He sighed. “So then you were seventeen,” he said, “and you made a mistake. I tell you, I hope you won’t hold it against me, speaking badly of your family. But I just can’t understand how your mother and father could turn their backs on you like that. I can’t understand how anyone could turn on their own child.”
Molly burst into tears. John took her hand and kissed it. “I’m guessing that you haven’t told too many people that story before,” he said. “I did nothing but think about you the whole time I was home. Don’t ever think that there’s something about you I wouldn’t want to know.”
They lapsed into a long silence on the downhill walk home. John, who still had no idea where Molly lived, stayed half a step behind her, guessing they were going back to his apartment but afraid that saying anything would break the spell. When they reached his door he took out his keys and they stepped inside without a word. His roommate could be heard in the shower; so they went straight to John’s bedroom and closed the door. The walls were covered with hundreds of postcards, all reproductions of great paintings, like a museum in miniature. There was nowhere to sit, apart from one desk chair, so they both sat on the bed.
When they kissed she felt a shudder go through him, an actual shudder, and after that there was nothing she didn’t want to give to him. They stood to undress each other; once her pants were off John remained on his knees for a few moments, his hands on her back, kissing her stomach, kissing the red impressions left by her jeans at the belt line. They sat cross-legged on the bed again, facing each other; Molly took John’s cock gently between her hands and looked as intently as she could into his eyes, doing nothing, feeling him grow hard in her palms.
He was so patient. She leaned forward, kissed him, and let her weight push him down on to his back. She straightened up, reached between her thighs, and guided him into her. She was trying to move as slowly as possible — not because that was more enjoyable for her, nor in response to any sign from him. She didn’t really know why she was doing it.
Still, it didn’t last very long. He closed his eyes and she felt him contracting inside her. She lay down on top of him; he laughed a little, then, still inside her, he began running his fingertips along her back, touching her as lightly as possible, from her neck down as far as he could reach, just below her hips. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, and it went right through her, painfully enough that she hoped he wouldn’t say anything more.
In the silence they heard the bathroom door open; John’s roommate walked past them on the other side of the wall and into his own room, where he shut the door and put on some music. Molly got up from the bed and carefully opened the door to the hallway.
“Everything all right?” John asked softly.
She nodded. The bathroom was shrouded in steam; she couldn’t see her own face in the mirror. She sat on the lid of the toilet, inhaling the heavy air, her palms up in front of her face, and watched her hands shaking.
By the time three weeks had gone by, Molly had pretty much moved in with him, though she now had so few belongings that she wasn’t altogether sure John even knew this was the case.
“HERE ARE SOME words that I never want to hear again,” Osbourne said. “Edgy. Postmodern. In your face.”
Nervous laughter around the table. They were gathered in the dining room — or what was formerly the dining room; no one ate there, and John kept waiting for it to be given some new name, but it remained “the dining room” — for their first staff meeting. The table around which they sat was a magnificent cherry-wood oval; at each place was a china cup and saucer. Apart from that, the sunlit white room was free of any decorative touch, for a few more hours at least. Some workmen had been in the first stages of the delicate, complex process of installing one of Osbourne’s own brushed-steel Frank Stellas on the long wall opposite the windows, when Osbourne had walked in, trailed by his new staff, and told the installers to take an early lunch.
“We are here to make art. We will make it in a communal setting. However, that doesn’t mean you’re going to hear a lot of that team-first bullshit that you might have been subjected to in some of your old places of employment. I believe in cooperating, but not at the expense of the emergence of individual genius. No great work of art has ever germinated from some committee decision. Greatness is a pure product of the individual consciousness.”
There were nine people, including Osbourne, around the table, six of them holding pens and notepads. No one had written anything down yet. The pads and pens were supplies they had brought from home. No one knew where to find them inside the mansion, because no one had been given an office yet. Osbourne’s hair was still wet from a shower; he wore a bright-green polo shirt with the collar turned up and chinos, and his feet were bare. He swiveled restlessly in his chair as he spoke, as if he could hardly wait for this meeting, which he had spontaneously convened, to be over.
“What else, what else. In the west wing there are several bedrooms, just about all of them furnished by now, I think — I’ll have to go take a look. Those are for you, as you want or need them. The kitchen can only stay open until eight p.m. Rose — that’s the housekeeper, for those of you who haven’t met her — is here twenty-four hours. As am I, by the way. For those of you who haven’t figured it out” — he held up one bare foot — “part of the east wing has been kept as a living quarters as well, and right now that’s where I live. Ah, Benjamin!”
Benjamin walked in from the kitchen entrance, a stout man somewhere in his sixties, John guessed; nodding at the mention of his name, he went around the table pouring coffee from a silver pitcher. A few of them held their hands over the small china cups and smiled apologetically.
“I hope you’ll all take the opportunity at some point today to introduce yourselves to Benjamin, who heads the kitchen staff, and to Rose as well. Now, a couple of you have asked me, in the last two days, when your various job descriptions will be spelled out. The answer is that there are no job descriptions. Titles, same answer — you have none. As for where your own individual office is located, you don’t have one.” He gaped, good-naturedly exaggerating their looks of surprise.
John had not yet met all seven of his colleagues. Interestingly, they all had the same expression, as far as he could see: gameness, he would have called it, a willed overcoming of the skepticism that every casually dropped bit of information about their new workplace instinctively produced.
“But the real reason I called you all here,” Osbourne said, “is to announce some happy news. Which is, we have our first client.”
A murmur of relief, and then some soft, somewhat sarcastic but good-natured applause spread around the table.
“Yes, it’s true. It’s a local client, a bank in fact. The First National Bank of Charlottesville. Now I’m going to try a little something here. Which is, I’m not going to tell you another thing about them.”
He stood up and went to the windows, which overlooked the dogwood trees behind the kitchen.
“No research, no market information, no looking at previous campaigns. No history. None of you are from here, and so I’m assuming you have no idea if this is the number one bank in the city or the number twenty-one. I want to keep it that way.”
Elaine Sizemore, who was sitting across the table from John, threw her little notepad on the table, where it made a louder noise than she had intended.
Osbourne didn’t turn around. “No idea what this client needs. No idea what their self-image is. Because they don’t know what they need. We’re the ones who know that. We know it already, and market research would just cloud our judgment about that. And if any of you have any experience doing campaigns for banks — well, I can’t do anything about that, I suppose, but really what I’d like is for you to forget all about it. Banks want to be humanized, and humanizing banks leads to lying, and lying leads to irony as a way of dissociating yourself, and your audience, from the lie. That’s no good. That’s the chain we’re trying to break.