The Pacific and Other Stories (11 page)

“Yes, she is,” said Fitch. “She bears up, but I’ve never seen a more wounded, deeply aggrieved woman. It’s not because she’s physically beautiful. What the hell do I care? It’s because she needs something like this, from me, from us, from everyone. Not that it would or could be a substitute, but as a gesture.”

“A substitute for what?” Gustavo asked.

“Her husband.”

“Her husband left her?”

“Her husband was in the south tower when it came down,” Fitch said. “For Christ’s sake, they’ll never even find the bodies. Vaporized, made into paste. What can she think? What can she feel?”

Gustavo looked away to his left, at the wall where he had drawn some lines and written some letters. “How old is she?”

“I don’t know. Early thirties? Middle? Her parents are old. The mother has that look in her eye, as if she knows that her time is close. I’m doing it as much for the parents as for the child.”

Still on his knees, Gustavo closed his eyes. After a while, he rose to his feet. “To me,” he said, “you cannot pay anything. Don’t protest. Nothing for this job. I’ll work with you day and night. Let me talk to the men.”

“No, don’t tell them. They have enough troubles of their own. They’re not in a position to do this. I am.”

“Fitch, they have honor as much as you. They’ll decide for themselves. And that fucking Scotsman, he owes it to everybody and the world.

“Listen up!” Gustavo called, a colloquialism he had embraced with great enthusiasm, and that he spoke with authority and promise.

T
HE RHYTHM OF THEIR WORK
in the month that followed was like a rolling wave. In hour upon hour of tedium, of scraping, sanding, sweeping, measuring
and remeasuring, driving nails, turning screws, drilling holes, fitting things, smoothing plaster, and running wire, Fitch saw himself, as if from a trance, atop a wave rolling across the sea, the wind lifting droplets from curling edges and blowing them back like a scarf trailing in the slipstream of a car.

Their normal conversation was curtailed until they said almost nothing. Even the Scotsman, whose chief work requirement was to argue with Fitch, Gustavo, and everyone else, was quiet. He let his paintings stand enormously in his cold loft until the smell of linseed oil and turpentine was taken by the drafts and pinpoint leaks beyond the loft and blown over Long Island and out to sea, and as the paintings rested in darkness, the Scotsman worked in Brooklyn Heights.

The only respite was when something was setting or drying, or materials were late in coming. They scheduled the bathrooms in such a way that one was always available for use. They scheduled the rooms so that they never lacked a place for a row of cots. One man’s job was purely cleanup and housekeeping. He took food orders, served the take-out meals on two doors resting on sawhorses, and carried out construction waste and debris twenty times a day. So that the food would be varied, he went round-robin from one type of restaurant to another. He bought compact discs and ran Fitch’s music system, brought from Chelsea, like a disc jockey, taking requests. They might have a Greek dinner and afterward work to Celtic music, or a Japanese lunch followed by an afternoon of rock and roll. Everything was possible, because some of the people on the floors below were away, and the others were almost deaf.

Another man did nothing but deliver materials. Whenever he arrived in the truck, as many men as needed would come downstairs to unload and carry. It went fast, and he would set out again. When Gustavo was not supervising, he did the fine-work. Fitch set up a desk, his two cell phones, a bank of battery chargers, a computer, and a neatly shelved library of plans, telephone directories, catalogs, and ledgers. To get a break on materials, he would, while in the physical presence of the supplier, state the purpose of the job.

For example, he might walk into the marble place, which was in northern Queens and surrounded by chop shops and piles of salt. He was a good
customer, but nothing like the big commercial contractors who did floor after floor of new office towers. “Deansch,” he might say.

“Hey, Fitch, how are you?”

“Great, Deansch, great.”

They liked him. Among other things, although he knew costs and never had to overpay, he did not have the power to make them slice so thin that they couldn’t eat, and he always paid instantly, something almost unheard of in the contracting business. Now, however, though they didn’t know it, he did have the power to make them slice it thin, so thin, in fact, that it was inside out.

“What can I do for you?” Deansch asked. “Are you in U.N. Plaza yet?”

“Eighteenth of March.”

“We’ve got the marble when you’re ready for it.”

“Now we’re on a small job in Brooklyn.”

“Whataya need?”

“The ivory Carrara.”

“The best we have and the best there is.”

“Two thousand square feet.”

“No problem. We’ve got it.”

“You have to cut me a deal on it.”

“I’ll consider it part of the U.N. Plaza pricing. That’ll drop it from sixteen to thirteen-fifty per square foot. That’s a deal.”

“I need better than that.”

“Better than that?”

“We’re doing this job for free, all of us. No one is getting paid. We’re working eighteen-hour days, sleeping there.”

Deansch tightened. “For who?”

“For a woman who lost her husband when the World Trade Center went down.”

“What’s her name?” Deansch asked, already struggling within himself.

“Lilly. Does it matter?”

Deansch shook his head, rocked it really, pursing his lips as he thought. “No,” he answered. Then he looked up at Fitch, and said, “Take what you need.”

Fitch answered him with a quick nod, which was all that was necessary, and within minutes the trucks were being loaded.

I
N THE DAYS OF FURIOUS WORK
, and the nights, when they labored in the blaze and heat of lights, something arose that made it easy. It was not merely a rhythm or a sense of progress. Nor was it the unusual speed of the work, nor the caffeine, nor the music, both of which powered them on all of their jobs and neither of which was capable of sustaining them as now they were sustained, power and perseverance flowing so voluminously and steadily that they were lifted from their fatigue, lifted above their difficulties, just as Fitch had imagined, as if on a wave in the wind. Such waves can without effort lift even immense ships, because the power of the wave comes from the great mass and depth of the sea.

Without the slightest hesitation, Fitch’s men had refused pay, committed to staying twenty-four-hour days, and started immediately. The weeks in which they would work this way would be weeks in which they would not see their families, and it was not as if they and their families had no troubles to speak of that a month without pay would make worse. Fitch had no children and therefore no need to keep what he had or to come out ahead. They did. These people, who had less power over their own lives than anyone Fitch had ever known, were the most generous he had ever encountered.

Wives, mothers, aunts, and cousins would show up to serve meals of rice and beans, fish, chicken, vegetables. The many children in tow, who were quiet, charming, brown-eyed, would take a turn at sawing, sweeping, or painting, their fathers’ hands often guiding them. Fitch paid their fathers well, but upon seeing this he resolved to pay them better, especially now that he had rid himself, or would shortly, of his carefully accumulated savings and, following upon that, of the need or desire to save.

A lapsed but believing Catholic, he had not been to mass since mass had lapsed out of Latin, but what happened in the weeks of February and March made up for the thousands of masses he had missed. The mass existed, in his perhaps heretical view, to keep, encourage, and sustain a sense of holiness, and to hold open the channels to grace that, with age and discouragement,
tend to close. Witness to those who had little sacrificing what they had, to their children contributing to the work in their way, and to the fathers’ pride in this, Fitch felt the divine presence as he had not since the height of his youth. The less he had and the closer to death he felt, the more intense, finer, and calmer the world seemed. It had been a long time since he had been on the ocean on a day of sun and wind, but now he and all his men were lifted and traveling on the selfsame wave.

T
HIS WOULD HARDLY BRING BACK
for Lilly what had been taken from her, and, knowing it, he would work furiously into March, as if it might. March broke with pale sun, spells of warmth, and respite from the snow and bitter cold. Sunlight now flooded in from the great airy spaces over the harbor and the mouth of the East River, from between the buildings in the financial district, from east, south, and west, and even by echo from the colder and bluer north.

For long periods they forgot Lilly and forgot their purpose, as if the driving force of what they were doing was merely what they were doing and its driving force, self-sustaining, self-feeding, and rounding in perfection. The work itself became the object, and never in their lives had they done better. Never had the walls been straighter or smoother, never had the plaster been whiter, never had the wood been closer joined, never had the joints been tighter, the colors more intense, the proportions more artful.

Georgy had been absent except to measure, and when he arrived with his cabinetry they had no need to comment as one might when someone else has made his best effort but not quite hit the mark, for what Georgy had done was so self-evidently beautiful at first sight that their quiet admiration was the greatest praise. And when they fitted it all in, something that normally would have taken four or five days but which now they did in a day, and when it was combined with the appliances that Fitch and the appliance dealer had bankrupted themselves to supply, the men kept on saying, “Look at that! Look at that!” because nowhere in New York or perhaps anywhere else was there a better job.

This was repeated in rosewood paneling, in limestone baseboards, in
nickel, marble, granite, and unobtrusive plaster molding that physics said could not be whiter, purer, or more like snow in bright sun. It was apparent in the ironwork, brass work, and glazing. The solid walnut doors were two and a half inches thick, with the same brass hardware and hinges as in the White House, and they closed more smoothly and quietly than the doors of a Rolls-Royce. The lighting had been planned by a theatrical lighting designer who had worked for free and delayed a Broadway opening (“So what?” the lighting designer had said), and its effects seemed to double the space. It shone here or there with such clarity and purity, or softly and gently, that moving from room to room was like passing through the seasons.

Although these attributes, some massive, some almost undetectable, were of interest in themselves and had taken sacrificial labor and care to create, the remarkable achievement was that they were all subsumed quietly into something greater. In the place Fitch and his men built, the trees and the garden below were pulled in, as were the water and the light, and the openness of the view in all its intricacy. It was a refuge, and yet it was not closed. It was a fortress, and yet it was light and airy. It was luxurious, and yet it was modest and austere. Everything was in perfect balance, contending forces in abeyance, as had been intended, and when on Sunday, the seventeenth, they withdrew, leaving the surfaces polished and perfect, they knew much more than that the next day they would be going to the big job at U.N. Plaza and would once again be earning. They knew that they had made something beautiful, and, because of this, they were content.

O
N
M
ONDAY
, the eighteenth of March, 2002, Lilly arrived at the apartment late in the morning. Her train into Grand Central had been delayed, and the Number Four to Borough Hall had sat on the track for twenty minutes, its doors opening and closing as inexplicably as if they were responding to radio signals from Mars.

The sky was delft blue, and broken clouds spread across it were touched with yellow as the sunlight passed through them. In the playground at the foot of Columbia Heights, scores of young children worked the swings and bars as if these were the machines in a factory run by monkeys. Half
were watched by their mothers and the other half by nannies who took benches according to nationality, with the world appearing largely Jamaican. As Lilly walked by, she saw a little girl on a sprung horse, a child of no more than two, with round red cheeks and marvelously intelligent eyes. Her grief flooded in—for the husband she had lost, for the child they would never have.

She could not appear to Fitch with her eyes red, so she veered onto the Promenade. She would look up at her apartment to see if they had made any progress on the outside, although there was not much you could tell from the outside. When she got there, she looked first across the river at the skyline, to the space that had been occupied by the World Trade Center, and where now there was only light. And then she looked at her building. They had done the roof garden. Instead of the rusting iron railing, now there was a limestone balustrade. She could see the tops of stone planters in which were rooted elegant topiaries. And where a toupee-like edge of crumbling tar had lapped over the roof, now there were heavy copper gutters and downspouts.

Was this her building? She had to check, counting from the big apartment house, remembering details from the garden and the lower floors. It was, but her windows had been replaced. They were beautiful, French. Fitch had not been supposed to replace the windows. She was alarmed, thinking that perhaps she had been cheated. And she drew in a sharp breath when, looking closer, she noticed that the sills and lintels, which had been wood in dubious condition and were supposed to have been painted, were now the same taupe limestone as the balustrades of the roof garden.

Almost in a panic, she made her way around the apartment house and then south along Columbia Heights. Out of politeness, she rang her buzzer to let them know she was coming. She saw that her mailbox was brass, the buzzer solid and new. Even her nameplate was elegantly engraved. No one answered. She rang again, and then, like someone who is worried and ready to be hurt, pushed her key into the lock. As she went up the stairs, she heard no hammering, no saws, no radios, no machines, the things that might have drowned out the buzzer, which, although she did not know it, was now a bell.