Jonathan Dee - Palladio

Molly scrutinized her brother; confusion was making her squint. “You’re really not coming with me?”

“I have business here,” he said.

They sat across from each other for several more minutes, until his patience with her began to seem like a form of ostentation. But when she stood up to go, she suddenly realized what she wanted to ask him.

“Can you do that?” she said. “Can you just decide that your family is simply no longer your family?”

She could see him soften a bit. “My family is right here,” he said gently. “The Howe family lived by nothing, for nothing. You are all reaping what you have sown.”

Molly expected to find John home from the library when she got back, but he wasn’t there. She called in sick at the restaurant. Then, after breathing deeply a few times, she called the house in Ulster. Her father’s voice was on the answering machine. “Mom, it’s Molly,” she said quickly; after a pause, she left her phone number. Then she hung up.

John didn’t get back for three more hours, much later than expected. Kay had not called back by then either. When he opened the door, after dark, and switched the lights on, he was frightened to see Molly glaring hatefully at him from the center of the living room, red-eyed, silent, and nearly hysterical from loneliness.

EVERY MORNING, ON his drive to work, John passed two of the five billboards that constituted the First National Bank of Charlottesville campaign. Three different times he had actually witnessed motorists drifting to a stop on the shoulder and getting out to look at the images more closely, which surely wasn’t something you could say about a lot of billboard campaigns. John hadn’t had a hand in them, personally. They were site-specific; one, on a stretch of county road that ran through some undeveloped rolling hills, was a trompe-l’oeil picture of a house under construction. The other, right across from the main gates of the university, showed a mother and daughter hugging beside the open hatchback of a car loaded to the roof with stereo equipment, duffel bags, and cardboard boxes full of books: first day of freshman year. Both contained no type — only the bank’s familiar logo, Monticello with a 1 in the center of it, in the upper left corner.

Initially Osbourne had loved them. The site-specific idea appealed to him right away; the fact that the ads were integral to the city’s very landscape — not something bought on local airtime during Friends or falling out of the Sunday paper with the Arby’s coupons — made them more exciting as ads and also reinforced the idea that the client was a hometown product, not some national chain whose monthly statements showed up from a PO box somewhere in North Dakota. And the clients, skeptical at first, had been won over as well. Their business had seen a slight upturn; more significantly than that, though, they kept reporting to Osbourne that everyone, everywhere they went, was talking about those First National ads. They’d never had such a buzz.

But within a few weeks, Osbourne had soured on the whole campaign. Though he kept stressing that he blamed himself, it was hard not to feel for those whose work was now the object of his undisguised contempt. “Billboards,” he’d say, shaking his head. “What the hell was I thinking? You can call it site-specific or whatever you want, but the fact is a billboard is a billboard is a billboard, people only expect to see one thing on it and that’s advertising. Their relationship to the work is poisoned from the start.” Nor did he care for the ads’ content; the approach was fresh, he said, but the message was still the same old message, your friendly neighborhood bank, look at this beautiful home we’ll help you build — the same old shit, everyone genially accepted it as a lie whether it was a lie or not. He seemed deeply troubled, and they saw him in the working part of the mansion less and less often; it was assumed that he was secluding himself somewhere in the east wing.

In retrospect John was glad he’d had nothing to do with the First National campaign; at the time, though, he had been frustrated, even a little panicked by his inability to come up with any decent idea at all. Osbourne had resolutely refused to do any partnering among the staff; nevertheless, John found that when he had an idea or a question or else just needed some company he was spending more and more time in the third-floor maid’s room where Elaine Sizemore had her desk. Elaine always wore her little round wire-rim glasses, and she didn’t seem to have brought with her from New York any sort of casual clothing: she wore skirts, loose dressy pants, blouses with fancy collars, while others walked around like skateboarders in baggy calf-length shorts and Limp Bizkit T-shirts. She wanted that maid’s room precisely because it was the smallest room in the main part of the house; the enormous cherrywood secretary she had found at a local antique store (in the end they had needed professional movers just to get it up the stairs and through the maid’s-room door) made the room even more formidably her own. John respected this bold maneuvering for solitude, even as he violated it by lingering in her doorway, blowing on a latte from the first-floor kitchen, asking her what was new.

Both of them were spending more and more time at the office. They didn’t have a great deal of work to do; but with the presence of a full-time kitchen staff, and TVs, and a pool table, and Internet access, it was easy to begin to feel estranged from their own small, still-unfamiliar homes. And home, no matter how John might wish it otherwise, was not terribly appealing right now. Eager to avoid the student-dominated apartment houses near campus — where the hours were crazy, the noise was tremendous, and where he would have been the oldest tenant by nearly ten years — he had taken a place out by the 250 Bypass. His two rooms were cramped, half-furnished, with no view; but the primary source of his depression on evenings and weekends there was his fellow tenants. Who, after all, in a small city like Charlottesville, would be living in a furnished one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette? Drunks; men who had been kicked out by their wives; men who were keeping mistresses and could afford a cheap place set aside for that purpose.

And the walls were not thick. The noises of sex were common; John felt that his inability to ignore them only reflected badly on himself. Much more upsetting were instances like the Friday evening he overheard his next-door neighbor on the phone; the words were muffled, but from the singsong voice the man was using John could tell he was talking to his children. He heard clearly the sound of the hang-up, followed a few seconds later by a wave of uncontrolled sobbing. The next morning John passed this man — maybe in his forties, with a puffy face under a blond beard — on the back stairs leading to the parking area; the man smiled and asked John if it wasn’t a lovely day. Six weeks of this sort of depthless interaction was about all John could take before he began spending some of his nights in the west-wing bedrooms at the office.

He wasn’t the only one. A custom developed whereby one would hang some personal item — a shoe, a bag, a sweatshirt — from the doorknob of a given bedroom to signal that it was occupied. One or two rooms were usually so reserved at any hour. In some cases, most verifiably Milo’s, this was because he worked best in the middle of the night; when he heard the kitchen staff banging around shortly after dawn, he would put down his brushes and go upstairs to sleep until lunchtime or so. But there were rumors that the bedrooms were being used for other purposes, at night and during the day as well. Olivia, the former gallery assistant from San Francisco, and Daniel, John was urged to observe, were often out of sight at the same time, usually just before lunch.