She looked like she was ready for it. Like she was expecting it, which is more than I can say for myself. Maybe she just knows me better than I know myself, even after all these years. Or maybe everyone sees through me, everywhere I go, maybe I just walk through life as no mystery to anyone but myself.
We sat in silence, side by side, for a while. I could feel that I was breathing hard.
Thank you for coming to see me, Molly said after a while, just to get me going, probably.
Coming to see you? I said. You’ve moved into my house.
She sighed. You mean a lot to me, John. A lot. I would never do anything to hurt you. You know that, right?
This struck me as incredibly patronizing. She went on.
In fact, I resisted it longer than I might have because I had an idea that you might be upset by it. I –
You had an idea about that, did you?
Molly raised her eyebrows.
But you went ahead and did it anyway. It seems to me you’re trying to have it both ways here. What, are you supposed to be so irresistible? So impossible to get over? Is this the same speech you gave to that poor sap Dex, by the way?
She sat back slightly, resting her shoulder blades against the iron railing, and I could see her relax: the stoic bit, the martyr bit. Her patience with me — everything she did infuriated me now.
I mean I understand that it’s all the same to you who you fuck, so it might as well be somebody with a few million bucks and a nice house. But you couldn’t find anybody like that in Manhattan? You had to come and do it here under the same roof as me?
There; that did it. Finally she looked at me with some anger of her own.
Please don’t talk to me that way again, Molly said. Ever. I haven’t done anything to deserve that from you.
No?
No.
So you’re serious about Mal. You’re in love with him.
I–I have no idea whether or not I’m in love with him. It’s only been a couple of weeks. I don’t fall in love as easily as that. I mean Mal has, I don’t know, a certain magnetism. An allure. I know I don’t have to tell you that.
From somewhere out in the direction of the road the breeze blew us the faint sound of sirens.
Anyway, Molly said, which answer would you hate more?
What?
Which would you rather hear? That I’m totally in love with him, or that this is all just some sort of sugar-daddy, mercenary-fuck situation so I can live in a mansion?
I just want to hear the truth, I said. (It sounded so lame, coming out of my mouth; I could tell just from the sound of it that it was a lie, just as surely as if I were listening to someone else.)
You know, she said with some heat, talk about wanting to hear the truth, we sat right here a couple of weeks ago and you told me that everything was okay between us; more than okay, forgotten, and I actually believed that, I took that to heart when I was back in New York trying to decide what to do. Plus you’re involved with someone else now, with that Elaine, and you told me that was a serious thing and so did Mal.
I wanted to say that the two things — my relationship with Elaine and Molly’s indifference toward our old feelings — had nothing to do with each other. But I was starting to sound ridiculous even in my own ears.
Whatever, I said instead, standing up. Fine. You want my blessing or something? You got it. The two of you are perfect for each other.
And I walked back to the house.
It’s all happening again. The helplessness of asking these questions (Are you in love with him?) when I know the answers will torture me. The total defenselessness. Laid wide open, completely obvious, unable to protect myself against total honesty, total exposure. Well, that’s not so bad, I guess; after all, it’s nothing she hasn’t seen before. Just so no one sees it but her.
* * *
I DON’T ACCEPT it. I don’t. He doesn’t love her. I don’t mean he’s lying about it: I’m sure he thinks he’s in love with her, and I’m sure she thinks he is too. They can’t see themselves the way I see them; that’s the key. She’s so full of self-hatred. She holds herself so cheaply, her sense of her own worthlessness is so profound, that she’s drawn into situations she knows are bad for her; and then when they don’t work out, when things fall apart, she says to herself, See, see what you’ve done, you knew it all along, you’ve left it worse than you found it. Then it’s on to the next disaster. If someone should come along who’s able to see more clearly, more objectively, what’s so beautiful and original and valuable about her, she wouldn’t believe in it; she’d think there must be some other motive at work.
And Maclass="underline" he sees something unique, original, unprecedented, something unbeholden to anything but itself, and he has to have it. That’s how he loves. How can I make her see him — see herself — through my eyes? Because if she could do that even for an instant — see herself as I see her — then she could at least see how she ought to be loved. She was loved, once, and somehow she’s forgotten what that’s about.
* * *
IN BED, ALONE, when Elaine came into the room and flipped on the light.
Hey John, she said. You awake?
I picked up my watch from the bedside table and squinted at it. 3.19 a.m.
No, I said. I am not awake.
She pulled the sheet off me. Please, she said. Please. I finished it.
With some difficulty I lifted my head. You what?
I need to show you something. She started to put her finger in her mouth to bite the nail, but then pulled it away again, smiling.
I put on a T-shirt over my pajama bottoms and we went down to the ballroom. She already had two chairs pulled up to the editing machine.
It’s a short film, just sixty seconds, opening with a shot of the tight interior of the coach section of an airplane; one flight attendant acts out the rote pantomime of what to do in case of an emergency water landing, while another, whom we don’t see, drones the familiar instruction over the intercom. A slow track down the narrow aisle shows that no one is paying the least attention. Then the track stops, and zooms slowly toward a guy in a window seat reading a book; the book, of course, is On the Road.
As the zoom finishes, the voice-over makes a seamless, volume-up, volume-down transition between the practiced, stultifyingly cheery sound of the flight attendant and a reading of a passage from On the Road itself.
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast …
The zoom moves slowly toward the tiny window beside the reading man, and as the tarmac moves we see the plane is taking off. (I have Elaine’s copy of the book open here as I write this, since it’s handy and I want to get it right.)
… and all that road going, all those people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa by now I know the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry … the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie …
The zoom seems to move through the window and it gazes down as the runway ends and the plane banks over the cloverleaves of crabbed highways surrounding Newark Airport; it seems like we’re looking at one particular car but as the plane ascends (reversing the zoom itself, in a nice, dizzying way) more and more cars fill the screen, smaller and smaller, until the plane breaks through the twilit cloudline.
… which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old …