Jonathan Dee - Palladio

“I hope you’ll all take the opportunity at some point today to introduce yourselves to Benjamin, who heads the kitchen staff, and to Rose as well. Now, a couple of you have asked me, in the last two days, when your various job descriptions will be spelled out. The answer is that there are no job descriptions. Titles, same answer — you have none. As for where your own individual office is located, you don’t have one.” He gaped, good-naturedly exaggerating their looks of surprise.

John had not yet met all seven of his colleagues. Interestingly, they all had the same expression, as far as he could see: gameness, he would have called it, a willed overcoming of the skepticism that every casually dropped bit of information about their new workplace instinctively produced.

“But the real reason I called you all here,” Osbourne said, “is to announce some happy news. Which is, we have our first client.”

A murmur of relief, and then some soft, somewhat sarcastic but good-natured applause spread around the table.

“Yes, it’s true. It’s a local client, a bank in fact. The First National Bank of Charlottesville. Now I’m going to try a little something here. Which is, I’m not going to tell you another thing about them.”

He stood up and went to the windows, which overlooked the dogwood trees behind the kitchen.

“No research, no market information, no looking at previous campaigns. No history. None of you are from here, and so I’m assuming you have no idea if this is the number one bank in the city or the number twenty-one. I want to keep it that way.”

Elaine Sizemore, who was sitting across the table from John, threw her little notepad on the table, where it made a louder noise than she had intended.

Osbourne didn’t turn around. “No idea what this client needs. No idea what their self-image is. Because they don’t know what they need. We’re the ones who know that. We know it already, and market research would just cloud our judgment about that. And if any of you have any experience doing campaigns for banks — well, I can’t do anything about that, I suppose, but really what I’d like is for you to forget all about it. Banks want to be humanized, and humanizing banks leads to lying, and lying leads to irony as a way of dissociating yourself, and your audience, from the lie. That’s no good. That’s the chain we’re trying to break.

“So we don’t relate the campaign to the bank at all. We don’t associate our work with the bank; we do our best work, and then we allow the bank to be associated with it.”

He looked around the table. “That’s all,” he said brightly. “I’ll be around. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.”

Osbourne walked by the table, stopped to drain his cup of coffee, and disappeared into the hallway. The others, smiling and perplexed, stood slowly. They didn’t speak to one another. What was in their minds was doubt, and no one was willing to express it — not out of fear of being reprimanded or informed upon, but because everyone had a significant stake in the success of this enterprise, and right now that success seemed to be largely, if not entirely, a matter of personal faith.

The installers came back in, one holding a carpenter’s level and drill and the other reading a pamphlet of some sort; they resumed preparations for the enormous Stella. John, grateful though he was for Osbourne’s generosity regarding starting salaries, had all along been expecting a much more shoestring-type operation than the one that was so far in evidence — the china cups, the full-time domestic staff, the sleeping quarters. Where was the money going to come from to pay for all this? With local banks as clients, how could Osbourne run the place at this level for more than a few weeks?

But these reflections were swallowed up in the instinctive fear that had been reinstilled in all eight of them by the familiar vague directive to get to work, to come up with something. John went into the south parlor and sat on one of the couches, trying to think about advertising without the impurities of an actual product to advertise. He sat and thought in earnest, but with nothing to build on his mind began to wander, toward what he might be able to order from the kitchen in the way of lunch, toward the amenities he still needed for his new apartment, toward Rebecca and what she might be doing now; and when Daniel, the novelist, noticing the blank look on his face, asked him if he wanted to go down to the basement and play some pool, John said okay.

IN THE MIDDLE of June came graduation day; but John, whose thesis on Goya was incomplete — abandoned, actually, at least for the time being — wasn’t ready for it. He called his parents and told them not to come. They did not react calmly. At the end of the month, John’s roommate, diploma in hand, said goodbye and moved south to Los Angeles. John renewed the lease in his own name, this despite the fact that his parents had told him to expect no more money from them. He took a word-processing job in San Francisco at a law firm, to cover the extra rent; and he and Molly had a home together, a home they couldn’t really afford, a home with one empty room in it.

Sometimes in the mornings, after John had left for the BART station, Molly would sit in the kitchen and cry for a while, without really knowing why. It wasn’t because she missed him. It just seemed like a good idea, at that point, to set aside part of the day for crying, and that was the part of the day she chose. She asked John once what his post-graduation plans had been, before meeting her that is, and he said he hadn’t had any; she knew this was a lie. The exodus of students for summer vacation made a certain type of job much easier to come by: Molly now worked as a waitress at Fondue Fred’s, a forlorn little restaurant in a mini-mall on Telegraph, four dinners and two lunches a week. Between them they made enough to pay the bills. Neither of them had much of an inclination to learn to cook, but they ate as cheaply as they knew how, frozen dinners, rice and beans from the taqueria. Weekends, unless Molly talked him out of it, John still went to the library to do some research for his thesis, which he now hoped to complete in time to graduate in December. All his friends were gone from Berkeley, either for the summer or for good, so the two of them spent every evening together. In February he would turn twenty-three years old.

Molly felt scared most of the time, particularly when she woke up. Her fear was exacerbated by a sense that she wasn’t entitled to it, that by all rights she should have felt safer now, in the embrace of someone completely devoted to her, than she had ever felt in her life. If she awoke before he did she would try to forget things by seeing how aroused she could get him without waking him up. But the early mornings were usually passed in that way in any event; it was a way of blocking out everything. They could hold each other’s eyes for a long time while making love. She’d never really thought of it before, but now, when it came easily, she realized what an unusual thing that was to do.

They never answered the phone anymore because chances were the call was from his parents, unless it was from a bill collector. They had no TV; it had belonged to John’s roommate, who had taken it with him, and their financial margin was too narrow at the end of each month to afford one. Neither of them could call on family, at this point, for any help with money, or with anything. Molly wondered to what extent true love was properly bound up with one’s feeling of having nowhere else to go.

She bought a cookbook from a Krishna selling odds and ends off a blanket beside Euclid Avenue. Since their incompetence in the kitchen was so general, they tried fancy things as readily as the most basic: vichyssoise, steak au poivre, crème caramel. The latter was doomed from the start, since Molly thought “egg white” meant the white part of the egg, i.e., the shell. John made fun of her; she picked up the phone, ordered a pizza from Domino’s, and bet him that she could make him come twice before the pizza arrived. Hours later they were still laughing at the way they had had to pass the money around the corner of the door to the delivery boy; later still, though, as Molly lay awake thinking about the ways in which these evenings were binding them together, there was less and less funny about it.