Jonathan Dee - Palladio

The next morning, when John handed Osbourne the book contract for his signature, his boss looked it over and shook his head appreciatively, then offered it back to John and said that, after thinking it over last night, he had changed his mind and decided not to do it. John, though somewhat put out by this, had to admit he was also not terribly surprised. For months now Osbourne, via his instructions to John, had turned down one by one every request to be interviewed, or photographed, for print or TV. He turned down public appearances of all kinds, in all countries. Even inside the office, in fact, he was less and less visible, though he was usually, as they were all aware, in the mansion somewhere. No one knew if this reclusiveness was calculated or not, but if it was calculated, it couldn’t have been working out any better for them.

WITH EIGHTEEN HUNDRED dollars held in a tight roll by a hairband in her front pocket, and a heavy bag with a shoulder strap on the seat beside her, Molly drove Kay’s Honda to the Albany airport and left it in long-term parking. Inside the terminal she bought a postcard with a picture of the airport on it, wrote a note to her parents which said only that the Honda could be found in long-term parking (Lot G-2) at the Albany airport, bought a stamp at a newsstand, and dropped the card in the mailbox near the terminal’s police station. Back outside the doors to baggage claim, Molly hailed a cab to the Trailways bus depot on Foundry Avenue. She staggered down the narrow darkened aisle of a half-empty bus, slouched in a seat by the tinted window with her knees pressed high up on the metal seatback in front of her, and with the cold, antiseptic-smelling air conditioner blowing on her forearm, her other arm resting on top of the bag stuffed shapeless with her clothes, she began to disappear from the lives of the few people who knew her.

Like the bus ride itself — torturously boring, until the moment she emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel and understood how completely her life had just changed — the years of Molly’s life that followed seemed to pass at two speeds simultaneously: interminable and abrupt. Inside Port Authority she called information for the address of the youth hostel, which turned out to be all the way up on Amsterdam and 105th Street. A few nights there, sleeping on a woven mat, in with the backpackers and the foreign boys who kept encouraging her, as baldly as if she were an idiot, to go out and get drunk with them; then she answered an ad in the Voice and took her place as one of six roommates in a three-bedroom apartment on Gansevoort Street. The third bedroom, which Molly now shared with a tall, sallow aspiring actress named Iggy, was actually a dining room with a Japanese screen placed in the entrance. Molly could look out the window nearest her futon and see, on one corner, the unmarked entrance to an S/M club, and on the other the trucks backing in and out of the meat wholesalers, the thick men, none of whom seemed any younger than middle-aged, in their absurd white coats like surgeons, covered with sawdust and blood. Molly came with enough money to cover two months’ rent and a lie she had prepared about a publishing job she was up for, but in the end the other tenants of the apartment never even asked her if she was employed. She had enough cash for a security deposit and that’s where their interest ended. They were used to people coming and going.

All of them in the slovenly apartment were involved in the arts in some peripheral and materially unsuccessful way. They passed around their part-time jobs the way they might have borrowed each other’s clothes; Molly found work first at a Kinko’s, then at a video store, then as a waitress. They sometimes went, in groups of three or four, up to Columbia for jobs as human subjects — drug experiments and the like. These jobs were so unrelated to who they felt they were that the changes, the hirings and firings, meant nothing. But Molly could meet her measly rent and her one-sixth share of utilities in this way, which was the only accomplishment in which she felt she could afford any interest. Everyone else Molly met took it for granted that she was an artist of some sort herself; she was living the life, she had the demeanor, and after all she had come to the city with no prospects in the first place. But if Molly was involved with creation of any kind it was only to weave herself so seamlessly into this life that she might not stand out from it at all.

Friends introduced her to friends. So many people she met now, men and women, were gay that she couldn’t always anticipate when some friendly figure at a club or a party in someone’s apartment would suddenly try to get over on her. She took up some offers and not others; she did make herself a rule — one which her roommates had long ago discarded — that she wouldn’t sleep with anyone else who lived in the shared apartment; she didn’t want to endanger her spot, since, should she find herself homeless now, she really had no safety net at all. If, in theory, Molly had suddenly changed her mind and decided to have sex with any one of them, she would have known in advance what kind of sounds they tended to make when they came; with the Japanese screens and the temporary walls and the excess of people, there was no privacy to be had at home. No one minded, because you couldn’t overcome the closeness of the quarters in any other way than not minding.

In the end they lost their lease anyway, when James, who had been at NYU film school for something like seven years, got drunk and set fire to his mattress after his dissertation was rejected. Molly and Iggy moved into a tiny one-bedroom on Seventeenth Street; the guy Iggy was sleeping with came over the first weekend they were there and put up a plasterboard wall in the middle of the one bedroom, with a gap cut on one side for a door. This meant that Molly had to walk through Iggy’s room to get to her own bed; but again, the pretense of privacy was best forgotten if you wanted to live sanely in such a situation. The boyfriend was married and he never knew very far in advance when he could sneak away and come over; if Molly walked in on them, he made no attempt to cover himself, and once in a while asked frankly if Molly would care to join them.

“Maybe some other time,” Molly said. Iggy just laughed.

She went to readings, she went to clubs, to gallery openings when there was the prospect of free food. The art that she saw everywhere was an art of personal expression; most of the theatrical productions were monologues or one-man shows, if only for budgetary reasons. This kind of highly confessional art, when it was bad, seemed false, insincere, yet Molly wondered if you could fairly call it inauthentic when the artists themselves (they were usually friends of hers) were sacrificing everything for it — comfort, money, security. Rarely did any kind of failure incline them to question these sacrifices. They would do anything to get their confession on the record.

Every time Molly met a new person, in a social situation, the fourth or fifth question out of their mouths was, What are you working on?

Iggy got a job playing a Mexican hooker on a soap opera, but then the character was killed off and she went on unemployment for a while. She tried to take a job at Starbucks but was fired for cursing out the manager before her training was even completed. Accustomed to such setbacks, Iggy continued going out at night, and refused to admit the possibility of real disaster.

“There’s always whoring,” she’d say brightly, shrugging her shoulders. It became a running joke between them, every time a bill collector would call or the landlord would wait for them on the stoop.

Years were going by. What was she working on?

She had what might be called an artistic temperament, yet she had no inclination toward art itself. Art was communication; she wanted only to be silent. Music, acting, anything that involved getting on a stage was outside the realm of possibility for her. Even writing seemed to her much too demonstrative. It wasn’t fear so much as distaste. In talking about a thing, you automatically forgave yourself for it. She didn’t want to transform her own experience, to pretend it was anything other than what it was.