He decided against Vaughan-Richards’s idea of one room abutting directly against the next and instead sketched hallways leading to the dressing rooms. They would feature the decorative cinder block used on so many Ibadan buildings. Without thinking, he sketched the first dressing room elbowing at the center. When he drew the second, he saw they would encompass the entryway courtyard like arms. Looking down on his sketch, it appeared like an airplane if you were facing it and it was coming straight at you: the fuselage with wings cocked downward. I might as well go for broke. He made the windows of the central room tall and conical.
His first Christmas in Nigeria, he and Samuel had taken a twin-engine propeller plane up to Kano to pay respects to Samuel’s uncle. Tacker had sketched the old wall of the city, an astonishingly tall mud structure with immense conical gates, the gates and the wall decorated with small windows at the top. According to Samuel, they were battlements for the frequent wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Tacker got up and drank a glass of water. It was seven thirty. He had thirty more minutes before he needed to leave for work. Back in his living room, he started a separate sketch of the roof. It would come way out over the broad veranda of the round central room. If only it could be thatch. He wished he could import some goats to hover in that deep shade while swimmers filled the pool. He wasn’t in South Carolina, so palm trees were out of the question. Instead he roughed out a pod of circular tables with metal roofs for lounging swimmers.
“This might go over in Disneyland,” he said, petting da Vinci.
A sense of violent hilarity kept him alert until he packed it in at the store that evening. Fortunately he wasn’t keeping Valentine. He fed the cat and fell asleep on the sofa.
The next morning he called Tom and took the job. He would start in two weeks, allowing enough time to get things squared away with Connie.
Kate dropped by the store. “A movie?” he said.
“You have time for a movie?” she said, either lightheartedly or with a skim of sarcasm in her voice.
“It’s been a rough stretch. Let me make it up to you.”
“How about bowling?” She said it a little wickedly, like Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.
“Sure,” he said.
* * *
• • •
KATE WAS AN ace at bowling.
“You never told me,” he said.
“You didn’t ask,” she said. She held the ball at her chin, considered her object, and started her approach, her arm gliding back before releasing the ball like a cannon. Nine pins. The last one wobbled and fell.
“Strike,” she said, swirling around in her skirt, displaying her legs, more toned than Tacker had noticed before, even at the beach.
Tacker sipped on his Pepsi. “Why don’t I just watch you play?” he said.
She swirled one more time. “I’ll be right back,” she said and skipped off.
The bathhouse descended into his brain like a swamped vessel and he had a vision of himself locked beneath it at the bottom of the sea. When the reverie broke, he glimpsed a girl two lanes over giving him a look. Then Kate was back, slipping into the chair beside him.
“Your turn,” she said.
“You bowl again. We don’t have to play a real game,” he said.
“Yes, we do,” she said. “Go.”
They played three games and he won two of them, but it was close and he wished more than anything that he could go home with Kate and fall into her bed. Back at the foursquare alone he couldn’t sleep.
Outside the night was dry as stone, the smell of tobacco high and tight. Tacker wondered if the air in the desert felt like this and then he wondered if it was true that you could wash your hands with sand. He watched from his front porch as a DeSoto barreled down the street, windows down, music blaring. Street light scissored through the leaves.
From some other time-space continuum a single line of song wavered: Who do you love?
* * *
• • •
TACKER WAS BEGINNING to enjoy the nihilism he felt. A desertlike existence might be just the thing. As long as he had water, so little else was necessary: a table, his drafting tools, paper, beans, and rice. He could hear his breathing as he moved about the house. Hovering somewhere in North Africa, he transferred his sketch onto drafting paper. He laid it out carefully, more carefully than he’d ever done anything in his life.
His instruments guided him. The central building wasn’t in the center at all. It was off to the left on the field. As if by divination, he comprehended the curving path that would lead up to it, with a decorative wall of cinder block four feet high. Kate’s hair cascaded down before him. His vision coalesced: the central room, which would, in swimming season, remain open all day; on either side of the room, curvilinear benches flanking the walls; the center of the room large enough for dancing. A great energy filled his arms. He was an architectural outlaw. To each side of the front door, he added a decorative cone-shaped battlement. Lunacy. He repeated the cone shape in the windows, elongated rectangles with half-moon panes above each one. Who can see out of them? They’re too thin, said Tom or one of his associates in a future conversation behind his back. Tacker ignored them.
He worked into Saturday dawn.
On the front porch, the floor felt keen beneath his bare feet. He sat in the swing and it let out a little bumpy cry, like an animal. He smelled the cedars in the yard. In the morning, he would finish up the design and drop it off at Tom’s house. It was a hard call as to whether planning to fail was better than failing unintentionally.
* * *
• • •
ELEVEN O’CLOCK SUNDAY morning he took a shower and slipped the design into a paper portfolio. He pulled on jeans and a white shirt and loafers. The Indian idled where West End entered First. Blue jays called in their flagrant gibberish. One swooped over the road. The sun was already high. Tom’s car was gone—probably he and his wife were at church. Tacker slipped the envelope into his mailbox.
* * *
• • •
HE TOOK THE Indian to Kate’s but her car wasn’t there. She sometimes went to Saint Paul’s Episcopal on Sundays. He left a note on her front porch. Going for a ride. Call me later. Love, Tacker.
He rode out toward Clemmons. Fields were flush with young tobacco plants, gas stations shuttered. It felt good to put miles behind him. For the first time since coming home, he wondered if he might like to move out of the state. Florida, Colorado, New Mexico. When would Gaines get back to Nashville and finish his degree? Was he going to have to wait for his mother to die? Maybe he could transfer to Winston-Salem State. Tacker turned onto a side road, and before long it petered out to dirt. The air turned cool and he knew there was water somewhere. Before long, he came to a pond. He turned the bike off and settled it onto the stand. A blue heron lifted off from the bank. Tacker took the circumference of the water before selecting a seat beneath a stand of cedars. He pulled off his shoes, lying back into the grass, and slept almost instantly. In his dream, he walked into a room and someone grabbed him. He couldn’t see a thing. For some reason he held a small potted palm tree in his arms, and he tried to hit his assailant but the darkness was too thick. His swipes with the palm were ineffective and his ensnarement became more certain with each attempt to free himself. The darkness was everything. At the end of the dream he touched his front teeth with his tongue and understood that they were falling out.
Tacker opened his eyes, astonished by the blue sky through the cedar limbs, the green of the cedars. He moved to the place near the edge of the pond where the heron had been. Why did he care so much? Life would be so much easier if he could just forget about fairness. What was justice anyway? You couldn’t quantify suffering or pleasure. The sun was full up over the treetops, sending inflamed shafts of sunlight onto the pond. Rather than illuminating the
surface, the harsh light turned it gunmetal gray. Tacker began to sob. Finally he let out a deep sigh.
Riding back, he stopped at a filling station with a Coca-Cola machine and bought one and sat in the hot sun and drank it and left the bottle in the crate. There wasn’t anyplace on a Sunday to buy a bouquet of flowers to take to Kate so he stopped at his parents’ house, where the first heads of hydrangea were turning blue. His mother cut six.
* * *
• • •
TACKER HELD THE bouquet and a record under his arm and rang Kate’s doorbell, a man in search of comfort.
“Thank you,” she said. And in an apparent spasm of madness added, “You know, flowers are actually sex organs. That’s why they’re associated with romance.”
“Wow,” he said.
Kate’s face reddened.
Tacker pulled her close and held her face and kissed her.
“What have you been doing? You’ve got a blue streak in your hair.”
“Painting,” she said. “Sometimes I play with Mom’s paints.”
“I kind of like it,” he said.
She darted to a mirror, maybe to distract him from her impulsive comment.
“Mind if I put this on?” Tacker said, showing the record.
“Go ahead.”
He did and then he held his hand out and she went to him and they settled on the floor in front of the couch in the library. The sound of the music was vitally sad.
“It’s how I’ve felt today,” he said.
Only the lonely.
“I’ve never heard this song. Who is this guy?” Kate said.
“Roy Orbison.”
“It’s so sad,” she said.
“It seems that way,” Tacker said. “But the sadness goes away when you listen. I think it’s the high notes.”
He started the record again. The music came out of the black disc distilled as wine. The turntable arm lifted, moved slightly forward and then back before settling into the armrest.
“That song tastes like your skin,” Tacker said.
“Your shirt smells like lemons,” she said.
A round house is a bowl, a nest, a den.
Chapter Thirty
KATE FILLED HIS mind like sunlight piercing water.
He and Connie figured out a schedule.
Gaines came in every day with an update on the movement. “Looking good, looking good.” Tacker worried that his high spirits might attract attention. Black fellows weren’t supposed to look too pleased with things, at least not in white parts of town. But Gaines kept doing his job in the same methodical way. “Yes, ma’am. No, sir.” Carried out groceries, dusted shelves, threw out spent produce, emptied the trash. With Connie taking over some of the management, Tacker wanted to offer to let him run the cash register, but it would be too much, not for his dad maybe, but for customers.
Tacker recalled his own surprise the first time he glanced in the windows of the First Bank of Nigeria and saw Nigerian tellers, all men, sitting in the booths, counting out money. Then he got used to it and looked forward to going in. He loved their smart attire and the way they wrote out receipts. Their penmanship was immaculate, everyone’s similar—a particular hybrid of longhand and print.
Tacker forgot to check his mail. When he did, the mailbox was stuffed. A black ant raced nervously along the edge of an envelope. Tacker flicked him into the grass. His mother had taken to writing him letters, a holdover from Nigeria perhaps. Aside from her letter, there was the usual: the electric bill, a free weekly paper, something from the NC State College alumni office, other odds and ends, including the most recent issue of Motorcyclist magazine. And at the bottom of the stack, so that it must have been delivered three days ago, a letter from Tom Driskell. A rockslide of embarrassment fell onto Tacker’s shoulders and slid down his back.
He spotted da Vinci through the screen of the front door. “Hey, fella, your human just failed famously. Again.” Pray to God Kate wouldn’t learn about the design stunt. He’d probably gotten himself fired before he was even hired.
In the living room, he dropped the mail on the coffee table. To delay the inevitable he went to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. The smell was enticing and for a moment he forgot about the letter. He remembered and the rockslide came back. Might as well get it over with. Da Vinci had settled himself and only twitched his nose at his master’s voice.
Tacker tore off the slender end of the envelope, pressed it so it yawned, held it upside down, and let the letter slide into his palm. The folded paper was tattooed with typewritten indentions. Apparently Tom had needed more than a dozen words to tell Tacker what a fool he was. He took a sip of his coffee and read the first paragraph: looking forward to having you join the firm on North Cherry . . . client happy with the Firestone rendering. And then the letter veered into absurdity.
I shared your bathhouse sketch with the head of Parks and Recreation and he likes it (most of it). The complementarity of garden elements with the building, the curvature of the walls and path, the use of open space, the round center with rectangular projections . . . the new Winston-Salem . . . the future.
Tacker looked across the room at the hearth, devoid of fire in the summer. A cool tide of air rode across his forehead.
You seem to understand fundamental rules of architecture that apply regardless of the age: one, that a building should suggest durability, and yet, that it should also communicate the very movement of time.
This had to be a joke. Tom was getting back at him for submitting such a ridiculous design. He was going to wax eloquent and at the end offer a flamboyant rejection. Tacker’s ears burned. He wanted to rip the letter in two, but he continued to the astonishing end.
Come by one evening and let’s discuss a few details. We’ll need to know whether you want to draft copies for the building committee or have someone else do that.
At the very bottom of the page, there was a penciled note:
I wonder if you studied Oscar Stonorov or had an opportunity to visit his house in Pennsylvania. I see the influence of his work in your design.
No, you don’t, Tacker thought. I studied the sculpture of Anna Becker along the banks of the Osun River and the round houses at Samuel Adeniji’s mother’s compound north of Ilorin and the king’s palace in Kano and practically copied Alan Vaughan-Richards’s house on the Lagos lagoon.
He wandered into his mostly vacant music room, where he had placed a copy of the design in a folder. He opened it up. It looked like an octopus in a sea garden. Yet something in it was mysteriously beautiful. It appeared to levitate over the ground like a foreign god taking note of its new surroundings.
What in the hell was he going to do? Hope Gaines wouldn’t learn about it? Who could he tell any of this to? It was a stupid joke and now here he was holding his winnings. It would be a catastrophe in his parents’ eyes for him to turn it down. Kate might stand by him but it would strain what they had together and he wasn’t sure they would make it through. He thought about Billy Cyrus sausaged in his banking suit. He would love for Billy to know that one of his designs would soon be realized in Hanes Park. Maybe he just wanted to feel like a success again. What was so wrong with that?
There was nothing but to go through with it. He’d submitted the design. Though he’d intended to fail, he had succeeded. Could anything be more idiotic? I’ll never swim in the pool, he promised whatever gods were listening.
He woke in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, trailing the nightmare he’d had under the cedars. All he had was a sense of hemorrhaging, losing something as holy as blood. He would go to Tom like a man. Withdraw the bathhouse design. Explain that it was a big mistake. He’d realized that the pool would be segregated and he couldn’t be part of it. He wouldn’t act holier-than-thou. He’d just say it, matter-of-fact. “You know I participated in the protests. I think it’s right what they’re doing
. We need to integrate. That’s the new Winston I see.” He would memorize the words so they would be right there when he needed them.
* * *
• • •
TACKER WAITED BY the goldfish pond beside Tom’s studio until the man came out his front door, then stepped forward to greet him.
“Winston’s up-and-coming architect,” Tom said. “Eager to get started, I see.”
“Good morning,” Tacker said. “Actually, I need to talk this thing over with you.”
“Sure thing. Come on in.”
Inside, the studio was just as Tacker remembered: the drafting table in front of the window; the long table stacked with papers; trailing philodendron on high bookcases.
“Let me clear a spot for us,” Tom said.
“This won’t take long,” Tacker said, taking the proffered seat. “What I want to say,” he began.
“By the way, did I mention that the director of Parks and Recreation, Ron Mastick, is a graduate of State College too? College of Agriculture.”
“I don’t think you did,” Tacker said, his mind beginning to freeze.
“So, what’s up?” Tom said.
Tacker looked out the window. He knew the sentences. Now was the time to say them. I made a mistake. I realized after turning in the design that I shouldn’t have. The pool will be segregated. I’ve been to the sit-ins. I agree with them. We need to integrate. That’s the new Winston I see.
“Don’t know if I’ll actually be able to make the copies,” he said. It sounded lame, like some kid saying he had a new BB gun but wasn’t going to let anyone else try it.
“Well, that’s up to you,” Tom said, unfazed. He looked at his watch. “By the way, the outdoor showers are going in week after next. The pool will be done and we can start on the bathhouse. A bit of a celebration. Just a few people. Bring a girl.”
Swimming Between Worlds Page 29