“As a joke,” Andrea said. “As a kind of parting fuck-you. I mean, including CLO in the review process was a joke anyway. Does an incumbent agency ever win out in a review? No. Never. So he was just being vindictive, trying to make a fool out of old man Doucette instead of performing for him.”
“I don’t know about that,” Mick said. “I just never got any kind of a sarcastic hit off his presentation today. Nobody’s that deadpan. I think he was serious. And what he said was actually kind of brilliant in its way, I mean deranged, but brilliant.”
“Or,” Andrea said, excitedly. “Or. I mean let’s remember that Osbourne doesn’t even come into the office anymore. Hasn’t produced an ad in years. He does no work at all, that I know about. And suddenly he decides to take over a major account pitch and then totally sabotages it?” She looked around the gently rocking compartment. “I think we just watched a guy self-destructing. Maybe he deludes himself that he’s some kind of ad visionary, maybe not, but in fact he’s just setting fire to himself, finishing up the ruin of what was once a really brilliant career.”
“Good,” Dale said. “That’s what I was waiting to hear. Okay, any other votes for the guy’s being clinically insane?”
There was a silence, in which John noticed Roman, across the aisle, studying him in discreet perplexity, as if to say, The others may have forgotten for a moment what happened in the minutes before the meeting, but I haven’t. John felt himself reddening and turned his head.
“I mean, the fucking Renaissance,” Dale said. “What’s up with that?”
John went straight home to Brooklyn from Penn Station. He called in sick the next day. Wednesday afternoon, a staff meeting was called, at which Canning announced that, by mutual agreement, the agency’s contractual relationship with Mal Osbourne had been terminated. Canning called the parting amicable, but he also apologized to the eight creatives whose hard work on the Doucette pitch had, he said, gone to waste. As for Doucette, they had signed that morning with Chiat/Day.
Osbourne’s office email account had of course been closed; but it was just as well that his next message to John, months later, came to his home, in the form of a cramped but curiously formal handwritten note. “I am in the process of conceiving an exciting new venture,” it read. “I’ll be in touch with you about it in due course. In the meantime, I sincerely hope that you and your wife are well.”
FIRST PERIOD MATH, second period US history, third period French, fifty minutes spent trying to find the facial expression that would discourage the teacher from asking you if you had a cat or if it was raining outside, and expecting you to answer. Lunch, the same long table in the corner farthest from the door with the same girls, Annika and Tia, Justine and Lucy, acting the way they thought people unaware of being looked at might act; the cafeteria tables seated eight and so they were always joined by two or three bold aspirants who did not join in the conversation but listened and laughed with great animation for the benefit of anyone at other tables who might be noticing them there. Fourth period free, fifth period bio; sixth period was AP English, where they were reading One Hundred Years of Solitude; it worked out well that this one interesting class was the last one, because it kept Molly from looking too frequently at the clock on the wall behind the teacher’s head. Then straight into the parking lot, with everyone else, to get on the idling bus for home.
You never understood how diligently, in the common course of things, you were watched — how your absence from any of those places you were in every day, places in which you might have felt yourself thoroughly anonymous, could never go unnoticed — until you tried to get out from under it. Cutting classes was one thing, obviously possible only on an occasional basis before teachers and then parents got involved. But if for instance you weren’t on the bus in the afternoon, people asked you about it the first time they saw you the next morning, and they had no doubt been speculating with each other about you before that — people with nothing more substantial to think about than what passed in front of their eyes. You couldn’t have that kind of talk in the air. Miss a warm Saturday night at the playground behind the elementary school and Sunday your friends all phoned to find out what had happened to you. If you weren’t at the dinner table, never mind the breakfast table, there were questions.
So what Molly did was to get off the bus at a stop before her own, near the center of town usually, telling anyone who raised an eyebrow that she had an errand to run or a babysitting job or that her mother was sick and had asked her to pick something up. Then, when the bus was gone, she would walk around the windowless back of the IGA, through a thin half acre of woods, and out the other side on to Route 2, where she would wait discreetly behind a tree, looking at the sky, until Dennis Vincent’s car pulled up and she saw a smile flickering on his pained face through the window.
There was experience and there was learning, and Molly knew that the last several weeks had consisted much more of the former than the latter; still, one of the things she could say she had learned about herself in that time was that she was a marvelously gifted liar. She took this in without self-satisfaction, nor with a bad conscience — more in the spirit that any knowledge about one’s self is a constructive thing. No one ever questioned her; no face showed any skepticism, no one ever caught her in a contradiction. She could only guess that Dennis was not nearly as persuasive with whatever lies he had to tell to get away from the bank at three-thirty in the afternoon, since he did such a poor job trying to convince her, when they were in the car together, that he was courageous, unconflicted, that his thoughts were only with her. It was touching, if also slightly condescending, that he should think she needed to be convinced of that.
The car trips, thirty minutes each way, were hard on Dennis. He tried to make conversation but it always tapered off into silence, and sometimes he looked through the windshield in such a way that Molly worried he didn’t see the road in front of him at all. It would have made more sense for Molly to drive herself to Oneonta and meet him there, since she had her license now; but Roger and Kay, who thought little about it if they didn’t see Molly over the course of an afternoon, were far more likely to notice if the car was gone for a few hours.
Sometimes she talked to him about trivial things, to try to cheer him up. Sometimes she too said nothing and they made the trip in a kind of considerate silence. And sometimes a very different feeling overtook her, and she would reach across and stroke his leg as he drove, unzip his pants and let him grow hard under her hand, watching as his face turned red, or undo a button or two on her own shirt and guide his hand inside the fabric under her breast. She’d see how far she could push him. This impulse was hard to describe, except to say that it felt closer to abandon than to excitement, less like lust than capitulation.
The motel in Oneonta was a long prefab rectangle, with an office at one end, and a brackish swimming pool behind a locked gate in the front. It was across the road from a strip mall. Parking and room entrances were in the back. Dennis always made her wait in the car while he went inside and paid. She looked around to see if there were any other cars in the lot; sometimes there were none. The best thing about those minutes in the car was the chance to savor the idea that no one in the world could have known where she was just then.
Inside, there was always some initial awkwardness, though some of that was dispelled by the fact that they needed to hurry, they were always so pressed for time. Dennis began by insulting himself, so reliably that Molly started to wonder if he wasn’t getting some sort of erotic charge out of it; but that didn’t seem to be the case.