Jonathan Dee - Palladio

And there was something in her that seemed to bring it out. She knew she wasn’t supposed to think that way, that someone impartial might say she was only blaming herself for things that were not her fault: still, she thought and thought about it (little to keep her from turning over the past, in the evenings in her two-room apartment) and she could not conclude that she was wrong. They all wanted to make her talk, when all she wanted was to stay silent. Silence maddened them. They all wanted to make her belong to them, for no other reason than that they could see she did not want to belong to anybody.

There is a multiplex nearby, and when she needs to get out Molly takes the bus there. Some of the movies seem more promising to her than others, but usually she winds up seeing them all. Some more than once. This has gotten her into trouble on occasion — an unaccompanied young woman at the movies, in a city just large enough for people to lose themselves in. Once a man came and sat in the seat right next to her with just ten minutes left to go in Castaway .

The credits rolled. The man — he was her age, or maybe a few years younger — leaned toward her slightly, without taking his eyes off the screen, and said, “That Helen Hunt — what have I seen her in before?”

“ As Good as it Gets, maybe?” Molly said.

“Oh, right, right.” The lights went up. “Hey, you know what?” he said, in a tone of playful conspiracy. “You’ve seen this movie before.”

Molly looked at him, alarmed.

“Yeah, I knew it,” he said. He had a kind of sallow, slack complexion, like someone who has lost a prodigious amount of weight. “I’ve seen you in here. In fact, I was thinking maybe you’ve seen me in here, too.”

Molly had lost a mitten, and looked around under her seat for it.

“I mean, come on,” the man said, laughing unconvincingly. “I mean, it’s not that good a movie.”

He followed her all the way to her bus stop, and by that time his banter had grown a little less ingratiating, a little more aggressive. But he didn’t get on to the bus. Molly next went back to the multiplex about two weeks later, and there was no sign of him.

Life alone, she understands, life without attachments, means that when she dies something will die along with her. But she doesn’t find any great cause there for regret — indeed on some nights, in some moods, there’s something grimly satisfying about it — and anyway, she still has a long, long expanse of time to get through, a life like a spy’s life, never disguised but essentially, retrospectively, unseen. At night sometimes she can hear, through the floorboards, the sound of Tucker and his sister Hannah crying in their beds. They are crying, Caroline has explained to her, for their lost father. Those moments only reinforce for Molly, actually, the wisdom of her own resolve not to become a mother herself. What comfort could she be to anyone.

* MESSAGE *

You are forgiven

A friend is someone you know about, someone you can trust. Abrand’s a bit like that. You met this friend through advertising … Without advertising, how would you recognize your friends?

You are forgiven

USEFULNESS OF TECHNOLOGY ALTERS ATTITUDES

You are forgiven

And if there is a gimmick in all of this, it is that there is no gimmick. For

You are forgiven

Let us, then, restore to the notion of commitment the only meaning it can have for us. Instead of being of a political nature, commitment is, for the writer, the full awareness of the present problems of his own language,

forgiven forgiven

forgiven forgiven

forgiven forgiven

forgiven forgiven

SKEPTICISM MAKES THE WORLD ACCOUNTABLE.

What’s On Your Mind?

THE REVOLUTION IS HERE.

YOU’RE ALL FORGIVEN!