Bobcat and Other Stories Part 9

"Milk the cows, feed the pigs," he said, and ducked out.

I should never have sent in those skysc.r.a.pers, I thought to myself as I fell asleep. Those are what got me the cow a.s.signment. You can feel it as you sketch plans, the drag in the hand, the worry, the Tower of Babel anxiety as the building grows too high. There ought not to be too much hubris in a plan. But this is not a simple directive either, since a plan also needs to be soaring and eccentric and confident. But still humble. A perfect architect might be like a perfect person, the soul so correctly aligned that it can ascend with humility. Humble and dashing, those two things, always and forever.

YOU COULD SAY THAT Fialta was not quite in its prime. Its reputation was fading a little, and all its surfaces tarnishing, but so beautifully that Fialta was a more romantic place than it must have been even at the height of its influence, something that could be said of Stadbakken as well. Early success as an architect and a slide into some obscurity had given his reputation a kind of legendary, old-fashioned quality, even though he was only in his late fifties. At seven o'clock, at the dimming of the next day, he stepped into the commons for our first session. He had the looks of a matinee idol in the early twilight of his career, and he seemed more substantially of the past than anybody I've ever met, so that even now, when I remember him, it is in black and white. He is wistful in my memory, staring off, imagining a building that might at last equal nature-generative and wild, but utterly organized at the heart.

That night in the commons, Stadbakken entered and said only this: "We have a new project. It's what we were all hoping for. It's a theater, along a city block in Chicago, surrounded on two sides by a small park designed by Olmsted. I'd like the theater to think about the park."

Sands and Reuben nodded, so the rest of us did as well. "Yes, well," he said, "you might as well begin." He put his hands together, in a steeple, as he stared at us-Reuben, Sands, me, Indira, and Groovy-taking each of us in briefly, and then he left.

Reuben immediately then took his position at the blackboard that was usually pushed against the wall. He and Sands began, and the rest of us very slowly joined in until Reuben had covered the blackboard with phrases, what they called patterns for the building-sloping roofs, alcoves, extended thresholds, hidden pa.s.sageways, rays of light, soulful common areas, the weaving of light and dark, cl.u.s.tering rehearsal rooms, simple hearths, thick walls, a dance hall, radiant heat, filtered light, pools of light, arrows of darkness, secret doorways. . . .

I was already developing a rule never to look at Sands, in order not to give myself away and make her nervous. But there was something in her-some combination of joy and intelligence and seriousness-that seemed unrepeatable to me. Her voice had a vaguely foreign sound to it, a rough inflection left over from someplace in the world that I couldn't quite locate. Her clothes were as plain as possible and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, all as if she were trying to overcome beauty, but this would be like lashing down sails in a high wind. You might get a hand on one stretch, but then the rest would fly away, billowing out.

At one point Reuben and Sands got into an argument. Reuben suggested that the building ought to be cloaked in some sense of the spiritual.

"Reuben," Sands said. "I'm so tired of all our plans having to be so holy. It's such a dull way to think of buildings. And especially a theater."

Reuben looked a little amused. "Maybe we're going to have to divide up again," he said.

"Divide?" said Indira, who up until now had stayed silent. When she spoke, her earrings made tiny, almost imperceptible bell sounds.

"Last year," Sands said to her, "we had to divide into those who believe in G.o.d and those who don't."

"Just like that?" I said. "You know, people spend their whole lives on this question."

"It's just for now," Sands said. "I don't think He'll hold you to it." She already knew I'd be coming with her. And I did, risking h.e.l.l for her, complaining all the way. The two of us worked in a tiny gla.s.s balcony, a little limb off of the commons. That first night Sands did most of the drawing, and I stood aside and made my suggestions, sometimes saying them more and more emphatically until she would finally draw them in. "Fine, fine," she'd say. We started over many times, a process that previously had seemed to me an indication of failure, but to Sands it was entirely normal, as if each building she called forth introduced her to other buildings it knew, and so working with her could be sort of an unwieldy process and you had to be willing to fight a little to get your way, but ultimately it was like walking into mysterious woods, everything related and fertile but constantly changing, and always there was the exhilarating feeling that one was continually losing and then finding the way.

More than anything, what I wanted was to enter into the rooms she drew, which would be like entering her imagination, that most private, far-flung place. By midnight we brought our draft to the others. It looked crazy, like big Russian circus tents connected by strings of light, like a big bohemian palace, but also very beautiful and somehow humble. I stood there while the others looked at it and felt as though I wanted to disown any partic.i.p.ation in it whatsoever, and at the same time I was quite proud.

"It's so beautiful," Groovy said. Indira and Reuben nodded. And then they showed us theirs, which was austere and mysterious, rising out of the ground like it had just awoken and found itself the last thing on earth.

And we laid out the two buildings on the table and looked at them. They seemed so beautiful, as things can that are of the imagination. One had to love these figments, so exuberant in their postures and desires, trying to a.s.sert their way into the world.

"Yours is beautiful," Sands said, softly.

"Yours is," Groovy said. "G.o.d wouldn't even come to ours. He'd go to yours."

"Definitely He would go to yours," Sands said.

"If He existed," I said.

"Now He's really mad," Groovy said, and Sands laughed a little, putting her hand like a gentle claw on my elbow. I can feel to this day her hand where it gripped my elbow whenever she laughed. Each of her fingers sent a root system into my arm that traveled and traveled, winding and stretching and luxuriating throughout my body, settling there permanently.

THE NEXT MORNING ON our way to breakfast, Reuben and I saw Indira in the distance, making her way down the path to the river that wound about Fialta. There was already a rumor floating among us that Indira was a former Miss Bombay. I couldn't imagine this; she was so serious. She had a large poetry collection in her room and an eye for incredibly ornate, stylized design. Stadbakken had set her to work immediately on the gates and doorways for the theater. Watching her now, slipping down through the fall leaves, one could see the sadness and solitude that truly beautiful women inherit, which bears them quietly along. "Hey!" Reuben surprised me by calling out, and he veered away from me without even a glance back.

A WOMAN READING IS a grave temptation. I stood in the doorway separating the commons from our tiny kitchen, named Utopia for its sheer light and warmth, and hesitated for a long moment before I cleared my throat. Sands looked up. She was wearing gla.s.ses, her hair pulled back in a dark ponytail. She said h.e.l.lo.

"What're you reading?" I asked.

"Oh, this is Vitruvius-The Ten Books of Architecture. Stadbakken lent it to me."

"It's good?"

"I suppose. He's asked me to think about the threshold."

"The threshold. That's romantic."

She stared at me. Probably men were always trying to find an angle with her. Her face was beautiful, dark and high-hearted. "What do you mean by romantic?" she said.

This was really the last thing I wanted to define at this moment. It seemed any wrong answer and all my hopes might spiral up and away behind her eyes. "Well, I guess I mean romantic in the large sense, you know. The threshold is the moment one steps inside, out of the cold, and feels oneself treasured on a human scale."

"That's pretty," she said. She was eating Cheerios and toast.

"You know, I never found out the other night where you are from," I said.

"From? I am from Montreal originally."

"You went to McGill?"

"Laval," she said.

I knew Laval from pictures in architecture books. In my books it had looked like a series of dark, wintry ice palaces. "And how did you get from there to here?" I asked.

"Stadbakken came and gave a lecture. I met him there."

My mind was at once full of the image of her and Stadbakken in her tiny, cold Canadian room, its small s.p.a.ce heater whirring out warmth, the animal skins on the floor and the bed, the two of them eating chipped beef from a can or whatever people eat in the cold, her mirror ringed with pictures of her young boyfriends-servicemen from across the border, maybe-and then of them clasped together, his age so incredible as it fell into her youth.

"Is he in love with you?" I asked.

"Not in love, no," she said. Which of course made me think that his feelings for her were nothing so simple or ba.n.a.l as love. It was far richer and more tangled in their psyches than that-some father/daughter, teacher/student, famous/struggling artist extravaganza that I could never comprehend.

And then Groovy approached, jangling her keys. Her hair had all these little st.i.tched-people barrettes in it. It was bright blond, and the little primitive people all had panicked looks on their faces, as if they were escaping a great fire. "Stadbakken wants to see you," she said to Sands.

Sands started to collect her books and her tray, and Groovy turned to me. "I heard you're taking care of those cows," she said.

"Yes. And you?"

"Trash," Groovy said. "All the trash, every day, in every room."

"That's a big job. How about you?" I asked Sands.

"She's his favorite," Groovy said.

"So, no work then?" I asked.

"Oh, it's a lot of work, trust me," Groovy said, winking a little lewdly, and then Sands smiled at me a little, and then they both left me to my breakfast.

THERE WAS A CHAIR in one corner of the commons that was highly coveted. It had been designed by one of Stadbakken's former apprentices, and it was nearly the perfect chair for reading. That night I was just about to sit in it with my copy of Stadbakken's biography when Groovy came out of nowhere and hip-checked me. She sat down. She was reading Ovid.

"Chivalry's dead," I said, and sat in one of the lesser chairs across from her.

"On the contrary," she said, settling in. "I was helping you to be chivalrous."

"Well then, thank you."

She was sucking on a b.u.t.terscotch candy that I could smell all the way from where I sat.

"How's that book?" she said.

"It's pretty interesting," I said. "Except the woman writing the book seems to have a real bone to pick with him. It's like the book's written by an ex-wife or something."

"Does he have ex-wives?"

"Four of them," I said.

"He's hard to love, I bet."

"I expect so. The book says he loves unrequited love, and once love is requited he seeks to make it unrequited."

"I see that a lot," Groovy said.

"Really?"

"Yeah, everybody loves a train in the distance."

Which is when Sands appeared. "Choo-choo," I said. Groovy smiled.

"What's up?" Sands asked. She stood behind Groovy, touching her hair, absently braiding it.

"He's lecturing me on unrequited love," Groovy said.

"What's his position?" Sands smiled at me. "Pro or con?"

"Very con," I said.

"Pro," Groovy said. "Look at him. It's obviously pro. It's practically carved in his forehead."

FIALTA DID EXIST PRIOR to Stadbakken. It was originally a large house atop a rolling hill, in which a poet of some significance lived in the late nineteenth century. Apparently Walt Whitman, both Emerson and Th.o.r.eau, Jones Very, and even Herman Melville had pa.s.sed through these walls during the years that America became what it is, when the individual stepped out of the light of its community and every life became, as Philip Larkin later said, a brilliant breaking of the bank. Stadbakken's father had been a member of this circle of friends and had bought the house from the poet in the year 1947; Stadbakken had grown up here as an only child. His parents had cherished him so fastidiously that he had no choice but to grow up to be, as his biographer put it, the ragingly immature man that he was, his inner child grown wild as the th.o.r.n.y vines that clung to the spruce down near the river.

Stadbakken went to school on the East Coast, lived for a while in New York City in his twenties, and then returned to Fialta and built his workshop here, presiding over it in his br.i.m.m.i.n.g room, up about a hundred turning wooden stairs, where I joined him every Tuesday afternoon at five. We would speak privately up here about my sketches, most of which involved Sands, about our plans for the theater, and also just about architecture in general. If you read about Stadbakken these days you will learn that as a teacher he can be offhand, blunt, manipulative, domineering, and arrogant, and though this is all true, his faults stood out in relief against the very lovely light of his generosity, like trees along a dimming horizon. He would turn his moony, moody eye on a sketch and see things I had never imagined-sunlit pools, fragrant winding gardens, gathering parties, cascading staircases. He would see people living out their lives. He would see life on earth. I would emerge from these sessions with him wanting desperately to run and run to catch up with his idea of what I might do, and in this way he created within me an ambition that would long outlast our a.s.sociation.

"WHAT I WAS THINKING," Sands was saying to me, while she leaned over our drafting table to turn on the bent-arm lamp, "was that we might bring the theater's balcony about two hundred and fifty degrees around. Wouldn't that be beautiful, and just a little strange?"

As she reached for the lamp, her body was crumpling up a map we had laid out of Chicago. "You're crumpling the map," I said.

"What?" She turned her face to me. It was riveting-dark and light in equal measure. Her skin had a kind of uneven quality to it that brought to mind childhood and all its imperfections, sun and dirt.

"Oh, nothing," I said. Would that the city be crumpled and destroyed by such a torso breaking over it-the Chicago River bursting its banks and running into the streets, the skysc.r.a.pers crashing down, the light extinguished suddenly by that gorgeous, obliterating darkness. We had until morning together to produce a plan that met a number of Stadbakken's and the client's specifications, which included these words-bold, rich, witty, and wise.

"It doesn't sound like a building," she said.

"I know, it sounds like my grandmother in the Bronx."

By the time we fell out, after finishing three reasonable drafts of interiors to show Stadbakken, it was nearly sunrise, and we went to Utopia, made ourselves cinnamon toast and coffee. I picked up the slop bucket that I set out on the kitchen floor every night with a sign above it for donations. This morning there was warm milk in which carrot shavings and potato peels and cereal and a lone Pop-Tart and some strips of cheese singles floated.

Sands accompanied me down through the field to the barn, which sat at the foot of the campus. We stood in the doorway as the shafts of sun fell through the high windows. The four cows were in their various stages-lying and dreaming and chewing and standing.

Sands stood quietly, peering at the cows. The standing cow looked back balefully.

"This one is Anna," I said. And then I introduced the rest-Ellen, Lidian, Marie. "Groovy named them for Stadbakken's former wives. She's been reading Ovid, where women are frequently turned into heifers when the men can no longer live with them, or without them."

"And now they're trapped down here forever."

"Punished for their beauty."

The cows lived so languorously from one day to the next that their being banished women seemed entirely possible. I was moving aside some hay so that I could set down the milking stool. I looked over to Sands, at her blackened form in the bright doorway. She moved then, and the sun unleashed itself fully into the barn. Daylight. For a moment Sands disappeared, but then coalesced again, this time sitting against the doorframe.

There was some silence as I struggled to elicit milk from the cow, a project that is part Zen patience, part desperate persuasion, and finally I did it. "Yay," Sands said softly. Some doves fluttered from their eaves and out the door.

"Stadbakken told me that if I wanted to build well, I should study the cows," I told her.

"What did he mean?" she asked.

"No idea."

We both stared for a moment.

"They have those short legs," I said. "Under such huge torsos."

"But good heads," she said. "They've got good, well-balanced heads on their shoulders."

"I suppose."

"Maybe he meant to make a building the way a cow would, if a cow could, not one that looks like a cow."

"So, like a barn then," I said. "Something nice."

"Maybe they're quite glamorous thinkers. Maybe something jeweled and spiritual, like a temple in India, or Turkey."

"Yes," I said. I shifted my chair to the next cow.

"Are cows monogamous?" she asked.

"Don't know, but I expect so."

"Why?"

"Look at them. They're so big and slow."