Читать книгу Physics of Sunset - Jane Vandenburgh - Страница 12

8

Laws of Return

ONE SUMMER ALEC and Gina moved with the kids up from Oxford Street; then almost immediately his parents came. The new house, built only a quarter mile from the strike-slip fault, was bolted to bedrock, as he pointed out to Stu and Viv. Its idiom was postmodern, Alec said. Its materials, he told them, were Wrightian. He enunciated as if his parents were hard of hearing. The two of them were small and sweet and clean; they blinked in stupid unison. The house had been shot for Architectural Record, he embarrassed himself by mentioning—this didn’t impress them either.

The house was simply perplexing to his father, hidden as it was up a drive in the center of a block so it didn’t even seem to sit on a real street and did nothing therefore to proclaim itself. Alec could see Stuart struggling to find adequate words of praise, saying it was unlike any house he’d ever seen, more like an art museum with the big rooms and Gina’s work put out on the floor around.

“What’s the matter with them, Stu?” he heard his mother whisper. “That they don’t own furniture? No furniture, no drapes or curtains, but they have these naked women sitting on the floor with their legs spread wide?” These were abstract landscapes, actually, hills, valleys, new mountains, the more ancient ones. What threw Viv off was that Gina called the pieces, which were done in rough plaster, The Great White Nudes.

It was August, yet his parents went around bundled up indoors, shivering dramatically . Alec once found them sitting in his car, where they had the motor on and the heater going, reading the travel pages of the newspaper as if plotting their escape. They found their son residing with his family in a hardship post, Stu said, in his most smug and jocular tone, the one he got with his degree at Yale. This was Alec’s father’s little joke; he repeated it to Viv nearly every single day. Ulysses S. Grant’s proclaiming San Francisco a hardship post meant he and his men got extra pay when they were stationed at the Presidio. Stuart found this fact by browsing in Alec’s life of Grant. Stuart was also reading whole stories from the Chronicle aloud to Viv at breakfast so they could laugh together at the ridiculousness of Californians, never mind these were Gina’s people. “Oh look, Stu!” Viv said one day. “That must be the mayor!” They were on Telegraph Avenue on their way to a concert at Zellerbach Hall. She was pointing at a barefoot, obese, homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk.

Alec’s parents, who once traveled and were sophisticated, now spent their time whispering between themselves about anything unfamiliar—what was the strange orange meat in the Chinese food? They shielded their eyes dramatically from the glare of the afternoon sun glancing off the too-bright bay. Because the house followed the hill’s slope, there were a few steps between the two main rooms. Alec’s parents couldn’t go up or down between the living room or dining room without remarking upon these steps, always in new surprise. More disturbingly, Viv had begun to keep her pocketbook clasped tightly to her side indoors, as if she expected to meet muggers in the hallway.

“That’s Mount Tam, Grandma,” Cecily pointed out helpfully. “And that’s the Golden Gate Bridge.” Cecily was so little then, her beauty seemed heartbreakingly pure to Alec—why didn’t her grandparents seem to really care for her? Had they become utter narcissists, entered the mirror world in which no one else any longer exists? They did now look almost exactly alike. Vivian couldn’t get over Cecily’s long blond hair, kept asking and asking when she was getting it cut, couldn’t believe her granddaughter was allowed to keep rats as pets.

“Oh, I know, dear,” Viv sniffed. “And believe me, by my age, if you’ve seen one mountain, you’ve seen them all.”

His folks sat overbundled with their hands clasped in their laps, bolt upright on the plain, straight-backed Stickley furniture in an attitude of bland endurance. Alec squinted, tried to see the place as they saw it, a trick he used with clients: a house built of rocks and metal and glass, as cold and blinding as a snowstorm. Home, on their tree-lined street in Queens, people sat out on the stoop in shirtsleeves on a summer evening to escape the air-conditioning. Home, there were lightning bugs, robins, real blue jays, the air was thickly humid. In Queens light was soft, old green trees overarched the pavement. The ice-cream truck would be along and Stuart would buy her one.

This was in 1987, a couple of years before the earthquake completely wrecked the transportation systems of the Bay Area, both freeways and public transit. Peter had just been born. Alec had never known such joy as that event aroused—their little family now was mathematically balanced in a way it hadn’t been before, and Gina had the second child she so desperately wanted, the baby who canceled the bad reproductive luck she thought she might have inherited from the unbalanced equation that was her parents’s tragic lives.

The house faced the bay, one blank wall sitting recessed behind an apron of glass panels facing the fall-away into the steeper part of the canyon. Alec called the entry the Water Room. He remembered the words etched on the first sketches he ever did of this house. The room preexisted in a Platonic sense, it seemed to him—he had simply been always striding ahead into the future in order to discover himself within the room he would one day make.

The room was positioned to catch sharp-edge morning light that poured in as the sun rose over the shaggy treetops. Light pooled, spilled back into the house from a line of interior dormers that ran just below the roofline. The floor was slate, stepped up from the entry door along the angle of the hillside. You stood in the entryway and saw the little creek foreshortened as it came at you, its streambed lined with rocks. The water was then pumped back up again out of the pond, which—he wished he could tell his mother this and have her understand him—said something about what might be known about eternity.

In this pond Carlo’s girlfriend, who then became his wife, had planted water lilies. Julie Empy was a landscape architect who had trained with Garrett Eckbo. The entry was an empty box. It held nothing but light and air and the sound of the flowing water. It was in this pond that Alec kept his three meaty carp, large fish that were each astonishingly individual and petlike. The arc of their flashing colors, a yellow gold and a reddish gold and a white that was opalescent, often made Alec feel he was present at a moment of creation.

His mother frowned at the whiskered ones, waved her tiny hand before her face as if to wipe the wet away. She was terrified of rats, fish, all of wild nature, of snakes and bugs and of the savage giantness of a redwood tree. This was the reason Alec and his sister were never allowed a dog when they were growing up, nor a cat, nor even a parakeet. Water running within a house? Viv asked, the baby might totter in and drown.

Alec’s house was as pure as koi, he consoled himself. His real father might have admired it had he lived past 1974. His true spiritual father—Alec often almost actually believed this—was the visionary Louis Kahn, the most important American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright, as he tried to instruct his parents. They nodded, their faces poised and blank to show they weren’t actually listening. Why was he not Alec Ben Kahn or Alec Son of Rothko (who was born killed) or of Charles Moore, with whom Alec had briefly worked when each of them was at Cal?

His parents liked Alec’s house, they said—it just wasn’t particularly homey.

“Homey?” Alec choked. This was years later, years even after his father died, but Alec found he was still stung by his father’s saying this. He was on the phone to Betsy. They were laughing at their parents. Laughing at their parents was the way the two of them had always kept themselves from going straight to Queens to kill them.

“What can I tell you, Alec?” Betsy asked. “It’s ten, eleven years and she’s still fussing about the wall-to-wall. She thinks you don’t have drapes because you ran out of money.” Betsy and her husband lived out in Riverhead. Betsy and Ben had the wall-to-wall. “She worries people across the way could look in and see her use the toilet.”

“Homey?” Alec said again. Tears of sick mirth stood in his eyes. Alec objected to just exactly that blend of schmaltz and wishfulness. The experience of home or homeland might come to those who were particularly blessed. Jews, however, had such a talent for exile that the memory of loss seemed to him to be embedded within their bones. Everyone in Berkeley, aside from Gina, had moved here from somewhere else, many from far-off countries.

Alec hated the way a word like “home” or “family” was warped the way a logo was by computer graphics, twisted, whizzed away by clients who were veering off into the purest state of self-delusion. Clients came to him insisting on a study in which they would never read a book or even manage a moment to quietly sit. Everyone these days was too busy being gone, out making money or writing the screenplay for the movie of the story of their own lives.

Alec was a big man, nearly six feet three. He often scaled rooms outward from the sense of his own anatomy—he made rooms big enough to accommodate his stride and physical restlessness. This was to relieve him of the Queensish feeling of having the ceiling come down on him. He and Gina furnished the rooms of their house slowly, sparingly, with a few good things that having little kids wouldn’t immediately wreck. Alec needed the sense of open spaces, needed to continue to witness the terrain and vistas, access, egress. These were what Moore called the spiritual matters of architecture, those concerning path and axis. How people might come and go within a room, how they might actually sit and breathe and read and be alive in one.

Try as they did, his parents were too old to ever learn the map of his house and so seemed to wander in that place as if they’d been lost for days.

Alec had always been a good student, never got in much trouble. He was a citizen, a mensch, had always been their good and loving son who was dutiful and never fucked around much but had kept his head down and had worked hard and had achieved much of what he’d set out for himself—his work and getting to see something of the world. He married, had two children, including the son that would carry on his father’s, okay goyish, name. He was hardworking, a good provider, had stayed married when it might have been easy enough for him to have found the reasons not to, but all this just wasn’t homey enough for Stu and Viv? It occurred to him he may have stayed with Gina in order to somehow spite them.

The two always subtly blamed Gina for whatever lack of the domestic touch they missed, usually something as cornball as tea towels embroidered with the Hebrew letters “chai,” or that there were the wrong birds on this side of the Rockies. This was because Gina was an orphan and wasn’t Jewish.

Or there may have been some tiny precipitating event, something about how Gina had once worn a sheer nightie down the hall on 219th to use the toilet without pulling a bathrobe on—his parents were both dumbstruck by her immodesty. “Oh hi, folks,” she said sleepily as she passed the open door to their bedroom. She was full-bellied, hugely pregnant, exhibited no shame in it.

“What can I tell you?” Viv told Alec’s sister. “She’s from California .” Betsy, who may have been ambivalent before, became, at that moment, Gina’s most staunch defender.

The house was acclaimed both for the purity of its design and for the theoretical efficiency of its energy use. It was heated by a system of water pipes running beneath the hardwood floors. The designer of this particular heating system was Frank Lloyd Wright, but Alec’s parents had already dismissed him from any importance since, unlike Kahn, he lacked the requisite Jewishness.

The house was cold because its systems worked imperfectly—Alec went back to the drawing board, above which he had pushpinned this, his own carefully written-out motto which was DON’T SELL THE BIKE SHOP, ORVILLE. He worked patiently. Alec was nothing if not patient, if patient in a few matters only . This was one: the time and money and psychological distance it took to build a real house, a real house being one that actually deserved to exist and take up space in an already too-crowded world. A real house was one that had achieved its own perfection. Often it was very simple. Alec didn’t actually believe in perfection but thought of it as he did the Unified Field Theory—he’d bet a lot of money the Unified Field was never going to happen.

Alec saw the house broken back down again into its elements: the softest graphite riding the smoothest sheet of vellum. As long as Alec lived and drew breath, there was still the possibility of actually achieving an exquisite balance of planes and shapes and formulae, and this lay in the same place off where the quantum met the Theory of Relativity, Hawking and Einstein touched, meshed. Everyone would know the moment though no one would at first believe it, just as Newton didn’t actually believe anyone sound of mind could believe in the Laws of Gravity. The truth in math could, however, be proved and proved and proved. Jerry Bloom said they’d most likely find the Theory of Everything by looking in an unlikely place. How Alec loved all math, particularly geometry and trigonometry, how he hoped to believe these manmade languages spoke of rules that accurately described the structure of the universe, as gravity did, in that it could be proved and proved and proved. It was this he loved, the theoretical rush of a torrent of light just as it struck the three-dimensional.

He imagined the house just as he had once dreamed it: a simple set of luminous volumes floating behind the oaks as seen from the road downhill. The house showed only on the private side, turning its back to the public street in a manner that was both Mexican and Japanese. Descartes looped up around the hill behind his house, dead-ending at the Blooms’ and the Chakravartys’, whose houses sat on the cul-de-sac.

He saw the house to be as elemental as the perfect chair he had not yet designed but might one day, the old joke being that the most brilliant of architects was incapable of making a chair that not only looked good in a room but was actually comfortable for a human being to sit in. A chair had every physical and aesthetic problem pared down, reduced to simple form: context, balance, materials, scale, all the problems in the physics of stress and of fabrication. Most chairs, if not purely imitative, were simply breathtaking in their ugliness. The comfortable chair often looked as ridiculous as a Laz-E-Boy.

Perfecting the systems took Alec and Carlo almost eighteen months. Carlo was a saint; he had also trained at M.I.T. in structural engineering. The floorboards came up; the pipes were then relaid. He and Gina and the kids camped out on the lower level during the mess of reconstruction—this space would later replace the place on McGee Avenue that she was using as her studio. McGee was Gina’s house when she was growing up.

Finally, the concrete was poured again, the floorboards reset. It was a wonderful house, was acclaimed as such. People wanted one—this surprised him since Alec had such a generalized contempt for so much of the taste of his fellow man. He and Carlo went on to build similar houses in the hills of Oakland and Orinda. There was one in Marin County, another larger one faced north in Encino, overlooking the San Fernando Valley, this one done for a movie star. The glow at night could be seen for miles.

The Baxter House had been perfected, but that ruined first visit was the last trip his father ever made to Berkeley, a place so Bad for the Jews that Stuart would evermore refuse to come.