Palladio

2

I STOOD UP behind my desk as they walked in. Through Tasha’s introductions I remained standing, my fingertips splayed out and pressing down on the desk, and honestly that’s because I thought there was a real possibility I would fall down.

And this is his assistant, Tasha said, Molly Howe. Molly, John Wheelwright.

We shook hands, that’s what kills me. We didn’t let on right away what was happening. A door that has opened eventlessly a million times opens one day to reveal Molly standing on the other side: there was a time in my life, believe it or not, when such a moment wouldn’t have found me unprepared, when I burned with the unreasonable belief that just such a thing would happen, that she would simply turn up one day, as inexplicably as she’d vanished. But that was years ago. On this day, my astonishment was profound. I put out my hand; Molly reached across the desk and held it for just a second; then our arms fell back to our sides and we went on staring into the mirror of our own disbelief.

It didn’t last but a second, though; maybe it was the touch, the physical touch, that snapped me out of it.

Actually, I said, smiling a little, we’ve met before.

No kidding? I heard Dex say. I don’t think I’d so much as looked at him yet.

Molly said nothing. We had a secret; but if I thought we were going to share the private gravity of it somehow, even silently, I was mistaken. She did not return my smile; in fact she seemed immobilized by her amazement, fighting it for control of herself, like someone who comes face to face with a dead person, or a bear, or the Virgin Mary. Her eyes seemed to dilate as I stared at her. She was afraid of me. It was unsettling to see.

Not that I want to put it all on her; I wasn’t about to get into explanations anyway, not then, not in front of my assistant and some tall overeager guy I didn’t know. Actually, we’ve met before. Actually, we’ve slept together. Actually, we were in love. Actually, she left me, and I haven’t seen her since.

Years ago, I said. So anyway, Mal is tied up for a little while longer. Why don’t I show you around?

IF I SAY it was dreamlike, I’m not just talking about the unlikelihood of it, or about wish fulfillment. There’s a helplessness to dreams: things take their unstoppable course, no matter how bizarre, and even if your dreaming mind is allowed to smile at the absurdity of it, still you have no real choice but to go through your paces, speak your lines. Dex walked between us down the broad hallway, hands folded under his arms, doing all the talking. I could see why Mal had found it so hard to say no to him. He’s just the sort of highly motivated young eccentric Mal can never resist. About six-three, comically skinny, with short, loosely curled red hair; even on his best behavior he gave off a kind of poorly restrained restlessness, as if events, or other people, were never quite moving at his pace. Just standing next to him was like being in New York again. He’d crashed an opening at Mary Boone to petition Mal to be allowed to shoot a documentary about the remarkable rise of Palladio and its founder; and Mal, while making it clear he would never allow any filming to go on inside the mansion, was smitten enough to invite Dex down to Charlottesville anyway, just for a visit.

What I felt right then, I suppose, was the desire to be able to say to someone, as we walked past, Hey, look; look who just showed up from nowhere. But no one in my current life knew that about me — who Molly Howe was, I mean. The only one with whom I might have shared this revelation, that the sheer unlikelihood of something happening was apparently no guarantee that it wouldn’t happen even so, was Molly herself: and she kept turning to look out the little hexagonal alcove windows in the hallway, or wherever she needed to look in order to keep her face discreetly averted from me.

I led them down the broad front stairs and through the main entrance hall, with its original wooden chandelier from 1842; through the tiny, belfry-like east parlor, with the glass-fronted bookcases and the window seat where Alexa, the land artist from Los Angeles, sat folded up in the sunlight, looking up irritably from a copy of Elle; through the long parquet-floored ballroom, curtains drawn, animated by the hum of two dozen computers, in which a lavish all-night dance was held in 1861 to celebrate Virginia’s secession from the Union. These days we keep most of our video-editing equipment in there.

It’s hard to say how she’s changed. Her hair is darker now. She doesn’t dress much differently, that’s for sure: a baggy black sweater, fatigue pants, no comb or pin that would hold her hair in anything other than its most artless position. She’s put on some weight. Her face is fuller, the curves of her body somewhat more pronounced, but that’s by no means a bad thing: she always was too skinny. I don’t just mean that it makes her more attractive. I mean one can take it as a sign of stability, that she’s eating, that she’s not too depressed, that her life is settled at least to the degree that she can look after her own health. I used to worry about that. She was never someone who took great care of herself.

Awkwardly abreast, we passed through the dining room and kitchen to the back stairs that led down to the basement. It’s like a warren, all brick and low ceilings and the occasional inconveniently placed steel support beam the contractors made us put in. I thought I’d show them the soundproofed artists’ studios we’d installed down there, but they were all occupied, or at least locked, by the artists themselves. Milo, not content with a sign, had painted the words ‘Do Not Disturb’ in Day-Glo orange across the door itself. The whole basement had the thrumming, busy silence of a library, and I found myself whispering as we passed through. Just to the right of the stone steps leading out to the driveway is the so-called basement lounge, a doorless rectangle where for decades firewood was stored; Fiona (the artist I hired in Venice), Daniel the novelist, and my girlfriend Elaine were huddled together in there on an old thrift-store couch, watching what I knew must be some of Elaine’s work-in-progress on a laptop.

I started past the doorframe, but Dex, for whatever reason, took a few steps into the room. The three of them looked up. Elaine noticed me and smiled uncomfortably before returning her attention to the screen; I have an idea what she’s working on, but she doesn’t want me to see it yet. Daniel and Fiona glared darkly at the strangers — at the very idea of strangers.

Sorry to disturb you guys, I said. This is Dexter Kilkenny and Molly Howe. Guests of Mal’s. Dex directed Throw Down.

We’re working here, Daniel said. You want to stare, go to the zoo.

Somewhat embarrassed, I led them from there up the basement steps and around the southwest corner of the house, to where you could really start to get a sense of the layout of the grounds. Palladio used to be a plantation home; the greater part of that land was sold off nearly a century ago, but we still have about two hundred acres. The hedges make a kind of smooth geometry of it as it rolls up and down, folding over and over itself like chop on the ocean, toward the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west. It was a beautiful Virginia spring day, hot, breezy, and fragrant.

That orchard, Dex said, sniffing like a hamster. What is that?

Cherry.

Beautiful.

I kept trying to fall a step behind him so I could catch Molly’s eye, but then Dex would deferentially try to fall a step behind me again. The wind was blowing, and she kept pushing her hair back from her cheek. She still wears it long enough to blow over her face, into her mouth. She hasn’t changed it at all.

So when was this place built? Dex said. Before the Civil War, right?

1818, I said.

Were there slaves here?

We’re pretty sure. They didn’t keep such careful records. We’ve never been able to find any record of the slaves themselves, but we did find some old architectural drawings of an outbuilding back by the orchard, with bunks in it and an outhouse nearby. It only makes sense as slave quarters.

Can we see it?

The outbuilding? It was torn down in 1866.

Oh. Well, naturally, Dex said; he seemed disappointed.

I walked them through the cherry orchard, with its brick footpaths and ornate iron benches, some more than a century old. I showed them the child-sized topiary maze the original owner had introduced to spoil his granddaughter, who died of tuberculosis in 1889. I mentioned his relation, admittedly a distant one, to Thomas Jefferson; I even threw in a quote from Jefferson’s famous essay on the beauty of Virginia. Somewhere in there, I heard the unmistakable throaty sound of Mal’s little Triumph turning off the main road and speeding up the driveway. Mostly to give him a few minutes to get settled, I called their attention again to the Blue Ridge Mountains, naming the ones whose names I was sure of, and in truth it’s rarely clear enough to get as beautiful a view of them as we had that day. Dex and Molly were politely awed.

That was the end of their tour. I walked behind them up the stairs to the third floor, and as I did I saw Dex put his arm around her, saw him whisper something she didn’t respond to and then kiss her on the top of her head. Colette, Mal’s assistant, was just closing the door to Mal’s office behind her; she saw me and nodded discreetly.

You can go on in and see Mal now, I said. Where are you staying, by the way?

The Courtyard Marriott, Dex said.

I know it well. Listen, I’ll come by when you’re done with Mal and walk you back out to your car.

Molly was standing like a dog outside Mal’s closed door, her back to me. She couldn’t wait to get away.

Oh, that’s nice of you, Dex said, but I’m sure we can –

I insist. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get lost in here.

Colette opened the door and ushered them in. A few seconds later she reemerged, pulled the door shut, and looked quizzically at me still standing there in the middle of the hall.

Buzz me when they’re done, would you? I said.

BACK IN MY office downstairs, the last of the initial shock wore off, and the truth is, I found myself feeling a little angry. I’m not talking about residual anger, anger over what she did to me ten years ago: ten years ago is ten years ago, and however all that might have fucked me up at the time, I’m well over it. We were kids then. I’m talking more about wondering where she got off acting so petrified.

I mean, what do you suppose she thought I’d do? Scream at her, throw her out, make a huge scene? She knows me better than that.

Of course maybe on some level it was gratifying too, let’s be honest; after all, the worst, most humiliating part of any failed love affair is the suspicion that maybe it never meant as much to the other person as it did to you. So if I still had the power to upset her, just the very sight of me, I can’t pretend that didn’t mean something. But still, to act afraid of me, to the point where she wouldn’t look at me or speak to me, that’s just over the top. She owes me more.

HALF AN HOUR passed before Colette summoned me upstairs.

Mal’s ready for you, she said when she saw me.

From her desk I could see that Mal’s office door was standing open.

Where are they? I said.

They left about ten minutes ago. I offered to buzz you but they said they could show themselves out.

In a state of disbelief, I walked into Mal’s office. He was in a lively mood. He sat on the front of his desk, in a white tennis shirt and jeans, his black hair still blown back from his recreational drive. John, John, he said. What news?

So you just saw Dexter Kilkenny and his, and his assistant?

I did. He’s kind of a character, isn’t he?

They cleared out of here awfully quickly. You guys didn’t get into any sort of …

God, no. Just talked about movies. He still wants to make a documentary about Palladio.

You told him no?

Just like I told him no two months ago. He’s a very single-minded guy. I told him to take a drive on Route 20, just get out to where the farmland starts, take in the beauty of the place. What a day! You get maybe ten days like this in a year.

Did he say he’d do that?

I don’t think he even heard me. You know he actually brought release forms for me to sign? The self-confidence of the guy! You have to respect that. I’m tempted to let him try it.

Are you?

Mal stopped bouncing his feet and looked at me; something in my voice, I suppose. Not really, no, he said quietly. The artists would never go for it in a million years. No upside for us in doing it anyway. Why, what did you think of him?

I had the strongest urge, right then, to tell Mal the whole story. But I didn’t.

I don’t know, I said instead. There’s something about him. Not that I think he should make a movie about us. But he’s young and very talented and he’s got a certain focus, doesn’t he? Maybe we should try to keep him around for a while, see if we have anything for him. I know Elaine needs some help. She asked me about directors just the other day.

Mal smiled fondly at me. Always on the job, he said. Where are they staying?

The Courtyard Marriott.

Christ. Okay, well, let’s at least call them up and invite them to stay over here for a few more days. We have room for them, right?

THAT WAS THE first lie I ever told him. In my defense, it was entirely spontaneous. I simply can not believe that she could run into me like that and then just leave town again without a word to me, as if all the history there is between us, everything that connects us, just plain didn’t exist at all. I have no plans to demand some big explanation from her. I have no plans at all. To me it’s more like a matter of simple courtesy.

I had Colette make the call. Well, Dex said, I don’t see how we can say no.

BUT ALL THAT was ancillary to what my meeting with Mal today was really about. I told him about the call I’d had from the President’s people, and also about the trial next month of the two guys from CultureTrust, the ones arrested for defacing our artwork in a gallery out in Spokane. In retrospect it was a mistake to tell him the two things at once, because he seemed to forget all about the first matter as soon as he heard about the second one. I should have seen that coming. It’s resistance, rather than the promise of reward, that always gets Mal going.

I don’t get it, he said. These are, what, activists of some sort?

College professors, I said. I mean, there’s a group of them, but these two particular guys are a couple of middle-aged professors from Eastern Washington University.

What’s their objection, exactly? To me, I mean?

I was at a loss as to how to answer that one in a way that wouldn’t rile him up further.

Maybe you should go out there, Mal said.

Out to Spokane?

Well, yeah.

And do what?

Mal held his hands apart. Do what you do, he said, smiling confidently, having disposed of the matter now in his mind. You’re the fixer.

LIES RAMIFY; I didn’t need another lesson in that. But they also raise the level of your alertness in a way, put you in more electric contact with your surroundings. Elaine and I went out to dinner that night at Il Cantinori. All her excitement over what she’s working on, the thing she won’t tell me about — all I know is it has something to do with Jack Kerouac, because On the Road has been sitting on the windowsill next to her side of the bed for the last three weeks — was sublimated into her eating; she went through her saltimbocca and started in on my risotto Milanese before I was halfway through it.

You’re not pregnant, are you? I said.

She rolled her eyes at me, and put down her fork. Very funny. Sorry, I’m just hungry. Listen, here’s a question, maybe you would know something about this. What’s the deal with copyright and dead people?

How do you mean?

I mean, a dead author, do you still need permission to quote from their work?

I took a bite of my reclaimed dinner. Depends. I think it passes into the public domain fifty years after the death of the author.

Oh.

Has — has the figure you’re talking about been dead fifty years?

Not nearly.

I mean, I can’t see that it matters, permissions aren’t that hard to work out.

Well, Elaine said, estates are funny sometimes. Plus I don’t want the cost to get out of hand.

Don’t worry about that stuff, I said. You know Mal doesn’t want you to –

I know, but I worry, I can’t help it. It’s in my breeding. And then the thing is, I spent the last three days looking at all the stock footage I could find of cameras shooting out of airplanes as they take off? Out the windows, or from the cockpit, from the wheel well, whatever? And it all sucks. None of it is what I need. So I have to find some way to do it in-house. Just like sixty seconds’ worth, but I know a shoot like that costs a fortune.

You know, funny you should mention it, I said, feeling the blood rise into my face. You know that guy you saw me with today?

Elaine nodded.

He’s a director, and he’s staying in the house for a while. His name is Dexter Kilkenny. Mal and I were talking about trying to find something for him to do. He made this documentary about poetry slams in New York, it went to Sundance, he got a deal with Fine Line.

She shrugged. Haven’t seen it.

You want to talk to him?

Sure, Elaine said, trying to act blasé. The busboy came over to remove the bread basket; Elaine laid a finger on it and waved him away.

He’s from New York? she said.

Sure is.

Because I was thinking that would be perfect, actually, La Guardia or Newark, for what I need. Something right next to a whole web of highways, lots of cars. Newark would be perfect.

I’ll get you guys together tomorrow.

So who was the chick? Elaine said.

Sorry?

Who was that with him?

Oh. Her name’s Molly. She’s billed as his assistant. I think they’re sleeping together, too.

Huh. Well, he must be quite a talented director, then, she said. Because he’s way too ugly to be sleeping with her otherwise.

We both had dessert, and I signed for the check; then we drove home with the top down. The night was as beautiful as the day had been; the smell of jasmine at every stop sign was enough to put you right to sleep. Back at the house there was a light in Milo’s window, but there’s always a light in Milo’s window: he’s like a vampire, he can only sleep when the sun is out. Otherwise the place was silent. I didn’t know if Dex and Molly had yet arrived, nor, if they had, where in the mansion Colette might have put them. Elaine and I took our shoes off and tiptoed up the back stairs, laughing. We didn’t even make it to the bed. It was just one of those nights, where all seemed right with the world and a locked room seemed like the most remote place on earth.

* * *

THERE ARE NOW a total of fourteen artists on staff at Palladio. Most of them live in-house, functionally if not officially — I suppose it’s too hard, especially for artists whose memory of material struggle is still fresh, to resist the maid service and the full-time kitchen staff. Even so, there are empty rooms. We certainly could do more hiring, but Mal has always resisted that, the idea of growth for growth’s sake: he never wants to take someone on unless he feels that person’s work has made itself indispensable.

This morning, I took my time traversing the ground floor on the way to my office, poking my head in every room. I saw Jerry Strauss half-lying on the couch in the parlor, powdered sugar still in his beard, reading the Wall Street Journal and writing on it with a Magic Marker. Jerry seems to like me but I know that with others he can be exasperatingly touchy, self-centered, messianic almost: he works best alone because while he’s punishingly self-critical, one word of criticism from somebody else and he flies off the handle. He came to us as a graphic novelist. Jerry is actually not his real name. It took me the better part of a year to find that out. In high school they thought he looked like Jerry Garcia.

I stopped in the main dining room to get myself a latte and there I saw Dex and Molly, eating breakfast, sitting somewhat sheepishly in the high-backed wooden chairs. Dex was at the head of the table, Molly to his right. I sat down across from her.

Welcome! I said, feeling my own smile. You got in last night?

Dex’s mouth was full, so he nodded.

Colette got you all set up? Where did she put you?

In a room up on the third floor in the … is it the west? (Molly nodded.) The west wing.

Right upstairs from me, I said. And everything was comfortable? Molly?

She looked a lot less agitated now, having had twenty-four hours to get used to my resurrection. Her panic had subsided, and in its place was a kind of injured stoicism, as if some joke were being played on her which she didn’t find funny at all. I didn’t care.

It’s lovely, she said.

Beats the hell out of the Courtyard Marriott, Dex said, maybe a little anxious that Molly’s tone wasn’t sufficiently polite.

So you guys can of course just do what you want today, take it easy, be our guests; but listen, Dex, if you’re interested, there’s someone here named Elaine Sizemore who’s familiar with your work and she wondered if you had a few minutes this morning to give her some help with a film project she’s working on.

Film project? Dex said, wiping his lips. She’s a director?

She’s not, that’s the thing. She’s a scriptwriter. So there’s a visual element she’s having trouble with in this short film she’s doing.

A short film, Dex said. So you mean a commercial.

Well, that’s not a distinction we make around here. It’s something she dreamed up herself, it hasn’t been commissioned by anyone, it has no commercial content.

He sighed. Yeah, okay, he said. All right. Why not. I’d love to get a look at the way things work around here.

That’s terrific. And Molly, I was thinking that would also give us a little while to catch up. I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to.

Silence. Rose brought my latte from the kitchen in a mug with a lid on it. I stood to go.

You guys went to college together, Dex said, is that right?

That’s right. So Molly, that sounds good to you? In maybe an hour or so?

She looked at me warily. Not much fear left in those startling blue eyes now: just resignation, a kind of dignified resignation, like you’d show your executioner. Sounds good, she said.

Great. I’ll come find you.

ONCE, YEARS AGO, in Manhattan, I thought I saw her. I was with Rebecca, and we were walking across Spring Street after the movies, on our way to Fanelli’s for a beer before heading back to her apartment. Through the windows of the bookstore I saw the back of someone’s head. Her hair, her build. I didn’t stop. I made sure we were all the way to Fanelli’s and had already ordered.

Oh my God. My wallet is gone.

You’re kidding me, Rebecca said.

I bet it fell out when I was sitting in the theater. I had my feet up on the seat in front. Listen, you stay here, I’ll run back and look.

It’s okay, I don’t need –

No, it’ll just be a minute; and I ran out the door. It’s like the more insane you get, the more instinctively crafty your lies become. At the bookstore, panting, I went through every aisle, and unbelievably, she was still there: head down, behind the curtain of hair, sitting cross-legged on the floor between the shelves with a William Burroughs novel. She looked up at me.

It wasn’t Molly. Still, strange to think that somewhere in the world there walked a woman who had that sort of power over me.

DEX CAME TO my office promptly an hour later. I escorted him downstairs to the parlor, where Elaine stood waiting by the window, and I shut the door behind me again as the two of them were shaking hands. I went looking for Molly, in the dining room, in the ballroom, in the basement, upstairs in her and Dex’s bedroom. She wasn’t there.

Quietly I unlatched the front door and stood on the lawn, making sure I couldn’t be seen from the parlor windows. I stared up the driveway, and off toward the mountains. Finally I thought to run around to the back entrance to see if their car was still parked there: it was.

So I walked into the orchard, and that’s where I found her, sitting on one of the iron benches. She had cleared a spot to sit, but it was no use, really — spring is here; more white blossoms had already fallen in her hair as she sat there. I try now to imagine seeing her as if for the first time, and I can’t, but still, there’s no getting around the fact that she’s a beautiful woman, more so, actually, than she was as a twenty-year-old. I felt a twinge of the same inappropriate sort of pride I used to feel when I’d be out with her, or even alone with her: that a woman such as this would go out with me. That not unpleasant feeling of being watched, even when it was just the two of us.

I tried to slow my movements.

You might have left word where you were, I said, sitting beside her. Or were you hiding from me?

She shook her head. If we’re going to talk, I thought we might do it somewhere where people aren’t walking through the room every two minutes.

Well, here we are, I said. I brushed some blossoms off my shoulder.

You engineered all this, didn’t you? she said.

All what?

You knew where I was. You brought us down here.

I was taken aback that she might have considered this. Absolutely not, I said. You saw my face when you walked in, right? I’m not that good an actor. The only thing I engineered was inviting you to leave the motel and stay with us. You said yes. Hardly anything sinister about it.

She held her arms crossed tightly in front of her, hands clasping her elbows.

I guess, I said (the edge on my sense of martyrdom dulling already, at the sight of her unhappiness), that I just couldn’t accept that after everything that happened, that you could run into me somewhere … I mean, I know it was a long time ago. But that’s all the more reason. Probably you hoped you’d never see me again. But you did see me. And you acted like you didn’t. You would have turned right around and left again. I can’t understand that.

Had you been hoping to see me? she said.

Sorry?

She looked down. All these years. Did you ever want to see me again?

I’d stopped thinking about it, I said. There was a while there. I mean, I actually flew out to Ulster to look for you. You knew that, right?

Her head sank lower, so that the hair — that reddish-brown hair that I’d once held in my hands; each memory was like a little pinprick now — curtained her face entirely.

I went to your house, I said. I’m amazed that you seem not to know this. I spent the night. I drove to the hospital to bring your father home. He didn’t know who the hell I was. He was waiting there for you.

Stop it.

Why are you scared of me? I said.

What is it you want? Molly said. She turned in her seat so that her leg was folded on the bench between us, and laid her hand against the side of my face, and I’m sure I jumped; I was the one who was scared now. What, an apology? What would be a proper apology, for what I did to you? If I killed myself, maybe? Of course I’m scared of you! You’re my nightmare! In my whole life that was the cruelest, most selfish thing I’ve ever done. Running away from you like that. Do you think I’ve forgotten any of it? And so now it’s all come back. Well, I deserve it. You’re right. It was cowardly to run. I deserve what I get. You must hate me.

Molly, I said, pulling my head back. Molly. Settle down. Keep your voice down.

Her eyes were shining now, but mostly she just looked dull, defeated. She let me put my arm around her. I don’t know what I’d imagined would be the outcome of this little meeting, but by now I had just about lost my taste for it; the stakes seemed too high. I wanted some remorse but I didn’t want her in pain like this. I tried to reassure her, it felt like an instinct to do so; at the same time, I couldn’t help but push on a little bit, gently, because I found there were still a few things I wouldn’t mind knowing.

When you would tell me you were in love with me, I said. Were you lying?

No.

Then I … I don’t get it. I don’t understand what happened. What do you mean by selfish?

She sat up a little straighter, composing herself, and slid out from under my arm. You saw my parents? she said, wiping her eyes.

I did.

She shook her head. I couldn’t watch them, she said. They’re monsters. All those years of living together turned them into monsters. You can’t join yourself to another person like that.

I would have married you then, I said.

I know that! I couldn’t … I might have said yes. I was getting to the point where I’d lost all confidence in my ability not to say yes. I was losing myself to you because your, I don’t know, your talent for intimacy was so great. Think where you and I would be right now. Think what would have happened to us. I was barely twenty years old. It would have destroyed us.

Is that what you thought? I said. You thought I wanted to destroy you? I wanted to save you. You seemed so damaged. I wanted to make the space that would let you just be who you are. The problem isn’t that love would have destroyed you. The problem is that you don’t see yourself as someone worthy of being loved. So you throw yourself away.

She raised her head and blinked away the last remaining tears. She stared into the branches for a long time, as the breeze came along every few seconds and slowly stripped them. Then, without looking at me, she told me the story of our unborn child.

* * *

ALL THOSE YEARS, I’d been wondering what I’d done. She knew what she’d done. She was afraid of me because I was the only one in a position to forgive her. If I didn’t quite understand why she’d done it, well, I don’t suppose it was important that I understood. Of course I forgave her.

I don’t know how long we were in the orchard; but when we came out, I know I felt that there was nothing left unsaid. It was upsetting, but it was purgative, and though I haven’t exactly spent the last ten years pining for closure, still, it was nice to get it so unexpectedly. That was probably the greatest heartbreak of my life, Molly abandoning me like that. But I was twenty-two, she was twenty: it’s the age of heartbreak.

We went into the house the back way, and in the kitchen we hugged for a long time before she went back up to her bedroom to wash her face and I returned to my office to see what calls I’d missed. I walked in and there was Elaine, sitting across from my unoccupied desk, her mouth set in a tight line.

Well, that was a fucking waste of time, she said. Where have you been, anyway?

DEX, ACCORDING TO Elaine, was no help at all. He flat out refused to go to New York and do the filming for her; she made it clear he’d be very well compensated for it, but he said the money wasn’t an issue. Then, as much as she tried to keep him on the topic, he kept asking her biographical questions, what had she done before this, what sort of writing had she always dreamed of doing, how did Mal recruit her, etc. He wanted to know how much control Mal exercised over her work, over everyone’s work; he wanted her to divulge the identity of the client who was paying for the production of this so-called short film she was working on. When she answered him — Mal doesn’t control content; there was no client — he said he didn’t believe her.

I placated her by promising we’d spend the next morning on the phone lining up a crew to get her airplane shot for her. Then I went off to find Dex, really just to apologize to him for any misunderstanding. Colette told me Mal had taken him out in the Triumph for a drive to see James Madison’s house; Molly, too.

* * *

IT MIGHT SEEM odd that when Palladio is as busy as it’s ever been, at the apex of its influence and success, its leader feels free to go off on these joyrides through the Virginia countryside. Mal’s traveled a lot this spring, too, sometimes on a kind of quasi-official business (he’s now on the board of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, for instance), sometimes just for the hell of it. He bought a house in Umbria, and he’s been over there twice to supervise its renovation. He’s doing less and less work these days, it’s true; but that’s all by design, a design he discusses only with me.

Not that he lacks for things to do, or at least for opportunities. For a period in the aftermath of that speech at NYU, half my day was spent sifting through and then politely rejecting all the offers that came his way. My sense of it is that there’s a kind of ego conflict going on within Mal right now. He’s well known, on a national, maybe even an international, scale, and he gets a lot of what’s generally classified as star treatment. People ask for his autograph; total strangers show up on the Palladio grounds to take his picture or to try to talk to him or put in his hands something they’re working on. Magazines arrive in the mail with articles devoted to him, some of them on a scholarly level, some treating him as just another element of the pop-culture firmament, wondering who he’s dating (nobody, is the answer to that one), reprinting his high school yearbook photo.

Having that kind of talk in your ear, I don’t care who you are, has to have an effect. There’s a part of Mal that sees this space being cleared for him, this space in the national psyche, and he wants to take his rightful place in it. He wants to respond, though up until now he hasn’t, whenever some reporter calls up to ask for a quote on the awarding of the Pritzker Prize or the role of propaganda in Castro’s Cuba or how he would have advised Bill Gates before his testimony on Capitol Hill.

But the true Mal, to me, is the facilitator, the one who stays behind the scenes. Real power is secure enough not to feel this constant need to show itself. I can understand that kind of feeling, actually. He doesn’t want the focus on himself. It’s counterproductive. It goes beyond simple modesty; I wouldn’t call Mal a modest man, exactly. He wants praise, but he wants it for his work, and so, in order to prevent people from making the reductive mistake of worshiping him, he hides himself from view. That’s one reason why he has me.

Anyway, in a nutshell, what he tells me sometimes is that his greatest achievement when all is said and done will be his own obsolescence — the withering away of the state, he calls it, which I subsequently learned is a phrase from the Communist Manifesto. In the early days, he had to ride the artists constantly, try all kinds of tricks to get them thinking out of the box, to break down the culturally imposed barriers between their own ways of thinking (about art, about advertising, about money, about form, about originality) and his vision of the way things might be, ought to be done. But once they get it — once they understand, and internalize, that new way of thinking — they don’t need him anymore. The more they work, the more they establish a tradition, one from which the next generation of artists will spring. Mal is laboring to make himself disappear. If he also seems ambivalent about this idea at times, I think that’s understandable.

* * *

MAYBE I HAD an original agenda in asking Dex and Molly into the house for a few days; but if so, Dex certainly had his own in accepting, and he hasn’t lost sight of it. He goes right around me, it seems, and through Colette to get to Mal, figuring, I suppose, that all he needs is enough time in which to ingratiate himself before Mal will relent and allow himself and all of Palladio to become the subject of some hip indie nonfiction film.

In one respect he’s been successful: Mal seems infatuated with him and with Molly, to the point where the three of them have spent much of the last few days together. Mal took them out to Monticello, he took them out to Il Cantinori and also to his favorite barbecue place out on Route 20; he arranged for a screening of Throw Down in the ballroom and of the Matthew Barney Cremaster films; he’s even had them up to the sanctum sanctorum, Mal’s own living quarters on the fourth floor of the east wing, where usually only I’m invited — and even then only in the little dining alcove, never in his bedroom at the opposite end of the hall. (Not that Mal makes me feel unwelcome — just out of respect for his privacy; besides, I’d have no reason to be in there anyway.) Of course there were times during the day when Mal was unavailable to them for one reason or another, and during those periods I’d sometimes see Dex just strolling through the ground floor, down to the basement, peeking into the different rooms, trying, somewhat insensitively I thought, to engage the artists in conversation about what they were working on, what they thought about Palladio itself.

Then today Fiona came to see me in my office. She’d seen Throw Down the previous night, by herself in the ballroom, and she was powerfully impressed. She’d been thinking recently about a video installation, a sort of after-Warhol piece in which she’d be filmed while sleeping, only every time she fell asleep, she wanted the person doing the filming to wake her up again, by poking her, making a loud noise, whatever was necessary. She envisioned this going on for ten or twelve hours; she wanted a record of her reactions. This is actually a somewhat chaste-sounding project for Fiona, who’s about five feet tall, a voluptuous and deadly serious young woman whose work usually involves a strong, some would say discomfiting, element of sexuality. Would Dex, she wondered, be interested in collaborating on it with her?

Let’s find out, I told her. I looked around for him or for Molly but they were out somewhere. So I wrote Dex a note and slipped it under the door to their third-floor bedroom.

He turned up in my office a few hours later. We talked idly about the virtues and the downsides, for an artist, of living in New York, while my assistant Tasha went downstairs to round up Fiona. When everyone was seated, Tasha left and closed the door behind her.

Fiona started by complimenting him effusively on his one film, a ritual Dex made no effort to hurry to a close. Then, leaning forward in her chair, she described for him the project she had in mind. It was just as she had described it for me with the exception of the added detail that she’d be sleeping naked. She knows how to sell herself, that’s for sure.

So I’d love it if you’d be my partner in this, Fiona said. Are you interested?

No, Dex said tonelessly, as if she’d asked him if he’d mind if she opened the window.

She was brought up short. No? she said. I mean, maybe I didn’t make it clear enough that I don’t intend for this just to be a camera on a tripod; there’s lots of room, hours of room, for all kinds of creative approaches to shooting the bedroom, the bed, my body.

Sorry, no, Dex said again. I’m not interested.

I felt a little awkward about having brokered this meeting, which seemed on its way to engendering some bad feeling.

Does it have to be video? I said. Because maybe Dex is partial to film, or hasn’t done a lot of work in –

I’ve shot video before, Dex said. I have no prejudice against it.

He looked down and started scraping with his fingernail at some sort of stain on his shirt. Fiona and I watched him.

Well then, she said. What’s your fucking problem?

Dex looked distractedly around the walls of my office. He winced a little, as if thinking something over, but at the same time he was pretty unruffled.

I’d rather not say, he said.

The room buzzed with silence for a few seconds.

Yo, Bartleby, Fiona said. Why are you even here?

You know what? I said, smiling, rising from my seat. I think maybe it’s time to bring Mal into this.

WE MET IN the fourth-floor alcove at the small oval table where Mal has breakfast — where he and I sometimes get together to discuss things before the business day has started. Benjamin was just putting coffee out when Dex and I arrived. Mal had told me to leave Fiona out of it. He knows what kind of a temper she has.

Mal’s own face was slightly red, but not out of anger — his manner was quite friendly, expansive really, as if he were pleased to come upon this situation where his intervention was required. He also seemed a bit out of breath. You would have thought he’d just come from some sort of exercise, were it not for the fact that Mal — trim as a twenty-year-old — never exercises in any form. Maybe he ran up the four flights of stairs.

Dex, Mal said, I’m going to get right to it. You’re our guest here, you’re not an employee, and of course you’re as free to do what you like inside this house as you would be out of it. But even in all the time we’ve spent together the last week or so, I’ve sensed that we’re doing a little dance — not just you, understand; you and me both — in terms of what we discuss and what we don’t discuss. That’s kind of exhausted itself by now. Wouldn’t you agree?

Dex pursed his lips. I suppose it has.

I know Palladio has its detractors. And I know that, as a general rule, when an angry young man like yourself wants to make a film about something, it’s not to praise it, but to discredit it, to knock it down. See, I’m torn here; because the very thing that makes me admire you, as a person and as an artist, is also the thing that I have to protect this place against.

You have to be protected against me? Dex said. A smirk, of sorts, was beginning to emerge on his face.

Well, no, I guess that’s not it exactly. I mean, I love it that you continue to hang around here because you think that if you can just manage to snow me about your true intentions, I’ll relent and let you film here. But your presence is starting to disrupt the equilibrium of this place, and for that reason, I’m honor bound to tell you that there is absolutely no way I will ever allow you inside this place with a camera, ever.

Dex nodded. He picked up his china coffee cup and put it down again without drinking.

So I think your visit here has to come to an end now. And that makes me sad. For one thing, I think you could have done some excellent work here, we have all the facilities and you could have had carte blanche in terms of what interested you; but more than that I mean that on a personal level I’m going to miss having you around. Anyway, I’ve had my say. It’s only fair that before you go I let you have yours as well. Because I get the strong sense that you’ve been censoring yourself all the time we’ve been together, and the strain of that is beginning to show.

Dex tapped his fingers on the polished tabletop for a while. When he looked up, he did, in fact, as Mal predicted, appear to be in some way relieved.

My own view of this place, he said somewhat breathlessly, is that it is the absolute epicenter of corruption, and I would never do any work for you guys in a million years. You know? I mean, back before you got started, whoring was whoring; if you had to abandon your art for a while to go shoot a Coke commercial at least everyone knew what that was all about, and even understood how maybe it was necessary from time to time. But look at these people you’ve hired. They’re brainwashed. They don’t even know what it is they’ve been brought here to do. My film wouldn’t have condemned anything. It would have exposed this place, that’s all. That would have been enough.

Exposed it to whom? I said. We’re not exactly keeping ourselves a secret. We’re more popular now than we’ve ever been.

Dex shrugged, as if to say that he was baffled too.

Mal, I said, looking at my watch. What time’s your flight?

Shit, Mal said, and stood up. He was on his way to Bilbao for a board meeting. Dex and I stood with him. On the landing, he turned and put his arms around Dex and hugged him — a backslapping hug, a quick, masculine sort of hug, but

Dex could not have been more surprised — before continuing down the hall to his bedroom, to finish packing. Dex and I walked in silence down the stairs. Halfway down the hall toward my office, he started talking to me, without turning his head.

You know, he said in an intimate tone, you’re the worst of all. You’re the perfect toady. You bring nothing to all this that I can see except your eagerness to please. You make it all possible, so they never have to deal with him, and he never has to deal with them. So everyone stays in the dark. You would have made an excellent Nazi.

I just kept pace beside him, until we came to the door of my office. I sure did enjoy fucking your girlfriend was one thing it occurred to me I might have said to him. But that’s not me.

* * *

I CHECKED THE window on the third-floor landing periodically until I saw them loading up the car. I hurried downstairs; out in the driveway, there was nothing to help them with — they’d only packed enough, originally, for a stay of two or three days — so I waited until the trunk was shut and then I put my hands on Molly’s shoulders. She smiled at me, warmly, not concealing anything from anyone; her eyes did look a little red, but I didn’t know what that might be about.

I felt like I knew just what I wanted to say. Dex was on the other side of the car, staring at the mountains, but I didn’t particularly care if he overheard. I knew this would happen, I said to her. I knew I’d see you again someday. I did want it. I’m glad we had a chance to talk.

I’m sorry, John, she said. I’m so sorry for hurting you. You didn’t deserve it.

I shook my head. You don’t need to say that, I told her. That’s history. It’s all forgotten. I’m just glad I got the chance to see that you’re (I almost said that you’re still alive, but I caught myself), that you’re doing well.

She put her face against my chest, and I held her for a minute. Dex looked over at us with a modicum of interest. I can’t say it felt like old times, holding her like that; but there was something, some kind of phantom reminder of what had more or less enslaved me to her way back when: that shroud of silence, that incommunicable need, that sense that you could do whatever you could think of and still never get close enough. We said our goodbyes. I nodded to Dex, who ignored me, then I watched until their car had disappeared up the driveway.

That was that. I meant it when I told her that I knew we’d see each other again, and get the chance to fill in the blanks, solve the mysteries, hash it all out at a sane distance from our own youth. Fate is a word I don’t like; it’s more like logic, an aesthetic sort of logic, the logic of beauty. The logic of the story of us.

* * *

NOT MUCH NEW this week. Elaine found her director, chartered a plane, got about a half-hour permission window from the Port Authority to take off and land at Newark Airport — every time I see her she’s shouting into a cell phone. Mal was supposed to be back from Spain by now, but he called Colette to say he was staying over in New York for a couple of days: someone put him on to the fact that there’s an auction of Thomas Jefferson memorabilia at Christie’s on Tuesday. He says maybe he can pick something up and donate it to Monticello. He’s donated a bunch of money already; they love him over there.

Then this afternoon there’s a knock on my office door, and it’s Jean-Claude Milo. I hadn’t seen him in two or three weeks, even though we’re living in the same house. He doesn’t look well: he’s pale, and exhausted, a little more spectral than usual, though all of us around here are used to seeing him like this during periods when he’s working hard.

I have a favor to ask, John, he says. It’s a money thing.

Have a seat. Listen, you want anything to drink or anything? I can have Tasha go downstairs –

He waved me off. Thanks anyway, he said. No, so there’s this thing I need.

Silence.

How much does this thing cost? I said, trying to prompt him.

He held up his hands. No idea.

Well, so what is it?

He shifted in his chair, staring at the Jim Dine that hangs behind me. It’s a deep-red-and-white abstract (I’ve always thought it looks a bit like a bloody heart), and for a moment there Jean-Claude seemed so engaged by it that I thought maybe he hadn’t heard what I’d asked him. Then he gave his head a little shake and returned his attention to me. The thing is, I need a refrigerator, he said; not like one of those huge ones but a small one. To go in my room.

I put my hand over my mouth so he wouldn’t see me smiling at the solemnity of this request. Jean-Claude truly seems to have no grasp of money and how it works — the kind of item he described could have cost five thousand dollars for all he knew. As it was, he could easily have gone to P.C. Richard right in town, brought one home, plugged it in, and expensed it. I wouldn’t have cared. This way, though, at least I got to have my curiosity satisfied.

What do you need it for? I said.

What do you mean?

I mean, just for eating in your room? I know the kitchen staff goes home at nine, I’m sorry if that doesn’t fit with your own hours –

No, it’s not that. It’s for work.

Work?

For this thing I’m working on. I need a place to store some of my, uh, my bodily fluids I guess is the expression. Oh, and it needs to have a freezer, I forgot to mention that. Is that okay?

Sometimes I wish I had someone around to help me make sense of stuff like this. But in the end, all it came back to was the question of justifying an expense of maybe a hundred and fifty dollars for artists’ supplies; and I didn’t even have to think about that one. I told him I’d have it delivered to him tomorrow.

* * *

ELAINE WAS OUT for a late-night run; I was lying on my bed, still fully dressed, trying to read a collection of new and selected poems by a reasonably well-known poet (if I’ve heard of her, she can’t be too unknown) who’s applying for a spot here, when I heard footsteps in the hall, footsteps that came closer and then halted. No knock; instead, the whisper of a folded piece of paper being slipped under the door. It was a note from Colette. Mal was back from New York; he wanted to let me know that he was in his office right now, in case I had anything urgent for him.

I didn’t, but I went anyway. The rooms on the ground floor were so dark I guided myself across to the east wing by the red lights of the burglar alarms. There were voices floating up from the basement, fading to silence as I took the stairs up to the third floor. Mal’s office door was open; the light spilled into the hall.

You’re back.

Mal smiled. Master of the obvious, he said.

He was looking through the drawers of his desk for something. On his desk was a small packing crate, from which he had removed the lid.

How was Spain?

Dull. But on the plane back to New York someone tipped me off about this Jefferson auction, at Christie’s. I couldn’t resist. I had to stick around for it.

You bought something?

Mal straightened up for a moment from his search through his desk and slyly folded his arms. He pointed at the crate. Have a look, he said.

I took a step forward and looked inside. Nestled in the straw-like packing material was a small pot, with a very narrow opening, set in a rectangular marble base. I wasn’t sure what it was.

Can you believe it? Mal said. That’s Jefferson’s actual inkstand, originally from Monticello. Been in private hands for more than a century. He wrote part of the Notes on Virginia with that inkstand. Lift it.

What?

Pick it up.

I did; though easily grasped in one hand, it was extraordinarily heavy.

Amazing, I said, replacing it in the crate. And I wasn’t just indulging him; it actually was amazing, to be in the presence of an original object like that, to think for a moment about the past from which it had emerged, the other hands that had been where mine now had been.

But in the meantime Mal had found what he was searching his desk drawers for: a roll of scotch tape. He picked up a stack of paper from his desk and set about taping individual sheets to the walls of his office, at eye level, a foot or so above the molding. They were color xeroxes. I only had to look at a few of them before I realized they were all works by or about that group out on the West Coast, CultureTrust.

I got them off the Internet, Mal said, following my gaze. I had some spare time in Bilbao.

I saw The Trend Is Near, of course, along with their appropriation of our famous mirror ad: a similar Mylar sheet, only with the word SUCKER and an arrow pointing downward, written in a kind of faux-lipstick, across the top. Apparently the Mylar technology had improved since we popularized it. I couldn’t help but smile.

It’s not bad stuff, is it? Mal said. I’ve been reading up on these guys. They actually have a lot of good things to say.

I sat down in the chair opposite his desk; he finished his circuit of the room, his back to me, rounding out the miniature gallery satirizing us, among others.

I mean look at this one, Mal said excitedly, taping it to the wall and standing back from it. It was a CultureTrust parody of one of Apple’s Think Different ads: the image was a photograph of Karl Marx.

The only problem here, Mal said, is how different is this from one of the real ads?

Not too different, I admitted.

So I was looking at it and I thought, you know, if they really want to parody this campaign they should use the same words over a picture of Steve Jobs with a knife sticking out of his head. And that’s when it hit me: I could help these guys! In the end we’re really all after the same thing!

And that rather startling idea hung in the air between us for a minute, until Mal stood and lifted the inkstand out of its crate again. Seeing him glance around for a spot to put it down, knowing how heavy it was, I jumped up and moved the crate on to the floor. He set the inkstand down and settled back into his chair again, with a happy sigh; and we sat there and contemplated the solidity of the thing, its disinterest, its promise to outlast us.

* * *

CALL CAME TODAY from the Committee to Reelect the President. That’s fallen through, it turns out; I’m told they opted for a more traditional approach. I thought Mal would be disappointed, and maybe he was, but he said that, fun as it was to think about, it was the outcome he had expected.

They’re not willing to turn over the control of content, he said, putting jelly on a bagel. They’ve got all these high-paid consultants, those are the guys doing the hiring, not the candidate himself, and those guys are unwilling to take risks or cede control because then their boss might suddenly wake up and ask what they’re doing to earn all that money.

As if content really mattered here, I said.

He nodded vigorously, still chewing. It matters less in this instance than most, he said. At the same time, because the differences between the candidates are so negligible, so superficial, the ads, the quality of the ads, is really all that matters. And when you take into account that every public appearance, speeches, conventions, whatever, is all so heavily scripted, it amounts to advertising as well. You could make the argument that people are really electing the makers of the ads.

We were sitting in that little breakfast alcove up on the fourth floor. It was about six forty-five in the morning.

You should run, I said.

He laughed. Why not? he said. It makes perfect sense.

But I could tell he was joking. Mal just isn’t that comfortable in the limelight.

* * *

SO I FLEW out to Spokane; and when I got there, the CultureTrust defendants refused to see me. Their lawyer was more polite; he called my hotel room with addresses, times, room numbers so that I could at least attend the opening day of the trial. A quick jury selection, he said, then state’s witnesses probably right after lunch. His name was Bill Farber, he was right around my age, and I was kind of touched, actually, by his excessive friendliness; I got the sense that he didn’t meet a lot of people in Spokane who came from the outside world, and he was reluctant to let me go. He had been just two months out of Penn law school, in his first job as an associate with some white-shoe firm in Philadelphia, when his parents were killed in a car crash. He took a three-week leave from the firm to return home to Spokane and take care of affairs, make arrangements to sell the house, et cetera. That was five years ago.

Spokane is another one of those cities where you might as well be anywhere. Starbucks, the Gap, some sort of ugly new convention center — it all looks like some sort of traveling exhibition that might pack up and move on the day after you do. And yet if you were to jump in your car in the middle of downtown Spokane and drive twenty-five miles in any direction, you’d be so deep in the woods as to be pretty much off the grid: in fact, you’re not too far at all there from the Idaho border, militia country, Unabomber country. Bill Farber offered me a tour of the Spokane River Valley after court was adjourned for the day; though I was sorry to hurt his feelings, my mind was on the business at hand, and so I begged off.

Even the courthouse looked like it had been put together after a recent trip to Home Depot, what with the dropped plasterboard ceilings and shadowless fluorescent lighting. There were six or eight people scattered along the benches behind the rail; one young woman held a notepad. If she was indeed a reporter, I just hoped Bill in his gregariousness wouldn’t tell her who I was. The judge was a thin, imposing woman of late middle age, with sparse, teased white hair, and she sat on a riser beneath the seal of the State of Washington, facing me across the heads of the lawyers and the two defendants.

They were older than I had expected; the one named Liebau is fifty-five if he’s a day. They wore tweed jackets and looked the part, as I’m sure their lawyer had the good sense to hope, of endearingly eccentric college professors.

The judge brought in eighteen prospective jurors and announced she expected to cull from that small group the whole jury of twelve, plus two alternates, in time for lunch. Everything went without a hitch for the first eight people: what’s your name, where do you work, do you have any connection with the advertising business, a few other questions, and done. Seven of them were empaneled on the spot, and the eighth was excused by the judge on the grounds, as he announced with near-belligerence, that he had irritable bowel syndrome.

The woman in the gallery I assumed was the reporter had her pen between her teeth. Across the aisle from me a man who looked like he could have been Liebau’s younger, more successful brother had his knees up against the bench in front of him and his mouth open, sound asleep.

Then the ninth citizen questioned, a guy wearing jeans with a crease ironed into them, who looked to be about forty and said he was a dog obedience trainer, said something about how he vaguely remembered having heard of this case on the local news, but he hadn’t formed an opinion about it; in a spirit of cooperation he volunteered that he hadn’t paid much attention at the time and couldn’t recall any of the details. Jack Gradison, the second defendant, scribbled a note on a legal pad and pushed it toward Farber, who was doing the questioning from his seat. The lawyer ignored it and asked the juror how long he had lived in the Spokane area.

All my life, the dog trainer said.

Gradison tapped loudly on the pad with his index finger. Calmly, as if he just needed a stretch, Farber stood up and walked away from him, toward the jury box, buttoning his jacket as he went.

Mr Pope, do you have any relatives who –

Ask him, Gradison said. Every face in the room turned toward him. Farber, though he had been stopped mid-question, kept his cool. After a considered pause he turned to the judge and said, Your honor, may I have a moment to –

Ask him! Gradison yelled.

The judge’s first response was to put on, with a matronly sort of sternness, a pair of glasses. Mr Gradison, she said, I’m afraid I’ll have to warn you not –

Turn off your TV! Gradison shouted at the jury box. Turn it off!

You might have thought Farber would go over at this point and put a hand on his client’s shoulder or something; but for reasons best known to himself, the lawyer stayed where he was, leaning with one elbow on the jury box, watching this meltdown with an air of worldly disappointment. Everyone who had been dozing a minute before in the small, overlit courtroom — the handful of spectators, the locals called to jury duty, even the fat old bailiff who was still seated but now had his hand on his gun — had his head up, alert, like a hound. Something out of the ordinary was happening.

Wake up! Gradison shouted at the jury, red in the face. Wake up! Death is coming for us all! Take responsibility for your own life, your own thoughts! Don’t let them tell you what’s beautiful! Snap out of it! Take a look at the work you’re doing!

I was surprised they let him go on in this vein for as long as they did, but when he climbed up on top of the defense table, that was the end of that. The bailiff spoke into a walkie-talkie and almost instantly three guards banged through the door behind me. They pulled the middle-aged man on to the floor and cuffed his hands behind his back, as he continued to shout. One of them finally put his hand over Gradison’s mouth. At some point I looked at the defense table and saw the other defendant, Liebau, still in his chair. He was laughing.

The judge called the lawyers into chambers and emerged about two minutes later to announce that all jurors present, even those already questioned and empaneled, were hereby excused. The case was continued until the following Tuesday, when jury selection would start all over again, this time with Mr Gradison in restraints, if necessary.

The next morning I went down to the hotel lobby and borrowed from the desk clerk his copy of that day’s Spokane paper. A three-paragraph story was buried on page A7. Outburst Postpones Ad Vandals’ Trial. I went back upstairs, sat on my bed with the laptop, and searched the various wire-service sites on the net for an hour: nothing. So I checked out and went to the airport. I took the puddle-jumper to San Francisco and the red-eye from there to Washington. It was nearly two o’clock by the time I got back to Palladio.

Mal’s not in, Colette called out her door as I passed.

No? Where is he?

New York.

What for?

Some kind of personal business. He said to expect him back tomorrow.

A WORD ABOUT process. Companies don’t subsidize any work of art directly; they subsidize the place itself, on a yearly or biyearly contract, and in return they are permitted, within very strict guidelines, to associate themselves with the existence of the art that’s produced here. No company’s name may appear on or in any work. Before or after the work, separate from it somehow, as in film credits or a book cover or a gallery program, is technically okay, but frankly even the clients themselves are starting to view this desire as stodgy, old-guard: far hipper to leave their name off it entirely.

As for the marriage of a particular work with a particular patron, Mal still handles most of that; his sense of appropriateness in these things is keen, and while some clients ask more questions than others, everyone trusts his judgment. Occasionally, a kind of buzz will arise about one of the artists here, and when that happens people will naturally start asking specifically for him or her. But the artists are on their own timetable; if someone happens to be waiting for something, Mal and I make sure that the artist never knows about it. The client will wait, or, if they feel they can’t wait, we’ll provide them with something else.

Nobody’s saying it’s a perfect system, of course, and sometimes we do get a complaint. Today a nervous young woman from Oracle called me, all in a snit about Milo. I should say that one of Mal’s great attributes is how undogmatic he is. (Well, now that I think of it, he can be quite dogmatic: it’s just that he reverses field easily, in terms of dogma, if that’s what circumstances dictate.) So that when Milo’s own aesthetic started moving more in the direction of performance art — to close the gap, as he says, the tragic gap, between his own person and his art — Mal went right along with that, even though the sorts of events Jean-Claude began mounting more or less contravened Mal’s stand on the whole notion of the technological, the reproducible, as the foundation of popular art.

(Truth be told, I think Mal’s hand was forced to some degree on that one. In January the Whitney is giving Milo his own one-man, mid-career retrospective, Charles Saatchi has started acquiring some of his work — his star is rising at least as fast as Palladio’s own within the art world, and I don’t know that Mal has much of a choice but to make philosophical room for whatever Jean-Claude feels he needs to do. Not that there’s any risk of our losing him. But you just don’t want even the appearance of turmoil, of some kind of aesthetic conflict, to get into the air where it might start affecting future commissions.)

So I’m looking at this prospectus, the Oracle woman says to me, and I see that this Milo intends to go sit on some mesa, in, in—

New Mexico, I said.

New Mexico, and cut himself? And execute a painting with his blood?

Jean-Claude’s been doing this for years, I said. And it’s not like he invented it. Look at Andres Serrano, look at –

It’s not the medium that’s the problem, she said; she really did have a naturally unpleasant, nasal way of speaking. It’s that he specifies no reproductions of the finished work?

That’s right, I said, looking through papers on my desk for something to refresh my memory about all this. No reproductions, no pictures of the blood, but the blood itself.

Well, that’s a problem for us. I know how well-respected he is, but I have to justify to people here how we’re spending this kind of money for something that will ultimately hang in a gallery to be seen by a total of what, maybe a couple hundred people?

You want me to talk to him? I said. Because I will, but I can tell you right now that when Jean-Claude gets hold of an idea, he generally—

Actually, the Oracle woman said, what I wanted to ask, and it’s not at all personal, I know you’ll understand that, but I wanted to ask if you would get Mal to talk to him.

I said I would, and we hung up. It was a more delicate matter than she supposed. Because Mal’s likely reaction, I thought, would be to fly into a rage about it and cancel the Oracle account altogether, give them their money back, which would not be a great development. Not because of the money. It would mean that a lot of great art we already have in the pipeline with those guys would lose its chance to be seen and heard.

So I buzzed Colette and asked if Mal was back from New York yet. I believe so, was her answer. I walked upstairs slowly, rehearsing how I would present this to him. His door was ajar, so I gave a polite warning knock and went right in.

Mal was there, all right, and next to him was Molly; they were there together, sitting in the window seat behind his desk. They were not looking out the window. I think I can be forgiven for staring, because I had to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. When they became aware of me they turned, startled, and took their hands off of each other.

I could feel my own mouth working, but no sound came out.

John, Mal said solemnly. Would you give us a minute or two, please?

Of course, I said. I backed out and shut the door. It was what I wanted, too, at that moment. It’s what I want now. Just to erase the sight.

* * *

MAL SENT WORD through Tasha that I was to meet him for dinner at Il Cantinori at 8 p.m. Actually, his message, which Tasha read to me off her steno pad while leaning in my doorway, was more politely worded than that — he asked if I was free to join him — but after all I work for the man, my livelihood is totally dependent on him: when he sends a summons like that, am I going to say no?

I drove there alone, top down, and only on the way did it occur to me to wonder if he had asked Molly along to this dinner as well. He hadn’t; another thing, though, which might have dawned on me but didn’t, was that this was Monday, the one night of the week when Il Cantinori is usually closed. Mal had them open it up just for us. Palladio spent upwards of ten thousand dollars there last year, so I guess he feels entitled to the occasional favor. We were the only two people in there. One waiter and one busboy stood impassively in the shadows against the wall of the empty restaurant, while the two of us ate at a round table in the center of the floor.

It seems odd, would be a polite way to put it, that he would want to confide in me of all people about this — ask me for advice, even. Truth be told, I came there half expecting he had made this date with me in order to apologize, or, what would have been more horrifying, to ask for my blessing. But no. Eating ravenously, talking more loudly than I’m sure he realized, he just needed to tell the story to someone; and Mal doesn’t have a whole lot of people in his life he can talk to, on a personal level, outside of me, and now, I guess, her.

First off, he said, I know about you two. I know you have a history. Molly’s told me all about it, that you guys were very serious at one time, and I guess things ended badly. It’s a pretty amazing coincidence, even though in another way it just bears out what I’ve known all along, that you and I are so on the same wavelength that we could even fall for the same woman. I don’t know why you felt you couldn’t tell me about it back when Molly was first down here, but that’s another conversation, and anyway, in retrospect I’m kind of glad I didn’t know.

Mal drained his wine glass; the waiter was beside us before he had even placed it back on the table.

It’s like something you read about, he said sheepishly, shaking his head; he wasn’t talking about me anymore. That first day she walked into my office, we hardly exchanged a word, but I just knew, I knew. I was completely transformed. I fell in love with her on the spot. There was this instant connection. Then you suggested inviting them to stay in the house; it was all I could do to keep a straight face, because it’s exactly what I was hoping for, but I didn’t know how to suggest it myself.

So I spent as much time as I could, that whole week or two, in Molly’s presence, but of course that meant Dex was always there too. I kept looking for some kind of signal from her, and I never got one, but then I’d think, well, of course not, how much of a signal is she going to give me with her boyfriend two feet away? So finally there was that one afternoon, the day before they left; I called downstairs to ask for you and Tasha told me you were in with Dex.

So I dropped what I was doing and went downstairs, and I found her in the parlor, on the window seat, just looking out toward the road. I closed the door and I just unloaded, I said it all. I told her I was madly in love with her. I told her that she was unlike any other woman I’d ever met in my life, from the moment I met her I suddenly had that feeling of knowing just what I wanted, and that I was sorry if all this put her in an awkward position but I knew if I let her go without declaring myself I’d regret it the rest of my life. It just poured out of me. Usually I have such trouble saying what’s in my heart. I don’t know where it all came from this time.

He exhaled nervously, reliving it. The waiter impassively poured more wine and withdrew again from earshot.

She didn’t say anything; she just turned redder and redder and stared at me. I felt bad for having put her on the spot like that, but on the other hand it was a terrible position for me to be in too, you know? Totally vulnerable. Wide open. I was dying, but I remember thinking, at least she’s not turning away. So then I hear these footsteps on the stairs behind me and it’s Tasha, coming to tell me that you need to see me about something.

Mal speared and ate the zucchini flower, the last thing on his plate. He wasn’t even looking at me anymore, he was so lost in the drama of it all. I wouldn’t mind knowing, actually, what I looked like just at that moment.

You know what? he said, sitting back. I think I’ve figured out what it is about her that’s so … inspiring. Tell me if this sounds right to you. She’s not uncomfortable with silence. If she has nothing to say then she doesn’t say anything. In fact, now that I think about it, she goes further than that: she makes these silences. She asks you something, you answer her, and then suddenly there’s just this silence. There’s something about it that’s intolerable, really, in terms of how self-conscious it makes you: it makes you want to fill it up. And so you go on to give more of an answer than you thought you wanted to, and inevitably that’s where you say your best stuff, you know? She brings it out of you.

I nodded, I suppose, but if I had crossed my eyes and stuck my tongue out at him I doubt it would have changed the course of the conversation. He was talking just to talk, just to get it out. It didn’t have to be me there. I could have been anyone.

I wonder if she even knows she’s doing that, Mal said. So anyway, I was grateful, really, to be interrupted there in the parlor, because the tension was just too great. And then I had to hear about this whole episode with Dex and Fiona. I knew he had to go after that. I’d known it for a while, I suppose, but I wouldn’t act on it because I wanted Molly around. If only there were some way to keep her here and get rid of him: that’s what I was thinking. But I couldn’t figure out how to make it happen. And anyway, she hadn’t said anything! She hadn’t given me anything to go by. Of course, she hadn’t said no either. But I got to thinking that maybe what I was doing was just too reckless, or maybe it was some sort of midlife crisis starting to surface. I mean I barely knew this woman at all, and here I was ready to sacrifice everything. So I let them go back to New York. But that just made it worse. I thought about her every second. I went to Bilbao and just lay in my room and thought about her. Finally I decided to go back home via New York. I had to do a little detective work. But I found her.

He wiped his mouth. He poured out the rest of the wine himself; from the shadows the waiter raised his eyebrows to ask if we wanted another bottle, and Mal shook his head no. What is it about her? he said. You know what? You’re the only one in the world I can have this conversation with. Literally. Except Dex, I suppose, but that’s not awfully likely. But what is it? She’s a beautiful woman, but there’s something about her beauty, something elusive, something withheld from you that you want to get hold of. Not having hold of it makes you crazy. I tell you, most women you meet, most people you meet, you feel like inside the first hour you’ve learned everything about them there is to know. But Molly, there’s so much inside her, so much you have to work to get at. Innocence is the wrong word, it’s definitely the wrong word. It’s purity. It’s an unconsciousness of being observed. Like — like the anti-Heisenberg; she’s not changed by being observed. Right? Like a work of art. In fact I keep wanting to say Mona Lisa, but of course that’s a terrible cliché.

I thought if I stayed silent long enough myself, the momentum of his excitement would just carry him past this pause and he’d start talking again. But he waited, and stared at me, until finally lines of concern appeared on his forehead.

Listen, he said. You’re being honest with me, right? That you’re okay with this? Because both Molly and I have nothing but –

We’re fine, I said hurriedly. She and I are all square. It’s ancient history anyway, and anything that was left to put to rest about the way it ended, we put that to rest. The two of you, well, it’s a huge surprise, obviously, but I’m very happy for both of you.

* * *

WE DROVE, EACH in his own car, back to the mansion. Mal, who enjoys driving like a lunatic even when he’s not as keyed up as he was tonight, beat me there by several minutes and was already inside when I pulled up behind the kitchen. From the third-floor landing I could see light escaping from under my door — Elaine was back from New York. I stood motionless for a few seconds, looking at that sliver of light; then I turned and went back downstairs. I went to the pantry and got myself a beer, and I drank it as I wandered around the darkened first floor, down to the empty basement, dark and silent except for some indeterminate noises coming from behind Milo’s studio door. It wasn’t that I was too upset to face Elaine, or anybody else; it’s just that sometimes when you have your mind on something, you’d rather be alone than have to pretend that your mind’s on anything else. I didn’t want to have to act interested in how anyone else’s day had gone. So I killed some time.

Meanwhile, Mal goes up to the fourth floor, opens the door to his bedroom, and Molly’s in there.

After a few hours I went back upstairs; the light under the door was out. I opened the door and slipped into bed beside Elaine without waking her.

HE HADN’T EVER met her until that day I escorted her into his office; Dex hadn’t even brought her along when he crashed that opening, back in New York, in order to introduce himself. When Mal invited Dex down to Palladio for a visit, Dex asked if it was okay to bring his girlfriend along. Mal said sure, whatever.

And those trips to New York the past couple of weeks, those were trips to see Molly. That one I figured out for myself. He had Dex’s address from Colette, he told me, so he just concealed himself in a restaurant across the street until he knew Molly was alone and then called on his cell phone. They went out for coffee, they went out to eat, and he gave her his pitch. Finally she agreed to leave her old life behind.

I never really got a straight answer as to how old Dex took it when she told him. I know Mal came along, which was standup of him, I have to admit — prudent, too, since Dex did always strike me as a guy with a temper. You wouldn’t send Molly alone on an errand like that.

* * *

SAW JEAN-CLAUDE today. He was sitting on the top step of the third-floor landing, both arms around his knees as if he were cold, drinking from a huge bottle of water. Behind him I could hear the roar of the vacuum cleaner; Rose had grown tired of waiting and had kicked him out of his room in order to clean it.

I sat beside him for a moment. I didn’t have anywhere else I needed to be. The sunlight on the stairs and the modulating whine of the vacuum cleaner being pushed repeatedly under the bed seemed as familiar, for a moment, as boyhood, as home. I turned to Jean-Claude; he was just staring at the scrollwork on the banister beside him. I nodded toward the water bottle.

So, I said. How’s that fridge working out for you?

He smiled at me, but I swear to God it was the smile you give to someone when for the life of you you can’t remember who they are.

* * *

A FULL WEEK now since her arrival and Molly, as far as I know, still has not made an appearance downstairs. Mal says she’s self-conscious because she thinks of the place as an office, and she’s the only one there with no work to do, no job to perform. Maybe so. It occurs to me, as it may not occur to Mal, that she’s avoiding me, that she’s embarrassed by this whole turn of events and understands that it may stir up certain feelings in me. She’d get why I might even be angry.

Of course I have no reason to assume Mal’s lying, either, when he reports that Molly is satisfied that she and I are all square now, just pals with a history. Fantasizing about how she’s avoiding me just takes me further into the vortex of the completely pathetic. At least I’m able to hide it from everyone, how humiliated I feel, how obscure are the sources of that humiliation: there are these two people I love, and now they love each other. A real disaster, right? It’s stupid. I’ll get over it.

* * *

A LITTLE SOMETHING to take my mind off it today, though not in a particularly pleasant way. We have more than half a million dollars committed to Palladio by an outfit called Virtech, out in Tucson; they’re trying to develop various sorts of virtual reality technology cheap enough for home consumers, and at this point they’re not much more than a gigantic R&D department. But they’re just two or three years away, from what we’re told, and if they hit first, they’re going to hit big. So today their CEO calls from out of nowhere, sounding very nervous. It turns out he just got back from some investors’ meeting at which a vocal minority, evidently not big fans of ours, wanted to know why these guys have ceded so much of their budget to their ad agency, when they don’t even have anything to advertise.

So why was he calling, Mal wanted to know. We were sitting in his office. He has a picture of her on his desk now, a picture taken one flight upstairs, which strikes me as ridiculous and boyish though of course I’d never say anything.

Because he wants to know what to say to the guy in response.

Jesus Christ. These high tech operations. The CEO is probably like twenty-four, right? Where are they again — Phoenix?

Tucson.

Can you fly out there and calm them down?

I frowned. Let’s wait and see, I said. I’ll go if it becomes necessary.

Well, let’s not wait too long. Mal rubbed his neck; he’s developed a sunburn there from spending so much time in the car. Eighty-six degrees yesterday. Spring is just about over.

* * *

A NOTE ON my desk this morning when I arrived at five of nine. Can I talk with you? I’m too nervous to run into you in the hall where there might be other people around. I don’t know how much you’ve told anyone and I don’t want to put you in a bad position. I’ll be in the orchard tomorrow morning at ten. On that bench where we talked before.

I folded it into my pocket and went back out to Tasha’s doorway. Was anyone in my office this morning? I said.

Tasha had the tiniest oscillating fan I’ve ever seen, and she was trying to get it to work but it kept tipping over. Present from my father, she said. They just came back from Japan. Anyway, no, I haven’t seen anyone, but I just got here about ten minutes ago. Why?

I turned and went back to my office, shutting the door behind me, bewildering her, I’m sure. I don’t know why Molly feels it has to wait until tomorrow; maybe she and Mal have plans today. Of course, I can’t assume that she’s keeping this meeting a secret from him either. Why would she?

If she starts to apologize to me over this I may lose it. But I don’t particularly want her to treat it like it’s no big deal either. I don’t know what I want. So I’ll go see what she wants.

ELAINE ASKED ME last night if I’m depressed about something. I should say that Elaine’s excellence as a girlfriend has its source in her emotional self-sufficiency. If I am upset, she doesn’t take that personally, she doesn’t assume that she must somehow be either the reason or the solution for it. Her independence lets her be utterly empathetic. She asked me this, as we sat having Brunswick stew for dinner at the big butcher-block table in the pantry (where the house staff used to eat, a century ago; it’s less stuffy than the dining room), with respectful concern — not that conspicuous overconcern that’s meant to hide the self-interest at its root.

I slept about three hours last night.

Elaine is very smart. I’m always drawn to these brilliant women, women I can look up to. (Rebecca was like that too.) She reads a lot, and I’m always finding these strange highbrow books beside my bed as if some set designer had snuck in there to help me look more intellectually audacious in my spare hours than I really am. She has a thin, slightly adenoidal voice, and a hyper-articulate manner — actually, manner is the wrong word there: she’s just very articulate — that she hedges with an appealing sort of fondness for self-deprecation. I sometimes wonder how she sounds when she’s talking to herself, if that makes any sense. Her latest kick is the weight room: a month or two ago, mostly at her behest, I filled one of the unused basement storage rooms with a few machines, a Gravitron, a StairMaster, a treadmill. She comes up to the room after dinner to change and she takes the back stairs to the basement. She wears a kind of halter top like a jogging bra, and a pair of Lycra bicycle pants which make her ass, not exactly small even under the best of circumstances, look enormous. No one sees her but me, usually; still, I love it that she doesn’t care.

I don’t know what keeps us together, really. We never have any problems. We’ve never talked about getting married. Which is fine with me, and with her too I’m sure. Not every relationship has to be about the rest of your life.

We should go away somewhere, is what I said to her at dinner. We should take a vacation together, travel somewhere. I’m tired of our always being here in the house.

It was an unassailable suggestion, strange only because it was coming from me, and so she couldn’t exactly say no to it. Sure, she said, let’s do that; keeping it, considerately, on that vague hypothetical plane, knowing it would probably stay there. She looked at me when she said it. I hadn’t been looking at her.

* * *

WELL, I CAN still be myself around Molly; I suppose that’s one lesson that might be drawn from today. I’ve spent so much time since that dinner with Mal trying to reason away this feeling I have that I’ve been wronged, telling myself that there’s no justification for it, I certainly have no claim on her, or on him for that matter — but when I saw her, sitting wide-eyed and sheepish on that iron bench in the orchard, there was no more reasoning to be done, it just all came pouring out, directed at her, which is maybe unfair, but really why should I always be the one who gets hung up on these questions of what’s fair or unfair?

She looked like she was ready for it. Like she was expecting it, which is more than I can say for myself. Maybe she just knows me better than I know myself, even after all these years. Or maybe everyone sees through me, everywhere I go, maybe I just walk through life as no mystery to anyone but myself.

We sat in silence, side by side, for a while. I could feel that I was breathing hard.

Thank you for coming to see me, Molly said after a while, just to get me going, probably.

Coming to see you? I said. You’ve moved into my house.

She sighed. You mean a lot to me, John. A lot. I would never do anything to hurt you. You know that, right?

This struck me as incredibly patronizing. She went on.

In fact, I resisted it longer than I might have because I had an idea that you might be upset by it. I –

You had an idea about that, did you?

Molly raised her eyebrows.

But you went ahead and did it anyway. It seems to me you’re trying to have it both ways here. What, are you supposed to be so irresistible? So impossible to get over? Is this the same speech you gave to that poor sap Dex, by the way?

She sat back slightly, resting her shoulder blades against the iron railing, and I could see her relax: the stoic bit, the martyr bit. Her patience with me — everything she did infuriated me now.

I mean I understand that it’s all the same to you who you fuck, so it might as well be somebody with a few million bucks and a nice house. But you couldn’t find anybody like that in Manhattan? You had to come and do it here under the same roof as me?

There; that did it. Finally she looked at me with some anger of her own.

Please don’t talk to me that way again, Molly said. Ever. I haven’t done anything to deserve that from you.

No?

No.

So you’re serious about Mal. You’re in love with him.

I–I have no idea whether or not I’m in love with him. It’s only been a couple of weeks. I don’t fall in love as easily as that. I mean Mal has, I don’t know, a certain magnetism. An allure. I know I don’t have to tell you that.

From somewhere out in the direction of the road the breeze blew us the faint sound of sirens.

Anyway, Molly said, which answer would you hate more?

What?

Which would you rather hear? That I’m totally in love with him, or that this is all just some sort of sugar-daddy, mercenary-fuck situation so I can live in a mansion?

I just want to hear the truth, I said. (It sounded so lame, coming out of my mouth; I could tell just from the sound of it that it was a lie, just as surely as if I were listening to someone else.)

You know, she said with some heat, talk about wanting to hear the truth, we sat right here a couple of weeks ago and you told me that everything was okay between us; more than okay, forgotten, and I actually believed that, I took that to heart when I was back in New York trying to decide what to do. Plus you’re involved with someone else now, with that Elaine, and you told me that was a serious thing and so did Mal.

I wanted to say that the two things — my relationship with Elaine and Molly’s indifference toward our old feelings — had nothing to do with each other. But I was starting to sound ridiculous even in my own ears.

Whatever, I said instead, standing up. Fine. You want my blessing or something? You got it. The two of you are perfect for each other.

And I walked back to the house.

It’s all happening again. The helplessness of asking these questions (Are you in love with him?) when I know the answers will torture me. The total defenselessness. Laid wide open, completely obvious, unable to protect myself against total honesty, total exposure. Well, that’s not so bad, I guess; after all, it’s nothing she hasn’t seen before. Just so no one sees it but her.

* * *

I DON’T ACCEPT it. I don’t. He doesn’t love her. I don’t mean he’s lying about it: I’m sure he thinks he’s in love with her, and I’m sure she thinks he is too. They can’t see themselves the way I see them; that’s the key. She’s so full of self-hatred. She holds herself so cheaply, her sense of her own worthlessness is so profound, that she’s drawn into situations she knows are bad for her; and then when they don’t work out, when things fall apart, she says to herself, See, see what you’ve done, you knew it all along, you’ve left it worse than you found it. Then it’s on to the next disaster. If someone should come along who’s able to see more clearly, more objectively, what’s so beautiful and original and valuable about her, she wouldn’t believe in it; she’d think there must be some other motive at work.

And Mal: he sees something unique, original, unprecedented, something unbeholden to anything but itself, and he has to have it. That’s how he loves. How can I make her see him — see herself — through my eyes? Because if she could do that even for an instant — see herself as I see her — then she could at least see how she ought to be loved. She was loved, once, and somehow she’s forgotten what that’s about.

* * *

IN BED, ALONE, when Elaine came into the room and flipped on the light.

Hey John, she said. You awake?

I picked up my watch from the bedside table and squinted at it. 3.19 a.m.

No, I said. I am not awake.

She pulled the sheet off me. Please, she said. Please. I finished it.

With some difficulty I lifted my head. You what?

I need to show you something. She started to put her finger in her mouth to bite the nail, but then pulled it away again, smiling.

I put on a T-shirt over my pajama bottoms and we went down to the ballroom. She already had two chairs pulled up to the editing machine.

It’s a short film, just sixty seconds, opening with a shot of the tight interior of the coach section of an airplane; one flight attendant acts out the rote pantomime of what to do in case of an emergency water landing, while another, whom we don’t see, drones the familiar instruction over the intercom. A slow track down the narrow aisle shows that no one is paying the least attention. Then the track stops, and zooms slowly toward a guy in a window seat reading a book; the book, of course, is On the Road.

As the zoom finishes, the voice-over makes a seamless, volume-up, volume-down transition between the practiced, stultifyingly cheery sound of the flight attendant and a reading of a passage from On the Road itself.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast …

The zoom moves slowly toward the tiny window beside the reading man, and as the tarmac moves we see the plane is taking off. (I have Elaine’s copy of the book open here as I write this, since it’s handy and I want to get it right.)

… and all that road going, all those people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa by now I know the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry … the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie …

The zoom seems to move through the window and it gazes down as the runway ends and the plane banks over the cloverleaves of crabbed highways surrounding Newark Airport; it seems like we’re looking at one particular car but as the plane ascends (reversing the zoom itself, in a nice, dizzying way) more and more cars fill the screen, smaller and smaller, until the plane breaks through the twilit cloudline.

… which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old …

I let it loop four times before I looked over my shoulder at Elaine. She had her arms crossed tightly, elated and nervous. Sometimes you can live with people, sleep with them in fact, and still be surprised by their recesses. Her eyes jumped back and forth from my face to the screen; she was too worried about what I would say to be impatient. I smiled at her.

He’s going to love it, I said.

IT WAS IN the sex that things started getting strange, that I sensed I might not have my hands on all the ropes, so to speak, in terms of what I was feeling. I was used to all Elaine’s likes and dislikes by now. I didn’t try anything different, anything that would help me pretend she was someone else or anything along those lines. It was more perverse than that. I just remember thinking that it was like Elaine was wearing some sort of mask that night, a mask she couldn’t remove, and the mask was her — Elaine’s — own face.

* * *

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 airline 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.

Finally Mal appeared, barefoot, in shorts; before taking a seat or saying a word to any of us he went around and pulled down all the window shades. He returned to his seat and stood beside it, looking around the room, whispering something to himself. I realized he was counting heads.

Anybody seen Milo? he said. No response.

Well, that’s okay, I guess, Mal said, and sat. He picked up a remote on the table beside him; there was a kind of popping sound, and then Elaine’s Kerouac film began to roll.

He let it run through twice, then switched it off. There was a moment of confusion — it’s not customary to hold this sort of formal screening of in-house work — in which Elaine stole a glance over at me and cocked her head to ask if I knew what this was all about. I shrugged discreetly to convey to her that no one was more in the dark than I was.

Around the table there was a bit of scattered, tentative applause. Mal was still looking at the blank screen. Finally he spun around in his chair.

Nice, he said, but no. I do like the way it reverses the usual imagery, I mean, it makes the whole notion of driving a car seem old-fashioned, retro. Most car ads you see are basically high-gloss porn.

It was startling — if I understood him right — to hear him refer to Elaine’s piece as an ad. He never does that.

The thing is the quote, he went on. The entire aural element of the piece is lifted from Jack Kerouac. I have that right, don’t I?

Silence. I don’t think Elaine was sure whether or not she was being addressed directly.

We could include an acknowledgment, I said, if that’s what you mean.

No, that’s not what I mean. The point is we don’t do that. My first thought was that Elaine should know this by now. But then I thought maybe not: maybe I haven’t made it clear enough, to everyone. So here it is. We don’t co-opt, we don’t filch value, no matter the source. Advertising has skated by on that method for decades. Any artistic value a piece like this one might have is value established somewhere else, in some other context, established and then bought. That’s why people hate advertising, even at the same time as they like the ads themselves. Stealing value. Well, we’re putting a stop to that here. We are about original value, about the creation of value. Let other art derive itself from us! No looting, no sampling, no colonizing of the past!

His voice was raised, and he wasn’t smiling. Elaine was leaning back in her chair, staring at him, her neck mottled red. His exhortation hung in the air for a few seconds.

The original, he said, more quietly. The unique. The unrepeatable. The perfect magic of the artifact. This is our new creed. That’s what I want. That’s what we will all, as of now, be consecrating our efforts towards. Our direction has evolved: that’s only natural. This just seemed like a good opportunity to make that clear. So this piece you all just saw: we won’t be using it. Thank you all for coming.

ELAINE, NEEDLESS to say, tracked me down in my office within the hour. I shut the door, but still she was so loud that I figured the best thing to do was get her off the site.

Okay, fine, she said, glaring. The least you could do is buy me a few drinks.

I took her to El Sombrero. She sat in silence through one margarita, her nostrils flared.

You know, I said finally, I had nothing to do with all that. I certainly would have tried to change his mind if—

Filching value, is that what he said? She shook her head. Jesus. You know what I think it’s really about? Pride. He doesn’t like the idea that he’d have to share credit for the provenance of one of these artworks with poor old dead Jack Kerouac.

I don’t know that that’s it. It’s more like, I don’t know, a point of dogma with him or something.

Dogma! Dogma bums! So did he think it was demeaning to Kerouac, is that it? That I was stealing from him? Did you know that I wrote my whole master’s thesis on the Beats? I went on a road trip to fucking Lowell when I was in college, for Christ’s sake! I visited his house!

The bartender looked at us sternly. I held up one hand and nodded to reassure him.

And he said it would be okay if I wrote the text myself, she muttered, quieter for the moment. But that’s the whole point. On the Road is an artifact of a specific past, a time we can’t go back to. What are we supposed to do, create a new past?What is this, Year One? What is he, fucking Pol Pot or something?

I drove home because I was the less drunk of the two of us, but it was still a mistake; I was plenty shaky myself. By the time we turned down the Palladio driveway, I was down to about fifteen miles an hour. Elaine started reciting.

So in America when the sun goes down, she said, and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all those people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old …

Other lights were on, in other rooms, but we saw no one. Somewhere on the road home oblivion had kicked in: in the hallway, walking behind me, she put her hand through my legs and squeezed, giggling delightedly when I jumped. Drunkenness always tends to release something in her, for better or worse. I was impatient with it tonight; but then, as she turned off the light I had just turned on and started fumbling with my shirt buttons, a strange thing happened, strange at least for me: that angry impatience fused with my lust, redoubled it, and it wasn’t like my desire to push her away from me just gave way to a desire to fuck her: the two desires were suddenly one and the same.

I put my hands under her arms, lifted her to a standing position again, and spun her around. She took two steps toward the bed in the darkness, but I shoved her the rest of the way, until she fell across it.

Oooh, she said; a little too sarcastically, I thought.

That didn’t help. Before long, though, her growls were real, and I closed my eyes and banged into her as hard, as violently as I could. I wanted to hurt her, there’s no question about it. But she didn’t seem to get it. Then, with my chest against her back, I withdrew, shifted up a little, pushed forward again.

Whoa, she said, with a kind of nervous flutter.

I kept on.

Hey, she said. Hey! Stop! Finally she got her hands underneath her and did a kind of pushup, so that I lost my balance. I rolled all the way on to the floor, and sat there.

You were hurting me there, she said. Jesus, you must be drunker than I thought.

I’m sorry, I said.

We were both breathing hard. She had raised herself up on her elbows and I could feel her staring down at me as I sat on the floor.

That’s not like you. I mean, you could ask. Don’t bother, ’cause the answer’s no, but you could ask, you know what I mean?

I’m sorry, I repeated. I guess I just got too excited.

I just stared at the wall ahead of me. Finally I felt her drop herself back across the bed.

What the fuck is going on around here today? she said.

* * *

I WENT TO your house, you know. I flew to Newark. I put the ticket on my credit card and flew out there. What a mistake, to have warned you that I was coming: but I had no inkling of that yet. I was spending money we didn’t have anyway, so there seemed no sense in limiting myself; I rented a car at the airport, spread out one of those Triple A maps on the passenger seat beside me, and found Ulster.

Nothing much to see. It’s the nicest town around there, I suppose, but then the surrounding towns look practically like Appalachia. You’d never really prepared me for it, the bald hills, the scruffy pines, the houses with collapsing porches and front yards full of rusting iron chairs and deer antlers mounted over the garage door; but I suppose you didn’t feel the need of it, you didn’t think I’d ever see it, or that you’d ever see it again either. At what I supposed was the center of town I parked just short of the traffic light and went into the first open store I saw, a cluttered, shabby Rexall pharmacy with a few of the ceiling panels missing, a few of the fluorescent lights burned out.

Excuse me, I said to the back of a gray head, and a thin, white-haired lady, bird-featured, eyeglasses hung round her neck with a black shoelace, turned to face me with a kind of dull mistrust. I don’t imagine they got a lot of strangers coming through that town.

Do you have a phone booth in here?

The stare she was giving me was mostly because of my accent, I realized. She shook her head no, as if the word no might not be part of whatever language I was speaking.

A phone book, then? A local phone book? She gazed at me blankly. I just need to look up an address, for a family in town. I’ve lost it, and they’re expecting me.

She cleared her throat. What family?

The Howes.

She cocked her head. Unhurriedly, without ever smiling or making some other kind of sympathetic gesture toward me, she patted down the apron she wore over her flat front, then searched through the mess around the register, until at length she located a pencil and a notepad. She wrote down the address, along with directions to the house, tore the paper off, and handed it to me.

You can thank me by telling them they still owe me two hundred and fourteen dollars, she said. Where are you from, anyway?

But the bell over the door was already ringing behind me.

* * *

DID I DO something wrong? Back in Berkeley? I mean, I always had the sense, in the year or so that we were together, that I had to be careful, that Molly was poised for flight in some sense, that the balance was delicate in terms of holding her life and mine together. Still, it all seemed to be going well, until one day she left and never came back. What happened? Should I have insisted on going out to Ulster with her? Should I not have followed her out there; should I have been more patient, shown more trust in her? Should I not have left all those phone messages, or announced I was coming, just springing a surprise capture on her instead, as one does with an animal or a mental patient?

I wish the answers were clear. Actually, what I wish is that the answer were clearly yes. Because such a mistake, the mistake of a young man too much in love, would gnaw at me, there’s no denying it: still, it would be easier to carry through life than the suspicion of a much more vague, ingrained, broad-based, personal insufficiency. I couldn’t hold her, I couldn’t make myself indispensable to her, and that kind of personal failure isn’t located in any act, one that might at least in the realm of fantasy be taken back or amended. I fell short; and that’s much harder to accept.

* * *

THAT WHOLE EPISODE with Mal essentially rejecting Elaine’s Kerouac film as too derivative — I confess I thought of it at the time as a small fire to be put out, a matter of mollifying Elaine, trying to let her know I sympathized with her bewilderment at having been humiliated in front of the entire staff and at the same time to let her know that Mal’s decisions, hard to understand though they might be, were basically unappealable. Well, I underestimated its effect. No work of art has ever been rejected here before. It’s all I hear anyone around here talk about: when they talk at all, that is, when they don’t clam up because they see me coming.

Jerry Strauss is carrying around what he calls a formal letter of protest, trying rather confrontationally to persuade everyone to sign it. Most have; those who refuse have a hard time with him.

It’s about your fucking freedom! he says. Does that mean so little to you?

Look, Daniel told him. (Daniel is one of the few people who dares to stand up to him.) A letter of protest, what’s that? Will it do anything? Will he reconsider?

If we’re all together on it—

Of course he won’t. This place is not a democracy. And I’m glad it’s not. Has he been wrong about anything yet?

He’s wrong about this. Ever since he brought back the goddamn Madwoman in the Attic up there—

He’s not wrong about it. That film of Elaine’s, God knows I love her, but that was a piece of shit, and he was dead-on right about why. I’m not going to the barricades over something like that. It’s childish.

You know, Jerry said, holding the typed letter a little too tightly in his hand, this really only means something if every name here is on it.

And why is that, if you value your independence so much? You’re just trying to have it both ways, to pretend you’re a rebel and still cover your ass. All you’ll do is make yourself feel better in the most superficial way. A petition! It’s like something you’d do in fucking high school.

Goddamn coward, Jerry said. Just admit that you’re too afraid of losing your job.

Admit it? Daniel said, laughing. Of course I want to keep my job! It’s nothing to admit! This is the best job in the history of the world. What, Jerry, do you want to go back to publishing zines and working at Kinko’s?

Elaine is never a part of these conversations that I can see. I guess the thinking is that she’s still too upset. Discretion keeps me from asking them, just as a way of taking part, if they know where she’s sleeping now. Her stuff has disappeared from my room.

* * *

THE HOUSE WAS a simple white condo with a split-rail fence in front, and a withered-looking garden on the side not shadowed by the rim of the valley. It was mid-afternoon but it seemed much later there; all the lights were on inside. No one else was in sight. The sky was a kind of bleached blue, one of those early spring days that seem surprisingly cold, unfairly cold.

I thought you were in there. I rang the doorbell, waited, rang it again. It was possible that all those blazing lights were on some sort of theft-deterring automatic timer, but just as that occurred to me, I saw someone moving, through the filmy curtain over the narrow window beside the door. Someone walked right through my field of vision and out of it again, without so much as a hitch in her step or a glance toward the door.

I knocked, even though I had heard the doorbell ringing in the house. Finally, crazed with the thought that you were inside, I jumped over the railing at the end of the porch and walked around to stand in the garden, the direction in which that figure had traveled. I found myself at about chin level with the sill of the kitchen window.

This was your mother; that much was obvious. Her gray hair was in a bun, and she wore a blue pants suit (maybe she went to an office on weekends, I thought), but she had that same mouth, that same smooth, too-fair skin. I knocked on the kitchen window and this time she heard me, though she didn’t jump or scream, as well she might have under the circumstances. She smiled at me as if this were the most natural thing in the world, to find a stranger staring and knocking at you on the other side of the kitchen window. Then she left the room. Maybe she’s phoning the police, I thought, chinning myself on the windowsill to try to see further into the house; but then I heard the front door open at last, and a maternal voice chirped, May I help you with something?

With all the good manners I could muster, I walked around the railing and back up the porch stairs, brushing dirt off my pants.

Are you Mrs Howe?

Kay, she said.

Her eyes were very bright, very wide.

Is Molly in?

Molly’s out, Kay said. Would you like to wait for her?

If I might, yes, thank you. She held her arm out, and I stepped across the threshold, through the vestibule, into the bright living room.

Do you know when she’s coming back? I said.

But Kay had already forgotten about me; with one knee up on the arm of the couch, she was straightening the pictures.

Left alone, I sat politely in the living room for a while. I had my bag in the car but I didn’t quite feel right about bringing it in yet. After an hour had passed, during which your mother walked by me four times, humming to herself, without so much as looking at me, I felt free to give myself a tour. At the top of the stairs was, I guessed, your room. It was unmistakably the bedroom of a young girl: the novels and high school textbooks still in the low, two-shelf bookcase, the stenciled mural on one wall of characters from nursery rhymes, the fringed and tasseled spread on the old wooden bed with the half-moon headboard. No photos in there, though, of you or anyone else, which I thought was odd; no trophies or mementos or anything specific to who you were, or are; still, that didn’t stop me from breathing the air in there, the atmosphere of you at age eight, age ten, age fourteen, as if I were on the top of a mountain.

I heard Kay humming as I came downstairs again. She was polishing the silver. It was now nearly six o’clock; there was no sign of you; and I was starving. Yet for all Kay’s industriousness I saw no sign that she was planning dinner, for herself or for anyone else. I hadn’t seen her eat all day.

Did Molly say what time she might be back?

No, dear, Kay said, smiling.

Because I wasn’t really … I hadn’t planned … I trailed off feebly, not sure how to say politely any of the things it occurred to me to say. Finally I hit upon:

Mrs Howe, since I’m putting you to so much trouble, I’d be happy to drive into town and pick up something for dinner.

She smiled reproachfully at me, as one would at a small child. Oh, you wouldn’t find anything open now, this late on a Sunday, she said. Not in a little town like this.

She went back to her polishing. My hunger was getting the better of me, even at the same time as I was growing a little afraid of her. All of a sudden it occurred to me to wonder if your father had died. Silently I begged you to get back home from wherever you were. Would you mind, I said, if I helped myself to something? I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve come all the way from California today. You know how that airplane food is.

Help yourself, Kay said cheerfully. I think Molly did some shopping.

I got myself two turkey sandwiches and a can of Sprite and sat at the little table in the kitchen. It was dark outside. I thought what an odd thing it was, to find myself in the space of a day transported into your childhood kitchen, and how that oddness would dissipate at once if you would just show up.

Kay was standing in the kitchen doorway. She now wore a nightgown.

Who did you say you were again? she said.

Hurriedly, I swallowed, and wiped my mouth. John Wheelwright, I said. I could have gone on, but I didn’t; surely the name must have meant something to her.

You’re the boy that’s been calling all the time, she said finally, with a terrifying kind of neutrality. From Berkeley.

Yes, that’s right.

She nodded. Well, good night, she said. And before I could resign myself to sleeping in my car, she added: If you like you can sleep in Richard’s room. I just put fresh sheets on the bed yesterday.

Mrs Howe. Do you know where Molly’s gone?

She shrugged. Molly comes and goes, she said. She’s always been a very independent girl. Very mature for her age.

Yes, but, I mean, do you … Should we be worried?

Her eyebrows shot up, and stayed there, and for a few moments I regretted having tried to puncture her equanimity after all: she looked as if she might be right on the edge of some kind of hysterics. But then her face resolved itself again into that same eerie calm. Nonsense, she said. Molly can take care of herself. We all can take care of ourselves, can’t we? Now, you get some rest. If she’s not back in the morning, there’s something I need your help with.

She disappeared. I washed my dishes and sat in the living room in one of two huge recliners there; determined to stay up all night if necessary, thinking now that you must have been out somewhere with some old high school friends, even an old boyfriend maybe. I lasted only a short while before the stress and the cross-country travel finally overwhelmed me into sleep, right there in the chair.

When I woke, the sun was up, it was Monday, and you were still nowhere in sight.

* * *

LATELY MAL SEEMS to have lost his taste, in the interstices of our discussions about work, for trying to get me to talk about Molly with him, to share our admiration, to help him put into words what he feels but can’t always articulate. Too bad; because as time goes by I find I’m getting better at understanding it myself.

I know that Molly loved me. Even then, though, it was her remoteness, her unreachability, that transparent partition between herself and the outside world that like it or not you were part of, even at the moments of greatest intimacy, that made her so alluring, so thoroughly involving. You could reach her, you felt, you could get to her, if only you could figure out how. It wasn’t a matter of simply putting in the effort but of finding the key, making the imaginative leap. Impersonating her, in a manner of speaking, as a way of intuiting what she needed. In some ways, it was like falling in love with someone who couldn’t speak a word of English.

Her hair is brittle, even I can see that, because she doesn’t take care of it, or even pay attention. Her lips are full, but also dry, chapped, uncared-for. My point is that beauty is greatest when it shows through in spite of itself. The more beauty is enhanced, the more it converges toward an ideal, an arbitrary, bland ideal; while every inch of Molly, every aspect of her, is unique, unrepeatable. Her two front teeth are just slightly, disproportionately large, so that they are sometimes visible between her lips when she’s listening to you. There is a blue vein that runs more or less straight down the center of her right breast. She bites her nails. These are not flaws. They are the opposite of flaws.

Some feelings acquire a burnish from time, some feelings are swallowed up by time, leached from memory. She was my one great love, that’s obvious, but I’m not just saying that, believing that, because that love failed. I’m not being sentimental; I’m not deceiving myself.

Of course it’s possible that that’s the very definition of greatness in love. A love so great that you fail it, you find your own resources are unequal to it. The problem of how to do it justice, in a sustained way, turns out to be beyond your capacities to solve.

* * *

MAL WAS PACING around my office today when I came back from lunch.

Elaine has quit? he said loudly. I turned around and shut the door.

Is that so? I said. I didn’t know.

Didn’t know? Come on, you think everyone around here doesn’t know you’re sleeping together?

I don’t know what everybody around here knows.

She’s gone already. She left me a note, because she said she couldn’t face me, and now she’s gone, back to New York.

I had an idea something like that might be happening, I said. She moved all her stuff out of our bedroom.

When did this happen?

A few days ago. But I was—

A few days!

But I was hoping she had just moved in somewhere else in the house.

Hoping! Mal said venomously. You couldn’t be bothered to check it out? She was one of our original hires here. She did a lot of fantastic work, and she’ll do more, only now it will be for somebody else. On top of which, I don’t particularly want it getting around that people are leaving the place, just when we’re hitting our stride. That’s a very damaging rumor to be floating around.

You know, she was really angry at you about the Kerouac thing. Did her letter say anything about—

How could you let things get out of hand like that? You have a romantic dispute, you settle it. There are more important things at stake around here. If you’re having some kind of problem with her, I expect you to manage it better. This is a very serious fuckup in my book, letting someone like her get out the door just because you can’t treat her properly.

Mal, I said, that’s a very personal thing. You get to a point where you have to ask yourself how committed you are.

I expect you to manage it better! he said, and slammed the door behind him.

* * *

I DROVE YOUR father home from the hospital. Your mother sat beside me, giving directions, not unpleasantly. All she had said by way of explanation was that she didn’t enjoy driving anymore. None of us had any idea where you were, at that point; but since Kay didn’t seem troubled by your disappearance, I figured I shouldn’t be, either. I guess that was it. I was younger then, and they were grownups, and it’s astonishing how the confidence another person displays in his or her madness can just draft you along, for a while anyway. Plus, they were your parents, and I wanted to make a good impression on them at any cost, because my plan at that point was that once I got my degree and a job I would ask you to marry me. That’s how I was thinking then.

Kay wanted to wait in the car, but in a moment of lucidity brought on by panic I pointed out that surely they would only discharge her husband to the care of a family member. We walked across the parking lot, myself a step behind her, and into the hushed reception area; she stopped a passing nurse and asked her which way to the mental ward. Just like that. I had only a few silent seconds, in the elevator, to savor that feeling — half fearful, half comic — that goes through you at such a time, the feeling of how on earth could I possibly have arrived at this moment? How could the leading edge of my life now consist of such an errand: in a town I’d never seen, a total stranger to everyone, chauffeuring a middle-aged man I’d never met back to his home after a stay behind the steel doors of a psychotic ward?

All for you, I had time to remind myself as the doors buzzed open. That was the justification for all the strangeness. All in the cause of you.

Maybe you’d disappeared for a day or two just because this particular errand was one you’d find too upsetting. I could certainly see that, now that I was there myself. Maybe you’d be home when we all returned. Or call, at least, to apologize for your absence, and to see that everything had gone as planned. Then you’d learn that I was there.

The look on your father’s face was something else I won’t forget. Yet for all the horror that registered in his face on seeing me — I was a complete cipher, a bafflement, an insult — I felt an instant bond with him, because, like me, the one and only thing he really wanted at that moment was to see your face. And you weren’t there. He stood holding a suitcase, dressed in a casual-preppy style (chinos, deck shoes, a V-neck sweater with some sort of country-club insignia on it) that couldn’t have been more inappropriate to that place. Which I suppose was why he had put it on.

Where’s Molly? he said. Who are you was the companion question that passed over his face; but I was obviously with Kay, and he was too well-bred to ask.

Molly’s not here, said Kay. She looked at me expectantly, until I jumped across the gap between us and took Roger’s bag. Not without some difficulty: he didn’t want to give it to me.

Where is she? Did she have to go back to school?

No, Kay said, nothing like that. (She had already taken two steps back toward the steel door of the ward.) Molly wasn’t around this morning, so … This is John, a friend of hers from California. He came to visit.

John Wheelwright, I said. Pleased to meet you, sir. Roger shook my hand, with astonishing feebleness.

His mouth fell open, as he struggled with this turn of events, with his wife’s apparent refusal to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging the strangeness of it. But what was he going to do: turn around and go back to his bed in the psych ward until everything outside reconfigured itself into the shape he had expected?

Well, he said finally. All right then.

I drove back; like everything else about these few days, the route was already engraved in my memory. Roger sat in the back seat. I’d feel better if I could tell you that not a word was exchanged, that at least there was that sort of tacit recognition of the absurdity and gravity of the whole situation. But in fact I was the only silent one. Your father looked out the window and spoke admiringly about the fecundity of spring, the beauty of the farms, the wisdom of those who laid out our nation’s highway system. Your mother spoke in a manner that seemed more concrete but was equally crazy, ticking off mundane household details as if her husband were returning from some sort of business trip. They spoke alternately, but nothing ever had any connection to what had just been said.

My father grew up on a farm, Roger said. Wheat. Wheat and rye. He used to go out, this was as a boy of nine or ten, and scythe before school. Can you imagine it? This would have been … well, he was too young for World War I, but his brother, I remember …

The porch light is out, Kay said, staring through the windshield. It’s not the bulb. I didn’t call Norman because I thought maybe it’s something simple. But if it’s the wiring, we’ll have to call him.

Dogwoods! Roger said. He rolled down his window.

We pulled up to the house; I hopped out and took his bag. He smiled at me, purely instinctively, as I imagine he would have smiled at any proper show of politeness; then he continued to stare at me as his smile gradually fell. I think he was trying to figure out if I was something he was now going to have to get used to. I walked a few steps ahead of him into his home; Kay was already inside, turning on the lights.

Is Molly back yet? Roger said.

You were not. It felt like an entire day had passed, but it was still only about ten-thirty in the morning. Roger said he thought he’d take a nap before lunch. I was sure his own bed would feel good to him, but such sympathetic sentiments were impossible to express, particularly when the two of them, husband and wife, seemed locked in an intuitive agreement that nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all. Even my own bizarre presence there didn’t cause a ripple in the placid surface of their madness. Kay sat down to watch a talk show on TV. I went out and sat on the porch, in an Adirondack chair facing the open end of the valley.

I had to believe you’d come back. I couldn’t figure out where you might be hiding, or why you’d slip out just at the moment when your father was scheduled for his release; you must have known about that. Maybe there was much more, in a sinister way, to your relationship with him than you’d ever told me. Or (I admitted it was possible) you were hiding out of embarrassment over my seeing what your home was really like. Well, if so, I regretted having put you on the spot like that, but really it was your own doing, refusing to answer my calls like that. You had to know I’d come looking for you. I was so stupid with love.

Down at the end of the driveway, just beyond the gate in the low wooden fence, a mail truck drifted to a stop; an arm reached out, opened the box, shoved in a pile of paper, shut it, and flipped the flag up all in one motion worn by boredom into a gesture of unbroken gracefulness. A few seconds later, when the truck was out of sight, the front door opened behind me, and Kay walked out to collect the mail. She flipped through it as she passed me again, without a smile or a glance in my direction. In spite of everything else going on, I felt a little offended that she should treat so casually a guest in her home. My own upbringing showing itself, I guess.

Ten minutes later, when I went back inside to offer to make your parents some lunch, I almost ran Kay down: she was still standing about two steps inside the front door, holding a postcard up in front of her face.

It was from you. All it said was that the Honda was in the long-term parking lot at the Albany airport. I read it a few times over Kay’s shoulder, both of us struggling to make sense of it. Then my heart leaped, and I began thinking immediately about how to make my own escape from that place, where in the house your parents might keep a phone book, where I could find a phone out of their earshot in order to call the airport myself.

Because it could only mean one thing. You had flown home to me, to California, and now I wasn’t there.

* * *

MAL SUMMONS ME to his office.

I had a call from Rachel Comstock, he says. You know who Rachel Comstock is?

He looks angry.

No, I say.

Neither did I. She’s a producer at 60 Minutes. She apologized for bothering me but she said she had called your office three times and never had her call returned.

The air was heavy with some kind of recrimination. He was sitting behind his desk; the windows were open, and a stack of papers riffled underneath a paperweight. I was damned if I was going to let this turn into a conversation about my job performance. I was damned if I was going to say I was sorry about anything.

What did she want? I said.

His nostrils flared. See, the point is that I’m supposed to be finding that stuff out from you, and not the other way around. But since you’re interested enough to ask, 60 fucking Minutes is now doing a story on these Culture Trust guys out in Spokane. The trial’s turning into some kind of circus. These two guys apparently think they’ve inherited the radical-clown mantle from Abbie Hoffman, at least that’s what this Comstock woman tells me. You know how embarrassing it is to have to learn this stuff from a total stranger, from a journalist no less? I thought you were on top of this!

I am on top of it. It’s a criminal trial. It’s the gallery pressing charges, not us. What do you want me to do?

What do I want you to do? I want you to go back out there and take care of it.

What do you mean, go back out there?

Fly back out there, he said, in a somewhat challenging manner, I thought.

When?

When? Right now would be good. What do you mean when? This is a public relations disaster—

There’s no point in my going out there. If the 60 Minutes people see me there all of a sudden, that’ll just make it seem like a bigger deal, like we’re genuinely worried about these –

I’m sorry? he said. Was there something unclear about what I told you to do?

Mal’s nostrils were flared, and his mouth was set so tightly it was quivering. It wasn’t like him to get this mad about something work-related. This can’t be about a couple of self-important middle-aged vandals three thousand miles away, I told myself. This has to be about something else. I folded my arms; the possibility existed that I might actually start crying, and the swell of that feeling in me really made me furious.

Is that what you want? I said. To get rid of me?

What the hell are you talking about?

I stood there staring down at him — he was still in his chair — and I thought, I don’t really know what to hope for anymore.

What’s happened to you, John? he said. You’ve really changed. Your behavior has been erratic these last few weeks; I’m not the only one who’s noticed it. What’s the matter?

What’s the matter? I said.

Because if this is about Molly then all I can tell you is you’re acting like a petulant idiot. Get over it. I realize this is a strange situation for you, it’s a strange situation for all of us, but it’s just what’s happened. I mean you might as well tell me now: do you still have feelings for her?

No, I said. I don’t.

Then what’s the problem?

We have a history.

Yes? Mal said. And?

And when he said that, somehow all the air just went out of me. Maybe he’s right, I thought: what difference does it make? Why should I think that what matters to me would matter to anyone else?

Okay, I said. Fine. I’ll fly out to Spokane tomorrow.

Mal relaxed. Well, you don’t have to look so glum, he said. It’s three days at the most. You have to be back Thursday for Jean-Claude’s thing.

Though in fact I wanted to be back for the debut of Milo’s Palladio piece, there was something about the way Mal said I had to that caught my attention.

Why? I said. You’ll be here for it, won’t you?

He smiled coyly. No, actually, he said. I’m leaving tomorrow too. I’m flying to Rome.

Rome?

He nodded. I’ll have to catch one of the subsequent performances.

I have to tell you, Mal, some of the clients we have flying in will be pissed when they get here and—

You can handle them, John, he said.

I couldn’t see why he was being so cryptic. Did I know about this? I said.

Actually, no one knows about it. I’m going back to Umbria, for the final renovations on the house. A week at the most.

He couldn’t keep the smile off his face. He stood up from his chair and leaned forward across the desk. In his tone of voice, in his every movement it was clear that he wanted to find some way to restore the old intimacy between us.

I want to spend my honeymoon there, he said to me. When I come back I’m going to ask Molly to marry me.

* * *

THERE WERE NO phones on planes back then. I tried once from the Newark airport and got my own voice on the machine. Of course, it was two in the afternoon, California time; you could have been anywhere. So then I spent another six hours, just as I had on the way out east less than a week before, in a kind of furious, helpless anticipatory limbo, knowing that you were below me somewhere, unable to communicate with you without actually finding you and holding you still. I still believed, I still believed, that I would find you back in our apartment, waiting for me. What is this power you have, to make me believe? I thought you’d have an explanation, a typically strange rationale for your odd behavior, and that I would have a right to demand that explanation. Not out of anger; never out of anger, where you were concerned. Maybe that was my mistake: you would have loved me more, or at any rate taken me more seriously, if instead of trying to talk you out of your own self-contempt I had shared in it, reinforced it, at least when provoked. But I wanted that explanation purely in the spirit of furthering my understanding of you.

There isn’t much else to tell. I took a cab straight from the San Francisco airport to our door, the last twenty bucks I had, by the way. The place was empty. I stood in the kitchen until a distinct visual memory of your leaving popped into my head through sheer force of desperation — a picture of you with a green canvas duffel bag with handles on it. I ran to the bedroom closet, but the bag wasn’t there. I looked under your bed, in the bathroom, in the hallway. Nothing was conclusive enough for me.

Then I sat and called your parents, back in Ulster.

Hello?

Mrs Howe? I’m sorry to bother you. It’s John.

Who?

I swallowed. John Wheelwright. Molly’s friend. I was just there.

Right. (There was a shuffling sound, as she sat up in bed I suppose, and she said quite clearly to her husband, No, it’s that friend of hers.) Sorry. It’s late here, you know. I was sleeping.

Honestly, it hadn’t occurred to me, but it was past midnight there by then.

Where are you? she said.

Back in Berkeley.

Oh. (This with some distaste.) Can you put Molly on?

What?

Molly, Kay said. Is she there?

No, I said. I was calling to see if she’d come home yet.

Home here?

Yes.

No.

No word from her?

No, Kay said, a little impatiently. I don’t know where she is. We went and picked up the car today, it was where she said it was, but beyond that I have no idea. I guess she’s left again.

There was a long silence.

All right then? Kay said; and she hung up.

So that was that. You were nowhere, and I had no idea what had happened to change what existed between you and me. Whatever existed, actually, was unchanged; it still existed; here it was — our kitchen, our phone, our furniture, our bed. It only needed you to come back and take your place in it.

I say that was that, but of course it took me a long time to come to terms with the finality of it, to admit that to myself. And anyway, before I could even begin those endless skeptical inner repetitions of the fact that you really were gone, start wondering what that meant for me, how I could move forward from there — how I could move at all, in any direction! — there was one more thing to try.

I sat in a restaurant on Telegraph, drinking coffee in a plush threadbare armchair which I had turned around to face out the window, until a young man in a red shirt and khakis appeared across the street, holding a stack of pamphlets in one hand and carrying an old plastic milk crate under the other arm. He plopped the crate down in the middle of the sidewalk and stood next to it for a minute or more with his eyes closed, in what I gradually understood was a prayer. Then his eyes fluttered open and he hopped nimbly on to the crate and immediately went into a loud harangue of some sort (I couldn’t hear it — I was still in my chair across the street) with his eyes focused sharply on the empty space before him, a foot or so above the heads of the pedestrians. Those with the bad luck to be passing just as he started to speak could actually be seen to jump in surprise, and to turn around resentfully or curiously as they picked up their normal stride; within just a few seconds, though, the voice had blended into the street scene, and no one paid any attention to the preacher’s words at all.

I got up and walked across the street. It was Berkeley, so the cars just coasted to a stop and waited for me even though I was crossing in the middle of the block. The preacher had reddish-blond hair, already beginning to recede from his large, unlined forehead. His features were small and round, piggish you could almost say. He didn’t seem to see me, even when I came to a stop in front of him, right at his feet.

Are you Richard Howe? I said.

He didn’t so much as glance at me; he must have heard me, I thought, but then again maybe not — maybe he was in some kind of a trance state. Look around you, he shouted, addressing the crowd without really seeming to see it. Is this the life you wanted for yourself? The years on earth are over in the blink of an eye!

Are you Richard Howe? I said again. I have to talk to you. It’s important. It’s about your sister.

Where are you rushing to? To the office? To a store, to buy things?What are you rushing toward, really? Death, my friends, death! It will be here in the next instant! Beyond it lies eternity! Is there anything more worth preparing for than that? Does money matter, in the end? Do nice clothes matter? Jesus says …

And on like that for nearly an hour and a half. No one, I reasoned, could keep that volume and pace up indefinitely; so I sat on the pavement with my back up against the used-record store and waited. He never turned around. If I’d had a hat, I could have put it on the pavement by my feet and probably made a few bucks, which I needed.

Ultimately he stepped down from the crate, picked it up under his arm, and started up the block. I jumped to my feet and overtook him. It wasn’t hard; he was clearly exhausted.

Are you Richard? Please. It’s important.

He ignored me. But now, beside him, looking down on him in fact, for he was not a tall guy when off his crate, I could see that he very likely was not your brother. There was no resemblance there at all. So I let myself fall behind him and I followed him down Telegraph until he turned on to Vine Street; I watched him unlock a door and I memorized the address. Then, because I had been away from home for a few hours, I went back to see if you had returned, or called, or maybe written a letter.

Around six I returned to the house on Vine Street. I knocked and then stood well back from the door, in case anyone wanted a look at me. It took a while before the door opened, and two smallish, short-haired, clean-shaven young men stood in the doorway, wearing red shirts. They stood abreast, as if trying to keep me from seeing inside, or from charging in. Not that they were big enough to stop me anyway. It was all pretty strange.

My name is John Wheelwright, I said as levelly as I could manage. I’d like to speak to Richard, as soon as it’s convenient. It concerns his sister Molly.

Yes, said the one on the left. We know who you are. I think he meant it to sound spooky, but his high voice and solemn demeanor just made my own impatience with him harder to control.

Shoes off, said the one on the right.

Sorry?

Shoes off, please. Leave them outside the door, if you would.

I did so, and the two of them parted. Nervous in spite of myself, I padded down the hall in my socks, and turned the corner into the main room.

The walls, stripped of decoration, were painted a blinding white — blinding mostly because the room was filled with lamps, maybe ten of them, lighting every cranny of the place so thoroughly that nothing cast any shadow. On the floor, his back against the wall just inside the doorway, was yet another red-shirted young man sitting cross-legged on the floor holding a sketch pad; on it, he was finishing up what for one startling moment I took to be a pastel portrait of your father. But then I saw Richard, and the family resemblance was powerful indeed. He sat in a cracked black leather La-Z-Boy, fully reclined, his hands folded on his stomach. It was the only chair in the room. The other young men, four or five in all, sat on or lay across these huge square pillows scattered around the floor.

The whole thing just struck me as amazing and pretentious: trappings with no discernible purpose beyond gussying up the triviality of their mission, compared to the mission I was on.

I am Richard, he said. He might as well have told me he was Mr Kurtz. He reached down for the handle and returned his chair to its upright position.

Is Molly here?

Of course not.

Do you know where she is?

I have no idea, he said archly, disdainfully, as if I’d asked him what time it was and he’d responded by telling me he didn’t wear a watch. I haven’t seen her in a long time. Are you the person with whom she is living in sin?

I nodded. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to offend him. I just had no time to waste on being offended myself.

And now she’s gone, Richard said, and you don’t know where she is.

That’s right. Have you heard from her?

Richard shook his head. If you were willing to defile her, he said, and of course you weren’t the first, then you can’t really be surprised if another defiler comes and takes her from you, can you?

I reddened at this. The young men on the floor were following our exchange with great interest, smiling, as if nothing more than amusement were at stake.

You don’t even know me, I said.

Oh, I know you.

The others murmured their agreement.

I know Molly, too, Richard went on. She has been on a path toward destruction ever since she left her parents’ house. She is remorseless. And you have taken advantage of her for a while, and hastened her down that path, when you could have done something instead to turn her toward salvation. But what have you lost, really, from your own point of view? I would imagine that such a sinful relationship is more or less interchangeable with another one.

Dumbfounded, I said: She’s your sister.

He shrugged. And you’re my brother, he said. What about it?

I’m in love with her.

You are a hypocrite. Your actions, not your words, are what signify, and your actions tell me that what you felt for Molly was not love.

He shifted in his seat, and smiled.

But it’s not too late, you know, he said. You’ve made a mistake, but it’s not a mistake from which you can’t recover, if you start right now, by pledging your soul to Jesus. Are you willing to save yourself?

I want to save your sister, I said. That’s how I will save myself.

Molly is past saving. Who knows? She may have arrived in Hell already.

I took a step toward him, expecting that his little minions would jump up to try to protect him. But they didn’t; I kept going across the room, fists clenched, intending to drag him out of his La-Z-Boy and take advantage of his slander of you to make him answer for all the frustration I felt.

Richard flipped up the armrest of his reclining chair, reached into a little wooden compartment there intended by the manufacturers, I imagine, to hold a bag of chips or a TV Guide, and pulled out a gun. He laid it in his lap. The young artist had stopped his sketching; he was shaking his head at me, sorrowfully.

If you change your mind, Richard said, our door is always open to you.

THAT WAS IT. I waited another month, until I was out of money, and gave up the lease on the apartment. I called my parents, apologized abjectly, and begged for the funds to continue living out there until Christmas. I took a room in the North Side home of a man whose wife had just left him and taken their kids; evenings, while he drank in front of the TV, I stayed behind my bedroom door and wrote my thesis on Goya for the completion of my degree. I had them mail it to me in Los Angeles, where I moved in order to work in the art department at New West magazine. When that folded, I took a job in the LA office of J. Walter Thompson; after two years a headhunter found me and I went to Chiat/Day. When they opened their New York office, they offered big raises to anyone willing to relocate. I was willing to relocate. There was nothing holding me anywhere.

There’s more I could tell you. But I get the feeling I’m talking to myself.

* * *

TO SPOKANE VIA Las Vegas this time; I lost fifty bucks on the slots right there at the gate. But before that I called Farber, the lawyer, from a pay phone and told him I was on my way. Same old guy; he kept insisting I hadn’t woken him up when it was clear that I had.

He was able to see me for breakfast the next day. I told him that Palladio was anxious to settle the case against Culture Trust in an expedient and mutually beneficial way.

Settle? he said, trying to flag down the waitress with the coffee pot; he’s just the sort of guy to whom waitresses don’t pay attention. It’s a criminal proceeding, not a civil one.

Nevertheless. When can I talk to your clients?

Lots of luck, he said, with a raised eyebrow; but right from the table he called and this time they actually agreed to see me, that very afternoon. I don’t know why they said yes this time; probably for no better reason than that they had said no last time.

The judge had lifted the contempt charge against Gradison and both men were out on bail. I rented a car and drove along the river until I was well out in the boondocks. I had to keep checking my odometer because, according to the directions Farber had faxed to my hotel room, which I held in one hand as I drove, the dirt road on which Liebau had built his house wasn’t marked in any way. I found it easily enough in the end. The house was two miles up the road, deep in the woods. It was some beautiful country.

Liebau’s house was a huge A-frame, with a small yard area in front and on one side, from which all the stumps hadn’t yet been cleared. Underneath the porch steps I could see two generators, one working, one evidently being repaired. I knocked; Farber appeared at the screen door, and let me in.

The great room was dominated by a wall of masks, hung haphazardly, in a variety of sizes and aspects. They were tribal, made of painted wood; more than that I could not say about them. They stared across the room at a wall of sagging bookshelves. On the north side, a vast picture window looked straight into the face of the woods; on the south, a large woodstove with iron doors. Above us, against the south wall and behind the chimney, was a sleeping loft. In the middle of the room, the two men — Professors Gradison and Liebau — sat waiting for me at a low table, cross-legged on a couple of pillows laid on the floor. They wore old wool sweaters, work pants, boots, and their time in prison did not appear to have slimmed them down at all. They did not get up.

The masks are beautiful, I said, lowering myself on to a leopard print cushion across the table from them. African?

From New Guinea, Liebau said, in a reasonable enough tone of voice. I did my doctoral research there.

And Mr Liebau, you built this place yourself?

He gestured to his colleague. Jack and I, he said. With some help from friends who had different sorts of expertise. Hooking up the generator, digging the well, and whatnot.

You’re not survivalists, are you?

Not yet, Liebau said.

Gentlemen, thank you for seeing me. I may as well get right to it. You and your organization seem to have locked yourselves in a kind of death spiral with Palladio, the place where I work. It’s gone on for a long time now; and it’s reached the point where the toll it’s taking on everyone concerned, on the work that we all want to do, is enormous.

(I knew I was flattering them with terms like organization, but that’s just what I wanted to do. I wanted to give them some opportunity to claim victory.)

I’m here to resolve our differences in an amicable way. Your lawyer, I imagine, has already told you that we’ve gotten the gallery itself to agree to drop the charges against you, but now, what with all the publicity the trial’s gotten, the judge says no. So now it’s between us. Nothing is off the table.

The door to the kitchen swung open. A young, attractive Asian woman brought in tea, on a beautiful hand-painted tray, and silently departed. She wore slippers. I tried not to let my surprise show.

You’re not here to resolve anything, Liebau said. You’re here to make us disappear. Mal Osbourne is not troubled by our disagreeing with him. He’s troubled by the fact that our disagreement (he held up his index fingers, clawlike, on either side of his head) is getting national attention, because of the chord it strikes with the masses.

I’m sorry, I said, smiling. Did you just use the word masses?

Yes, god damn it! So you can come here and simper all you want about cooperation, but we know this is all about silencing us. And we will not be silenced.

You pathetic lackey, Gradison added, in an almost apologetic tone, as if completing Liebau’s sentence for him.

There was a chair in the room, by the picture window, and Farber sat in it, his back to the windblown pines outside. Legs crossed, he sipped his tea and studied the scattering of masks across from him.

You’re wrong, I said. Mal is bothered by the fact that you take issue with him. And no one wants to silence you. Anyway, you’re missing the point. Mal Osbourne is not the enemy here. He’s fighting the same thing you guys are fighting. The established cultural order is what he hates.

Then Liebau, a man nearly old enough to be a grandfather, a man with patches of white in his neat beard, did an astonishing thing: he stuck his tongue out as far as he could, crossed his eyes, and repeated what I had just said, in a tone of mock earnestness. The estabwissed cuwtuwaw owdew is what he haes.

This was a new one. I reminded myself that my unflappability, my ability not to take things personally, was what Mal prized in me — it was the secret to my ascent. Still, it was clearly time to do away with the niceties; social graces only seemed to antagonize these people.

Fall semester starts soon, I said. You guys ready? For classes and whatnot?

Farber sat up straighter. I don’t see how that’s in the bounds of –

Liebau held up his hand. He already knows. He wouldn’t ask if he didn’t know the answer. We’ve lost our teaching jobs.

How will you find work?

We have our resources.

You put a lot of faith, I said, in the strength of your ideas. I mean, I guess that goes without saying. You’d have to, since all the force, all the money, is amassed on the other side.

Gradison, who had been noisily stirring his tea, suddenly held out one fist to me, turned sideways. Thumbwrestle? he said.

No, thank you. So let me get to the point.

Mal had said I would know what to do, and it was true; it was all coming to me now, spontaneously, as if he were working through me, without instruction, my mind racing to keep one step ahead of my speech, since I didn’t think it would be wise to stop talking.

Mal Osbourne actually has a great respect for the work that you two have done. Even when it’s been directly at his expense. He can see — he and I have talked about this several times — he can see that it has a great deal of iconoclastic energy, as well as a strong visual sense, a sense of how to get a message across in the least fussy, most memorable way possible. Not just a desire to break molds, but an instinct for it, a knack for it.

I’m moved, said Liebau to Gradison. Are you moved?

Palladio would like to hire you both, I said. Your starting salaries would be two hundred thousand for the first year.

Now I had their attention. In the crack of light under the swinging door to the kitchen I could see two points of shadow; the Asian woman was listening there. Farber was all ears as well.

You want us to come down South, Gradison said, and live in the big house?

Not if you don’t want to. You can stay right here if you prefer.

Liebau held up his hand. Hire us to do what? he asked, confused.

To do exactly what you do now.

Come off it.

I’m not kidding. We’ll write it into your contracts. No restriction on content. Keep making fun of us, if that’s what you want to do.

They stared at each other.

Ask anyone who works there, if you want to, I said. Ask if their content has ever been tampered with, or censored in any way. (I was out on a limb now — Elaine’s Kerouac ad had been squashed, of course, on formal grounds — but that was an anomaly, and anyway I had to win here, I had to go back home with something to show. I knew it’s what Mal would want, even though, strictly speaking, there was no precedent for it.) Mal is a facilitator; he provides the link between great artists and the means for disseminating great art. All he has to offer is his sensibility. He hasn’t been wrong so far. And he thinks that you two have greatness in you.

Liebau tapped Gradison on the shoulder; they stood and walked to the corner of the room, where, shoulders hunched, they whispered to each other, complete with overdrawn hand gestures. Everything they did seemed to have that overlay of irony to it, of performance. I looked over at Farber, who met my eyes and shrugged, caught up in the suspense of it himself. After a minute or two they came back to the table and lowered themselves on to the pillows again.

Two million, Liebau said.

Sorry?

Two million. Each. The first year.

I scratched the bridge of my nose. Well, I can talk to Mal about it. We can work something out. Nothing’s outside the realm of –

Twenty million, Gradison said. For me.

Yeah, me too, Liebau said.

I didn’t change expression. I’ll talk to Mal about it, I said. It was clear that they were just trying to get me to say no to them, and I would not.

Liebau leaned forward, stuck his bearded face at me over the table, with an expression of great curiosity in the crow’s feet around his eyes. You are an amazing creature, he said to me. An evolutionary marvel. Do you know that?

This isn’t about me. It’s—

Oh, I beg to—

It’s about the two of you. It’s a sincerity check. Because I think that your idea of yourselves is predicated on failure. You enjoy making these destructive gestures precisely because no one’s listening, because you know no one cares what you think. Well, here’s a chance for you to take the ideas you hold so dear and make the whole world listen to them. What’s your answer?

No, Gradison said, not smiling now. Our answer is no.

See, I don’t understand that. You define yourself through these ideas, that, I don’t know, that Mal Osbourne is Satan, that nothing he says is sincere, that his art is about commerce even when it has no commercial content, whatever. I don’t know. But now it seems to me that these same noble ideas would, to you, not be so noble — they’d be changed entirely — if instead of being unemployed middle-aged leftie dinosaurs you were actually succeeding in disseminating them widely. It’s the trappings that really concern you, not the art. I think it’s all a pose, I really do. I think you don’t really believe in yourselves at all. It’s a pose.

Liebau beckoned me closer. I leaned my head across the table. He cupped his hands around his mouth as if he were getting ready to shout, but when his voice came out, it was a whisper.

Dissent is the art, he said.

He sat back, and, in his normal voice, repeated himself. Dissent is the art. And crushing dissent, Johnny, in case you haven’t twigged to this yet, is the business that you’re in. Swallowing it, bastardizing it, defanging it, eliminating it. The reason you think our art’s meaning wouldn’t change if we sold it to you is that you don’t think it means anything anyway. Art comes from somewhere. It has a provenance. Changing that provenance changes the art. Denying that provenance denies the art.

He sighed. And now, he said, in conclusion: get out.

I thought they were kidding. I smiled.

Get out, he said. I mean it. Get out of my house. You defile it by sitting here.

Get out! Gradison said.

Get out! Liebau said, louder. The two of them got to their feet. Get out! Get out!

I looked at Farber. Do you think you could encourage your clients to—

Something — a pencil, I think — whizzed by my head. Get out! They were shouting now. Gradison ran over to the wall and took down a mask — long, scowling, with open mouth and large wooden teeth. Holding it over his face, he ran back across the room and stood inches from me, hopping from foot to foot.

Booga booga booga! he shrieked. It was ridiculous. Then he picked up my half-full cup of tea and proceeded to throw it on me.

They followed me out on to the porch, still screaming, Get out! I hurried into my car. Gradison and Liebau, overweight men, college professors, climbed up on the hood and banged on my windshield with the flats of their hands. Their faces were stretched by a fury so outsized I couldn’t really be sure it was genuine. When I put the car in reverse, slowly, they rolled off the hood and landed on their feet in the driveway; but when I got out on to the dirt road and stole a glance into the rearview mirror, there they were, still huffing after me, shaking their fists, before they finally stopped, leaning over with their hands on their knees, trying to get their breath.

* * *

IT WAS ALL in the nature of a demand, I see that now, but why shouldn’t I make demands of her? An impartial observer, I think, would say that I was owed, that I had a claim originating in what she had done to me, in the cruel aimlessness she had brought to my life just when I thought I knew what my life would be devoted to. But forget impartiality, I don’t want to be impartial. That’s the last thing I want. Nothing in my life since has been as real as our love, and I can’t see anything in her life right now that strikes me as particularly genuine, either. And before that? A glorified PA for some half-talented Hollywood wannabe, for whom nastiness was passed off as integrity, as evidence of a tortured soul, when really the only thing torturing him was ambition? I’ll show him a tortured soul.

All the way across the country I thought about what I would do. Mal was out of the country. I couldn’t make up my mind what to say to her, but saying nothing was out of the question. The inevitability of it propelled me; resisting it would have been like trying to break a fall by flapping your arms. So I dropped my bag in my half-empty room and made my way across the ground floor to the east wing. The ballroom doors were closed, to protect the surprise of Milo’s installation: other than that, a normal day. I did stop in my office, on the way upstairs, to see what messages there were that needed returning. It was nearly seven o’clock, and so Tasha had already left for the day.

On the fourth-floor landing I felt a wave of nervousness, but I kept on going. I knocked, for the first time, on Mal’s bedroom door. No one answered. She may well have been out; I hadn’t thought to check for her car. Suddenly it began to seem like an opportunity of a different sort. I tried the door, and, as if in a dream, it was unlocked.

I’d never been in there before. I don’t know what I expected. He’s done it in white, all white, the bedspreads, the curtains; only the brass railing at the head of the bed shone gold. No artwork on any of the walls. No books, no mirrors. A door to the bathroom, a double door leading to what must have been a walk-in closet, and a door to the balcony, which was open; the breeze pushed at the skirts of the long white curtains.

There was someone in the bathroom, and she seemed to hear me at the same moment I heard her. The faucet turned off.

Who’s there? she said.

I stood still, and held my breath. I made myself so silent I could hear the blood in my ears.

John? she said.

Molly walked slowly into the room and smiled at me, with a lack of alarm that I thought was really inappropriate under the circumstances. What are you doing here?

I came to tell you something, I said, my voice shaking a little in spite of myself. You have to leave this place. You have to get out of here.

She looked concerned — not for herself, though, for me: as if there were something so odd or disturbing about the expression on my face that she hadn’t even heard what I’d said.

Listen to me, I told her. I swear to you this isn’t about me. It’s about you. Well, it’s about this whole place, really, everything around here is fucked up, it’s falling apart, and that’s because you’re here. I’m not sure why that’s true, exactly, but I’m sure it’s true.

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.

The corporate clients’ petulance (I’d been on the phone with some of them all week, finding new ways to explain why and how they were being asked to subsidize work that would literally never be seen outside the doors of their ad agency) eventually gave way, over lunch, to the general mood of high anticipation. A Jean-Claude Milo unveiling was a big deal indeed, and there is always something invigorating about being part of the select. All the heads of marketing were there, PR people, art-loving corporate vice presidents and their comely secretaries. Jean-Claude’s dealer from New York, her assistant, nearly all of our staff who wanted to see the happening. About forty people in all. At two o’clock exactly, I unlocked the tall ballroom doors and we all ventured in.

In the ballroom all the heavy curtains were drawn, and the computer screens glowed blankly. A larger movie screen hung from just about the exact center of the ceiling. Jean-Claude was sitting underneath it, on a small red carpet, wearing a rough brown robe like some sort of Tibetan monk. I remember thinking that this might have explained the weight he’d lost — some sort of Eastern asceticism, some sort of exploration of Buddhism, maybe. Beside him was a rectangular table skirted with a black curtain: not unlike a table you might see a magician use. Jean-Claude himself was calm, engaged, smiling at everyone who made eye contact with him. When most of the murmuring had subsided, he looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

That’s everyone, I said.

Would you shut the door then, please, John? he said.

It was his normal voice — he was not in any sort of character; still, soft as it was, the sound of it silenced everyone even before I had the heavy doors pushed shut.

Jean-Claude stretched out his arms before him, paused a few seconds, then, with an air of great ceremony, clapped his hands twice; whereupon the lights went off. Ironic laughter, at this religious-ceremony-cum-infomercial: laughter that quickly subsided, though, maybe because we were now in almost total darkness.

A smell, a strange sort of artificial smell, sweet but excessive, like an overabundance of air freshener, seemed to rise up from the floor of the room. Then, one by one, all twenty or thirty of the small video screens at the computer-editing consoles flickered to life: each showed a different sequence of still shots of various works of art, some famous, some unknown to me, some I recognized as Milo’s own. They ran in a loop, slowly, at about the pace at which an old-fashioned slide show might go, and as they did, a sound arose from speakers Milo must have concealed all around the ballroom, an empty sort of crackling and hissing that had to emanate from an open microphone with no one in front of it, turned up louder and louder — I’m sure I wasn’t the only one feeling some dread lest someone actually start speaking into it, for it would have been earsplitting.

The sequence of artworks on the video screens looped a third time. Only this time, each image, after a few seconds, was consumed on the screen by a digital image of fire, creeping from the corners, blackening the center, until it was gone and the next image took its place. A murmur, audible to me even over the taped hiss of the unmanned microphone, went through the assembled. Then, on the larger, overhead screen, a simple white-on-black text began to scroll downwards.

This is what the words on the screen said:

If you were to go into the teahouse today, on execution day, and listen to what is being said, you would perhaps hear only ambiguous remarks. These would all be made by adherents, but under the present Commandant and his present doctrines they are of no use to me. And now I ask you: because of this Commandant and the women who influence him, is such a piece of work, the work of a lifetime, to perish? Ought one to let that happen? Even if one has only come as a stranger to our island for a few days?

At this point, though we could still see almost nothing, and any noise in the room would have been lost in the ambient sizzle of the empty mike, a stronger smell began to permeate the room, a chemical smell, something familiar but not easily identified.

The screens went blank. The hiss was cut off. Then, after a moment, we heard a familiar little trill of electronic bells, followed by another voice, instantly recognizable, the voice of James Earl Jones.

Thank you for using AT&T.

Laughter.

There was a sound, a whoosh like the sound of a tablecloth being snapped, and before anyone knew what was happening the center of the ballroom was lit by a kind of pillar of flame. I heard a couple of screams. Actually, though I say the room was lit, the weird thing was that that light seemed to draw everything into it; I don’t remember seeing any other faces or even any shadows; the flame itself was steady, it held its shape, like a cigarette lighter or something. It was the shape of a pear or an inverted teardrop, rising a few feet off the floor and coming to a sort of point, smack in the center of the field of darkness that was the ballroom. A different sort of acrid smell began to reach us.

Turn on the lights! someone screamed. It was Fiona’s voice. For just a moment I thought it was a collaboration, a part of the piece. Turn on the fucking lights, somebody, please!

We were a crowd, and we reacted as a crowd, even though we were still invisible to each other. All of us moved at the same time. I turned to grope my way back to the wall where I knew the switches were, and as I did I fell right over one of the corporate visitors, who had probably just stumbled over someone else. I heard the air escape from her with a little cry as my knee went down right into the center of her back. We were in a panic, and I will leave it to others to interpret at what point we were officially outside the boundaries of poor Jean-Claude’s masterpiece, if indeed we made it out of there at all.

The stench was unbearable, and it only seemed to feed the animal quality of our fear as we knocked each other down and banged our hands against the walls, searching no longer for the light switch, but for the door. Stand back! I screamed. Get away! Back off! but I have no idea if anyone heard me. By the time I got to the door and opened it — I dared to look behind me only once the light from the rest of the house had flooded in there — the fire had reached the heavy, floor-to-ceiling drapes and from there you pretty much knew that the whole old house was bound to go up.

Someone else called 911. Someone else at least had the presence of mind to run into the pantry for the fire extinguisher, though by that time the ballroom was like a furnace; the door to it couldn’t even be approached. Me, I ran like someone being pursued by the hounds of hell across the living room, through the front hall, and up the stairs. Colette was out on the third-floor landing, an inquiring look on her face, waiting, I suppose, for someone to come and explain to her what all the commotion was about. I pushed her out of my way as I turned on the landing and headed for the fourth floor.

Molly! I screamed. Molly! Get out of there! The bedroom door was locked; I pounded on it. Molly! Get out! I’m not kidding! It’s John! I pounded once more; then I took a step back, kicked right beside the doorknob, and splintered the wood around the lock. One more kick and I was in.

Molly!

She wasn’t there.

Like an idiot I wouldn’t believe it, I looked in every room up there and then I looked again: she was gone. By now I had gone through the panic, I suppose, come out on the other side of it. I was calm, but not in a level-headed sort of way. It was a stupid calm, one that caused me to walk rather than run to the fourth-floor landing and peer down the stairs as if I were waiting for the distant light of a train. My eyes smarted. Smoke was already finding avenues to the top of the house.

I went back into the bedroom and pushed open the doors to their balcony. The first fire engines had already arrived. I could see people, a lot of people, standing or sitting or doubled over coughing on the great lawn, staring up at the catastrophe, up at me, though they didn’t seem to see me. I wondered if they thought I was planning to go down with the ship. Then a firefighter pointed to me, the others pointed too, and as I stood on the balcony, smoke beginning to frame me as it made its way through the balcony doors and disappeared in the daylight, I watched them run to one of the rescue vehicles, drag what looked like a huge tarpaulin out on the grass, and connect some sort of generator-run air pump to it. In just a couple of minutes it had inflated into a huge soft target, like a pillow, like those landing areas stuntmen use, just outside the frame.

Cracking noises were now audible somewhere behind me, but I couldn’t feel any heat yet apart from the strong heat of the day. With my hand as a visor I took a look all around, from this view I had never before enjoyed and never would again, at the grounds, at the tiny featureless figures of the people with whom I had worked and of the people who would save me, at the lawns and orchards and hedges, at the shadows of the clouds pouring over the scorched contours of the Blue Ridge Mountains. When the firefighters finally signaled that they were ready I put one leg, then the other, over the iron railing of the balcony. It’s no easy thing to make a drop like that, even when you have no choice, even if you’ve seen it done before. My fingers were tight around the balustrade. But I wasn’t ready to die yet, that’s all it really comes down to if you wait long enough, and so I closed my eyes, opened them again, and with one last loud exhalation to calm myself, I jumped.