Molly Bit

by Dan Bevacqua

  “Pretty soon.”

  “He’s an awful person,” Greg said.

  “I know.”

  “I mean like really.”

  The wind picked up and blew into them as if from out of every direction possible. Both Molly and Greg staggered in it, a little two-step, and peeked at the other through lashes. Once upon a time, two weeks before, they’d been drunk at three in the morning, side by side on a stranger’s top bunk. He’d kissed her. She’d called him sweet. It devolved into one of those moments where she had a boyfriend.

  “I gotta do this thing,” Greg said. He moonwalked away from her, his back to the wind.

  “O’Malley’s?”

  “Where else?”

  Back upstairs, her roommate was gone. Leslie had taken everything that belonged to her: the TV, the rug, the mini-fridge, the bean-bag chair, the microwave—even the phone. Molly wanted to be angry about it, about the phone, but what was poor, depressed Leslie supposed to do? She was seventeen, and seemed even younger than that, and she wasn’t coming back in the spring. She was “taking the semester off,” but Molly could guess what that meant: naps, masturbation, TV. It gave Molly the willies. It seemed like a long dark road.

  She sat on Leslie’s bed and contemplated her own side of the room. Molly liked her Breathless poster, and her giant Bette Davis smoking a cigarette. She liked the upside-down roses from after the freshman showcase. She loved the bookshelf she’d put up herself, and all the books upon it, their colors and titles, how she’d read them all, and the way she’d ordered them, not alphabetically, but by size, tallest to shortest, so that a tiny volume by Blake greeted anyone who entered. Near the foot of her bed was her desk. On top of her desk sat her computer. Above her computer was an old gilded mirror that had belonged to her mother’s mother, and in the window a stained glass of an eagle made by her too. There was also her great aunt’s jewelry box on top of her dresser. It was empty, but it was expensive. How much for all that? she wondered. What was all that stuff worth?

  * * *

  The short was about a girl whose father has a heart attack. She gets a phone call from her mother. It’s not serious, the mother says. It’s minor. She doesn’t need to come home, or not now at least. He has to eat better, the voice of Rosanna Archer says. He has to exercise. The mother’s been saying that for years. Molly goes ahead and throws her party as planned. It is a wild time in a small space. One guy wears a sombrero. A girl falls onto a table and flattens it. Someone brings their dog, and the dog eats the cake. After the party montage, Molly goes out onto her fire escape. She smokes a cigarette and looks through the window of the apartment across the way. A young father puts his tiny daughter to bed, turns the light off in her room, and goes into his kitchen, where he opens the window. He too smokes a cigarette, half his body hanging out into the cool, autumn night. He says hi. Molly does the same. She apologizes for the noise. Eric Os, portraying the father, says it’s fine. It’s karma. It’s all the parties he ever went to coming back to him. Everyone gets a turn, he says, but could they wrap it up by midnight?

  The party dies its drunken death. It’s well past three. Alone again, Molly’s phone rings. She answers. She listens. Everyone decided it would be more powerful if she didn’t cry.

  She did her laundry and packed. By five o’clock, there was still no Eric, still no tape. They had an hour.

  “Do you know how much money I spent on that crane shot?” Rosanna asked. She lay on Molly’s bed and stared at Bette Davis. “The permit alone was fifteen hundred. I had to tell the city it was for a commercial. Do you remember how hard it was to get the crane in the alley? It was impossible. Impossible!”

  “But you did it,” Molly said.

  “I did. I made that happen. Me. I did that,” Rosanna said. “Whosoever can change the night to day. Whosoever can turn the sun to rain. She shall be the producer.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” Rosanna said. “Where is that asshole?”

  They tried calling from the pay phone, but once again they got his machine.

  “Hello, Eric. This is Rosanna. I am going to kill you with my bare hands. I’m not even upset about it anymore. I’m resigned to whatever jail time I do. I will kill you, and when the judge asks me if I feel remorse, I will say no, and that the only thing I regret is that I can’t strangle you to death, every day, until forever. Molly’s upset as well.”

  They would have to get the tape themselves. It was decided. They would have to run out of there, through the Common and the Garden, up Beacon Street to Eric’s apartment at the corner of Exeter, and pry it out of his coke-over’d hands, no matter its state. That was all there was to it. It would have to be done.

  In front of the dorm, as they pulled on their hats and gloves, Kevin Murphy, a marketing major with ill-advised dreadlocks who Molly knew through Eric, said, “Hey, you two. I almost forgot about this,” and yanked a thick, oversized envelope from out of his messenger bag.

  * * *

  The students had daydreams about the future in which they sat to be interviewed by entertainment news reporters. It was one of the things young lovers bonded over—the revealing of this fantasy. They kept journals and diaries and what some of them insisted on calling notebooks, and in these they admitted to a certain kind of anguish. They threw the word genius around. She was a genius. He was a genius. They were geniuses. Harvard was for shitheads. Fuck those kids, they said. The students walked around with guitars strapped to their backs as if they knew more than three chords. They called their parents and asked for money. They rehearsed. They went to Alaska the previous summer and PA’d on a documentary about Inuit tribes and then acted like it was the first time in the whole history of the world anybody had ever done that. They could not understand why that Harvard girl would not call them back. They dropped acid on a rooftop in Beacon Hill and saw the city stretched out before them like the glowing revolutionary concept it was. They watched endless amounts of television and wrote term papers comparing Little Women to The Golden Girls. Like anyone, they rolled big fat fatties that went straight to their domes. They had nervous breakdowns. They were shipped off to rehab. They went on tour with their band, a little van circuit, to Buffalo and back. They free-styled. They went to Miami over break and came back with crabs. They would not shut up about Bret Easton Ellis. They spoke of Howl like Ginsberg had written it yesterday. They said they had an idea for a play that was ten hours long, maybe twelve, and they were going to need everybody. They did a line of coke and went to the gym and passed out on the treadmill. They watched a movie being shot on Charles Street with a TV actor who was trying to break through. They listened to the Cure, to the Wu-Tang Clan. They went to the Middle East, the Orpheum, to that shithole in Inman. They rode the Red Line. The Green Line. The Orange Line if they were cool. They performed. They wrote. They rehearsed. They found an original print of this. Of that. They watched it in the Student Union and wondered if they should drop out. Should they drop out? They wanted to drop out. They got off on Cassavetes, Kieslowski, Lynch. Hollywood was full of crooks and liars, but they wanted in. Everything was for that. That was everything. This wasn’t pretend. It was real. It was happening. They were going there. Or New York. Or San Francisco, if they were some kind of purist. No matter where, they were going. They were a movement, a motion, a force like a river overflowing its banks, and who could stop that?

  The Vault was packed. It was a refurbished bank building with its namesake like an open mouth in the back, but covered up now by the projection screen. The purple and gold NHSFF logo wobbled on the canvas as if floating in a day old bowl of milk. Molly wore heels, a red jumpsuit, and a bra that pushed her tits up. She knew how good she looked: she looked amazing. It had been decided that if they won, Rosanna would accept the award, but Molly wanted to leave an impression up there on stage. Everyone clutched their voting ballots or had left them on chairs to save their seats. The little pencils were all over the place. Students circled one another, and then one m
ember of the circle would splinter off and hurry down the row to another circle. They spent their lives on top of one another, and they were never not in competition, or on the verge of hating someone forever, but every occasion felt like a reunion, or a once-in-a-lifetime party.

  Through the glittering air above their heads and onto the screen the movies played one after the other. A girl met a stray dog and took the dog home to her sister who was dying of cancer. A boy who was late for school ran through a series of obstacles including a drive-by shooting played for laughs. There was a music video with a choreographed dance, a mockumentary about a homeless super villain, a doc titled My Summer with the Inuits. A father explained in a voiceover what it had been like to escape Cambodia under Pol Pot as the camera panned over skulls from the killing fields. Men in full drag reenacted a scene from The Golden Girls, and then it was Molly’s movie. She didn’t recognize it at first. Eric had changed the title.

  “The Candle in the Window?” she whispered to Rosanna.

  The opening was the same. The camera swooped down from the tops of the buildings. Through the window, Molly is seen in her apartment. Her phone rings. From the audience, she watched herself on screen.

  MOLLY

  Hello?

  The voice track cut out immediately. The whole tenor of the short was lost, the entire plot gone. There was a jump cut to the B-roll, to what Molly had thought were extended establishing shots where she’d sat on the futon and mouthed nonsense into the phone. The next shot was of the candle. Watching the movie, Molly sensed the tonal shift. It wasn’t the same story anymore. There wasn’t a story, or not a good one. Eric had reshot his part. The young daughter was history. He stood alone in his character’s apartment, staring out across the alley into Molly’s living room. The next three minutes were a sequence of establishing shots reedited to look continuous. These shots were intercut with new footage, and each cut to Eric was worse than the last. In one, he unbuckled his belt. In the next, he unzipped his fly. Eric’s only decent choice for the following shot was that it was framed from the waist up, but everybody knew what that arm motion meant. The next shot was of Molly reaching out to put her finger in the candle flame. During the shoot, she’d done this as a gag. It was something between her and him, not their characters. Molly hadn’t even known they were rolling. She watched herself pull her finger out of the flame and put it in her mouth and suck on it. She watched her character stare at Eric. She watched her finger slip out of her mouth and then slide back in. She did this twice more, and then she pulled down her bottom lip so her mouth was half open. The last shot was of Eric, a close-up, and everybody knew what that face meant. The moan was entirely unnecessary.

  * * *

  “At least it wasn’t you getting off on camera,” Greg said. “That’s one good thing.”

  The Candle in the Window placed next to last. Molly and Rosanna sat through the award announcements and speeches in a traumatized stupor, their eyes dead and faces slack, like the last remaining survivors in a bloodbath. Greg had found them. He led them next door to O’Malley’s, where the bouncer was a rageholic sophomore named Trevor. If you were cool with Trevor, it was cool—you could be there.

  “I hate him,” Molly said. She put her hands down on the table they had miraculously scored, felt the sticky beer, and lifted them back up into the air. “I feel like a whore.”

  “I would too,” Rosanna said. “I just paid fifteen thousand dollars to watch you simulate a blowjob.”

  “How much?” Greg asked.

  “You heard me,” Rosanna said. “We aren’t all fundamentalists, like you. This isn’t art for art’s sake. Talk to me in five years when you’re living in squalor.”

  They sat there drinking. O’Malley’s was not a college bar. It was for old men who drank during the day, and there shouldn’t have been a hundred and thirty students in it. “Freedom” by George Michael played on the jukebox. A few of the older marketing majors, tall girls like her, but with blow-dried hair and a certain finish to their outfits, looked at her and laughed, but otherwise no one paid Molly any attention, or, if they did, it was only to briefly glance at her, a stupid girl who’d made herself look like an ass, one of a million, and not worth their time. This, finally, was the offense that revealed itself, and stuck. It wasn’t that she’d been sexualized—she was used to that. It wasn’t that Eric had ruined the movie—that almost made sense. What bothered Molly, hurt her feelings, and enraged her, was that she wasn’t being taken seriously. Eric had turned her into a joke. It felt unforgivable.

  “Did that thing really cost fifteen thousand dollars?” Greg asked.

  Rosanna had gone to the bathroom. The line was seven miles long.

  “Twice that,” Molly said. “That was her half. Eric paid for the rest.”

  “For that?”

  “What’s it matter? You’re all rich. You’re all sitting on a pile of candy.”

  “First of all, Brando said that. And second of all, in what universe am I rich? How do I get there? I wanna go.”

  “You always have money,” Molly said.

  During the three and a half months she’d been friends with Greg, she’d noticed him noticing. He was not especially suave about this. It came off like a long stare, where he wouldn’t blink, and simply look into a person, rummage around inside them for a while, and then come back out into the light of day with a bloody, incontrovertible truth in his hands. He’d shared some of this information with Molly. “Rosanna hates herself,” he’d told her. “Your friend Denise is a closeted lesbian.” “Eric’s father never shows him affection.” Across the table, he peered into her. She thought Greg was going to tell her something about herself she didn’t want to hear.

  “I sell weed,” he said.

  “Since when?” Molly asked. “I want some.”

  “I don’t sell it at school. I don’t want people knowing. I sell it back home in Newton. Not all the time. Just when I need the money.”

  Greg knew a guy who lived in Allston. The guy fronted him the weed. If they asked nicely, if they were cool, he would probably do the same for Molly, but only if she wanted to, and only if she could sell it back home. It would solve her money problems, Greg said. It would take care of the holds.

  The thought crossed her mind in a serious flash, but, then again, she’d seen that movie and read that book. It was an exciting and entertaining story, and it was for those very reasons it kept getting made, but Molly didn’t have time for a lunatic drug dealer, or the cold, hard fact of a gun on the table. All of that was totally not her. In the moment, her whole life felt that way. Everyone Molly knew wanted experience, and Greg was no exception. His life was research. He was in the pursuit of material. Molly admired this about him, but she was tired of experience. She wanted a life. It was a no-thanks.

  After one more beer, she called it quits.

  “Come see me,” Rosanna said. “My parents would love you. They’d want to adopt you. You could stay forever.”

  “Let me know if you come down,” Greg said. “I could give you a heritage tour. Those are always boring.”

  Molly hugged them both and promised them each she would do what she could. Crossing back over Tremont, she noticed the weather. One of those warm December evenings had been born. She smelled the earth in the air, and the garbage. It was early still, not even ten, and she wasn’t tired anyway. She walked into the Common, and retraced those steps she’d made all year. Here, in its center, Boston was an old jewel of a town, a dark ruby, or a fortress made of brick and tarnished bronze. On the hill, the State House dome radiated light. She crossed the street into the Garden, where the pond had long been drained, the mud at its bottom rippled in ice. The city had dressed the Comm Ave lampposts up in Christmas boughs and ribbons. She went up the mall, between the brownstones, and then cut down Dartmouth in the direction of the river. Marlborough was spooky in the dark, and in the daytime too, the untrimmed weight of the apple blossoms deforming them into the street, and it was always a revel
ation, a feeling of having come through, when it was behind her. She took Exeter to Beacon, went a half block, and walked up the stairs at 309. At the top, near the front door, Molly leaned over the handrail. She steadied herself so as not to fall, and knocked on Eric’s window.

  After several long minutes, during which she rapped, and tapped, and shouted, “I know you’re in there, Cecil B. Jerkoff,” his shade went up. Eric was wrapped in a blanket, and his face had the bunched, dehydrated look of a dead white rose. The dim wattage of his desk lamp in the background completed the mood of existential hangover going on. He put a crooked finger in the air, and Molly watched him shuffle away.

  The front bolt was tricky, but he finally got it.

  “Not yet,” he said. “I’m begging you, please. Let me lie down.”

  She followed him back into his apartment, and closed the door behind her. She heard him drop onto his futon. It was a cheap and familiar sound. The studio gave off whiffs of body odor and mold.

  “I’m opening a window,” she said. “When was the last time you were outside?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Today? Yesterday?”

  “Negative,” he said.

  With some effort, she raised the window. The cold air blew against her chest. She stared across the alley at the condos.

  “You’re a piece of shit,” Molly said. “Do you know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everybody hates you.”

  “I know.”

  “Everybody.”

  She sat in the chair nearest him, and examined his face. Eric had radiant blue eyes. In between them, above the bridge of his nose, a pair of tiny hairs grew. Molly knew he usually plucked them, but there they were, taunting her. She told him to stop crying, went into his bathroom, and came back out with a roll of toilet paper and his tweezers. She handed him the toilet paper. “Sit up,” she said. “Blow.” When he was finished, they looked down together at the blood. “Shhhh,” she said. “It’s okay.” She wrapped the old toilet paper in a bundle of new and threw it in the trash. She told him to sit up straight, and to relax. With her left hand, she cupped the back of his head, and leaned in close. He smelled of sweat and gin. She narrowed her eyes, and plucked.