Jonathan Dee - Palladio

She was the one taking him through everything, trying everything, acting experienced even when it came to things she had never done before. Trying, she supposed without really acknowledging it, to lose him, to leave him behind, to shock him or to test the reality of what he seemed to feel for her, which was total loyalty, an unwillingness to let her cast herself for him in any light other than the light of his love.

She all but goaded him, for instance, into anal sex, even though it was something she had never tried before. The thought that it might hurt her went against every instinct he had. Ultimately, the pain of it, while not as severe as she might have thought, wasn’t balanced out by any great corresponding pleasure, other than maybe an abstract, intimate sort of pleasure born of mutual transgression. But the whole thing, though they never repeated it, was worth it for the look on his face, tenderness bordering on alarm, as he held himself frozen uncomfortably in one position, balanced on one elbow, waiting for her muscles to relax, the other hand stroking her hair.

They did go out, of course. The city was hushed, depopulated, yet strengthened in its character somehow, like something boiled down to its essence. When they could afford it they went out to a movie. On the occasional Thursday — half-price day — they took BART into San Francisco and went to the Museum of Modern Art. John talked her through the dim rooms, modestly, reluctant to offer any evidence of his expertise unless he was asked. Molly was warmed by the pleasure he took not just in knowing a lot about the paintings but in the paintings themselves; and she was even a little jealous of the years he had spent in classrooms, lecture halls, auditoriums, developing this interest. Jealous because it all seemed to have passed her by, impossible now, like a trip back in time, even though she was just twenty years old.

September arrived, and then October. The life of the university renewed itself; neither of them was a part of it now.

Her brother Richard had become, on an irregular basis, part of the street life. He wore his red shirt and announced the damnation of everyone who passed in front of him, damned them without looking at them, his gaze leveled above their heads. Molly stopped to listen to him on her way to work. She didn’t have to worry about being exposed. He knew where she was living now, and so he did not even acknowledge knowing her, much less being her brother. Students who stopped to listen for a moment, she noticed, usually broke the connection by laughing, or imitating him, or pantomiming great fear. Their irony was something to which Richard was completely impervious; but it was no less mighty an instrument for that.

Sometimes she encouraged John to dominate her a little bit, to be a little less gentle, less considerate, both because she liked it and also to jolt him out of what he thought he knew about women; but he couldn’t really do it, that wasn’t who he was. Once he made her gag slightly and he apologized so many times she finally started to laugh at him.

She thought a lot about her brother and what had happened to him, and about whether, apart from the fact that she missed him, what had become of him was something to be mourned. Unabashed eccentricity; a desire for a sense of family, a sense of mission in the world, to rescue life from the pointless and the sham; a longing for something real in the midst of everything that seemed insubstantial; a need for something besides oneself to fear. Were these reasons to doubt the authenticity of a man’s religious feeling, or the strongest evidence of that very authenticity?

When they had no money to go out, John and Molly sat at home and read, looking up from time to time and shaking their heads at the picture of premature domesticity they presented, or would have presented if there were anyone looking at them. Once she caught him looking up at her rather more than she was used to.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Nothing.” He had a pen in his hand. She got up and walked to his chair, and saw that on the flyleaf of his book he had drawn a picture of her face.

“It’s good,” she said.

“I’m not very good with portraits.”

In the depths of one night in their bed — out of breath, unaware what time it was — John said, “I don’t know what to do. I can’t remember what I used to feel like before this. I’m worried all the time that something will happen to change it.”

She curled up against his chest. “You’ve just never gotten laid like this before,” she said.

She felt him tense up. When a minute had gone by, and he hadn’t said anything, she raised herself on her elbow, so that he could feel she was looking at him.

“Don’t do that,” he said softly. “Don’t joke about it.”

Some days Molly would feel, without any particular cause, that it was all bound to end badly, and when that happened she wanted to turn herself off, to make herself stop thinking, usually by trying to flood out with lust these pockets of despair. John didn’t really understand what was going on at such moments. She would suddenly engage him in some kind of pointless sexual dare: sitting on his hand on a crowded BART train, blowing him, at three-thirty in the morning, in the brightly lit lobby of their building, sitting astride him, her feet braced against the wall, in a men’s-room stall at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She wanted to find his limit, because knowing that limit would drive a wedge between them; but in his mind, the question was not how far he would go but how far he would follow her, and she couldn’t find the limit to that.

The chef and the maître d’ at Fondue Fred’s were constantly asking her out. They knew she was living with someone, but they took it for granted that an attachment like that in someone so young — they were both at least ten years older — was not solid enough to withstand the right pressure. For some reason they preferred to harass her in each other’s presence; they were emboldened, or maybe just put at ease, by the knowledge that when they said something outrageous to her they could look for each other’s reaction rather than just Molly’s. Manny, the maître d’, had a small ponytail and wore shiny, ventless suits, of which he seemed to own only two. The difference between his deportment with the customers — practiced, a little too unctuous to be as classy as he thought he was — and his amazingly profane manner among Dylan and the other kitchen staff was so broad that Molly found herself wondering about the circumstances of his life outside of work. But she didn’t ask any questions; curiosity about Manny, she knew, would be instantly and eagerly misinterpreted.

Dylan had been in the navy, or so he said, and had no obvious connection to this part of the country at all, having grown up in New Jersey and apparently resolved never to go back there. He had a series of Japanese ideograms tattooed on his biceps, which he always kept exposed. One evening Molly dropped a tray and broke a few glasses just on the kitchen side of the swinging door. She swept the shards into a bread basket and went out back to the alley to dump them in the trash. Dylan was out there, smoking a cigarette. Black trash bags were piled against the stucco walls on three sides; the fourth was the narrow open end of the alley, with a streetlight just beyond it, where every few minutes someone would walk past.

Molly’s eyes met Dylan’s; she turned away to dump the glass in a garbage can, but the first two she opened were full to the brim.

“You didn’t have to smash those glasses,” Dylan said, “just for an excuse to meet me out here.”

Molly laughed halfheartedly. “I guess I could have taken up smoking,” she said.

“Want one?”