The Empire of the Dead (3 page)

“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—
conversation
. 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. “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 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—an Irish tolerance for blather?—but he didn't want to press his luck. He
didn't flatter himself he was sexy; on the other hand, he didn't want her to think him an old pedant.

A green Mystic Oil truck rumbled past them. Garbage spilled from ripped bags on the corner. A rat scurried behind a low stone wall. Bern glanced down Seventh to the Vanguard. When he had first come to the city in the early 1980s, he spent an evening in the club listening to Woody Shaw. Shaw was dead now. So was Max Gordon, the club's old owner. Ghosts of jazz. Bern remembered Shaw's drummer as ham-handed and loud.

A man in a motorized wheelchair, hunched and smoking madly, whizzed past them, nearly knocking Kate over. Bern steadied her, touching her arm. Two men in blue cotton overcoats strolled by them. “What I'm saying is, all of our daily encounters with people, even with our friends, are essentially
financial
in nature,” one man said to the other.

Kate led him up West Twelfth. She pointed to a lighted window in her building. “There. Can you see?” she said. Bern followed her gesture to the fifth or sixth story: creamy yellow light through rippled panes of glass. A wrought-iron railing just inside the window frame. Wrapped around the railing, orange blossoms. “Moss roses!” he cried.

“Welcome home,” Kate said. “Thank you, Wally. For the lesson, the tour.”

“I'm sorry, Kate. I get carried away. Pompous.”

“It was fun.”

“Sleep well.”

“You too. Forget about fire escapes, just for tonight. Dream of …”

Bern pecked her cheek and backed away.

A few days later he read in the
Times
that St. Vincent's Hospital, which had “lost money for several years,” planned to demolish its current building and erect a sleeker, more efficient facility across the street. The paper cited “New York's shrinking hospital industry”
and said that St. Vincent's old “mazelike layout,” with some rooms dating to the 1930s, had become too expensive to heat, light, and cool.

In the early afternoon, walking up Fifth to scope out a new project he had been assigned, he saw that a shop for skin creams and facial care now occupied the high-windowed space (with old leaded frames) where Scribner's Bookstore had formerly displayed its treasures. The culture had declared its priorities: vanity over history, art, and literature.

Well, Bern thought, recalling Kate's gray eyes. On one level, hard to argue.

I like solitude
. Had he really told her this? However true it was, she had tapped into a deeper reality. “Rut,” she said. “You get in a rut.” Loneliness had become a habit with him—a common enough malady, he supposed. Especially here. Especially now.

Kate had evened his keel. Nowadays, his melancholy over the rapid changes all around him was mitigated by the pleasure she took from the regular walks they made together, from “his knowledge,” she said, “of the city's many layers.”

“This talk of many layers,” he said uneasily one afternoon. “There are scads of books …”

She squeezed his arm. “But you're my
personal
Baedeker.”

“Me?” he thought. What about Lewis Mumford? E. B. White? But he held his tongue. That day with Kate, Bern worked assiduously to stem his commentary—he faced no such problem alone, but now, in her presence, he became aware that his
thinking
could be antisocial, a hostile, distancing act if it wasn't parceled out.

“Like
this
neighborhood,” Kate said abruptly, tugging his sleeve.

They had turned onto Greenwich Street, between Rector and Carlisle, just south of Ground Zero. The Pussycat Lounge. A peep show, a topless bar. “Your timing is uncanny,” Bern told Kate. “This is actually a very interesting area.”

“I knew it!”

What was he to do? It was difficult not to recede behind lectures
when she prompted him like this, encouraging his natural propensity. Like dear old Lodoli, Bern considered strolling—the cold experience of
touching buildings
—a means of learning “in blood.” “You really want to know?” he said.

“Absolutely.”

“From, say, the 1790s to about 1820, this was the poshest real estate in Manhattan.”

“Mansions?”

“Sure.”

“To-die-for clubs?”

“The jet set of the eighteenth century wouldn't party anywhere else. New York City got its start here at the southern tip of the island.” He waved his arm. “This was the home of the mercantile elite until waterfront shipping changed the dynamic.”

“Hey, Professor,” a greasy-haired man with an eight-ball tattooed on his chin called to Bern from a smoky doorway, “we got lap dances from ten bucks. Your lady friend's welcome too.”

Kate pressed close to Bern without actually touching him. He ignored the man's black chin. “A developer wants to tear all this out now.”

“Good riddance, yes?” Kate said. “Like when they cleaned up Forty-second Street.”

“Except—and there's always an exception—the building housing the Pussycat, here, is over two hundred years old, a Federal-era townhouse and, as such, unique and valuable. It's the old story. The developer claims to envision a better New York—wiping out blight, hmm? The Pussycat's owner claims to want to preserve the city's rich heritage. Up to a point, both men have a legitimate position. And of course, no one's listening to the ghosts of the old well-to-do, who gave the city its start and were swept away long ago.”

“What kind of ice cream do you like?” Kate asked. On most afternoons, despite her apparent interest in his stories, she had about a twenty-minute limit for his oratory.

“Plain vanilla, I'm afraid.”

“I could have guessed it. Let's go. I know a place just around the corner here, and it won't be crowded this time of year.”

Her bounciness, an almost desperate craving for distraction, convinced him his “lessons” really did delight her—”
All
Southerners are history buffs,” she said. “You've read Faulkner, right?”—and this helped Bern swallow
her
first principle: “No sex between us, okay, Wally? It's not an age deal, or anything.” Bern judged her to be around twenty-five—she wouldn't come right out and say. “It's just that, what with Gary”—her man—“I need a
friend
.”

“Sure,” Bern had said, wondering where the opening lay in this genteel arrangement. There was always an opening. Her solicitude had tempered his fears of unseemliness. He could be patient. In a shockingly short time, he had learned to depend on her company, as he had formerly staked his comfort on solitude.

Now, today, on Fifth Avenue, anticipating supper with Kate at the Cedar (Gary—whom Bern had not yet met—had a late evening at the theater, with rehearsals for a new play), Bern reflected on how his renewal had arrived: not with the Ann Cline book or his sketches of huts, but from the conversations Kate tripped him into, the challenge of articulating his cherished principles to a person who had never heard them before. New people! Who knew?

He wished he could share his revival with the city. Apparently, post-9/11, the thirteenth century was “in” again. Barricades. Blocky walls. The old/new urban style. He thought once more of the Freedom Tower. The prismatic glass panels planned for its base couldn't hide the
flinch
in its frame. The other day in the office, one of Bern's young colleagues had joked that, in the age of expanding terrorism, architects required military training: “Mark my words. We're going to see Rem Koolhaas marching around Rockefeller Center in a helmet and a flak jacket.”

If only the city had kept its
lightness
. Bern missed the “Phantom Towers,” the twin beams of light cast into the sky from Ground Zero, six months after the shock: a powdery afterimage of what had once existed on the spot and a public echo of the private vigils that
had taken place with candles in every neighborhood. An architecture of the imagination.

He also missed the spirit of sober whimsy visible in the attacks' immediate aftermath: for instance, the suggestion (who had made it … some artist?) that the barricades around the smoking pit be replaced by plastic piping—shifting, soft, ringed with buckets for flowers. Instead, burdened by habitual politics and the egos of celebrity architects, the site's fate had locked into a predictable pattern, with little hope of renewal.

Either way, Bern thought—vulnerability or an impregnability so forbidding even citizens felt imprisoned—suicide was the end result.

Perhaps a giant marble head of Robert Moses was the most appropriate marker for the site. Vandal planners could sneak into the area at night, swords at the ready, zoning codes hand-printed on vellum clutched to their armored bosoms. Ritual dances could be aimed at cursing the mayor. Chanting, drumming, spray-painting Jane Jacobs's face on the Power Broker's pockmarked nose, a nose the size of a motorboat.

The city's many layers. If Bern had helped Kate manage them, she had enabled him to tunnel back into and forgive himself his first reckless enthusiasms here: the art parties he'd been invited to on upper Broadway and in SoHo and Chelsea when he'd just arrived, a fresh young professional. For a few years he'd stayed active in the art scene, shyly attending openings, until the high energy of mingling with strangers finally wore him down.

He recalled Dan Flavin's wedding in the Guggenheim—'92? '91? A friend of a friend, a staffer with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, had gotten Bern an invitation to the gala because the artist's young bride, a painter, was a Texan. Bern's acquaintance thought he might know her, as if Texas were no bigger than a kitchen. The bride was stunning, tall and dark-haired in a shimmering white Isaac Mizrahi dress. All night, Bern skirted the edges of the ceremony.