A green Mystic Oil truck rumbled past them. Garbage spilled from ripped bags on the corner. A rat scurried behind a low stone wall. Be'rn glanced down Seventh to the Vanguard. When he had first come to the city in the early 1980s, he had 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 panes of rippled 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 ofâ”
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 “maze-like 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 noticed that a shop for skin creams and facial care now occupied the high-windowed space (with old leaded frames) where Scribner's Bookstore 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 booksâ”
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 when on his own, 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 âjet set' of the eighteenth century wouldn't party any-where 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.”
“Exceptâand there's always an exceptionâthe building that houses the Pussycat, here, is over two hundred years old, a Federal-era townhouse and, as such, rather 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, a craving for distraction that came across as somewhat desperate, convinced him that his “lessons” really did delight
herâ“All
Southerners are history buffs,” she said. “You've read Faulkher, right?”âand 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-fiveâshe wouldn't come right out and say. “It's just that, what with Gary”âher man “sort of”â“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 his 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 that had risen in the attack's 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, at this point, 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, like centuries of sand in a desert. If Bern had helped Kate bore into 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 Guggenheimâ'92? â91? 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.
He didn't long now for the awkwardness of grand public occasions, preferring his sandwiches in the corners of quiet bars, but jogged by Kate's fondness for the city's tchotchkes he remembered the mystery and magic of certain moments. For Flavin's wedding the museum's inner walls were bathed with ultraviolet light, with yellows, pinks, and greens turning the corridors into rivers, the walls into warm energy. That night, Bern had felt that the building and everyone in it would lift into the air; he imagined the bride's dark hair grazing his face as they rose hand in hand into paradise, which smelled of blossoming moss roses.
The one blemish on Bern's private wall of remembrance was his ex-wife's unhappiness. Marla came from an old Houston family with conservative politics and narrow social values, yet she had always seemed easygoing and nonjudgmental-until New York. The prodigious drinking and sexual energy at art parties rattled her. She claimed she wasn't homophobic, yet Bern felt her stiffen in the presence of gays. Manhattan acted as a palette knife, scraping off the unfixed surface of her personality and revealing the coarser base underneath. A common enough story. But this isn't fair to her, Bern thought. Even in 1983, when she complained about the city's squalor, its noise and dirt and heat, its exorbitant pricesâ“Back home, for this rent, I could get the fucking Astrodome!”âhe understood that deeper currents shocked her into smashing against her surroundings, and he may have been part of the problem. Just as the city's rhythms unlocked movements in her behavior that Bern hadn't sensed before, it unleashed his latent capacities for self-absorption, obsessive work, quiet anxiety. This much he had learned about himself in twenty years: whole swamps of his quirks remained hidden from him. He had known from the first that Marla didn't have patience for his pronouncements, not the way Kate did now.
What continuing part, if any, did Bern play in Marla's mental life? A few years ago, a friend informed him that her father had died, a gentle man whom Bern had always liked, and he had given her a brief condolence call. He hadn't spoken to her since thenâover a decade now.
Remembrance. Hopeless.
Over the years since Marla's departure, he'd developed a reputation in the office as a loner, slightly off-kilter, seldom dating, seldom leaving early for the day. He worked hard, earning the firm a small, steady profit, so his job was secure. But the young guns (he was about their age when he started) with their software lingo, their gossip about Robert Venturi and postmodernism, viewed his passion for history, his “seeking the truth in building,” as quaint. Behind his back (but not so softly he didn't hear it) they called him the “Utopian.” In the coffee room, one of them would quip, “You know, Wally, eventually every utopian experiment ends in tyranny and disaster,” and they'd all crack up. Bern thought it a serious point, worth pursuing.
What he really wanted to tell them, if they had granted him the courtesy of entertaining his ideas, was that he didn't care about Utopia. From his office window he could point to billboards, tenements, distant shipping cranes, sewer pipes exposed beneath jack-hammered sidewalks, the used clothing store. He could turn and ask his colleagues, if they had ever gathered in his office to listen (as he often imagined them doing-on a pleasant late afternoon, say, the sun in bright squares on his carpet, a lazy warmth in the room), “What do the things we see around us have to do with our inner lives? Is this blandness a reflection of who we are? Or do we come to reflect the objects we live among?”
But the original young guns had all moved up or out, leaving Bern in the same old spot surrounded by fresh faces, men and women whose years he
did
now exceed. Considerably. The youngsters got the corner offices, the sexy commissions (trendy night spots, restaurants in Trump's benevolent shadow) while the nonprofits trickled down to Bern, the social service agencies in need of a bit more room, old churches looking to remodel, foundations with cash restrictions-projects for which a slow pace and a simple approach could still turn a profit for the firm, and earn Bern's bosses citizenship points throughout the community.
Lately,
function
was the firm's motivational catchword: workplace as System, with each component fulfilling its designated capacities. Bern understood function in more natural terms, as the
suffering of a process
, the way wood weathers over time, or the body experiences mild discomfort as it goes about its sweet digestive task.