They had lately had inquiries from UNICEF; from the Chicago Art Institute; from two different city governments in the United States, looking for ways to raise revenue through advertising in public places without attracting too much negative press; from the committee to reelect a prominent senator; from a consortium which wanted to build a historical Civil War theme park in nearby Manassas; from Major League Baseball. John felt like laughing with wonder each time Osbourne gave him news of this sort — the scope of their success and their influence seemed to be surging past the boundaries of even their fondest original hopes. But in the time it took him to descend to the first floor and assemble the staff, he tried conscientiously to expunge any of that giddiness from his voice and his manner. The client doesn’t exist: this was Osbourne’s guiding principle, and John, in the interest of their continued success, tried hard to emulate his boss’s thinking.
DEX WAS DOING nothing; he lived in a world of offers. At night he and Molly went out, to clubs, to premieres, to after-hours clubs, to restaurants where no one ate; Molly was usually ready to go home at least an hour before they finally left, in the overlit quiet and the bad smells of Manhattan at 4 a.m. She knew one sure way to get his attention — flirt with another guy, or even just allow herself to be flirted with — but the few times she had tried that, she didn’t like the way it ended. She woke up one morning, surly and hung over, and was amazed to see the fully articulated marks of Dex’s fingers still visible on her upper arm.
Dex got up at about 1 p.m., when the Federal Express man came. He sat at his tiny kitchen table — big enough for only one, really — under the huge poster of Jean-Paul Belmondo, drank coffee, and read scripts. After a few minutes, he would begin flipping through the pages rapidly, as if looking for a particular word, a scowl of restless contempt stealing over his face. Molly, under orders to keep quiet while he read, would read something herself, or look at the TV with the sound down. Eventually Dex would stand up, listen to his answering machine messages, step into the shower, and ready himself indolently for another night out.
This went on for months. Dex accepted every invitation, in a kind of frenzy, not because he felt he had arrived but because he understood that his window on this kind of life might close at some point unless something else as substantial as Sundance happened to him soon. Molly got to meet her share of famous people, the fatuous and the moody; every evening she swore she didn’t know why they went out every night, and every afternoon she became restless to go out again, if only to escape the confines of the tiny apartment on Ludlow Street, which Dex, with twenty-one thousand eight hundred dollars in the bank, refused to give up because it was rent-controlled. Drunk and exhausted every night, hung over every day, their sex life had receded nearly to nothing.
Dex, having told his agent he was eager to look at feature scripts and escape the documentary ghetto, was trying hard to sell out; but something inside him, some kernel of self-regard for which he himself had grown to have a real dislike, was keeping him from doing it. The scripts were all so terrible. He would read aloud to Molly from them.
“Why does everything have to be so awful?” he said, blowing out a thin violent stream of smoke. “And I wouldn’t mind if it was awful in some new way. I wouldn’t mind being the originator of some new awfulness the world has never seen before. You know?”
Then one day Molly came home from D’Agostino’s and played back the messages; after the usual calls from Dex’s agent, party planners, film-school buddies, the last one was from Dex himself, talking excitedly over the street noise, asking Molly to meet him at the southeast corner of Houston and Broadway. Immediately. It was just a ten-minute walk, and she found him standing there, neck tilted back, staring up at the exposed side of a ten-story loft building. Atop it was a water tower, just like the towers atop many of the older buildings left in the city, except that this one had been painted, monochromatically, a shocking, bright, metallic red. There was something else off about it, too, and it took Molly a minute of looking before she understood what it was: a mold had been taken of the original water tower, then recast with some sort of plastic in place of the original wood, so that the lines of the object before her, while instantly recognizable, were smoothed out as well, softened, diminished, like a three-dimensional echo, a death mask, of the everyday object it had supplanted.
Molly touched Dex on his shoulder; he looked down at her for a second and smiled — unusual enough, those days — before he went back to staring. Molly realized that she had been brought here to look at it, too.
“I like it,” she said. “Has it been here long?”
Dex shrugged.
“Kind of eccentric,” Molly said. “What’s it doing there, I wonder.”
“It’s an advertisement,” Dex said quietly.
“It’s what?”
“An ad,” he said — smiling again. “A commercial.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know.” He laughed, without changing expression.
Molly thought about it. “Oh!” she said suddenly. “Is it that guy, that … what’s his name, the ad guy—”
“Malcolm Osbourne.”
“Yeah! It’s one of his?”
Dex said nothing. A kind of sneer was creeping over the lower half of his face. It was a look that was attractive only to Molly, who knew the true engagement it signified.
“Is this”, she said, “a movie idea?”
He nodded. “I guess it’s that,” he said. “I mean, I’m standing here looking at this thing — the incredible phoniness of it, the way this guy is held up as a great artist, a revolutionary — the emptiness, the pretension — and I just want to take this guy Osbourne, I want to take a scalpel and cut his throat down to his belly and pull him open and show him to everyone, I want to fuck him up the ass, I want to rip his head off and shit into it, I want to pop his lying eyes out with a spoon and skullfuck him. So yes,” he said, “I guess you could say that’s a movie idea.”
Dex wanted to go back home and call his agent. On the way, he kept turning back to stare at the painted water tower from different perspectives, to hold it in his mind’s eye, knowing he wouldn’t be able to see it from the windows of their apartment. Molly mentioned, as they waited for the light on the Bowery, that she had just read somewhere that Osbourne was due to appear at NYU, to pick up an award and give a speech, some time later that spring. Dex’s face lit up at this news. “We’ll go, then,” he said. “You can get us tickets. That’s excellent, that’s ideal, that’s why I need you,” and he took her face between his hands, grinning broadly, in a loving way, though a little harder than necessary.
JOHN FELT AS if he were carrying some sort of explosive secret with him on the trip from Palladio to Richmond, Richmond to La Guardia, La Guardia to the St Moritz. It was just the two of them, himself and Mal, and Mal didn’t say much. No one would be likely to recognize his face, of course; and John, like some employee of the Witness Protection Program, kept restating to himself the importance of acting normally. They sat in their adjoining rooms at the St Moritz for three hours, even ordering separate room service dinners. At Osbourne’s direction, John had turned down a dinner invitation from the Tisch School’s board of trustees; he needed more time, he said, to go over his remarks. He had seemed agitated all day — not worried exactly, but suffering from a kind of surfeit of physical and nervous energy. Now, when John muted the TV in his room, he could hear Osbourne rehearsing his speech on the other side of the wall. John ate his salmon en papillote from a tray and looked out the window at Central Park, feeling strangely subdued. At six forty-five he put on his suit jacket, went out into the hallway, and knocked on Osbourne’s door.