This kind of remark from him always shocks me right at first, because it feels like such an unexpected and intentional fuck-you. It takes me a second to remind myself that he doesn’t think about me in that way at all, as a spurned rival or even as someone whose feelings might be hurt — that what seems so real to me, where Molly’s concerned, usually turns out to be real only to me.
Doing what? I said.
Talking, mostly.
What do you guys talk about?
You, he said. Just kidding. He stared off into the corner of the room. No, actually, I suppose we talk mostly about me. Or about this place. Now that you make me think about it. She asks a lot of questions. She’s curious how I got to where I am. I try to ask her about her own life but she has a way of turning it around. Maybe I should be asking you.
Oh, I really don’t think so, I said.
Anyway, she listens. That’s what’s so great about it. Every woman I’ve ever been involved with, it eventually comes around to her wanting to change me somehow, they want to identify some sort of middle ground for you to move on to so you can be more like them. But Molly — it’s not that she thinks I’m perfect, she just takes me completely as I am, she has absolutely no desire to change me. And the paradox is that being around someone like that — that, itself, changes you. It’s changing me. It makes me want to be more like her.
How so? I said, sorry I’d brought the whole thing up by now. But he didn’t even seem to hear me.
Not that I worship her either, Mal said. I mean, I do but I don’t. I know this may sound a little hypocritical of me now, wanting to change something about her. But she stays upstairs most of the day, reading, sleeping, sitting on the balcony and staring at the mountains. I want to take her places. I want to show her the world. She’s never really been anywhere. But she just wants to hang out up there in the room. I bet she could be happy like that a long time, actually. No real contact. Just her and whatever goes on in her head.
* * *
I KEEP COMING back to that moment, that instant, when I first saw her again, in my office, after ten years. I stood up. I shook her hand; I took my hand back. I remained standing, people spoke, I did nothing else. It’s easy to say it was the presence of other people that kept me from vaulting over the desk, pinning her to the wall so she couldn’t get away again. But what other people? My assistant and some stranger. Who cares if they know? Why should I care if anybody knows? Do I really believe that once you’ve made a fool of yourself over someone, you can ever go back to not being a fool, as if it all never happened?
Maybe I should have pushed that skinny fuck Dex out the door, locked it, and then had her, right there on the floor, however forcefully I had to do it. Tasha could watch or not watch, it’s unimportant.
Because what I’m really scared of, what I would really like another opportunity to disprove to myself, is that some instinct toward self-deceit, some tendency toward whitewashing, has hardened in me to such a degree that it wouldn’t have mattered if no one else was there, if I were alone in my office and the door opened and from the mists of oblivion Molly Howe walked in. I would still have smiled and stood up — buttoned my jacket, maybe — and shaken her hand, like we’d never met before, like nothing was real but the present, like the springs of desperation inside me weren’t just blocked but had never run at all.
* * *
COLETTE COMES THROUGH my office this afternoon delivering the message that Mal has called a special meeting of the entire staff, in the first-floor dining room at four o’clock. Usually he would give me some sort of heads-up as to what something like that’s about. Instead, though, I filed in along with everyone else and took a seat. At the head of the table, where Mal sits, someone had wheeled in one of our fifty-inch TVs and a DVD player. There was an empty seat next to Elaine, but I sat across the table from her. We don’t keep our relationship a secret but we try not to call attention to it either.
Finally Mal appeared, barefoot, in shorts; before taking a seat or saying a word to any of us he went around and pulled down all the window shades. He returned to his seat and stood beside it, looking around the room, whispering something to himself. I realized he was counting heads.
Anybody seen Milo? he said. No response.
Well, that’s okay, I guess, Mal said, and sat. He picked up a remote on the table beside him; there was a kind of popping sound, and then Elaine’s Kerouac film began to roll.
He let it run through twice, then switched it off. There was a moment of confusion — it’s not customary to hold this sort of formal screening of in-house work — in which Elaine stole a glance over at me and cocked her head to ask if I knew what this was all about. I shrugged discreetly to convey to her that no one was more in the dark than I was.
Around the table there was a bit of scattered, tentative applause. Mal was still looking at the blank screen. Finally he spun around in his chair.
Nice, he said, but no. I do like the way it reverses the usual imagery, I mean, it makes the whole notion of driving a car seem old-fashioned, retro. Most car ads you see are basically high-gloss porn.
It was startling — if I understood him right — to hear him refer to Elaine’s piece as an ad. He never does that.
The thing is the quote, he went on. The entire aural element of the piece is lifted from Jack Kerouac. I have that right, don’t I?
Silence. I don’t think Elaine was sure whether or not she was being addressed directly.
We could include an acknowledgment, I said, if that’s what you mean.
No, that’s not what I mean. The point is we don’t do that. My first thought was that Elaine should know this by now. But then I thought maybe not: maybe I haven’t made it clear enough, to everyone. So here it is. We don’t co-opt, we don’t filch value, no matter the source. Advertising has skated by on that method for decades. Any artistic value a piece like this one might have is value established somewhere else, in some other context, established and then bought. That’s why people hate advertising, even at the same time as they like the ads themselves. Stealing value. Well, we’re putting a stop to that here. We are about original value, about the creation of value. Let other art derive itself from us! No looting, no sampling, no colonizing of the past!
His voice was raised, and he wasn’t smiling. Elaine was leaning back in her chair, staring at him, her neck mottled red. His exhortation hung in the air for a few seconds.
The original, he said, more quietly. The unique. The unrepeatable. The perfect magic of the artifact. This is our new creed. That’s what I want. That’s what we will all, as of now, be consecrating our efforts towards. Our direction has evolved: that’s only natural. This just seemed like a good opportunity to make that clear. So this piece you all just saw: we won’t be using it. Thank you all for coming.
ELAINE, NEEDLESS to say, tracked me down in my office within the hour. I shut the door, but still she was so loud that I figured the best thing to do was get her off the site.
Okay, fine, she said, glaring. The least you could do is buy me a few drinks.
I took her to El Sombrero. She sat in silence through one margarita, her nostrils flared.
You know, I said finally, I had nothing to do with all that. I certainly would have tried to change his mind if—
Filching value, is that what he said? She shook her head. Jesus. You know what I think it’s really about? Pride. He doesn’t like the idea that he’d have to share credit for the provenance of one of these artworks with poor old dead Jack Kerouac.
I don’t know that that’s it. It’s more like, I don’t know, a point of dogma with him or something.
Dogma! Dogma bums! So did he think it was demeaning to Kerouac, is that it? That I was stealing from him? Did you know that I wrote my whole master’s thesis on the Beats? I went on a road trip to fucking Lowell when I was in college, for Christ’s sake! I visited his house!