Jonathan Dee - Palladio

Molly pulled her head back in amazement. John, she said, I haven’t done anything. To you or to anyone else. I do my best to stay out of everyone’s way. It’s a huge house and I live in it, that’s all.

I nodded. I’m not accusing you of anything, I said. But ever since you got here, I can feel things going downhill. For all of us. And now he’s going to ask you to marry him.

She actually laughed.

What? she said. You’re dreaming. What makes you think that?

He told me so. He’s going to ask you when he gets back.

Molly’s eyes widened.

It’s a fucking joke, I went on. He doesn’t even know you. He doesn’t know how to love you. He doesn’t have any idea who you are. He can’t understand you, and so he wants to have you. And if he has you, then that’s it, it’s all over. I’m sorry I can’t say it any better. But I remember you, Molly. I know how you need to be loved. And it’s better not to be loved at all than to be loved in some inauthentic way. I mean, for most people any kind of love is better than nothing, but that’s not you, you can’t have less than you deserve. It wouldn’t be right. Can you understand what I’m trying to say?

Molly was looking at me strangely. Unfocused. Like she didn’t really see me; but her eyes were right on mine.

Because if you can’t, I said, then God knows no one else will. Let me just ask you one thing, okay? What do you see in him, anyway?

She took a step closer to me. I’ve stopped seeing things in men, she said. If you wait long enough, they show you everything anyway.

Her voice was odd. She was staring at me carefully, like you’d stare at a mirage, like you half expected it to disappear if you just looked at it hard enough, and as she did so she reached up and ran her fingers gently along my collarbone.

I didn’t move.

What’s left for me, John? she said. I have a lot of time left to get through. All I want is to be comfortable. Shouldn’t I be comfortable?

You have to get out of here, I said. Inside me the blood was hammering away. My face was turning red.

She ran her hand gently over the curve of my head, like you might do to a child. Why do you care? she said.

Stop it. I’m trying to tell you something.

Everything I touch falls apart. You’ve come back to me, though. I knew you would. I’ve been waiting up here for you. Is that what you want to hear?

That’s not true, I said.

She was talking almost like someone in a trance. Something’s happened to her, I told myself. You can’t take advantage. But it was no use. What was the point of resisting? Still, inside, until the last second, I resisted.

Why do you care? she said again.

Because he doesn’t love you.

You still love me, though, she said. Don’t you?

I could feel her breath on me when she said it.

You have to go.

With one hand around my neck she pulled me toward her, and with the other she covered my eyes.

I’m not even here , she whispered.

I wanted to worship her but it wound up happening differently. Though I wonder about it now, at the time it seemed right that she should be so passive, letting me call all the shots, which I was certainly in the right frame of mind to do. I thought of her passivity as a gift to me, an offering. I went through the whole catalogue of sexual memories, though in truth a lot of the stopping and starting had to do with my trying not to come. I wanted it to last for ever. Literally, that was what I wanted. I made it last a long time.

Did it change anything? Did it make me feel like I’d taken back something that had been stolen from me? To some extent. At one point, when I was behind her with my fingers dug into her hips above the bone, and she was on her knees and elbows, I saw that, with her eyes closed, she was crying. But I was too far gone myself at that point to stop and ask her what was going on. The sight of it at the time, if you want to know the truth, just made me fuck her harder. I used to go out of my way to avoid using that word, actually: fuck . But I need it now, it is the anti-euphemism, it describes what cannot otherwise be truthfully described.

But that was well after I laid my hands gently along her jaw and we kissed, for a long time, until at one point I heard a lovely suppressed moan from deep in her throat, as if she had just remembered something. Every instant, in fact, was another memory brought painfully back to life, as painful as it should be to bring something dead back to life again. I’ll know it’s time to kill myself the day I can’t recall even one aspect of it.

At one point we were in a kind of sitting position, with her legs wrapped around my waist. The patchy redness that broke out around her neck was a sexual response: another detail to remember. As we ground slowly together I realized she was saying something, her face buried in the hollow between my neck and shoulder.

What? I said.

She moved her lips from my skin, but left her forehead there.

I’m sorry, she said. I’m so sorry.

Don’t say it. Don’t. It’s forgotten.

Which, actually, was the truth. Nothing could have been further from my mind. Or no, that’s not it; time seemed to have collapsed in some way, so that what had happened then was also happening now, only with a different outcome: I was holding on to her, I would never let her get away like that again. We had gone back in time, so that what was in many ways the defining moment of my life was now unmaking itself. Just as if it had never happened at all.

We fell asleep there, in the dead of night, in the white room, a room defined only by our presence in it, sterile, outside time. Sometime before morning I was snapped awake by the prospect of Benjamin’s arrival with breakfast, and I dressed and tiptoed back downstairs.

When people — poets, or what have you — compare sex to death, I think this is what they’re referring to. Everything builds toward one moment, that moment is the completion of the act itself: just as the moment just before you die is the realization, the sum total and final complex relation, of everything about you, everything you’ve done, felt, said, heard. Then the moment comes, and you want to put it off, you want to go back. Because you realize the explosive moment you’ve been spurring yourself on toward is also the end of everything. You want to turn back time, to knock everything apart so that it can reassemble itself again. You want to go back. But you can’t do it.

* * *

TWO WEEKS SINCE my previous entry, which I had imagined would be the last one. Two days since the contents of my laptop — returned to me following its miraculous survival — were subpoenaed. Palladio’s lawyer is fighting it, but from what I’m told he won’t have a lot of luck. So my most private thoughts, all the things that I considered unsayable, are now about to become part of the public record. Perfect.

Forrest Shays, the lawyer, has told me in no uncertain terms to stop writing things down, but I’m sorry, it would feel pretty hypocritical that way; if it’s all going to be out in the open anyway then this little digital record, permanent and ephemeral, may as well have at least the virtue of completion. So I’ll end by relating the — what’s the word Mr Shays himself keeps using, the word we’re all supposed to remember come deposition time? The incident . I guess that’s to try to establish that not only did none of us see it coming, but no one could reasonably have been expected to do so. Well, they can call it what they want. I do consider myself responsible, though maybe that’s just my nature; anyway, the lawyers are all over it now, and I’m relieved that none of it is for me to decide.

Tasha sent a fleet of limos to bring Milo’s audience in separate groups from the airport, and I waited outside the front door to greet each car as it arrived in a cloud of dust up the driveway. We haven’t had any rain here in at least a month; the mountains are still an unseasonable brown. Anyway, I brought them in, bore stoically the disappointment they didn’t bother to hide when I told them Mal was still in Umbria, and gave them the tour. Took them through the front hall, the main dining room, the basement studios; escorted them out the back door and through the orchard, where everything was now picturesquely dead. I saved the ballroom for last because that’s where we were going.