Yes, but, I mean, do you … Should we be worried?
Her eyebrows shot up, and stayed there, and for a few moments I regretted having tried to puncture her equanimity after alclass="underline" she looked as if she might be right on the edge of some kind of hysterics. But then her face resolved itself again into that same eerie calm. Nonsense, she said. Molly can take care of herself. We all can take care of ourselves, can’t we? Now, you get some rest. If she’s not back in the morning, there’s something I need your help with.
She disappeared. I washed my dishes and sat in the living room in one of two huge recliners there; determined to stay up all night if necessary, thinking now that you must have been out somewhere with some old high school friends, even an old boyfriend maybe. I lasted only a short while before the stress and the cross-country travel finally overwhelmed me into sleep, right there in the chair.
When I woke, the sun was up, it was Monday, and you were still nowhere in sight.
* * *
LATELY MAL SEEMS to have lost his taste, in the interstices of our discussions about work, for trying to get me to talk about Molly with him, to share our admiration, to help him put into words what he feels but can’t always articulate. Too bad; because as time goes by I find I’m getting better at understanding it myself.
I know that Molly loved me. Even then, though, it was her remoteness, her unreachability, that transparent partition between herself and the outside world that like it or not you were part of, even at the moments of greatest intimacy, that made her so alluring, so thoroughly involving. You could reach her, you felt, you could get to her, if only you could figure out how. It wasn’t a matter of simply putting in the effort but of finding the key, making the imaginative leap. Impersonating her, in a manner of speaking, as a way of intuiting what she needed. In some ways, it was like falling in love with someone who couldn’t speak a word of English.
Her hair is brittle, even I can see that, because she doesn’t take care of it, or even pay attention. Her lips are full, but also dry, chapped, uncared-for. My point is that beauty is greatest when it shows through in spite of itself. The more beauty is enhanced, the more it converges toward an ideal, an arbitrary, bland ideal; while every inch of Molly, every aspect of her, is unique, unrepeatable. Her two front teeth are just slightly, disproportionately large, so that they are sometimes visible between her lips when she’s listening to you. There is a blue vein that runs more or less straight down the center of her right breast. She bites her nails. These are not flaws. They are the opposite of flaws.
Some feelings acquire a burnish from time, some feelings are swallowed up by time, leached from memory. She was my one great love, that’s obvious, but I’m not just saying that, believing that, because that love failed. I’m not being sentimental; I’m not deceiving myself.
Of course it’s possible that that’s the very definition of greatness in love. A love so great that you fail it, you find your own resources are unequal to it. The problem of how to do it justice, in a sustained way, turns out to be beyond your capacities to solve.
* * *
MAL WAS PACING around my office today when I came back from lunch.
Elaine has quit? he said loudly. I turned around and shut the door.
Is that so? I said. I didn’t know.
Didn’t know? Come on, you think everyone around here doesn’t know you’re sleeping together?
I don’t know what everybody around here knows.
She’s gone already. She left me a note, because she said she couldn’t face me, and now she’s gone, back to New York.
I had an idea something like that might be happening, I said. She moved all her stuff out of our bedroom.
When did this happen?
A few days ago. But I was—
A few days!
But I was hoping she had just moved in somewhere else in the house.
Hoping! Mal said venomously. You couldn’t be bothered to check it out? She was one of our original hires here. She did a lot of fantastic work, and she’ll do more, only now it will be for somebody else. On top of which, I don’t particularly want it getting around that people are leaving the place, just when we’re hitting our stride. That’s a very damaging rumor to be floating around.
You know, she was really angry at you about the Kerouac thing. Did her letter say anything about—
How could you let things get out of hand like that? You have a romantic dispute, you settle it. There are more important things at stake around here. If you’re having some kind of problem with her, I expect you to manage it better. This is a very serious fuckup in my book, letting someone like her get out the door just because you can’t treat her properly.
Mal, I said, that’s a very personal thing. You get to a point where you have to ask yourself how committed you are.
I expect you to manage it better! he said, and slammed the door behind him.
* * *
I DROVE YOUR father home from the hospital. Your mother sat beside me, giving directions, not unpleasantly. All she had said by way of explanation was that she didn’t enjoy driving anymore. None of us had any idea where you were, at that point; but since Kay didn’t seem troubled by your disappearance, I figured I shouldn’t be, either. I guess that was it. I was younger then, and they were grownups, and it’s astonishing how the confidence another person displays in his or her madness can just draft you along, for a while anyway. Plus, they were your parents, and I wanted to make a good impression on them at any cost, because my plan at that point was that once I got my degree and a job I would ask you to marry me. That’s how I was thinking then.
Kay wanted to wait in the car, but in a moment of lucidity brought on by panic I pointed out that surely they would only discharge her husband to the care of a family member. We walked across the parking lot, myself a step behind her, and into the hushed reception area; she stopped a passing nurse and asked her which way to the mental ward. Just like that. I had only a few silent seconds, in the elevator, to savor that feeling — half fearful, half comic — that goes through you at such a time, the feeling of how on earth could I possibly have arrived at this moment? How could the leading edge of my life now consist of such an errand: in a town I’d never seen, a total stranger to everyone, chauffeuring a middle-aged man I’d never met back to his home after a stay behind the steel doors of a psychotic ward?
All for you, I had time to remind myself as the doors buzzed open. That was the justification for all the strangeness. All in the cause of you.
Maybe you’d disappeared for a day or two just because this particular errand was one you’d find too upsetting. I could certainly see that, now that I was there myself. Maybe you’d be home when we all returned. Or call, at least, to apologize for your absence, and to see that everything had gone as planned. Then you’d learn that I was there.
The look on your father’s face was something else I won’t forget. Yet for all the horror that registered in his face on seeing me — I was a complete cipher, a bafflement, an insult — I felt an instant bond with him, because, like me, the one and only thing he really wanted at that moment was to see your face. And you weren’t there. He stood holding a suitcase, dressed in a casual-preppy style (chinos, deck shoes, a V-neck sweater with some sort of country-club insignia on it) that couldn’t have been more inappropriate to that place. Which I suppose was why he had put it on.
Where’s Molly? he said. Who are you was the companion question that passed over his face; but I was obviously with Kay, and he was too well-bred to ask.
Molly’s not here, said Kay. She looked at me expectantly, until I jumped across the gap between us and took Roger’s bag. Not without some difficulty: he didn’t want to give it to me.