Initially Osbourne had loved them. The site-specific idea appealed to him right away; the fact that the ads were integral to the city’s very landscape — not something bought on local airtime during Friends or falling out of the Sunday paper with the Arby’s coupons — made them more exciting as ads and also reinforced the idea that the client was a hometown product, not some national chain whose monthly statements showed up from a PO box somewhere in North Dakota. And the clients, skeptical at first, had been won over as well. Their business had seen a slight upturn; more significantly than that, though, they kept reporting to Osbourne that everyone, everywhere they went, was talking about those First National ads. They’d never had such a buzz.
But within a few weeks, Osbourne had soured on the whole campaign. Though he kept stressing that he blamed himself, it was hard not to feel for those whose work was now the object of his undisguised contempt. “Billboards,” he’d say, shaking his head. “What the hell was I thinking? You can call it site-specific or whatever you want, but the fact is a billboard is a billboard is a billboard, people only expect to see one thing on it and that’s advertising. Their relationship to the work is poisoned from the start.” Nor did he care for the ads’ content; the approach was fresh, he said, but the message was still the same old message, your friendly neighborhood bank, look at this beautiful home we’ll help you build — the same old shit, everyone genially accepted it as a lie whether it was a lie or not. He seemed deeply troubled, and they saw him in the working part of the mansion less and less often; it was assumed that he was secluding himself somewhere in the east wing.
In retrospect John was glad he’d had nothing to do with the First National campaign; at the time, though, he had been frustrated, even a little panicked by his inability to come up with any decent idea at all. Osbourne had resolutely refused to do any partnering among the staff; nevertheless, John found that when he had an idea or a question or else just needed some company he was spending more and more time in the third-floor maid’s room where Elaine Sizemore had her desk. Elaine always wore her little round wire-rim glasses, and she didn’t seem to have brought with her from New York any sort of casual clothing: she wore skirts, loose dressy pants, blouses with fancy collars, while others walked around like skateboarders in baggy calf-length shorts and Limp Bizkit T-shirts. She wanted that maid’s room precisely because it was the smallest room in the main part of the house; the enormous cherrywood secretary she had found at a local antique store (in the end they had needed professional movers just to get it up the stairs and through the maid’s-room door) made the room even more formidably her own. John respected this bold maneuvering for solitude, even as he violated it by lingering in her doorway, blowing on a latte from the first-floor kitchen, asking her what was new.
Both of them were spending more and more time at the office. They didn’t have a great deal of work to do; but with the presence of a full-time kitchen staff, and TVs, and a pool table, and Internet access, it was easy to begin to feel estranged from their own small, still-unfamiliar homes. And home, no matter how John might wish it otherwise, was not terribly appealing right now. Eager to avoid the student-dominated apartment houses near campus — where the hours were crazy, the noise was tremendous, and where he would have been the oldest tenant by nearly ten years — he had taken a place out by the 250 Bypass. His two rooms were cramped, half-furnished, with no view; but the primary source of his depression on evenings and weekends there was his fellow tenants. Who, after all, in a small city like Charlottesville, would be living in a furnished one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette? Drunks; men who had been kicked out by their wives; men who were keeping mistresses and could afford a cheap place set aside for that purpose.
And the walls were not thick. The noises of sex were common; John felt that his inability to ignore them only reflected badly on himself. Much more upsetting were instances like the Friday evening he overheard his next-door neighbor on the phone; the words were muffled, but from the singsong voice the man was using John could tell he was talking to his children. He heard clearly the sound of the hang-up, followed a few seconds later by a wave of uncontrolled sobbing. The next morning John passed this man — maybe in his forties, with a puffy face under a blond beard — on the back stairs leading to the parking area; the man smiled and asked John if it wasn’t a lovely day. Six weeks of this sort of depthless interaction was about all John could take before he began spending some of his nights in the west-wing bedrooms at the office.
He wasn’t the only one. A custom developed whereby one would hang some personal item — a shoe, a bag, a sweatshirt — from the doorknob of a given bedroom to signal that it was occupied. One or two rooms were usually so reserved at any hour. In some cases, most verifiably Milo’s, this was because he worked best in the middle of the night; when he heard the kitchen staff banging around shortly after dawn, he would put down his brushes and go upstairs to sleep until lunchtime or so. But there were rumors that the bedrooms were being used for other purposes, at night and during the day as well. Olivia, the former gallery assistant from San Francisco, and Daniel, John was urged to observe, were often out of sight at the same time, usually just before lunch.
There wasn’t a great deal of work to do just then. One Friday, with Osbourne’s permission, John left early and drove down to Hilton Head to spend a weekend with his parents. It was September, and the air smelled like cherries as he drove with the top down in the darkness toward his mother and stepfather’s development. He got lost, briefly, inside the main gates, before finding the right condo; he had been there only two or three times before. The last time had been with Rebecca. When he walked in the unlocked door he saw his stepfather, Buzz, in pajamas and bathrobe, reading in a chair inside a circle of lamplight. Buzz smiled and closed his book. “Your mother couldn’t wait up,” he said. He hovered, beneficently, until John had his bag moved into the guest bedroom; then he announced he was going up to bed himself.
After Buzz was gone and his door closed, John reemerged from the guest bedroom and paced through the house in the darkness. The place had been redecorated again; there was nothing in view now that he recognized from his childhood home. Nothing, even, from the post-Buzz years; so it didn’t have to do with considerations of that sort, an effort not to haunt her new husband with relics from the life of the first one. Perhaps even in their seventies they wanted to feel that everything was before them — they didn’t feel comforted, but rather threatened, by objects which reminded them of all the years that now loomed behind them. It all seemed worth sorting out to John only because of the nagging sense of failure he had begun to feel every time he entered his own apartment back in Charlottesville. The rented room, the haphazard furniture, the books still in boxes, the neighbors who weren’t really neighbors. It didn’t seem to him the way a man now in his thirties ought to be living — no connection to anybody, no sense of personal history.
Not much else happened of note on his weekend visit. In the morning his mother made biscuits with sausage gravy, just as she used to do on weekends when he was a teenager, and then while he ate she talked to Buzz across the table about how much she missed Rebecca, what a wonderful girl she was, would it be too awkward now if she tried to stay in touch. John played a ritual round of golf with Buzz and two of his friends — he never touched a golf club except on these visits home, a fact which never seemed to register with Buzz — and John did not begrudge the three old men their undisguised pleasure as a boy their sons’ age struggled to keep up with them in this pseudo-physical contest.