Canning accompanied John and Roman to Omaha, the most featureless, depressing city John had ever spent a night in. Nothing in it looked like it could have been more than fifteen years old. Only the cowboyish attire of some of the men and women they saw in the lobby of their hotel made them feel the influence of a past, even an ersatz past. Roman — who was acting more and more unpredictably lately, on a kind of creative high which seemed ready to collapse at any moment — all but refused to leave his hotel room. He was in the alien Midwest of his imaginings, and he couldn’t imagine that they wouldn’t know him and hate him on sight.
Roman ran the pitch. The men from the Beef Council wore expensive suits with boots and enormous belt buckles. They were ludicrous; Roman spoke to them in a voice that was almost belligerent. He was not about to explain his work to them. John was worried that these industry giants weren’t used to being talked to that way; but Canning seemed calm, even pleased.
They gave the agency their business on the spot. The campaign was the best they’d ever seen; cutting-edge, they said, avant-garde, just what they were hoping for to change their image. Eighteen million dollars in billings a year.
Three weeks later John took Roman out to lunch and told him he was quitting Canning & Leigh to move to Virginia and join Osbourne’s new agency. When he had finished the whole story — the letter, the postcards, the trip to Charlottesville — Roman nodded thoughtfully; but he kept on nodding for too long. He tapped his fork on the tablecloth.
“It’ll fail,” he said finally. “It’ll go belly up, and everyone will have a good laugh. And you’ll deserve that. Fuck you. Fuck you for lying to me.”
And at that point John would have expected him to get up and storm out: but he didn’t, he went on sitting there, staring at John with a hostility that was really unexpected. John could think of nothing to say. He signaled for the check.
He was shaken enough by this that he put off giving Canning his notice until the next morning. Canning took it gratifyingly hard, though much less personally: he asked John to reconsider, told him how much his work there was valued, even offered him a raise of seven and then ten thousand dollars on the spot. John wouldn’t be moved. The boss was surprised but didn’t seem to take the position, as John had half expected, that he was insane. Canning said he had heard of one or two other defections from within agencies in the city.
Around the office, John was of course subjected to a few sarcastic remarks, but in the end there were no hard feelings, and no one — except for his partner, who wouldn’t stay for long in the same room with him — treated him any differently in his final weeks at work. After his last day they even threw a little bon voyage party for him at the Landmark Tavern. Only Roman didn’t attend. John got drunk enough to forget about that for the evening. In fact, by the time they had to relinquish the banquet room and move downstairs to the bar, they were all as drunk as John could ever remember seeing them.
Rebecca had moved out two days earlier. Her anger had mostly passed. They talked about staying in touch, but it was hard to see how their involvement could survive the discovery that there were attachments in their lives more important to them than their attachment to one another. As for John, the one thing he couldn’t admit to her was that he was glad, in the end, that they had never married. Because a divorced man would always have that failure on his record; whereas for them it would presumably be easier to move on, to forget the past, to start again as if starting at zero.
Dale came up with two double scotches, and handed one to John with an air of great ceremony.
“I propose,” he said, “that since this may be the last time we ever see each other, we get drunk enough to say what we really think.”
John clinked glasses. “Seconded,” he said.
“Here’s something I’ve always wanted to tell you,” Dale said. “That Rebecca. I’ve always had such a thing for her, I’ve always been so jealous of you for getting this amazingly beautiful, smart, hot woman to fall in love with you. So what do you do? You ask her to move down to Deliverance country, to piss her life away in the middle of nowhere. She says no. You dump her. So now my whole opinion of you has changed. You stand before me, revealed as a total fucking idiot.”
John put his hand gently on top of Dale’s head and smiled. “You’re not in her class,” he said. “Go on, ask her out after I’m gone. You’ll never get near her. Besides, there is a whole nation south of Battery Park, you snob. You stay here on your little island ironizing yourself into early heart trouble. I know where the future is.”
“Fuck you,” Dale said affectionately.
“Fuck you too,” John said.
Canning came up behind them, drunk as a lord, and put his arms around both their shoulders. “Isn’t this great?” he said. “All this candor!”
THEIR TIME TOGETHER, over the next month or so, passed predominantly in silence, in half-darkness, looking at slides in Modernism class. There was no real impetus to take things to another level; already Molly spent more time around John, two or three hours a week, than she did with anyone else in her life. It was a relief, actually, to have someone in on the secret of her presence there. Molly would arrive at about ten minutes to eleven and take a seat in the back row; John, whose ten-o’clock class was all the way across campus, would show up a little red-faced, trying not to breathe hard, and sit beside her. This arrangement was never discussed. They had four or five minutes to talk before the lights went down and Professor Leonhard came around to sit on the front of his desk, holding the clicker. Molly watched the screen, watched Leonhard, watched John taking notes as he listened; she felt slightly jilted when he would shut her out in this way, but then the midterm was coming up, which he had to worry about and she didn’t.
Four or five minutes a day, three days a week, for a month, was time enough to learn a good deal about each other. Molly answered his questions partially. She told him, for instance, that she was not on good terms with her parents, and had come to live with her brother for a while. John never pushed her for more; he politely accepted every answer as complete, even when she was obviously holding something back. Nor was he the kind of boy — the only kind she knew, when she thought about it — who listened to your speech hoping to hear something in it which would remind him of a tangentially related experience of his own, which he would then explain in full, as if this were evidence of empathy of some sort. Maybe it was only because his experience was so very different from hers.
John just looked at her when she talked. It was a look whose intensity she knew he was not aware of showing. She knew what was going on. Still, he never asked her out.
Leonhard turned the lights off, and directed two TAs to pull the enormous shades down. In the sudden darkness and slightly laggard silence, the first slide, already on the screen, brightened into view.
“Kandinsky?” Molly whispered to John. She could feel him nod. He took out his pen and his notebook; she folded her arms, put her feet on the back of the empty chair in front of her, and stared.
The best way to deflect his interest in her background was to ask questions of her own. Thus she learned that John was from Asheville, North Carolina; that he was the only child of his father’s second marriage; his father, a lawyer, was forty-eight when John was born, dead now for eight years, and John’s two half sisters were both more than ten years his senior. His mother was very Old South, old money, a great thrower of parties and arbiter of other people’s reputations. As he grew older he had an inkling of how small his parents’ world really was. It was a desire to shock them out of being who they were that led him to enroll at Berkeley, which they and all their friends had considered — even in 1985 — to be a virtual outpost of Comintern. John had never seen the school, had never seen the state of California, before he arrived for his freshman orientation, three and a half years ago.