One Day the Wind Changed (19 page)

“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 babbled 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 White would find charming, but for James they were filled with too many windows, which ruined 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 Chelsea Hotel. 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. He had witnessed elsewhere the abrupt 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? He was 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.”

“Sorry, Wally. 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 amuse 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? A little late in your case, maybe.”

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

“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
.”

“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 twenty years. “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?”

“You laugh,” he said, “and of course it's just a fantasy. But there's a certain
rightness
to the notion.”

She
did
laugh at him.

“I'm serious,” he said. “A return to origins. What better place for it? And it needn't be crude-the savage
box
most people picture when they hear the word ‘hut.”‘

“What do you mean?”

“I mean …” Should he? “Where
is
your apartment, Kate? Can I walk you home? I'll show you on the way.”

“Wally. Are you a weirdo-psycho-creep?”

“Not weirdo-psycho.”

“No rolling in feces? That sort of thing?”

“Not lately”

“Okay. Let me finish this.”

Her apartment was on West Twelfth—part of an old condo, she said, that had been partitioned into hotel rooms and rental units with community baths. On the way, she mused, “I know what your trouble is, Wally. If you're thinking about Adam and Eve and
preposterous
and giants on the earth, but you're spending your days with fire escapes, well then, you're bound to feel a bit…”

“Displaced?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps. And the closing of Glasco's. But—”

She laughed. “You
do
like to talk, don't you? For a quiet sort.”

A silent beat. Then: “Lodoli—the guy I told you about?—he liked to walk with his apprentices, looking at buildings. He saw his ‘lessons' as a series of strolls and
talks-conversatio
. His favorite mode was the allegory.”

“And yours?”

“The apology, I think.” He stumbled over a curb. “Among Lodoli's students were young women. Unusual for that day and time.”

“Is that what
I
am tonight? Your student?”

Was she flirting? Was
he?

“Not at all. But here,” Bern said. “Here we are.”

They had come to the Presbyterian Church. Bern took Kate's shoulders and positioned her in front of the grand entrance. At first, she winced at his touch, but then she seemed to settle, become malleable. “All right. Imagine this building made of wood instead of stone,” he said. “Slender tree trunks framing the entry, and the arch at the top formed by flexible willow limbs, curved and tied together. Can you see it?”

“Yes!” Kate said.

“Good. And the ornamentation, the busy carvings above the doorway—like foliage. In the spring, when the rooted willows sprout new life—”

“Is
that
where the design comes from? Those Gothic monsters in Europe?”

“It's a theory. So: simple wooden construction-the hut-as prototype for our greatest creations. The echo of origins. It needs to be there, like an old message in a bottle, for anything we make to have meaning.”

“At Ground Zero?”

“Anywhere,” Bern said. Lodoli would object. Apparently, the lost master was anything
but
a traditionalist. Still, if you love him, you must fight him, Bern thought-how else to keep the mental conversation going?

Kate nodded at Bern but looked uncertain.

“You're cold. I'll get you home,” Bern said.

They strolled quietly up West Eleventh. Near Gene's, the Italian restaurant where Bern had eaten lunch the other day, they came upon a clump of small, mossy stones just off the sidewalk. “What's this?” Kate said.

Twenty or so jagged markers in the shadows, behind a tiny iron gate. “A cemetery,” Bern said. “Of the old Spanish and Portuguese synagogue. Some of the city's first Jewish immigrants are buried here. In fact, this is one of the oldest graveyards in Manhattan.”

“It's lovely.”

“Yes, it's a favorite spot of mine. I walk by here every day.”

They squinted to read the dates on the stones. 1683. 1734. 1825.

“This plot used to be much larger,” Bern explained, “but city commissioners ran a road through West Eleventh and cut it in half about 1830 or so, disturbing a few unlucky souls.”

He started to point out the unusual number of relief carvings on the headstones-remarkable, given the Jewish aversion to graven images. A snipped-off flower (life cut short), the Angel of Destruction waving a flaming sword at Gotham. He stopped himself No more Teacher for tonight, he decided. Why
did
he go on so, hiding behind his moldy old facts? To protect his thin and shabby inner life? From what? Kate seemed to enjoy him in a smirky sort of way-her Irish tolerance for blather?-but he didn't want to press his luck. He didn't flatter himself that he was sexy; on the other hand, he didn't want her to think him just another old pedant.