The Empire of the Dead (2 page)

Today, he worked into the early afternoon on a project for a small foundation whose office space on West Broadway lacked sufficient light in the interior, despite floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street. Where Bern would normally place tubing for a light scoop, an old fire escape interfered—a pretty little problem that kept him from fully realizing his hunger until well past midday. When he
did
knock off for a while, he walked and stretched, ending up at a nice little Italian place on West Eleventh called Gene's. While he waited for his salad, he sketched hut designs on his napkin: flat-roofed, pyramid-shaped, open to the air.

He took a meandering path back to work. Children's drawings of the neighborhood filled the front window of Ray's Pizza: happy families clustered beneath the Jefferson Market Library clock or around the flower garden where the women's prison used to stand (long before the children could have known about it).

For three more hours he worked on the foundation design. At 5:30 he wandered over to Glasco's, to find it locked and dark. A handwritten sign taped to the front window cited plumbing problems and apologized for the inconvenience. A tall young woman in jeans and a green wool sweater stepped up beside him, squinted to read the sign, stepped back, and gripped the straps of her tan leather purse tightly against her body. Bern recollected having seen her in Glasco's now and then.

“Well,” she said. “I guess it's the Cedar tonight.” She set off down the street, her auburn hair bouncing on her shoulders. After a moment's delay, Bern followed her.

The only seats inside the tavern were jammed into a corner. Bern squeezed next to the woman in green. “May I?” he asked. She answered, “Sure.” Separately, they ordered drinks and food. The place was too bright. Acoustically bad.

Bern scribbled on his napkin.

After a few sips of her beer—Guinness, Bern noted; this woman was serious about her beer—she said to Bern, “Nice,” and indicated the napkin with a lift of her chin. “Are you an artist?”

“No.”

“Make houses?”

“I'm an architect, yes.”

“Cool,” she said. She drank some more. “Say something … I don't know … architecturally
cool
.”

Bern laughed. She had a way of speaking loudly, over the crowd, which sounded soft: the low timbre of her voice, perhaps. “Well, I'm not sure I …”

“Come on. Amuse me. It's been a long day.”

“Okay. Let's see. The seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher attributed to demons all of Roman architecture, because of the nudity in its statuary,” Bern said.

“No kidding?”

“The philosopher Vico believed the bastard children of Noah's sons became giants by feeding on the nitrates in their own feces, which they rolled around in—primitives that they were—and that their large stature and fat fingers led to crude and awkward building practices.”

“You're … something else,” the woman said. “I'm Kate.”

“Wally. Wally Bern.”

“So, Wally, what are these little houses all about?” She tapped the napkin, leaving two or three wet spots on it. “Is this how architects doodle?”

Their sandwiches arrived and Bern swept the napkin into his lap. “I suppose … periodically, most professionals seek a renewal,”
he said, aware of his shyness, his formal manner. “A return to first principles, right? When the business starts to feel stale or the ideas dry up? We try to remember what drew us to our work in the first place—that initial euphoria, the falling-in-love—and we reach back to basics.”

“Sure,” Kate said. “When you get in a rut.”

“Yes. Well, in my profession, the hut is often seen as the most basic building design. The source: column and roof. The idea that it must have been raining the day Adam and Eve left Paradise. They had a sudden need for shelter, you see, so they grabbed the first things they could find. Tree limbs for structural support, leaves and grasses for their ceiling.”

“Cool,” Kate said.

“There's something very appealing, very elegant, about the
spare
.”

“So.” She brushed foam from her lips. “Your ideas are stale, huh?”

“Excuse me?”

“These doodles. Back to basics. You're feeling a need for renewal?”

Bern wiped his mouth with the napkin. Kissing the hut, he thought. Falling in love once more. “I'm not sure. The truth is …” Did he really want to explain? To someone just killing time after work? “… I've been thinking, in the last day or so, about the wrangling over the World Trade Center site … the rebuilding process, you know, the
meaning
of it … how we've lost sight of the basic needs for that area, our community values …”

“Like?”

He didn't know
what
he wanted to say. Why had he prattled on so? “We have a fundamental desire to understand what happened there and why, so whatever we do with it should involve, I think, first principles.”

“Wally? You want to put a
hut
at Ground Zero?”

Bern stared at her.

“Well, well. You are
crazy
, baby.” She ate her sandwich.

* * *

Did he believe what he had told the woman at dinner? He hadn't said so many words—to anyone—in weeks. Nerves. The unexpected break in his evening routine. The loss of the Wall of Hope and Remembrance.

A need for renewal?

He walked and walked, all the way up to Bryant Park, past the statues of Goethe and Gertrude Stein, then back down to the Strand. The E. B. White book still sat, prominently displayed, on a table near the front entrance. Next to it, Henry James's
The American Scene
. Bern picked it up. Published in 1907. After a twenty-year sojourn in Europe, James had returned to New York to find its “Gothic” pride “caged and dishonoured” by “buildings grossly tall and grossly ugly.” Some of these, Bern knew, were the Beaux Arts beauties E. B. White would find charming, but for James they were filled with too many windows, ruining their “grace.”

New York's style had changed, wholesale, at least twice—if such a thing could even be measured—since James had first observed it. Bern made his way over to Twenty-third Street, taking another circuitous route past the Flatiron Building, past Edith Wharton's birthplace—an old Anglo-Italian brownstone—and the Hotel Chelsea. At home, he tried to read himself to sleep. “Sweet, sacred, and profane”—this is the “hut dream,” said Ann Cline.

In the street in front of McGee's someone yelled obscenities. “She don't
want
my skinny brown ass no more!” another man barked into a cell phone. A car horn brayed.

Bern closed his eyes and tried to picture a garden, a soothing space in which he could slumber, but various thoughts intruded: E. B. White; auburn hair; leaky roofs. Lodoli seems to have believed it was humanity's aim to perfect Nature. Imperfect in itself, Nature offered materials to men and women of genius who, in choosing certain substances for particular designs, improved the makeup of matter. In this way, the world strove to return to Paradise.

Bern imagined moss roses, hoping to will himself into a dream. Acres and acres of orange and yellow blossoms around the family house and near his grandfather's grave, north of Houston: the small granite stone under swelling Gulf Coast clouds, the swoon-inducing sweetness of pollen, and the dense, rich loam underneath.

Glasco's remained closed the following evening. The plumbing sign had been removed. A new sign said, “Vacation. Back in Three Weeks.” Bern suspected something more sinister at work. Elsewhere, he had witnessed the gradual letting-down of clientele, as in the saga of the Gotham Book Mart, which had apparently been dying of high rent for two years now without admitting as much to its customers. No one knew the store was in trouble until the steel fencing came down in front of its windows, shutting out of reach the first edition Joyces and the copies of
The Sun Also Rises
signed by Papa himself. Had Glasco's lost its liquor license? Had the building been sold?

The Cedar was even louder than last night. Bern didn't see an empty chair until one sailed across his sight line, dragged by a booted foot. The foot—a lovely and perfectly functional ornament—belonged to Kate. “Okay, hut-man. I've been waiting for my turkey and mayo for thirty minutes now. I'm hungry and bored. Tell me something crazy,” Kate said.

Bern sat beside her. “Well, then,” he said. “All right. Have you heard of Carlo Lodoli? History's greatest architect. He was cursed with ambitious students who distorted his teachings. He felt—or we
think
he felt—that all architecture, even the ‘primitive,' had value, but his apprentice Algarotti dismissed whole continents of builders.”

“You don't say.”

“There are peoples on the Earth, Algarotti said, who, lacking materials or a ‘certain kind of intelligence,' make their huts ‘out of the bones and skins of quadrupeds and marine monsters.' It's clear he disapproves.”

Kate cased the busy room. “I'm
thirsty
, too,” she said. “Tell me more.”

“Trouble arises naturally. Pleasure has to be planned for.”

With cool gray eyes Kate appraised him. “How did you spend your day, Wally?”

“Sketching, on paper—”

“Not a computer guy?”

“Not a computer guy. Sketching, on paper, methods of squeezing a light scoop past a fire escape.”

“How old are you?” Kate asked. “What's the matter with computers? … Oh, bless you,” she said to the waitress who arrived with a pint of Guinness and took Bern's order for a pilsner.

“Forty-nine. And computers …”

“No, it's okay, I get the picture. A Luddite in love with huts … I mean, you know, a little out of touch, aren't we, Grandpa?”

“What's wrong with computers is, they minimize the hand,” Bern said, trying to resist Kate's humor. This girl, he feared, could make him giddy. Unseemly, at his age.
Focus
. “Building comes from nerve endings. Fingertips. It's all about the body. But also”—as he spoke, he twisted the cardboard coaster in perfect little circles on the tabletop, and Kate watched him, amused—“with a sketch, you can't tell just by looking at it if it predates the structure or if it's a rendering of something already there. Drawings have this magical quality, past and future all at once … they're preposterous.”

“You lost me there,” said Kate.

“
Pre
and
Post
,
before
and
after
, all in the same word.
Pre-posterous
. The ideal architecture.”

Kate laughed.

Was she put off by him? Charmed? Bern thought the latter, but he wasn't sure. She
had
asked him, the other night, to entertain her. Now, maybe she was just being polite. At least she didn't get up to leave right away.

“Forty-nine, eh? So this ‘renewal' business,” Kate said. “Midlife crisis? Maybe a little late in your case …”

“I don't know. What
is
a midlife crisis?” Bern said. “Something dreamed up by magazine editors to sell copy.”

“But you all have one, right? Sooner or later? All you guys. Wife?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

“No.”

“When was your last affair?”

“A couple of years ago,” he said before he could check himself, prompted by the easy sway of their conversation. She waited for more. “I was married for two years in my late twenties. A Texas girl who hated the east and went back home. I'm okay, you know, being alone. I like solitude.”

“Sex?”

His face burned. “Well, yes.”

“So what do you …”

“Are you always this forward with strangers?” Bern asked.

She smiled. “You're not a stranger. Life is short, Wally.”

Her sandwich appeared, and Bern ordered a garden burger. “Okay, old friend,” he said. “How did you spend
your
day?”

“I'm a staff writer for a magazine called
Theatre News
.”

“Oh. I'm sorry. What I said before … I don't really have a gripe against editors.”

“It's okay.” She touched his arm. “Naturally, the old hands get the plum assignments and reviews—
Vertical Hour
,
The Coast of Utopia
. I get the off-off-off stuff. But last week I got to meet Wallace Shawn—the lispy guy in all those Woody Allen movies? Another Wally! That was exciting. And the editors let me do a capsule review of
Translations
over at the Biltmore—the Irish play? It's the leprechaun in me.”

“Hence the Guinness?”

“Cheers.” She raised her glass. “My family's roots are in Ireland. As whose aren't? Anyway, we have a small but avid readership and I write small, avid articles.”

“How long have you been in Manhattan?”

“Four years.”

Still a tourist on the island—as was he after two decades. “From?” he asked.

“New Orleans.” Before he could speak, she added, “I haven't been back since Katrina. I'd find it too devastating. I want to remember it the way it was.”

Bern mentioned the muddy bayous of his upbringing.

“Houston! So! You and me, Wally,” Kate said. “Big storms in common.”

“Moss roses?”

“Oh, my god! You should see, in my apartment—I couldn't get over it when I saw them for sale at a street market here. In January! How do they do that?”

“Boyfriend? Girlfriend?”

“Boyfriend. Sort of. A lighting technician over at the Beckett.”

“Sort of?”

“We're … volatile with each other, which is sometimes good, sometimes bad. You know? So we're on-again, off-again.”

Bern played with the coaster. Kate watched him. “Tell me, Wally. How's your hut?”