It hadn’t taken more than a week for Molly to figure out that everyone in the house was a Christian. She wasn’t sure if they could all be classified under the term “born again” (though certainly Richard would have to be); some of them might have lived this way their whole lives for all she knew. But they never talked about it, at least not in front of her. It didn’t exactly fit her stereotype of young college Christians; she would have expected them to be all over her. Whatever they did was done in secret, with the exception of Sunday dinner, when they put the leaf in the dining-room table and matter-of-factly held hands to say a long grace before eating. It was the one time during the week when they were all together. Otherwise, what with part-time jobs (they pooled their salaries, along with whatever money some of them still received from their parents), classes, volunteer work, they were all on different schedules; if Molly returned for a nap in the afternoon, when she knew Sally would be in the library — Molly slept a lot now, often for two or three hours in the middle of the day — she never knew who else would be at home. There were few visitors.
She sat in a European History lecture and learned about the assault on the Bastille. Afterwards she went to a coffee shop and sat at an outdoor table, without money to order anything, and watched the scenes of student life at the too-small tables, the uneven stacks of books, the couples stroking each other’s arms, the students with their heads in their hands stubbornly reading Lacan or Derrida, not imagining themselves a part of the general pageant of unburdened youth.
Sally came from Massachusetts. Her parents disapproved of Berkeley and wouldn’t pay any of her tuition or living expenses there; she had a TA job and some financial aid. She talked to Molly about all this when they were in their beds with the lights out, like twelve-year-olds at a sleepover.
The student film societies, screening old movies in lecture halls and auditoriums, were one of Molly’s few affordable pleasures. She spent two or three evenings a week there. Admission for students was a dollar, and of course no one there ever questioned Molly’s status as a student; still, mindful of her finances, she snuck in without paying when she was able. She saw The Sweet Smell of Success for the first time that way, and as the credits rolled she still felt so exhilarated by all that hyperverbal moral viciousness that she decided to stay in her seat for the second show. The guy at the door saw her trying to hide, but he smiled discreetly and didn’t make her pay a second time, or perhaps he knew she hadn’t paid the first time either. Watching a movie straight through just minutes after seeing it before, with everything so fresh in your mind it lost its capacity for surprise, produced, Molly discovered, a new sort of awareness of the people who made a movie: an awareness of the actors on screen as actors, of the technicians and assistants who must have been standing disinterestedly just outside the frame as the stars emoted, an awareness of everything they said as words on a page coming out of someone’s typewriter in a room somewhere. It only made the emotions themselves seem more remarkable to her. People right there at Berkeley, she considered, studied the art and the science of making movies. Of course those were small, intensive, hands-on classes, not the sort of classes you could sneak into undetected. Molly felt a little sorry for herself and her outsider status.
After the lights went up again, she saw someone moving against the tide of departing film buffs, deeper into the auditorium, toward her. It was the guy who took the tickets.
Panicked, her face became still. He sat down beside her and smiled. He wore black jeans and a bowling shirt with the name Dave stitched over the pocket.
“Great flick,” he said. “My name’s Eric. I’ve seen it like ten times. Have you seen that Barry Levinson movie, Diner? There’s a character in it who does nothing but quote lines from Sweet Smell. Plays a character who never breaks character.” Molly listened carefully through all this banter for any concealed irony which would end with his busting her for sneaking in without paying. But when he finally asked her if she wanted to go get a cup of coffee at Geppetto’s, she realized he was on the level; she let her guard down and said yes.
Eric talked a lot about himself, about movies she hadn’t seen and theoretical journals she’d never heard of, and even though this might reflect badly on him, Molly wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Any effort to draw her out, to get her to fill in her own history, would have spoiled the evening for her. He had long black hair but even though he was no older than twenty his hairline was receding. Molly found this satisfying; she liked to see as much as possible about a man when she looked at one, and in that respect at least you could see fifteen years into his future. His glasses were tinted yellow.
“So you’re not in the film-studies major,” Eric said. “I would have recognized you. Are you a freshman?”
Molly nodded — not because she had thought out this lie beforehand, but because it was the response which least obstructed the flow of his talk.
“Live in the dorms?”
“No,” she said, “in a house on the South Side. My older brother is there.”
Eric lived in the dorms, even though he was a junior. Couldn’t stand those roommate situations, he said — eight people, one refrigerator, no one ever cleaning the bathroom.
He started talking about his efforts to get the film society to arrange a guerrilla screening of Titicut Follies. Molly kept her eyes on him while listening discreetly to the conversations at the tables around them, intimate and vehement, couples and circles of friends. Eric’s presence was what made her a part of all that, for the moment. It didn’t feel so bad, though she was puzzled as always by the general practice of going out at midnight in order to have private conversations in public places. Maybe it was a California thing.
“So what I’d like to do now, Molly,” Eric said, “is take you back to my room and make love to you.”
Molly, her attention divided, smiled for a moment before she thought to be startled. Men. Usually you could learn everything there was to learn about them in around five minutes; she knew instantly, for example, that Eric had never used this particular line before, that he’d been waiting, his whole uneventful sexual career, to meet some stranger so he’d have a risk-free opportunity to try it. And whence the idea that this was what women wanted — a frank, take-charge, no-time-for-games man, a man too evolved for pretensions? Was it grounded in anything that had ever happened to him, or in too many evenings in his single dorm room reading Penthouse Forum? She wondered about all those things so sincerely that she very nearly said yes just to see if he would fall over dead with surprise; but she collected herself and said, demurely but unambiguously, no.
“That’s too bad,” Eric said without missing a beat, as if following a script. “Can I have your phone number, then?”
She gave him a false one. But it got her thinking. Not about Eric, but in a more general way about how her invisibility wasn’t as complete as she thought. You didn’t move through the world without being watched. She liked the idea that boys like Eric, boys who just happened to see her on the sidewalk or in a classroom or a store, wanted to take her home and fuck her, conceived fantasies, instant fantasies in which maybe she would melt at a line like “I’d really like to take you to my room and make love to you,” or fantasies involving bringing Molly home to meet their parents for all she knew. The randomness, the variety of these projections was what she liked. They thought they knew her, but they didn’t. She might surprise one of them one day.