They walked to his car, a boxy black American midsize, no siren or police radio visible. In the dust on the trunk someone had written with a forefinger the word PIG. He ignored it.
He drove slowly across Telegraph, pedestrians striding past the car at all points, not waiting for the lights. Molly was looking out her window at the Bubble Man when she felt the policeman’s hand at the top of her thigh.
“Not in the car,” she said.
Of course he knew a place. It was down by the Marina, near the old Fantasy Records plant. The scarier things got the more satisfied Molly felt. He walked ahead of her up three flights of stairs; he knocked, then pushed open a door to a room with nothing but a fold-out sofa in it. He started kissing her, to get that over with, and when she put her arms around him she felt something in the small of his back, underneath the big ugly windbreaker. It was his gun.
He flinched a little, but he let her keep her hand on it, through the fabric. Maybe he’ll shoot me, Molly thought. Maybe after we’re done he’ll shoot me and leave me here. She tried to think of what would stop him from doing that. They could trace the bullet to him, she decided.
He didn’t want to see her body, didn’t want her to take her clothes off, except for what was absolutely necessary, which in this case meant pulling her jeans and her underwear down to mid-thigh. She guessed it was some kind of rape fantasy for him. He bent her over the arm of the sofa without folding it out. It did hurt her a little bit — though probably not as much as he hoped — partly because he was a little larger than she had encountered before.
He mumbled something.
She turned her head and said softly, “What?”
“Say something.”
“What do you—”
“Just say something,” he mumbled, a kind of stage whisper, his thighs banging into hers.
“Do it to me,” she said flatly.
“Shut up! Shut up, bitch!” he screamed. “Fucking cunt! Shut up!” And he shouted wordlessly as he came inside her; if he hadn’t had his fingers dug so tightly into her legs, she would have lost her balance.
Afterwards, he wouldn’t look at her, though now it seemed more a matter of embarrassment than contempt. When he dropped her off on Telegraph, he didn’t even put the car in park. But she wouldn’t let him off that easily; she stared at him as she backed slowly out of the car, smiling coldly, and as he drove away she continued to stare at his rearview mirror to let him know that she could not be intimidated out of her understanding of him.
Molly had the next few weeks to worry that she was pregnant (she wasn’t) and to revisit what she’d done. Sex was what it was to her, an act unconnected to any other and a way of forcing men to reveal their secrets, but she knew too that it was not these things to most other people. To them, sex was intimate; to Molly it was extremely intimate as well, but never mutually so. She could imagine meeting a man (though she never had) who would hold this same kind of power over her, who would leave her crying and exposed and feeling fraudulent afterwards; what she couldn’t imagine was a balance of power. That wasn’t what sex was about. She wondered if she should be worried, though, about the increasing kick she felt from being objectified.
For Christmas her brother gave her a Bible.
On a gray morning, in a steep lecture hall, Molly slipped through the door after the lights were turned out for slides. The class, which she had been to once or twice before, was called Modernism and its Discontents. The chairs in back were filled; even in a class with a hundred students, their instinct was to put as much distance between themselves and the seat of authority as possible. So she walked halfway down the steps and took the first empty spot she could see once her eyes adjusted to the dark, three seats in from the aisle, between a girl wearing a Madonna-like T-shirt ripped to fall off one shoulder and a boy wearing jeans and a white Oxford shirt, his long hair pushed behind his ears, who watched the screen with his hands in front of his mouth, fingertips pressed together.
The hall flashed into darkness for a second, then back to the dim magnesium glare from the giant screen as a new slide appeared.
“The Disturbing Muses,” the professor said. He was fat and wore a multicolored sweater. He sat on the front of the broad desk, looking up at the screen, his back half turned to the class. He held the control for the projector in his left hand. “1917. Remember for a moment Malevich from last week, the concern with movement, dynamism, the restlessness of the industrial age. Here, at virtually the same moment of history, Chirico counterposes an art of almost deathly stillness, not motion but contemplation, reverie, quiet.”
Another flash.
“The Song of Love. 1914. Incidentally, Magritte called this painting, which he saw as a young man on a museum visit in 1922, one of the most important events in his life. Because, he said, in a world of Cubists and other self-conscious manipulators of the flat plane of the picture, here at last was someone who dreamed not of how to paint, but of what must be painted.”
Molly heard the scratching of pens, and indeed it was the kind of resonant remark she liked to write down herself, not for any purpose other than as a way of making the remark pass through her. She patted softly at her pants pockets, then at the pocket of her shirt.
“Need a pen?” the boy next to her whispered. She started. His voice was soft, and had, of all things, a Southern accent; he looked at her simply and with his index finger pushed the hair back behind his ear.
“No thanks,” said Molly. The moment of admiration had passed, and the slide was gone. “I don’t have any paper anyway.”
He smiled. After a minute, not looking at her, he leaned on the armrest between them so his head was closer to hers. “Can I ask you something?” he whispered. “Are you even a student here?”
Molly’s heart raced a little in the near-darkness; she said nothing.
“Because,” he said, whispering now, still not looking at her, “it’s almost midterms, and this is only the third time you’ve been in here.”
She considered getting up to leave, but there was nothing threatening in his manner — just curious. The professor went on talking.
“No,” she said finally, in a whisper. Their heads were almost touching in the darkness, though they didn’t look at each other. “My brother goes here. I live with him, and I read through his course catalogue, and sometimes I go to classes if they look interesting.”
“Well, I admire that,” he said, and sat back.
A half hour later the lights went up, and Molly tried not to look at the boy to see what he would do, with this new advantage he held over her.
He stacked up his books, exhaled as if satisfied, and smiled at her.
“May I ask your name?” he said.
His manner was almost courtly. But there was no exaggeration in it; she could tell that he wasn’t about to ask her out.
“Molly,” she said.
He put out his hand. “John Wheelwright,” he said. They shook hands, which made her laugh a little. He blushed, and stood up to go.
“Molly, will I see you again?” he asked.
OSBOURNE OFFERED TO send a car to the Washington airport, but seemed delighted with John’s offer to rent a car and drive the two and a half hours to Charlottesville himself. At the last minute he upgraded to a convertible and paid the difference in cash. He didn’t know what he was expecting to feeclass="underline" the airport was like an airport anywhere, Highway 29 like all highways; the damp heat was the only thing that gave him any sense of geography at all. In a town called Culpeper he turned off the highway for lunch, and there in the dining room of some forgotten country inn he felt a little touch of the South again, the voices like his inner voice, the dark interiors and ceiling fans, the old locals who regarded his long hair and fancy car with a hostile opacity no one from Manhattan could ever have understood. He would have driven the back roads the whole rest of the way, but he had told Osbourne that he would be there in plenty of time for dinner, and he didn’t want anyone to worry.