Collect myself? Molly looked around the tiny room for a minute, having numbed herself to such a degree that it was difficult to think at all. She dressed quickly and left. The exit did not take her back through the waiting room; she pulled open a fire door and was back in the bright sunshine of the parking lot.
On the long drive back to Ulster the pain commenced. Soon Molly’s fingers were white around the steering wheel. No bleeding, though, which was important, since this was her mother’s car. She fished the prescription out of her pocket. Without slowing down, she crumpled it up, rolled down the window, and threw it into the weeds along the highway.
“There you are,” Kay said absently when she heard the door open. “I didn’t know where you’d gone.”
“Visiting friends.”
“Oh, lovely. I saved you some lunch.”
“No thank you,” Molly said, not breaking stride. “I’m not feeling that well.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Cramps,” Molly called from the stairs.
“Poor thing,” Kay murmured. Molly went into her room and shut the door.
She lay on her side, facing the wall. Each wave of pain squeezed the tears from her eyes; they rolled sideways across the bridge of her nose and on to the pillowcase. Good, she said to herself. Good. It should hurt. She did not have to think of John, or of their aborted child, in order to feel that where she was right now was where she deserved to be. She wanted, but couldn’t quite bring herself, to wish it would last longer than just one day.
IF JOHN WAS unsure at first what his duties might be as Osbourne’s adjutant he didn’t have the luxury of wondering for long. The new business that poured their way after the mirror ad necessitated expanding the staff; Osbourne insisted on no more than three new employees (though they could have used and afforded twice that number), and he left John in charge of the hiring. They didn’t have to recruit — the office was besieged by job applications, by phone, by mail, by Internet, at the very door of the mansion — but John, eager to impress, recruited anyway. In the end he hired a graphic novelist from Cleveland, a faculty member from the American studies department at Yale, and a video-installation artist whose work he read about and subsequently traveled to see — with Osbourne’s blessing — at the Biennale in Venice. He kept raising the stakes for himself, wondering when he would contact someone who would refuse to consider his offer. But no one ever did.
John also ran all the client meetings now, which was sometimes a touchy business — in spite of the agency’s escalating fame — only because Osbourne had decreed that they were not to take part in any pitches. If a client wanted them, then the client could hire them, but Palladio would not expend its creative energies in these demeaning closed-door competitions. This rubbed a great many executives the wrong way, and John — flying around the country, usually working alone — needed all of his unthreatening charisma to convince these executives that, considering the agency’s brief but unblemished record, they really weren’t taking any undue risks; and that Osbourne’s refusal to pitch their account was not a slap directed against them, but a measure of the lengths he would go to in order to insulate the best creative staff in the world.
That staff was indeed working at peak inspiration. They had internalized Osbourne’s message, which was that only the art mattered, that clients and their interests were an aesthetic crutch which was hereafter kicked out from under them, that the world of commerce would subsidize them endlessly in return for a portion of the reflected glory of the work they happened to do within the walls of the mansion. The more personal, the better. They were dependent on no one; and John, free of the stress now of competing with them, was able to take pride in the greatness of the work they were producing.
Inevitably, as Osbourne’s name — despite his efforts to stay out of the spotlight, to credit only his employees — grew more and more revered, offers began to materialize for him to write a book. John flew to New York to negotiate on his boss’s behalf. Private cars took him everywhere, from the hotel to the publishers’ offices, from the offices to the restaurants, yet he was still surprised to find himself a little keyed up at the prospect of running into someone he knew in the city — from his days at Canning & Leigh, or possibly even Rebecca herself, who still worked in midtown, as far as he knew. In his daydreams about it he concentrated mostly on how not to appear condescending, in light of the success none of them had predicted. But in the end, he saw no one but strangers and new acquaintances, and he flew home to Virginia with no such experience useful for measuring his old life against his new one, only a contract for his boss to sign, for 1.1 million dollars.
Though it was late when he got back to Charlottesville, he drove straight to the office. Osbourne would certainly be there, and might even be awake, since he kept strange hours; but John would wait to see him first thing in the morning. He went to his own bedroom — the one now generally recognized as his — in the west wing, and he opened the door. The bedside light was on; but Elaine, though she had tried to stay awake, was sleeping on her side, one knee drawn up, under the sheet. John smiled; he undressed, turned off the light, and, sliding in as noiselessly as he could, moved his fingers lightly across the solid curve of her hip, to see how far he could get without waking her. It was a game they had.
The next morning, when John handed Osbourne the book contract for his signature, his boss looked it over and shook his head appreciatively, then offered it back to John and said that, after thinking it over last night, he had changed his mind and decided not to do it. John, though somewhat put out by this, had to admit he was also not terribly surprised. For months now Osbourne, via his instructions to John, had turned down one by one every request to be interviewed, or photographed, for print or TV. He turned down public appearances of all kinds, in all countries. Even inside the office, in fact, he was less and less visible, though he was usually, as they were all aware, in the mansion somewhere. No one knew if this reclusiveness was calculated or not, but if it was calculated, it couldn’t have been working out any better for them.
WITH EIGHTEEN HUNDRED dollars held in a tight roll by a hairband in her front pocket, and a heavy bag with a shoulder strap on the seat beside her, Molly drove Kay’s Honda to the Albany airport and left it in long-term parking. Inside the terminal she bought a postcard with a picture of the airport on it, wrote a note to her parents which said only that the Honda could be found in long-term parking (Lot G-2) at the Albany airport, bought a stamp at a newsstand, and dropped the card in the mailbox near the terminal’s police station. Back outside the doors to baggage claim, Molly hailed a cab to the Trailways bus depot on Foundry Avenue. She staggered down the narrow darkened aisle of a half-empty bus, slouched in a seat by the tinted window with her knees pressed high up on the metal seatback in front of her, and with the cold, antiseptic-smelling air conditioner blowing on her forearm, her other arm resting on top of the bag stuffed shapeless with her clothes, she began to disappear from the lives of the few people who knew her.
Like the bus ride itself — torturously boring, until the moment she emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel and understood how completely her life had just changed — the years of Molly’s life that followed seemed to pass at two speeds simultaneously: interminable and abrupt. Inside Port Authority she called information for the address of the youth hostel, which turned out to be all the way up on Amsterdam and 105th Street. A few nights there, sleeping on a woven mat, in with the backpackers and the foreign boys who kept encouraging her, as baldly as if she were an idiot, to go out and get drunk with them; then she answered an ad in the Voice and took her place as one of six roommates in a three-bedroom apartment on Gansevoort Street. The third bedroom, which Molly now shared with a tall, sallow aspiring actress named Iggy, was actually a dining room with a Japanese screen placed in the entrance. Molly could look out the window nearest her futon and see, on one corner, the unmarked entrance to an S/M club, and on the other the trucks backing in and out of the meat wholesalers, the thick men, none of whom seemed any younger than middle-aged, in their absurd white coats like surgeons, covered with sawdust and blood. Molly came with enough money to cover two months’ rent and a lie she had prepared about a publishing job she was up for, but in the end the other tenants of the apartment never even asked her if she was employed. She had enough cash for a security deposit and that’s where their interest ended. They were used to people coming and going.