Osbourne laid his head back against the leather seat. “Me too,” he said, just audibly.
They were turning on to John’s block in Cobble Hill, the sidewalks alive now with children and dogs and sunlight, when Osbourne said suddenly, terrifyingly, “So John: are you happy working at CLO?”
John silently cursed his own uncontrollable blush. “Yes,” he said, straining to sound sincere even though he was in fact telling the truth. “Yes, I like it very much.”
Osbourne nodded thoughtfully. He looked out his window again, and then rested his forehead against it.
“I hate it,” he said.
All the verbal pleasantries of goodbye were left to John; Osbourne remained in the back seat, listening with interest as John labored to thank him, but not saying a word. He took John’s hand when it was offered. The limo disappeared around the corner and John still stood there, listening to the traffic sounds and the screams from the playground over on Kane Street. He didn’t want to go inside yet. He hoped Rebecca wasn’t watching him from the window, insane with curiosity, wondering what was the matter with him. It was just that, once he went in, he was going to have to start talking about everything he had seen and heard that morning — the odd rift between the artists and their art — and about Osbourne himself, his appearance, his cryptic ignorance of John’s desire for any sort of explanatory remark, his strange and somehow charismatic uneasiness around those who only wanted to please him. And maybe it was just a matter of his own poverty of expression, but John found that anything truly interesting usually became less interesting, even to him, when he heard himself trying to explain it.
IN A LIFE such as Molly’s — in the life of a place such as Ulster, unwatched, forgetting itself, animated now mostly by the remote hand of late-century technology — the world outside the world you knew reached into your life now and then in a way that was not imaginary. These points of contact were a mixed blessing, for they served both to connect you to the larger vitality you dreamed of and to remind you at the same time how cut off from it you were. For Molly, the tool of this insinuation was music. Music was as private as it was international. It was everywhere you went but at some point around the age of twelve or thirteen it suddenly began speaking to you directly.
The Howes owned a fancy Bang & Olufsen stereo, seldom used except at parties, which was wired into a large cabinet beneath some built-in bookshelves in the living room. After dinner, when her father read the newspaper in front of the TV, her mother sat at the kitchen table with a cigarette and a stack of magazines, and her brother Richard had shut himself like a lodger in his room for the evening, Molly would drag a chair from the dinner table and listen to the radio for hours with the headphones on. The reception was sometimes poor because they lived in the valley, but she could pick up a college station from Albany if the night was clear. She sat with her back to the room, the cabinet door open and her feet propped on the shelf inside it, her head on her hand, her eyes closed. Gay boys in London, scarified New York City punks, patiently righteous black men in Jamaica: on the one hand she believed she understood their feelings, felt their feelings, with an unimprovable clarity; but then the lives they lived were so improbably romantic, so taken up with the painful drama of themselves, that when the song was over and she opened her eyes she couldn’t believe she lived where she was living. Every few weeks she would ask her father if she could just move the stereo into her room, since no one else ever used it, but he was helplessly mindful of the value of the thing and couldn’t stand the thought of damage to it. To salve his guilt over saying no to her he wired the radio to the rooftop antenna, so that her reception was no longer dependent on wind or the weather.
She came to know the DJs from that college station in Albany by name. They mumbled, they forgot when their microphones were off, they made private jokes to their friends, because they couldn’t imagine that anyone who wasn’t a friend of theirs would be listening. Their absence of a talent for what they were doing only impressed her further, because it seemed like the purity of the amateur. No news, no commercials, seldom even a mention of what time it was. They loved the music they played, and they hated the music they didn’t play. Molly too conceived a scorn for whatever too many others liked. She thought that this was what college would be like — a place of tacit understanding, a little republic of sensibility.
Though she herself was often silent, silence was less and less a part of her waking life; anytime she found herself alone was by definition an opportunity to hear music, loud, without others to spoil it by rousing her anesthetized self-consciousness. She never once had the ambition to learn to play an instrument or to form a band herself. Music was not something you made but something you listened to; listening well was the act. The nearest she came to this creative boundary was to copy especially pithy song lyrics into her school notebook, during biology class or in the minutes before tests were collected, so that they might seem to her more like original thoughts of her own.
Home is where the heart is
Home is so remote
Home is just emotion
Sticking in my throat
Let’s go to your place
Records weren’t the same. It was a moot issue because any record Molly might consider worth owning was not likely to be found at the Rexall in Ulster or anywhere near it; but even so, a record, which you could hear whenever you wanted, as many times as you wanted, skipping the bad songs and hearing your favorites as many times in a row as you liked, could never produce the same satisfaction because it lacked that element of providence. When a song you loved — a song you felt protective of, because you were hearing things in it that no one else seemed able to hear — came on the radio, it was an event, a small blessing conferred by randomness, a reason to believe in waiting at all, when the rest of your life brought you nothing with any power to surprise, no reason to expect much from the passage of time.
It didn’t cost her anything, this type of modest self-estrangement from whatever was most popular; if others took it the wrong way, she didn’t notice. The word most often applied to her, in discussions among her peers which did not include her, was “intense,” which in the way of teenage vocabulary meant nothing specific but stood for a great deaclass="underline" a sincere demeanor, a reputation for intelligence, an abstention from any of the self-mockery or regressive foolishness which insulated most kids her age from the things that really bothered them, a quietness which was not exactly shyness but more like patience, a face that did not smile much but did not turn away or look down either, that held your eyes until you forgot that you were the one doing the observing. And she was looked at more and more. All the children in Ulster knew one another too well, and yet as they passed through the onset of adolescence they watched each other more or less reborn, at least in some cases — visually and socially reestablished. Molly emerged as one of the prettier girls, certainly, if not one of the three or four prettiest, but she had a kind of physical charisma that made her seem older than she was, an ease within herself expressed in the slowness with which she moved and spoke — an indolence that was easy to make fun of but that also seemed construable into sensuality. Her languor, her inattention to the stare of others, introduced many of the boys her age in that town to the agonizing interplay between desire and sexual fear. Among themselves they included Molly in all their contemptuous fantasies of conquest, but this was partly an effort to talk away their private images of her, which were less definite; they drifted more toward those girls who they felt might be more naturally dominated.