by Jonathan Dee
* * *
IT’S NOT THAT I love Molly, at least not in the way that I used to, that’s over, but I still feel protective toward her and respect her and want the best for her. And I love Mal – I guess I can say that. Why should it bother me, then, the idea of the two of them?
I can’t deny there’s something strange about seeing them together – foraging for wine late at night in the climate-controlled closet next to the pantry, talking in the driveway (his hand under her chin), sitting in their low canvas chairs on the balcony outside their bedroom – something that goes beyond simple jealousy. They don’t seem to belong in the same room, or in the same world; they seem irreconcilable. Maybe that was just my mistake, viewing them not as people in themselves but as aspects, as cordoned-off areas, of my own life. Anyway, I’m shocked, every time.
Jealousy: well, maybe. But also, if those two people find what they need in each other, then, I think, I become truly superfluous in the world.
* * *
I STOPPED BY my office after dinner to check my voice mail and found a long message from the CEO of Virtech. Offering to fly out, any time it’s convenient for us, to have a look at our work in progress, possibly contribute some input, he says. I sat and thought about it for fifteen minutes or so. The last thing in the world I want to do right now is go to Tucson, but there seems no way out of it now. There was a tremor in this guy’s voice that makes me think he’s close to pulling the account, if he’s not under pressure to do that already. Not keeping Mal abreast of it is out of the question. I’ll make the arrangements in the morning.
SHE WATCHES MOVIES by herself in the projection room, she cooks a little bit, she goes off to the university or just out to explore the town – she can’t drive the Triumph so Mal has bought her a little red car of her own, a Sonata I think it is. She’s the only one who’s not here to work. And I think she is self-conscious about that, because she keeps strange hours, she’s all by herself up on the fourth floor – I guess; I don’t really know for sure where she is, or when she’s in the house at all – for long stretches during the day. She haunts the place. I’ve heard the others talking about her, but just in a fondly catty way, Jerry asking if now would be a good time to ask for a new matte system now that Mal’s getting laid, that kind of thing.
The anger that I feel is the reason that I don’t want to go to Arizona or anywhere else right now, the reason that I need to know that she’s somewhere nearby at all times. The anger’s all I have. I write these sentences down as they come to me, even when I don’t know what they mean.
JOHN, FIONA SAID. Can I talk to you?
I motioned to her to close the door behind her.
So Jean-Claude is back, she said, leaning against the wall with her hands behind her. She wore a black T-shirt with the word Pussy emblazoned on it in rhinestone script, and chunky shoes that really only call attention, I think, to how short she is.
I know. The work’s in the front hall for the next few days if you haven’t –
I’ve seen it, she said. It’s amazing. But I have this other thought.
I leaned back in my chair.
Have you seen him? Fiona said.
I hadn’t.
He looks … I’m worried about him. He’s so thin. And he came back and went to his room to sleep and that was like sixteen hours ago.
He’s been through something, I said. He’s weak and he needs some time to get his strength back.
Well, sure, she said, and she looked nervous, as if concern for him were something to be expressed only in confidence. But my idea was … There’s a lot of people here who work very hard, I mean, it’s their choice, but it takes a physical toll, and I wondered if you or Mal would be receptive to the idea of having a doctor on staff, or on call, or whatever the expression is. Not living here, obviously, the need’s not that great, but just on some kind of retainer so if we—
We already have somebody like that, I said.
Fiona’s mouth fell open. We do?
We do. His name is Cadwallader, great old Southern name. He’s at University Hospital. Do you want me to have him come over and take a look at Jean-Claude?
It took her a few more seconds to absorb, I suppose, this idea that everything around there had already been thought of. Then she shook her head and laughed. No, she said. I suppose not. He’ll wake up. Anyway, good to know.
And she left.
* * *
JUST AS IN some beach towns you’re always hearing the low growl of the surf even when you’re not conscious of it, so in Tucson your inner ear is always working against a backdrop of constant, unobtrusive noise, the roar of air conditioning. No one wants to take a step outside if they can avoid it. It seems an odd place for a city, is what I kept thinking. At the Hilton I took a shower and had the front desk call me a taxi, and I gave the driver one of those five-digit street addresses you find in new cities. Twenty minutes later we pulled up in front of an office tower that rose about five stories off the pavement, not an unimpressive sight when seen against the level desert that began immediately behind it and ran to the horizon.
The special suits, the gloves, the helmets, the sensory-deprivation chairs, all the stuff of today’s science fiction: the young people of Virtech go to their office every morning and work on making it real, about eighteen hours a day from the sound of it. The directors who met with me were all men, all just out of college, wearing concert T-shirts to a business meeting; standard dot-com culture stuff. Pulling somber faces, they escorted me into their boardroom, which was nothing but a long table and chairs on a blue wall-to-wall carpet. The furniture looked like it had arrived that day. I said no to coffee, no to snacks, no to bottled water, and got right to the point of my visit.
What would you say it is you’re selling? I asked them gently. I already knew the answer to that. The key to confrontation, in these cases, is to make it look like something else.
They glanced at one another. Then one of them, who wore glasses (well, actually, come to think of it, nearly all of them wore glasses), said, Nothing, right now. Not much VR technology is widely available yet, mostly for pricing reasons. But it’s all just around the corner, and what we want, basically, is to imprint our name with the public. So that when the time comes, they’ll associate us with the whole idea. If they hear of a thing, or dream of a thing, we’re the first place they’ll look to see if we have it.
I nodded. So the answer, then, is that you have no product to advertise. See, most agencies you might go to, that would be something of a stumbling block. (Laughter.) But you’ve come to exactly the right place. This is what we do. We don’t do product-related advertising. Palladio is a studio for the production of avant-garde art, and by subsidizing the wide dissemination of that art, Virtech becomes part of the avant-garde as well, in the public mind. Which is entirely appropriate. Because you guys are the vanguard. You are the bringers of the next big thing. We embody that idea, and you are going to borrow it from us.
And so on. It really wasn’t hard. They wanted to be sold; they just needed a little stroking. I brought out some autographed copies of Daniel’s last novel, and a series of glossy black-and-white self-portraits by Fiona, also signed. I showed them photos, including some amazing nighttime aerial shots, of something no one has seen yet – Alexa’s massive land-art project right there in Arizona, where she’s transforming a series of natural caves with mirrors and colored neon lights. Mal predicts it will be a sensation. I told them I’d be happy to make a phone call if they wanted to take a day off, drive down there, and see it all in progress.
Right there, in the conference room, they called their banker and had him cut a check for the last of the money they had originally agreed to commit to us. Smiles all around; one of them suggested that some champagne be brought in, but they had none on hand, and then they began to argue about the best place to send out for it. I was already leaning forward in my chair, anxious to get back to the Hilton, maybe eat a quick meal at the bar before phoning the airl
ine to try to change my reservation. But before they would let me leave, such was their enthusiasm, they insisted I go down to the second floor, to the Prototype Room as they referred to it, and check out some of the stuff whose reproduction I was now a part of bringing into the world. Their excitement about it was touching in its unabashed geekiness, its disconnection from any concern about the impression they were making. They couldn’t stop smiling.
In the Prototype Room I stood on a sort of round treadmill while a guy in baggy army shorts equipped me with a visored helmet, a sort of breastplate, and two heavy, loose-fitting, elbow-length gloves. Then he gave me a thumbs-up and lowered the visor over my face.
For the next five minutes, I walked through a ruined city, my feet crunching audibly on pulverized stone and broken glass. I could hear the crash as chunks of concrete snapped off of sheared-off buildings and fell into the street. For a while I wondered if I was the only one there; then a voice whispered in my ear, Hey, baby. Pretty wild, huh? I turned my head, my actual head, in its helmet, and was face to face with a lecherous bald man with a goatee. He smiled at me and raised an eyebrow. I hurried away. It doesn’t take long, it may interest you to know, to buy completely into a manufactured reality once your senses apprehend it. A block or so further on, a small child popped out from behind the flaking corner of a facade and threw something at me, a rock or maybe a broken brick. I threw up my hand and felt a distinct sting as it bounced, or seemed to bounce, off the glove. The wind whistled in my ears.
Not much else happened, really: I suppose incident is what the people in the Prototype Room are working on. The rest of my virtual tour of this landscape – based on no real landscape, as far as I could recognize; only a kind of imaginary template of ruin – held one other surprise. At some point, I passed a pool of water in the street, fed by a broken hydrant. I stopped and looked down: and there, shimmering but still distinct, was my reflection. I was a tall, muscular, busty red-haired woman, in torn fatigue pants, with a dirt-smudged face, full lips, and bright green eyes. Across my chest were two bandoliers, and hanging at my side was a gun. I reached down to my hip and touched it.
A few moments later everything went black, except for a small pulsing dot in the upper left corner of my field of vision. The guy in the army shorts lifted my visor, and there in front of me again were the three young executives of Virtech, tense with the effort of modesty.
When I walked out the street door of the office building, night had fallen, and the heat was a little less oppressive. It may sound like a cliché, but in that solitary minute before my taxi arrived, with all the city lights burning steadily against the pure indigo backdrop of the desert sky, I wouldn’t have been too surprised if the whole thing had just started to shimmer, then vanished, revealing to me that I was really standing in a sealed, undecorated room somewhere, far from where I believed myself to be.
HIGH WINDS KEPT us on the ground in Atlanta; it was well after midnight when I got back to Palladio. The house was silent; no light even in Milo’s room. I put down my bag until I could see by the red lights of the security system. Kind of a peaceful moment, actually.
Then I started walking, toward my office, treading on the outside of the steps where they wouldn’t creak (a trick I learned as a kid); past my office; halfway up the stairs between the third and fourth floors, where I stopped. There was an edge of light shining from under the door to Mal and Molly’s bedroom. It was so quiet that I had to wait there motionless for a few minutes just to satisfy myself that they hadn’t heard me. I sat on the step for a while, thinking of I don’t know what – of nothing, really; I might as well have been a part of the house – until at some point I looked over and saw that the light was out. Holding my breath, I rose and started down the stairs again toward my own room, anxious not to make a sound.
* * *
IN MY OFFICE, with Mal, who’d come looking for me just to see what he needed to keep tabs on. Actually, I’d gone looking for him, in his office, around nine, but he wasn’t downstairs yet. Now he was barefoot and holding a huge iced coffee from the kitchen. Another scorching day.
Daniel’s taken a section out of his novel, I said, a section he said he was having trouble with, and he’s turned it into a short story. So now the New Yorker says they’ll take it.
Outstanding, Mal said, yawning. Good for him. I’d love to see it.
Yeah, well, the thing is, we’ve worked all this out policy-wise as far as books go, but what about stuff of ours that appears in magazines? They have their own advertisers. They have their own layout, where ads might appear in the middle of a story, ads that maybe our own clients would consider –
I get it, Mal said, smiling, pleased almost. Things like this, unforeseen things, the kind of things that keep me up at night, tend to give Mal a charge. He loves new territory.
So you’ll –
I’ll talk to everybody. Anything else?
Yeah. I spoke to Jean-Claude.
Mal’s jaw set a little bit. Not that he’s mad at Milo for any reason – on the contrary, the further out into the ether Milo seems to go, the more Mal treats him like a favorite son. But his fame is snowballing to the degree that clients who used to ask hopefully if Jean-Claude had any forthcoming work still unspoken for are now insisting on him and him alone. They’ll wait, they say. Milo or nothing. It irritates Mal no end.
Hey, he said, where’s that thing that was supposed to be in the Times about him?
Next Sunday. Anyway, he finally came to me ready to tell me about his next project.
It’s finished?
No. But there’s a reason he’s telling me about it now. It’s … it’s site-specific.
Where’s the site?
You’ll love this, I said, not sure Mal would love it at all. It’s here. Palladio. That’s the site.
Mal sat back in his chair and thought for a few seconds. He shrugged affectionately. I don’t see any problem with it, he said.
Okay, good, I’ll let him know. It might actually make things easier, logistically, because at this point we’ve got so many people lined up waiting to see it when it’s done. Banana Republic, Xerox, DaimlerChrysler …
Mal yawned again. Sorry, he said. Didn’t get much sleep.
This kind of remark from him always shocks me right at first, because it feels like such an unexpected and intentional fuck-you. It takes me a second to remind myself that he doesn’t think about me in that way at all, as a spurned rival or even as someone whose feelings might be hurt – that what seems so real to me, where Molly’s concerned, usually turns out to be real only to me.
Doing what? I said.
Talking, mostly.
What do you guys talk about?
You, he said. Just kidding. He stared off into the corner of the room. No, actually, I suppose we talk mostly about me. Or about this place. Now that you make me think about it. She asks a lot of questions. She’s curious how I got to where I am. I try to ask her about her own life but she has a way of turning it around. Maybe I should be asking you.
Oh, I really don’t think so, I said.
Anyway, she listens. That’s what’s so great about it. Every woman I’ve ever been involved with, it eventually comes around to her wanting to change me somehow, they want to identify some sort of middle ground for you to move on to so you can be more like them. But Molly – it’s not that she thinks I’m perfect, she just takes me completely as I am, she has absolutely no desire to change me. And the paradox is that being around someone like that – that, itself, changes you. It’s changing me. It makes me want to be more like her.
How so? I said, sorry I’d brought the whole thing up by now. But he didn’t even seem to hear me.
Not that I worship her either, Mal said. I mean, I do but I don’t. I know this may sound a little hypocritical of me now, wanting to change something about her. But she stays upstairs most of the day, reading, sleeping, sitting on the balcony and staring at the mountains. I want to take her places. I want to show her the
world. She’s never really been anywhere. But she just wants to hang out up there in the room. I bet she could be happy like that a long time, actually. No real contact. Just her and whatever goes on in her head.
* * *
I KEEP COMING back to that moment, that instant, when I first saw her again, in my office, after ten years. I stood up. I shook her hand; I took my hand back. I remained standing, people spoke, I did nothing else. It’s easy to say it was the presence of other people that kept me from vaulting over the desk, pinning her to the wall so she couldn’t get away again. But what other people? My assistant and some stranger. Who cares if they know? Why should I care if anybody knows? Do I really believe that once you’ve made a fool of yourself over someone, you can ever go back to not being a fool, as if it all never happened?
Maybe I should have pushed that skinny fuck Dex out the door, locked it, and then had her, right there on the floor, however forcefully I had to do it. Tasha could watch or not watch, it’s unimportant.
Because what I’m really scared of, what I would really like another opportunity to disprove to myself, is that some instinct toward self-deceit, some tendency toward whitewashing, has hardened in me to such a degree that it wouldn’t have mattered if no one else was there, if I were alone in my office and the door opened and from the mists of oblivion Molly Howe walked in. I would still have smiled and stood up – buttoned my jacket, maybe – and shaken her hand, like we’d never met before, like nothing was real but the present, like the springs of desperation inside me weren’t just blocked but had never run at all.
* * *
COLETTE COMES THROUGH my office this afternoon delivering the message that Mal has called a special meeting of the entire staff, in the first-floor dining room at four o’clock. Usually he would give me some sort of heads-up as to what something like that’s about. Instead, though, I filed in along with everyone else and took a seat. At the head of the table, where Mal sits, someone had wheeled in one of our fifty-inch TVs and a DVD player. There was an empty seat next to Elaine, but I sat across the table from her. We don’t keep our relationship a secret but we try not to call attention to it either.