Charlottesville itself, from the car at least, was a disappointment. Every midsized city he went to nowadays — Columbus, Lexington, Eugene, no doubt Omaha just a week from now — looked the same, the chain hotels and chain stores, the strip malls and overused local roads, the grotesque boosterism that led to the too-expensive Center for the Performing Arts. Only the sight of the Rotunda, as he inched along Ivy Road on the way to the Courtyard Marriott where he would be staying, fulfilled any longing for a sense of the verticality of time. He had visited his cousin at UVA two or three times as a teenager, and the way the empty lawn stretched out before that imposing dome was all he remembered of the whole city.
The jammed roads, the strip bars, the prefab apartments: John kept thinking, almost in spite of himself, how Rebecca would hate it all. He acted with faith in the best possible outcome, which was that the trip would go well, and Rebecca would be surprised and converted by John’s own enthusiasm, and they would move down South to restart their careers together without any sense of pessimism or martyrdom. This vague, sentimental refrain was really a way of keeping at bay a more surprising and threatening feeling: which was not simply that it would be possible for John to start over by breaking it off with her, but that there was a dangerous appeal — an element of subversion, of role reversal — in being the one who leaves.
The Courtyard Marriott was a long two-story corridor by the highway; beyond the windows, a neatly kept grass embankment and then nothing. John dropped his bag in his room, locked the door again, and headed down the hall to Osbourne’s suite. Candy machines, ice machines, the Rube Goldberg-esque maid’s cart, the antiseptic, shadowless light. Osbourne had been living and working in these rooms for months, not to save money but because he didn’t care where he lived, beyond the idea that he didn’t have to waste minutes thinking about emptying his own trash or changing his sheets. When the door opened it was clear from the mess that he was indeed in Osbourne’s bedroom, this despite the fact that the table, dresser, and even the walls had huge sheets of drawing paper taped to them. A laptop sat in the middle of the unmade bed.
He acted as if John had just come from the other wing of the Marriott rather than across the Mason-Dixon Line. “You’re here,” he said, and turned to walk back into the room. “Good. Let me just find some shoes. We’ll go take a quick tour of the house and we’ll head over to join the others.”
“Others?” John said. Osbourne didn’t answer. He kicked gently with his stockinged feet through the piles of carefully executed architectural drawings on the floor until he uncovered a pair of black suede shoes.
Osbourne owned a loud little Triumph; John followed in his own car as they drove well out of the city center, into the older districts far from the highway. John couldn’t help smiling with pleasure just at the sight of the sprawling, colonnaded antebellum houses, with the great chandeliers hanging above the portico. Some had small historical markers, too small to read from the road, mounted on the wall beside their oversize front doors. John was lost in admiring the sheer arrogant beauty of them, barely paying attention to where he was going, when he noticed Osbourne’s turn signal was on. He followed, amazed, as the Triumph turned left on to a long driveway which led to one of the mansions.
They passed beneath a porte-cochere to a parking area in the back. Tarpaulins covered some construction debris, and a stack of windows leaned against the steps to the kitchen door.
“This is it?” John said, in a higher voice than he would have liked.
Osbourne was already out of the car, his eye roving critically, but smiling all the same.
“Built before the war,” he said. “But the previous owner messed with some of the original interior about sixty years ago, which is a break for us actually, because it’s usually impossible now to get permission to touch anything in the really genuine antebellum homes.” He opened the back door with a key, and they walked into the empty kitchen. Osbourne must have noticed the look on John’s face. “You know the story of Motown Records?” Osbourne said. “They operated out of a row house in a residential neighborhood in Detroit. On a typical day you had people recording backing vocals in the bathroom, people in the living room typing press releases, people working out bridges on the porch. That’s the feel that I want here. Not to make us all feel like we’re a family or any corporate bullshit like that. But work that you do in a place that doesn’t really look like a workplace always has that improvisatory feeling. You know?”
They went through all four stories, room by room; John stopped counting after twenty. Most of the rooms were still empty except for paint cans or stacks of wallboard. A few drafting tables were already set up, and a walk-in closet whose door had been removed was packed with unopened boxes of video equipment. But despite what Mal had said, it seemed that little of the house’s interior structure had been touched, and even unfurnished it was easy to recognize in each room what must have been its old incarnation: a child’s bedroom, a den or study, a servant’s quarters, a pantry. Apart from the profligate size of it, it looked, in a ghostly way, as if it were the result of a careful excavation, like any number of rich people’s homes John had been in as a child; and he briefly entertained the feeling — absurdly paranoid, yet at the same time not altogether unwelcome — that Osbourne had known all this somehow, that he had had John researched in some way. No one else was in the mansion. The sun poured through the uncurtained windows.
John felt simultaneously excited and jilted by the news that there would be others at dinner; the likelihood of this had never occurred to him, just as he hadn’t imagined, though of course it made perfect sense, that Osbourne would be lunching other prospective employees on that brief trip to Manhattan last week. But in order to think about any of it — or about the five strangers and potential colleagues who met them at the restaurant, on the pedestrian mall downtown — he had to fight his way through a haze of much more elemental and blissful associations. Ham with gravy, sweet tea, cheese grits, fried chicken served as a side dish: it was exotic to everyone there but him, and while they all made jokes about diminishing their life expectancy if they moved down here, John tried to be discreet about lowering his head nearer to the table and just smelling it all.
Around the small table it was easy for Osbourne to rule the conversation. No one was inclined to interrupt him in any case. They had all come down here to consider their futures, but for now Osbourne seemed much more at home talking about the past. He told them the story of the creation of Apple’s “1984,” the spot that revolutionized their form. He talked about a weekend spent in Woody Creek with Hunter Thompson, trying unsuccessfully to get him to write some copy for them; in the end they all got high instead and test-fired automatic weapons in the meadow behind the ranch. And of course he had a great many stories about the artists of the 80s boom, Schnabel and Fischl and Borofsky and Jim Dine, whose reputations, he implied in a modest way, he had done much to create. Only through these art-world anecdotes did John learn, to his amusement, that the moody young man on Osbourne’s immediate left, wearing black denim in the ninety-degree heat, was Jean-Claude Milo, the artist who had stood them up at his Manhattan loft on that first Saturday morning, almost a year ago now.
Osbourne wasn’t drinking, and so no one else dared have more than one; still, it was late — past ten o’clock — and their spirits high when the hostess appeared and told Osbourne he had a phone call. Acting as if nothing were amiss about this, he excused himself; and the six of them whom he was courting began to ask shyly about one another.