Jonathan Dee - Palladio

So she started taking any sort of available job in the film business: as an extra, in craft services, redirecting traffic when directors were shooting on location (legally or otherwise) on the streets of Manhattan. Carrying tape, carrying screens and stands, when it wasn’t a union shoot: offering her labor in the service of someone else’s vision. She didn’t think of it in terms of advancement — only in terms of hopscotching from one job to another, without too much of a nerve-racking break in between. There was a whole society of young people who lived in this way, and their sense of self-importance was tremendous, though, to be fair, most of them went into it with more of an ambition than Molly did.

She did some stupid things, some crazy things, from time to time. This was why she tried to keep her personality tamped down now, because when she didn’t, what tended to emerge was a vengeful sort of self-effacement. Mostly it involved a reluctance to take herself out of the path of dangerous men. Once she and Iggy had to change their phone number; for Iggy, who had that number on the back of countless 8 x 10s sent to casting directors, this was a great inconvenience, but when Molly made her listen to a few of one particular man’s answering machine messages, she said okay. Most of Molly’s sexual experiences were pickup situations, in clubs or at parties, once on the street with an Israeli man who asked her directions to the Circle Line. She gravitated toward (or allowed herself to respond to) the ones who verged on some sort of emotional extremity; but it was no longer about wanting to see what they had to show her. Nights like that were like tearing the veil, like mounting little productions of her opinion of herself. She wanted to see what she would look like having sex with a coked-out Dominican who could only stay hard if he was holding a knife to her face. She wanted to see what she would look like afterward.

She had no news of her family. She had no idea if they wondered where she was, or if they knew. She felt she had forfeited her right to have her curiosity satisfied about these things.

There was never a shortage of men who wanted her. She was beautiful, self-effacing, open in her manner and yet completely unreachable; thus she had become the kind of woman a certain kind of man will want to wreck himself against.

One such man was the director of a film she worked on, a documentary about poetry slams. Molly made herself useful, handing out and collecting releases, taking care of the parking permits for the crew. His name was Dexter Kilkenny. He was tall and unhappy, the kind of man whose legs bounced whenever he had to sit down for too long, and he was driven by a career ambition which shone through any cynical disguise he tried to drape over it. Molly did not miss any of the looks he gave her on location, even though he only looked when he was under the impression she didn’t see him.

When the finished film was accepted at Sundance, eight months after the crew had broken up at the end of shooting, Dex made sure to call Molly and invite her to the celebratory party at Nobu. She had no idea how he had even gotten her phone number, but she didn’t ask. She went with Iggy to the party. Next day, Dex called her at home again.

“Sorry I didn’t get to talk to you much last night,” he said, as if they were old friends. “The guys from Miramax were there, so I had to, you know.”

“Sure,” Molly said. “So how are you doing?”

“Hung over.”

“Drunk with success.”

“Yeah. So I had wanted to talk to you about, about working together again. I really enjoyed what you, what you brought to, uh—”

“You have another movie lined up?”

“Well, no, but from what everyone tells me, the offers should start pouring in after Sundance.” He paused.

“So,” Molly said.

“Yeah?”

“So really this is more like a call where you want to ask me out on a date.”

“Well, yeah, except, except I don’t really do that. Date. No experience in that area.”

“So you thought what you’d do instead is hire me,” Molly said, smiling. She teased him, but she liked how comfortable he seemed with his own eccentricity.

“No, no, I mean don’t misunderstand me—”

“It’s okay. Listen, I have an idea. We’ll go to the movies. It’s dark, no talking, then afterwards we can go to our separate homes if we want to. Sound good?”

Four months later, when he went to Sundance, Dex didn’t take her, which was disappointing. While he was gone, though, she moved her stuff into his apartment on Ludlow Street. He was right, too. The offers came pouring in.

AS JOHN’S BANK account mushroomed, he grew to feel that the two featureless rooms of his rented apartment, even though he rarely set foot there anymore, were an unnecessary drag on his personal sense of well-being. He let his lease expire and moved his few belongings into his room at Palladio while he contacted a few local realtors. But the first few places he saw were not right — too new; too garish; too big for one man living alone — and then, after he’d been forced to cancel two or three real estate appointments at the last minute for emergency business trips, the whole house-hunting effort ran out of the steam of its initial enthusiasm, swamped by the more pressing short-term concerns of work.

This contributed to a peculiarity of John’s new relationship with Elaine Sizemore, a romance about which he was growing very optimistic: they had never had sex outside the office. John, for now at least, had no other home, and Elaine (she, too, had rented a cheap room upon moving to Charlottesville, half expecting the whole thing to go belly-up in the first six months) insisted that her “home” was so embarrassing she would never let anyone who knew her from the office lay eyes on it. So she and John, on the nights they had been able to spend together, often went out — to dinner, to parties, to the movies — but they always returned to Palladio, unlocking the door quietly and moving on tiptoe through the hallways, even though the west wing was usually unoccupied at that hour, and even though their relationship was an open secret anyway.

That was the way the whole thing had started. After a fancy dinner with a group of executives from Pepsi, John and Elaine had left the restaurant in separate taxis, and had laughed tipsily when his taxi pulled up right behind hers in the mansion’s driveway.

“Don’t you have a home?” John teased her. She had unpinned her hair in the taxi, and now she kept nervously pushing it back behind her ears.

“I do,” she said, “but after a meal like that, one should spend the night in a nice room with a fancy bed, don’t you think?”

“One agrees,” said John.

Feeling like he was in college again, he invited her to his bedroom for a drink. She said yes with a kind of mock wariness, and the two of them giggled their way through the dark kitchen until they found a cupboard with liquor in it. For some reason he was now finding her round, wire-rimmed librarian’s glasses terribly exciting in a sexual way; though this feeling was born in drunkenness, it never went away.

Elaine had a graduate degree, it turned out, in comparative literature, from UC Santa Barbara. It was hard, intriguingly so, to imagine her in the context of southern California, but in fact that was where she was from, and where her parents still lived. John told her that he had had plans to go to grad school in the history of art; he didn’t get into why those plans had fallen through, and she didn’t ask. No one, he reasoned, wants to hear old-girlfriend stories, particularly traumatic ones, so early in a new relationship. The time for more detailed and honest presentation of their respective pasts would come sooner or later. In the meantime, they were at home in each other’s company. The unlikely success of the venture that had brought them together seemed to draft them along in its wake. Elaine had that opaque quality, that air of hidden resources, he liked in women, though she was funny at the same time, alert and undemonstrative and not at all neurotic. Twice she had stopped, in the middle of sex, to ask him — with no trace of insecurity, only a kind of amicable curiosity — what the hell he was smiling about.