Jonathan Dee - Palladio

Two nights before her date with John Wheelwright, she had come home late from a film-society screening of Knife in the Water . No one seemed to be awake. She tiptoed into the bedroom she shared with Sally, carefully closed the door, and began undressing in the dark. Slowly, as her eyes started to pick out shapes in the dark room, Molly began to feel that something was wrong. Her anxiety spread until finally she reached out to the wall and felt around for the light switch. Sally’s bed was stripped to the mattress; the closet doors and dresser drawers were all open, and every one of Sally’s belongings was gone.

Next morning four of the strangers were at the breakfast table, eating as if late for some appointment; Richard sat at the head. Molly waited until the others had left before asking Richard, her voice scratchy, what was going on.

“Sally’s gone,” Richard said offhandedly.

“Yes I can see that, but—”

“We took a vote, which was unanimous, and asked her to leave.”

“Without any notice?”

Richard shrugged.

“Did she do something wrong?”

Her brother reacted as if this were not a simple question. After a long pause, he said, “It was … I guess you could say more on an ideological plane, but I don’t want to say any more, we all agreed not to discuss it. In fact, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t make reference to it in front of the others.”

While Molly, who still lived there rent-free, could hardly afford to feel slighted by her brother’s continual use of the word “we,” she began to wonder how safe her own place there really was. As long as she didn’t start antagonizing them — bringing men home, doing drugs, things like that — she supposed they would continue to ignore her as she flew, so to speak, below the radar of their Christianity. Of course, her only real protection was afforded by her kinship with Richard, who seemed more and more, if also obscurely, in charge. If something should happen to cause the others to turn on him, or if he should turn on her himself, then she would have no place to go. She went back to her barren room and thought about it. Not quite twenty years old, she found herself without an attachment in the world she could rely upon, not even within her own family. Calmly she turned over the question of whether or not something was wrong with her.

On the Friday that marked the midway point of spring break she cut across the empty campus to Mr Whalen’s house. She read him Herb Caen’s column in the Chronicle . Friday was payday; on the sidewalk, once she was out of sight of his windows, she tore open the envelope in which he always put her cash: seventy dollars. It wasn’t enough to protect her from anything. On Telegraph she walked past a group of five or six blank-faced kids sitting under and on top of some army blankets, passing around an open can of peaches with a plastic spoon in it. She felt everything she came across cutting through the veil around her now, the veil that separated her from what was real.

Outside the BART station she found a copy of that day’s Chronicle , the same one she had just read to Mr Whalen, on top of a trash can; she took it to a bench by the parking lot and opened it to the want ads. It was like a catalogue of the ways in which her own short life had quietly defamiliarized her with the customs of the world. When she saw an ad for phone sales, she remembered that she had always been told she had a good voice. But when she called from a phone booth the woman on the other end of the line rejected her on the spot. “Sorry, sweetie,” she said. “You’re too timid. I can hear your voice shaking. I mean, come on.”

Phone sex operator: she could do that, she thought, and she liked the idea that her working life would consist of fantasy, that she would be another person entirely. But the “girls,” she learned, were expected to take these calls in their homes, at all hours, and that, at least for now, was out of the question.

At some point during the week she had begun to think about John Wheelwright. The form this took, at first, was a series of startling realizations that wherever he was at that precise moment, he was very likely thinking about her too. There was no one else in the world about whom she could say that right now.

Still, she fought against the feeling of missing him, or of looking forward to his return. She didn’t believe that these feelings were authentic on her part. John’s kindness, his concern for her, was genuine, she had no doubt about that. Her vulnerability to these things was what bothered her. By virtue of their very intensity, she thought, her own feelings couldn’t be trusted.

At home she found Richard doing the dishes, wearing a red polo shirt and khaki pants, which didn’t strike her as unusual until she walked through the dining room and saw two of her housemates, Steve and Guy, typing into laptops at the table, also wearing red polo shirts and khaki pants.

The weather was growing warmer, and as a consequence the streets, even before the students’ return, were more and more crowded with people who weren’t going anywhere: preachers, entertainers, schizophrenics, bums. Molly had never given John her phone number or address. On the weekend before classes resumed she realized this meant that, since he had no way to contact her, she never had to see him again if she didn’t want to. While having a cup of coffee at the Soup Kitchen she saw a blue spring-term course directory on the table beside her. She asked the couple sitting there if she could borrow it for a second; quickly she flipped through the Art History section until she found a course called The New York School which met Monday in Sprague Hall — it sounded like something John might be enrolled in. She borrowed a pen from the waitress and wrote the room number on a napkin.

Monday morning she went to the first floor of Sprague Hall and took a seat in the back row. John never came. After half an hour she left to go to work. She read Mr Whalen an editorial about the sale of the Empire State Building to the Japanese.

On the way home, on the corner by the secondhand clothing store, Molly caught a glimpse of a red shirt, and was a few steps past before she turned to see her brother, Richard, standing on a wooden stepstool, reciting the Bible from memory. She felt a kind of constriction around her lungs. No one was listening, and yet he did not acknowledge her when she retraced her steps and stood in front of him. He did not acknowledge anyone — he stared into the bricks halfway between the first and second stories of the buildings across Telegraph. On some level, Molly thought, she must have seen this coming, because, though thoroughly frightened, she was not exactly surprised. She noticed a stack of leaflets on the stool beside his feet and took one. “Ten Righteous Men?” it read.

That night she had a hard time getting to sleep. She now believed it was imperative that she see John Wheelwright again soon, but not just for the sake of seeing him. The larger his absence grew, the more he came to stand for everything missing from her life. He was becoming inhuman in her mind, and she longed for the disillusionment of seeing him again, of being reminded of some compromising thing about him which she had apparently managed to forget.

Awake almost till dawn, she then slept past eleven. Deliberately she showered, dressed, and ate a bowl of cereal, before walking to John’s house and sitting on the front steps. She did not ring his doorbell. After three hours she saw him walking up the street, alone, in and out of the shade of the elm trees. By the time his face came into focus for her he had recognized her, and he was smiling broadly. He took out his keys as he reached the steps.

“Molly,” he said, a little too jovially. “Come on in.”