken in by the seeming genuineness of it; and that thought was quickly supplanted by something even more surprising, which was an aching desire to be normal, to be a part of every stupid thing, a desire to play Thumper with a table full of idiots in a public place spending pocket money Daddy sent from home, a pain, in fact, at the idea of being worried about.

John sat back in his chair. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve said the wrong thing. Please forgive me. Sometimes I don’t know what to keep to myself.”

Molly started to tell him it was all right, but at the same time she didn’t want their conversation to go any further along that particular path; so she said nothing. Politely, he began talking about himself again.

An hour later, they were done, and the place was becoming noisier. He asked if he could walk her home. But things had been getting strange at the house lately. It was irrational of her, she knew, since he would only be taking her as far as her front door; still, for whatever reason, she didn’t want him to see it. She asked him if she could walk him home instead.

He lived with a roommate in a three-story apartment complex on Bancroft. On his face, when they reached the door to the lobby, was a little amused smile, a look of comic dignity; Molly realized it was because the simple role reversal involved in being walked home after a first date made him as mirthfully self-conscious as if he were in drag. “I had a great time tonight,” he said. “Would you like to come up, have another beer or some coffee or something?” And right then she thought she saw, like a shaft of light coming from under a closed door, all the dates he had ever been on in high school, how conscious he was of what was expected of him, and how much, if she got him into bed, he would enjoy being controlled, being overwhelmed; she could do it, she could lose herself and what she was feeling for him in that clinical administering to him of what she knew he would want, even if he didn’t know it himself.

But she didn’t want to have sex with him. It was a bad and confusing sign. Of course, when she said, “I think I should just get home,” he took it for simple restraint. “I guess I won’t see you for a couple of weeks, then,” he said. And he reached out very gently to where she stood with her arms folded against the chill and touched her very lightly on both elbows as he kissed her.

Something about it, the tenderness of it, upset her; and she thought about what this might signify the whole way home, on the overlit side streets, past the parking garages roofed with artificial turf for soccer games. She was glad she hadn’t slept with him, and she was glad she wouldn’t see him for a while, but she didn’t know the reasons for these feelings. When she got back to the house there were six people, none of whom she had ever seen before, in sleeping bags on the living-room rug. She stepped over them, went to her room, and closed the door.

Some kind of seismic shift, the nature of which she was not made privy to, had taken place in the last few weeks in the house on Vine Street. It now resembled less a home than a sort of base of operations, though what sort of operation it was impossible to say. All day long there were meetings in the house, some involving all the housemates and some composed of just a few; they would stop talking when Molly passed through the room.