Jonathan Dee - Palladio

“No, thank you,” she said.

They stayed like that for a little while.

“Can you come for a walk with me?” Molly said.

They went to the Soup Kitchen. “Will you buy me some coffee, please?” she said. Then she told him the story of her fainting spell here and her trip to the clinic in Oakland. She regretted having started the story — it sounded too much to her like a plea for sympathy — but she followed it through. When she pointed through the serving window to the cook who had driven her to the clinic, he waved at them. She looked hard at John, who was holding her hand now, for any sign of fear or insincerity. Not that she would have been put off by such a sign; in fact, she would have been reassured. She didn’t see any.

John said he had to go to the registrar’s office to drop off his tuition check, and Molly went with him, standing silently in line, feeling a little foolish. By the time they came out on to the plaza again it was after four o’clock. They bought a six-pack and went all the way up the hill to sit on a bench outdoors in the empty Greek Theater, to drink and watch the evening fall.

Then Molly told John the story of how she had come to live in Berkeley, of how she had been estranged from her parents, of her affair with the man whose children she had been hired to care for. She left nothing out. She did it so he would hate her, because she felt quite strongly now that if she couldn’t do something to change his mind about her she was going to lose control.

They looked across the top of the stage at the sunset lighting up the hills. John waited a long time; then he said, “Do you think it was a mistake?”

“What?”

“Sleeping with this guy, this Dennis. Looking back on it, do you think you made a mistake, doing that?”

Molly nodded; then, realizing he was still staring off at the hills, she said, “Yes, I guess so.”

He sighed. “So then you were seventeen,” he said, “and you made a mistake. I tell you, I hope you won’t hold it against me, speaking badly of your family. But I just can’t understand how your mother and father could turn their backs on you like that. I can’t understand how anyone could turn on their own child.”

Molly burst into tears. John took her hand and kissed it. “I’m guessing that you haven’t told too many people that story before,” he said. “I did nothing but think about you the whole time I was home. Don’t ever think that there’s something about you I wouldn’t want to know.”

They lapsed into a long silence on the downhill walk home. John, who still had no idea where Molly lived, stayed half a step behind her, guessing they were going back to his apartment but afraid that saying anything would break the spell. When they reached his door he took out his keys and they stepped inside without a word. His roommate could be heard in the shower; so they went straight to John’s bedroom and closed the door. The walls were covered with hundreds of postcards, all reproductions of great paintings, like a museum in miniature. There was nowhere to sit, apart from one desk chair, so they both sat on the bed.

When they kissed she felt a shudder go through him, an actual shudder, and after that there was nothing she didn’t want to give to him. They stood to undress each other; once her pants were off John remained on his knees for a few moments, his hands on her back, kissing her stomach, kissing the red impressions left by her jeans at the belt line. They sat cross-legged on the bed again, facing each other; Molly took John’s cock gently between her hands and looked as intently as she could into his eyes, doing nothing, feeling him grow hard in her palms.

He was so patient. She leaned forward, kissed him, and let her weight push him down on to his back. She straightened up, reached between her thighs, and guided him into her. She was trying to move as slowly as possible — not because that was more enjoyable for her, nor in response to any sign from him. She didn’t really know why she was doing it.

Still, it didn’t last very long. He closed his eyes and she felt him contracting inside her. She lay down on top of him; he laughed a little, then, still inside her, he began running his fingertips along her back, touching her as lightly as possible, from her neck down as far as he could reach, just below her hips. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, and it went right through her, painfully enough that she hoped he wouldn’t say anything more.

In the silence they heard the bathroom door open; John’s roommate walked past them on the other side of the wall and into his own room, where he shut the door and put on some music. Molly got up from the bed and carefully opened the door to the hallway.

“Everything all right?” John asked softly.

She nodded. The bathroom was shrouded in steam; she couldn’t see her own face in the mirror. She sat on the lid of the toilet, inhaling the heavy air, her palms up in front of her face, and watched her hands shaking.

By the time three weeks had gone by, Molly had pretty much moved in with him, though she now had so few belongings that she wasn’t altogether sure John even knew this was the case.

“HERE ARE SOME words that I never want to hear again,” Osbourne said. “Edgy. Postmodern. In your face.”

Nervous laughter around the table. They were gathered in the dining room — or what was formerly the dining room; no one ate there, and John kept waiting for it to be given some new name, but it remained “the dining room” — for their first staff meeting. The table around which they sat was a magnificent cherry-wood oval; at each place was a china cup and saucer. Apart from that, the sunlit white room was free of any decorative touch, for a few more hours at least. Some workmen had been in the first stages of the delicate, complex process of installing one of Osbourne’s own brushed-steel Frank Stellas on the long wall opposite the windows, when Osbourne had walked in, trailed by his new staff, and told the installers to take an early lunch.

“We are here to make art. We will make it in a communal setting. However, that doesn’t mean you’re going to hear a lot of that team-first bullshit that you might have been subjected to in some of your old places of employment. I believe in cooperating, but not at the expense of the emergence of individual genius. No great work of art has ever germinated from some committee decision. Greatness is a pure product of the individual consciousness.”

There were nine people, including Osbourne, around the table, six of them holding pens and notepads. No one had written anything down yet. The pads and pens were supplies they had brought from home. No one knew where to find them inside the mansion, because no one had been given an office yet. Osbourne’s hair was still wet from a shower; he wore a bright-green polo shirt with the collar turned up and chinos, and his feet were bare. He swiveled restlessly in his chair as he spoke, as if he could hardly wait for this meeting, which he had spontaneously convened, to be over.

“What else, what else. In the west wing there are several bedrooms, just about all of them furnished by now, I think — I’ll have to go take a look. Those are for you, as you want or need them. The kitchen can only stay open until eight p.m. Rose — that’s the housekeeper, for those of you who haven’t met her — is here twenty-four hours. As am I, by the way. For those of you who haven’t figured it out” — he held up one bare foot — “part of the east wing has been kept as a living quarters as well, and right now that’s where I live. Ah, Benjamin!”

Benjamin walked in from the kitchen entrance, a stout man somewhere in his sixties, John guessed; nodding at the mention of his name, he went around the table pouring coffee from a silver pitcher. A few of them held their hands over the small china cups and smiled apologetically.