“So we don’t relate the campaign to the bank at all. We don’t associate our work with the bank; we do our best work, and then we allow the bank to be associated with it.”
He looked around the table. “That’s all,” he said brightly. “I’ll be around. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.”
Osbourne walked by the table, stopped to drain his cup of coffee, and disappeared into the hallway. The others, smiling and perplexed, stood slowly. They didn’t speak to one another. What was in their minds was doubt, and no one was willing to express it — not out of fear of being reprimanded or informed upon, but because everyone had a significant stake in the success of this enterprise, and right now that success seemed to be largely, if not entirely, a matter of personal faith.
The installers came back in, one holding a carpenter’s level and drill and the other reading a pamphlet of some sort; they resumed preparations for the enormous Stella. John, grateful though he was for Osbourne’s generosity regarding starting salaries, had all along been expecting a much more shoestring-type operation than the one that was so far in evidence — the china cups, the full-time domestic staff, the sleeping quarters. Where was the money going to come from to pay for all this? With local banks as clients, how could Osbourne run the place at this level for more than a few weeks?
But these reflections were swallowed up in the instinctive fear that had been reinstilled in all eight of them by the familiar vague directive to get to work, to come up with something. John went into the south parlor and sat on one of the couches, trying to think about advertising without the impurities of an actual product to advertise. He sat and thought in earnest, but with nothing to build on his mind began to wander, toward what he might be able to order from the kitchen in the way of lunch, toward the amenities he still needed for his new apartment, toward Rebecca and what she might be doing now; and when Daniel, the novelist, noticing the blank look on his face, asked him if he wanted to go down to the basement and play some pool, John said okay.
IN THE MIDDLE of June came graduation day; but John, whose thesis on Goya was incomplete — abandoned, actually, at least for the time being — wasn’t ready for it. He called his parents and told them not to come. They did not react calmly. At the end of the month, John’s roommate, diploma in hand, said goodbye and moved south to Los Angeles. John renewed the lease in his own name, this despite the fact that his parents had told him to expect no more money from them. He took a word-processing job in San Francisco at a law firm, to cover the extra rent; and he and Molly had a home together, a home they couldn’t really afford, a home with one empty room in it.
Sometimes in the mornings, after John had left for the BART station, Molly would sit in the kitchen and cry for a while, without really knowing why. It wasn’t because she missed him. It just seemed like a good idea, at that point, to set aside part of the day for crying, and that was the part of the day she chose. She asked John once what his post-graduation plans had been, before meeting her that is, and he said he hadn’t had any; she knew this was a lie. The exodus of students for summer vacation made a certain type of job much easier to come by: Molly now worked as a waitress at Fondue Fred’s, a forlorn little restaurant in a mini-mall on Telegraph, four dinners and two lunches a week. Between them they made enough to pay the bills. Neither of them had much of an inclination to learn to cook, but they ate as cheaply as they knew how, frozen dinners, rice and beans from the taqueria. Weekends, unless Molly talked him out of it, John still went to the library to do some research for his thesis, which he now hoped to complete in time to graduate in December. All his friends were gone from Berkeley, either for the summer or for good, so the two of them spent every evening together. In February he would turn twenty-three years old.
Molly felt scared most of the time, particularly when she woke up. Her fear was exacerbated by a sense that she wasn’t entitled to it, that by all rights she should have felt safer now, in the embrace of someone completely devoted to her, than she had ever felt in her life. If she awoke before he did she would try to forget things by seeing how aroused she could get him without waking him up. But the early mornings were usually passed in that way in any event; it was a way of blocking out everything. They could hold each other’s eyes for a long time while making love. She’d never really thought of it before, but now, when it came easily, she realized what an unusual thing that was to do.
They never answered the phone anymore because chances were the call was from his parents, unless it was from a bill collector. They had no TV; it had belonged to John’s roommate, who had taken it with him, and their financial margin was too narrow at the end of each month to afford one. Neither of them could call on family, at this point, for any help with money, or with anything. Molly wondered to what extent true love was properly bound up with one’s feeling of having nowhere else to go.
She bought a cookbook from a Krishna selling odds and ends off a blanket beside Euclid Avenue. Since their incompetence in the kitchen was so general, they tried fancy things as readily as the most basic: vichyssoise, steak au poivre, crème caramel. The latter was doomed from the start, since Molly thought “egg white” meant the white part of the egg, i.e., the shell. John made fun of her; she picked up the phone, ordered a pizza from Domino’s, and bet him that she could make him come twice before the pizza arrived. Hours later they were still laughing at the way they had had to pass the money around the corner of the door to the delivery boy; later still, though, as Molly lay awake thinking about the ways in which these evenings were binding them together, there was less and less funny about it.
She was the one taking him through everything, trying everything, acting experienced even when it came to things she had never done before. Trying, she supposed without really acknowledging it, to lose him, to leave him behind, to shock him or to test the reality of what he seemed to feel for her, which was total loyalty, an unwillingness to let her cast herself for him in any light other than the light of his love.
She all but goaded him, for instance, into anal sex, even though it was something she had never tried before. The thought that it might hurt her went against every instinct he had. Ultimately, the pain of it, while not as severe as she might have thought, wasn’t balanced out by any great corresponding pleasure, other than maybe an abstract, intimate sort of pleasure born of mutual transgression. But the whole thing, though they never repeated it, was worth it for the look on his face, tenderness bordering on alarm, as he held himself frozen uncomfortably in one position, balanced on one elbow, waiting for her muscles to relax, the other hand stroking her hair.
They did go out, of course. The city was hushed, depopulated, yet strengthened in its character somehow, like something boiled down to its essence. When they could afford it they went out to a movie. On the occasional Thursday — half-price day — they took BART into San Francisco and went to the Museum of Modern Art. John talked her through the dim rooms, modestly, reluctant to offer any evidence of his expertise unless he was asked. Molly was warmed by the pleasure he took not just in knowing a lot about the paintings but in the paintings themselves; and she was even a little jealous of the years he had spent in classrooms, lecture halls, auditoriums, developing this interest. Jealous because it all seemed to have passed her by, impossible now, like a trip back in time, even though she was just twenty years old.