A few weeks later, near the end of a hot June day, Molly walked aimlessly through the quiet, cool rooms of her house. Her parents were out. A cab was coming in the morning to take her to the airport in Albany. She was all packed. The narcissus and the daffodils Kay had planted years ago were browning in the sun; the paint was cracking on the vacant houses in the development; Molly went out on to the porch barefoot to listen to the sounds of the valley and to see if it all looked any less familiar to her now that she was relatively sure she would never lay eyes on it again.
On the road in front of the house a young girl was riding her bike. She rode in a lazy figure-eight right by the Howes, pedaling slowly, not looking where she was going unless she had to. She was overweight, and wore a big loose Little Mermaid T-shirt over pink bicycle shorts. She turned around to pass the house again and Molly saw that it was Bethany Vincent. When she noticed that Molly had seen her, she stopped circling and slid forward off the seat so her feet were flat on the road. Molly stood waiting for a minute or more, but Bethany’s expression never clarified; the sun was right in the girl’s face, and she held up one hand as a visor over her eyes. When Molly started down the porch steps Bethany hopped back up on to the seat of her bike and rode away.
JOHN WOULD HAVE felt at home in a world governed by an unspoken compact ordaining that anytime anything awkward or unpleasant happened, everyone involved would agree to forget about it and to go forward as if it had never happened at all. This may have been less a fantasy than a kind of vestigial memory of his childhood in Asheville, North Carolina, in particular of the houses of some of his older relatives, whose genuinely terrible secrets were held aloft by a magical understanding that any break in the chain of pleasantry would result in those secrets’ crashing noisily to the floor in plain view of everyone. But John lived in New York now; and somehow he had surrounded himself with people who had no capacity for ignoring things that were difficult to explain — most conspicuously at work, where Roman spent the days immediately following the Doucette debacle glowering at him from across their office, ostentatiously awaiting some explanation for John’s failure to mention his friendship with Mal Osbourne. John soldiered on as best he could, cordial and red-faced. On the subsequent Monday Roman didn’t come in at all. Only by checking with the receptionist did John learn that his partner had decided to take a week’s vacation.
Rebecca, too, tried hard to be supportive when he told her of the strain on his relationship with Roman; but she had trouble getting past the fact that he had never even said anything to his partner about that bizarre Saturday with Osbourne. It was kind of a funny story, she thought; certainly there was nothing embarrassing or shameful about it. Why keep it a secret?
“Don’t you feel you guys are friends?” she asked gently. “I know we don’t see them much outside of work—”
“We’re friends,” John said glumly.
“You trust him, right? Wouldn’t he trust you as well? I mean, why wouldn’t he?”
“You’re probably right.” He wanted to bring the conversation to a close by making every concession.
But she was too perplexed. “Aren’t you assuming that he would think the worst of you? That he’d think you were lying, you were ambitious, you scheduled the whole thing because you somehow knew the Doucette review was coming up and then you lied about it?”
“I see your point,” John said.
“Well, have you ever given him any reason to think that way about you?”
He sighed.
“Of course you haven’t,” she answered herself. “You should just have told him. Now you’ve turned nothing into something.”
John didn’t welcome being analyzed and so he agreed with her. There was a part of him, though, that held a more self-justifying view: We live in the age of directness, he thought; circumspection, the art of leaving things unsaid, is a lost one.
Still, he knew that no such formulation could answer the charge that his silence had been pointless, and he was desperate for things to go back to the way they had been. When Roman came back from his petulant vacation, John took him out to the Tenth Avenue Grill for drinks and told him the complete story of his dealings with Mal Osbourne, all its unlikelihoods intact, laced with apologies but pointing out also, in his own defense, how unbelievable it all seemed. He could tell that in Roman’s mind, miffed though he was, the whole Doucette episode was already just about consecrated to the past, to the war-story pantheon, even though they were still less than three weeks removed from the trip to Philadelphia (which meant that John had not yet received his handwritten letter from Osbourne about his “exciting new venture,” so he didn’t need to worry about whether to throw in that detail as well).
Roman, though he struggled not to show it, gradually began to find the whole thing funny. He shook his head. “Chocolate sculpture,” he said. “Well, as furious as I was the day of the pitch, I sure would have been sorry to miss it. It was one of the most demented things I’ve ever seen.”
John, relieved, ordered two more drinks.
“I guess I can see why you didn’t tell anyone,” Roman said. “Still, I wish you’d told me a week ago, at least.”
“Why?”
Roman smiled into his scotch glass. “’Cause I went to Canning and said I wanted somebody else to work with, that’s why.”
Next morning they went together to Canning’s office; with a viselike contraption balanced on his knees, the boss was trying to tie his own flies. “We kissed and made up,” Roman said.
“Thank God,” Canning said. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”
“So who were you going to partner me with?” Roman asked.
“I hadn’t even thought about it. Things like this happen all the time around here. It’s like a fucking junior high school. Now go and sin no more.”
Everything became as it had been. The two of them came up with some spots for a fruit juice that won the account for the agency (now called Canning & Leigh) and led to Dale and Andrea — laid off in the wake of the Doucette disaster — being rehired. John and Roman even got to go to Malibu to oversee the production of the first two spots. It was a different world. Their director was about seventy-five years old, with a deep tan and long, chalk-white hair; he showed up on the set the first day scowling and waving a rolled-up copy of the script.
“Where’s the cum shot?” he barked at them. “You left it out.”
“Sorry?” said John.
“Fucking New York,” the director said. “They think they invented everything. Do you know how many commercials I’ve directed?”
“Excuse me,” Roman said, before the director could supply the number, “‘cum shot,’ is that what you said?”
He looked at them murderously. An assistant was walking by with a tray full of unrefrigerated bottles of the fruit juice, to be used as props in one of the shots; the director grabbed one off the tray, unscrewed the top, tilted his head back, and poured the juice into his mouth from a height of about eight inches, so that some of it splashed off his perfect false teeth. He then lowered his gaze to Roman and John again, juice dripping off his chin.
“Idiots!” he said.
When they returned from the coast it was winter, just like that. The sun bounced off the roofs and the store windows. The plows came by after each snowfall to expose the streets, and the parked cars, up to their door handles in the resultant gray drifts, stayed half-hidden like cats in a meadow for weeks at a time. John wore his sunglasses on the walk to the subway in the morning, his breath steaming in front of him. The months that passed so quietly included his thirtieth birthday. He was less worried about growing old than he was consternated by the idea that thirty years — an enormous wedge of time — had now amassed behind him, without any correspondingly enormous sense of having lived.