by Mark Helprin
“It’s so noisy in here,” she commented as they entered. “How will we be able to hear?”
“It’s the vaulted ceilings,” Fitch said, leading her forward, “but if you sit at the far end of the oyster bar itself, the effect almost vanishes.”
“Oh,” she said, stopping short. “I can’t eat shellfish; I have to sit at a table.”
“No no, I know, I thought that might be the case,” Fitch told her as they moved toward the quieter place. “You can order anything here that you can have at a table, and I won’t have any shellfish.”
“Please do,” she said. “Have whatever you want. It’s not a problem. I have, in my time, eaten every kind of shellfish. I love it. But my husband came from an Orthodox family, and we just never. … I stopped eating shellfish.”
It was remarkably quiet at the end of the bar. They sat and opened their menus. Fitch, who knew what he was going to have, put his menu down almost immediately. “Take your time,” he told her. “I already know. I’ve come here—in fact, to this seat—a lot.”
She studied the menu with the triple difficulty of someone avoiding shellfish at the Oyster Bar, trying to hurry, and not being clear about who would pay. Because of these multiple confusions, it took her some time, and as time passed she felt embarrassed, and she, Lilly, turned the color of a rose.
He was obliged to look at her at intervals to see if she had finished and was ready, and he spent as much time looking at her as he spent looking away. He had known that her eyes were blue, but he had not known how blue. Behind her polished lenses they were exquisitely beautiful, he thought, not merely because of their extraordinary Prussian-blue color but because of the intelligence and spirit they betrayed in their quick and alert motion. Even when immobile, they seemed ready to move, to judge, compare, and take in fact and sensation from the center and from the periphery.
He could not possibly love her the way her beauties invited him to love her, because he was too old, and because she had just lost her husband, whom she loved, and she would not, she could not, be ready until Fitch was not merely too old, but far too old. Still, when he looked at the several tiny crescents at the corners of her mouth as she smiled, at her lips pursed or moving in speech, and at her hands floating gently, sometimes, in pantomime, he felt a rush of love and contentment that he then had to suppress.
He was good at suppression, having learned in Manhattan’s expensive neighborhoods that young, elegant, and beautiful women turned from the gaze of a man who, no matter how intelligent, worthy (perhaps), and admiring, had paint on his clothes, his watch, and his glasses, and who was dressed to work with his hands. And he could suppress his desires because he was an honorable man. And he did, though, aware that he was studying her and forcing himself not to look too hard or too long, she had, to her own surprise, no objection.
A pound of oyster crackers was already in a basket in front of them. “That’s a great deal of food right there,” she said. “I’ll have a small fish chowder and a glass of white wine.”
“I’ll have the same,” Fitch told the waiter, “but with a beer, not wine.” He opened his briefcase to take out copies of the contract. “It’s ready for signing. We can get that done today.”
“I can’t,” she told him. “I didn’t transfer funds or bring a check.”
“You don’t need a check.”
“What about the deposit? Don’t you require a twenty-five-percent deposit?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t need a deposit.”
“You don’t? What about materials?”
“We’re coming off other jobs,” Fitch said. “We’re hardly short of funds. Don’t worry.”
She had not done enough of this kind of thing to know how unusual this was. Her father would have been—and would be later—very suspicious, but she was not.
“And, about materials, that’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about. We have a warehouse where we store our materials, tools, and trucks. We do a lot of expensive projects, and most of the time the clients have no way to use excess material, so they ask us to take it. Because we bring particular types of marble, tile, fixtures, moldings, whatever, from job to job, most of the time this is to our advantage. But if we go to another kind of job where we don’t use that exact set, we have no room in our warehouse for the things we might need.”
“So you want to offload it on me?”
“No. We can sell it back, but with the restocking fee and prices for broken lots, it works out to the same thing as buying new material at a lesser quality, and it’s an accounting nightmare. After your place, we’re going to U.N. Plaza to do two entire floors, and the materials are specific to that job. We’ve got to empty our warehouse, so there may be opportunities for advantageous substitutions.”
This was totally untrue: his warehouse was too well managed to be overfull. He simply intended to give her, at his own expense, a far better job than she could afford, and he did not want her to know that he had done so.
“I’ve made an extensive list, with cut sheets and full specifications, of these potential substitutes. It has only upgrades, as you’ll see. And if you don’t like anything, we’ll pull it out and go with the original.”
“You can do that?”
“There’s no structural work. We can do that.”
“But you might have to repaint a room, or redo a floor or something. Wouldn’t that injure your profit?”
“No,” said Fitch, quite honestly, for on this job he would have no profit as commonly understood. He would have, as commonly understood, a loss. “You’ll see in the contract that if any substitution, or all, will not meet your approval, you can require us at absolutely no additional expense to install the original, to meet the contract specifications exactly.”
Taking out a little leather portfolio, she opened its red Florentine cover and, shuffling the pages, said, “I’m going to be away until Monday, March eighteenth. You might put a lot in, in a month, that I might make you pull out.”
“Not to worry,” Fitch told her. “In a month, we’ll be mainly setting up, doing demolition, the systems rough-ins, framing, and administration—permits, ordering, receiving, inspections, all that kind of thing. It’s a five-month job.”
“My father said six months. Can you do it in five?”
“I’m going to put a lot of men on it. You’ll see that there’s a penalty clause. We’ll have to refund to you five hundred dollars for every day past the completion date.”
“And what do I pay for every day that you’re early?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“That’s right.”
They were looking at one another directly, eyes locked as if purely because they were in the crux of a business negotiation. Anyone viewing them from nearby, however, might have thought that they had fallen into the lovers’ traction that one sees so often in New York, mainly in restaurants, as gardens and bowers are scarce.
“It sounds so disadvantageous to you. It makes me nervous. Do you understand?”
“Of course I do. Look, I don’t know what happened to the country, but everybody tries to screw everybody else. More so than in my father’s day, more so than when I was a child, more so than when I was a young man, more so than ten years ago … more so than last year. Everybody lies, cheats, manipulates, and steals. It’s as if the world is a game, and all you’re supposed to do is try for maximum advantage. Even if you don’t want to do it that way, when you find yourself attacked from all sides in such fashion, you begin to do it anyway. Because, if you don’t, you lose. And no one these days can tolerate losing.”
“Can you?” Lilly asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Tell me.”
He hesitated, listening to the clink of glasses and the oceanlike roar of conversation magnified and remagnified under the vaulted ceilings of the dining rooms off to the side. “I can tolerate losing,” he said, “if that’s the pr
ice I pay, if it’s what’s required, for honor.”
“Honor,” she repeated.
“Honor. I often go into things—I almost always go into things—with no calculation but for honor, which I find far more attractive and alluring, and satisfying in every way, than winning. I find it deeply, incomparably satisfying.”
“How do you stay in business,” she asked, “in Manhattan?”
“We do a lot of work in Brooklyn,” he answered. “Look, although I’m not as rich as some other contractors, I always have a steady supply of work, and usually it goes well. Sometimes we have a loss, but we’re paid back in reputation and in pride in what we do and how we do it.”
“I know,” said Lilly, “from last time.”
“Take the contract home. You don’t have to sign it now. Bring it to a lawyer.”
“My father’s a lawyer.”
“That’s perfect.”
“But, listen,” she said. “I don’t have to bring it to him. I can read it right here, and sign it. I trust you.”
“No,” he insisted. “I want you to give it to him. If he wants, we can modify it. I want you to be absolutely confident, absolutely reassured.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I want you to be happy.”
Moved by this, for many reasons, some of which seemed even to her to be mysterious, Lilly looked away—at the long sweep of the bar at which they sat, and the blur of waiters and barmen in white, moving like the crowds in Grand Central, even busier, and the noise like that of water and ice flowing in a rock-strewn brook.
“Tell me why you value honor,” she said.
“I’m fifty-three,” he answered with analytical detachment. “My father died at fifty-nine. What good is money? If I have six years left or thirty, it makes no difference. My life will be buoyant, and my death will be tranquil, only if I can rest upon a store of honor.”
“There are other things.”
“Name them,” he challenged.
She met his challenge. “Love.”
“Harder than honor, I’m afraid, to keep and sustain.”
This startled her into silence.
“YOU’RE AN IDIOT,” Gustavo said, as he and Fitch were measuring in Lilly’s dust-filled duplex. The first day after the permit, the demolition had been finished in record time and removal and cleanup were under way, with nine men moving about like the builders of the Panama Canal. Gustavo was insulting only when he was frightened. “Here, because there are so many people with Ph.D.s, they have to drive taxicabs and mix drinks.”
Fitch wasn’t entirely sure what Gustavo was trying to say. Nonetheless, he answered. “But Gustavo,” he said, “that’s why we’re a great power. It’s how we invented the blender.”
“You can’t throw away the whole business for one crazy thing.”
“Who’s throwing away? Everyone’s getting paid.”
“From your pocket.”
“So?”
“How are you going to retire? With the materials you’re going to use here, and this kind of detail, it will cost us half a million dollars. No profit, and two hundred thousand dollars from your pocket.”
“No,” Fitch said calmly. “Five hundred thousand. I’m not going to charge her.”
Gustavo put his clipboard down where he was kneeling, and straightened his back. “That’s everything you have.”
“Don’t worry, Gustavo. We’re going into U.N. Plaza on the eighteenth. We won’t be late. We’ll be early.”
“The eighteenth of what?”
“March. Monday, the eighteenth of March.”
“We’ll finish here in less than a month?” Gustavo was stunned.
“I’m going to call in as many subcontractors as we need, pay overtime, work day and night myself. It’ll be done by that date. When she returns from California she’ll come back to the most beautifully done space she’s ever seen—in pristine condition, clean, quiet, safe, complete—with a Fitch Company bill that says, ‘No Charge.’ That’s what I want.”
“Why?” Gustavo asked. And, when Fitch was not forthcoming, Gustavo commanded, “You’ve got to tell me why.”
“If you could see her …,” said Fitch.
“I saw her when we did the kitchen. She’s pretty. She’s beautiful. But she’s not that beautiful.”
“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.
THE 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 physic
al 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.